A Separate Country (27 page)

“Where is Rintrah?” He was big, but he was a priest and I was not intimidated.

“Still like to kill him, then, the unnatural creature?”

“No.”

“Sure you don’t want to even kick him around a bit, have a little sport? Ah, he’d make a good sound bouncing down the stairwell,
Help, Father Mike, I’m bumpity bumpity owww.
Can’t say I haven’t thought about it myself, obviously.”

Before I got to know Father Mike better and realized he was having fun with me and that, in truth, any man who raised a hand to Rintrah risked his holy terror and wrath, before I understood this particular priest’s peculiar
methods,
I became fully convinced of his insanity.
Insane with the love of Christ,
he would have said.

The priest walked toward the doorway and beckoned me to follow. We walked down a hallway lined with cabinets, some containing dozens of tiny drawers labeled in French, others containing a few large doors big enough for a man to crawl into. At one end of the hall a small metal door had been fitted, like the door to a coal stove.

“Incinerator,” Father Mike said, noticing my puzzlement. As if that answer didn’t raise more questions. Everywhere the floors were bare. The treads of the stairs were short, rising only a few inches at a time. Each landing had been reinforced underneath with cypress beams angled floor to ceiling. We walked up to the third-floor landing, so many tiny little steps. Four piles of wooden cots, broken down and stacked, rose from the landing to the ceiling. Hundreds of them. I heard a faint voice.

“The boys are down this way,” he said, turning left down the long hallway cut through by bright, white light admitted through thin windows in each room. Every door had been opened, every window too. The place was being aired out.

“What boys?”

He said nothing, just kept striding down the hallway as if on the march, swinging his long arms and whistling. At the end of the hallway we turned into a room on the right away from the street. I expected to see Rintrah, but there was no one. Along the wall to the left stood piles of white washbasins, like the one Father Mike had used to cool my head, and also a couple dozen cases of what appeared to be whiskey. A violin leaned over in one corner, gathering dust.

I was angry and confused. I had been led through a twisting rabbit warren of whitewashed walls and emptiness. I was no one’s plaything, and whatever Father Mike had intended, I wanted no part of it. But I followed.

“Right through there, Cap’n.”

The priest pointed at a small door in the wall. I kept looking and realized it was much bigger, only painted to look much smaller like a child’s door. The rest was disguised as part of the clean, white wall.

“Father, this has become too tiring for me. I shall see Rintrah another day. Thank him for his company and trickery, which I will take up with him later.”

Father Mike took a deep breath and turned to face me full. He bowed his head and for a moment I thought he might whisper a prayer. Perhaps he did.

“Hood, I must insist that you accompany me into this room. Rintrah is in there, you may speak to him about his behavior yourself. But there is someone else with him you must meet.”

He said
must
in the tone of a man who was making a statement and not a request. Then he opened the door and disappeared into the dark. From inside he called, “Follow or leave, bugger, but you will never know that woman of yours until you come through that door.”

Presumptuous papist. I went through the door.

Inside was an empty room, darker than the rest, lit only by thin, horizontal windows that I later realized were hidden by the eaves of the house and not visible from the street. A secret room, exposed rafters and beams and studs. I saw manacles attached to every other beam, bolted deep into the wood, awful and black and rusted.

“What place is this?”

“It was one place once, now it is another.”

His mysteries were tiresome, but I would become used to them. They were Rintrah’s great joy. I looked toward the voice I recognized as the dwarf’s. He stood on his fruit box naked to the waist, an apron around his middle. He had posted himself at the side of a sturdy wood bed. There was a patient, a man entirely nude and unmoving. I had never studied a man as closely as I did this one. His skin was perfect, pale smooth and hinting at a color thwarted only by the darkness of the room. His legs and arms were long, his torso muscled. I couldn’t see his face. A fly walked up one of his legs and posted itself at the concavity of the man’s stomach. The man didn’t twitch, his skin did not goose bump. Rintrah killed the insect with a towel, leaving a quick welt on the flesh, and the man never flinched. Rintrah bathed him with a wet rag, never stopping except to wipe the sweat from his own neck and chest.

It was not as hot in that room as I would have imagined. I remember the open windows everywhere. I didn’t understand the manacles, and I didn’t understand the scene at the bed.

“Is he dead?”

“I may be only a fruit man, but I ain’t a fool, General, and I don’t waste my time bathing corpses.”

“Don’t smart off at me. I’ve got business with you.”

He nodded.

“He ain’t dead, that’s what I’m saying.”

I felt the two of us falling back into our old banter, as if the events of the last day had not happened. I considered telling him what a pretty little nurse he was, but then he stepped down from his fruit box and I had nothing more to say.

The man on the bed was not dead, by God. I saw his chest move and his eyes blink. He was not dead, and he was not entirely alive either. He was between worlds: between the living and the dead, and between what I had believed and what I knew.

The naked man on the bed in the middle of the secret room of a rambling and strangely immaculate house, tended by a hairy and impetuous priest and a caustic and duplicitous dwarf, that man,
that man
…

That man had been dragged off to be killed by a man called blackbird. I’d seen him go off to die. I’d heard him speak when he could still speak. He was the very same man. I knew his eyes and those long fingers. They grasped nothing now, moving nowhere.

“And now you’ve met all of Anna Marie’s friends,” Father Mike said ruefully. “Too bad for Paschal.”

There was a hospital at Franklin, where the hundreds died. Several of them, actually. They hadn’t been hospitals before I rode my army up into that town, but for weeks afterward those houses and mansions and churches were the refuge of the maimed and hopeless, my casualties, the men whose names we’d have to strike from the rolls. Their absence would be my handicap, my burden. When I walked through the Methodist church that cold day in November 1864, I was
angry
. Not at myself, never that, but at them. Them in their neat rows of improvised cots. Blood and piss ran between the floorboards, there were men who would never wake up from their slack-jawed sleep, there was a man missing his tongue and bottom jaw who flapped the sagging skin of his bottom lip at me.

I studied their faces for signs of malingering. I poked men at their wounds to ascertain the degree of their pain. The churchwomen gaped at me and finally, tired of my harassment of their charges, took to rattling the bedpans against the bed frames in protest. Had they been my troops I would have had them locked up. Instead I left, disgusted.
How had they let this happen to them?
I remember thinking of the men in that hospital room.
Why did they let it happen?

I had spent my time in hospitals. I’d woken up in a hospital ward suddenly missing a leg. I hadn’t noticed until the nurse turned down the blanket to dress the amputation. The air had been foul, its stink and corruption nearly visible in the air wafting over me, but I would not despair of it. I had demanded to be sent back to my unit, I had demanded a leg or a post or a piece of kindling to strap on, I had left as soon as I could sneak away. I’d gone back to fight. I despised the sick and, truly, anything prostrate and passive. Such things—such people—were meaningless for being cast aside and passed by, for not being able to act on the levers and pulleys of this world, for not making the world
submit
.

I can barely remember what is true about the battle at Franklin now, what I’ve invented or warped or twisted to protect myself. I knew that my saving might be in something as simple and small as making amends, making a confession, an apology. But I had been terrified of what would happen afterward, the humiliation and finally the forgetting, the anonymity. I did not want to be forgotten. I used to tell myself, I am a good man, I love my wife and my children, I am a good citizen, I was a good soldier, and so why should I be ridiculed and forgotten and judged? How few men have been in my shoes, yet how many would step forward in judgment? I wished to be left alone.

And then I found the man in the attic, and immediately I had will for nothing else but to submit myself to the levers and pulleys of the world, to submit to them and whatever I was called to do.

I was, indeed, surprised to see Paschal alive, though in some state between life and death. I didn’t know his name before, of course, I knew him only as the victim of Sebastien, the tablet on which Sebastien had written his private note only I could see, only I could read:
I am still here and I have grown large, greater than you can imagine
. I was responsible for the body in the attic. It seemed a miracle he was not dead, but his living corpse was even more of a rebuke to me. I was
still
responsible for him. I dared to tell no one.

That day I spent hours sitting with Father Mike and Rintrah, bathing the patient’s brow. Rintrah told me their story, about the orphanage and the very brutal way the two of them had made the acquaintance of the priest, who had not been a priest but some sort of Creole berserker back in those days.

I learned the sleeping man’s name. They both described a man not made for this world, a grown man who believed in magic and pixies and beauty and grace, who refused the baser truths of this life. He played music, they said, that sounded like people whispering and giggling. He could spend a whole day eating nothing but squash, so taken by the perfect curve and color of the ripe yellow vegetables he bought by the basket from the Italian vendors in the French Market. He was puzzled by the idea that such behavior was odd. He believed it was only paying proper respect to beauty, and in fact was required of him. I watched him in the bed as they told these tales, and all that moved was his chest, up and down, the sheet slipping down his thin arms with each breath.
Obviously a lunatic. A beautiful, chivalrous, and gracious lunatic.

Still, I was responsible. I went back to my office high above Common Street. I stripped to nothing before lying on the cot under my office window. My body felt diffused, dissipating in the air like dust, reconstituting itself, changed. I wondered if Anna Marie would ever return from her parents’ house. Someone, Father Mike probably, had cleaned up my desk. My partners had cleared out, their desks were empty. Mice skittered in the walls, and I knew they were mice because the rats tread slower and liked to screech. The floor, old barge wood, was gray with age.

I had little money, and what money I had we spent on clothes and entertainment and lessons for the children. Appearances, appearances. Perhaps Anna Marie would never come back. The room faced west, and in the late afternoon the only admirable feature of the room took over, the fanlights over the tall windows. I could see to the river and out into the green wasteland behind the city and over to the great inland ocean called Pontchartrain.

That day I lay and let the heavy breeze pass over me. It had been two months since the ball, and it felt like years. The man was still alive. He was a ghost. He was my ghost.
I don’t believe in ghosts
. I had made him as surely as I’d made Sebastien his executioner. One thing from another, the endless piling of bodies.

I had thought that my reckoning would come, if it came from anyone, from some soldier who had been with me during the last, failed campaign of the late Army of Tennessee. Surely those would be the losses that would be counted against me. Many thousands died during those few months while I drove them on and on and on. (I have the exact figure around here somewhere, but it doesn’t come to mind at the moment.) That’s the sort of thing they hold against a general.

But Indians? And, hell, we
won
that skirmish. Of all the men with grievances to lodge with me, and there must be many thousands roaming around the Southern states, why would it be the corporal from the old Texas campaigns who rose up to smite me? This is the way I thought of it: he had lynched a man because of
me
. I had no good reason to think that, no reason to think he had even known I was there at the ball. But I believed it nevertheless, because what I saw him do I’d seen him do before. He had taken the squaw in hand just the same way.

While I lay there, stewing in the endless me and me and me, a note was slipped under my door. I was by myself, of course, so I didn’t bother with my leg. I crawled across the floor to retrieve it, crawled back, and hoisted myself back onto the bed. I picked the dust and two dead bees out of my beard. The note was in Anna Marie’s handwriting.

I hear you made an ass of yourself yesterday. Congratulations! We await your report! Please trim your beard and come home. You are wanted. Lovingly, AM and the Hood Brigade

p.s. Watch out for Rintrah, he’s a mean one.

I strapped on my leg and got dressed.

Anna Marie Hood

B
efore that sickening night, your father insured the lives and cargo of other men. He paid them for dying or being destroyed.
How much easier war would have been had that been the arrangement
,
just a series of transactions in a ledger book,
I said to him once. In the months after the ball, during that spring last year he became a ghost flitting through to and from the house filled with our children, and I rarely saw him. At first, when he was gone for days at a time, I thought perhaps he had found a woman. I didn’t care. But he was instead a mopper of vomit and a burner of bedsheets, a benefactor, cavorting among the afflicted under the command of Father Mike. He had been smitten by a priest, and this infuriated me. He became the hero and savior of the sick and the dying. He dared fate among the ill, and most important, he had little need of us. You and me, Lydia, and the children.