Free A Separate Country by Robert Hicks Page B

own big church down by the tracks near the wharf. We prayed. Flowers sprouted in walls, through walls, around walls. All things grew. We picked sprigs of jasmine and set them behind our ears. We gaped at the dirty girls with bright white teeth hawking Creole tomatoes down along the market. In the faubourgs, we knew a place where the old quadroon slept beneath her awning and served good coffee and cold milk. Palms rattled and scraped, dry and green, in the air above her. We craved her chicken, baked in rosemary and served with cress.
    I smoked cigars and rode horses. I rode them fast so that the gaudy new houses lately raised by Americans in our neighborhood—Creoles called it
the country
—would streak together until they were indistinguishable and mere sloppings of color. Mud in my hair and on my nose, hooves clattering over canal bridges. Riding away from town, the wilderness stretched to my right. There were trails, and at night, campfires ringed by men in foreign clothes cackling nonsense. Italians and Germans. Sometimes there were families of negroes, but they had no campfires and tried to hide from me. They were like Indians. I smiled at them. I was not the law, I thought.
    I now know that I was naïve, and that the law always follows certain of us whatever our intentions. It was good that I was also a private girl and hated telling anyone anything about my adventures. The negresses often had children at their breast and others sitting by or climbing the old knotty cypresses. During the day they were alone. I brought them what I could sneak out of the house, usually bonbons. Sometimes it was pralines made by the colored women down at the market. They were little things, luxuries, ridiculous things of no value in the deep woods of their exile.
    Do not think too much of your mother, do not think she was a particularly charitable or kind girl. Those people in the woods were my playthings, my amusements. My father never caught me carrying off supplies into the woods, though I’m sure he suspected.
    This was the way we maintained civility amid cruelty: we’d rather not know, and we wished there was nothing to know in the first place.
    I cast myself out from my family, although they never ceased their efforts to bring me back. I roamed, I ate ices straight from the Italians making them on the street, I studied dirt. I loved my family, but I would not be their possession. I hope they understand that now.
    I fell in with other outcasts and they became my family. Michel Martin, who you know as Father Mike, Rintrah King the clown, and the lovely fine-fingered and light-footed boy who had named himself Paschal Girard because no one had bothered to gift him a name. He was a boy of other worlds, a hunter of fairies and fleeting beauty.
    The most important thing that ever happened to me, the thing that changed my life and eventually your father’s, long before we were married, happened the night the four of us—Michel, Rintrah, Paschal, and I—first came together as mere children. Nothing about my life was the same afterward. I sometimes wish it had never happened, but now I cannot imagine who I would have become without them.

    *   *   *

    I went to the backswamp as I’ve told you I liked to do. I was older then, older than you, old enough to have become a woman and still young enough to trust in the protection of my horse and in my mastery of the close dark of the backwoods paths I knew by heart.
    Michel, one of the altar boys in our parish, followed me that night on foot. We had been at Mass, and as I was dipping my fingers in the holy water on my way out, Michel drew me into an alcove guarded by a blue Virgin.
    “Why do you run?”
    “I don’t live here at the church, Michel. My bed is at home, and that’s where I will be soon.”
    “I long to be in that bed.”
    “You would not be in it long. Father would toss you out quick enough.”
    “So you would have me to bed except for your father?”
    “Except for my