The Bride of Texas, page 23
A firefly lit on Dinah’s breast. They both watched the tiny insect trace the curve of her bosom with a faint point of blinking light, then drop to her belly and move lower.
“Scat!” Dinah flicked the firefly off her belly. It spread its wings and flew off, a cool, winking spark in the darkness.
“Now that what?” he repeated.
“Now that your sister has charmed Étienne. Maybe they’ll let you have me cheaper.”
This was news to him. After all, he himself had been charmed.
“I thought,” he began nervously, “she was coming here to paint those —” It hadn’t occurred to him that the young aristocrat could have fallen in love with a girl who was disgraced. Cyril only knew he’d expressed an interest in the designs she had burned into the shutters of their cabin with a red-hot nail, just as she’d done the hearts on Deborah’s cradle. Because he was charmed himself, Cyril had thought nothing of it when colourful Moravian designs of hearts and flowers and doves and four-leaf clover suddenly began winding up the white columns of the Ribordeaux mansion. Linda’s imagination left something to be desired. In Moravia they would have laughed at her, but this was another country. Once she tried drawing a buffalo head among the hearts and doves and flowers, and it looked a lot like the Devil. Still, it was another country and it didn’t matter.
“She comes here to set a trap for him with her abracadabra, so he’ll never get away,” said Dinah. “And she’ll get rid of me once she knows. Oh, she’ll mind, all right. She ain’t no real Southern lady.” She shrugged her tea-rose shoulder. “Even some real Southern ladies mind. Matter of fact, most of them do.”
“I mind too.”
“That’s because you ain’t no true Southern white massa.”
“Why, I’m white as cheese!”
She laughed aloud. It was a simile from another world. “Cheese ain’t white,” she said. “I’m closer to cheese than you.”
“You’re the colour of a rose.”
Dinah opened her hand and looked at her palm, then gave him a questioning glance.
“I mean a tea-rose,” he said, kissing her breast. “And I’m jealous. I’m going to kill that one-legged son of a bitch.”
“You better save up and buy me instead.”
“All loved up by a cripple,” he said bitterly.
“He’s quitting,” she said, “now that he’s all wild over your sister.”
“What do you mean, quitting?”
“Quitting loving me.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“He really did love me, white boy, I wasn’t just some nigger-girl he took to bed. The stories I could tell!”
“I don’t want to hear them!” he snapped.
“Oh, you dear white boy of mine,” she sighed. “Why not just look at it like I’m cheating on him with you. That should make you feel better right away. Or are men jealous of the husbands of the wives they’re cheating with, back where you come from?”
“I don’t know,” said Cyril. “I never did it!”
“She’s pretty foxy, your Dinah!” laughed the sergeant.
“Was,” said Cyril bitterly. “And not foxy. She was wise. It really did help me. Oh, God!” He raised his head to look at the moon, which was just like a Texas moon. They were sitting on a hillside while the Ninth Iowa marched below them like a torchlight parade, their fire-brands soaked in turpentine resin. They were headed for Fayetteville.
“Well, you’re doing it now,” said Dinah. “I belong to him, and you’ve got me. You’ve got me and you never even paid for me.”
“I have got you!” He grinned blissfully.
“Because I love you, and I only belong to him. Do you love me?”
“I do, Dinah.”
“See what a fool nigger-woman I am? I believe you.”
“You’re not a fool nigger-woman. And I do love you.”
“Come to Mammy!” She reached out for him, and he did.
Afterwards, she said, “Maybe you’ll get me cheaper. High-yellow girls are cheaper.”
“That’s not true.”
“Is too.”
“Why?”
“And the cheapest of all are practically white. Like Pompey.”
Pompey was a white shadow in the home of Monsieur de Ribordeaux. He polished silver and served meals wearing white gloves. He looked like a footman in the prince’s château in Dvorec.
“But why?” he pressed.
“Because it’s easier for them to run away. In town, nobody can tell they’re niggers,” she said, and Cyril suddenly grasped the logic of the market-place, if not of the ideology. “Unless they happen to know them,” Dinah added.
And it rained. It poured and yet the forests went on burning. They were still in South Carolina. The engineers laid down a corduroy road, row upon row of logs in mud that could have stopped the caravan of wagons, that seven-mile snake with its tail still in Columbia. What he had seen just north of Columbia drowned out Cyril’s reminiscences. Beneath them rolled the flaming river of the Eightieth Ohio with their turpentine torches, and it had been pouring rain, then as now. He had galloped along with Sherman’s officers, who were cursing in their beards as they surged forward, then reined in their horses to keep pace with the general on his mount. Suddenly the general had halted, so abruptly that the sergeant had almost gone flying out of his saddle. The general had looked ahead through his field-glasses and cursed loudly. They had started off again across the soggy meadow to the plantation house in the middle of the garden. Then he had seen what the general had seen.
They were swinging from the massive lower branches of a mighty tree — seven dead men in rags, puffy tongues lolling between heavy black lips. The tallest had one leg chopped off at the knee. Blood mixed with rain trickled thin and pink from the stump. It couldn’t have happened long ago, or perhaps the rain had kept the blood from coagulating. No, the wound was much too big. The huge dead man had a board hanging around his neck and written on it in charcoal, only partly smeared by the rain, were the words “HERE’S YOUR EMANCIPATION!” The white plantation house looked haunted, its front door wide open in the rain. They approached cautiously, the sergeant with his Enfield at the ready, the lieutenant with his revolver drawn. In the spacious foyer there were portraits of gentlemen and oddly unattractive beauties. On the floor lay a number of brutally beaten Negroes, some dead, some unconscious. Under a painting of the Good Samaritan performing his deed of mercy, a young Negro woman in a silk chambermaid’s dress sat on a chaise longue. Her face was large and sallow; her widely set eyes had an oriental cast, a little like his Annie with her pretty Tatar features, the sergeant thought. But the Negro girl’s cheek had been cut open with a whip, and blood stained her white apron. Her eyes were terrified, still staring at things no longer there. She trembled and her teeth were chattering. Lieutenant Williams went up to her; she saw his revolver and started to scream. The lieutenant quickly holstered his gun and took her by the shoulders.
“What happened here?” he asked.
She kept on screaming. An old man with frizzy white hair, wearing livery, sat up on the chaise longue. “It was Chisholm’s cavalry, massa,” he said. “General Cheatham’s division. I see young Massa Burdick. His daddy, old man Burdick, he got a plantation five miles down the road.”
“But what happened here?” Lieutenant Williams repeated, because he knew something strange must have happened. Rebels did not destroy their own property.
“Maybe you’ll buy me and not give me my freedom anyways,” said Dinah, pulling on her white corset. She turned her back to him and awkwardly he started to lace her up.
“You’re right, I won’t,” he said. “I’ll marry you instead.”
“That’ll be the day,” she said.
“We’ll move up north.”
“You don’t say.”
He pulled the laces tight, and a lovely little gully formed between her breasts. “Ouch!” said Dinah. “You’ll end up treating me like Auntie Bramwell’s children treated her.”
“Do I know them?”
“How could you?” she said, carefully removing her dress from the beam. “That was back in Louisiana. She had five — three boys and two girls. And she could embroider real nice, too. Miz Bramwell taught her that before she died.”
She disappeared inside the dress and emerged at the neck. The moon split in two and settled in her eyes.
“And what about her children? What did they do?”
“Nothing,” said Dinah. “But when Miz Bramwell died, old Massa Bramwell remarried with Miz Bourbon. They married for love, white boy. I only wish you loved me as much as old man Bramwell loved Miz Bourbon.”
“I love you more!”
“You don’t say!” Pearly teeth flashed a smile in the moonlight. “Well, they didn’t have no children,” said Dinah, “and old Massa Bramwell kind of lost interest in the estate. Actually he wasn’t that old either. Before Miz Bramwell died they just had their tenth anniversary, and him only ten years older than her. Massa was forty. Well,” said Dinah, “I have to go now, white boy. Will you buy me? Cross your heart?”
“Cross my heart! If they’ll sell you. If not, I’ll steal you!” said Cyril.
“I’ll be for sale. You can bet your life.”
“You’d better be!”
“You can bet on it,” said Dinah. “Your sister will make sure of that.”
The torchlight procession at the foot of the hill moved towards Fayetteville. Beyond it the turpentine forests were ablaze. Because it was night, they could see the flames inside the bursting grey mushroom clouds. The fires roared like a storm in the dense forests, and the low clouds lit from beneath looked like an inverted Niagara Falls, with pink and orange whirlwinds descending on a topsy-turvy world. If the sergeant had still believed in such things, it would have seemed like hell. But as hells go it was a splendid one, and anyway the sergeant no longer believed in the god of the priests. He believed in the general. Sherman had no particular love for the Negro, but with the fire in the turpentine forests he was reforging the broken Union, while the Union violently purged itself of the illogical logic that so perplexed Cyril, who was bewitched by a bewilderingly free spirit in a body worth eight hundred, maybe a thousand dollars. The fire and brimstone of this splendid hell were burning that logic out of an ugly world.
The sergeant remembered carrying a dispatch for General Slocum. Towards evening, just outside Winnsboro — a large village about forty miles north of Columbia — he had caught up with Sergeant Metcalfe’s skirmishers, among them Stejskal with his long legs and a bright yellow silk patch on his back, Paidr, Shake, and Houska. They entered Winnsboro together, and found they’d been preceded by bummers, the drifters of Sherman’s great army, who were already wandering the main street and throwing things at each other that looked like uncooked dumplings. Sacks of flour were scattered in the road. They had been sliced open and the flour was spilling out of them. On the corner in front of the Episcopalian church, a tattered man with a porcelain chamber-pot on his head was mixing dough in a wash-tub. The bummers, apparently deranged, were grabbing fistfuls of the dough, and flour was flying through the air. All around them houses burned like flaming Christmas trees, and from somewhere — not the church — came the sound of a pump organ.
“Looks to me like old Slocum liberated the local madmen instead of the local slaves,” said Shake.
One bummer, covered from head to toe in flour, rolled up a big barrel of molasses. Right behind him was another with a vinegar barrel. The street ran downhill to the south. Soon a strange mixture was flowing downhill in a trough, and the bummers were floating hardtack biscuits down the stream like toy sailboats.
The organ was still playing. They arrived at the corner just as flames burst through the church roof. Three men came rushing around the corner carrying turpentine torches, and a chorus of military voices sang in unison with the organ:
Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the Jubilee!
Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free!
So we sang in chorus from Atlanta to the sea,
While we were marching through Georgia.
They finally saw the organ around the corner. It was out in the street, a short distance from the church, and on either side of it were carefully stacked pyramids of smoked hams doused in turpentine. A bummer put his torch to the one on the left and it burst into flames; then he ran over to the other side and set fire to the second pyramid. A small bummer sat at the organ with his back to them, playing. The chorus of soldiers, who looked like weather-beaten devils, sang facing the organ, the two in the middle supporting something that looked like a coffin standing on end. When they came closer, they found it was indeed a coffin, still damp from the graveyard behind the church. The bummers had dug it up and pried open the lid and had found a fresh corpse dressed in the brand-new uniform he’d been buried in. It was a Rebel captain, his face twisted in a grimace of death, his teeth bared at the sizzling hams. One eye had been incompletely closed and he looked as if he were winking mischievously. The smell of roasting ham filled the air, along with the roar of the fire inside the church. The organist kept hitting wrong notes, and the pedals creaked behind the diabolical chorus.
“Local madmen,” said Shake. “Dangerous lunatics, I’d say.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Zinkule chimed in. “He’s sold his soul to the Devil!”
This time Houska didn’t object. He was staring, flabbergasted, at the grimacing captain in the coffin. He rubbed his eyes with his fists.
“A smoked Apocalypse,” Shake remarked.
“I told you so,” said Zinkule darkly.
Yet the Devil is a mere servant of God, thought the sergeant. A helping hand when there’s dirty work to be done.
“Stop!” he yelled, but the crazy singers went on singing, in soldiers’ discordant harmony:
How the darkeys shouted
When they heard the joyful sound!
How the turkeys gobbled
Which the commissary found!
How the sweet potatoes even
Started from the ground,
While we were marching through Georgia.
“Stop it!” the sergeant yelled again. That brought Sergeant Metcalfe to his senses. He barked an order, the men shouldered arms. With a final wheeze the organ fell silent.
“What’s the matter?” asked the organist.
“Break it up!” ordered Metcalfe.
Half an hour later, the main street was cleared of bummers. By then, of course, it was too late. As Zinkule and Paidr lowered the coffin back into its grave — after tying the lid back on with a piece of rope — the smell of burnt ham hung over the cemetery. Zinkule made the sign of the cross over the coffin and shovelled the dirt back over it with a village drudger’s steadfastness. Though it was a long way down the road, the sergeant, when he looked back over his shoulder, could see the fires of Winnsboro dying down. He felt no regrets. Everything was possible in this war. Everything was at stake.
“Just like Auntie Bramwell’s ungrateful children,” Dinah said, as they walked out of the barn into the moonlight.
“But what did they do that was so awful?”
“They did the awfullest thing in the world. They didn’t set her free.”
“And they could have?”
“That’s just it,” said Dinah. “See, they used to hire Auntie out to do sewing for young plantation ladies even back when Miz Bramwell was still alive. And more after she died. Old Massa Bramwell let Auntie keep half of what she earned, sometimes even more when she asked real nice. So she saved her money. First she bought her oldest son, Bob, and freed him. He was a carpenter, and he took off north right away.” Suddenly Dinah jumped behind a bush and gestured for him to join her.
The man with the wooden leg was limping out of the white manor-house. Cyril’s sister was holding his arm. They strolled to the carriage shed. A groom stood waiting with a horse and buggy, which shone in the moonlight.
“See? What did I tell you? Old Massa Ribordeaux is in Austin today,” whispered Dinah. “While I was cheating on the young massa with you, white boy, he was busy with your Linda.”
Cyril was confused but he was beginning to understand, and it terrified him. His sister jumped up into the buggy and held out her arms to the man with the wooden leg, and helped him onto the seat beside her.
“I don’t want you to call me white boy,” whispered Cyril.
“Why not? You are my white boy.”
“What if I started calling you black girl?”
“You couldn’t. I’m pale yellow.”
“I’m not white either. I’m darker than you are, after all this time in the Texas sun.” It was all Dinah could do not to burst out laughing.
“So Auntie Bramwell saved up to buy all of them their freedom?”
“Sure she did,” said Dinah. “After Bob took off, Tom followed him north, then Beulah, who knew how to embroider like Auntie did, then Clothie — she sang real pretty — and finally Jim. He didn’t do nothing. But he was only fifteen. In fact,” she said, “he wasn’t the least bit to blame. As soon as he got up north, they locked him up for getting into the chicken coop at the Methodist manse. They say he got ten years. So it wasn’t his fault.”
“What do you mean, it wasn’t his fault? He was a thief.”
“No, he wasn’t,” Dinah shook her head. “He took from white folks, and that ain’t stealing.”
The buggy started down the road, the man with the wooden leg at the reins. Lida’s lovely head glimmered like silver. She had made up her mind about something, but what was it? Was it this? It couldn’t be love. After all, love had stayed behind in Moravia. Suddenly everything fell into place.
“But the rest of them — they could have done something,” Dinah continued. “Tom and Bob, they started up a carpentry shop in Boston. Beulah got work with a fancy dressmaker in Philadelphia and Clothie married a minister in Buffalo. They say he sang better than he preached. They even say he used to get hired along with some other freed slaves to sing at white folks’ weddings. What I mean is,” sighed Dinah, “they done fine. And they forgot all about Auntie.” The tiny moons in her eyes narrowed to silver slits. “Think of that, white boy!”
“Scat!” Dinah flicked the firefly off her belly. It spread its wings and flew off, a cool, winking spark in the darkness.
“Now that what?” he repeated.
“Now that your sister has charmed Étienne. Maybe they’ll let you have me cheaper.”
This was news to him. After all, he himself had been charmed.
“I thought,” he began nervously, “she was coming here to paint those —” It hadn’t occurred to him that the young aristocrat could have fallen in love with a girl who was disgraced. Cyril only knew he’d expressed an interest in the designs she had burned into the shutters of their cabin with a red-hot nail, just as she’d done the hearts on Deborah’s cradle. Because he was charmed himself, Cyril had thought nothing of it when colourful Moravian designs of hearts and flowers and doves and four-leaf clover suddenly began winding up the white columns of the Ribordeaux mansion. Linda’s imagination left something to be desired. In Moravia they would have laughed at her, but this was another country. Once she tried drawing a buffalo head among the hearts and doves and flowers, and it looked a lot like the Devil. Still, it was another country and it didn’t matter.
“She comes here to set a trap for him with her abracadabra, so he’ll never get away,” said Dinah. “And she’ll get rid of me once she knows. Oh, she’ll mind, all right. She ain’t no real Southern lady.” She shrugged her tea-rose shoulder. “Even some real Southern ladies mind. Matter of fact, most of them do.”
“I mind too.”
“That’s because you ain’t no true Southern white massa.”
“Why, I’m white as cheese!”
She laughed aloud. It was a simile from another world. “Cheese ain’t white,” she said. “I’m closer to cheese than you.”
“You’re the colour of a rose.”
Dinah opened her hand and looked at her palm, then gave him a questioning glance.
“I mean a tea-rose,” he said, kissing her breast. “And I’m jealous. I’m going to kill that one-legged son of a bitch.”
“You better save up and buy me instead.”
“All loved up by a cripple,” he said bitterly.
“He’s quitting,” she said, “now that he’s all wild over your sister.”
“What do you mean, quitting?”
“Quitting loving me.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“He really did love me, white boy, I wasn’t just some nigger-girl he took to bed. The stories I could tell!”
“I don’t want to hear them!” he snapped.
“Oh, you dear white boy of mine,” she sighed. “Why not just look at it like I’m cheating on him with you. That should make you feel better right away. Or are men jealous of the husbands of the wives they’re cheating with, back where you come from?”
“I don’t know,” said Cyril. “I never did it!”
“She’s pretty foxy, your Dinah!” laughed the sergeant.
“Was,” said Cyril bitterly. “And not foxy. She was wise. It really did help me. Oh, God!” He raised his head to look at the moon, which was just like a Texas moon. They were sitting on a hillside while the Ninth Iowa marched below them like a torchlight parade, their fire-brands soaked in turpentine resin. They were headed for Fayetteville.
“Well, you’re doing it now,” said Dinah. “I belong to him, and you’ve got me. You’ve got me and you never even paid for me.”
“I have got you!” He grinned blissfully.
“Because I love you, and I only belong to him. Do you love me?”
“I do, Dinah.”
“See what a fool nigger-woman I am? I believe you.”
“You’re not a fool nigger-woman. And I do love you.”
“Come to Mammy!” She reached out for him, and he did.
Afterwards, she said, “Maybe you’ll get me cheaper. High-yellow girls are cheaper.”
“That’s not true.”
“Is too.”
“Why?”
“And the cheapest of all are practically white. Like Pompey.”
Pompey was a white shadow in the home of Monsieur de Ribordeaux. He polished silver and served meals wearing white gloves. He looked like a footman in the prince’s château in Dvorec.
“But why?” he pressed.
“Because it’s easier for them to run away. In town, nobody can tell they’re niggers,” she said, and Cyril suddenly grasped the logic of the market-place, if not of the ideology. “Unless they happen to know them,” Dinah added.
And it rained. It poured and yet the forests went on burning. They were still in South Carolina. The engineers laid down a corduroy road, row upon row of logs in mud that could have stopped the caravan of wagons, that seven-mile snake with its tail still in Columbia. What he had seen just north of Columbia drowned out Cyril’s reminiscences. Beneath them rolled the flaming river of the Eightieth Ohio with their turpentine torches, and it had been pouring rain, then as now. He had galloped along with Sherman’s officers, who were cursing in their beards as they surged forward, then reined in their horses to keep pace with the general on his mount. Suddenly the general had halted, so abruptly that the sergeant had almost gone flying out of his saddle. The general had looked ahead through his field-glasses and cursed loudly. They had started off again across the soggy meadow to the plantation house in the middle of the garden. Then he had seen what the general had seen.
They were swinging from the massive lower branches of a mighty tree — seven dead men in rags, puffy tongues lolling between heavy black lips. The tallest had one leg chopped off at the knee. Blood mixed with rain trickled thin and pink from the stump. It couldn’t have happened long ago, or perhaps the rain had kept the blood from coagulating. No, the wound was much too big. The huge dead man had a board hanging around his neck and written on it in charcoal, only partly smeared by the rain, were the words “HERE’S YOUR EMANCIPATION!” The white plantation house looked haunted, its front door wide open in the rain. They approached cautiously, the sergeant with his Enfield at the ready, the lieutenant with his revolver drawn. In the spacious foyer there were portraits of gentlemen and oddly unattractive beauties. On the floor lay a number of brutally beaten Negroes, some dead, some unconscious. Under a painting of the Good Samaritan performing his deed of mercy, a young Negro woman in a silk chambermaid’s dress sat on a chaise longue. Her face was large and sallow; her widely set eyes had an oriental cast, a little like his Annie with her pretty Tatar features, the sergeant thought. But the Negro girl’s cheek had been cut open with a whip, and blood stained her white apron. Her eyes were terrified, still staring at things no longer there. She trembled and her teeth were chattering. Lieutenant Williams went up to her; she saw his revolver and started to scream. The lieutenant quickly holstered his gun and took her by the shoulders.
“What happened here?” he asked.
She kept on screaming. An old man with frizzy white hair, wearing livery, sat up on the chaise longue. “It was Chisholm’s cavalry, massa,” he said. “General Cheatham’s division. I see young Massa Burdick. His daddy, old man Burdick, he got a plantation five miles down the road.”
“But what happened here?” Lieutenant Williams repeated, because he knew something strange must have happened. Rebels did not destroy their own property.
“Maybe you’ll buy me and not give me my freedom anyways,” said Dinah, pulling on her white corset. She turned her back to him and awkwardly he started to lace her up.
“You’re right, I won’t,” he said. “I’ll marry you instead.”
“That’ll be the day,” she said.
“We’ll move up north.”
“You don’t say.”
He pulled the laces tight, and a lovely little gully formed between her breasts. “Ouch!” said Dinah. “You’ll end up treating me like Auntie Bramwell’s children treated her.”
“Do I know them?”
“How could you?” she said, carefully removing her dress from the beam. “That was back in Louisiana. She had five — three boys and two girls. And she could embroider real nice, too. Miz Bramwell taught her that before she died.”
She disappeared inside the dress and emerged at the neck. The moon split in two and settled in her eyes.
“And what about her children? What did they do?”
“Nothing,” said Dinah. “But when Miz Bramwell died, old Massa Bramwell remarried with Miz Bourbon. They married for love, white boy. I only wish you loved me as much as old man Bramwell loved Miz Bourbon.”
“I love you more!”
“You don’t say!” Pearly teeth flashed a smile in the moonlight. “Well, they didn’t have no children,” said Dinah, “and old Massa Bramwell kind of lost interest in the estate. Actually he wasn’t that old either. Before Miz Bramwell died they just had their tenth anniversary, and him only ten years older than her. Massa was forty. Well,” said Dinah, “I have to go now, white boy. Will you buy me? Cross your heart?”
“Cross my heart! If they’ll sell you. If not, I’ll steal you!” said Cyril.
“I’ll be for sale. You can bet your life.”
“You’d better be!”
“You can bet on it,” said Dinah. “Your sister will make sure of that.”
The torchlight procession at the foot of the hill moved towards Fayetteville. Beyond it the turpentine forests were ablaze. Because it was night, they could see the flames inside the bursting grey mushroom clouds. The fires roared like a storm in the dense forests, and the low clouds lit from beneath looked like an inverted Niagara Falls, with pink and orange whirlwinds descending on a topsy-turvy world. If the sergeant had still believed in such things, it would have seemed like hell. But as hells go it was a splendid one, and anyway the sergeant no longer believed in the god of the priests. He believed in the general. Sherman had no particular love for the Negro, but with the fire in the turpentine forests he was reforging the broken Union, while the Union violently purged itself of the illogical logic that so perplexed Cyril, who was bewitched by a bewilderingly free spirit in a body worth eight hundred, maybe a thousand dollars. The fire and brimstone of this splendid hell were burning that logic out of an ugly world.
The sergeant remembered carrying a dispatch for General Slocum. Towards evening, just outside Winnsboro — a large village about forty miles north of Columbia — he had caught up with Sergeant Metcalfe’s skirmishers, among them Stejskal with his long legs and a bright yellow silk patch on his back, Paidr, Shake, and Houska. They entered Winnsboro together, and found they’d been preceded by bummers, the drifters of Sherman’s great army, who were already wandering the main street and throwing things at each other that looked like uncooked dumplings. Sacks of flour were scattered in the road. They had been sliced open and the flour was spilling out of them. On the corner in front of the Episcopalian church, a tattered man with a porcelain chamber-pot on his head was mixing dough in a wash-tub. The bummers, apparently deranged, were grabbing fistfuls of the dough, and flour was flying through the air. All around them houses burned like flaming Christmas trees, and from somewhere — not the church — came the sound of a pump organ.
“Looks to me like old Slocum liberated the local madmen instead of the local slaves,” said Shake.
One bummer, covered from head to toe in flour, rolled up a big barrel of molasses. Right behind him was another with a vinegar barrel. The street ran downhill to the south. Soon a strange mixture was flowing downhill in a trough, and the bummers were floating hardtack biscuits down the stream like toy sailboats.
The organ was still playing. They arrived at the corner just as flames burst through the church roof. Three men came rushing around the corner carrying turpentine torches, and a chorus of military voices sang in unison with the organ:
Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the Jubilee!
Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free!
So we sang in chorus from Atlanta to the sea,
While we were marching through Georgia.
They finally saw the organ around the corner. It was out in the street, a short distance from the church, and on either side of it were carefully stacked pyramids of smoked hams doused in turpentine. A bummer put his torch to the one on the left and it burst into flames; then he ran over to the other side and set fire to the second pyramid. A small bummer sat at the organ with his back to them, playing. The chorus of soldiers, who looked like weather-beaten devils, sang facing the organ, the two in the middle supporting something that looked like a coffin standing on end. When they came closer, they found it was indeed a coffin, still damp from the graveyard behind the church. The bummers had dug it up and pried open the lid and had found a fresh corpse dressed in the brand-new uniform he’d been buried in. It was a Rebel captain, his face twisted in a grimace of death, his teeth bared at the sizzling hams. One eye had been incompletely closed and he looked as if he were winking mischievously. The smell of roasting ham filled the air, along with the roar of the fire inside the church. The organist kept hitting wrong notes, and the pedals creaked behind the diabolical chorus.
“Local madmen,” said Shake. “Dangerous lunatics, I’d say.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Zinkule chimed in. “He’s sold his soul to the Devil!”
This time Houska didn’t object. He was staring, flabbergasted, at the grimacing captain in the coffin. He rubbed his eyes with his fists.
“A smoked Apocalypse,” Shake remarked.
“I told you so,” said Zinkule darkly.
Yet the Devil is a mere servant of God, thought the sergeant. A helping hand when there’s dirty work to be done.
“Stop!” he yelled, but the crazy singers went on singing, in soldiers’ discordant harmony:
How the darkeys shouted
When they heard the joyful sound!
How the turkeys gobbled
Which the commissary found!
How the sweet potatoes even
Started from the ground,
While we were marching through Georgia.
“Stop it!” the sergeant yelled again. That brought Sergeant Metcalfe to his senses. He barked an order, the men shouldered arms. With a final wheeze the organ fell silent.
“What’s the matter?” asked the organist.
“Break it up!” ordered Metcalfe.
Half an hour later, the main street was cleared of bummers. By then, of course, it was too late. As Zinkule and Paidr lowered the coffin back into its grave — after tying the lid back on with a piece of rope — the smell of burnt ham hung over the cemetery. Zinkule made the sign of the cross over the coffin and shovelled the dirt back over it with a village drudger’s steadfastness. Though it was a long way down the road, the sergeant, when he looked back over his shoulder, could see the fires of Winnsboro dying down. He felt no regrets. Everything was possible in this war. Everything was at stake.
“Just like Auntie Bramwell’s ungrateful children,” Dinah said, as they walked out of the barn into the moonlight.
“But what did they do that was so awful?”
“They did the awfullest thing in the world. They didn’t set her free.”
“And they could have?”
“That’s just it,” said Dinah. “See, they used to hire Auntie out to do sewing for young plantation ladies even back when Miz Bramwell was still alive. And more after she died. Old Massa Bramwell let Auntie keep half of what she earned, sometimes even more when she asked real nice. So she saved her money. First she bought her oldest son, Bob, and freed him. He was a carpenter, and he took off north right away.” Suddenly Dinah jumped behind a bush and gestured for him to join her.
The man with the wooden leg was limping out of the white manor-house. Cyril’s sister was holding his arm. They strolled to the carriage shed. A groom stood waiting with a horse and buggy, which shone in the moonlight.
“See? What did I tell you? Old Massa Ribordeaux is in Austin today,” whispered Dinah. “While I was cheating on the young massa with you, white boy, he was busy with your Linda.”
Cyril was confused but he was beginning to understand, and it terrified him. His sister jumped up into the buggy and held out her arms to the man with the wooden leg, and helped him onto the seat beside her.
“I don’t want you to call me white boy,” whispered Cyril.
“Why not? You are my white boy.”
“What if I started calling you black girl?”
“You couldn’t. I’m pale yellow.”
“I’m not white either. I’m darker than you are, after all this time in the Texas sun.” It was all Dinah could do not to burst out laughing.
“So Auntie Bramwell saved up to buy all of them their freedom?”
“Sure she did,” said Dinah. “After Bob took off, Tom followed him north, then Beulah, who knew how to embroider like Auntie did, then Clothie — she sang real pretty — and finally Jim. He didn’t do nothing. But he was only fifteen. In fact,” she said, “he wasn’t the least bit to blame. As soon as he got up north, they locked him up for getting into the chicken coop at the Methodist manse. They say he got ten years. So it wasn’t his fault.”
“What do you mean, it wasn’t his fault? He was a thief.”
“No, he wasn’t,” Dinah shook her head. “He took from white folks, and that ain’t stealing.”
The buggy started down the road, the man with the wooden leg at the reins. Lida’s lovely head glimmered like silver. She had made up her mind about something, but what was it? Was it this? It couldn’t be love. After all, love had stayed behind in Moravia. Suddenly everything fell into place.
“But the rest of them — they could have done something,” Dinah continued. “Tom and Bob, they started up a carpentry shop in Boston. Beulah got work with a fancy dressmaker in Philadelphia and Clothie married a minister in Buffalo. They say he sang better than he preached. They even say he used to get hired along with some other freed slaves to sing at white folks’ weddings. What I mean is,” sighed Dinah, “they done fine. And they forgot all about Auntie.” The tiny moons in her eyes narrowed to silver slits. “Think of that, white boy!”
