A Separate Country (18 page)

The last night of our vacation we ate capons trussed up in red ribbon. Father joked that they looked uncomfortable. John untied his before the blessing and then began to try to tie it back up again before I stopped him.

“What are these?” he whispered, after Gustave had made the blessing, full of thanks for happy things that had yet to come to pass, and also for Henriette.

“Chickens. Fatter roosters.”

“Not pheasant?”

“There are no pheasants here, John.”

“Of course, but I thought the Creoles could get their hands on anything and put it in a box to be shipped to their summer-house.”

I kicked him lightly. I thought,
I am glad there will be no more fishing.
John was not one to let a joke go.

“There are Creole tomatoes, and Creole eggs, and Creole peppers, and Creole beef, and Creole okra, and Creole traditions, and Creole water, so surely there must be a Creole pheasant somewhere prancing about.”

“No. Well, yes, but they aren’t birds.” John opened his eyes wide at me, feigned shock at the betrayal of my own people.

“In any case, that’s what I thought it was, a traditional Creole pheasant. Now it’s a chicken. I’m not nearly so impressed.”

“Nor is it terribly impressed with you, I’m sure.”

“Ah, it will be.” He rested his good hand on the breast of the chicken and pulled off a leg. A piece of yellow fat from around the thigh joint flipped into the air and landed on the tablecloth in front of Henriette. Father smiled, but no one else seemed amused. The rest had their knives and their forks poised in midair like musicians awaiting their conductor. Gustave smiled, nodded at John, and carefully placed his fork and knife on the bird, sawing gently and without sound.

After that we were quiet until the dessert, which was imported blueberries from upriver and, as Mother unfortunately put it, “Creole cream.” John swallowed a laugh and began to cough.

“Are you all right, John?” Father asked.

“Perfectly,” John said, straightening his back and looking fierce. King for a moment.

I listened to the clink of spoons, the slurps, the deep breaths John took beside me.

“And everything else?” Father never ate blueberries.

John had his mouth full, nodded his head. I watched Henriette and Gustave across the table, pulling their berries one at a time to the edge of the bowl and draining them with the spoon, looking up at John. I thought of overturning their bowls, standing on the table, challenging them all. There were only a few times in his life that John ever needed protection.

“Just fine, Mr. Hennen, we’re squared away now. I have entirely transferred our assets to the insurance company that General Longstreet turned over to me, and we have just finished our first year underwriting river vessels. Mostly barges, though I was also honored to insure the steamship
Natchez
this year as well.”

“Has it been good work?” Gustave nearly leered, a great dark jaw and narrow teeth, big brown eyes. He knew something, they all knew something. Or thought they knew something. They always thought they knew more than the
américain.
John had been right about that. He quietly finished his blueberries and placed his spoon on the table in front of his bowl crosswise. It was a strange place to put it. Gustave looked at it as if it were a pistol. John squared his shoulders, crossed his arms on the table, and leaned toward Gustave, unblinking. It was easy to forget his size, he was always so sad seeming.

“Very good, thank you for asking, monsieur.”

Gustave leaned back and feigned to stretch his arms, as far from John as possible. He turned his head and seemed to be speaking to Henriette’s right shoulder.

“I’ve heard otherwise.”

Father stood up, but Mother pulled him back down.

“I’ve heard the same,” she said. “It’s a perfectly acceptable question, we are all family here.”

“And me, I’ve heard it too.” Henriette, though I have always loved her dearly, didn’t know the first thing about insurance or the riverboats or the trade at the harbor. I’m not sure she’d ever been there. She loved her man, but I loved mine.

“Pah, you’ve heard no such thing.”

“I’ve heard that our dearest John, despite his best intentions, has been associating with the wrong people.”

Henriette was fierce, fiercer than Gustave. She said this looking straight into my eyes, aware of John glaring at her and not caring a bit. She knew I disliked her fop, and so she had to dislike my general.

“Who did you hear that from? Our dearest Gustave?”

“Anna Marie.” John put his hand on mine. It was hot and dry and tense.

“I think,” Father said, “that we should let each other to their own business.”

The servants picked up the berry bowls quickly, flitting around the table like black moths. They hurried away and through the door to the kitchen, where I knew they would listen intently to the sport at table and argue its nuances. I used to join them before I became too old to be trusted with their secrets.

Though he had been given the opportunity to end the interrogation, I knew John would not take it. He had to know. I understood him suddenly, and I understood the fish.

“No, Mr. Hennen, I think that it
is
a family matter and I am happy to discuss it. My success is my family’s success, which is the success of your daughter and your grandchildren. However—” And here he turned to Gustave, who was caught flicking and rubbing at a tiny blueberry on his linen lapel. He looked up, surprised.

“However,” John said, “I must know specifics and facts, numbers and the testimony of trustworthy men. I am not interested in gossip.”

“That seems a proper policy, certainly,” Father said.

“I do not gossip, sir.” Gustave began to raise his voice. It was a lovely voice, he once sang in the theater near Jackson Square before it burned down, before he decided to marry. He was a land speculator, he said to strangers, but we knew it meant that he sold plots of his family’s ancient property, which had come to him by death.

“Then speak up, sir, and remember who you are addressing.” The General awoke.

“Who I am
addressing
? Oh good Lord. Fine. Who are your partners?”

“Two men recommended at the St. Louis Hotel by a friend. They are insurance experts. And Creoles, though that means nothing to me, it surely means something to you.”

“I do not know these men,” Gustave said. “They are not to be trusted.”

“The second surely does not follow from the first, unless you are the Lord Himself.”

The rest of us sat back in our chairs. The argument was on, there was nothing to say. To my shame and horror, I nearly nodded my head with Gustave.
They are not to be trusted
. I knew this in my heart, and had known it from the beginning. Gustave spoke for me, and it made me want to walk into the lake and never turn back. I was a traitor.

“Mr. Hood, you are being naïve. Not every Creole is, say, of the same moral fiber. They do not all come from the proper families, and thus they have not all had the concepts of honor, and lawfulness, and loyalty, imbued in them as it has been in us, and, certainly it must be said, in you.”

“Are you accusing my partners of a crime? Of betrayal?” Though he shot back angrily as if to defend them, I believe John sincerely wanted to know. But he was loyal, it was true, loyal to a fault, and he would not act except in their defense.

“I am accusing them of being unknown, either to the proper businessmen of my acquaintance, or to the families of my circle. And that makes them a foolish gamble for you, sir.”

“And why?”

“They have your money, sir! They have Anna Marie’s money, and Lydia’s money, and John Junior’s money! They are strangers.”

John closed his eyes and sat still, arms still folded on the table in front of him.

“It is something to consider,” Father said softly from the end of the table.

And John did consider it. He
had
considered it. He had told me so. But I was not enough.

“They came to me with the recommendation of men I trust. Men I trust to tell me truth and to advise me properly, to be loyal to me. I am loyal to them. These men, my partners, have given me no indication that they cannot be trusted. And so, because honor dictates it, I shall give them my trust until they abandon it. And I shall do no other.”

“They drink!” Gustave hissed.

“That is their business. And, might I add, do you not drink spirits also? I believe I’ve seen you. For instance, last night.”

“You are naïve and obstinate, Mr. Hood.”

“General Hood.”

“You cannot trust unknown men, even if they speak French and knew the Emperor himself. Oh hell.” Gustave leaned back, all of us now in the shadows of the candlelight, hiding from the man sitting at the table frowning. He was quiet for a long time, but no one moved. Father began to stir, but then Hood spoke up.

“I must believe in the goodness of men. I must assume their godliness. I am called to this, we are called to this.”

“
Enfant
,” Henriette whispered, and I kicked her under the table.

“I will believe men when they speak to me, and I will believe that they will return my trust and loyalty to me. I will believe this
first,
and I do not give a damn who gave birth to them, or who baptized them, or which of their ancestors consorted with Iberville, or which of them paid to build the cathedral. I am as willing to trust the son of the man who built the cathedral as the son of the man who paid for it. I choose to live this way now, because I have seen what comes of men’s suspicions of each other. It grows to anger, and anger grows to war. I have given my leg and my arm for the right and the privilege to live my life as I choose, and this is how I choose to live it. I do not want to hear your opinion about my partners ever again. If you think that I will not answer you if challenged, you are very mistaken, little Gustave. I have retired from war, but the war has not retired from me.”

Gustave knocked over his chair when he rose to his feet, but instead of challenging Hood for insulting him, he marched out the doors onto the veranda and then down the path to the cabins. Henriette followed him, but not without hesitating for a moment and looking at John steadily. She nodded her head to him and he nodded back.

“Good night, General Hood.”

“Good night, Henriette.”

Only much later, when Henriette was no longer engaged to Gustave and he had become barely a memory, did I realize she had not bothered to say good night to the rest of us. Only John. I don’t think it is right to say that she ever came to like John, though I dearly wish she had. She approved of him, that’s all.

We were left at the table, the four of us blinking at the guttering candles. After a minute John stood up to beg exhaustion. “Tomorrow it’s back to the city, and I’ll have to get the troops up early and organized if we’ll ever make it back by sundown,” he said. In his dark suit in that dark room, his face appeared to float above the table on its own.

I said I would join him and began to stand, but he whispered that I ought to sit with Mother and Father awhile, as this was the last night of the summer with their daughter. So I sat and watched him hitch and limp out the same door Gustave had slammed open.

Mother began to cry and Father handed her his handkerchief, which he removed and held out to her without barely seeming to move. She nodded. “They are both so wrong, and that is all that I know,” she said. “I don’t know what to believe.”

I said nothing and neither did Father. Mother looked from one to the other of us, waiting for Lord knows what, and finally she excused herself also. We all stood. Mother went through the door to the upstairs bedrooms, and I waved to Father before walking out onto the veranda on my way to our little cabin where the children, if God was in His heaven, would be sleeping and I could lie awake all night in peace.

Outside the candlelight the stars crowded and receded and flashed, and the more I stared the more the dark seemed to lighten and disappear. On the lake, chopped by a light night breeze, the starlight broke and multiplied. The peaty rot of cypress water drifted in the air, also the sweet rusty scent of grass that’s been out in the sun all day. The rocks that formed the veranda’s short wall where I sat had been warmed by the same sun.

“Anna Marie?”

Father’s voice from the doorway, tentative. Letting his eyes adjust to the dark, I suppose.

“Right here, Father.”

“Ah. Yes.”

He walked over and stood next to where I sat until I patted the rock next to mine. He thanked me, though it was his wall. He had built it when I was still a baby.

Quiet. Father could appreciate quiet, as well as the undeserved spectacle of the heavens. John was the same way. Silence was no sin among us. But, finally, Father came out to say what he had to say.

“The General is an unusual man, Anna Marie.”

“Yes, he is, but I always knew it. So did you, I think.”

More quiet. Father toed the cracks in the stone below his feet.

“I did know it. But I’m not sure I quite understood until tonight what that meant. I thought he was just an eccentric, because a man is never quite like the rest of us when he comes back from war. Never. But it’s not just that.”

I wondered if he’d been sent out by Mother.

“So what have you learned tonight about my unusual husband, Father? I don’t intend to change him, and I know I couldn’t anyway.”

“Oh, Anna Marie, I hope he doesn’t change. I will pray for the world to change around him.”

“That’s a strange idea, and I’m not sure what it means, either.”

“I mean that a man who is willing to face criticism, ridicule, failure, because he prefers to believe that men are good, such a man is closer to God than the rest of us. He is unusual, he is good. But. But, but, but.” He took my hand and pulled gently so that I would face him. “He is naïve and you are not, at least not about life in this city. He has seen more of the worst of man than you and I will ever see if we are lucky. He was a brutal commander, Anna Marie, I know you don’t like to hear this, but it’s true. He had no patience for weakness and he was arrogant. He cost many men their lives without good reason. He knows it, I heard it tonight. And I heard a man praying for absolution, willing to suffer for it.”