The Bride of Texas, page 16
Doc Paddock liked the pictures. The portrait of the father depicted a stocky, round-faced fellow in a flowered vest sitting at a table, holding, in his left hand, a glass of beer with a perfect head of foam. The father radiated good cheer and good health, and on the wall in the background hung a miniature portrait of his son Vincek. The second painting showed a considerably younger man seated at the same table, with a gaunt, sallow face marred by a sketchy goatee. On the wall behind him hung a miniature copy of the portrait of his dad. There was a glass in Vincek’s hand as well, containing a yellowish but foamless liquid. To ensure full comprehension, a bottle stood on the table with a label that said, “Visky”.
Doc Paddock looked approvingly at the pictures, and then he looked at Houska. “Tell me, Vojta, are you a beer drinker or a whisky drinker?”
“A whisky drinker,” admitted his patient.
“Take my advice: stop while there’s still time,” the physician said, pointing to the stitched-up ear. “You’re young and you can still escape its clutches. Drink beer instead!” He looked again at the portrait of the healthy father, then at the portrait of his haggard son, and finally at the still rosy-cheeked son before him. “Just remember, you’re not Irish!” he declared. “As long as a Czech sticks with beer, he’ll be as sound as an oak. But the moment he starts drinking whisky, he’s paying for a plot in the cemetery.”
Houska was startled by this advice and resolved to follow it — and he did, too, at least until he found himself in uniform.
“If I were to start drinking beer,” Doc Paddock continued, “I’d soon look like this” — he pointed to Vincek — “and not like this!” He pointed to Houska’s dad. Doc Paddock was a pinkish, plumpish man with a head of thick ginger hair. “Because I’m Irish,” he went on, “I only drink whisky. If I were to take all the whisky I’ve drunk so far in my life and pour it into a cask, it would kill off all the Czechs in Bee Grove — and that’s the entire village, because the only one who isn’t Czech is black Freddy — like sick chickens. And so would Freddy — the only thing that’s good for Negroes is mint julep.”
Houska never found out what a mint julep was until he reached Georgia, and then; because he drank himself sick on it, his faith in Doc Paddock’s theory was confirmed.
That day in Wilber, Doc Paddock offered to take the pair of two-dollar paintings as full payment of his ten-dollar fee. Houska wasn’t authorized to agree to this, but when he arrived home that evening he communicated the offer to Vincek, who thought for a while and concluded that the doctor was making six dollars on the deal. The next morning, Houska’s father was presented with a problem in mathematics, instead of his portrait. They worked on solving it all day during the birthday celebrations, and the next morning, bright and chipper, the father rose with the chickens (he’d been celebrating with beer) and set out for Wilber. In the evening he returned jingling six silver dollars. He’d refused to let the doctor bamboozle him, so all in all, Houska explained, the paintings had wound up costing Doc Paddock six dollars apiece. The doctor hung them in his office and used them to educate his patients and visitors.
“How do you see six bucks apiece?” asked Paidr.
“Well, the six I owed him and the six he gave Dad,” said Houska.
“And what about the paintings? You have to add four bucks, so that makes it four bucks apiece.”
“Subtract four bucks,” said Shake.
“Bunk, you add them,” maintained Paidr. For a while they sat and thought about it, then Fisher said, “You got taken. Your dad doesn’t know how to haggle. He should have realized that the doc didn’t so much like the pictures as he needed them for his livelihood. Your dad should have squeezed at least ten bucks out of him, on top of what you owed him.”
“Six dollars?” asked Stejskal.
“Ten. Plus twenty bucks in cash.”
“And the paintings,” Houska asked tentatively, “add them or subtract them?”
They worked for a while on the mathematical puzzle, but resolved nothing. So they returned to the racial theory.
“The fattest man in Wilber is a guy called Baloun,” Houska said, elaborating on the theory. “He’s the blacksmith. He’s seventy, but nobody can shoe a horse like he can. When he was young he used to play in a Russian military band, and one time when he was playing in Rome the mere sight of the Pope blessing people from a balcony brought on a huge thirst; he’s been guzzling beer ever since. Ten litres a day and more.”
“What did he drink before that?” asked Shake.
“Different things,” said Houska. “Pine gin, mostly.”
Shake gave Zinkule a telling look. “If he’d stuck with pine gin, he wouldn’t be shoeing horses any more. He’d be dead and gone.”
The Pope’s miraculous influence seemed to confirm Doc Paddock’s theory, but then Svejkar poked a hole in it. “Pine gin isn’t whisky,” he said.
“What’s it made of?” asked Salek.
It turned out that they had all left their homeland too young to know this basic fact, so they speculated. Was it made from pine bark? Pine cones? They finally concluded that it was distilled from rye, with some kind of evergreen essence — pine needles, perhaps — added.
The theory held.
They assigned beverages to nationalities. For General Sigel’s Austrian divisions they chose schnapps; no one knew what it was made from, but all the troops, including the general, drank it and flourished. Fisher added the persuasive evidence that General Blenker, who was as German as Sigel, had brought on his own premature death by his frequently issued “Ordinanz Numero eins!”, following which champagne was always served in his tent, while his troops, quite properly, drank schnapps. They had difficulty agreeing on whether champagne or brandy was more appropriate for the French, but unanimously agreed that red wine suited the Italians. And there was no doubt about the Irish: they all recalled the incident on the march to Kennesaw Mountain. An overturned sutler’s cart lay beside the road. A cannon-ball had killed the horse and the sutler had gone for help. Among the crates of dried fruit and sacks of coffee and tea was a small cask of whisky. Private O’Malley jumped onto the cart, but before he could unstop the cask the bloody-minded teetotaller Captain Parry ordered two sergeants to seize it and spill the whisky out onto the road, where the dry earth quickly drank it up.
When they resumed their march, Private O’Malley turned to Sergeant MacManus and said, “If I’m killed tomorrow in battle, Billy, bring me back and bury me here,” pointing to the rapidly disappearing pool of aromatic liquid. It was a wish Sergeant MacManus was unable to fulfil, for both men were killed in the fray at Cherry Grove.
So the Irish were a clear case, as were the Scots and the English. They decided that bourbon was harmful to Canadians. They never resolved the mystery of the fellow from Tristan da Cunha, who by some fluke of war joined the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin and drank a whitish liquid that he carried around in a leather bottle. The erudite Shake identified the man’s native island as a whaler’s port somewhere between Tierra del Fuego and the Cape of Good Hope, and they decided that the most appropriate drink for a man from Tristan da Cunha would be fermented fish oil, which Shake said was exactly what the fellow had in his leather bottle.
But despite their collective wisdom, they were unable to explain satisfactorily the dramatic effect that Southern whisky had had on Kakuska.
Their beginnings in Texas were difficult. Little Josef fell ill as soon as they arrived in Galveston, and that cost money. Property prices had risen in the five years since Lesikar’s arrival, and what they had left from the proceeds of their property in Moravia was only enough to buy them about thirty acres. Like Lesikar, they started out in a log cabin, but Cyril and his father studied the neighbouring farmhouses and soon built themselves a house that was better than the one they’d had at home. Cyril even made a cradle for little Deborah, and in the evening, under the amber Texas moon, he would listen to Lida singing lullabies. The work on the new farm was back-breaking, and he often fell asleep even before the baby. While dozing off he would think for a while about his sister’s voice. Was it love he heard in it, or some other emotion, less benevolent but more profound? Then he thought about his old homeland. Like Lesikar, he had no particular feelings for it. Perhaps he felt exhausted by having to work like a slave in the land of the free. He already knew the lullabies, and preferred the Negro songs that floated across the cotton-field on Mr. Carson’s plantation down the road. They stirred him deeply, though he couldn’t understand a word of them as yet. The singing was different, as different as Texas was from the Lhota foothills, as the bright Texas stars were from the sad, smudgy little points of light over their cottage in Moravia.
He’d left nothing behind, not even a girl. The balmy nights of those first months, Lida’s homesickness — or whatever it was — and the harmony of the incomprehensible voices beyond the waves of cotton, all that merged into a single overwhelming feeling that he had managed to escape from a cage into a vast wilderness, that while life so far was harder than in that tiny village redolent of manure and wild sage, somewhere out there, in the flow of time, the future was waiting. He had never felt that way back home.
Aside from that, calamity followed calamity. The ox broke a leg and had to be put down. They were late getting the cotton in, but that was from lack of experience. Disaster and woe — but with the future awaiting them somewhere out there.
One day, while working in the field, Cyril saw a gig jouncing merrily down the road from the Carsons’ place, probably headed for Austin. In the driver’s seat was a girl in a red dress. As he straightened up to get a better look, the bones in his spine cracked like an old man’s. Just then something spooked the horses. They reared, and the gig went off the road and tipped over. Cyril saw the girl fly through the air like a red bird and land in the cotton-field.
By the time he’d caught the horses and calmed them down — something he was good at, for he’d often helped out at the count’s estate in Dvorec, back home — she was standing on the road, ruefully examining her raw and bleeding hands. She was cursing, though he still couldn’t hear what she was saying. She was no delicate flower, that girl.
She wasn’t much of a beauty, either. She looked, in fact, a little like her horses. But she was slender and had a shapely bosom. She walked over to him and said, “How can I thank you?”
That much he understood. She might vaguely resemble her horses, but they were handsome, spirited horses, still breathing heavily from their recent fright. When she patted their noses, they licked her bloodied hand.
“Good,” she said, and repeated, “How can I thank you?” Then she said something he didn’t understand.
“Is okay,” he said, using up about a tenth of his English vocabulary in a single phrase.
“You’re German?” That he understood too.
“No, Moravian.”
“Oh,” said the girl, with another annoyed glance at her injured palms.
“Come,” he said, “wash hands.”
So Rosemary Carson found herself in the log cabin, and while Cyril was fetching water from the pump in a wooden bucket (they had been lucky to find water right away) she examined Deborah’s cradle. Lida had decorated it by burning designs into it with a red-hot nail — they had brought a box with them to Texas, because Lesikar had warned them that nails were hard to get there — little black hearts surrounded by garlands of tiny black blossoms. He poured the water slowly over the girl’s injured hands. Rosemary nodded towards the cradle.
“Very nice design!” she said, and something else he couldn’t understand. She pointed at the sleeping baby and said, “Your baby?”
“No, sister baby.”
Her face softened.
Much later, mainly thanks to Rosemary, he was even able to talk Southern politics, which were gradually slipping, unwanted, into the Toupeliks’ world. But by then he knew all the beauty of the black and white worlds, and where the horses were. In the meantime, an improbable love story — they were in America, the Carsons didn’t even seem to mind the disgraceful memento of Linda’s sin — and the flow of time would give way to the future. But back at the cabin —
He bandaged Rosemary’s hands with a piece of linen torn from one of the baby’s little shirts, not thinking how angry his sister would be when she got back from working in the field; the linen, brought with them from Lhota, was a real rarity here. As he held the horses, waiting for her to climb into the gig, she pointed at the reins with her bandaged hands.
So he got into the gig with her and drove her back to the Carson plantation. He couldn’t catch a word of the rapid exchange between Rosemary and her mother — Mr. Carson was out in the fields — but Cyril could guess what they were talking about.
He waited in the vestibule of the white house. It was big, but not as extravagant as Mr. de Ribordeaux’s mansion with the white pillars along its façade, on the road to Fayette. Still, it was a spacious home, fragrant with the smell of the smokehouse. On the vestibule wall hung paintings of men in red coats and white trousers, riding through unfamiliar scenery with packs of dogs. Mrs. Carson poured him a glass of something that tasted like apple cider and left the room. Rosemary smiled at him. He said, “I must go work. In field.”
The girl kept on smiling. Her teeth were small and white. “Just wait a minute,” she said. “Wait, please!” Her mother came back with something large wrapped in a piece of linen.
“No, no!” he protested.
“Yes, yes,” said Rosemary, mimicking him, and then, noticing that he was blushing, she added, “You must take this. You — saved — my — life!”
As he hurried home towards the distant field with the big bundle under his arm, he realized how exaggerated Rosemary’s words had been. After all, she had merely scraped her palms. But he didn’t mind, and could even forgive her mild mockery of his accent.
The bundle contained a whole smoked ham. For the first time in a long time, they had a proper dinner. Back home, they wouldn’t have had a meal like that even on a feast day.
“She’s fallen in love with you,” said Lida, when he recounted the story over supper, and told her how Rosemary had enticed him into the gig to drive her home. As charmed as he was — less by the girl than by the adventure that had briefly brightened the monotonous slavery of his days — he was still worried about what Lida would say when she discovered what he had used to bandage Rosemary’s hands. But Lida didn’t discover her loss until three days later, and by that time the adventure had produced a healthy return.
“You don’t say,” replied Lida, licking her fingers, when he protested. “You think she gave you a present like that for no reason?”
“I saved her” — he almost repeated her exaggeration, but caught himself in time — “her team. The horses bolted and pretty near got away.”
“You don’t say! And bolting horses run for ever, do they?”
The next evening, as they were having supper, they heard a horse whinny outside the cottage. A knock came at the door. Cyril’s father opened it and a man in a cowboy hat stood silhouetted against the Texas sky. “My name is John Carson,” he said in English.
“Toupelik,” said Cyril’s father, and then, in Czech, welcomed him with a country saying: “Come on in so you don’t steal our sleep.”
“May I come in?” asked Carson. By now Cyril was beside his father.
“Yes, please come in.”
He had come to offer Cyril a job. Carson’s overseer had fallen ill and wanted to return to New Orleans, where his sister, widow of a rich tobacco merchant, lived. Carson needed a replacement. Later, Cyril discovered that Carson’s blacks didn’t need much overseeing.
Even though his farm-hands were his property, Carson wasn’t much of a slave-driver. He was a gentleman plantation-owner; originally a farmer in England, neither rich nor poor, he had inherited a huge Louisiana plantation from his childless brother. He didn’t like Louisiana. When Texas opened up to slave-owners, he sold the plantation, bought one in Fayette County, and brought his slaves with him.
“They didn’t like Louisiana either,” he grinned, and by this time conversation came more easily to Cyril, because he’d picked up English quickly, the way small children pick up a new language. Rosemary teased him for talking like the Negroes (there were too many of them on the plantation and they talked a lot), though her own King’s English, acquired back in Miss Meacham’s boarding school in Devonshire, was coloured with a Texas twang and Negro syntax, especially when she tried to get a word in edgewise with her father’s garrulous slaves.
“Not many Negroes like Louisiana, and they have good cause not to,” said Mr. Carson. Cyril still didn’t understand why. After all, Carson’s Louisiana Negroes seemed to like it in Texas, at least in that tiny piece of Texas owned by Mr. Carson. The reasons gradually became clear as the Toupeliks became acquainted with the politics of the South, and as Cyril came to understand that Mr. Carson was not a slave-driver.
Carson put two young Negroes at the elder Toupelik’s disposal to replace Cyril’s labour, and in exchange for half of Cyril’s new wages. They didn’t seem like slaves, either, and they had nice names: Washington White and Jefferson Black. They were so talkative that even the elder Toupelik picked up some English from them — their English, of course. They had clever hands and they helped him fix his cotton gin, a rickety old machine that had already had five owners and was a cotton gin in name only. They laughingly encouraged Mrs. Toupelik to teach them Czech, and they picked it up as quickly as Cyril had picked up English, which seemed to confirm the theory that Mr. Carson put forward with true British irony — that if they were children, as most Southerners claimed, they were the wiliest of children.
