A Separate Country (2 page)

I crossed the Place du Tivoli, a circle traced by a ring of old live oaks. I looked over toward the new canal straight north and saw the cotton boll clouds twisting and piling atop each other. A storm was coming. I watched a pack of dogs shy and snarl at each other. I walked faster, out across the circle where, soon, they would cut down the trees to raise a statue of General Lee atop an ugly tower sunk in a mound of cut granite. Even now I could see the cypress coming down in the swamp beyond the houses, to make room for more houses, and occasionally I heard the shouts of the men on the felling crews.

I slipped through back alleys behind the new houses, hopped black iron fences, stepped through sharp old quince bushes, dodged the horses pulling families and lovers in carriages across Coliseum Square, and finally turned left down Third Street.

I suppose he had decent enough reason to bear a grudge even to his deathbed, if he was going to put it that way.
Because you tried to kill me once
. Yeah, I had done that and I owed him, for that and other reasons besides. He had been kind to me since that first meeting when I’d put the knife to his neck. That had been unexpected.

I walked under drooping banana trees and between two dwarf date palms bristling with spikes, and then I was in the Hoods’ yard, a green wrestle of vines and swamp grasses twisted up together in an awful tough fight. Up against the back stoop, overhung by a small porch roof, I saw a wide and deep pile of pork bones, carrot tops, rotted squash, broken furniture, soiled sheets, black-haired rag dolls, broken liquor bottles, one mirror, three busted clocks, a rusted frying pan, and a mess of white paper covered in nonsense scribbling. Such things should have been carted off to be burned or buried, but that pile had obviously just kept growing outside the door. The vines had wrapped over part of it and beneath them I could see movement, leaves shaking and crunching. I threw a rock and out popped a black ship rat that took stock of me and then walked calm under the porch to wait me out.

I should prepare you for the situation here at the house. Most of the children are gone off with some nuns and safe away from the city. Only Lydia is still here. I can hear her down the hall, in her bed, moaning and singing children’s rhymes. I shall go look in on her soon, but I am terrorized by the sight of her, my girl. I still have hope, but that is all. The truth is that she will join her mother soon and, when that happens, I hope that this fever, this yellow jack, which I can already feel creeping up in my bones and polluting my blood, will take me soon after. It is inevitable, and I don’t want to be alone very long. I want to see them again and soon. And so you can understand the urgency of this letter, I hope. The mission I am to assign you is the most important thing now. The other children? Yes, of course important, but I ask you to do this, in part, for them. They should hear the truth from me. The truth!

I went around to the front door. It was unlocked and I pushed in.

At least some part of the truth.

The windows in the house had been locked shut and the air was dead. There was sweat in it, and something sharp like vinegar. The General’s clothes had been thrown over chairs and piled in doorways, like he’d been pacing the hall while dressing and undressing himself. Dust fairies blew around the sunbeams that slipped past the drawn curtains, and I thought of the times I’d seen little Lydia jumping to catch the dustlight in her hand.

Lydia. I stopped at her door and listened for a rasp of breath or the sound of sheets twisting. There was nothing, and when I pushed open the door it was dead black.

Then Lydia’s face lit up in the gray light from the doorway. Her eyes had stuck open just a little. She looked like she was waking up, but nothing moved. She looked strapped down. They say the dead let go of earthly burdens and become lighter, but I have never seen that. I had only seen them get real heavy. Lydia was dead and she was weighed down by it. Her face had gone white like a fairy’s.

If Mrs. Hood had been alive the house would have been under control. There would have been light and air. The other ten children would have been home, sitting quietly, praying for their sister and their father. Lydia would not have grown cold in her bed, alone. But the yellow jack had got Anna Marie, and the nine healthy children had been sent off. Hood and Lydia were all that remained, too sick to leave. They were the ruins of what Hood said was his own separate country. There had been enough Hoods for a country, or at least a small town, but that wasn’t what he’d meant and I ain’t figured it out.

I closed the door quietly, like I might wake Lydia up, and walked toward Hood’s room. I opened each door as I passed, and each window inside. By the time I reached Hood’s room, the air had shifted. I smelled jasmine, hot dirt, and boiled fish. The outdoors. Hood had fallen asleep with a smile on his face and his sheets gathered up tight in his big right fist. I opened the window in his room. The breeze woke him up.

“Where have you been, Mr. Griffin? I await your report.”

“My post is secure.” This was our standard greeting.

He said nothing, only stared up at the ceiling, where a lizard stalked a crazed mayfly. I searched around the room for a rag to wet, and finally tore off the bottom of his sheet. In the next room a washbasin still held some clear, cool water and I soaked it up. When I returned he had rolled on his side to face the window where a mockingbird shuddered and strutted and cocked its eye at him. I put the rag on his forehead and let the water drip down his face. I looked outside for someone to carry a message, but the street was empty. The neighborhood was empty, I knew: it was summer in New Orleans, and no one with any money stayed behind to face the yellow jack and floods and heat.

“Do you think I am humorous?” The General looked at me out the side of his eye. I wished he’d stayed asleep. I decided I wouldn’t tell him Lydia was dead. He was too close himself, he’d see his girl soon enough.

Humorous was not the first word I would have suggested, but there was some truth in it: Hood didn’t tell jokes, and he didn’t make silly faces, but he
did
enjoy talking foolishness behind that beard, and he knew the joke was that grave-damned face of his. Here was a dying man, a man who had lived his life as if cast in a Great Tragedy, the first man I had ever seen a mockingbird actually
mock,
and what he wanted to know was if he was funny. His face was soft and mournful. It was a serious question.

“Yes sir, I think you’re humorous.”

“I don’t think people know this about me. I should have told them.”

“Some people do. And you can’t tell people you’re funny, anyway. Otherwise they think you’re not funny for sure.”

“I have no time for paradox, but I will accept your judgment. Still, I want them to know this. Not that I’m funny. I am not funny. Dwarves and monkeys are funny.”

Not all dwarves are funny,
I thought, and I believe he was thinking the same thing about the same person, our friend. It made him smile.

“Anna Marie knew it. She always did. She did not marry me for my countenance, my money, or my gentle good grace.”

I’d not thought much about why she had married him, some things being better not considered too hard. She had been a beautiful and educated woman who had studied in Paris with Frenchmen. She could ride a horse like a country-ass Acadian, paint like a man, and pray like a saint. If there were proper rules, I reckon that marriage would have been barred.

“Anna Marie thinks I am humorous.”

“Yes, she does.” Wherever she’s gone.

“She was the only one who wasn’t surprised to discover it.”

He turned back over and stared at me, as if sizing me up. His beard had twisted and matted into three thick strands.

“You received the letter. I had begun to think you hadn’t, or that you had ignored it.”

“Hard to ignore such a thing.”

“Staying away is easy. Staying out of strange business is what we do.”

“Maybe. Got no thought on it.”

“I thank you for coming.”

I didn’t say anything more. He blinked hard, fast. I could see his eyes spin up, like they were moving on their own, and I knew he was pushing back against the fire in his head, burning off the layers of his mind, twisting it, disordering it. I’d seen it too many times since getting to the city. Madness in those eyes. He fought it. He looked at me, straight and hard.

“I take it that, because you’re here, you accept the idea that you owe me?”

“I’m here because you asked me to be here.”

He shook his head. Sweaty hair stuck to the side of his face.

“No, no, it’s important that you realize you owe me. You are obliged to me. You cannot have honor until you have discharged your obligation.”

Fancy words, words you were supposed to obey. Words that could snuff a man’s life. I wanted to tell him I cared nothing about honor, and whether I had it or not. I’d meant to say it for years, but now a dying man lay before me. All things were sucked in by that man’s body and his voice, there was nothing else outside the walls of that room, the magnolia drooping in the sun outside the window was not real and was fading away. I could only nod my head at him.

He sucked in air and I heard the dry flapping rattle in his throat.

“You tried to kill me once, and now that I am dying and you are receiving your wish, you are obliged to make amends. This is truth, you can’t escape it, son.”

“It’s not my wish for you to die, General.”

He puffed up his yellowing cheeks and blew out. His mustache flapped slightly.

“Don’t try to confuse me with your paradoxes and feints, your false charges,” he said.

“I’m not.”

“I know you don’t want to kill me now.”

“That’s right.”

“But you must answer for your sin, like the rest of us.”

“Yes. I will, someday.”

“No, now. And you must see it that way, and not merely as a favor for an old man who may be abandoned once he’s in the grave.”

How
he could talk, even on his deathbed.

“I see it, yessir,” I said.

He asked me to help him sit up, and so I grabbed him underneath the arms and pulled until his back leaned against the headboard. He was very light and too tall for the bed. He smiled at me.

“This is not only about
your
sin. It is mostly about my own. I must make sure it is destroyed, it and all the shoots and tendrils that have grown from my sin are withered. I’ve run out of time, you’ll have to finish. I have written a book, or at least part of one.”

He had been writing a book since I’d known him, but it weren’t about sin. It had been about war,
the
war, and it had been his one great task, his obsession. “The war memoirs.”

“No, not that book. I care nothing for that book anymore. It is a lie. Or, no, it was a true story built of lies I didn’t understand were lies until very late. Too late, really.”

He had spent years writing that war book. Ten years of his life working on it, writing his letters and analyzing his reports, putting together his great defense—that he had been right, and a great general. Most people who knew Hood knew of this book. There had been years in which it was all he had talked about, and there were hundreds of men in nearly every state and territory who could paper their houses with his letters: requests for information, for maps, for papers, for recollections, for assessments, for apologies. Sometimes he’d tell me about the book while we sat in the dripping dark of the ice factory. The old warmonger. He told me how perfectly true it was, how it would vindicate him, how it would make him a hero once again when all the world thought him a bloody-minded fool who had thrown his men upon certain death with as much concern as kindling upon a fire.

General John Bell Hood could go to Hell. But this man in the bed, I hadn’t thought of him as the General in a long time. He was just Hood now, called Papa by his children and John by his wife. I felt sorry for the man Hood, who had carried the deadweight of the General, part of his soul, all this time since the war.

The pieces of soul can’t be cut out without filling them up again, that’s a real law right there. God’s law. Can’t cut out the pieces any more than you can go around with a big hole in your gut. Got to be plugged up, replaced somehow. Hood wrote another book.

I stood watching the brown thrashers pecking and rattling in the weeds beyond the window, but all of that faded to nothing as he told me about his other book.
The truth,
he called it.
The important story
. He wouldn’t say what was in it, only that it was the thing he wanted to say to his children, and that it was not about the war.

“This book, the pages of this book, are in my library, Eli, though I’ve hidden some of it and forgotten where,” he said. “The other book, the war book, is in the possession of General P. G. T. Beauregard. You know of him?”

“Yes, of course.” He lived in one of the biggest houses of the old city and liked his drinks and his dancing girls. He was a hard man to miss.

“It has been suggested to me by an associate that you would be the proper person to take charge of this book, that you would do a fine job of seeing to its publication. There are problems with it, and you must overcome them. Grave problems. Beginning with this: I want you to get that other book from Beauregard, and then I want you to destroy it.”

Like a priest making his prayers, repeating the words, Hood had repeated for years,
I was right
. It was a shock to realize he didn’t believe it.

“Are you sure, Hood?”

He had closed his eyes and I could see the crust in his eyelashes, which now opened slowly.

“I
was
an arrogant man, Eli. I
did
send men off to die without good reason. I
was
a murderer. Don’t you think I understand why you tried to kill me? I always understood. If not for me, you’d be a young farmer up in Middle Tennessee raising corn and beef cattle, and you’d have a beautiful country wife and some country children. Instead you’re a gambling and fornicating ice maker in the Devil’s city.”