A Separate Country (38 page)

I thought I would gag at those words. I saw the picture Mr. Plessy was drawing, a picture of a man cast out,
sent down to niggertown,
a place where he wouldn’t have been comfortable, but at least a place where he wouldn’t be reminded of our betrayals. And he was right, it had become difficult to explain our friendship with a colored man. It had never been mere familiarity, never just acquaintance. He had been our intimate, and when the war ended and the negro came to be thought of as a traitor, we became suspect, possible traitors ourselves. It was best, I suppose we thought, to be more guarded, more circumspect. But secrecy and circumspection can quickly become mere abandonment. It’s easier.

“You’ve come in here not to help me, but to punish me,” I said. “You are a terrible man.”

He shook his head slowly, but knew well enough to get up and begin to leave. He was a very smart man, I could tell, and very keen on his own intelligence, his knowledge. He carried it on him like armor. He knew more than me, and he’d proved his point. But in his face there was no spite, and I realized his anger had not been at me, or at Rintrah or Michel.

“He forgave you, I should tell you that, missus. He didn’t think he would have done anything different if it had been him, and for that reason he had to forgive you. I think he was right about that, and it makes me hellfire hot. We would have all done what you did. That’s the evil, you see. He was a very sad man when I knew him, which was only when I tried to intervene between him and a white man who lived down in the neighborhood with a colored girl, who he called his wife. Your friend was a very handsome man, and that’s all I’ll say about that.”

Then he left me alone with the image of Paschal strung up from a tree, alone as he’d been for years.

John came to stay with me in the shack during those final weeks of seclusion, finally satisfied that all the camps were running in proper order. In the nighttime I tried to tell him what I had done to Paschal, but he didn’t want to talk about it.

“There are others who have more to answer for than you and your friends. You didn’t kill him.”

I wasn’t so sure. I hid, engulfed in your father’s arms, vanished in the heat of your father’s body. I wanted to be nothing, air, ether, something not bound by the laws of this world, the arbitrary and cruel laws. But I was not ether, I was flesh. Nine months later the littlest Anna was born. Nine months later we were as poor and as ostracized as anyone in
niggertown,
and though I’m certain Paschal would not have wished that on us, I felt closer to him then. He had always said he loved my name.

Eli Griffin

T
hat was one hell of an operation they pulled off that summer, and of course, old Rintrah had come to me demanding that I help. When I asked how much I would be paid he hit me in the shins with a red-and-black cane carved with twisting snakes on it.

“I ain’t paying you a damned thing, and if you know what’s good for you and your
job
and your
lady,
if you can call her that, you’ll take yourself a vacation and help me haul these negroes up to the camps.”

He had come down to the ice factory, but instead of sitting down for a spell like normal, he fidgeted and picked at the ice on the big tubes, flicking shards here and there until I had to tell him to quit before someone slipped up and hurt themselves.

“What am I supposed to say to Mr. Rouart? ‘Sir, I’ve got to leave for a couple months so I can smuggle negroes out of the city, I’ll be back for my job directly after.’ Is that what I’m supposed to say?”

He tried some of the ice and spit it out, rubbing at his yellow-and-green teeth.

“Have you seen Mr. Henri Rouart around these parts recently?”

“I have not, no. He’s a busy man.”

“Busy getting hisself the hell out of this city. Henri Rouart isn’t even within a hundred miles of this city at the moment. He’s not dumb, he ain’t going to die with the fever. So, first, Rouart wouldn’t notice if you decided to swim to Ireland. Second, Henri Rouart does what I say, in certain cases, and that includes giving you a job. And third, you ain’t to tell anyone, not one single soul, what we doing. Don’t test me. Keep your mouth shut.”

When Rintrah put things like that, it was hard to resist him, and so I packed some things and wandered out over to his house on Chartres, and Holy Christ it was like an army had decided to shack up in Rintrah’s house and in his courtyard. Men, mostly colored, strode in and out of the house, piling supplies here, lining up women and children over there, and greasing up the hearses by the carriageway. And who was in charge, who barked the orders and took the reports, who inspected the lines of escapees, who examined the quality of the horses? General John Bell Hood,
CSA
. I could see that this chapped Rintrah’s ass, but Hood would just look at him and say, “My money, my operation, step back,” and Rintrah would storm off. Father Mike thought it was quite funny, and he chuckled while he took down names and examined the refugees for the telltale signs of the fever.

I had only imagined what Hood had been like as a general, and I will admit that it wasn’t an entirely favorable image. But now, when he was standing on one of Rintrah’s fruit crates, I could see why he had been able to send men into battle though they faced death. He was still when all around him was flitting and hopping and screeching. His eyes saw everything, and those eyes had become even lighter in his excitement, they looked barely human. He spoke in low tones, and the lower his voice went the more attentive people became. Nothing happened without his knowledge or approval. Most important, he looked as if nothing could go wrong, his face said that there would be no problems and no mistakes and that all would survive and return safely, and under his gaze the people of that house and in that courtyard were encouraged and assured. When Rintrah had told me about the plan to move negroes to the fish camps in hearses, I had thought it unlikely. No, impossible. But now, I stood in the courtyard with my adventure sack slung over my shoulder and not only believed that the plan would work perfectly, but I was eager to put my shoulder to the wheel and help out. I walked over and reported to Hood.

“Lieutenant Griffin, good of you to finally make muster. We’ve got people who need to be escorted into the transports and made comfortable, though you need to pack them tight. Don’t know how many runs we’re going to be able to make, so we have to maximize the use of space. But be gentle, dammit.”

“Transports?” I was already confused.

“The hearses, son. ‘Transports’ is a more accurate name at the moment.”

And so it became my job to take the lists from Father Mike, call the names one at a time, and see that the men and women, fathers and grandfathers and grandmothers and aunts and mothers and sisters, all got into the hearses in some degree of comfort. The line of them never seemed to end.

The plan was not only clever, it seemed a little poetic too. In order to not attract attention, the refugees arrived at the front of Rintrah’s house coughing and bundled up, as if they were in the final stages of their illness and had come to be comforted unto death by Father Mike and his helpers. Nothing unusual there, and nothing unusual about the constant convoy of hearses leaving out the back of Rintrah’s house. Either they were filled with the dead or Rintrah’s liquor, either way they were nothing remarkable. And between the two, the afflicted cast off their blankets, cleared their throats, and marched bright-eyed to the staging area where Father Mike got them prepared to leave.

It was perfect, and Hood saw that the plan was executed down to the least detail, and he was the last to leave the compound before going to meet Anna Marie and the children, who would be riding out of town in a carriage. I rode out of town on a mule that was in bad need of the services of a mule skinner, ornery bugger.

*   *   *

At the fish camps, Hood was in constant motion, only stopping to attend at the birth of his new son, Oswald, and then only briefly. Somewhere he had requisitioned old U.S. Army tents, and he supervised their raising in the woods and open spaces around each fish camp. He directed the digging of latrines, and he identified scouts and foragers who would root through the countryside for food. On his horse, moving down the paths, he was a man shoring up his defenses, shouting orders here, encouragement there.

I fished most of the time, alongside the others. I had a pole out of cane and some line and a hook made from a sewing needle bent in a campfire. I looked like I was sleeping most of the time, except when I pulled up some bass or a cat, but mostly I was listening through the canebrakes and the winding webs of creeper.

“Why you
think
these people of a sudden gone to help us out?”

“The white men? One, he a priest, he got to. God got a straight line to him, that one got a boss man that don’t get talked back at. So that’s him.”

“The priest, all right then.”

“The dwarf, he love him some negro ass, he just protecting his interests, get me?”

“The dwarf is a god
damn
criminal and you know it, and I say he got plans.”

“What plans?”

“You see if they anything left at the house when we all get on back. You’ll see.”

“Aw, hell.”

“You see.”

“They gone to rob
us
? They rob me and what they gone get is a piss pot and my extra pair of trousers. They gone get shit, what I’m saying. You not right in the head.”

“You see.”

“Mmmhmm. You got one on that line there, maybe you oughta quit running your mouth and fish.”

I listened to the sounds of the man pulling in his catch. It thrashed at the surface and dove briefly, a nice catfish. After that first burst of fight, it rolled over on its side and let itself be pulled in, fighting one last time at the end in the shallows, sending the men cursing. Then I heard the sound of a branch or a club brought down hard on its head. A wet thunk and then nothing. Before long I watched the innards go lifting up over the water, glistening green and red and yellow and black, before falling to the water and disappearing again.

“Fry that one up nice.”

“Sure will.”

“What about that other one, the colonel?”

“General.”

“Wit the leg.”

“You mean no leg.”

“Mmmhmm.”

“He done a good job getting this thing together, that’s what I think.”

“I think he got plans for us too. I think he and his cracker friends gone to do something.”

“You an ungrateful man, need to pray for your soul.”

“What I know is, when niggers get rounded up all at once, ain’t nothing good gone come from it. And I ain’t never been, I ain’t gone to be, grateful to a white man for nothing. Nothing.”

“Who rounded you up, boy? I seen you running down the street with your little ones and the woman just as soon as you heard they taking negroes out the city, tongue out and pumping them legs like you running out a burning house. You yelling, ‘Wait now, wait on us now.’?”

“You a lying nigger.”

“Seen it with my own eyes.”

“Outran your ass, now, didn’t I? Fat boy.”

“I don’t run nowhere. I knowed they’d wait. And I also know this. Someday you gone to be thankful for this here fish camp, and when you start telling them tales about how you were saved that summer, and Oh Lord Praise Our Rescuers, I’ma tell tales on you, no mistake.”

“All I know, I don’t trust a cracker, but Plessy and Houdou John, they good men. And they colored. I’m here ’cause of them.”

“Another fish, now.”

“That’s right, they know who’s got it right. They throw themselves at my hook, I so right. I got the fish on
my
side.”

“Shit.”

When I wasn’t fishing, I was running errands for Hood. He called me his adjutant, but I reckoned this was a joke. I took head counts, checked to see if anyone was coughing or fevered, hauled blankets and food here and there as it came in on Rintrah’s hearses. All the while I rode on that brokedown old white mule, and the people who saw me going down the paths or delivering vegetables began to call me Lightning. Or maybe it was the mule.

“Won’t ever go the same place twice.”

“Unless you give ’em two weeks to get there.”

After the birth of Oswald, Hood eventually returned back to the central fish camp, a larger place on stilts clad with tin and heart pine. It was the camp closest to the center of his line, as he called it, the string of fish camps under his command. From there he was no more than an hour from anyone who might need him. He spent his days at first pacing around the shack and having quick conversations with the people camped around. I think he was hoping someone
would
need him, but there was never any report of trouble or crisis, except when Anna Marie took to the bed and even then things seemed to go smooth. After a few weeks he finally sat down and tried to teach himself to carve little figures from some of that hard pine. Oh, he was terrible at it, and he nicked his fingers often, including one time I thought he’d torn his little finger right off. I was running around looking for something for a bandage when I heard a rip, and turned around to see that he had ripped the cuff off his shirt and had applied it to the wound.

“That, my boy,” he said, giving me a shit-eating grin, “that ain’t nothing.”

“How about I show you how to carve, General?”

“That would be fine.”

And so we made little figures for each of his boys and girls, and then two more for him and Anna Marie. I carved General Hood so that you couldn’t see that he was missing anything. I began to carve in a uniform, buttons and stripes and all, but he stopped me and told me to put him in a suit. So I did.

Finally we run out of people to carve—Father Mike hung his from his rosary, and Rintrah tossed his into the fire and cuffed me on the head. I will admit, I had carved his hardly bigger than a splinter, and his ears weren’t near that big.

The last one I carved was of M., who I was surprised to find that I missed. She wasn’t so squinty-eyed and suspicious in my carving, and she didn’t look like she was ever ready to run. She looked happy, I reckon. General Hood noticed, though I tried to hide her.