The Bride of Texas, page 39
The letter contained a poem but Cyril didn’t understand much of it yet. “Lida? Whatever English she knew she had learned from Washington and Jefferson. They followed her around like puppies. One time in Austin she bought herself a textbook for newcomers, but she learned a lot more from those two lovesick servants. I read that poem over and over until I knew it by heart. Finally I figured out what it was all about. Of course, Lida knew the first time she read it — if she ever read it, for all she had to do was look at the letter. It was obviously a poem. What else can a poem from a young man mean?”
“Do you still remember it?” asked the sergeant.
So Cyril recited it. At the other end of camp, a band was playing taps.
What is love? ’Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, Sweet-and-twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
“Yesterday they were smooching down by the weeping willow,” Benjamin said in the kitchen. “I got an awful sneeze and it scared them off.”
“Just be glad he didn’t break your back with his wooden leg!” Uncle Nero grinned.
“He never seen me. I scuttered down the ravine and on out of there,” said Benjamin, “so I missed watching him screw her.”
“Massa he never do it like some white trash,” said Uncle Nero. “Down by the creek.”
“You don’t think so? Just ask this little girl here.” He turned to Dinah. “Go on, tell Uncle Nero!”
Before she could say something sassy, Uncle Nero said sternly, “I don’t abide no dirty stories.”
“Anyway,” said Benjamin, “now they got scared off the willow tree, they’ll find somewhere else.”
Cobson’s Grove was a miniature French park, one of de Ribordeaux’s flights of sentiment, like his big library full of French novels that, for the most part, only Dinah had read. There was an arboretum with a gazebo, where Hortense de Ribordeaux had spent hot afternoons perspiring over her reading lessons. There were places to hide all around the gazebo. That evening, from one of those places, Dinah heard Étienne reading English poetry, and through the leaves she saw him try to steal an ordinary kiss from Miss Blue-eyes between sonnets. But Miss Blue-eyes wouldn’t let him. She told him to read her another poem instead.
Dinah was amazed. Was this the way white folks did it? Just the way they did in novels? She recalled his crude command to her that first night and practically laughed out loud. Étienne was so comical now. After all kinds of flirtatious toing and froing she finally let him kiss her, but the moment Étienne put away the sonnets and reached for her bodice she stood up and said she had to go home. The moon had barely risen. Étienne got up too, and limped obediently beside her to the buggy. Miss Blue-eyes climbed in and snapped the reins, but by then Dinah was running along the hedge in the little park, then between the cabins and back to the big house.
That night she tried to control herself, but she cried out again. She owed her pleasure to little Miss Blue-eyes. And this time she even caught herself closing her eyes and imagining it was the white boy under her. She was feeling something strange, and she had no idea that it was happiness. That afternoon the white boy had asked her a third time. This time she had said yes, and had invited him to the arboretum. Étienne was going to Galveston the following day.
The sergeant watched his daughter through half-closed eyes as she struggled with the dry sentences of the colonel’s memoirs by the light of the kerosene lamp. “The advanced guard of General William Passmore Carlin’s division encountered the North Carolina division of General Robert F. Hoke. The latter, having taken advantage of the cover provided by the dense scrub oak which bordered both the road to Bentonville and the fields surrounding the Cole plantation, had taken a position as the axis of a vice that was meant to pulverize Carlin’s division. The right arm of the vice was the army of General A.P. Stewart, positioned in the bushes and groves to the north of the road, while the left one was to be the corps commanded by General William Joseph Hardee, which, according to Confederate General J.E. Johnston’s plan, would locate along the south side of the road. General Johnston, however, had formulated the plan on the basis of maps of dubious precision, since more precise ones were not available, and thus, to his dismay, General Hardee discovered that the distance he and his men were to cover on their march towards Bentonville was twice that indicated by the maps. When General Carlin’s advanced guard came in contact with Hoke’s units, only the northern arm of the vice — A.P. Stewart’s Tennessee army — was in the position called for in Johnston’s general plan. Once the assault of Carlin’s advanced guard was thwarted, neither Hoke nor Stewart proceeded with a counter-attack but instead waited in anticipation of the arrival of Hardee’s units. Thus Johnston’s carefully formulated plan collapsed even before it could be implemented.”
The girl put down the book. “Daddy, can I have a drink of cider?”
“Apple juice,” the sergeant corrected her and closed his eyes. He could see Carlin’s soldiers, whipped by the hot breath of battle, retreating behind bushes and stone walls. Not an orderly retreat, but it had been weeks since they had danced to the roaring music of cannon and sought shelter from the rain of canisters all around them. They re-formed their ranks behind the bushes and the walls, and attacked again. The countryside, flooded with morning sunshine, was blanketed with running men, and gunfire began crackling in the bushes opposite them. Small clusters of grey-clad soldiers broke out of that cover to counter-attack. The blue of the Union uniforms had faded to a dull grey-blue on the early spring march through the Carolinas, so to General Carlin, watching through his field-glasses, the battling soldiers became a jumbled, indistinguishable mass, punctuated by the gleam of a bayonet or the flash and puff of a gunshot.
“Apple juice,” the girl corrected herself.
“Go ahead,” said the sergeant. “You read very nicely.”
The child’s smile was lovely. If the war had turned out differently — if —
The sergeant would live to a ripe old age. He would die content in his ninety-seventh year. By then the Austrian Empire was history, and all of them — Ursula, Shake, Paidr, Javorsky, Salek-Cup, Houska — all of them were dead, alive only in the memories of an old soldier. An American-style republic was born back home in the old country, but the sergeant’s home had long been America. Or so it seemed to him when another child, a great-granddaughter, read an American newspaper to him, because by then his eyes truly were failing him. Padecky, Stejskal, Fisher, Zinkule — all gone, vanished with a vanished age, forgotten, alive only in the flickering and dying memory of an old sergeant. But if the war had turned out differently — would there have been that new American republic in old Europe?
It wasn’t a battle yet, only a prolonged skirmish, but the cannon were firing hungrily. Braxton Bragg, with his inclination to confusion, was in command of Hoke’s division, and he sent General Johnston a request for reinforcements just before the blue ranks wavered, stopped, and turned tail. The path of their retreat was littered with the corpses of men bitterly struck down in the final days, the early spring days, of the terrible war which, had it turned out differently —
The morning courier galloped across the greening meadows, avoiding marshland, taking cover behind scrub-oak hedges, carrying Slocum’s dispatch to Sherman.
Three Rebel soldiers, followed by some men in faded blue uniforms, jumped the stone wall and surrendered. General Slocum looked them over suspiciously. “People who can bury a mine in the ground, and then in safety enjoy the prospect of an infantryman treading on that mine and seeing it blow him to pieces — people who can fight with that kind of base perfidy —” The general waved dismissively. “Are these soldiers? NO! Where would we be if, instead of real soldiers, we had only these spineless cowards who commit cold-blooded murder from a distance!”
Sunbeams shone through bursting buds on the trees. Slocum and his staff sat on tree stumps in a clearing while on the other side, guarded by soldiers with bayonets, stood the three musketeers with their improbable tale. Slocum frowned as he regarded them. “According to them, Howard is supposed to turn around and concentrate all his forces on Bentonville — where, granted, there may be more than a few squadrons of Wheeler’s cavalry — and Hoke’s division, or part of it, is there too. But in my opinion that’s all. They’re trying to tell me that as soon as Howard clears the field, Johnston is going to pull some kind of devilry like an outflanking manoeuvre?”
“I don’t know,” said General Carlin.
“They’re spies,” said Slocum. “Their task is to mislead us. Why would Johnston have his whole army waiting for us, when all he has behind him is a river with a single bridge?”
The deserters maintained that Johnston’s aim was to destroy Jeff Davis’s Fourteenth Corps. By itself, their version was not improbable. It only became suspect when Slocum considered it alongside different assessments of the situation, assessments that became certainties in the mind of a confident commander-in-chief. The deserters claimed to be Union soldiers taken prisoner at Resaca. In order to stay out of Andersonville Prison, they’d convinced the interrogating Rebel officers that they were Copperheads, followers of Vallandigham who had never wanted the war with the Confederacy in the first place, and that, now that Vallandigham had been silenced, they wanted to fight on the Confederate side for the old rights guaranteed by the Constitution. So the Rebels had taken them into their army, and since then they’d been waiting for a chance to desert. It had finally come, at Bentonville.
“They’re spies,” Slocum insisted. “I’ll have them shot.”
“I don’t know,” said General Davis.
From not far off came the crash of cannon. A shell fell close to the edge of the woods and exploded. They heard the shrapnel tearing the leaves off the trees. Someone cried out.
“I don’t know,” said Davis. “Why would he just send Hoke?”
They glanced at the prisoners, who were standing almost at attention, their faces paper-white in the light of the rising sun.
Refreshed, the girl returned, sat down on the stool, kicked her bare feet a couple of times, placed the book on her lap, and searched with her finger for the place where she had stopped reading.
If the war had turned out differently, the old country wouldn’t be the American republic it had turned out to be — a dream that had never crossed his mind on that slow sail across the Atlantic, with the wily Fircut, to where a war awaited him and then a long life. Would the expeditionary forces of some Northern States of America have fought in the war that happened much later in Europe? If they had, would the Confederate States of America have sent proud descendants of the victors of ’65 to bolster the other side, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy? Even in the new century, officers battling on the side of the imperial armies would have been accompanied by black servants. If his general had lost.
But Sherman could never have lost. Nor could Shake, Kakuska, Paidr, Houska, Javorsky —
The little girl resumed her reading:
“Whereupon General Slocum issued the order for the remainder of the Fourteenth Corps to advance and dig in, and simultaneously, the order for the Twentieth Corps to leave the rear and reinforce the advance units that were in a frenzy of palisade-building.”
Slocum, Davis, and Carlin stared at the deserters.
“Stand them up against the wall,” said Slocum. “Of course —”
Major Tracy of Slocum’s staff emerged from the bushes on the opposite side of the clearing. He approached the three men with the paper-white faces. The cannon were still firing. Major Tracy spoke with them for a while and then walked over with one of the spies, or whatever they were.
“I know this man,” Tracy said to Slocum. “We grew up together, general. He’s telling the truth.”
Slocum examined the prisoner. Sunburned skin showed through the days-old growth of whiskers, and his nose was red and peeling.
“Johnston’s there with his entire army?”
“Yes, sir. General Hoke’s division is right in front of you. North of it is General Stewart’s Army of Tennessee. General Hardee is supposed to make up the left flank but he hasn’t arrived yet. General Bragg’s main force is in Bentonville and General Johnston —”
“OK,” Slocum interrupted. “Lieutenant Foraker!” He looked around. A clean-shaven young man jumped up off a stump. “You’ll ride to General Sherman!”
Ten minutes later, the courier galloped off to Howard’s camp with a second, pessimistic dispatch. General Slocum was urgently requesting reinforcements.
The white boy wasn’t really that white, at least not in the more visible places. The Texas sun had baked him to a reddish-brown colour, as it did all the white trash. Once in a while she would catch a glimpse of them stripped to the waist and washing themselves at the pump or in the creek: reddish-brown faces and necks, torsos white and freckled, mostly the arms too — just the hands were reddish brown, as if they were wearing brick-coloured gloves. Some were furry like bears, and all of them had some hair on their chests. The only truly white ones were young ladies like Hortense de Ribordeaux, because they never went anywhere without a parasol, and even so, when she was undressed, her face was darker than her milk-white breasts, so that she had to use talcum powder to make it the colour of alabaster. Dinah examined herself in Étienne’s mirror, where she was changing before meeting the white boy. She was the colour of tea with milk. The sun merely made her slightly darker, and she didn’t have the silly white shirt the poor farmers had, or the brick gloves on her hands. She was the colour of tea with milk all over. A nigger. She doused herself with the French perfume issued to the house niggers after the father of Étienne’s fiancée visited the Ribordeaux household, wrinkled his nose, and said, “You can smell a nigger at a hundred paces! We make our house niggers use perfume, even the men. I can’t abide the stink of niggers!” So she covered herself with perfume, though who knew — maybe the white boy liked the spicy smell of sweat. He certainly didn’t look like a plantation fusspot.
She also got herself a book from massa’s library: Poems for Every Occasion. She wasn’t at home with poetry. All she had ever read were French romance novels. But she liked the look of the book, with lots of gilt curlicues on the binding. Having learned from novels that punctuality did not become a lady, she resisted her inclination to be on time, and stepped into the arboretum like a countess, a whole five minutes late, smelling of sandalwood at a hundred paces.
The young man was sitting there, waiting for her. He had even brought flowers. He had a small nose and a broad face. In fact, he looked a lot like his sister. He even had the same eyes. But, unlike his sister, he had the brick-coloured skin of white trash. And his blue eyes “looked at her with veneration.”
“Bonsoir,” she said.
He jumped up and gave her the flowers. He hadn’t picked them in some meadow. This kind didn’t grow in meadows.
“Oh! They are beautiful!” she said, like a countess, and he actually cleared his throat: “I’m — I’m glad you came.”
“Me too,” she said, with unaristocratic enthusiasm. He said nothing. Birds were singing all kinds of songs in the surrounding treetops. After a pause, she asked, “Do you like poetry?”
“Poetry?” he replied, taken aback.
“Yes, you know, poems.” She handed him the gilt-lettered volume. “There are beautiful poems in this book,” she said. “They’re for reading on every occasion.”
“Oh,” he said. He turned the book over in his hands and examined the back cover.
“Read me one,” she urged. She was a black countess and he would be Étienne reading sonnets to Miss Blue-eyes. But he wasn’t.
“I don’t think I know how,” he said dubiously.
“Give it a try!”
He opened the book at random and made a heroic effort to read the first poem his eye lit on:
Look ’round thee now on Samarcand! —
Is she not queen of Earth? Her pride
Above all cities? —
He gave her a miserable look: “I don’t read much English, miss. I just speak it some.”
Miss!
“No, you read beautifully,” said the countess. “Are you from the North?”
“No, from Moravia.”
“Where’s that?”
“That’s in Europe. Across the sea.”
“Ah,” she said. “So you’re from France?” There was France, she knew, and there was Africa. Both of them were over the sea. Each of them somewhere else probably.
“No, not France. Austria.”
“Ah!” Where was that? Somewhere far away. Austria. They must have black countesses there. “Do they have niggers there?”
He shook his head. “No. I never saw one till I came here.”
“Ah!” A world with no black folks. Where could that possibly be?
Later on he told her where. And he also told her about the little cottage where they had all slept in one room. Lida on the bench.
“Lida?”
“My sister. She calls herself Linda here.”
“Ah!”
And how they had toiled and drudged and never got ahead. And farmer Mika, and how they had sailed to America. And seen their first Negroes.
“And you saw me, white boy!”
“Yes, I saw you. But you aren’t a nigger.”
“Yes I am,” she said. “But you love me anyway, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do! I love you very much, my sweet-smelling tea-rose!”
“That’s sandalwood,” she said.
But back in the arboretum he hadn’t said a word. He was no Étienne.
And she was no Miss Blue-eyes.
She took the gilt-covered book from his hands and patted his cheek.
“Dinah.…”
Nor was she a countess. She put her arms around his neck, pressed her black lips to his, and they kissed and then they made love on the green lawn by the arboretum. She hoped the foul-minded Benjamin wasn’t spying on them from some place, but nobody sneezed. Only the song of birds hung in the air, and the fragrance of perfume issued to niggers to quench the stench of sweat.
