A Separate Country by Robert Hicks Read Free Book Online

now a respected man of business, and soon a writer of memoirs. I could not have lived according to the laws of civilized man with any more faith, except for the matter of finding a wife.
    I wore my wounds proudly, but privately they revolted me, even after several years with them. In my rooms, which were spare and glowing and polished, crouched a monster who draped the mirrors in black as if in mourning. He didn’t like to see himself. He avoided the floor-to-ceiling windows that opened to the gallery that looked out over a street loud with the perambulations of the happy and the whole and the ignorant. The monster, withered and chopped, paced his rooms muttering of calumnies and, when moved, he flung himself at his desk to write down every slight he’d suffered at the hands of the graceless warrior victors and, even worse, from men of his own tribe, his Confederates. My war memoirs were composed in a rage and intended to offend and to destroy: reputations, lives, complacency.
    I
had
deserved command, and I had commanded in victory and in defeat. There’s not a general who did not suffer defeat. I suffered defeat. I did. I suffered. Lee also suffered defeat. He stood at the edge of that battlefield at Gettysburg as what was left of his army filed back past him in retreat. I saw him that day. We had been defeated, but I had given a good fight. I expected to hear his congratulations as we passed, but instead he looked down from that great white horse, Traveller, and bent his head toward my men as if in supplication. “I am sorry,” he said. I thought his apology unbecoming, which shows how little I understood about General Lee, war, and the minds of men.

    I felt at home in the city. Me, a Kaintuck country cracker. I had spent most of my life sleeping out on cold jabbing ground, and so I came to cherish my feather bed and thick blankets, the soft sound of my footfall on thick carpets, meals prepared in kitchens, meats diced and filleted rather than ripped off the bone and skewered on hot red bayonets in the starless dark. On the street I learned the mongrel language of English, French, German, and Spanish, not a language so much as a mercantile code spoken by shopmen in single bursts and grunts. One word, such as
déjeuner,
contained a weight of agreed directives and responses that, ultimately, brought poached eggs and ham and a chickory-laced milk coffee to my table. I admired the efficiency of our shared dumbness.
    The most I ever saw of the Irish were the hearse carts piled with dead Irishmen newly fallen in the pits of the latest canal, all of them covered in dried yellow mud like totems of a lost civilization. I had known Irishmen in the war and knew them to be valiant if also sentimental and incautious. General Claiborne died at Franklin like a private. Well-loved, but dead, and what good is that? I listened to the banshee call from their lairs in dark pubs and from the backs of blue-dark sanctuaries. I pitied them.

    The negroes controlled the market, they ran the wharf gangs without which none of us would have made any money. They built things, they spoke their beautiful, strange French and, all in all, seemed a closed society well in possession of itself. Then it came time to root them out like plague, and the Irish—and the Spanish, the Germans, the Americans, and even the white Creoles—burned and stabbed their way over the negro, establishing forever the hierarchy of piteousness.
    I was invited to participate in the parade of the Krewe of Comus that first year in the city, my first Mardi Gras. The men of Comus, a secret society of white men, had imported from England a barge full of costumes, monstrous blasphemies all. A grasshopper with a bear’s head, a singing fish with a beaver’s tail. This was Mr. Darwin’s vision, or so they said. My eagle with a frog’s legs also had a negro’s lips. I took the costume to the Pickwick Club, home of Comus, and asked about that particular detail of my