The Bride of Texas, page 31
“In a coach far away from the slaughter, General Buell had no idea what was happening,” Shake continued, “because, in addition to the powdery dust, there were something like bubbles forming on the battlefield that didn’t let any sound through.”
“Bubbles? Of what?” Zinkule wondered.
“Hot air,” said Houska.
“I don’t know,” said Shake. “One minute you’re deafened by Rebel yells, then you take a step and they look like a chorus offish. Buell and his coach were right in the middle of one of those bubbles, waiting for the fighting to start, but it had already been going on for an hour and he couldn’t hear it. He was confused when his messengers described the start of the operation to him.”
Fourteen hundred from both armies died in the battle, and later on almost six thousand more died in field hospitals and infirmaries — legless, armless, gangrene-ridden, thirsty, racked with pain. Around the campfire, the horrors turned into comedy. It was the reverse of the chromotypes printed in ladies’ magazines at the beginning of the war, reducing the horrors of the slaughter to one or two symbolic soldiers splayed out picturesquely on emerald-green grass.
Shake said, “In the course of the battle, the Lincoln’s Rifles took up a position in the ruins of a farmhouse, and we waited for the right moment to deliver a decisive blow against the enemy. The farmer and his family were trembling with fear in the cellar, but they had a supply of well water, and because they were loyal to the Union they sent their daughter up to bring us water and she ended up staying and watching the battle. So we finally slaked our thirst as we waited for the right moment to attack. Then we gradually got really thirsty.”
“You said you already slaked it,” said Houska.
“He means figuratively speaking,” said Javorsky.
“Exactly,” said Shake. “The farmer was prepared for that too. He sent his son up with a jug; the kid put it beside the trap door and went back down into the cellar. So we worked on getting rid of that kind of thirst, and towards evening —”
“What about the girl? I’ll bet you tried to seduce her into drinking with you too,” said Houska with a frown.
“Not into drinking with us,” said Shake, “and anyway, we got nowhere. It was the fighting she was interested in. Just when we thought the moment to attack had come, a fresh brigade headed by Colonel O’Sell emerged from a cloud of dust. We cheered and Colonel O’Sell walked over to Geza Mihalotzy and asked him if he was in contact with the enemy. Mihalotzy didn’t want to admit that so far the only contact we had had was with the civilians in the basement — and they were friendly — so he told O’Sell that we hadn’t been able to identify the enemy clearly in the raging battle. At that moment one of those sound bubbles rolled over to us, a cloud of dust was blown away, and on a little rise ahead of us was a tall officer in a dark uniform, scouring the valley with a pair of field-glasses, though he couldn’t have seen much. ‘Isn’t that General Terrill?’ Colonel O’Sell asked. In his embarrassment, Geza Mihalotzy ran his finger inside his collar and raised his chin. Colonel O’Sell took this for a nod and hurried over to the officer in the dark uniform. Just then the bubble burst and we could hear O’Sell as clear as a bell. “General, sir, I’m here on your orders with an infantry brigade.’ The general looked him up and down, which was unusual, given the battle situation, then asked him which brigade he meant. ‘The second brigade of the First Division of General Gilbert’s corps,’ replied Colonel O’Sell. ‘I await specific orders regarding our position in the field.’ The general looked him over again, apparently taken aback, and then said, ‘There must be a mistake. You, colonel, are my prisoner.’ And then we saw O’Sell sheepishly unbuckling his sword and handing it to the general. It was General Polk. With all that dust on his uniform, it looked blue.”
“Why didn’t you go to O’Sell’s rescue?” asked Fisher.
“We intended to start firing but we might have hit O’Sell. So we had to stand by helpless as Polk escorted him to the nearest bubble.”
“Why didn’t you launch this attack you keep talking about?” Houska asked.
“It didn’t seem like the right moment,” said Shake. “When the right moment finally came, General Polk was gone with his prisoner, Colonel O’Sell.”
More cannon boomed in the distance. Shake inverted the canteen with the word WODA carved on it, ran his finger around the inside of the neck, and licked off the last few drops. He sighed. “The situation got more and more complicated,” he said. “It was getting on towards dusk, on the north hillside of the valley a greenish sun crept along the jagged horizon, the moon rose in the south and it —”
“— had polka dots,” Stejskal prompted him.
“Damn near,” said Shake. “It was kind of a turquoise colour, with strange orange blotches on it. Bubbles were rolling about the battlefield and it turned out that they didn’t just block out sound, they could hold it as well. When a bubble burst, it sometimes let loose an order shouted half an hour earlier at the other end of the battlefield, which just made things more confusing. One of the bubbles released some choice bits of profanity uttered by General Braxton Bragg, and then we could hear General Polk interrupting him: ‘General Bragg, expressions like that will not be tolerated on my battlefield!’ ”
“Admit it,” said Houska, “your thirst was so quenched that you slept right through the battle and dreamed up the bubbles.”
“It’s extraordinary that some of you don’t believe me,” said Shake. “In this war anything is possible.”
They sat around the campfire palavering in Czech while farther away, at a respectful distance, was a circle of Negroes they had gathered on their march. They looked like impoverished scarecrows. Tattered shirts were draped over dark sweaty torsos, muscular legs were barely covered by what had originally been trousers. But they were grinning into the fire, for they were free. Then two Negroes got up and moved closer to the fire. They had obviously been listening to the conversation. Their clothes seemed in better repair than the rest and one of them had an embroidered design near the collar of his shirt, stained though it was with the mud and dirt of North Carolina. To the sergeant it looked like a little Moravian dove design. Was it the booze? No, he was quite sober.
“A blessed good evening to you,” said the first Negro, in Czech. The sergeant spun around to face the man, whose plump lips framed a shiny white smile. He closed his eyes and opened them again: the little Moravian doves were still there on the grubby shirt.
“Are you Czech?” Kapsa asked, in the same language.
“Oh no, I’m Moravian,” the man replied, in a Moravian dialect. “So’s Breta here,” he added, pointing to his companion.
“Massa was Moravian,” he explained, “and so was his missus.”
“What’s your name?”
“MacHane,” said the Negro. “He taught us to read and write, too.”
The sergeant was moved by this living evidence of a compatriot’s destiny in the depths of the Carolinas, amid the smouldering turpentine forests. He invited the two men over to the fire. Stejskal gave them some roast meat and they downed it hungrily. The story or legend, or whatever it was, emerged gradually. It must have been the truth; after all, both men spoke Czech. Their mother had died young; Massa MacHane had bought them as kids. He only had five slaves, all male, and they worked on his steam-powered sawmill on the Charleston River. He bought the two little boys for his kind missus, for the couple had no children of their own.
“What was her name?”
“Ruzena. She died five years ago, a year before the war started.”
“And where is your massa?”
“He had to join up. He’s a colonel with Massa General Braxton Bragg.”
The name was still confusing him. “You know how to write?”
They both nodded. He handed them a pencil and a notebook. “Write down your massa’s name, his whole name.”
The Negro wrote, in a large schoolboy’s hand, Jindrich Machane. Then he said aloud, “Ma-khah-nee-yeh. But everybody called him MacHane. So we did too. Sunday he’d read the Bible to us. Massa was a Moravian Brother.”
An odd story to come across here, in deepest North Carolina. Massa MacHane had been born here. Maybe his father came from the old country, the Negroes weren’t sure. Now he was the enemy in Braxton Bragg’s corps out there somewhere. Colonel Henry MacHane. Kapsa glanced at the Negroes gnawing away at the generous hunks of plundered meat roasted over a campfire. Freedom. The respectful circle of black men hung back in the black darkness, singing pianissimo:
Oh Freedom, oh freedom, oh freedom over me
And before I’d be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave.…
Ursula’s face emerged from the darkness. Freedom. No von Hanzlitscheks.
There are rocks and hills
And brooks and vales
Where milk and honey flow.…
Sucking on a cold meerschaum pipe, Shake was finishing his wild dream: “Clouds of dust that started out yellowish brown turned blue when the spotted moon rose over the battlefield, and suddenly out of one of those clouds came a swarm of attacking soldiers in pale green uniforms. It was an optical illusion, of course, but we recognized them from their hats. Not even the zouaves from New York wore anything like that, and they’d wear practically anything. No, these were Rebels. So Colonel Shryock, who had replaced Colonel O’Sell when he got taken prisoner, gave the order to fire, and all of us Lincoln’s Rifles obeyed to the last man.”
“How big was that jug?” asked Javorsky, but Shake went on unperturbed.
“The Rebs took cover behind a low stone wall dividing two fields and returned our fire. Then all at once an officer in a dark general’s uniform emerged from a dust cloud on our right and looked around, and when he saw Colonel Shryock hiding behind a wayside cross —”
“Aren’t you getting this mixed up with the Hussite Wars?” asked Stejskal. “A wayside cross in Perryville?”
“The farmer was from Moravia,” Shake retorted calmly. “The general walked over to Colonel Shryock behind the wayside cross — it was a pillar depicting the agony of Christ on the cross — and yelled, ‘What’s going on here, colonel? Can’t you see you’re firing on your own men?’ Colonel Shryock was startled, uncertain, and glanced over at the low stone wall and the unmistakable hats showing behind it. ‘I do not think, general, that we are mistaken here,’ he reported in an official tone. ‘I have no doubt whatsoever that these soldiers are indeed the enemy!’ ”
“Sounds like a book,” said Houska.
“That’s because Shake tells stories straight out of storybooks,” said Javorsky.
Shake just shrugged. “ ‘Enemy soldiers!’ the general shouted, annoyed. ‘What nonsense! Colonel, hold your fire, at once! And what is your name?’ Beside me Pepik Dvoracek jumped up and tried to alert Colonel Shryock to something, but he and the English language didn’t get along too well, because he never had much use for it tapping beer at Slavik’s Tavern. ‘Sir, Sir,’ Pepik shouted, ‘He … he.…’ ‘What do you want to tell him, Pepik?’ I asked, but he was so eager to speak that he couldn’t get it out. ‘Sir! He … sir!’ As Pepik was stammering away, I heard Colonel Shryock say, ‘Colonel Shryock, Eighty-seventh Indiana Regiment. And might I ask who you are, general?’ ‘Sir! Sir!’ Pepik Dvoracek kept saying. The general looked at the Lincoln’s Rifles and scowled. He rode over to Colonel Shryock, shook his fist in the colonel’s face, and declared, ‘You don’t know me, but you will!’ He turned his horse, did a slow gallop along our battle position, calling, ‘Hold your fire! Hold your fire!’ We obeyed and, oddly enough, so did the fellows in the hats behind the wall. ‘Sir! Sir!’ Pepik kept trying, but still couldn’t get out what he wanted to say. The general slowly vanished in a dust cloud, with a neigh and the sound of galloping hoofs. And Pepik Dvoracek gave up and shouted in Czech at Colonel Shryock, ‘Colonel, sir! That was General Polk. I know him because once, before the war, he dropped in for a drink at Slavik’s.’ ”
“And a bubble burst and translated it into English, right?” said Fisher.
“Wrong,” said Shake. “I translated it into English. Shryock ordered us to resume firing, but meanwhile a bubble of dust had drifted over and hidden the wall, and by the time it burst the hats were gone. Bragg had ordered a tactical retreat.”
The sergeant glanced down the row of campfires that lay across the dark landscape like a fiery arrow pointing at Bentonville. The war was ending. Somewhere beyond the tip of that flaming arrow, General Johnston was devising some desperate defensive action, Wheeler’s wild riders were galloping about, and a nervous Leonidas Polk was counting heads in his battalion, mired in the blood-drenched Carolina mud.
Benjamin ran down the hill to the plantation house: “They’re coming! They’re coming!” So they lined up outside, at the foot of the front steps. As the youngest, Dinah stood at the end of the line, in a new black silk dress and a new starched white apron. She was curious about young massa. She had last seen him four years before, when she was twelve and wasn’t even allowed to stand in the line of the house niggers to wave goodbye, so she had waited with a bunch of the other children by the road for young massa, proud on his horse, in a grey top hat and grey boots with red cuffs. Riding behind him was Gideon, happy to have been chosen to go to Paris.
Now Gideon sat dejected on the jump-seat and young massa was inside the coach, sunk back in the pillows, looking grim. Before the coach came to a stop, Gideon jumped down and put down the step. He wore soft leather riding boots and was dressed in red livery. The coach stopped. Old Moses, who had been riding beside the driver, took up a position by the step; young massa reached out, put his left arm around Moses’ shoulders, hopped onto the step, and lowered himself to the ground. His left leg was gone. With Gideon and Moses supporting him on either side, he moved slowly towards the house, with old massa behind him, a pained expression on his face.
They didn’t know if they should cheer his arrival, so they were silent and grave. Old Abe bowed. “Welcome home, massa!” But young massa barely nodded. He hobbled past the line, up the steps, and through the front door. The left leg of his white riding pants was pinned up in the back.
Dinah felt sorry for him. She pictured it in her mind. The horse had broken its leg jumping a wall and had gone down so fast massa hadn’t had time to pull his foot out of the stirrup. The bones in his leg were so badly smashed not even the famous Paris surgeon could save it. That was the story. But Gideon couldn’t hold his tongue, and the day after they came back everyone knew the truth. It had happened in a duel, and the duel had been over a woman, of course. Dinah imagined someone fighting over her. She had read about such things in the French novels that belonged to Mademoiselle Hortense de Ribordeaux, who had just gotten married and gone off to live in Louisiana.
“It was Count Lissex,” said Gideon.
“Lissieux,” she corrected him.
Gideon exclaimed, “Listen, girl, was it you in Paris or me?” He looked at her as though he had never properly seen her before. “Tell me your name, anyway.”
“Dinah. I never been to Paris, but you say it Lissieux. He’s famous. He fought three duels.” She counted them off on her fingers: “Baron Fleury, Prince Jean-Paul de la Roche, and the Spaniard Don Carlos.”
“What is this nonsense?” he interrupted her. “Massa, he only fight one duel. I never heard of no Jean-Paul!”
“I read about it!”
“Whereabouts you read it? The newspaper? We don’t get no Paris newspapers here.”
“No, it was in a novel that Miss Hortense had —”
“A novel!” Gideon exclaimed. “My, ain’t we smart!”
Young massa lay on the big four-poster canopy bed smoking slender Parisian cigars, staring out the open window at the dismal trees with their beards of moss. He did not come down to dinner. Gideon took it to his room on a wheeled cart, while old massa sat alone at the huge dining table, between the candlesticks, permanently grim. When she came upstairs with the coffee, she saw that Gideon had just been whispering something in young massa’s ear, and massa watched her so intently as she walked over to the table that she felt self-conscious and almost tripped over the carpet.
“You speak French?” he barked at her abruptly.
The man’s tone scared her. She should have kept it to herself. What if — “No sir, massa.”
“She lying,” said Gideon. “She corrected my French.”
“Don’t lie, ma petite,” said Massa, still gazing at her.
“I’m not lying, sir,” she said, pouring the coffee with a trembling hand.
“Fais tomber une goutte de cognac dans mon café,” said massa. She walked over to the liquor cabinet and opened it.
“You are lying, ma petite,” he said. “Where did you learn French?”
She finally told him, but it was like pulling teeth.
“ ‘You see, Cyril, I was scared to tell him. There’s a kind of law about it. Negroes can’t learn how to read and write and speak French. Our massa doesn’t respect the law much, but I thought to myself, he may not like it.’ ” Cyril said later, quoting her. In his mind the sergeant rearranged the story into scenes and dialogues, evocations of nights and events.
That evening after dinner, Beulah, the cook, who was in charge of the girls like her in the big house — the kitchenmaids, parlourmaids, chambermaids — told her, “You gonna take care of young massa. You bring him his food, his drink, and” — she made a face — “you empty his thunder-jug.”
“Me?”
“Who else? You the youngest.”
“On top of that,” said Benjamin, “you’ve got the prettiest tits.”
“But it’s mainly because she knows French,” said Gideon. “Young massa won’t feel like he back in Texas so much.”
“He didn’t lose his leg in Texas.”
“He lost his heart in Paris. Dinah gonna read him love stories.”
