The Bride of Texas, page 28
Then he found out about the hole in Mother McCormick’s chest.
He still had the ticket.
By Monday he had only six dollars left. The rest had gone for whisky and food after his encounter with Salek. At eight o’clock he was standing beneath the gold balls on Sixth Street. A gilt sign in the window said PAWNSHOP — COHEN AND SON, and behind it, in the sleepy morning sun, he could see a dusty violin along with some alarm clocks, mandolins, and a faded frock-coat on a chipped mannequin sporting a real monocle set in a wooden eye socket. Moments later, Cohen arrived and opened his shop. Kapsa hurried inside with him, almost knocking him over from behind. He handed the pawnbroker the ticket.
“Two dollars at forty percent a month,” said Cohen. “That’s eighty cents. You pawned it Friday evening, Saturday, Sunday — I have to count Monday too — that’s a tenth of a month — eight cents, counting Friday. That’ll be ten cents. Two dollars and ten cents altogether.”
And he placed a silver cigar-holder with an ivory snake coiled around it on the counter.
Kapsa handed him the money and stuck the cigar-holder in his pocket.
Rain and more rain. It was a warm rain, as in South Carolina, but wet enough to put out the fires in the turpentine forests. Now they were just smouldering. The nature of the terrain had changed. The endless wagon-train of Sherman’s great army now wound its way among pine groves, along carpets of logs laid down by the engineers where the road became marshland, across freshly repaired bridges spanning flooded rivers, through meadows just starting to turn green, northward towards Goldsboro. The sergeant was galloping ahead with a dispatch for General Davis from Sherman, who was riding on his huge horse, Sam, beside General Slocum, in the ranks of Howard’s Twelfth Corps. Davis’s Fourteenth Corps, with General Morgan’s division leading it, was up ahead, snaking its way deeper and deeper into North Carolina. By morning, the sergeant arrived at the house where General Davis was conferring with Major Belknap. The major’s foragers had met a man going to Springfield on a mule. He’d been more than willing to talk, because he owned a small farm south of Raleigh, and hoped the war would end before Sherman’s bummers got to it. The man had confirmed that a large force led by General Joe Johnston was gathering at Bentonville, with every indication that they were preparing for a battle.
But Sherman no longer believed that General Johnston or his subordinate commanders had large forces at their disposal. Hundreds of miles and three months had gone by since Kennesaw Mountain, since the bitter battles over Atlanta. His own army was now moving into North Carolina in three long columns — Slocum’s battalion in the north, Howard’s to the south, and Schofield’s closer to the coast. They were marching at some distance from each other, like three independent armies rather than a single one, and in all that time they had had only minor skirmishes with Hampton’s and Wheeler’s cavalries. Spies and prisoners brought them tales of an epidemic of desertion infecting the Confederate infantry, with only Wade Hampton’s skirmishers remaining immune, the cream of the cavalry patrolling the margins of the Rebel army. Most of its infantry was dying of attrition.
Sherman had always tried to avoid major battles; he left those to Grant out in the wilderness, where regiments numbering tens of thousands rolled over one another, bleeding each other dry on carefully constructed palisades and earthworks, and filling their trenches with fresh blood from units that were marched to the battlefronts past corpses there had been no time to bury properly. Spring downpours washed them out of their shallow graves, leaving half-decayed skulls to grin at the earnest newcomers as if to say: soon you’ll look like us.
Sherman no longer believed in the power of huge, ponderous armies engaging in monstrous battles that had no decisive outcome. The sergeant would listen to him when he joined them around the campfire and philosophized about war, while Lieutenant Williams surreptitiously took notes in a leather-bound book. “Let’s give Pyrrhus credit where credit is due,” said the general. “He was a soldier, and a brave commander. But what kind of general pays for every five feet his troops advance — and five feet is the height of a very small soldier — with a dead man or a cripple? War is an art, a terrible art. It ought not to exist at all but, since it does, it ought to be practised as an art. It is not an exercise in mass execution, the winner being he who has more men to sacrifice and more executioners who are, in turn, also condemned to die. To my mind Pyrrhus was an executioner of that calibre,” said the general, placing a cigar in his mouth and enshrouding his creased face with smoke. “Caesar was the real artist,” he said from behind the smoke. “His soldiers were superlative marchers first, and only then soldiers.”
And yet, mused the sergeant, looking over the newspaper that had caught up with them north of Savannah, the general had the reputation of being a gambler, an adventurer, even a madman. Counter to the rules of war, he had plunged into the backwoods of Georgia, cut himself off from his supply routes and lines of communications, and driven his soldiers on long daily marches to the south. As they went they plundered the countryside and impoverished the farmers, so as not to have to wait for the arrival of unwieldy supplies. They did not have to rely on vague, uninformed orders from strategists working in safety far from enemy territory. They did not allow the Rebels time to manoeuvre or concentrate their strength and force the hand of battle, which could transform an art into a bloodbath on some fixed field of glory and of death. Kil’s skirmishers and armed bummers spearheaded Sherman’s army and rode in small battle groups threading through the countryside. And so the great but agile army drove quickly and deeply into Georgia, then on to South Carolina, and then northward. The general avoided major battles, not because he feared them, but because he was an artist practising an art that, although it shouldn’t exist, did exist, and demanded artists, not bloodied tyros, to be properly applied.
Sometimes the sergeant was ambushed by memories of long-ago times in the one-room schoolhouse of his childhood, where their patriotic teacher, Erazim Kozel, used to tell them stories of another great military leader, Jan Zizka of Trocnov. Under the Georgia stars, the sergeant imagined Zizka’s fifteenth-century battle-carts filled with stones, careering down the hillside and crashing into the ironclad phalanxes of crusaders, smashing swaths of death through their ranks. What if his general had that kind of battle-cart? What if Georgia and the Carolinas were full of smooth, steep hillsides? What if the general had light wagons, perhaps powered by steam instead of oxen — wagons that could ply the roads of the Carolinas like gunboats plying the Mississippi, and carry soldiers armed to the teeth with repeating rifles. The sergeant shook off the idea, but the vision of an army with armed wagons arrayed in small battle groups like Kil’s cavalry, penetrating like lightning in all directions throughout the burning Carolinas, made him shake his head again. He knew that Sherman’s headlong drive into the unknown was a lesser risk to life and limb than the slow, prudent, well-supplied steamroller that called itself the Army of the Potomac.
Even less did the general believe in a grand pitched battle now, in the twilight of the war. He simply waved his hand and sent the sergeant with instructions to General Davis to keep a sharp eye out.
The sergeant caught up to General Davis at dinner-time in a charming farmhouse about twenty miles outside Bentonville, where he was in the company of General Carlin and an alarmed farmer who hadn’t the slightest desire to see his land become a field of glory.
“It weren’t,” said the farmer, “I mean, it weren’t just the cavalry. There was infantry too, three regiments at least, gentlemen. I seen them yesterday, moving towards Bentonville.”
“All Morgan came across was cavalry,” said General Carlin.
“It was them set fire to my barn at Pete’s Bend this morning,” said the farmer. “They were covering the infantry. I seen them yesterday. They come back to give the infantry time to gather at Bentonville. I’m telling you, gentlemen, there’s a battle brewing. If it happens here — and I’m damned sure it will — it’ll cost me a lot more than an old barn.”
On his way back to General Sherman, the sergeant rode with General Davis and his aide. Sherman heard his account of the conversation with the farmer, and Major Belknap brought up his own experience with the man on the way to Raleigh.
But just as Sherman didn’t believe in big pitched battles now, in the twilight of the war, he was convinced that the other side didn’t believe in them either.
“No, Jeff,” he told Davis. “Johnston won’t risk a battle, with the Neuse rising at his back and only one bridge across it, if I can believe my scouts. There’s no infantry standing in our path, Jeff. All they have is a few squadrons of cavalry. Sweep them aside and you’re fine. We’ll meet tomorrow at Cox’s Bridge.”
“ ‘If I were to tell you!’ ” The sergeant impatiently knocked the ash off his cigar into a tin ashtray fashioned to resemble a heart pierced by an arrow. “You keep saying, ‘If I were to tell you.…’ All right, tell me!”
So Salek told him. The tavern was in a large building on the corner of Randolph and Desplaines. The owner stood behind the bar in a cloud of smoke with just his head showing, a scimitar moustache, his hand on the tap guiding the draught beer into quart-sized mugs. A band was playing a loud polka on the podium, also surrounded by a cloud of smoke: a flugelhorn, a clarinet, a tuba, violin, drum, and an accordion. On a plank floor in front of the band, couples were swirling energetically to the music. A Czech Sunday in Chicago. Act One of Salek’s Chicago story hadn’t been Czech, but his present wife, Vlasta, was — Vlasta who never left the dance floor, and whose grey eyes kept firing shafts at the sergeant as he tapped his ashes into the tin-heart ashtray. Act One had been Deirdre.
“If only she hadn’t died on me!” said Salek sorrowfully over his two-pint glass of beer, his fifth this afternoon, each one spiked with a shot of gin. Deirdre — who had opened the door at five o’clock one morning, sleepy-eyed but dressed in a grey skirt and faded blouse, while he stood on the step holding the two loaves of warm bread he was supposed to deliver every other day to that large, hungry house on Dearborn Street. On the street was his cart, pulled by an old mule. The morning was as murky as the Vltava River after a rainfall. She had a freckled nose and green eyes.
“Good morning,” he said in a heavy accent, and she took the loaves from him, yawned, and turned to close the green door while he, enchanted by her reddish braids, went on staring long after the door, with its heavy polished brass knocker, had shut behind her.
The sergeant felt Vlasta’s eyes upon him, as she kicked up her black-stockinged legs in the smoky mist and the band played the polka.
“If only she hadn’t died on me!” Two days later, when Salek was delivering the loaves of bread again, he noticed that her thumb was bandaged. He took out a fragrant braided poppyseed roll he’d made especially for her the night before. She shook her head and said something he didn’t understand. He knew only a few words of English, but her speech had an Irish lilt.
He shook his head too, pointed to her, and said, “Is for you!”
She was startled but then she smiled and took the roll from him. “Thank you!” She hesitated. He was standing there like a lump, unable to think of anything to say in English. She gave him another smile, then turned away and closed the door: two reddish braids tied with green shoelaces, the green door, the brass knocker.
Two days later: “Was good?” This time she smiled as soon as she opened the door. Another beautiful roll didn’t catch her off guard.
“Oh yes, it was very good!”
He pointed to his chest and said, as he’d planned to, “Ondra.”
“I’m Deirdre,” she replied and waited.
“I bring you again, yes?” he said.
“You’re very kind,” she said.
No chess master, he hadn’t thought of his next move, but when she turned away he saw that she’d replaced the laces in her braids with shiny green ribbons. Two days later, he brought her a big poppyseed kolach.
She died less than a year after they were married. It had been a late-evening wedding, with one tallow candle in an out-of-the-way Irish church, the only other glow coming from priest’s red nose. Salek couldn’t afford a better wedding by daylight. The bride wept with disappointment. Deirdre went on living with her master on Dearborn Street and he lived with the baker, Rehacek, in a furnished room. They saved their money and saw each other once a week. Their dream was a bakery of their own, where she would sell bread and pastries.
“All I have left now is Annie,” sobbed Salek, pouring another shot of gin into the two-pint glass of beer. “If it weren’t for how kind Vlasta is to Annie.…”
The sergeant didn’t press him to continue. Instead, he said, “Don’t you and Vlasta have any children of your own?”
“Thank heavens, no,” said Salek. “I’m sure about Aninka. I know she’s mine. If Vlasta and I had — I mean, if Vlasta had a child — I couldn’t be sure.” The sergeant saw a black-stockinged leg flashing through the smoke. The grey eyes, darker than the smoke, caught his for an instant.
“I’ll divorce her, I will!” Salek said bitterly. “But what about Annie?”
The memory of Salek’s sad voice was driven out by Shake’s high-pitched tenor, and the sergeant’s mind returned to the present, to the campfire a few miles from Bentonville.
“Nobody ever said so out loud,” Shake was saying, “but deep down we were all surprised that Salek stayed with us. Especially Mihalotzy. By that time Salek was pretty well off, better than Honza Talafous, and nobody thought Honza’s sudden concern for his family’s welfare was odd. We all knew he had a prosperous shop on Randolph Street. Or Kabrna, whose cigars were selling so well that he’d hired twenty people. Nobody even thought it was strange when Kabrna tried to get the Austrian consul to get him out of military service. But he wasn’t the only one in Chicago to give the Czechs a bad name.”
“What about you?” asked Paidr.
“Me? I was the wonder of the town,” said Shake.
“You mean,” Kakuska said, “the whole town wondered about you.”
“But I knew they’d wonder and I wanted them to wonder,” said Shake. “I like being the centre of attention. Besides, everyone knew I’d bought some armour, so I had no reason to be afraid.”
“They say you wore it backwards at Perryville,” said Kakuska sarcastically.
“I didn’t know how to put it on properly,” said Shake. “It was supposed to fasten in the back with a buckle, but I couldn’t reach around to do it up.”
“Why didn’t you get help?” asked Fisher.
“I didn’t want to be laughed at,” said Shake. “So I put it on backwards and buckled it in front, and then I couldn’t get it turned around properly. But it saved my life all the same.”
“Is that so? When?”
“During the attack on Perryville. I got a direct hit but the armour held fast.”
“If you try to tell me someone on our side accidentally shot you in the back,” said Houska, “you’re going to get a direct hit in the nose from my fist.”
“I’d just turned around to urge my fellow soldiers on,” said Shake calmly. “I got shot right in the back — a solid shot, my friends. I lay there, stunned.”
“But in one piece,” said Kakuska.
“Take a sniff!” warned Houska, sticking a clenched fist under Shake’s nose.
“Why don’t you still wear it, if it saved your life?” asked Paidr.
“I don’t have it any more,” said Shake. “You remember the winter we had in ’63? It got rusted.”
“I said, take a sniff!” Houska challenged him again.
“I want to hear more about Salek,” the sergeant said, averting the impending conflict.
“He was practically a wealthy man,” said Shake. “You don’t think that grocery store of his was something he earned by the sweat of his brow, do you?”
The sergeant cast his mind back to Chicago, back to that afternoon before the dance, when Cup-Salek was bragging about business and took him on a tour of the bakery.
“You need to be a little bit lucky and a little bit shrewd,” he said. One morning five wagons loaded high with sacks of flour had stopped in front of his bakery, when it was still tiny.
“What’s this?” he asked the driver.
“You ordered flour?”
“Yes.”
“Well, here it is,” said the driver, handing him a purchase order. It said, “2000 sacks of flour”. The last two zeros had been squeezed in before the word “sacks”.
“The wheat crop that year was excellent,” Salek-Cup explained to Kapsa. “Flour was going cheap. But I had an almanac from back home that had long-term weather predictions in it.” So he said nothing and had them carry the flour into the bakery. When they ran out of space, he rented the empty shop next door. Then he went to the wholesaler’s, but entered by the back door so that the agent who had taken his order didn’t have a chance to sneak away. The agent was a little guy with a tic, and Salek towered over him menacingly.
“He knew I always paid cash,” said Salek, “and never took anything on credit, so he thought I was feeble-minded. I held the purchase order under his nose and said, ‘Look, you made a mistake.’ He turned pale. I said, ‘I wanted twenty thousand sacks, not two thousand.’ ‘You — you don’t need that much,’ stammered the agent. ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘I may have overdone it a little. So I’m only going to pay you for the two thousand. But I want the discount for twenty thousand. After all, it was your mistake.’ The discount he gave me was so big that each sack of flour only cost me a few pennies. And the almanac was right. Next year the harvest was terrible, and the price of flour went way up.” Salek moved from the little shop on Goat Street to the one on the corner of Clinton and Randolph.
“What was wrong with that?” asked Fisher. “If anyone was dishonest, it was the agent.”
“But it wasn’t honest work,” said Shake. “It was cunning.”
“Is it dishonest to be cunning?” asked Paidr. “If it were, you’d have been in jail long ago.”
