A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

A Multi-Cast Production

Set in New Orleans in the years after the Civil War, A Separate Country is based on the incredible life of John Bell Hood, arguably one of the most controversial generals of the Confederate Army--and one of its most tragic figures. Robert E. Lee promoted him to major general after the Battle of Antietam. But the Civil War would mark him forever. At Gettysburg, he lost the use of his left arm. At the Battle of Chickamauga, his right leg was amputated. Starting fresh after the war, he married Anna Marie Hennen and fathered 11 children with her, including three sets of twins. But fate had other plans. Crippled by his war wounds and defeat, ravaged by financial misfortune, Hood had one last foe to battle: Yellow Fever. A Separate Country is the heartrending story of a decent and good man who struggled with his inability to admit his failures-and the story of those who taught him to love, and to be loved, and transformed him.

Release date: September 2, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 437

Sample

Notes of Eli Griffin, August 1879

I woke sick to the sound of an envelope slid under my door. Outside the cotton presses clunked and smoked, the roustabouts
shouted oaths at the screwmen, the river slipped past silent and heavy with mud and men and their craft. I listened for the
footsteps of the messenger but heard none. They’d begun to burn the sugar down by the molasses sheds, where the Creoles I’d
bested at faro the night before would now be standing overseeing the sugar niggers, nursing their own illnesses of indulgence,
and finding themselves unable to do anything but mutter oui, oui and call for more coffee. San Domingue rum is a hell of a thing, I should say. Oh Lord, my head. I wondered if M., lying
next to me, could hear the bones in my head creaking when I breathed. The sound in my head was loud, like the sound of two
ships scraping by each other at the quay. It must have made sound. Or maybe that squeaking was me. Quite possible.


Though I lived near the docks, I was not myself a dock man. I was an iceman. I worked in the ice factory and therefore I was
suspect, an outsider, someone very odd. I spent my days in the cold, in rooms with no smells and little light. The little
factory was an alien thing to New Orleans, the opposite of hot. We icemen were very possibly magicians or devils and I liked the reputation,
and I very much enjoyed my job. Good for early morning pains too. I considered going to work and taking an extra shift just
to lean against the frozen condenser coils and think of snow angels.


I shook my head to clear it, and immediately regretted moving at all. I became nauseous. I sat down at the small table under
the window and inhaled the air pouring through the cracks. When I’d got my bearings, I took stock of the situation.


Had I won at faro last night? Really and truly? That’s what I remembered, but that didn’t mean nothing. I remembered being
an innocent boy once, but that wasn’t possible. Couldn’t have been. In my bed slept M., my twiggy Irish girl, my sole companion
for many months standing. If she was still selling time to grunting cigar chompers in the plush house on Royal Street, it
was only because I couldn’t keep money very long. We didn’t talk about her work, though she still called me her caller. The one who never pays and who owes me, she’d say. Not never pay, I guess, but there’s no use arguing with M. For instance, this particular morning. If I had won
at faro the night before, there was no longer any sign of the victory. M. had my cash now, and most of my little bed, and
still when she woke she would call me her caller. She sucked at her bony freckled knuckle while she slept. I tried not to
wake her when I went to get the envelope under the door, but the floor creaked and she stirred, cursing me sweetly in a language
I’d never heard. I cursed her right back and crossed the bare, dust-mortared floorboards to the envelope, which was brown
and sealed with black wax.


“What is it, hon?” M. called from her pillow, suddenly friendly, probably thinking it was money. She prayed every evening
that she would be saved from that fancy house on Royal Street, and so every unexpected thing came to her first as a possible
sign of deliverance. Always disappointment, always expectation. I opened the envelope at the wax, using the long middle fingernail
I cultivated for desperate fights in saloons. I sharpened it like a knife twice a week.


“It’s a letter.”

“Oh Christ.”


“What do you care? You can’t read.”

“Such a nice boy, you are. The girl swoons, boyo.”

“Not in the bed, there’s a bucket in the corner.”

She swung her feet to the floor. Her feet were tiny, perfect, and her ankles had freckles. Everything had freckles.

“I’m leaving.”

“Kiss me for luck.”

“You don’t got no more coin for that.”

“Don’t ever work anyway.”

A striking, pretty, bony little thing was my M. She stood up to my chin and could look at me so that I would be afraid. She
was delicate, nearly no flesh on her except for the sweet turn of her bare ass and the muscles in her shoulders. I looked
on her, naked and smirking, and I felt real fondness. Love? Heavens. Great fondness? Sure. She covered up quick, stomped around
picking up pieces of her ensemble here and there until she was dressed and ready to march on. She could dress instantly when
it suited her. I assumed this was a professional, cultivated skill. She stopped beside me before walking through the door.
Her eyes, flecked and hazel, turned down sadly, either from the paint or the wear or both. She carried a small black purse
in her hand, which she pointed at me like a pistol.


“What do I care?” she said quietly. “I care for lots of things, things I ain’t ever told you these months I been to your bed.
But someday, if you’re very good and God sees fit to save me, I will tell you, we’ll talk a long time, you’ll be sick of my
talk. Now I’ll only say this.” She reached up and stroked my jaw, rubbing at the stubble before pinching my ear.


“I’ll say this. What do you care about, boyo?”


I didn’t answer quick enough and she gave a little whoop.

“Nothing! That’s it? You care for nothing? Ah, the world is so black, how do you ever stand it?”

She laughed and tippietoed down the back stairway, chuckling to the ground. I walked back to the table to consider the thing
that was not money but had been slipped under my door. I also, and I will admit this here now that I know how things turn
out, I also prayed real quick that she would get back to her fancy house safely, and that she would be protected. See, there were
things I weren’t going to tell her either. Ha. As if I didn’t care for nothing.


I recognized the letter immediately. In the cold wax lay the seal of General John Bell Hood, formerly U.S. Army and Confederate
Army, currently a ghost haunting the uptown provinces, New Orleans. Not truly a ghost, I don’t believe in that mess, don’t
believe in the spirits and goblins that I’m told parade through this city in their nightclothes and masks and all manner of
costume. What I mean is, the man now lived at the edge of everything, cast out from his old habitats, which included the ice
factory where he had once liked to nap and harass me in the cold dark. Before his wife’s funeral the month before when I had
seen Anna Marie laid in the ground at Lafayette Cemetery, I hadn’t seen Hood in almost a year. Since the epidemic. I had assumed
he’d died or fled, but later I was corrected by one of the high collars down at the cotton exchange where I wagered money
on the afternoon’s Shell Road races. “Not dead, young ice wrangler, just mad,” he’d said, slipping my money into his vest
pocket.


Since insanity was about as remarkable as water in the city, I had given up hope for Hood and the rest of the family. It was
sad but inevitable. Hell, I was half crazy and well on my way to full-bore lunacy. That is an overstatement. I was eccentric, and becoming more so. I
didn’t know what I could do for Hood. And I suppose I was afraid. I am a sinner, I am the man who walks right round the wounded
man on the road to the Temple. I never went out to the house on Third Street to see for myself, see. Went right round it,
so to speak, until I heard of Anna Marie’s death from a nun who had been teaching me the catechism.


I was becoming a Catholic—there’s something I care about, M.! Pasture and horseshit and all that waiting for rain, all the
country in my blood had been bled from me, and the poor-ass country boy I’d been had begun to disappear with it. And I had
learned, as the sister had taught me, that death had power, that death must be witnessed. Unlike insanity, which is best left
to itself in my opinion. Don’t know what the Church has to say about that though. Ought to check.


Eli Griffin

Top Floor

Levi Fabrics and Rooming

August 17, 1879

Forgive me my neglect, Eli. It has been a very strange year and now we are dying.

I quietly folded the letter and replaced it in its envelope before going on. I put it in the dead center of my eating table,
out of the sun that spattered the room through my wood blinds. I got dressed. It seemed disrespectful to be reading such a
thing without clothes. Black homespun trousers, blue cotton shirt, longshoreman’s boots. Simple.


I saw you at Anna Marie’s funeral, so first please accept my gratitude. There were very few of our friends there, and I appreciated
your gesture. I may call you a friend?

I read the rest of the letter and when I had finished, I folded it into my shirt pocket. I rooted around for my adventuring
bag before finding it under some muddy clothes. I checked the contents: a fork, a pigsticker, a Bowie knife, rope, an extra
shirt, dried salted beef, bandages, the key to the ice factory, a pencil, a small sack of field peas, a crucifix I’d found
in a garbage pile on the levee. Then I walked out the door for the journey uptown.


I do not tell you this, that Lydia and I are stricken also, to elicit sympathy, only to make clear the urgency of matters
at hand. I have no time for Creole time, so to speak. You are a Tennessean, despite appearances. (I have heard of your visits
to the cathedral.) You are not yet so much a Creole that you can’t occasionally move quickly. I ask that you move quickly.

You hated sympathy, old man, but I still had some for you. I stepped out of the way of a dray splashing colored and oily water
up and over the cypress-paneled banks of the streetside ditch. I walked fast, knocking shoulders and not looking back. Decatur
Street was full up with carts and drays carrying rice and cane back and forth. Sometimes a hearse, too, sometimes a wagon
full of Sicilians settled in among their tomatoes and okra and turnips. Too many people in my way, so I turned down toward
the river and the more open spaces of the wharf and the sugar sheds.


Even there I had to push my way upriver toward Hood. Here were the pale German street boys sliding through the crowd of sugarmen
outside the Broker’s Charm, handing out samples of sugar in tiny brown envelopes, drumming up business for the men at the
top of the Bonded Warehouse, who owned the thousands of hogsheads piled up on the quay. The nervous men with money. I took
some sugar and continued through the crowd and into the straight rows of molasses sheds, where the negroes boiled cane and
sucked on pickled, salted onions. I ran down those straight alleys until I was beyond the black smoke and bittersweet air
of the sugar district and could breathe proper again.


I passed the statue of Henry Clay, where the mumbling old soldiers lived their days upon the great circular pedestal. At Canal
I turned up toward St. Charles, past Touro Row where the man at the piano shop ragged a tune without much interest, and past
Cluver’s Drugs where I stopped for a bottle of headache spirit. Women dressed in billowing curtains of black from bonnet to
hem drifted up the boulevard like loose puffs of coal smoke from the great clacking double-stacked riverboats that crowded
at the foot of the street.


Smells washed up on my nose and drew back like waves: shrimp shells, old sweet potatoes, new-cut stone, wet cotton. Water
ran down the cypress street gutters though the sun was high. A crop of lightning rods reached up across the city from nearly
every building, black against the blue sky. I navigated by the church steeples, and steered toward St. Patrick’s.


Before I am utterly out of my mind, I must make a request of you, I must ask you to settle a very delicate matter for me.
I am certain you long ago thought me mad, and that was insolent. Now I forgive your insolence, and admit that though I wasn’t
mad, I must have seemed so. I forgive everything, and only hope you will forgive me also.

At St. Patrick’s the Irish were seeing off another of their dead, a full-time occupation for the city’s tunnelers, diggers,
chippers, carvers, and trenchers.


“Drowned, crushed, or fevered?” I asked as I passed.

“Crushed, then fevered,” said a little man in a big black suit, inhaling his pipe and mumbling an Our Father through the smoke.


The old General wanted forgiveness? My forgiveness? His army had come to my town, and afterward I was orphaned and raised
by saloonkeepers, gamblers, and madams in every brokeass river city down the river from Memphis to Natchez. Not once had he
said, My, Eli Griffin, you have made something of yourself despite all! I had, of course. My girl M. might have suspected there was nothing I cared about, but there was in fact something I cared
about right much: I cared about Eli Griffin, marooned boy, hustler, grifter, now a maker of ice. I vowed years before while
hauling piss buckets down brothel stairs that Eli Griffin would get his share and hold on to it and not give a damn, and I
had done it. I was not playing the jug for pennies down on Jackson Square.


The General might have had his own grudges, I ain’t saying he didn’t have reason.

I call on you because you tried to kill me once, and now that I am in fact dying, I believe it is time to settle accounts
in that matter. Which means, of course, you owe me for sparing you the pain of revenge and the shackles of the Calaboose.

I crossed the Place du Tivoli, a circle traced by a ring of old live oaks. I looked over toward the new canal straight north
and saw the cotton boll clouds twisting and piling atop each other. A storm was coming. I watched a pack of dogs shy and snarl at
each other. I walked faster, out across the circle where, soon, they would cut down the trees to raise a statue of General
Lee atop an ugly tower sunk in a mound of cut granite. Even now I could see the cypress coming down in the swamp beyond the
houses, to make room for more houses, and occasionally I heard the shouts of the men on the felling crews.


I slipped through back alleys behind the new houses, hopped black iron fences, stepped through sharp old quince bushes, dodged
the horses pulling families and lovers in carriages across Coliseum Square, and finally turned left down Third Street.


I suppose he had decent enough reason to bear a grudge even to his deathbed, if he was going to put it that way. Because you tried to kill me once. Yeah, I had done that and I owed him, for that and other reasons besides. He had been kind to me since that first meeting
when I’d put the knife to his neck. That had been unexpected.


I walked under drooping banana trees and between two dwarf date palms bristling with spikes, and then I was in the Hoods’
yard, a green wrestle of vines and swamp grasses twisted up together in an awful tough fight. Up against the back stoop, overhung
by a small porch roof, I saw a wide and deep pile of pork bones, carrot tops, rotted squash, broken furniture, soiled sheets,
black-haired rag dolls, broken liquor bottles, one mirror, three busted clocks, a rusted frying pan, and a mess of white paper
covered in nonsense scribbling. Such things should have been carted off to be burned or buried, but that pile had obviously
just kept growing outside the door. The vines had wrapped over part of it and beneath them I could see movement, leaves shaking
and crunching. I threw a rock and out popped a black ship rat that took stock of me and then walked calm under the porch to
wait me out.


I should prepare you for the situation here at the house. Most of the children are gone off with some nuns and safe away from
the city. Only Lydia is still here. I can hear her down the hall, in her bed, moaning and singing children’s rhymes. I shall go look in on her soon, but I am terrorized by the sight of her, my girl. I still have
hope, but that is all. The truth is that she will join her mother soon and, when that happens, I hope that this fever, this
yellow jack, which I can already feel creeping up in my bones and polluting my blood, will take me soon after. It is inevitable,
and I don’t want to be alone very long. I want to see them again and soon. And so you can understand the urgency of this letter,
I hope. The mission I am to assign you is the most important thing now. The other children? Yes, of course important, but
I ask you to do this, in part, for them. They should hear the truth from me. The truth!

I went around to the front door. It was unlocked and I pushed in.

At least some part of the truth.

The windows in the house had been locked shut and the air was dead. There was sweat in it, and something sharp like vinegar.
The General’s clothes had been thrown over chairs and piled in doorways, like he’d been pacing the hall while dressing and
undressing himself. Dust fairies blew around the sunbeams that slipped past the drawn curtains, and I thought of the times
I’d seen little Lydia jumping to catch the dustlight in her hand.


Lydia. I stopped at her door and listened for a rasp of breath or the sound of sheets twisting. There was nothing, and when
I pushed open the door it was dead black.


Then Lydia’s face lit up in the gray light from the doorway. Her eyes had stuck open just a little. She looked like she was
waking up, but nothing moved. She looked strapped down. They say the dead let go of earthly burdens and become lighter, but
I have never seen that. I had only seen them get real heavy. Lydia was dead and she was weighed down by it. Her face had gone
white like a fairy’s.


If Mrs. Hood had been alive the house would have been under control. There would have been light and air. The other ten children would have been home, sitting quietly, praying for their sister and their father. Lydia would not have grown cold
in her bed, alone. But the yellow jack had got Anna Marie, and the nine healthy children had been sent off. Hood and Lydia
were all that remained, too sick to leave. They were the ruins of what Hood said was his own separate country. There had been
enough Hoods for a country, or at least a small town, but that wasn’t what he’d meant and I ain’t figured it out.


I closed the door quietly, like I might wake Lydia up, and walked toward Hood’s room. I opened each door as I passed, and
each window inside. By the time I reached Hood’s room, the air had shifted. I smelled jasmine, hot dirt, and boiled fish.
The outdoors. Hood had fallen asleep with a smile on his face and his sheets gathered up tight in his big right fist. I opened
the window in his room. The breeze woke him up.


“Where have you been, Mr. Griffin? I await your report.”

“My post is secure.” This was our standard greeting.

He said nothing, only stared up at the ceiling, where a lizard stalked a crazed mayfly. I searched around the room for a rag
to wet, and finally tore off the bottom of his sheet. In the next room a washbasin still held some clear, cool water and I
soaked it up. When I returned he had rolled on his side to face the window where a mockingbird shuddered and strutted and
cocked its eye at him. I put the rag on his forehead and let the water drip down his face. I looked outside for someone to
carry a message, but the street was empty. The neighborhood was empty, I knew: it was summer in New Orleans, and no one with
any money stayed behind to face the yellow jack and floods and heat.


“Do you think I am humorous?” The General looked at me out the side of his eye. I wished he’d stayed asleep. I decided I wouldn’t
tell him Lydia was dead. He was too close himself, he’d see his girl soon enough.


Humorous was not the first word I would have suggested, but there was some truth in it: Hood didn’t tell jokes, and he didn’t
make silly faces, but he did enjoy talking foolishness behind that beard, and he knew the joke was that grave-damned face of his. Here was a dying man,
a man who had lived his life as if cast in a Great Tragedy, the first man I had ever seen a mockingbird actually mock, and what he wanted to know was if he was funny. His face was soft and mournful. It was a serious question.


“Yes sir, I think you’re humorous.”

“I don’t think people know this about me. I should have told them.”

“Some people do. And you can’t tell people you’re funny, anyway. Otherwise they think you’re not funny for sure.”

“I have no time for paradox, but I will accept your judgment. Still, I want them to know this. Not that I’m funny. I am not
funny. Dwarves and monkeys are funny.”


Not all dwarves are funny, I thought, and I believe he was thinking the same thing about the same person, our friend. It made him smile.


“Anna Marie knew it. She always did. She did not marry me for my countenance, my money, or my gentle good grace.”

I’d not thought much about why she had married him, some things being better not considered too hard. She had been a beautiful
and educated woman who had studied in Paris with Frenchmen. She could ride a horse like a country-ass Acadian, paint like
a man, and pray like a saint. If there were proper rules, I reckon that marriage would have been barred.


“Anna Marie thinks I am humorous.”

“Yes, she does.” Wherever she’s gone.

“She was the only one who wasn’t surprised to discover it.”

He turned back over and stared at me, as if sizing me up. His beard had twisted and matted into three thick strands.

“You received the letter. I had begun to think you hadn’t, or that you had ignored it.”

“Hard to ignore such a thing.”

“Staying away is easy. Staying out of strange business is what we do.”

“Maybe. Got no thought on it.”

“I thank you for coming.”

I didn’t say anything more. He blinked hard, fast. I could see his eyes spin up, like they were moving on their own, and I
knew he was pushing back against the fire in his head, burning off the layers of his mind, twisting it, disordering it. I’d seen it too many times since getting to the city. Madness in those eyes.
He fought it. He looked at me, straight and hard.


“I take it that, because you’re here, you accept the idea that you owe me?”

“I’m here because you asked me to be here.”

He shook his head. Sweaty hair stuck to the side of his face.

“No, no, it’s important that you realize you owe me. You are obliged to me. You cannot have honor until you have discharged
your obligation.”


Fancy words, words you were supposed to obey. Words that could snuff a man’s life. I wanted to tell him I cared nothing about
honor, and whether I had it or not. I’d meant to say it for years, but now a dying man lay before me. All things were sucked
in by that man’s body and his voice, there was nothing else outside the walls of that room, the magnolia drooping in the sun
outside the window was not real and was fading away. I could only nod my head at him.


He sucked in air and I heard the dry flapping rattle in his throat.

“You tried to kill me once, and now that I am dying and you are receiving your wish, you are obliged to make amends. This
is truth, you can’t escape it, son.”


“It’s not my wish for you to die, General.”

He puffed up his yellowing cheeks and blew out. His mustache flapped slightly.

“Don’t try to confuse me with your paradoxes and feints, your false charges,” he said.

“I’m not.”

“I know you don’t want to kill me now.”

“That’s right.”

“But you must answer for your sin, like the rest of us.”

“Yes. I will, someday.”

“No, now. And you must see it that way, and not merely as a favor for an old man who may be abandoned once he’s in the grave.”

How he could talk, even on his deathbed.


“I see it, yessir,” I said.


He asked me to help him sit up, and so I grabbed him underneath the arms and pulled until his back leaned against the headboard.
He was very light and too tall for the bed. He smiled at me.


“This is not only about your sin. It is mostly about my own. I must make sure it is destroyed, it and all the shoots and tendrils that have grown from
my sin are withered. I’ve run out of time, you’ll have to finish. I have written a book, or at least part of one.”


He had been writing a book since I’d known him, but it weren’t about sin. It had been about war, the war, and it had been his one great task, his obsession. “The war memoirs.”


“No, not that book. I care nothing for that book anymore. It is a lie. Or, no, it was a true story built of lies I didn’t
understand were lies until very late. Too late, really.”


He had spent years writing that war book. Ten years of his life working on it, writing his letters and analyzing his reports,
putting together his great defense—that he had been right, and a great general. Most people who knew Hood knew of this book.
There had been years in which it was all he had talked about, and there were hundreds of men in nearly every state and territory
who could paper their houses with his letters: requests for information, for maps, for papers, for recollections, for assessments,
for apologies. Sometimes he’d tell me about the book while we sat in the dripping dark of the ice factory. The old warmonger.
He told me how perfectly true it was, how it would vindicate him, how it would make him a hero once again when all the world
thought him a bloody-minded fool who had thrown his men upon certain death with as much concern as kindling upon a fire.


General John Bell Hood could go to Hell. But this man in the bed, I hadn’t thought of him as the General in a long time. He
was just Hood now, called Papa by his children and John by his wife. I felt sorry for the man Hood, who had carried the deadweight
of the General, part of his soul, all this time since the war.


The pieces of soul can’t be cut out without filling them up again, that’s a real law right there. God’s law. Can’t cut out
the pieces any more than you can go around with a big hole in your gut. Got to be plugged up, replaced somehow. Hood wrote another book.


I stood watching the brown thrashers pecking and rattling in the weeds beyond the window, but all of that faded to nothing
as he told me about his other book. The truth, he called it. The important story. He wouldn’t say what was in it, only that it was the thing he wanted to say to his children, and that it was not about the
war.


“This book, the pages of this book, are in my library, Eli, though I’ve hidden some of it and forgotten where,” he said. “The
other book, the war book, is in the possession of General P. G. T. Beauregard. You know of him?”


“Yes, of course.” He lived in one of the biggest houses of the old city and liked his drinks and his dancing girls. He was
a hard man to miss.


“It has been suggested to me by an associate that you would be the proper person to take charge of this book, that you would
do a fine job of seeing to its publication. There are problems with it, and you must overcome them. Grave problems. Beginning
with this: I want you to get that other book from Beauregard, and then I want you to destroy it.”


Like a priest making his prayers, repeating the words, Hood had repeated for years, I was right. It was a shock to realize he didn’t believe it.


“Are you sure, Hood?”

He had closed his eyes and I could see the crust in his eyelashes, which now opened slowly.

“I was an arrogant man, Eli. I did send men off to die without good reason. I was a murderer. Don’t you think I understand why you tried to kill me? I always understood. If not for me, you’d be a young farmer
up in Middle Tennessee raising corn and beef cattle, and you’d have a beautiful country wife and some country children. Instead
you’re a gambling and fornicating ice maker in the Devil’s city.”


I began to protest his description of me, but he was right enough and so I stayed quiet. I looked down and saw the edge of
his bedsheet t