A Separate Country by Robert Hicks Read Free Book Online Page B

Richmond with the best young ladies, the proper young ladies, the kinds of women General Lee had meant when, back in Texas years before, he’d told me to marry well. During the war I had been a man in demand. I had shared many glasses of bourbon with nervous fathers. But then I was butchered and I took myself away, ashamed and weak. In four years I had not been seduced by any woman who wasn’t paid to do it.
    “I’m Hood,” I said too loudly, half rising to my foot again. I surprised myself with my desire to keep her near.
I’m tired,
I thought. But what was true was that I was lonely.
    What had I known of beauty? I had known nothing, that was instantly obvious the moment she removed her peacock feathers from her face. I had known prettiness, the prettiness of the shiny and extravagant, but not the beauty of singularity. What I mean is, there stood a young woman by a broken man unable to keep track of his leg. There was a horde of prettiness gliding in island silks behind her, but she had chosen to stand by the broken thing in the room. She chose to be alone with me, and by that gesture, she became alone in the world. Alone, but not lonely, for God’s sake. While we talked young men drifted by across the parquet, heels clicking and chests billowing before them like sails. They watched us out the corner of their eyes, or looked over each other’s shoulder at the cripple wooing the girl with the long white neck, the cascading dark hair, the thin waist. They admired her as they might have admired a horse at the track. I saw only her eyes.
    And what do I mean by beauty? The other men might have looked at us and seen only a rough man and a pretty girl. But I saw that if I had gone through my life intent on the ugly and difficult (as I had!), shedding every delicate and perfect part of my soul like so many raindrops, Anna Marie must have followed behind me gathering what I sloughed off so that one day I might sit in a ballroom in New Orleans and see for myself what I had lost. No other man could have seen what I saw, which was the light that went with my darkness.
    I don’t know how else to say this: I was confirmed at that moment in all that I didn’t know that I knew, simultaneously aware of the beautiful pieces and assured of their truth. I wanted to kiss her and more, and had I not been hobbled, I might have jumped up and done just that. Instead, I could only look up at her and hope I wouldn’t foam at the mouth.
    She sat down next to me, so close I could hear her breathe and watch the fine hairs on her arm rise up in goose bumps.
    “You are a famous man,” she said. “I care very little for fame, it makes a person so tedious and unnatural.”
    She could have told me she was a goat with a preference for clover and I still would have loved her. “Infamous might be the better word,” I said.
    “Not among my people, they think you’re a hero! The great Confederate! The misunderstood American Achilles!”
    “I would like to meet these people of yours to thank them properly.”
    “Oh, I don’t know that they would actually want to
meet
you, my parents and my cousins. They just like to know you exist.”
    She blushed and held her hand to her mouth.
    “I’m sorry, that was terribly rude of me. I sometimes forget that there are real people at these things, and not only masked boys in borrowed frippery.”
    I bowed my head and noted how her hands lay enfolded on each other in the caress of her lap. Extraordinary.
    “I am pleased to meet you, ma’am, whoever you are.”
    “Anna Marie Hennen. I have somehow lost my chaperone.”
    By
somehow
I came to understand that she meant
through great effort and ingenuity.
    “And where is
your
chaperone, General Hood?”
    “I did not know I required one. I am remiss.”
    “You have your reputation to consider.”
    “I am at risk?”
    “Well, perhaps not
you
. But one should be careful.”
    “Are you careful?”
    “I have nothing to fear.”
    Her words spooled out