The Bride of Texas, page 17
There was one way in which Mr. Carson was a typical slave-owner: he thought more about politics than about his plantation. The plantation ran as well as it did mainly because he was the kind of slave-owner he was, and the slaves were the kind of slaves they were. Behind their cabins — not the standard, cramped, dirt-floor cabins, but spacious wooden structures — were verdant vegetable plots and clucking chickens.
Cyril was fascinated by how a large plantation worked, even though it wasn’t his own. He was always poking around and asking questions.
Under a shelter in the corner of the Carson farmyard stood a cotton gin. Beside it was a deep pit filled with layer upon layer of cotton seeds, the remains of several bountiful harvests.
“What do you do with them?” Cyril asked the Negro operating the machine one day.
“Nuthin’,” replied the man, whose name was Franklin Adams. “They ain’t no use at all.”
Cyril picked up a handful of seeds from the top layer and rubbed them between his palms. “No use at all?”
Franklin shook his head, “We tried usin’ them for fertilizer, but cotton plants come in too tall and the bolls don’t make much cotton. No need to fertilize here anyways. It’s fresh soil. Massa told us to feed them to the stock, but they won’t eat them much, and the milk tasted bad. Too much fat,” said Franklin. “So here they sets.”
In the old country, nothing went to waste. He mulled it over. He started playing with a corn crusher. In the old country he had learned how to fix anything, so now, by tightening some screws and readjusting the plates, he got the crusher to remove the shells from the cotton seed. He roasted the kernels in something he rigged up from an old metal stovepipe, then pressed them by hand.
A few days later, he turned up in the Carson kitchen, where Hester the cook was preparing dinner under Rosemary Carson’s scrutiny. Chicken was frying on the stove.
“Try this,” he said, handing them a small bottle.
“What is it?”
He explained that it was oil from the cotton seeds. Rosemary wrinkled her nose and pretended to gag.
“Just try it,” he said. “No one will know.”
He was sure of that. He had tried the new oil out on Washington and Jefferson the day before.
Rosemary stopped making faces and began to wonder when Cyril would approach her father.
Franklin stood by the corn crusher and watched in amazement as the cow gobbled up the cottonseed mash.
“Look at that, Massa Cyril,” he said. “Look how she love it!”
And so they started making cottonseed oil on the Carson plantation. It turned out to be the first production site of its kind in the South. Soon Cyril had improved the cleaning process and found a way to eliminate the mild but unpleasant taste. He and Mr. Carson formed a partnership. His reputation reached the ears of Monsieur de Ribordeaux, at whose house Cyril first set eyes on all the beauties of the white world and the black. That was when everything else faded in importance.
He put the question delicately to Washington, because he knew he could hardly ask the Carsons.
“Dinah?” Washington winked at Jefferson and they both laughed. “She was a birthday present,” said Jefferson, “for young Massa Dribordo.”
Cyril didn’t think their laughter sounded very genuine. And he didn’t like what he’d found out.
Sergeant Kapsa couldn’t bring himself to ask the question. Was it for fear of opening the old wound? Time and this huge land had healed it for him long ago; all that remained was the scar. He could feel it but it no longer hurt. It was merely a memento of the paradise in the mysterious little house on the hill at Gottestischlein, not a reminder of the hardship of his escape, Hanzlitschek’s clothes flapping loosely about him, with none of the officer’s documents, no official papers to provide him with security. That had been a land where sundry uniforms with eyes and ears — or so Kapsa saw it, evading the authorities on alpine footpaths and forest trails and later, in Germany, fleeing in coaches and even leaping from moving trains — existed only to annoy travellers who were doing nothing suspicious (which in itself aroused suspicion) by demanding stamped papers of the sort the fugitive did not have. All he had was money, the hundred and eighty gulden in gold and silver coins that Ursula had taken from the Hauptmann’s cash-box. But the money could only help him on his way, not protect him from uniformed spies. He managed to cross two borders and reach Holland — by then he was wearing new clothes he’d bought for three of Hanzlitschek’s gulden from a discreet Jew in a small town in southern Germany, where he’d finally mustered the courage to emerge from the woods. He spent several anxious hours at a tiny railway station, realizing that the eyes beneath the derbies could be more dangerous than eyes in uniform. In a dubious effort to disguise himself, he returned to the merchant and bought himself a derby like the ones the police agents wore. But now, in Amsterdam, his anxiety almost completely vanished.
He still had well over half the gulden, and under his shirt, against his bare skin, was the velvet pouch she had pressed into his hand during their last kiss, their final farewell: “Jetzt lauf! Run now! And don’t forget me, mein liebster Mann!”
He hadn’t looked inside the pouch until he was well into the woods. Under the alpine moon, the diamond necklace had glittered like a nest of crystal eggs.
He heard the distant report of a Parrot gun and braced himself to ask the question. He didn’t want to hear of death from the Polish woman’s lips. In the nightmares that had haunted him all the way from the haystacks and stables he’d hidden in, on the Atlantic crossing and even in the garrisons of the Thirteenth Regiment, he had hellish visions of Ursula facing the gallows. What if the maid had talked? What if there had been gossip? What if the colonel investigating the tragic accident in the forest had failed to believe the evidence of the bloody rock and the bootmarks in the moss? Kapsa had sweated in mortal terror as he tried to sleep in the garrisons of the United States Army. In a hot summer, he imagined Ursula standing in prison garb under the malevolent imperial eagle, before an awful judge. His own safety only made his fear worse. Once, in a fit of madness, he decided to desert the army once again, cross the ocean and two borders to Helldorf, and then, like some Robin Hood or Janosik, carry Ursula off through her prison window, down a rope, and back across two frontiers and the Atlantic. But it had been no more than a momentary fantasy.
That had been long ago. Now, here in the burning city of Columbia, his fears were revived.
They had almost reached the white building when a terrified young woman in a blue-grey dress came running out of the door, screaming, “Mama, Mama! Something terrible has happened!”
Shake came up with a hypothesis that had nothing to do with the relationship between race and alcohol, but rather with the linguistic abilities of Kakuska’s young wife. It was based on something Kakuska, chastened and humiliated but now released from the infirmary, had let slip.
“Medicine? What for?” Stejskal wondered. Kakuska was one of the healthiest men in Kil’s cavalry; he’d never had a cold, or even diarrhoea, a common complaint during the march through Georgia. There was a surplus of hogs on the farms and, despite the rigours of war, these animals were well fed. While others cut the fat from their pork, Kakuska tended to trim the lean bits off his, and stuff his cast-iron innards with bacon and pork rinds. It never seemed to bother him. Even as they talked now they were roasting big chunks of fatty smoked sausage over the fire.
“What kind of medicine was it?” Stejskal pressed.
“From my Bozenka,” mumbled the oddly subdued Kakuska.
“What was it for?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, turning red.
Shake noticed. “Don’t you know lying is a mortal sin?”
“I’m not lying,” declared Kakuska.
“Does anybody believe him?” Shake turned to the others. They shook their heads.
“Kakuska! The truth now! You put something in your booze. What was it?”
“A powder.”
“What kind of powder?”
“I told you, something Bozenka sent me.”
“We heard you. But why —”
“I —” Kakuska tried to interrupt Shake, but he wouldn’t let go.
“— and what was it supposed to cure you of? The itch in your pants?”
Kakuska was now the colour of fresh blood. Shake, thanks to his dirty mind, had hit the nail on the head.
They were finally able to drag it out of him. They knew that Kakuska had gotten married three years before, mainly because, after he’d enlisted, Bozena had informed him that she was pregnant. He couldn’t de-enlist, so he made a respectable woman out of the deflowered virgin and then, straight from the altar, galloped off to join Kilpatrick. All this time he stayed away from the pleasure parlours and girls with nicknames, and instead became a regular user of Corporal Gambetta’s library. But that made him feel guilty too, so he decided to write to his wife and their son, Matej, two and a half years old.
“You idiot, why didn’t you go to Dr. Fishbach?” Fisher asked. “He has just the thing for it.”
“Fishbach’s only a doctor,” said Kakuska. “He’s not bound to keep the secrets of confession, like a priest. He’d shoot off his mouth some place, and I’d feel like drowning myself for shame.”
“Weren’t you ashamed to write to your old lady about it?” asked Paidr.
“Yes, I was,” admitted Kakuska. “But a husband and wife aren’t supposed to have any secrets.”
“Did you ever think she’d feel ashamed to ask the doctor for your stupid powder?” Fisher snapped. “I’d rather go jerk myself off.” Fisher was a bachelor.
Shake, who was usually talkative, just listened.
“Bozena has a smooth tongue in her head,” said Kakuska, “not like me. I figured she’d know how to ask the doctor without blushing.”
Now Shake spoke. “In English?”
Kakuska stopped. “Well, yes, in English. The doctor back home is German, Schlaflieber, but Bozenka can’t speak German.”
“So she’d have spoken English with him?”
“Sure.”
“Who speaks English the best,” asked Shake, “the doctor, your little lady, or you?”
Kakuska admitted that he might. He’d picked up some in the army, though not very much. Like every soldier, he had had several brushes with death, and one of those had been caused by his poor English. He had gone to the woods for firewood. A sentry (a Scot) had challenged him and Kakuska, not understanding, had replied in Czech, “Kiss my butt.” The sentry had fired at him. Fortunately his aim was rotten.
The sausages roasting on the sticks smelled wonderful. “Dr. Schlaflieber doesn’t actually need English that much,” Kakuska explained. “There aren’t hardly any Yankees in the county, just Czechs and Moravians, a few Swedes in the south, Germans in Ulm, and one Pole in Halden. Most of them don’t speak English anyway, except maybe the Swedes. But the doctor can always find a way to make himself understood.”
“What exactly did you write to your wife?” said Shake. “How did you phrase it?”
“Well, ah” — Kakuska turned pink — “I said I needed something so I wouldn’t always have this — this — need — you know. When Bozenka and I can’t —”
“Screw?” Stejskal prompted.
“That’s not what I wrote!”
“When I cannot make love to my wife?” Shake offered, and Kakuska nodded.
“That’s right.” Embarrassed, he pulled his sausage out of the fire and took a bite, squirting some pinkish juice into Paidr’s eye. Paidr swore.
“So I hope it’s clear to you now what happened,” Shake said to Kakuska.
“Well,” Kakuska replied, “something must have gone wrong.”
“You bet it did,” said Shake, and then he explained his hypothesis: of Bozenka’s awkward English explanation Dr. Schlaflieber had understood only the words “husband” and “cannot make love to me”, and had assumed that Kakuska, apparently home on furlough and traumatized by the war, had potency problems. He had therefore mixed up a dose of Spanish fly big enough for a horse, and —
“How much did he tell her you were supposed to take?” asked Shake.
“An inch,” said Kakuska confidently.
“An inch?”
“Yes, an inch,” repeated Kakuska firmly. “There was about an inch in the vial she sent. So I figured it was one dose, and I dropped it all in my whisky.”
“Jesus Christ!” exclaimed Stejskal. “What a jackass! Supposing Dr. Schlaflieber had understood your old lady and given her what you wanted. You’d have been limp till the day you died!”
Kakuska froze.
“The good Lord was watching over you,” said Shake. “Or if you’re in the free-thinkers’ camp these days, you’re luckier than you are smart. But — did the doctor really tell Bozenka you were to take an inch?”
“That’s what she said,” replied Kakuska. “But there’s a good chance she didn’t understand him.”
“A very good chance,” said Shake. “Couldn’t he have said ‘a pinch’?” Kakuska slowly turned his sausage over the coals. “So you swallowed an inch of Spanish fly instead of a pinch, and mixed it with whisky. Just be glad you didn’t attack Jeff Davis, with that little porky butt of his.”
He was referring not to the Rebel president, but to a young swine they had found on the farm where they’d liberated the sausages. That afternoon they’d christened the pig with bourbon also liberated from the farm, whereupon Jeff Davis had fallen asleep — grunting, so Shake maintained, to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”.
A white horse stood in the upstairs parlour, and behind it on the carpet lay a pile of horse buns. Slumped on a divan, beneath a large portrait of an officer in a foreign uniform, was a corpse in a tattered Union uniform. A sabre sheathed in a decorative scabbard lay on the floor beside the divan. The sergeant had never seen anything like it in Sherman’s army, or since Helldorf, for that matter. A blonde young woman with curly hair, in a blue-grey dress, stood trembling over the corpse. Her teeth were chattering. An open satchel with silver spoons spilling out of it lay on the floor in front of the horse, along with a big doll in a folk costume and a bronze American eagle. One of its wings had blood on it. The sergeant felt as though he’d landed in the middle of a bizarre dream.
“What happened?” asked Madam Sosniowski, running to embrace the girl. “Are you all right? And what is Ferdy doing indoors?” She pointed to the horse, which tossed its head and whinnied.
The young woman who had greeted them with screams outside said, “The Yankees took Linda and Dapple. So we brought Ferdy up here —” She looked over at the man on the divan. Madam Sosniowski turned to look at the pale corpse.
“And him —?”
The girl cleared her throat. “We didn’t try to stop him from stealing the silver, or the Polish doll. But —” She stopped, trembling.
“Did he — did he try to force you to do something you didn’t want to, miss?” asked the sergeant. He realized that she hadn’t really taken account of his presence, or that of the two Irishmen, who were looking around the parlour. The white horse gave another whinny and the Irishman who’d been caught drinking on the street walked over and stroked the horse’s nose.
“No, he didn’t,” she replied. She turned to Madam Sosniowski. “But he took Papa’s sabre off the wall. I begged him to leave it, but he pulled it out and waved it at me, so I tried to get it back from him.” The Irishman took something messy from his pocket and offered it to the horse.
Madam Sosniowski turned to her other daughter.
“I didn’t mean to kill him!” wailed the young woman, covering her mouth with both her hands. The sergeant walked over to the divan and unbuttoned the corpse’s tunic. There was no shirt underneath it. The sergeant placed an ear to the bare chest. He turned to the other Irishman, who was staring raptly at the girl with the blonde curls.
“Give me that whisky!” he snapped.
“What whisky?”
“The whisky in your pocket,” said the sergeant impatiently. “Give it! Give it here!”
“Oh, that whisky,” said the soldier, pulling the flask from his tunic. The sergeant reached for it, uncorked it, and placed it to the corpse’s lips. Madam Sosniowski put her arms around her daughter.
“Ever since I found out from Doc Paddock that Czechs shouldn’t drink whisky,” said Houska, “nobody at our house drank it. Not even Vincek, and I tell you it wasn’t easy for him.”
“Did he switch to water?” asked Shake. “Or vodka?”
“Just as Doc Paddock advised,” said Houska, “he switched to beer. And he lasted almost two months. Then one fine day —”
One fine day Father Houska had to go to Wilber for the christening of the sixth son of Ezekiel Kohak, who owned the Wilber general store. In keeping with Doc Paddock’s advice, he got half drunk on beer at the christening, and as he set out for Bee Grove at four in the afternoon, he found himself craving more of the kind of conversation he had so recently enjoyed in Ezekiel Kohak’s garden. He then allowed himself to be drawn into the Homestead Saloon. He was carrying home a gift, a bottle of Scotch whisky in a brown paper bag — from Kohak’s wife, who was from Scotland and could therefore imbibe it unharmed — and he put it on the windowsill beside his table. Then with a foursome of his Wilber cronies he sat drinking beer and gossiping until dusk. With another superhuman effort, he overcame his irrepressible urge to go on talking and set out for home, forgetting the bottle on the windowsill. He arrived home at dawn and had three bottles of beer for breakfast. Meanwhile the foursome at the Homestead Saloon sat around until midnight, when the saloonkeeper tossed them out. By this time they were three sheets to the wind, having exhausted the saloon’s supply of beer and gin, and then having found the bottle of whisky in the brown bag on the windowsill. As they staggered off into the night, neighbour Vejrobek’s conscience got the better of him, and he went back and refilled the whisky bottle with some cooking oil he had with him that happened to be roughly the same colour. He corked it up, put it back in the paper bag, and managed to replace it on the windowsill before the sleepy saloonkeeper noticed him and threw him out the door again.
