The Bride of Texas, page 11
“For you,” he replied solemnly. More sleigh-bells, and the hand that had recently spread healing water on his burning back now stroked his hair.
“She is Frau Doktor Sosniowski,” said Ursula in the deepening twilight, which cast the only shadow on his paradise, that brief interval in which Hanzlitschek drank beer in the officers’ mess. By now, since the sun was almost setting behind the Alps, he was probably tucking into his first nightcap. Ursula rose and, as she put on her clothes, she explained that the woman was the wife of a Polish doctor from Austrian Galicia. They had moved into the garrison town about twelve years before, and she was Ursula’s good friend. “It was she who gave me the salve for your back. Her husband knew what it was for. He’s a good man. They have endured a great deal.”
She never told him what it was they had endured, and he didn’t really care. The red fringe of sunset was shrinking behind the mountain peaks; Hanzlitschek would be finishing his second nightcap, and wouldn’t down the third one till he got home. The sergeant watched Ursula through the window as she ran down the hill and disappeared into the outskirts of Helldorf. Soon after that, Hanzlitschek appeared in paradise with a bullwhip.
The black and white procession came to a halt in front of the manor-house. It was a cluster of little girls in soiled white dresses, surrounded, like the border on a funeral notice, by nuns in black habits. Their heads were bowed meekly, their gowns speckled with holes made by burning snowflakes. The procession was headed by a statuesque Mother Superior with a face that was anything but meek, just like the lady he’d finally remembered was — or had been — Frau Doktor Sosniowski.
“Is this the residence of General John S. Preston?” the Mother Superior asked a second lieutenant who was leaning against a pillar.
“No, Reverend Mother,” replied the officer. “This is the headquarters of General John Alexander Logan, Commander of the Fifteenth Corps of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army.”
“You are mistaken, lieutenant.” The tall nun pulled a piece of paper out of her sleeve. “I have here a letter from your General William” — she made a slight pause — “Tecumseh Sherman, in which he assigns me General Preston’s house as compensation for my convent school, which your soldiers set ablaze after General William Tecumseh Sherman promised me that both our convent and our school for young Catholic ladies would remain unharmed.”
The lieutenant, nonplussed, took the paper.
“My name is Sister Baptista Lynch,” the nun continued as he tried to decipher the general’s scrawl. “Years ago, in Ohio, I taught Miss Minnie Sherman, daughter of your General Sherman —”
The second lieutenant yanked himself erect and ran into the house. They could hear him calling, “General! Just a moment!”
Sister Baptista looked around and saw the lady. “Ah, Madam Sosniowski! I do hope your academy has been spared such barbarism!”
The sergeant listened and remembered.
General Sherman finished reading the letter, and said, “It’s true, she did teach Minnie, and now she suddenly remembers. In ’61, though, she conveniently forgot, just like her brother, Patrick Lynch, the Bishop of Charleston.” He turned to Colonel Ewing. “He’s a friend of my wife’s.” He stared out the window at the burning city. “He also bears part of the blame — and no small part — for this devastation.”
“Tecumseh Sherman,” said Mother Baptista contemptuously. “He and his bandits — they’re like the Roman soldiers who ridiculed Our Lord Jesus Christ,” and she made the sign of the cross. “Would you believe it, madam? They blew their cigar smoke in the sisters’ faces — and the little girls’ faces too — and they laughed at us. They said, ‘We’re just as holy as you are, Reverend Sister! And, now what do you think of God? Ain’t Sherman greater?’ ” The Mother Superior made the sign of the cross again. “Tecumseh Sherman. The pagan name suits him all too well.”
The sergeant had never seen his general pray. Except maybe once —
“That was only on account of old Abe,” insisted the newly pious Zinkule. “Sherman is in league with the Devil.”
“How would you like a punch in the nose?” Houska offered.
“Leave him alone,” said Stejskal. “He may be right.”
“I am,” declared Zinkule. “Remember Kennesaw!”
“And what’s there to remember from Kennesaw?” Houska asked suspiciously.
“Things happened. Mysterious things.”
They were sitting in the parlour of yet another white manor-house somewhere near Savannah — the sergeant had lost count already. A large, scowling Negress towered over them, sulking because they had kept her from relieving the daughter of the house of some bed linens she was about to carry up to the master bedroom, where Vendelin Kabinus was about to deflower his new bride. Her wedding dress had belonged to the daughter of the house, whose husband-to-be was off fighting with Hood’s army to the south, and it was quite dirty but still manifestly white. The bride’s freshly scrubbed skin, on the other hand, was as black as tar.
“Woman! You’re free now!” Stejskal snatched the comforter the black woman was still holding and put it on the rest of the linen in the daughter’s arms. “You’re not a slave any more, you have to drop those slave habits.”
“I’s part of the family,” the black woman protested.
“You are? Let her take it anyway. She’s younger than you are.”
The Negress pouted, and Houska said, “Isn’t this a waste of fine sheets, messing them up on a wedding night?”
“It’s none of your business,” said Stejskal. “Do you have any idea what this means to Vendelin? He had to travel halfway around the world and fight his way from Wilber to Southern Georgia before he managed to talk anyone into it.”
The plantation-owner’s wife walked through the parlour. She was taking a blanket, as they had ordered her, to the rear of the house, where the Negro members of the family were sleeping. During the entire march from Georgia, Vendelin Kabinus had scarcely spoken; according to some, he had delivered one brief and not entirely coherent speech. That was when he fled inside his tent to escape the young vivandière that Kapsa and Svejkar had bribed. That was also when he explained the reason for his continuing chastity, which had always mystified them. How could he ever get a woman to marry him, he said, not to mention seduce her, when he had no idea what to talk to her about? He didn’t know what he would talk to his bride about either, but that didn’t trouble him because he spoke no English. Shake, whose Yankee tongue was nearly as smooth as his Czech one, had arranged the marriage. One of the few times Kabinus had spoken during the march through Georgia had been when he saw a young black girl in a green turban eyeing Sherman’s troops. “What a piece!” he’d said, and that was all Shake needed to hear. He delegated himself to propose to her on Kabinus’s behalf. Stejskal put her age at seventeen, Shake at twelve, and when Reverend Mulroney asked her just before the ceremony, she said, “I ain’t exactly sure. My ma says I’s sixteen.” Shaking his head, Mulroney recorded her age in the marriage registry as sixty.
They thought of the incredible things that had happened at the foot of Kennesaw Mountain, and the sergeant knew that Zinkule was right to imply that the general’s display of piety in the Methodist church in Memphis was not religiously motivated. The general was simply a patriot like himself.
He had attended the Methodist holy of holies because of a sermon of Bishop Lynch’s, published in the Charleston newspaper, about the states’ inalienable right to freedom. The sergeant had read it and thought that he would be inclined to live among the subjugated Czechs if Austria were free, not as it was now, but as America was. He couldn’t understand how two freedoms could be so different. And what kind of freedom was Bishop Lynch talking about? He glanced at the Negress in the corner of the dining room, taking out her rage on a silver tray so that, when they left the following day, her master would count that tray among the damages caused by the Unionists, along with the voluptuous nude statue that the virtuous Zinkule had covered with whitewash.
The sermon had unexpectedly driven the general to visit the nearest church. With an escort of four men from his personal bodyguard (two Czechs, two Irishmen), he sat in the front pew, and when the preacher, unnerved by his presence, concluded his circumspect sermon with a prayer for unspecified “soldiers on the field of battle” but without the usual prayer for the victory of an unspecified side, the general rose and, in a voice he usually only employed to be heard above artillery fire, launched into the prayer prescribed by the Union Army Command for the battlefield: “Almighty God, I beg you, grant strength, health, and long life to the President of these United States of America, Abraham Lincoln!” The soldiers thundered “Amen!” in two accents, and the preacher braced himself to be arrested.
They mused about the curious things that had happened to them at the foot of Kennesaw Mountain. Late on the afternoon of June 22, the veterans of Carter Stevenson’s Confederate division had moved up along both sides of the Powder Springs Road to engage with Alpheus Williams’s division. It was an old-fashioned attack, elbow to elbow, perhaps because they were veterans, but in Zinkule’s eyes there was no accounting for it. Williams’s division, supported on the right by Milo Hascall and on the left by John Geary, had the advantage of numbers. General Hood, who had ordered the attack, must have lost his mind. Otherwise his order could only be explained as inspired by a malicious God who was siding with the Union on Kennesaw Mountain. The Union artillery let Stevenson’s men advance to within five hundred yards of their position before they cut loose with all forty cannon and hammered them, first with conventional ammunition and then, because that didn’t stop them, with explosive canisters. Those forty cannon fired a record ninety salvoes a minute, yet the grey-clad ranks, with gaps like a mouthful of rotten teeth, got to within fifty yards of Williams’s fortifications before the butchery was ended in a hail of minnies. Only then did the Rebels retreat to a muddy hollow, regroup, and attack again. The next fusillade they faced was worse, Paidr swore later, than the one at Chickamauga or on Missionary Ridge at Gettysburg. They retreated again, with more gaps in their ranks, and then attacked a third time. It couldn’t have been mere insanity on Hood’s part, Zinkule maintained. The barking of the cannon became the roar of a wild beast, and the madmen got to within thirty yards of the fortifications, where they were cut to ribbons. The survivors fell back a third time to the gully, where it was already dark. Soon darkness descended on Williams’s palisades as well. But before it did, the rocks on the hillside glowed red with blood. In the dark, Rebel litter-bearers carried the moaning and the silent wounded back into the gully. Paidr climbed over the palisade and gave some water to a groaning Rebel lying a short distance from the barricade; when he had taken a sip of the lukewarm water in Paidr’s canteen, he gave up the ghost. Paidr set out down the hill and didn’t return until he ran into the Rebel litter-bearers. On the way back, his foot caught in the strap of an abandoned knapsack, and when he’d untangled it he took the knapsack back with him. Next morning, when the first rays of sunlight emerged, Paidr opened the knapsack and turned pale at what he found inside. There was a scrap of newspaper with a sketch of a man resembling Lincoln, and surely meant to be Lincoln, judging by the name printed under the picture in angular German script. But that wasn’t what horrified Paidr. After all, there were Germans on both sides, and in the North there was an entire German division under the command of the Prussian General Franz Sigel — or so Stejskal, who had served under him briefly, claimed. No, what horrified him was the poem under the crude image of Lincoln. It too was printed in German script, but the words were Czech.
Paidr read it out loud:
Like the ancient fabled Phoenix, Freedom
Is born again in smoke and flashing flame,
And no man calls another man his brother,
Unless his hand with human blood is stained.
Thus has it ever been: Bohemia’s hero,
John Hus, was burned to death for his ideal,
And here John Brown, for principle and honour,
Did bravely ’neath the looming gallows kneel.
And yet, when both these heroes bowed their heads
To bravely meet their cold and brutal fate,
Did bigotry and reason clash around them,
Brother shed brother’s blood for love and hate.
Yet reason shall prevail as always,
Though blood-drenched soil and graves abound,
As friend and foe lie side by side, beneath the ground;
And broken shackles are the signs
Our dauntless efforts must obey.
Our quest for justice follows where they point the way.
“Boys,” said Paidr, his voice catching, “there’s Czechs on the other side too. Maybe we did this one in yesterday —”
“Why did he join up?” growled Stejskal.
“Join up?” said the sergeant. “Why do you think he carried this around in his knapsack?”
And he repeated the line to himself:
Like the ancient fabled Phoenix, Freedom —
He tried to understand the different freedoms: Bishop Lynch’s freedom and the freedom of the black bride. That night the conundrum kept him awake, and in the morning he decided that there should be two different words for it.
Houska thought it over. At the top of the hill, bright cherries were glistening temptingly. Cherries in July? In Georgia? Houska’s boyhood cravings were awakened. They were sitting in trenches at the bottom of the hill, and above them hung this bounteous tree with its mysterious red fruit, a perfect target. Hood’s artillery were watching from the opposite hillsides. Houska’s mouth was watering. Later, Shake claimed Houska should been court-martialled for trying to poison himself with inedible fruit — how could they possibly have been cherries, when the birds were ignoring them? But Houska started crawling up the hill towards the Tree of Paradise.
A bit farther on, at the foot of Kennesaw Mountain, Svejkar became the victim of an uncanny incident. One of Hood’s sharpshooters had fired on Lieutenant Bondy in his observation post among the rocks, after he carelessly let his field-glasses catch the sun. The poorly aimed musket-ball glanced off the granite cliff face just above a ledge where Svejkar was tanning his stomach; it ricocheted upwards at an absurdly sharp angle, then fell back and landed directly on Svejkar’s solar plexus, fortunately striking the book lying on his chest while he dozed. That, together with the projectile’s decreased velocity, cushioned the impact, like General Ritchie’s famous Bible — except that Svejkar had borrowed his book from Gambetta and it wasn’t suitable for public display. He had to pay Gambetta a whole dollar for the damage, and on top of it all, the incident gave him a savage case of the runs.
Strange things had indeed happened at the foot of Kennesaw Mountain. Fisher, for instance, had managed to avoid the battle at the village of Dallas, though not deliberately, for he was frozen by supernatural terror. At the moment the order to attack arrived, Fisher was aiming his musket at a Rebel in a flagrantly piratical hat, when he realized that the man was aiming his musket directly back at Fisher. Before Fisher could pull the trigger, he saw a flash in his sights and the butt of his musket kicked him in the shoulder. Squinting down the barrel, he saw that a bulge had appeared in it. He dodged behind a boulder and discovered that the pirate’s shot had gone straight into the muzzle of his own musket; since it was of a larger calibre, it had plugged the barrel like a cork, making the weapon almost useless. Fisher mounted his bayonet and listened in disgust to the racket his unit was making as they advanced to a low stone wall a hundred yards ahead. He poked his musket out from behind the boulder, then peered carefully over the edge. The pirate must have been waiting for him to emerge, for he saw another flash and the musket flew out of his hands. By now Fisher was terrified — the pirate had hit the very tip of the bayonet, and a minnie was impaled on the point of his bayonet like a sugar plum. He retreated behind the boulder again and gave up all thought of heroism. Indeed, he experienced a sudden conversion to Zinkule’s faith. He now believed that there was indeed some kind of black magic going on out there beyond the boulder. When the rest of the men set out from the low wall they had just taken, he remained behind his cover, stunned by metaphysical terror.
Despite his absence from the battle, the attack made him famous throughout the regiment. The amazing musket travelled from hand to hand, until Colonel Connington confiscated it for his collection of war memorabilia, which included a tiny bottle containing his own little finger, bitten off by a Washington society lady who had come out to observe the first battle of Bull Run and, when her carriage had suffered a direct hit, had bolted in terror towards the Rebel lines; Colonel Connington had grabbed her and tried to prevent her from screaming with his hand.
“The Devil is on Sherman’s side,” Zinkule insisted solemnly.
“How would you like a punch in the nose?” Houska asked again.
“He is!” the mystic repeated.
“So you think Lucifer is helping our sacred cause?” chimed in the normally taciturn Javorsky. He took everything seriously. “Whose side is God on, then?”
“Both,” said Shake. “God, as you know, is a Jew, and wants to be on good terms with everybody.”
“Are you asking for a punch in the nose too?” asked Houska.
“What leads you to draw such erroneous conclusions about my desires?” countered Shake.
“Seriously, friends,” said Zinkule, “the signs are obvious.”
“You mean hell is on our side?” Javorsky asked ominously.
“No, Jindra,” said Zinkule, rolling his eyes to the ceiling as if he were in the midst of a vision. “God Almighty sides with our cause as such. It’s just that Sherman has the Devil on his side, because he’s sold his soul just like Faust did. The signs are obvious.”
