A Separate Country (55 page)

I suppose I should pay him something for this, some compensation, I cannot just load him with these burdens as if he is obliged to me. He will not want money, though he needs it as badly as we do. He is proud and stubborn and, most of all, averse to indenture. He will not want to owe me anything, and this is how I will get him to come, to take these burdens. I will tell him that he owes me. For what? For trying to take my life. Only
trying,
and barely. Still, he waylaid me like a common thief and put the knife to my throat, and I can use this. He owes me nothing for that, and if I had been in his position I would have finished the job and not shown mercy. But I will tell him that he must make amends, because he is proud and he will hate that he might be indebted to me.

Perhaps he would come of his own accord. Perhaps I am underestimating him. I have made this mistake many times. I lack faith, Lord. And anyway, what shall I give him as compensation? What indeed. I shall tell him a truth.

Though Eli has never told me, I know what happened to him back in Franklin. To him, and to his sister and her infant child, and to his sister’s gallant but foolhardy beau, and to his father. Between letters to former commanders and colleagues, between the endless tracing of maps, I found time to investigate the mystery of one Eli Griffin, orphan.

He was a boy when our army marched up from Spring Hill, Tennessee, and toward Franklin, heading straight up the pike not knowing we were condemned men marching to our doom. Near what would become the battlefield we passed several small farms on either side of the pike. We had seen hundreds, perhaps thousands of such farms during the war, but these would be among the last. They were like so many of the rest, homesteads centered on small square houses and dotted with gray outbuildings spilling with half-starved chickens and hogs and rotting grain and old plows polished to gleaming. One of them was the Griffin homestead, though I don’t know which. I can remember the farms, though, and thinking that I had come to defend them, when in fact I would destroy them.

I have great faith in my own power, do I not?
I would destroy them
. But I was no god, no destroyer of worlds, hurler of thunderbolts. I was just a man who, for the moment, other men would obey. We all destroyed the Griffin family, I was only the first among many.

Eli’s mother had died years before. His sister, Becky, had become something like a mother to him. I know this from an old woman who has buried the dead, my men, in her own yard and given them numbers and obsessively walks the cemetery as if she were the keeper of Heaven and Hell, ticking off the numbers of the souls. I have forgotten her name. In her letter she told me she had sheltered Eli for a time, but that finally he had run off. She asked me rather plaintively if I had seen him, if he was ever coming home to Tennessee. I never wrote back, which was cruel.

He is a delicate boy, however he appears. At least, that is how I remember him. If you see him, or hear of him, please be kind. He has not been treated well by this life, General Hood.

Eli’s sister died in childbirth, carrying the child of one of my officers. He was a young adjutant, I have gathered from the old woman. That was all she would tell me, and so I have no idea who he was, only that he died with the colors in his hand, flapping in the cannon smoke in an impossible charge on a frightful battlefield of my choosing. I wonder if he even knew he was to be a father. He wore my uniform, he had no doubt, as adjutant, handled messages from me to his commander. He had seen my handwriting, my name, on the orders that sent them charging off to die. Where there had been three souls, a mother and father and child, there were soon none. The sister died in childbirth, the old woman said, but she always thought it was heartbreak.

Soon afterward Eli’s father disappeared. I wonder if he is dead too. Or one of the wanderers who live by the river bridges and meander from town to town, waiting out this life among the ruins of war. Such men were a common sight in the southern lands.

Eli became an orphan. I made orphans, that was my occupation. I confess it, and will confess it to Eli if he ever gets here. One of the thousands, I assume. If I pass on, if I get ill, too, there will be ten more orphans. It will have been my life’s work! My tombstone shall read,
He stole their parents.
They do not tell you this at West Point. They teach you to form lines, to skirmish, to properly set the deflection and elevation on a cannon, to ride, to dig entrenchments, to properly supply a company. They do not teach you that there will be others on the battlefield who have never studied such things and don’t know they exist, that these people might have lived their lives quite happily never knowing what a cannon sounded like, or the buzz of a tumbling ball shot out the end of a rifle.

I know what Eli saw the next day. I watched the boys venture out onto the battlefield, slow and amazed, and I assume that Eli was one of them. It is always the boys who go where they shouldn’t, who see what they later wish they hadn’t. I was there the morning after the battle. I woke up to the smoke of smoldering barns and the queer drapery of a thin snow laid on the gouged and torn red earth. I saw it and I didn’t think much of what I saw on that field, having seen it before. Now I see it through new eyes that have of late, so late, recognized suffering as the corrupt and permanent condition of man, something inescapable and best faced square on, for in suffering is life, and its denial is a kind of death.

Or perhaps these are the eyes of Eli Griffin. Suppose they are one and the same.

The ground was red not because of the clay, but because of the blood. It had run in rivers, as if it had been prophesied in Scripture, and perhaps it was. The dead lay on the field as if they’d fallen from a great height. Here they had clung to each other as they plummeted to earth, and they were piled limb upon limb. Over there they had struck out on their own and fallen atop themselves, split and twisted and frozen. Thousands of men lay there, having suffered every kind of grievous wound, most too horrible to conjure into memory, even more than a decade on. I shall see those faces again, I am sure: the men without jaws, without noses, with only half a head. I shall see the shattered bones and the swollen flesh. I am not afraid, I welcome my penance.

We were about to ride out, on the tracks of General Schofield’s Union Army, on our way to our final destruction at Nashville. I must have known that it would be the end of us, but I refused to act accordingly. It was better to be destroyed than to be weak. I couldn’t see the contradiction.

I paused there on my horse while my staff began to ride ahead, their heads shrouded against the cold and the lingering snow, my cowled and stooped monks. I am certain they thought me half out of my mind on laudanum when I stopped. I bent my head and swayed in the saddle, I’m certain I looked drunk, but I was only momentarily consumed with pain. My leg burned, as it often did, and the only way I knew to make the pain pass was to disappear into it quietly, to keep still and suffer. I did not take laudanum, that is the honest to God truth, whatever the gossips said. Now I wish that I
had
taken the cure, if I had to suffer the rumors anyway.
Hood must have been out of his mind on the tincture, or he’d have never charged that town like that
. I wish I’d had that excuse.

I swayed in the saddle and closed my eyes, concentrating on the pain. Horses could always sense that pain and it frightened them. This time the horse fidgeted around in a half circle until, when I’d opened my eyes, I was looking straight into the eyes of a young blond boy, not one hundred feet off, who was staring at me. Or, rather, at the scene at the feet of my horse. There below me ran the entrenchment the Union had dug, against which my men had flung themselves. Now it had been filled with the butternut brown and the gray of the Confederate Army, an open grave, a human abattoir. I remember thinking,
Good, he is seeing our sacrifice, the evidence of our great courage
. Fool. Now I realize what I saw in
his
eyes: he saw a devil on his black horse, mutilated and fire-eyed, possessed and under the command of Satan himself, towering over the spoils of five thousand souls. The other boys walked slowly across the battlefield, daring each other to look. One by one they broke away and ran into the town and disappeared without a word. But the blond boy, he would not move. I believe he was waiting for me to take him too. I nearly called out to him, but there was fear upon him and it gave me strength. But I know now that fear was only part of what I saw in that boy. Had I known to look for it, I would have seen hate and shock and the melancholy of knowing he could no longer be a child, now that he had seen what men could do to men. I rode off.

I want Eli’s forgiveness. Who was that boy? I don’t know, it could have been any boy, and thus I had decided that it was Eli. In Eli I can find forgiveness. I want to tell Eli that now, or if I had been the man then that I am now, I would have dismounted and held out my hand to him, that I would have taken him home to his father and to his sister, and that I would have protected them. I would have changed his fate, I would have provided for that boy, the only living thing on that field that morning. I would have done it, Eli, I would have done it.

He will see. I will send him to see my other creation, not an orphan but a killer. Sebastien. The killer and the orphan, the Janus face of my life’s work. I have made peace with them separately, but now it is time for them to meet.

I am wasting time. My memory will not submit, it plays across fields I’d rather forget even as I struggle to remember when, precisely, I knew I had fallen back in love with my wife, when I became undeniably happy. It was not so long ago. It was only months ago. Or I suppose it’s possible that I never fell out of love with her, I merely forgot about her. And now her memory recedes and I wish I would die and be free to catch up with her, wherever she’s gone. I want to remember the great moments, the crucial moments, but the thing that keeps coming to my mind again and again and again is something of such little significance! It is a trifle, and yet it insists that I remember.

We had dismissed the last of the servants, and the children were, by and large, in their beds. Those who weren’t pretended to be asleep, anyway, which was good enough. There was quiet. I sat in one of the parlor chairs and I could feel that pain coming on again, the pain in my leg that I had felt on the battlefield that snowy morning, the same pain of the saw and the knife even now, so many years after I’d lain upon that surgeon’s table. I closed my eyes. I swayed in my seat. I saw explosions of red and yellow behind my eyelids and I bore down harder on them until I could trace the veins. I let my head rock back against the chair back and could feel every raised thread in the cushion scratch against me. I became painfully aware of everything, even the weight of the ashes blowing gently out of the fireplace on soft hot breezes slipping through a crack in the flue. And then I felt her hands on me, first at the top of my boot. She pulled it off, the boot on my real foot, and the sock too. I opened my eyes. She sat on her knees and massaged the bottom of my foot, the inside of my foot, the hard tendons and bones and ligaments, until I could feel coolness and calm that moved through me and scattered the pain in my other leg. She held my foot close to her, she leaned her head against my knee. I thought about it and told myself no. Then I silently cursed my cowardice and reached out with my hand and rested it on her head. I sifted the black and silky hair through my fingers. She closed her eyes. And there we sat until it was dark.

She didn’t think I was drunk. She didn’t think I was light-headed on laudanum. She wasn’t afraid of me. She only knew that I was in pain, and that she could make it subside. She knew without my telling her. It seemed at that moment that she had always known me. No, that’s not it. It seemed that she had always
loved
me. And instantly I thought,
I’ve always loved her
. I don’t know by what magic this happens, but it seemed just then that between us, between lover and loved, there was something that had always existed, something sacrificial and nourishing and perfect. Love. That is to say, God. I knew God then and for the first time. Afterward He was everywhere, and especially with Anna Marie. In her I found rest, and through her I spoke to God.

I think that is all I ever needed to say. But now I must say this: Lord, save Lydia. Lord, have mercy on Lydia. Lord, take me instead.

I am tired.

Eli Griffin

I
f you are reading this, you are obviously aware that Anna Marie’s ledgers and my own scribblings survived the next two hours. You also might know that I was not able to get the war book back from Beauregard. As Hood’s official literary executioner, exector, I’m not sure of the term, he got the thing published. It’s called
Advance and Retreat,
which Beauregard had published the next year, in 1880, to benefit the Hood Memorial Fund. That’s the outfit that prints up all them postcards with the photograph of the Hood Orphans—John Junior and the eight others—looking so sad and lonely in that dark and dusty room. God knows where they made that photograph, or when they made it. It sure has been a moneymaker for the fund, though, hasn’t it? I’d bet a week of suppers and my left arm that you’d give up some cash money if you got one of those postcards, or saw one of those posters. You’d have to have a hard heart to turn your back on them. They’re looking at you, and their parents are dead, and so are their oldest and youngest sisters, and they’re alone, alone, alone! They don’t tell you that Beauregard had them all split up in every direction, to Texas and Maryland and Kentucky and New York and all over the place. No, in the picture they’re all there, together, waiting for you to help them. Oh, well, hell, ain’t nothing to be done about that now.

But Hood’s real book, the book he wanted me to get published? Well, here it is. Too late to change the story of John Bell Hood, but I kept my word. Hood has been remembered as the stubborn man, the willful man, the foolish man, the self-righteous man, the immodest man. The incompetent commander. The drug addict. The cripple. Nothing’s going to change that now. I wonder, though, if that was ever what Hood wanted. I’m not sure he cared at the end about changing that reputation for all the rest of you. At the end I think he only cared about what his friends and his children thought, what they knew about him and Anna Marie. He succeeded at that, at least. But I often wonder what might have happened had we got ourselves up into the Beauregard mansion and found that damned book and taken it away for burning. I wonder how things might be different had this book been the one published, and not that one. I wonder whether anyone would have believed it. Do folks want their generals to be the kind of men who write about their families, their children, as if there was nothing else in the world? Do they want to remember their generals as flesh-and-blood sinners like the rest of us, capable of regret and of change? I don’t think we want that from them. I think we want them to be gods in an American mythology, unchanging creatures who are purely what they seem to be, and different from the rest of us. Because if they aren’t different, if they are like us, then what the hell are we capable of? These are the gods of war, able to bring destruction and stride across the fields of dead like they were walking through wheat fields, reaping their crop. They can’t be like us, or we are more terrible than we think.