A Separate Country (22 page)

I never told John that I knew Paschal. What does that matter? I should have told him
that night,
that first moment we heard the shouts and saw the young women running. I didn’t tell him, and then I couldn’t tell him for the shame. And why hadn’t I told him, why hadn’t I said, “John, that is my dearest and oldest friend, you must save him!” John would have done it, for that reason. He needed a reason, that was his sin. And what was my reason for silence? I was like every bystander in every mob formed since God created the earth: I didn’t want anything bad to happen, so I convinced myself it wouldn’t.
I didn’t think they would take it so far.
And if they weren’t going to take it so far, then why, I reasoned, should I risk revealing myself as the woman who had invited Paschal, as his friend? I’d never be invited to a party again. As much as I claimed to not care about our snubbing, it had cut me hard. I wanted to go to their parties, so I let them kill Paschal. That’s what I did.

I left John that night and walked to your grandmother’s house in my bare feet. I left my shoes at the base of a small oak like the one that had hidden me. An offering. Oyster shells in the road cut my soles. I prayed to St. Basil and the Holy Mother, the two who knew the ways out of Hell. I prayed that I might be rescued from my sin, that the pact with evil would be broken, torn up, and burned. I remembered to pray for all of us, too. It was an afterthought. I don’t remember praying for the souls of strangers before that night. I have prayed that way many times since. May God forgive me my youth.

I arrived at their house as the moon fell below the trees. It crossed my mind that I might never return to John, to our house and, forgive me,
to you
. I thought of you, though, I thought of you so innocent and sweet, probably asleep in your blue gown, your hair tangled around your face, your chest rising and falling silently while the other girls, Anna Bell and Ethel, snored in perfect rhythm. But I was marked, condemned, I was sure of it, and I could not risk seeing you. I was contagion.

The path to the front door was cool underfoot, lined by squared boxwoods and lavender. I could feel each red brick and each line of mortar, canted this way and that, a pattern I’d nearly forgotten since, as a girl, I’d run that path without shoes, ever in flight from pirates, or alligators, or fish oil, or church. I had known those bricks as well as I had known my own freckles. I had once been able to walk the path with closed eyes, knowing with each step where I was, what would come next, and how close I was to the end. That awful night I closed my eyes and walked. I discovered I had not forgotten. At the end, at the foot of the steps and in the gaslight that wavered behind the wings of moths and an ephemera of mayflies, I stopped and opened my eyes. I watched the last few bloody footprints behind me disappear into the brick.

My mother believed I must have taken ill, otherwise why would I cast off my shoes and my husband, and bloody my feet? No fever, she said, but a spell nonetheless. She sent me to bed and washed my feet through the night. She said I looked like a ghost.

I wished John could have known Paschal. Paschal had not been of this world, he’d been something apart, something blessed and innocent, though not so innocent that he didn’t know how to acquit himself with a woman, as my cousin had once reveled in telling me. There are beings not meant to live among the rest of us, I think. They have been lost on the way to Heaven, they live only as an exception, an anomaly. Paschal was born out of sin, and as if to refute that wickedness and the transgression of abandonment, he swallowed beauty whole, infusing himself with it. Art and music, they were all. He played the piano as if the instrument were only incidental, a convenient conduit for thoughts that became music when exposed to air. It would not have surprised me had he made his music from rocks and ash, from the clang of iron on brick.

But this is what a killing does: it proves that safety is a wisp, that evil is strong, and that every moment of comfort and peace and beauty rests on a foundation of wishful thinking and ignorance.

John Bell Hood

I
knew Sebastien Lemerle, I had known him many years before, but on that night at the ball, I let Anna Marie think I’d never seen him before. I led Anna Marie to think I was a coward, which was far better than her thinking I was complicit in the scene unfolding before us: in the torture, the perversity, the mercilessness. Better she think me only a coward than a cruel and inhuman coward. Better that she didn’t know that I had been shocked to paralysis the moment I recognized him.

I believed Sebastien Lemerle was an evil blown into our lives from parts unknown, that he was sent by the Devil to murder, terrify, and destroy, and we were not to understand. Only bear it, bear the burden of man’s lot and original sin. But it did not fall to us randomly.

On the train into the city, the old man had warned me that I would be remembered. I thought he meant
recognized,
singled out, noticed as I limped and clunked down the street. To be remembered, though, that implied a kind of familiarity I was sure I wouldn’t find in New Orleans. This was why I had chosen the city, to escape. These were not my people, these were not my trees and birds and fish, these were not my streets, these were not my churches. I would disappear in New Orleans, lost to memory. I dreamt sometimes, when it was particularly heavy and wet in my quarters, when dreams came as in a fever, that my leg would grow back. Everything else grew in the damned place. The air lay upon me like soil and I felt new.

But I knew Sebastien Lemerle, and surely I was
remembered
by him. He would not have been able to forget, and had I cared to think about it, I might have guessed he’d be in the city. I did not care for Sebastien, though, as I cared very little for the men I ruined.

It was a hundred years ago. A thousand, maybe.

I remember him clearly. He rode with me in Texas before the war. He polished and sharpened his knives when he wasn’t eating or sleeping or fighting. He let his black hair grow down in front of his eyes and he never said much to the rest of us, and then it was often in French. He was a corporal, in charge of men. He never raised his voice and still his squad never questioned him and always followed. I wondered what hold he might have over them, but only briefly. I assumed he was a private disciplinarian, meting out beatings and threats when no one was looking. It had been my experience, to that point, that men could be led by fear. I learned later, in the war, that love would bind men, thousands of men, to some generals, but by then it was too late for me. I was the Gallant Hood, riding into danger, damned be the weak and nearly everyone else.

In Texas I was young. I wanted to fight. I wanted to fight Comanche. Sebastien Lemerle and his squad came with me.

We drove for many days over dry country. The horses had little to drink and less to eat as there was very little rain to green the sand and dirt. The earth there was broken into slabs thrust up in every direction and concealing the dark and narrow avenues of ambuscade. In the daylight we avoided those hiding places, and in the night we sought them out. One morning we awoke to a brief rain, and we all gathered about one man who was holding out an old oilcloth in his wide arms, catching the water in its trough. We drank like dogs.

We were out for weeks longer than I reported. The Comanche were always ahead of us, leaving their curious, light-footed tracks. At least once every couple of days we’d see one watching us. We were always just a half day’s ride away, always so close. I wanted them. I didn’t realize then, in my cursed and doomed youth, that one killing led to another, geometrically, until the only way possible to escape the massacre was to lead a whole army into the maw and hope for an ending.

The first man to go down was one of our sharpshooters, a Kentucky man like me, but small, blond, and bone hard. He spoke in tongues and thrashed while the other men tried to hold him down. He needed water and there was no one with enough to spare. To share it would mean a sooner death for us. He asked us to give him his birthday cake, he asked us who we were, he asked
what day is the fair gone start?
I took Sebastien aside.

“We’ll have to leave him.”

“We can send him back, sir. One man could take him back.”

“I can spare one man, but not two.”

I looked at Sebastien closer then. He had fine bones, and a large and round head, but his face was pocked. He wore his hair long to cover it, I realized. He never looked at me directly, always at my shoulder or my feet or at some imaginary figure off in the short distance. He chewed his words and let them go with a struggle, as if he were afraid of what would happen if he looked me in the eye. Not to him, but to me. The idea amused me, but I didn’t know him so well then.

“Yes sir. But we can leave him a horse and what food and water we can give up. He can have mine.”

The more he talked, the more righteous I became.

“We leave no food or water behind. We can’t spare it, Corporal, and you know it quite well. He can have the horse, she’s in worse shape.”

“We have to spare it. The food. The water. He’ll die.” He pushed the hair out of his eyes.

“We don’t. And we won’t.”

He looked at me with sudden and unhappy understanding. I had given the order: leave the man to die alone. This is what I believed I had been taught to do. It had always thrilled me at the Academy to hear an instructor describe how we would have to make hard decisions, to eschew popularity for right, comfort for necessity. I had wanted to be that man. What I hadn’t realized then was that every decision didn’t need to be so damned hard. Hard-hearted, that is.

Sebastien walked away and ordered his men to mount up. They fell in with me, and we went off. Perhaps the boy would gain his senses and make it to safety. Perhaps he would die with honor, fighting Indians. Perhaps he would die and never be found. I would later declare him missing in my official report.

Sebastien let us go and walked back to the boy. I saw the smoke and the birds fleeing before I heard the shots. Two shots. Some of the men turned to go back, but I urged them on. They didn’t know what I had said to Sebastien, and some of them cursed him as a murderer. I let them think it. I had nothing to say. I could feel my hands shake. I had not thought what would happen to our little sharpshooter after we mounted out. Sebastien had, and the shots rattled me. My first kill, and it smelled of dust and horse sweat. Tasted dry.

He caught up to us a half mile or so down into the next valley. He rode at the back and said nothing for two days other than
yes sir
.

I had bound him to me. I knew he disliked me, perhaps hated me, but I was his only friend now, after those two shots. He would not explain himself to anyone, though some of the smarter men figured out what had happened and approached him diplomatically, with forgiveness.
Go fuck yourself and get in line,
he’d say. He didn’t speak to me, either, but when we bedded down he stayed close, and when we rode we rode together. He wasn’t afraid of the others. He simply couldn’t be one of them anymore, having killed their friend, no matter what the reason. He could put a gun to their heads and pull the trigger, and that made him an outlier. He wasn’t one of them anymore. He was one of me.

It was three days after the killing that I realized how I could beat the Comanche.

I nodded off in the saddle and jerked awake periodically. The rest of the men were in worse shape, and I knew that we had only a couple more days before we’d all be dead of starvation or thirst. Two men had deserted, riding off toward civilization, and I knew I had to act quick to finish things off or risk being recalled to the post and humiliated.

I was awake when we passed a strange rock for the second time. I remembered it because it had resembled a very large, bloody red liver. Birds had perched on it, streaking the rock with their dung. I had seen the rock seven days before.

A circle. If we were being led in a circle, what were we circling? There was something at the center very dear to the heathen Comanche.

It was only a day’s ride to the center. I was glad for the drought then, for the dust. We moved faster than we had for a week, raising a great cloud. I wanted them to see that I’d solved their riddle and that I was riding for their children and their wives. I wanted them to stop me. I wanted them to fight.

Sebastien rode beside me, shaking his head and pulling his slouch hat tighter down over his eyes. I knew this to be his one outward gesture of anger.

“You are not satisfied with the plan, Corporal?”

He scratched his horse’s neck slowly, gathering his words.

“I just would like to know what we’re going to do when we get there.”

“That will be up to them.”

“We’re going to beat them there.”

“Yes.”

“Then what?”

“We shall see.”

I believe Sebastien was afraid. I believe he was afraid of himself. I believe that Sebastien was afraid of what I would allow him to do, what I would encourage him to do. The killing of the sharpshooter was the beginning. While riding beside him and observing him, I decided I had misjudged him. His men obeyed not because he disciplined them, which he didn’t, but because he was unknowable and therefore capable of anything. His silences contained possibility, and after he put down a man and his horse, those possibilities turned dark. If he was not insane just then, he would become insane under my tutelage. I pulled it out of him, used it for my own ends.

The camp was dirty and chaotic. The women, children, and old men lay in the shade of deerskin shelters, nothing more. They had little. The twisting breeze of the lower valley pulled the smoke from their fires into whirling cones that danced from shelter to shelter. I watched from an overlook with Sebastien and two scouts. The men, crippled by age, ambled from fire pit to fire pit, each built in a hollow part of a rock wall, or under an overhang. They had seen our sign and struggled to put out the fires slowly without releasing too much smoke. Too late, of course.