A Separate Country (35 page)

He blanched for a moment at the mention of Rintrah’s name, but only for a moment. He patted my shoulder. I wished he could stay, that I could allow him. It wasn’t possible.

“Not if I see you first, friend. But you’ll not see me in the city again. Only in that next life.”

He mounted up, picked a scab from his face, and wheeled around and out of the clearing. He may have been my closest friend, or at least the man who knew me the best, and I disliked him some for this. Even so, he was spared, and I wondered if God would credit me that mercy. I don’t know what difference it would make, but I like to have the books square, the maps precise. Not that it ever did anyone, me least of all, any good.

I didn’t love the disease, the dying. I loved Anna Marie. How could a maniac have seen that while I remained ignorant of it myself? I mounted up. I sensed the last battle approaching.
Be proud of me
,
Anna Marie
.

When I returned to town, I rode straight to Rintrah’s house. Rintrah and Father Mike sat in a small pantry they’d made into their war room, the secret room to which only a few were admitted. They bent their heads over a pine-stick table, rickety and bowlegged, on which Rintrah had laid out a sheaf of papers. They looked up when I walked in, they nodded, and turned back to what I now understood had been an argument.

“Can’t do it, Michel. There is no money for this.”

Standing around them were three colored men, two of whom I recognized as Houdou John, Father Mike’s friend, and the coachman who has worked for Anna Marie’s father so many years, George. I didn’t recognize the third colored man, but everyone in the room, even Rintrah and Father Mike, deferred to him and called him Mr. Plessy.

“You mean,” Mr. Plessy said, “that there is no money you would spare.”

Rintrah narrowed his eyes at him. “Don’t get any ideas, Plessy. I’ve been very generous. Look at this house, it’s a blasted storage shed for colored castoffs that even
your
people won’t look after while they die, so don’t be getting high and mighty with me. I’ve done put down plenty of money for you people.”

He said this nearly without anger in his voice, which he kept soft and steady, as if still trying hard not to offend even while offending. I wondered who this Mr. Plessy was, exactly.

“We all have made our sacrifices, in our own ways, this is why we here today together,” said Houdou John, always the peacemaker. I leaned against the wall and tried to remember his last name. I realized I never knew it.

“Who is this?” Mr. Plessy nodded his head at me, as if I were a servant.

“That’s Anna Marie’s husband, the General Hood,” said George, looking at me nervously. I didn’t know his last name either. Mr. Plessy nodded his head.

“Your wife knows my stepson, Homer, General Hood,” he said.

“I know nothing about that. Anyway, I am here on other business.”

“I reckon you have the same business here as the rest of us do, General Hood.”

I stood up straight to register his impertinence, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Father Mike and Rintrah, who had stopped fiddling with the papers in front of them and had looked up at me.

“Perhaps you do,” said Father Mike. “Have the same business, that is.”

“We might have a proposition for you, Hood,” Rintrah said.

And so, though I had intended to tell them I could no longer spend my days and nights there at the sick house, that I had obligations as a husband and a father at home, I listened to their plan. I listened out of friendship and respect, but at first I had no intention of seriously entertaining any scheme for any purpose that would require me to be away from Anna Marie and the children anymore. I had been shamed by a killer into recognizing my obligations to my family. Then, as I listened, and the perverse brilliance of their plan unfolded, I couldn’t help but be drawn in to their madness.

They intended to spirit from the city as many colored people as they could come high summer, when the yellow fever would be at its height. Father Mike had become tired of always tending the dying, and I came to understand that Mr. Plessy, Houdou John, and George had become tired of burying their dead.

Escape from the city during the summer had always been the luxury of those with money. They had the carriages, the servants, and the houses up north of Lake Pontchartrain where the yellow fever nearly never appeared, and when the summer was over they would return to the city as if they’d merely been on a holiday and not in flight for their lives. They never saw the city that was created in their absence, the suffering, the heat, the constant parade of coffins, the despairing insanity of those who had nowhere else to go. That was not their city.

Father Mike and Mr. Plessy, I learned, had decided that it would no longer be the city of the poor colored either. Where the others had their houses and breezy verandas and cooks and maids up north of the lake, Rintrah had his fish camps, where he had been storing his goods for many years. And in the city, he had his fleet of hearses.

“You got the perfect setup for moving people out of the city,” George said. “It ain’t like you never moved contraband before.”

“They ain’t contraband, you can’t just stack the poor bastards up like pallets and bottles,” Rintrah said.

“They aren’t contraband?” said Mr. Plessy, to no one in particular.

The problem was the money, always the problem in everything. Rintrah had the means to move people out of the city, and a place to send them where they could stay a couple months, but he didn’t have the money. He would lose all the money he’d be making moving liquor instead of people, first off. Second, most of his men wouldn’t likely have any part of it, and the rest would want an unconscionable amount of money, more money than he had in the world. “They ain’t going to take kindly to the idea of moving negroes out of the city ahead of white men,” Rintrah said. “And neither will anybody else in this damned city.” The rest of the people in the room nodded their heads sagely, and yet they persisted with him.

I suggested that they move poor blacks
and
whites, so as to partially assuage the concerns of Rintrah’s men. Mr. Plessy chuckled bitterly.

“That might make things easier on Rintrah and his boys, but it wouldn’t do a lick of good for us,” he said. “When it came down to it, no white man, poor or not, is going to let a nigger go on ahead of him, and so we’d have riots and the only way to end it would be to take the whites out first, all proper like, and when that’s done, and once the whites had taken up all the fish camps, what would we then do with the coloreds? Half them be dead by then anyway. That’s not what this is about. Understand me, General Hood, I am here for
my
people.”

“And what about those whites who have no way out either?”

“They better get to planning and scheming they ownselves, I do believe. They on their own.”

So, the money. When Rintrah looked up at me and said,
We might have a proposition for you, Hood,
this is what he meant: he wanted my money. At that point, I asked if I might be excused to talk with Rintrah and Father Mike in private. Mr. Plessy, Houdou John, and George filed out slowly, watching me, and went into the hallway, closing the door behind them.

“This is not why I came here,” I said.

“Nevertheless, it’s the question at hand,” Father Mike said.

“I don’t have such money, such resources.”

“But, I believe, the Insurance Association of America does.”

“That’s not my money. That’s someone else’s money, that’s everyone who’s bought policies.”

“It’s money, and it’s in your possession,” Father Mike said, leaning so close I could smell the vinegar on his breath. Collards. “They’re going to break you with those policies, we all know that. Your business is just about done, anyway, we all know it. They’re going to bleed you dry with their claims. All those riverboats you insured, all that cargo? All those profits? They’re gone and you know it. This is a plague city, friend, there isn’t going to be any business here soon. And they’re all going to come running to you for their claims, for some money. So you got to decide, who gets that money.”

“It’s a matter of honor, Father,” I said.

“It certainly is.”

I promised to think about it. Rintrah snarled and said I’d have a week to decide, or else they’d have to scrap the whole idea. In the confusion of it all, I forgot to tell them I was leaving them for Anna Marie and the children. The point had become moot, I guess.

I began to get up to leave, but Rintrah held me back. His strength, the size of his hands, was always surprising.

“I have other business to discuss with you, Hood,” he said. “I know what you been doing.”

“Calm down, Rintrah,” Father Mike said. “Just ask your question and get it over with.”

Rintrah sucked air into his cheeks and blew out. He looked me straight in the eye.

“You went after him. You went after him without telling me. Without my men.”

“Yes.” I saw no use in lying about that.

“What happened?”

I
did
see some use in lying about that, however.

“He’s dead.”

“Where?”

“I said he’s dead.”

“Sebastien Lemerle is dead. And you killed him.”

I didn’t answer, I only returned his stare. I was tired, and my heart had gone black momentarily. Rintrah looked at me suspiciously, but then relaxed.

“That’s it then.”

“That’s it. It’s over.”

I walked out, nodded to the three colored men lined up along the hallway, and mounted out for the house. Rintrah was weeping the last time I saw him.

Anna Marie Hood

J
ohn never told me about what he’d done to Sebastien Lemerle. I heard about it much later, and even then I never told John what I knew. I decided that if he didn’t want to tell me about it, he had his reasons. I’d come to trust him again, don’t ask me why. I will admit this, though: I was ashamed. Or, rather, I was saddened by the realization that what I had prophesied in that café, something I thought was the most terrible thing I could utter, this oath I had sworn in anger on Sebastien Lemerle in the presence of another ugly and laughing killer, that those words of mine had been made hard and true. I was shocked to know that my husband could kill a man. Is it odd to say that? Yes, I was shocked that my husband, the Confederate, the man known even among his detractors as a vicious fighter, could end one particular man’s life. I was responsible, I thought. I had wished it to happen, I had prayed for it, I had uttered the words,
Sebastien Lemerle will die
. And so he did, and I was not at all unburdened by that knowledge. I was not set free, I did not feel that there had been justice. It just seemed one more killing, nothing greater, and did not bring any greater order to the world. Perhaps this is why I never mentioned it to John: I could neither bring myself to congratulate him or condemn him.

He came home afterward. It took me three days to realize he meant to stay, and that he wasn’t running out the door to carry water for Michel and Rintrah. It was unexpected, Lydia, not least because I had come to understand, I thought, his obsession, and I had been prepared to accept it. Instead he bumped around the house, noticing things for the first time in many months. He saw that the oil was out in the lamps, and he rode off to get some. He fixed John Junior’s door, which squeaked. One day I watched him from the doorway as he slowly spun around in the middle of the living room, as if memorizing it, crinkling his brow now and again when he saw something new, or something old he’d never bothered to notice. He tested the red upholstered chairs, all three of them, and the blue couch, unmatched but comfortable, and spent the rest of the afternoon leveling the legs with a plane. He was very neat, I noticed. Meticulous about picking up the wood shavings. Then he took a nap.

He carried you around on his shoulders, Lydia, like he used to, hunting spiders and wren’s nests up in the eaves of the porch. He lingered after supper, even as the sun went down and it became dark, and we talked. Not the talk of giddy lovers, but talk between a man and a woman who had been tested and had decided that they could not go through with the days alone. This was love, too.

I didn’t ask him why he never went to the office, I was too glad to have him at home. He seemed preoccupied in his quiet moments, and at night he mumbled to himself.
I have obligations, I have made promises.
I thought he was talking about us, you and me, Lydia, and the rest of the children, and so I would put my arm over his chest and draw myself close. We slept in the same bed for the first time in several years, without any discussion.

Should I have questioned his return, should I have forced him to explain it, to justify it, to argue why he
ought
to be let back into my bed? Should I have made him prove himself, should I have forced him to make various admissions of fault and sin and recklessness and coldheartedness? Another woman might have made him earn his way, but I thought I could see in him, and feel in the knots of muscles in his back, that he had already earned something, that he had already suffered for his absence. Had I wanted to be right, I would have made him argue his case. The truth, though, was that I just wanted things whole, this family and this man and our bed.

I let my fingertips drift across his chest, stirring him only just enough to set the nightmares flitting off into air and nothingness. I would soon learn that his
obligations
weren’t only just to the family, but in that moment I was particularly content.

On the fourth day John went over to Bayou St. John with John Junior, and they brought back five large catfish. The fish lay on the back porch slowly turning from dark blue to gray while John showed Junior how to skin and fillet the big cats. We ate fillets fried in cornmeal and pepper, with okra from Rintrah. The okra came with a note to John, which he didn’t show me.

During supper, and after you children had left the table to play among the weeds and vines in the backyard while the sun still shined, John kept pulling out the note to unfold and fold again, each time creasing it tighter and tighter. He looked at me over the last few of our candles, and he cleared his throat.