A Separate Country by Robert Hicks

snapped. I didn’t know why he cared so suddenly about the other boy’s pain. He mumbled to himself, and occasionally the breeze carried back bits of prayer, the familiar Latin lilt of the dimly lit altar, the comfort of the priest’s dark and murmuring box. He had so much to confess, it was true, but I’m still not certain why that confession began at that moment in those woods. He had done worse in his short life. He had beaten and stabbed men twice his age, he had waded into bars swinging his fists in every direction, if the rumors were true. He was all instinct and fire and power and sinew, a rage. He had always lashed out, though, at those he thought mocked him or took advantage of him. Perhaps now he’d seen how close he had come to the murder of an innocent, the mortal sin. I never found out, and he never volunteered the story of his epiphany. Paschal and Rintrah never talked about it either.
    He said to Paschal, over and over again, “I’ll get you there. I’ll get you there….”
    I carried their orphanage bags, and Rintrah got the pork and the sweets. We followed behind and talked shyly. They had run away from the orphanage because they, the oldest boys, were to be signed over by the end of the week to merchant ships as apprentice seamen. They had grown up together, the two oddities: one dwarf, one nameless colored boy. They called each other brother and meant it. They’d thought they could run someplace else, far out of New Orleans, and live a different life. They had planned their escape for weeks, afraid that if they weren’t smart they’d be found and dragooned by the merchant captains. Rintrah was particularly afraid of what he would become on board a ship.
What they gonna do with me? I ain’t no toy, ain’t gonna be a toy of any kind.
They’d picked that day as their one chance, and but for meeting me, they would have spent the next day slipping through the swamp and up the bayou until they were far from the city, and then they would have gone north. Maybe Chicago, Rintrah said, where the cattle lined the streets and a man could hide and make something of himself without always being gawked at.
    That was over. We marched them back into the city.

    Michel carried Paschal to the church and handed him over to the priests and nuns, who kept him out of the orphanage and tended him. Michel said he’d found him fallen out of a tree, and Paschal never said otherwise.
    A week later Michel walked into St. Louis Cathedral, barged into the bishop’s office, got on his knees, and prayed loudly for the blessing of the vocation. The bishop, no small man himself, slapped Michel across the face and Michel smiled. This is what he told me years later. What I know for sure is he didn’t throw the bishop through the narrow, gray window of his office chamber, that the bishop took him on as his special project, that after some years Michel became Father Mike, and that Father Mike never quit paying for the sin he committed that night in the swamp.
    I didn’t, either, now that I think about it. Always paying for that now. I’m glad of it. Yes, I am.
    Neither Paschal nor Rintrah left the city again. Michel left it only briefly, to attend Assumption Seminary down in Bayou Lafourche, but he quickly returned. I went to France to study, and there I was finished, as they say of girls like me. When I returned I returned for good, and before meeting your father, the only three people I cared for in this city were the boys who had fought in the swamp that day.

    I tell you this because I want you to know that your dear
maman
was not always surrounded by children, not always
bien souffrante,
not always waddling about bearing her belly before her like a great round shield. I was not always this way, the boundaries of the world were not always the gates of the General’s house. I saw and remembered everything. I did not know then how to fix a cough or calm a fever, but I could dance.
    The General. John. I shall call him that