The Bride of Texas, page 1
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 1992 by Josef Skvorecky
Copyright © 1995 in the English Translation by Kaca Polackova Henley
All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada in 1995 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto. Originally published in Czech in 1992 by Sixty-Eight Publishers, Corp., Toronto. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Skvorecky, Josef, 1924-
[Nevesta z Texasu. English]
The bride of Texas
Translation of Nevesta z Texasu
eISBN: 978-0-307-36415-9
I. United States – History-Civil War, 1861–1865 – Fiction.
I. Title. II. Title: Nevesta z Texasu. English
PS8537.K86N4813 1995 C891.8′63 C95-931230-7
PR9199.3.S58N413 1995
v3.1
To my brother-in-law Lumir Salivar, a veteran of the penal uranium mines in Joachimstal, because he loves America, and for all the years of friendship.
The following friends have rendered me help, advice and support: Zdenek Hruban from the University of Chicago, Svatava Jakobson from the University of Texas at Austin, Clinton Machann from Texas A & M University, Patrick D. Reagan from Tennessee Technical University, George Kovtun from the Library of Congress, Josef Andrle from the University of North Carolina, the late Vít Hrubín from California, and Emma Barborka from Chicago. And, last but not least, my editor-friends of many years Louise Dennys and Barbara Bristol.
I received much precious information from Vlasta Vráz from Chicago who, unfortunately, did not live to see the day for which she worked all her long life. She died in the late fall of 1989.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
A Historical Foreword and a
Note on the Characters
Savannah
The Writer’s First Intermezzo
Columbia
The Writer’s Second Intermezzo
The Burning Forests
The Writer’s Third Intermezzo
Bentonville
The Writer’s Fourth Intermezzo
Chicago
Postscript
Main Sources
Illustration Credits
Sail On, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
… life, that monster made up of beauty
and brutality …
– Kate Chopin
… though my digressions are all fair, as
you observe, — and that I fly off from what I am about,
as far and as often too as any writer …
yet I constantly take care to order affairs so, that
my main business does not stand still in my absence.
– Laurence Sterne
(illustration credit frw.1)
A Historical Foreword
and a Note on the Characters
The Bride of Texas is a romantic fictitious story, but it is set in a world that is as real as I know how to make it.
I chose General William Tecumseh Sherman to be the central character of this novel based on the American Civil War — indeed, I don’t hesitate to call him the hero — for obvious reasons. It was Sherman who commanded the huge army that marched through Georgia to the sea, and then up through the Carolinas to its final engagement, the Battle of Bentonville. And with him marched my Czechs.
Of the many other real-life commanders who appear in this book, I shall name here only those who took part in the Campaign of the Carolinas and the Bentonville battle, which greatly contributed to the final victory of the Union armies.
At the end of the war, Sherman’s forces consisted of three armies: the Army of the Tennessee, the Army of Georgia, and the Army of the Ohio.
The Army of the Tennessee’s commander was Major-General Oliver Otis Howard, a pious, one-armed officer who took part in many battles of the war, including Gettysburg and the bloody assault on Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg. Howard’s army was divided into three corps, one of which, the Fifteenth, under the command of Major-General John Alexander Logan, included Major-General William Babcock Hazen’s Second Division.
The Army of Georgia was commanded by Major-General Henry Warner Slocum and consisted of two corps: the Fourteenth, with Major-General Jefferson Columbus Davis commanding, which included the division headed by Brigadier-General William Passmore Carlin and Brigadier-General James Dada Morgan; and the Twentieth, under Major-General Joseph Anthony Mower — Sherman’s favourite, whose rash action almost changed the course of the Bentonville battle. In Mower’s Third Division fought the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin Volunteers, with numerous Czech soldiers in its ranks.
The Army of the Ohio’s commanding General was Major-General John McAllister Schofield. It was composed of two army corps: the Tenth, under Major-General Alfred Howe Terry, and the Twenty-third, under Major-General Jacob Dolson Cox. Part of this army was the Cavalry Division of Major-General Judson Kilpatrick, a flamboyant and fearless womanizer.
Quite a few other union officers are mentioned in the novel, but since this note cannot be a Who’s Who of the Civil War I refer interested readers to the many non-fiction books on the subject, particularly the magisterial three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote.
Among the very few fictional Union officers in these pages are Captain Warren Baxter II, Colonel Browntow, Captain Bondy, Lieutenant Williams, Lieutenant Szymanowsky, and Lieutenant Bellman. The latter is important because he later wrote a fictitious book on the Bentonville battle, from which I quote freely.
On the Confederate side, the most prominent historical figure is one of the South’s best commanders, General Joseph Eggleston Johnston, who eventually withdrew from Bentonvillle not for lack of courage but for lack of soldiers. Also frequently mentioned are his three brilliant cavalry generals: Matthew Calbraith Butler, Wade Hampton, and Joseph Wheeler.
A note on the characters
Lorraine Henderson Tracy, the successful author of humorous novels for young women, is not entirely fictional. According to some sources (or perhaps rumours), the real-life General Ambrose Everett Burnside did have a fiancée who ran out on him when the couple were just about to take their vows. Lorraine’s literary career is my invention, although some problems of the craft she struggles with (and never really solves) are very real. Naturally, since she herself is not quite real, neither are her husband and her children. Most other characters around her, however, actually lived — from the peacemonger Clement Laird Vallandigham to Burnside’s subordinate, General Milo Smith Hascall; to the bloodthirsty Colonel Jennison, who had been with John Brown in “bleeding Kansas” and promised that Chicago streets would “be carpeted with Copperhead corpses”; and, finally, to the luckless Jeremy and Elihu Lecklider, and the murderer Thomas McGehan. On the other hand, the lovely Jasmine, her unworthy fiancée, Hasdrubal, and her mother-in-law, Gospel, never lived, although their problems are not fictional. Made up also is Vallandigham’s young colleague in the legal profession, Snopes, though I did not invent his name.
Real too are the Czech soldiers in the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin Volunteers, except for Jan Amos Shake, who anglicized his name from Schweik; he too is a good soldier — at least when he describes actions like the Perryville battle to his companions. Otherwise these men actually lived and fought: Jan Kapsa, Frantisek Stejskal, Vojtech Houska, Frantisek Fiser (Fisher), Adolph B. Chladek, Jan Dvorak, Vaclav Svejkar, Josef Paidr, Frantisek Javorsky, Frantisek Kouba, Ondrej Salek, Frantisek Zinkule, and numerous minor characters like the gunboat gunner Pechlat, who was determined to volunteer for submarine duty as soon as the Union had submarines. Very real also is the commander of the Lincoln Slavonic Rifles, Captain Geza Mihalotzy (in various sources the company is also called the Lincoln Slavonian Rifles or — as in Mihalotzy’s letter to Lincoln — the Lincoln Riflemen of Slavonic Origin). Mihalotzy was probably Hungarian, or he may have been Slovak, and sometimes he even claimed Czech nationality — depending, allegedly, on who was paying for his drinks; he ended up as a colonel in the German Twenty-fourth Illinois Infantry. Though his ethnic background is unclear, he was a capable and valiant soldier; he was killed in action at Buzzard Roost, where a small fort commemorated his name.
The sources are similarly unclear as to which men actually went to the field with Mihalotzy, when the original number of pre-war volunteers dwindled after Fort Sumter. Apparently they numbered about ten, and the names most often mentioned are those which appear in the novel: Filip, Neuman, Kouba, Uher, Kukla, Dvoracek, Hudek, Smola, Kafka, and Jurka. (I added Shake and Salek.) They fought valiantly, and some were wounded.
Most Czech civilians who appear in these pages likewise lived. Charles Sealsfield, whose real name was Karel Anton Postl, was an adventurer who travelled in Texas and Lousiana probably as early as 1823, and later became a popular fiction writer under his Americanized name (though he wrote in German). Anthony M. Dignowity took part in the Polish uprising of 1830 and was forced to flee to America, where he became a jack-of-all-trades, his trades including that of medical doctor and writer (in English). At the beginning of the Civil War, Dignowity, an outspoken enemy of slavery, narrowly escaped public hanging in San Anton
The actions of the Kakuska family of Chicago are well documented, including the moving of their cottage; among the twelve strong men who carried it were Matej Barcal, Frantisek Hejduk, Kristuvek, and Jakub Padecky. Even the Czech-speaking black slave Breta who helps Zinkule cleanse himself of skunk stench is real, although he has no name in my source.
On the other hand, Lida Toupelikova, her brother Cyril, and her lost love Vitek Mika are characters I lifted from a nineteenth-century Czech magazine story, “Reunion on Texas Soil”, written by Josef Bunata and published in Chicago in 1898. It is a simple, rather Victorian story which sheds much light on the life of the early Czech settlers in Texas.
Of the two important non-Czech characters, Mme Sophie Sosniowski (sometimes spelled Sosnowski) actually ran a school in Columbia and asked Sherman for protection; Ursula von Hanzlitschek never existed.
Fictional are the de Ribordeauxs and their black slaves Dinah and old Uncle Habakuk. But very little in the latter characters’ stories is my fantasy; there were slaves who outwitted their masters, and there were slave girls who learned a lot by listening to their young mistresses’ tutors. Finally, I have used the word Negro thoughout this historical novel because it was the term used at that time by both African-Americans and whites.
(illustration credit frw.2)
Savannah
IT WAS RAINING on the sycamores. A fog crept along the ground from the Salkehatchie River and out of it came the sound of tin cups clanking against haversacks. The soldiers themselves were invisible except as shadows, with the occasional flash of a bayonet when the sun broke through the clouds. Above the low blanket of fog, a flagstaff floated slowly forward, and on top of it, on a horizontal perch, sat a wet red squirrel scratching its ear with a hind leg. A piglet squealed. Still it rained on the sycamores.
“The Fifteenth,” said Sergeant Kapsa. “Logan. Good chance the old man will show up after all.”
“Who is he, anyhow?” asked Kakuska. “A nephew twice removed?”
Kakuska pointed a bandaged hand at the white tent and said, “Kil’s inside there. They can start now.”
They both looked at the tent. Beside it, under a canopy the engineers had put up when the rain started, stood the bride. She wore a snow-white dress, and Kapsa deliberately avoided looking at her face. He understood why Vitek had been blinded by the girl’s loveliness, the cascade of gold setting off her cornflower eyes, serpent’s eyes though they were. It wasn’t the colour — Kapsa had never in his life seen a snake with blue eyes. But that day in front of the shop on Savannah’s Bay Street with the sign saying MADAM RUSSELL’S BAKERY, when she had cast a sharp, narrow look at her brother, she had hissed like a snake, “Shut up this minute, Cyril, d’you hear?” Cyril had repeated, “You shameless wench.… For her! You say you did it for her sake?” The cornflower-blue concentration of — what? Selfishness? The eyes she had narrowed when she hissed, “Shut up this minute, Cyril!” were not the pools of girlish innocence that had once reflected the clouds over Mount Radhost. And now the sergeant knew why.
“See? He got himself a new one!” Kakuska’s voice drove away the memory, and the sergeant watched the diminutive cavalryman in a general’s uniform stride over to the canopy. The incessant South Carolina rain falling on the sycamores around the tent had faded his uniform, but hadn’t had time to saturate his black plumed hat.
“He could have been shorter by a head, my friend,” he heard Kakuska say. “Last time I saw his old hat, it was flying over me like a crow, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a sword graze that shiny noggin of his.” Kakuska chuckled. “I watched the hat spin away and thought: his head could have been in it, and goodbye Kil. Well, next thing I knew, this fool thing happened,” and he raised his bandaged left hand.
With a flourish more typical of a Southerner than a Yankee officer, the tiny general swept off his splendid hat and bowed deeply before the bride. Even from behind, the sergeant could see the carefully brushed whiskers on either side of his face — whiskers that would do even that dandy Burnside proud.
Yesterday, Sherman had run out of his tent calling, “General Logan! Come here!” Logan had turned and, with two of his staff officers, marched past the sergeant, who was standing guard, into Sherman’s tent. There they’d been treated to Kilpatrick’s story-telling prowess, and so had the sergeant, since Sherman’s voice carried right through the canvas walls. Everyone knew Aiken had been a catastrophe, and if some frightened rebel in the last bunch of sixty-year-old conscripts hadn’t opened fire prematurely, the tiny general would have been caught in an ambush and Kakuska’s vision might have come true, except that Kakuska would have been done for too. Kilpatrick’s version, however, was very different. Though short on tactical information, it echoed with the clang of blades, the flowery oaths of General Wheeler’s retreating cavalry, and the neighing of their horses — and above all this, the reassuring voice of the diminutive Kil, ordering the retreat. Why both sides were retreating wasn’t clear. And not a word about the hat. After the fray, the ambulances brought in one load of dead cavalrymen and two loads of their severely mangled comrades. Kakuska sat beside the driver, carefully resting his left elbow in his right palm, his left hand pointing skyward and wrapped in a dirty rag that turned out to be his puttee.
“Don’t know how I’ll ever live this one down,” Kapsa heard him say.
“What do you mean, live it down?” he asked. “Now, being shot in the hind quarters, that.…”
“Getting your trigger finger shot off?” wailed Kakuska. “Can you think of anything worse?”
Looking at Kakuska’s hand, now wrapped in clean white calico, the sergeant made a face. Ever since Fort Donelson, a strange epidemic of shot-off fingers had plagued the Union army. At Vicksburg they’d heard about it from young Dignowity, who had deserted to the North on principle. Before that he’d been assigned to the sharpshooters in Waul’s Texas Legion, after word got out that he’d once won a hunting competition in San Antonio. “The minute I was in uniform,” Dignowity had explained as they stood under cover, watching the Vicksburg palisades, “my eyesight got worse. Never did hit one of those fingers. But the Rebs thought it was great. Best target practice in the world. Really!” Dignowity slapped his thigh like a farmhand. “Some Yankee was always poking his finger up over the parapet, like he was trying to tell which way the wind was blowing. Trouble was, there wasn’t so much as a breeze. So we’ll do them a favour, said the Rebs. One more Yankee with an honourable discharge, and one less finger on the trigger.”
“But they shot off your left one,” said the sergeant. “So it ain’t part of the epidemic.”
“Well, I guess that’s so,” said Kakuska with a rueful look at the bandage. “Do you think I’ll have to see this war through?”
“You were awful keen to get into it,” said the sergeant. “Surely you’re not going to quit now?”
It was still raining on the sycamores, but the sun broke through right over the tent, making it gleam white, and as the wedding party lined up, a rainbow appeared in the sky, arching over the lovely bride with the serpent’s eyes. A hand in a cavalryman’s glove pointed to the heavenly phenomenon and a murmur of excitement rippled through the company. From the low fog along the road they could still hear the tinkle of tin cups and the muffled, rhythmic thud of marching feet. By now the squirrel’s flagstaff was far down the road. The animal itself had scrambled down and vanished into the fog.
