A Separate Country

Excerpt

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.

Excerpted from the book A SEPARATE COUNTRY by Robert Hicks. Copyright (c) 2009 by Labor in Vein, LLC. Reprinted with permission by Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, New York, NY. All rights reserved.