The Bride of Texas, page 27
Jakub showed Kapsa and Salek through the house. “Dad and I hammered this front section together first, every evening for a week, but it was on Sixth Street then. It had no floor, it just sat on the ground like a doghouse or a shed. But it was home, a roof over our heads. We were happy, but happiness — well, it never lasts long.”
“We arrived in Chicago completely beggared,” Kakuska said. “All I had left was a silver half-dollar and a two-dollar bill I hid in my clothes. We’d been three months on the ocean, hungry and thirsty most of the time, but the thirst, my friend, was the worst. And then, wouldn’t you know it, just as we docked in New York, some people on the boat broke out in a rash and a bunch of them died — and the boat was put in quarantine. For ten days. Some poor wretches breathed their last looking out at America, at Manhattan. We survived, praise God. But the shipping company had to pay our room and board for the extra days. We had no money left, except for what I’d hidden in my clothes, and I wasn’t going to part with that for anything. We had train tickets paid all the way to Chicago, and we needed the money for those first days there. They accepted our feather beds as security, but we were real greenhorns and of course we never saw the feather beds again, and all we got in exchange for them was one salt fish a day and a slice of bread each.”
At first they slept in a dormitory that a philanthropist had built for Czech immigrants — a single large room, a stove for cooking in the centre, broad bunks along the walls for eating, sitting, and sleeping. They shared it with six other immigrant families, but at least they had a roof over their heads.
“We’ll be grateful to that kind man till the day we die,” said Tereza. “Next day Father went to the docks and got a job unloading the ships. It was hard work. I didn’t have the connections to practise midwifery yet, and besides, I was carrying Matej at the time. Father didn’t make much, but we saved enough for lumber and Father and Jakub put up this shack. They built it on the prairie, not far from the dormitory. But we were happy. We were in America, and we knew this was only the beginning.”
One afternoon, someone came pounding on the door. Tereza, eight months along, opened the door, and there were two men dressed in knickerbockers and tweed caps.
“We’d like to talk to Bartholomew Kakuska,” said one of them in an official-sounding voice. Tereza was frightened by the tone and put her hand on her stomach.
“Not home. Is working,” she said.
“What — time — will — he — come — home?” said one of the men. He looked disdainfully around the single room until he saw a printed picture of George Washington carefully nailed to the wall under a crucifix they had brought from home with a painted metal Christ on it. The contemptuous expression faded. Molly, who was fifteen, walked in from the vegetable garden, where she had been hoeing.
“Molly, tell them Father won’t be home till dark. I hope he’s not in trouble of any kind,” Tereza said, in Czech.
“My father comes home after sunset,” said Molly.
The men asked if they could wait and Molly invited them in. By the time Kakuska and Jakub returned from the dock after sunset, the women knew all about the two men.
One of them, an engineer called Schroeder, was a Bavarian, a forty-eighter, who after the defeat of that revolution left for America along with Fritz Sigel, who had commanded the rebel force and whose neck was on the line. Schroeder was now a surveyor for the City of Chicago. The other man was Schroeder’s assistant, a Yankee called Trevellyan. They had come to tell Bartolomej Kakuska that his dwelling was standing right in the middle of what was to become Sixth Street, along which the future metropolis of Chicago would expand westwards, and that he had three days to remove it from the road allowance.
Nothing lasts for ever. Schroeder talked Kakuska out of his first idea — to ask the authorities to run the street elsewhere (Kakuska valued his home so highly, or else his notion of American democracy was so preposterous, that his idea didn’t seem outlandish to him) — and then Tereza talked him out of his second — to ask that they widen the street and leave his house as an island in a river of traffic. She couldn’t imagine stagecoaches and carriages, carts and buggies flowing past her door, drowning them in constant racket. Bartolomej Kakuska decided with a heavy heart to take the building apart and reassemble it farther out on the prairie. Now that they had tasted the joy of owning their own roof and four walls in a free country, they could not face returning to the shelter and starting again from scratch. Tereza wondered if they should buy a tent to tide them over, but Bartolomej was strongly against it. “What good would a tent do once we’ve built the house again? It’s a complete waste of money!” He began making calculations with the stub of his carpenter’s pencil. The structure had to be taken apart carefully, so as not to damage the valuable boards; nails had to be pulled out and straightened so they could be hammered back in; and it all had to be dismantled like a puzzle so it could be reassembled. It went against everything the poor pragmatist knew to waste anything but his own efforts. He decided that he and Jakub couldn’t manage to dismantle it carefully in three evenings, because they had to earn their living by day. So they set out to Slavik’s Tavern on Van Buren Street to ask their fellow countrymen for help.
They found five of them in the tavern: Barcal, Hejduk, Kristuvek, and Padecky, and a fifth that the Kakuskas didn’t know — a black-haired, sprightly young man with a round, canny face, and a pair of guileless eyes. At first Kakuska thought he might be Father Zdeborsky from the parish in Prachen, who had been rusticated for a pious swindle he had run back in Bohemia. Father Zdeborsky — a handyman with a commercial bent — had created a crucifix with a Christ figure that wept tears of blood whenever a coin of sufficient size was dropped into a coin box that carried the words IESUS EST HOMINUM SALVATOR. The deacon intervened when pious old widows began to go hungry, spending their mite to see the Lord weep. Father Zdeborsky was threatened with excommunication for blasphemy, but the Bishop of Budejovice settled for exile. However, this gnome with the clever, guileless eyes of a con man was not Zdeborsky. He was introduced as Shake, and as Kakuska came in he was telling his skeptical countrymen of his plans to set up a readers’ society that would subscribe to a magazine called Czech that a veteran of the ’48 rebellion had just started up in Paris. But the rest had other things on their minds, so they were deaf to Shake’s contention that without a literature there was no nation. Kakuska’s problem, on the other hand, was close to their hearts, and though it was nearly midnight they set out to the site of the endangered house. Reluctant to stay behind in the tavern alone, Shake went along.
The night was dark and they had to look over the structure by torchlight. They examined the nails that Kakuska had hammered in (much too securely) and began to discuss the problems of taking the building apart without damaging the materials.
Meanwhile Shake walked around the little house and went inside. Moments later a rather loud slapping sound came from the cabin, but nobody paid much attention to it.
Shake emerged from the cabin and rejoined the men. He listened to them talk about the number of nails they would have to cut around and pry out, and how they would have to take the roof off in one piece because Kakuska had nailed the shingles on too meticulously. Then Molly came outside in her night-shirt, with an oversized wool shawl tossed over it. She looked around, stepped over to her mother, and whispered something in her ear. The torch in Tereza’s hand wavered. Shake looked on warily. Barcal was explaining that the inner beams would have to be turned around so the nail-holes wouldn’t match, otherwise they wouldn’t be tight enough. Tereza stepped over to Shake and was just about to speak when Shake said, “Why do it the easy way when you can do it the hard way?” Tereza hesitated.
“What do you mean?” asked Barcal.
“How much can it weigh?” speculated Shake.
“How much can what weigh?”
“The whole building.”
“Mind your own business,” said Padecky irritably.
“Well,” said Shake, “if you think harder is better than easier —”
“What kind of nonsense is that?” Padecky snapped.
“It’s a favourite Czech saying,” said Shake. “I collected them back home.”
“So stick it in your ear and let’s help the Kakuskas,” barked Padecky.
“The cabin has no cellar, …” Shake observed.
“It doesn’t have a steeple with a clock on the roof, either,” Padecky said drily.
“… because it has no floor,” said Shake.
“Didn’t have enough boards for a floor,” said Bartolomej Kakuska.
“It’s just sitting there on the ground like a doghouse,” said Shake.
“Oh yeah! I’ll show you a doghouse!” yelled Padecky.
“Can we get hold of two long beams somewhere?” asked Shake.
“Oh, you mean —” Barcal responded, frowning thoughtfully.
Tereza finally had an opening. “Mr. Schweik, you’re never to set foot in our house again!”
“My fellow countrymen,” said Shake, “man is by nature a vessel of weakness. The shame is mine.”
“How much can it weigh? A couple of hundred pounds? Four, maybe?” Barcal wondered.
“I can tell you how much your brain weighs,” snarled Padecky, enjoying his annoyance.
“Even if it weighed six, …” said Barcal, turning to Shake.
“Don’t change the subject,” declared Tereza. “You’re a wicked man, Mr. Schweik, and you’re no longer welcome in our house!”
“How many men do you think it’ll take?” asked Barcal.
The next day, before sunrise — before the men left to unload ships and push wheelbarrows — both the Kakuska women, along with Mrs. Hejduk and Mrs. Barcal (Shake was a bachelor and Padecky’s young wife had left him and returned to Bohemia two years after their marriage), called on seven other Czech households. That evening Schroeder went to visit the Kakuskas’ domicile, drawn by compassion for the hard lot of the industrious immigrant, but also by his memory of the immigrant’s daughter. Twelve Czechs, armed with hammers and mallets, were hammering big carpenter’s nails into two large beams that were longer than the Kakuskas’ cabin. Then they nailed the beams along two opposite walls of the structure. Then they lined up, six to a side, and on the command of Geza Mihalotzy — a former Feldwebel who had deserted from Paloczy’s regiment in Budapest after the débâcle in ’49 — they all bent over and, like twelve weight-lifters, heaved the Kakuskas’ little house onto their shoulders, and on the order “Marschieren, marsch!” they started off, left foot first. Backlit by the setting sun and its reflection in Lake Michigan, the caterpillar with twenty-four legs moved slowly westward across the prairie, away from the unfortunate Sixth Street allowance. The admiring Schroeder strode along behind the women and the wives of the men who bore the dwelling on their shoulders (Shake, granted partial clemency as the man who had come up with the idea, was one of them) and young Larry Kakuska, who wasn’t yet big enough to be part of the caterpillar.
That night, half a mile farther out in the prairie, the little house was settled down like a bird in a nest, half buried in sagebrush, and in its one room they celebrated a job well done with two bottles of schnapps contributed by Schroeder, who was gratified by their Bohemian ingenuity. The chastened Shake, still in disfavour, sat in the sagebrush beside the little house, which was rocking with laughter, and soothed his pride with a third bottle of schnapps from the generous Schroeder, which he had all to himself.
“What had he done?” Kapsa asked Jakub Kakuska years later, at the christening.
“I can’t tell you here in front of everybody,” said Jakub. “Maybe some other time.”
He never did. Much later, after the great battle of Bentonville, Kapsa heard the story from Jan Amos Shake himself, freshly decorated with a medal.
The Bohemian Casino on Twelfth Street in Manhattan was not, as its name suggested, a gambling den. It was just a tavern, and the only game the patrons indulged in was Marias, a card game they played for matchsticks, since no one had money for more than supper and ten or at most fifteen beers. Above the bar was a portrait of Frantisek Palacky, the father of the Czech nation, with the Czech heraldic lion on its right and the Moravian eagle on its left. Underneath it were two small star-spangled banners, crossed. At the end of the bar lay a stack of Havlicek’s liberal newspapers, Narodni noviny, for which the pubkeeper, Tuma, was a secret correspondent. Some of the tables were occupied by beer-drinkers reading newspapers, others by beer-drinkers playing cards. Kapsa and Fircut sat drinking whisky at a table in the corner. Tuma would occasionally toss them a glance from his place behind the bar
“If you think I’m trying to rob you — which is what you apparently think,” Fircut was saying, “then go pawn them or sell them yourself. What else would you do with them?”
“Nothing,” Kapsa replied. “For now.” He was annoyed.
“So what are you going to do? Break your back at the brickyard like the rest of those clowns?”
Kapsa had got so used to Smithie’s whisky on the boat that he’d developed a taste for it, and had only a handful of Hanzlitschek’s gulden left, and now that he’d entrusted them to Fircut to invest, he had only twelve dollars left in his pocket. The whisky helped him drive away the visions of the gallows, but it also addled his brain.
“So what are you doing — just hanging onto them for luck?” Fircut persisted. “There’s no luck without money, you know.” It was a favourite Czech proverb.
“That’s exactly what I’m doing. And besides, what’s luck?” Through a golden fog of scotch, Kapsa saw Fircut thinking hard.
“You know what I think? I think that commander of yours had a wife.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course. He did, didn’t he? A looker!”
“He did not!” Kapsa almost shouted.
“A commander without a wife?” said Fircut. “He must have been a widower.”
“Yes, he was.”
“I’ll bet he was!” said Fircut.
Kapsa took a sip of whisky but it didn’t help him come up with a reply.
“I think you were schtupping his wife.”
“He was a widower, I said!” he almost shouted again.
“I don’t think he was. But I’ll bet she’s a widow now,” said Fircut. “And I think it was your doing.”
Kapsa tried to tell him to shut up but he tripped over his tongue.
“So that’s how it was!” said Fircut. “Of course, that —”
Tuma came over and sat down.
“So, neighbours, have you made a deal?” he asked.
“Almost,” said Fircut. “First I have to stop off at the Austrian consulate. There’s something I have to take care of.”
“Wonderful,” said Tuma. “The building next door is going cheap. We’ll cut a door between the two buildings, we’ll make a dance hall out of the storage space, maybe even a theatre, book in those minstrel shows. They’re all the rage now. Ever seen one?”
“Of course,” said Fircut. “I just have to take care of one small matter with the Austrian consul.”
“I’d stay out of there if I were you,” said Tuma. “The consul won’t lift a finger for you, especially not since ’48. He thinks anyone who ran off to America can’t have much love for Austria.”
They hadn’t admitted to Tuma that they were deserters. Fircut had passed himself off as a nouveau-riche merchant who had outgrown Austria. He had cast Kapsa as the heir to a fortune left to him by a wealthy aunt. He embellished his story with frequent references to the captain’s cabin, implying that their only contact with life in steerage on their way across the Atlantic was the stench they could smell on their walks on deck.
“You’re right,” said Fircut. “But there’s one matter I must take care of. It concerns a certain lady and her late husband. My friend Kapsa here knew them both well.” He placed his hand on Kapsa’s shoulder. “I’m still owed a fair sum of money. But my friend Kapsa here has been a big help. The Austrian consul can hardly refuse me now, especially since the Austrians stand to make some tax on the money, but even so.…”
“Well” — Tuma glanced at Fircut suspiciously — “I don’t know about things like that. All I did was confiscate the regimental treasury. But like I say, the building next door is for sale cheap. It’s a good location and it’s a gold mine. I need backers and I’d prefer my own countrymen.”
He got up and went back to the bar.
“Well,” said Fircut, “what do you think? Should I write a love letter to the consul?” He grinned. “Of course, you’re beyond the imperial jurisdiction. But what about her? What’s her name? Not that it wouldn’t be easy to find out.”
“I’ll throttle you!” Kapsa growled.
“That would make it a double murder,” Fircut smirked. “You won’t tell me? No matter. As I say, it won’t be hard to find out.”
Kapsa finished his drink and poured another, emptying the bottle.
He gave up.
After that, all he could remember was sitting on a bench on the edge of a park. He remembered triple gold balls over the entrance to a shop. That was Friday afternoon. He remembered Fircut coming up to the bench, and hearing the sound of the chimes as the shop door opened and closed.
“Here’s the ticket,” Fircut said. “Look, I’m putting it in your wallet.” He flashed a piece of paper.
Then a ride — in a hack? — and being carried — did Fircut carry him? — and then darkness. He woke up in a doss-house.
The next evening he and Tuma waited in the tavern for Fircut to show up. He never did.
Kapsa still had the ticket. He hadn’t looked at it yet, but he had it.
Twelve dollars was all he had left now — ten, actually. He’d bought dinner and a bottle of whisky at the Bohemian Casino.
