The Bride of Texas, page 38
He was standing in front of the dark canvas with the family tree, the evening sunlight on his handsome, proud, and — she sometimes thought — haughty face. She knew already that he was having strange thoughts about her. After his cousin’s slaves were caught trying to escape she knew she was no longer just a body to warm his bed, no longer even a “servant”. His philosophy was crumbling, but he still couldn’t speak the new words aloud.
“It was either Hannibal McGuire or Patrick McGuire,” she said, looking at him mischievously. Her power over him was leaking into the cracks in his philosophy. “And, massa —”
“Étienne!”
“Massa Étienne, can you guess which one it was?”
“Your lovely sister, Mademoiselle Linda,” said Étienne awkwardly, “is an extraordinary girl.” By then he knew she was from Moravia, in the Austrian Empire. Back in the parlour with the portraits, Cyril had told him the story of the family’s move to America, changing only a few details. He had failed to mention the baby, but Étienne’s black messenger had sharp eyes.
“Or should I call her Madame Linda?”
So he knew about the baby.
“Well, to be precise, you probably should,” said Cyril. “But her husband was killed in a riding accident two months after the wedding. Deborah was born after he died.”
“Deborah,” mused Étienne. “That’s not a Moravian name?”
“She was born in Texas,” said Cyril. “When Linda’s husband was killed, we were all getting ready to come to America anyway.”
“And he believed you?” asked Kapsa.
Cyril gave a bitter laugh. “Lida had him figured out. But nobody had Lida figured out.”
“Because it was ladies’ choice, Mihalotzy went from hand to hand. Every one of them wanted to touch him. There was plenty to touch, too. He was nearly two metres tall. And when he had gone around once, they started him round again, so that Bill Trevellyan — guest of honour at the party along with Schroeder — decided that Czech women were a band of Amazons. The prettier they are, the more terrifying they are, and he started trying to talk Schroeder out of Molly Kakuska. Because even though she came from a highly moral family, she got her hands on Mihalotzy too.
“Well,” Shake went on, nodding to Paidr for a light for his long pipe, “the dance party was a huge success, and they raised plenty of money for the trousers. Enough, in fact, to inspire thievery. A certain Skotas-Kulhawey offered to keep the proceeds for Marticka Lusk, since the women’s dresses had no pockets and Marticka hadn’t brought a purse with her. Skotas-Kulhawey kept the money, all right. He ran off with it that very night, presumably to Russia.”
“Where?” asked Stejskal, horrified.
“That’s right — Russia,” said Shake. “It’s a long story. Some immigrants were having trouble with English. Most of them were farm people and Chicago seemed like a strange place. They started seeing Russia as a Slavic paradise, and a few benighted souls even wrote to the tsar and asked if he’d let them move there. Of course, he didn’t take the trouble to tell them to piss off. Pretty soon there were two camps. The smarter ones began wondering if this idea of a Slavic paradise wasn’t a little far-fetched, since the Poles, who are Slavs too and had lived in that Slavic paradise, had been treated like savages by the Russians — and don’t forget there were a lot of Poles in Chicago. A man called Tom Plavec, who was a Czech but from some Russian province, escaped to America and said the Russians would make muzhiks out of the Czech Americans if they came, and then they would be serfs again, although not in Austria but in the Slavic paradise. ‘Although Siberia,’ he added, ‘is a wonderful land with lots of forests, even if it’s too cold.’
“Most of those who’d been thinking of going to Russia were discouraged by what he said, and Vasek Lusk pointed out that it wasn’t so much that they were homesick for their Slavic homeland, it was more that they missed village life. So Lusk and Tonda thought everyone who was unhappy in Chicago should get together, hire wagons and oxen, travel west to Nevada or California, and set up a pure Czech community. They had a name all ready for it: New Bohemia.”
“Not a bad idea,” remarked Houska.
“Are you kidding? A community of pure Czechs?” said Salek. “They’d be at each other’s throats before they even got there. The first thing they’d do is break into two separate communities.”
“Or three,” said Stejskal.
“As a matter of fact, they did fight,” said Shake. “Even before they got the first team of oxen, they fought about whether to build a church to Saint Wenceslas in New Bohemia, which is what the Catholics wanted, or a Shrine to Reason, as the free-thinkers demanded. It got into the newspapers. Kohout, leader of the Catholics, publicly accused Stradal, the free-thinker, in the pages of Slavia, of having had a picture of His Imperial Highness Franz Josef on the wall of his cabin in the old country. Stradal replied that indeed he had, but that was before he was living in freedom. In America he had realized the error of his ways, renounced his former admiration of the emperor, and hung a portrait of George Washington in his home instead. Later on that got a bit sticky too, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Kohout wrote in Slavia that, as he was a Catholic, the only picture he ever had on his wall was the Virgin Mary. Stradal couldn’t resist getting back at him with a few digs at the virginity of the Mother of the Lord. The Kohout— Stradal controversy made Slavia’s circulation shoot up, and the paper is still going in Chicago to this day. When the war broke out, Kohout suddenly discovered that his eyesight was bad, and Stradal decided that his admiration for the emperor hadn’t been entirely a mistake. He went to the consulate — but that was later. In short — ” Shake puffed some more on his pipe — “thanks to the legendary Czech unanimity and harmony, neither Utopia — Russian or Californian — came to pass, and instead the Czechs gradually put down roots in Chicago. The only one who kept pushing for an exodus to Siberia was Skotas-Kulhawey. And when eventually they all decided to stay in America, he went alone. With the proceeds from the dance.
“And that was a real blow to Lincoln’s Slavonic Rifles,” said Shake. “When Geza Mihalotzy told us we’d have to pay for our own uniforms, and when a tailor told us a uniform with red trousers would cost three-fifty and one with plain trousers no more than two seventy-five because they could use cheaper fabric from the government stockpiles, the company almost fell apart. Only a few were willing to give up the red trousers and make do with ordinary ones. The rest lost interest. It was only Mihalotzy’s strength of personality that saved the Slavonic Rifles from dying before they were even born.”
North of the only road to Bentonville (he read about it in Colonel Bellman’s book one winter long after the war, because winters on the farm were for reading; actually it was Terezka who read it to him. He pretended his eyesight was failing because he loved the sound of her eleven-year-old voice reading fluently, her American accent unblemished by even a trace of Czech, though she spoke Czech too), where the marshy gloom was unaffected by the spring sunshine, stood the remains of the Cole plantation. The pillars of the big house, once pure white, were now grey, with holes in them that showed them to be hollow — nothing, in fact, but the trappings of nobility. The plantation was surrounded on all sides, as if by a crown of thorns, by a tangle of the scrub oak that lined the narrow road for some distance towards Bentonville. A few leaves left over from last fall rustled drily in the tangled branches. The screen formed by the trees was almost opaque. Lieutenant Bellman, commander of the Twenty-second Wisconsin’s reconnaissance unit, noted a few dead, dried-out bugs impaled on the twigs of a bush by the road, left there by some satiated butcher-bird. Or perhaps the butcher-bird had died and its victims had been left hanging on hooks, unconsumed. The sergeant listened to his daughter’s lovely voice reading words she did not always fully understand. “There were men enough; all dead, apparently, except one, who lay near where I had halted my platoon to await the slower movement of the line — a Federal sergeant, variously hurt, who had been a fine giant in his time. He lay face upward, taking in his breath in convulsive, rattling snorts, and blowing it out in sputters of froth which crawled creamily down his cheeks, piling itself alongside his neck and ears. A bullet had clipped a groove in his skull, above the temple; from this the brain protruded in bosses, dropping off in flakes and strings. I had not previously known one could get on, even in this unsatisfactory fashion, with so little brain.”
Lieutenant Bellman had grown used to this kind of thing — gutted plantation houses, ruins — and it no longer struck him as ominous. On the other hand the butcher-bird’s deserted larder was an evil omen, a sign of the battle that General Carlin was so convinced would happen. Carlin now rode right behind the last men of the Twenty-second Wisconsin, in the freshly washed shirt and pressed uniform intended for his coffin.
With his reconnaissance unit right behind him, the lieutenant stepped into the alley between the bushes. They walked along in silence, listening to the skeletal rattle of the dry leaves. Then the lieutenant saw the trench. He jumped backwards into the bushes, but the scrub oak was impenetrable. The men behind him dropped, but before they hit the ground the first shots cracked from the Confederate trench. The lieutenant silently gave the signal to withdraw. The soldier behind him didn’t move, then moaned softly, trying to help himself up. But his strength was fading fast and he dropped back. The lieutenant grasped him by the armpits and elbowed his way out of the roadway with the wounded man, while other men opened covering fire. Once outside the alley of scrub oak, they zigzagged towards a low wall bordering a newly ploughed field where the rest of the unit had taken cover. The Rebels stopped firing. The lieutenant lifted the wounded man onto his back and stumbled towards the wall and over it. He turned him over to the litter-bearers in time to see two generals jump off their horses at the forest’s edge and run towards the front line. One of them lost his hat; he bent to grab it and in the early sunlight his hair glistened wetly. It was Major-General Slocum, Commander of the Army of Georgia. The other general was someone the lieutenant knew personally: the sharply pressed uniform, a Schlachtanzug — as drill sergeant Hoenicke used to call it, may he rest in peace. His battle outfit.
The lieutenant saluted. The generals reached the wall and dropped to their knees. Slocum pulled out his field-glasses.
“There’s a trench about fifty yards from where the trees start,” Bellman reported. “When we got close, the Rebels opened fire. We have one wounded.”
“Thank you, lieutenant,” said General Slocum, surveying the area with his field-glasses: the thick hedge, the devastated plantation house, the scrub oaks stretching from the house to the road and farther south, and on the low hills a pine grove here and there, low walls marking the edges of fields. Nothing was moving anywhere.
“What do you think, general?” Slocum asked Carlin.
“I’d be careful if I were you,” said Carlin. “The terrain is full of thickets and groves and swamps. It could be hiding a considerable part of Johnston’s army.”
Slocum continued surveying the landscape for a while. Then he said, “There won’t be more than one or two of Wheeler’s squadrons. But let’s see. Send skirmishers north and south of the road. Let’s make contact with the enemy — that is, if he doesn’t just silently fade into the underbrush by himself.” He laughed. “Johnston’s division is at Raleigh. Surely there can’t be more than one or two cavalry squadrons here.”
The two generals strode calmly back to the woods where their horses stood. They mounted their horses; General Slocum wrote something down and passed it to a rider, who left the group waiting for the generals by the woods and galloped off across a meadow and along the bushes to the south. That would have been the courier who caught up with Sherman’s staff later that afternoon with the optimistic dispatch, the sergeant thought as he listened to Terezka reading.
The men of the First Brigade of Davis’s corps marched across the meadows to the south and north of the road. They spread out and advanced to the hedges and walls around the plantation fields. The lieutenant followed them with his eyes. Suddenly there was a flash to the north of the hedge, then another, then a third. The men of the First Brigade broke into a run. The thunder of cannon rolled over them, and smoke came spurting out of the long, black, uneven line of bushes. The first casualties dropped to the grass. There was another flash to the south, then farther north, then farther south. Was this one or two squadrons? It was the first time since the taking of Atlanta that the lieutenant had heard the majestic roar of artillery in the full strength of several batteries.
The blue ranks wavered. Some men continued running forward, others turned and fled, crouching and staying close to the walls. The first canisters exploded over the meadow. Now everyone turned and retreated. The brightness of the sun faded as the smoke rose to veil it. Thunder from the west — Carlin’s batteries opening fire. They overshot. The men of the First Brigade quickly ducked behind the walls and into the brush of the nearby grove. Several soldiers were writhing in the grass, others lay there motionless.
The courier galloped south with his optimistic dispatch. The roar of the cannon got there before he did. But when he found Sherman, the general chose to believe the dispatch. It strengthened his conviction that he had been right: “… a few squadrons of cavalry. Sweep them aside and you’re fine. We’ll meet tomorrow at Cox’s Bridge.”
Dinah only looked at the letters after they started talking about it in the kitchen and Benjamin asked her, “Well, can he still get it up for you, girl?”
“Just make sure your own tool’s working!” she retorted.
“I just wondered what white meat does for him —”
She wasn’t sure about that either. His eyelids had started to flicker shut. “Are you getting married, Étienne?” she had asked him.
He opened his eyes and stared at her. “Why do you ask?”
“I thought you and Miss Scarlett got engaged?”
“What do you want to know that for?” he said, raising his voice.
“Don’t get upset,” she said.
He got up and limped, naked, over to the window on his beautifully carved wooden leg. After a while he said, “I’ve bought that little house in Austin.” He was staring out the window at the cotton-fields in full bloom.
But what did that mean?
“Thank you,” she said.
He didn’t look at her. She got out of bed and picked up her clothes from the armchair.
“Don’t leave yet!” he said. Was it a command? He kept looking out at the moonlit countryside.
She put her clothes back on the armchair and got into the bed.
Finally he joined her there, a shadowy, hobbling silhouette. But it wasn’t completely dark, and she could see that he was ready again.
She opened herself to the wild bliss. She always did, but stopped herself from crying out. This time she couldn’t help it. “Ahhh!” she cried. “Ohhh, ohhh!”
“Stick a gag in your mouth next time, gal!” Benjamin said in the kitchen the next morning. “I needs my sleep.”
Afterwards, Étienne kissed her on both cheeks and rolled over on his back. For a while she lay beside him, then she got out of bed. This time he didn’t stop her from leaving. She dressed quickly, crept out of the house, and walked towards the summer-house. White meat? The thought made her cringe. What magic powers lay in that white porcelain skin, those blue eyes?
She walked through the orchard thinking about the white boy who talked funny and called her miss. He spent all his time back there by the stables, putting some kind of machinery together, and whenever she walked by — which was more than she needed to — something strange happened: she had the feeling that his eyes were not undressing her. She knew what the undressing looks were like. Now and then Étienne had visitors from neighbouring plantations, young dandies from Galveston, and she heard them joking about her to Étienne, and he would laugh and not say a thing. This young white boy, covered with black axle-grease, was something different. When he stared at her over the oily metal plates his two helpers were struggling with, it made her feel like a black countess, or a countess in the novels in Mademoiselle de Ribordeaux’s bookshelf, at whom the cavaliers always “gazed with veneration”. That was it. The white boy looked at her “with veneration”. He had already asked her twice to meet him in the evening after she was done working. She hadn’t been able to because Étienne had wanted her. But yesterday Étienne had told her he was going to Galveston for three days. If the white boy should ask her again.… She walked past the blossoming cactus plants and realized how unhappy she’d be if he didn’t.
In the morning, when she was cleaning Étienne’s room — he had ridden out early in the carriage — she thought of those letters. After what had happened the previous night, she wanted to be clear about things, so she searched through the drawers in his writing-desk. There they were: ivory-coloured sheets of paper with the name of some town and a picture of church towers and bridges across a river printed across the top. They were written in a large calligraphic hand, four letters in total, the English funnier than the brother’s. “Dear Mister de Ribordeaux,” said the first one. “Thank you for the letter. I cant meet you day time but tomorrow Tuesday at seven o’clock I coming to were Hardy Creek turn south at weeping willow tree. sincerely, Linda Towpelick.” So the boy’s name was Towpelick. The rest of the letters were shorter, but all the more eloquent. They started “Dear Étienne,” followed by a time and a place, and ended “Your Linda.” The last one had been delivered the previous afternoon by Jefferson, one of the men Carson had lent to the Towpelicks. It read: “Seven o’clock Cobson’s Grove.”
“I swear I never snooped around in Lida’s things,” Cyril declared one of those turpentine evenings. “But she left the letter lying on the chest. She knew it was nothing but gibberish to Mother and Father, and anyway she didn’t have to keep secrets any more, like back home.”
