A Separate Country Read online

  “Mr. Griffin! How nice to see you! Have you been to see our patient?”

  What else would I be doing here? I held my tongue and stood stock-still, stuffed like a scarecrow.

  “Yes, Monsieur Ardoin, I have. He is off his head and Lydia is dead.”

  “Oh dear. Poor girl.”

  “That she was. Now she’s just dead in her bed. Don’t know if anyone knows when she died. Do you?”

  “Mmmm, well, it’s hard to say.”

  “Don’t matter. Reckon General Hood is not long behind her. I’ve tried to cool him off, but there’s not much else I can do.”

  The little man shook his head sadly and fiddled with the brim of his homburg.

  “No, nothing to do now. A great tragedy.”

  “Don’t know what’s so great about it.”

  He picked up his bag and brushed past me on the way to the bedrooms. I made only a very slight papery sound, which he didn’t seem to hear. I waited until he was a good piece away before waddling stiff-legged toward the front door. I thought if I could get outside into the garden, I could stash Hood’s pages somewhere safe before going back inside. But then the doctor called.

  “Mr. Griffin, are you there?”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  “I need your assistance.”

  I waddled for the door.

  “Mr. Griffin, please. Now.” I couldn’t refuse him again or he’d think I was hiding something, and men like Ardoin don’t know how to leave alone the things being hid from them, got to root ’em out.

  And so I returned to Hood’s bedside. The pages made me sweat, and I worried about the ink. (Later M. discovered that some of the words got themselves tattooed on my back.) Hood had sunk deeper into the bed. Ardoin held his wrist with two fingers like it was live crab ready to snap, and he held a wet handkerchief to his own mouth. I leaned over to mop the cold sweat from Hood’s brow, and while I did that Ardoin went and sat in a chair pushed into the corner. He watched and stayed away. Tsk, tsk, so sad. When I left Hood was still alive, though silent and unseeing. I walked slowly home, looking behind me for the pages that slipped out and lay on the ground in my path.

  When I returned to the house the next day, Dr. Ardoin and a small crew of Irish laundresses were busy cleaning up, balling the sheets and clothes that needed burning, opening up the whole house to the air outside, and scrubbing the floors. I should say the women were busy. Dr. Ardoin only sat in that same corner of Hood’s bedroom, out of the sun and half in the shadow of the plain cypress wardrobe. He puffed at a straight pipe fashioned in the shape of a growling gargoyle and scribbled some notes. Hood and Lydia had both been removed. The doctor rubbed his eyes with his free hand while bent over his notes, which I guessed were an account of Hood’s death and the doctor’s own heroic efforts to save him. Newspapers loved that kind of horseshit when someone famous died. The death of the General would get their attention.

  “Morning, Doctor Ardoin.”

  He looked up with big hound eyes, as if the only thing he had wanted in the world was for me to appear in the doorway. He smiled, I crossed my arms and nodded. He smoothly slipped his notebook into the pocket of his coat.

  “A terrible night, friend. He did not go quietly. Much yelling, carrying on. Visions! A horror!”

  “Surprised he lasted into the night.”

  “Ah, the will of the man! The bullheadedness, the strength. He fought like a wounded lion.”

  He raised his eyes to the ceiling, and I reckoned he was remembering to remember that description.

  “He was tough, sure enough,” I said. “Did he say anything?”

  “Oh, so much. A rather patriotic defense of the late Confederacy, a poem—”

  “And what did he really say?”

  Dr. Ardoin looked at me close, frowned, but didn’t say anything. I reckon he thought I wouldn’t rat on him, even if I disliked him.

  “Have they cleaned Lydia’s room?” Better get my business done and get out, I thought.

  “I believe they have.”

  “I’ll go make sure they do a fine job rifling through her things.”

  “Mmmhmmm.”

  He had returned to his notes. I turned to leave.

  “Mr. Griffin.”

  “Yes.”

  “If he had recited a poem, what do you think it would have been? Something heroic, no? But short?”

  Good Christ. I walked away.

  “Probably a psalm,” he said to no one.

  * * *

  If the charwomen had indeed been poking through Lydia’s things, they had probably found nothing to interest them. Nothing obviously valuable, that is. What would a woman want with a child’s things, especially those of a child whose family was well known to be poor. The silver lockets, the ivory-handled brushes, the place settings, all that had once been part of their rich lives, they’d been sold off. I was sure of that.

  But I knew there was something to be had in that room, and I aimed to get it. I’d remembered it the night before, unable to sleep and spending the time counting M.’s breaths. I lay flat out in the moonlight, staring up at the shining white face of it. When I got tired of M.’s hisses and whistles, I turned to counting the moon’s flaws. Then I got up and tried to keep reading Hood’s book in the dark, but it hurt my eyes. And then I remembered. I nearly jumped up and ran across the city just then, but thought better of it. Too many knives and garrotes in the dark. Wait to morning.

  A month before, at Anna Marie’s funeral, I had stood at the far edge of the mourners, who were mostly Anna Marie’s cousins. I didn’t listen to the priest, I’d heard the service too many times before. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis, I heard it in my dreams, I knew it all, though I still got no idea what it means. I watched Lydia instead. She had her father’s long, straight nose, his high brow, his small ears. She had his same quiet and tired face. The face that made her daddy look sad and mysterious had made her look beautiful and fragile, even at ten. She wore a blue dress, no trimmings, and dark blue shoes with new paint on the heels. She did not move while her mother was committed to the tomb.

  At the end of the service, I watched a cousin, maybe a great-aunt, approach the girl and pull her behind a tree to yap in her ear. This woman could have been the resurrection of Anna Marie Hood: she was dark, slim, simply dressed, and she waved her hands and made faces just as Anna Marie had done it. That day she was a woman who wanted to be heard and obeyed, no mistake. Lydia kept saying, “But Aunt Henriette, please!” Over and over.

  In her arm Aunt Henriette carried a small bundle of ledger books. She held them dangling from her fingers. I tried to get closer, but there were mourners standing between us. The woman appeared to be pushing the ledgers on the girl. Lydia shook her head and gnawed at her knuckle, eyes big. The other mourners finally trooped out of Lafayette Cemetery, leaving only the four of us—the lady and Lydia, me and Hood. Hood kneeled before Anna Marie’s tomb and prayed. I stepped behind a tree so he wouldn’t notice me, and so that I could watch Lydia, see if she needed help. Hood hadn’t said anything to me, and I reckoned he’d want to keep it that way. I tried to listen to what the woman said to Lydia. Then I thought, What the hell is Lydia doing here, anyway? She should be gone, out of the city. Later, when she was dead, I heard that Lydia refused to leave her mother behind.

  Lydia kept shaking her head and sliding toward her father, until finally Hood got to his feet and walked over to take her hand. The woman hid the bundle in the folds of her umbrella before Hood could see.

  At the house, the family of Anna Marie gaggled on the front lawn. There were no drinks, no food, and no one went into the house. It had been contaminated by disease, and in the custom of some New Orleanians, it was thought that it was courting death to enter a yellow-jack house so soon. Hood and Lydia received the mourners under the oaks, shin-deep in the dark, green ripples of their uncut lawn. When they moved, tiny beetles, leafhoppers, and spittlebugs flew off like spray in their wake. I staye
d back, leaning against the edge of the porch. My head got hot and tight, but I didn’t cry.

  Not all of the mourners stayed outside. I watched that Aunt Henriette from the cemetery edge toward the sidepath until she had disappeared around the house, heading toward the back door. I followed slow and careful, and then hid behind a mulberry bush to watch her as she wrapped her face with a fine and embroidered white handkerchief, pulled the ledgers from her umbrella, crossed herself, and went into the house through the kitchen. I stayed put. If she was so on fire to give the girl those useless ledgers, and that’s what I figured her for doing, I saw no reason to stop her. When she came back out and removed the handkerchief, the ledgers were gone. Tears shined her cheeks and made her nose red. She kneeled right there on the step and prayed. Grief is a kind of craziness, and I knew better than to interrupt.

  Now, a month later, I stood in Lydia’s room, which had been stripped and mopped and emptied. I had to find that bundle. I had come to think that it weren’t just numbers in those books. If I was going to do Hood’s bidding, I wanted to know it all, every secret, whether Hood knew them or not. Especially if Hood didn’t know them. I wouldn’t mind knowing more than him for once.

  The ledgers were easy enough to find, hidden under a small pile of scarves in the bottom of Lydia’s wardrobe. There was a note tucked into the top ledger:

  Cousin,

  Please be sure Lydia receives these. She will want to read them someday. John must not know about them, for obvious reasons.

  A.M.

  That night I finished reading Hood’s book and I began on Anna Marie’s notebooks. Two nights without sleep. When I had finished, there was nothing left to do but begin the job Hood had set out for me, or be a coward. A traitor, to Hood, to Anna Marie, and to any hope that this life isn’t just a crazy pile of accidents. I slept all the next day.

  CHAPTER 2

  From the Secret Memoir of John Bell Hood,

  Written Between September 1878 and August 1879

  I came to New Orleans with $10,000 in my pocket. In a small valise, to be absolutely truthful. This was money borrowed from my family’s acquaintances back in Kentucky. I had once dismissed Kentuckians as ditherers and cowards unwilling to sacrifice even a drop of blood or a pound of coin to protect the homeland. I had fought for Texas, instead. Texas, where the Comanche maimed me. After the war, I went to Kentucky as a pariah Confederate and I begged from those same men I had once insulted and abandoned. They had the grace to forgive me. I had been another man when the war started, they said. I was now a humiliated man, a worm, albeit a worm with $10,000 in United States currency packed in a leather bag at my feet.

  I remember rolling toward the train station by the lake that first time. The lake mirrored the sun, fracturing it into an infinitude of tiny fires, flaring and extinguishing while I held my breath. Not having been to New Orleans, and a little travel weary besides, I mistook it for the river. An old, hairless man in black slept on the seat across from me. When I said to myself, The river is worth the trip, the man snorted and wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands as a child might.

  “Ain’t the river, General Hood. You’ll know the river when you smell it.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Your name? Everyone knows your name. I think what you mean is, How do I know your face?”

  He unwound and stretched before sitting up straight. He was old, but his arms were tight coils of tendons, a workingman’s arms. He was brown, sun-brown, from the crown of his freckled head to the ankles that emerged sockless when he stretched his legs. He was tall, and I had to look up at him.

  “Yes, my face. How do you know it? Who are you?”

  “I am merely an old fisherman, un pescador. But I hear things, and I see things, and they tell me you are you.”

  Ungodly bastard. I had heard about the mystical blasphemies popular among the Louisiana negroes, but had not known that white men indulged in them as well. He was Spanish, I assumed, and I decided that this explained his foolishness.

  “Please spare me your superstitions.”

  “Of course, General. But are you sure you would not like me to read your hand? Not the lame one, of course. Perhaps I might examine the hairs of your beard and tell your future?”

  He winked at me and settled contentedly into his seat, and I knew he had been joking. I tested this by smiling, and he smiled back. Let it be said now: John Bell Hood knows a joke and he can laugh too.

  “How do you know my name, then?”

  “The conductor is my friend. He sat me with you because he knew I wouldn’t bother you with talk. He likes you, I assume. Once he told me your name, I knew it was true. Your face has been in the papers many times, General, and it’s not a face to forget. You’ve got that wood leg too.”

  I had removed my leg and tucked it under my seat beside the satchel.

  “I understand,” I said. “Thank you for correcting me about the river.”

  A small cloud of smoke from the engine floated through our window and he waved it from his face.

  “Well, it wouldn’t be right to let a general loose in the city without giving him a bearing. Even Orpheus knew his way around. A little guidance is the last I can give you.”

  At first I thought he’d said least, but I realized soon that he’d said last. I felt that familiar dread again. He looked out and spit a mouthful of soot through the window. He checked his tongue for specks, wiped his hand over his shiny brown head, and looked down at his shoes. For a moment he didn’t look at me, or anything in particular. He watched the void in front of his face, where I suppose he could see time moving past. Years into moments into eternity and back.

  “We should have all had some guidance,” he said to whatever it was he watched.

  “You had a son,” I said. It was obvious. I was embarrassed as soon as I said it. He’d had a son, and that son had marched under my flag. He had eaten whatever food I decided to give him, he had slept when I told him he could sleep. He had made friends, he had written letters and those letters had been carried back to the rear when I thought I could spare a messenger. Without knowing, and I would have never dared to ask, I decided he had died at Franklin, on the cold slope littered with shoes, hats, canteens, rifles, fallen osage orange trees, the bodies of other men. He was nearly to the entrenchments, nearly to a breakthrough and some kind of safety. He might have hidden in a corncrib or a smokehouse had he made it that far, but instead he fell just in front of the Union line. Perhaps he’d been close enough to be bayoneted. What had he thought of the cold in Middle Tennessee, that son of a Spaniard from south Louisiana? I hoped that he had died quick, and hadn’t shivered his life away there. At the time I wouldn’t have cared, but now I did. It shouldn’t have happened that way. I shouldn’t have ordered that charge. But I knew better, I was the Gallant Hood, and the Gallant Hood ordered a charge into near certain death for most of his army because I saw no other choice and it was good for their sense of Southern invincibility and pluck. I sent them up and laid them down before the Union’s fire like so many sheaves of wheat. All in rows. I had killed thousands of my own people because I, the Gallant Hood, had led as if battle was a bracing bit of exercise, a game. I knew this, and yet I could not admit it then.

  He smiled. “Now who is the voudou witch?” He nodded his head.

  “And he died.”

  “Yes.”

  “Under my command.”

  “Sí.”

  I had no children, and at that moment I could not know what pain he might have felt. I know it now, but then all I could think to imagine was his anger. His pain was merely an abstraction.

  “Your son did not die in vain.” Such a stupid thing to say, such an arrogant, ignorant, brutal thing to say. The man took a minute to answer me.

  “He died. That’s all.”

  I thank God I had the sense not to say anything then.

  We sat silent during the last few minutes of the ride, each of us swaying together as the train
turned and wobbled and banked. I had some trouble staying upright without the leg, so I bent over to strap it on. I could feel him watching me.

  “You’ve made your sacrifice, General.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “May I tell you something?”

  I nodded my head while crouched over my leg. I stayed like that, listening for him.

  “I won’t be the only one who will recognize you. You are not easy to miss. You would be better off looking us all in the eye. If you are ashamed, you will not last.”

  I sat up. “I am not ashamed.”

  “Ah, my mistake. I assumed.”

  He had no bags. I watched him stand at the end of the platform, watching the red sun bleed into the horizon. Meanwhile porters scurried to load my great, varnished, ironbound trunks onto the back of a four-in-hand. When he walked over to the stairs and stepped down from the platform, he looked over at me and scanned me from head to toe, as if looking for something. Or judging me. I watched him walk, on fisherman’s legs bow-legged and steady, moving fast down the Shell Road toward the city. He was soon lost in the dust clouds that kicked up in the wind that now rushed in off the lake as the sun disappeared. I never thought to offer him a ride. When my coach passed him on the way into town from the station, he had stepped off the Shell Road to piss. He grinned up at me.

  “Don’t look back, General!” he shouted over the clatter of the horses. He was laughing when we turned out of sight.

  New Orleans was, very simply, the only Southern city that still worked, where a man might still make a dime in those years just after the war. Briefly my mind turned to the subject of money: its acquisition, cultivation, its transformative properties, its promise of freedom. I had never cared much for money before, but war had changed that. Forgive the young general, forgive me.