The Bride of Texas, page 24
“Don’t call me white boy!”
“Okay, brown boy. They started out saying they’d save up and buy her out together. But Bob and Tom, just as soon as they got a whiff of freedom, they went crazy over women — slave women, of course, two fancy little maids back in Massa Carruthers’ house in Louisiana. Carruthers set their prices real high, so Auntie had to wait while the boys saved up for Phillippa and Brigitte. Next they had to save up for a nice house for Bob, and another one for Tom. Clothie started having babies and Beulah had left two back on Massa Bramwell’s plantation, so they had to save up for them, too. Meantime things were going bad on the plantation because old Massa Bramwell didn’t care about nothing but Miz Bourbon any more, and she didn’t give two hoots for the property. The niggers in the cotton-fields lollygagged around, watching the clouds roll by, because when the meanest overseer, Mr. McDrummond, saw how everything was falling apart, he quit. The other two overseers was old and married like Massa Bramwell, and they started loafing around with the niggers. The crop was ruined, Massa Bramwell got deep in debt and come to his senses, left Miz Bourbon in the parlour and went out in the cotton-field where the overseers were down playing poker with the niggers.”
A whip snapped in the moonlight; the carriage, a gold and silver blossom in the night, vanished around a bend in the road and rattled off towards where the Toupeliks’ farmhouse stood, five miles away.
This tea-rose, thought Cyril, would be too refined a creature for his father, and his mother would probably call her “Miss” because Dinah looked like the countess from the château at Lhota, only prettier.
“What are you thinking about, white boy? You’re not listening to me.”
“I’m thinking about how we’ll go north,” he said. “I probably couldn’t marry you here.”
“Sure, go north,” sighed Dinah. “Question is, can I believe you, or will you turn out like Auntie Bramwell’s rotten children?” She scowled. “Except for Jim. He was behind bars, so he couldn’t save up for nothing.”
“May God strike me down if I’m like Auntie Bramwell’s rotten children!”
“He will, too! Like He did to Bob and Tom — sneaky, ungrateful niggers.”
“Did they lose their carpentry business?”
“They lost Phillippa and Brigitte. Soon as Bob and Tom bought them their freedom, the two girls ran off to Chicago. I hear they got work in some fancy house there, as whores or nannies, I ain’t sure which.”
“You’re making this up, I bet,” he said. “What happened to Beulah and Clothie?”
“Nothing, of course. In the South, the Good Lord is a gentleman. But Jim got his reward.”
“Jim the thief?”
“I told you Jim never in his life stole nothing!” This time she seemed genuinely annoyed. “But he got his freedom too, like Phillippa and Brigitte. The jailer’s ugly daughter fell in love with him and unlocked his cell door one night.”
“Where do you get these stories?”
“I read the books that Missy de Ribordeaux left here when she married and left for Louisiana,” said Dinah. “But Jim got away and ran all the way to Canada. He went way up north, where I hear there’s niggers who milk whales. So he got work as a whale-herder.”
“Now, I’m positive you got that from a book!”
“No, it just came into my head.”
“Where did you learn to read?”
“When Missy de Ribordeaux was little, she didn’t want to play with nobody but me. And she had a tutor, Mam’selle Seulac. Missy was a mite slow, so you had to repeat everything ten times over. All I had to do was listen.”
“But this mam’selle must have been French, with a name like that?”
“Sure. The novels are in French too. I don’t read English so well. Everything is spelled funny in English.”
Cyril couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Let me touch you,” he said.
“Why?”
He reached out and touched her. She was real — he hadn’t dreamed her up. But nobody else knew about her. Just him.
“That’s Brutus,” said the old black man in livery. “When they put that sign around his neck, he kick young Massa Burdick, and the young massa haul out his sword and slice off his leg.” He pointed a black finger at the stump, which was still dripping pink drops, like a water-clock measuring time on the cross. “Then they hang him.”
“Was it all his own idea?” asked Lieutenant Williams.
“He always a bad nigger,” said the old man. “He got this trick, colonel.” The lieutenant did not correct him. “He throw his arm out of joint and put it in a sling and get off work. Bad nigger. He talk about Nat Turner sometime, too.”
“What happened to your master? And his family?” asked Lieutenant Williams.
“Nothing, colonel. Brutus don’t want to kill ’em. He say he don’t need to, now that Massa Lincum give us freedom. He just tell the white massas the plantation belong to us now, and he drive ’em off it.”
Lieutenant Williams glanced at Sherman. The general frowned and said nothing.
“I tell him it ain’t ours,” said the old man. “The only thing we is, is free, because Massa Lincum’s soldiers come in and do the job. That’s what they tell us, Gen’ral Kilpatrick’s cavalry. Trouble is, they ride right off again. Cato join Brutus.” He pointed to the corpse hanging next to the man with one leg, and then recited all the names like a litany: Caligula, Marcus, Aurelius, Cicero, Catiline, and the last one, with ebony skin and a horrifying post-mortem erection, Hannibal. Their master had had a classical education.
“I do what I can,” said the old man. “We only got freedom, and freedom ain’t property. But Brutus, he don’t want to hear this. We work till we bleed, he say. That’s true — some do. But not him. He got this trick, and other tricks too. Never go to the fields much. He sweep and pick up, fix the gins, help out in the kitchen —”
A wave of hot wind blew in from the burning forests. The corpses began to turn slowly.
“Cut them down!” snapped the general. The little band of Negroes started taking the wretched corpses down one by one.
“So they drive them away,” said the old man. “Brutus, he don’t let them take the carriage, or the horses neither. They has to walk. They walk straight to the Burdick plantation. I knowed it,” the old man sobbed. “I tell Brutus, but he don’t listen. They each take a room in the big house, and Brutus take Claudia right into his — poor girl, he drive her crazy, I think.” The old man turned to look at the girl. She was sitting on the steps now, moaning softly through clenched teeth. “Next morning, they back up with Chisholm’s cavalry. Young Massa Burdick, he with them.” The old man began to cry.
The Negroes carried off the dead bodies. General Sherman said, “Leave a guard here. Send a unit to the Burdick plantation.”
The blistering wind from the turpentine forests chased clouds of black smoke in their direction. The general’s horse reared and pivoted, and he galloped off towards the long blue line of his great army.
They forded a creek in which the water was almost boiling. The horses galloped across, scalding their hoofs. Gigantic cathedrals of fire roared against the sky. “Mene, mene, tekel.…”
His beautiful Dinah said, “He never even yelled at them. He just told them, ‘You’re wallowing like hogs in the mud while the cotton’s rotting, and you’re going to get off your backsides and work till I’m out of debt or I’ll sell you off to a rice plantation and move to New Orleans.’ And that was that. He walked away, they all got scared. Big Wellington yelled, ‘Get crackin’!’ and he clapped his hands, his palms are five foot square —”
“Come on, yellow girl, you’re making that up!”
“Inches, then. The only ones who never got crackin’ were those two overseers. Nobody needed them. The niggers worked so hard you could see the steam rise off them. You know, brown boy, niggers on rice plantations die like flies. By the time Massa Bramwell passed on three years later, he wasn’t even forty-five and he had the richest plantation in Louisiana.”
“Fear is the best overseer,” said Cyril.
“Maybe,” said Dinah. “He also told them he’d give them their freedom in his will, because he had no children, but if they didn’t work hard he’d change his will and sell them to the rice plantation, because he didn’t mean to spend his old age begging.”
“So what made them work? Fear, or the hope of freedom?” asked Cyril.
“Fear they wouldn’t get their freedom,” said Dinah. “And you know, white boy — or brown boy, or whatever you are — in the end, Auntie didn’t have no use for her ungrateful children. When old Massa Bramwell died, she got her freedom like all the rest, and she used what was left of her savings and bought herself a train ticket to Canada. But she went all the way north to where the niggers milk whales, because that’s where her good son was working, as a whale-herder. Auntie Bramwell spent the rest of her life nursemaiding whale puppies.”
“Whales don’t have puppies, yellow girl,” said Cyril. “And if you say they do, I’ll have to touch you again.”
“They do,” said Dinah.
Kapsa was trying to work up the resolve to take the final step. Had it not been for the eagle over the door, he would have long ago turned away and walked down Broadway, where the casino was, to the Lower East Side, where he would have lost his way, died, vanished. But you can only vanish from the world, not from yourself. So he would have hanged himself there.
This eagle was different, but how or why he didn’t yet know. Odd that his memory of that other eagle was already so vague after such a short time. The sign on the door to the little stone building said U.S. RECRUITING OFFICE, but he couldn’t bring himself to walk through the door. If it hadn’t been for the eagle and how different it was, he would have turned around, walked away, hanged himself. What else was there? The brickworks in Brooklyn? Why? For what?
“Yes, Touzimsky’s still hiring, and he’s only hiring Czechs. He has more orders than the brickworks can fill. They say he’s expanding.”
“But twenty-five cents a day? For a fourteen-hour day?”
“Well, I know it’s not a lot. But the work is steady. Longshoremen make two or three times as much, but they never know if they’ll have work the next day. Half the time, they don’t.”
“If he’s doing so well, why doesn’t he pay you better?”
“That’s exactly why he’s doing so well. He can sell his bricks cheaper than the competition, so he doesn’t have to lay people off. And a place to sleep comes with the job, too.”
He looked around the bunkhouse. There were eight men there at the moment. Some had already gone to bed. Along the front wall was a long military pallet for ten, but twelve slept on it. A colour print of George Washington hung askew over the pallet. Kapsa sat at the table with one of the twelve workers, a fellow called Zrubek. He could see through the open doorway to the brickworks. The stacks were belching smoke into the approaching night, and black shadows danced like devils around the bright squares of fire as kiln doors were opened and closed. There were several clay tumblers, a stoneware pitcher, and a candlestick on the table.
“Night shift pays forty cents,” said Zrubek. He was covered with dust and looked as if he were made of brick, and so did the others. Brick dust is hard to wash off — if the men ever washed.
“Where’s Salek?” asked Kapsa.
“He didn’t like it here. He left the day before yesterday. Said he was heading for Chicago.”
“You like it? Can you save any money?”
Zrubek shrugged, reached for the pitcher, and poured himself a tumbler of beer. The pitcher was nearly empty.
“We could if we didn’t have to drink so much. It’s hellish hot in the works now in summer but the work is steady. I can last for” — he hesitated — “a year or so, save up —”
“And then?”
Zrubek took a drink. “Then we’ll see. Maybe get something better when I pick up a little more English. Cigar-making isn’t bad, they say, but you need some money to start out with. Here, you know you got steady work and steady pay.”
“Where are you going to pick up English in this place?”
Zrubek shrugged again. “I haven’t even been here a year —”
“And how much do you know?”
“ ‘Tzenk you’,” said someone sitting on the bunk. “And ‘beer pleeze’.”
Devils danced around the open kiln doors. Why, he asked himself.
“Well, I wish you luck,” Kapsa said, and rose. His mind was made up. In the course of the night and the long morning and afternoon previous, he had changed his mind several times, but by evening, standing outside the gates of that tolerable hell, he finally made up his mind.
“Goodbye.”
Zrubek walked out of the bunkhouse with him. Kapsa could smell the ocean and feel the hot breath of the brickyard on his face. Zrubek glanced at the sky. The brickyard smoke blurred the stars.
“If you want to live, you’ve got to get born, and you mustn’t die,” said Zrubek.
Why? Exhausted in body and soul, he couldn’t think it through. He could only wonder: why?
“Well, goodbye, neighbour.”
He set out back to Manhattan.
On the ship, he and the butler’s son, Eduard Frkac (he registered himself in the passenger list as Ed Fircut), had shared a cabin with two other tycoons, one a German, the other an Englishman by the name of James Smithie. It was a foolish extravagance but, like the hotel in Amsterdam and the bottle of cognac, he thought it was worth it. The hicks going to work in Touzimsky’s brickyard travelled steerage. Even after paying for his cabin, he still had more than half of von Hanzlitschek’s money left, and he carried the case with the diamonds under his shirt. He had no intention of giving that up, not now that Ursula was dead, as he knew she must be. With the passage of time, he realized how clumsy his attempt to cover up his crime had been. How could the man have been killed by striking his head on a moss-covered rock in the forest? What would von Hanzlitschek have been doing there anyway, so far from his usual haunts at the officers’ casino or the promenade? And the maid must have been too terrified to remain silent. Ursula must be dead, even though she might still be technically alive in a jail cell somewhere.
At that time Eddie Fircut had some irrational, magical power over him. “In the hold? Think again, man! You can afford better, and it’s an investment that will pay off a hundred times over. A cabin passenger is in an entirely different class from some stinking refugee in steerage. Besides” — by then they knew who would be sharing the cabin with them — “in these three or four weeks you’ll pick up some English from the Englishman, and that makes it an even better investment.”
He was right about that. Smithie was a garrulous, pompous man who never looked them in the eye. He felt superior to them, of course, yet he also felt flattered in his role as teacher. He was the son of a wholesale wine and whisky merchant and he’d brought several kegs of the latter along. The captain allowed him to keep it in the pantry in exchange for the privilege of free access. Smithie had a long journey ahead of him, for he was going to California to prospect for gold. He talked too much and was conceited, but he wasn’t stingy.
The crossing was stormy and took six weeks instead of the usual four. Kapsa had English lessons every day and was quick to learn. By the time he reached New York, he was reasonably fluent. In the evenings he drank scotch to drive out the vision of the gallows that haunted him, waking or sleeping, and listened to Fircut and Smithie tell stories.
Fircut, who never actually drank, told tales of erotic conquests, and helped to take Kapsa’s mind off the gallows. But one stormy night Smithie told a story that began as an English romance, about Evelyn, a woman he had loved and lost because he hadn’t been her social equal. In an act of pure vengeance, he had helped her and her lover to the gallows. Fortified by Smithie’s whisky, Kapsa didn’t know whether to believe him or not. But the story horrified him, and revived all his old fears. He tossed back more whisky, hoping to punch a hole in his memory and let his fear for Ursula escape.
His only recollection of the rest of that night was a storm at sea, the cold wind of the North Atlantic, whitecaps reflecting flashes of lightning on their slick coal-black slopes, hands grabbing him in the air above the water. He was flying, but he never landed, merely tumbled into darkness.
When he awoke Fircut was standing over him, smoking a cigar in a holder. The next thing he knew, Kapsa was sitting at a table, eating something he couldn’t identify, and Fircut was saying, “What’s the problem, my friend? You have one foot in America, and Austrian imperial justice can’t touch you there.” He smirked and added, “Not unless somebody turns you in to the Austrian consul.”
Kapsa broke out in a cold sweat. Could he have babbled something in his sleep? Did Fircut know about Ursula? Would he blackmail him? How could he know?
Fircut reassured him somewhat. “Even if they did, you could disappear,” he said. “In America, nobody ever asks to see your papers. Change your name.” He paused. “But you ought to hide this a bit better. If it weren’t for me, it would be inside some shark’s stomach by now, along with you.”
He pulled the pouch from his pocket. Kapsa reached out to grab it, but Fircut handed it to him without a struggle. When he opened it, the nest of diamonds lay intact in the blue velvet. His terror began to fade.
“So you did your commander in, did you? Robbed him and rubbed him out? He caught you in the act, right? Scared of the gallows, are you? More than of the galleys?”
Kapsa gave a sigh of relief. Fircut was only guessing, and he wasn’t about to put him straight.
He stared at the eagle over the entrance to the little stone building. It was holding a bundle of arrows in one claw, an olive branch in the other. It was so different from the eagle on von Hanzlitschek’s cap, and on the banners that had fluttered over the conquered barricade that cannoneer Salek, as black as a demon, had destroyed with well-placed shots from Windischgraetz’s heavy artillery. But Kapsa still couldn’t make up his mind.
