The Bride of Texas, page 40
At home, his little sister sniffed the air meaningfully: “Big brother! You’ve been to a house of shame!”
Lieutenant Bellman couldn’t get the dead bugs impaled on the branches out of his mind. On the orders of General Slocum, the men wrestled boulders and the trunks of hurriedly felled pine trees into place. Like frozen waves on a green sea, palisades and stone earthworks quickly sprang up in the hilly countryside checker-boarded with black hedges and interspersed with pine groves and steaming marshes, to hinder the progress of the wild Southern troops under Johnston, Taliaferro, Bragg, Hardee, and Wheeler. Slocum was finally convinced of their presence. On his orders General Morgan’s division had made a quick, strenuous march forward from the rear of the long column that, only an hour earlier, had been winding through the countryside like a lazy snake. Now they were digging in at the front. The sun stood high in the sky among white clouds that cast their moving shadows on the ground, now and then extinguishing the delicate glitter of dew in the grass. In the melancholy Carolina landscape, men in tattered uniforms toiled as if their lives depended on it, erecting formless structures — traps for other men, Lieutenant Bellman thought — while deep in their souls they were eaten alive by the question: Why? Why so late, when the end is already —
Within arm’s reach? Only the sparse columns of black smoke rising from the turpentine forests on the distant horizon reminded them of the butcheries of the rapidly receding past, when such questions would never have arisen. The graves of the many who could no longer ask those questions were far, far away. Lieutenant Bellman watched the men sweating in the fresh landscape of pine groves, green meadows, awakening fields, but he couldn’t shake the memory of that graveyard of bugs tortured to death by the butcher-bird. Within arm’s reach.
Lida sniffed the air in the room.
“Wait outside until I call you,” she said. Obediently he limped out.
She slowly took off her clothes. What was going through her head?
“I told him you were widowed,” said Cyril.
“Thanks, big brother, but you didn’t have to. Pegleg” — she always referred to him as Pegleg, never Étienne — “doesn’t mind. How could he? He’s crazy about me.”
“So he knows you never had a husband?”
“I told him everything. Well, almost everything. I made Vitek a count, to make it easier for him to swallow. The count gave me a little bastard and then the count’s father paid our family’s way to America.”
“Did you love him?” asked the jealous Étienne.
“I don’t know,” lied Lida. “He was handsome. I liked that. And he was a count.”
“You still love him, don’t you?”
Lida glanced out the window at the moonlight on the cotton, as Étienne had done the night before. And she lied through her teeth. “No, it’s you I love, darling. But I wonder —”
“Wonder what?”
“What’s that smell?”
“Smell?” His intonation gave him away.
“Smell,” she said. She rolled over onto her side and rubbed her breasts against his chest. “You’ve had another woman here!”
He had to admit the truth. “But here, in the South, that’s nothing important.”
“Do you love her?”
“It’s you I’m in love with!”
“But you like her,” she said. “And where I come from, that’s something important.”
“I love you, Linda. It was love at first sight, and I love you as I’ve loved no one else in my life, ever!”
“So it won’t be hard to choose.”
“Certainly not.” But he didn’t sound so certain.
The turpentine forests were on fire.
“He was fond of her,” said Cyril. “How could anyone not be fond of Dinah? There isn’t another woman like her in the whole world. But he was just crazy over Lida.”
“So this other woman will go,” said Lida.
“What do you mean?”
“You will sell her,” she said. “That can’t be a problem, can it?” She sniffed the bedclothes. “Sell her somewhere far away, otherwise it will be a problem.”
Whatever could have been going through her head?
“Heaven knows,” said Cyril. “I don’t understand her. Or actually I do.”
Enormous turpentine fireballs.
“What about Rosemary?” Lida asked. “Did you throw her over for that nigger girl? Are you crazy, Cyril? You’ll never get her.”
“I will. I’ll buy her and then give her her freedom.”
“You will? And then what? Will you both move to the North?”
“That’s right,” he said. “I don’t want to live in this kind of country, anyway. The real America is up north.”
“And what about the farm?”
“I’ll leave it for Josef. I can always find a way to make a living.”
His little sister grew thoughtful. She stared out at the field where their father was walking contentedly among the rows of corn.
She said, “Well, Father won’t hold you back, that’s for sure. He won’t be able to. But think it over. Starting all over again, with a Negro wife — it’s not going to be easy, not even in the North.”
“Will he sell her to me?”
“He’ll have to. But Cyril —” She paused.
“What?”
“You really will move to the North? You wouldn’t stay here with her, would you?” She was almost imploring him.
“How could I possibly stay?”
“No one objects to black concubines for white masters around here. And you’re a master already.”
“I love her.”
She gave him an odd look. “Sometimes masters can love their concubines, can’t they?”
She didn’t know that Étienne would soon prove her right. A few days later, Dinah was sweeping out the little house in Austin, and Gideon, bearing a letter for Miss Towpelick from Étienne, was also carrying a secret note from Dinah to Cyril. It said, “Baywater Street by the river. A dry chrysanthemum on the door. Yours — and ONLY yours, Dinah.”
“Sold her? You sold her?” Lida asked, horrified.
“To show you I’m a man of my word, my sweetheart,” Étienne lied. “You said either, or. There’s no more ‘or’. Are you pleased?”
“Étienne!” she exclaimed, almost unhappily. “Where is she?”
“I sold her to a slave-trader. It’s better that way; I’ll never know where she ends up.”
“Étienne!”
The sergeant’s eyes were stinging.
Was it old age?
No. Because within arm’s reach, at the very last minute — a ragged figure rose over the tent, capless but with a dirty bandage around his head, the red badge of ardour soaking through it. The figure broke into a halting run towards him and he reined in his horse. Then he recognized him.
“Sarge!” exclaimed Vojta Houska, his blue, naive, caring eyes full of pain. He also had a dirty bandage around his left leg, visible because his trouser leg had been shot off. “Kakuska’s on his last legs.”
Kakuska lay in the plantation-house foyer, along with a number of others. He was gasping for breath. A big Negress, probably a member of the household, was wiping his forehead with a wet rag, which was all she could do now except say a prayer — and she was apparently doing that too, for her lips were moving silently while Kakuska’s breath rattled in his throat as he breathed heavily in and out. There was a white bandage around his neck, with the red badge of ardour soaking through it.
“I only caught a glimpse of him, sarge,” Houska whispered. “Wheeler had just attacked us and we had our hands full and suddenly our cavalry rode up from the right and one of them seemed to float out of the saddle, his arms spread. I heard a nasty crackling sound over all the racket and he was flying through the air like he was crucified, his carbine in his right hand and his left spread out so I noticed he was missing an index finger. Kakuska, neighbour, poor Kakuska!”
Within arm’s reach.
The minnie had struck Kakuska in the chest, right below the collar-bone, and had lodged in his spine. The surgeon had extracted it, because that was what they did in those days — the ball must come out — but could do no more. And Kakuska was choking; his throat was rattling and he couldn’t talk.
The sergeant bent closer to him: “Jake, man —”
The eyes recognized him. Then the hand missing the index finger reached slowly for the tattered jacket that lay on the floor beside the cot. It felt for something but couldn’t find it. Kakuska’s eyes implored the sergeant, his lips moved but the sound that emerged wasn’t human speech but a gurgle, the kind that heralds our transformation into nothingness, or into angelic beings. Kapsa looked up at the big Negress. It was hard to tell her age. He had seen hundreds like her in plundered plantation houses. Kakuska’s hand was still groping. The sergeant leaned over, picked up Kakuska’s jacket; Kakuska closed his eyes and opened them again, as if he were nodding. The sergeant unbuttoned the breast pocket and pulled out something that looked like a little book, with wooden covers hinged and tied together with a worn, once golden piece of string. In the middle of the top cover, which Kakuska had cleverly carved with his pocket-knife to look like a miniature altar, were the words BOZENA KAKUSKA in beautiful letters, first lovingly chiselled and then burned, perhaps with a red-hot nail at a campfire, so the words gleamed black against the yellowish wood.
Kakuska lifted his hand and moved his fingers; the sergeant understood that he wanted him to untie the string. Between the covers was a picture of a girl’s face, and the sergeant knew who had painted it. She had rosy cheeks, cobalt-blue eyes, red lips, a copy of a folk embroidery around the neckline of her blouse. To her right, on the wall behind her, hung a crucifix. To her left was a tiny portrait of a bearded man in a miniature frame. Kakuska’s hand moved again. Behind the picture the sergeant found an envelope, the kind the sutlers sold, with a picture of doves and two hearts pierced with a single arrow. On the envelope, in Kakuska’s farmer’s hand, it said in English: “Wen I fal delyver to Bozena Kakuska, Kakuska farm neer Manitowoc Wisconsin.”
The sergeant put the envelope back and retied the covers and, while Kakuska followed him with his eyes, unbuttoned his own jacket pocket, put the wooden booklet inside, and re-buttoned it. Kakuska closed his eyes. The sergeant thought he smiled. Then the sign heralding the transformation: the brief lull; then, from the throat of the dying horseman, the awful, deep rattle, the abrupt silence. The sergeant took Kakuska’s hand by the wrist. It was already lifeless. He searched for a pulse but found none. He looked up into the broad, black face leaning over Kakuska. His eyes met her brown ones.
“Crucifixus est etiam pro nobis,” said the black woman.
The sergeant glanced at her in astonishment, for he didn’t understand a word — though it reminded him of something he couldn’t identify.
“Amen,” she added.
The sergeant glanced at the girl still struggling with the colonel’s vocabulary. He died for me too, not just for the big black woman. He died for the nothing he had back home, and the farm he had here, so he died for this country even as it was threatened with falling apart. He died for the world. Kakuska.
Once, after the war, his father-in-law had asked, “Tell me, were there a lot of you Czechs in the army?”
“Not a lot,” he said. “Maybe a few hundred. A lot more of them found ways to avoid army service.” He recalled Chicago, and how Ursula had said in her sweet German, “I thought of you when they turned up in my husband’s office, looking for ways out of it. Sunshine patriots!”
“But the ones that didn’t seek ways out fought as Union soldiers,” he said almost proudly, although he had never been a sentimental sort. And it was true.
After the war, he went from Chicago to Manitowoc with the carved wooden keepsake, and from there he continued to the farm, about three miles outside town.
You died for that too, friend Kakuska.
The sergeant bowed his head. Beside his cot stood a pair of riding boots. On them sparkled the dead man’s spurs.
“We’re off to the North!” said Vincenc. “Dad isn’t that young any more, but we’re going! Come along with us!”
“I will,” said Cyril. He looked at old man Lesikar. What Lesikar had seen on his way to Austin had been the last straw, the last stain on the sweet face of America. It was a slave auction, with able-bodied mulatto women for sale. On command they would stand up and strut back and forth, displaying their breasts, then turning so the buyer could see the curve of their buttocks. Behind a screen stood some elderly slaves having their grey hair blackened to drive up their price. It offended everything that old Lesikar had come here for, and he raged inside. And Cyril had a piece of paper in his pocket, with an address on Baywater Street written on it, a reference to a dry chrysanthemum, and in his ears Lida’s uncertain voice: “You wouldn’t stay here with her, would you?” So the last stain on the sweet face of America affected him too, Cyril Toupelik, and his tea-rose, who didn’t even have a surname of her own, just the trademark “de Ribordeaux”.
In the little house on Baywater Street, they wished for war.
But first: “He’s going to sell me, I know it. This here, Baywater Street, this won’t last long. Your sister will figure it out, but he won’t sell me to you. He’ll be jealous of you. He’ll sell me the way Massa Leclerc sold Auntie Penelope.”
She knew nothing. Europe wasn’t even a word for her, much less an idea. Just France. She was full of stories no one had ever written. Not yet. Maybe sometime, years later, but by then they’d be half fiction.
“Auntie Penelope,” she said, “was in the same predicament as me, except she didn’t have you. But she did have two children with Massa Leclerc, a boy and a girl. And when Massa Leclerc got married, nobody had to tell his new wife who Auntie Penelope was. She drove her out of the house into the fields. The children too. She ordered the overseer to keep them strictly in line.”
“Lida wouldn’t do that,” he said. “Lida goes after what she wants, but she’s not mean. She knows what meanness is because she’s felt it herself.”
“But she’s going to want to get rid of me, and he won’t sell me to you. He’ll sell me exactly the way Massa Leclerc sold Auntie Penelope, though no one was jealous of her. He sold her and her two children to his cousin, who was a Methodist minister in Georgia. Actually, he gave them away. Reverend Leclerc just paid for the journey. And he was good to them. And me” — she wiped away a tear — “I’m going to end up the same way. If I’m really lucky. Just you wait and see.”
“No you won’t,” he said. “There’s a war coming. The Yankees will win it. You’ll be just as free as me or Lida or Étienne. Nobody will ever be able to sell you again.”
“War,” she whimpered. “You’ll have to join up. And maybe they’ll kill you.”
He took her in his arms. She was trembling, weeping, her shoulders quivering. He had never seen her like this. She had always been cheery, sassy, imperturbable.
“The hell I knew her,” he said as the turpentine woods blazed on. “She laughed so she wouldn’t have to cry.”
“They won’t kill me,” he said. “I’ll run away. We’ll run away together. The Yankees will win. They have more men and cannon, and besides, they’re in the right. Nobody will ever be able to sell you again, my sweet rose. It’s war. Too bad it didn’t start a long time ago!”
They invoked war, while outside the window the river rolled lazily past, warm and southern, and the breeze caressed the moss dangling from the mournful trees. They invoked war and dreamed of running off together.
That night, when he got home, his sister was waiting up for him. She sniffed his coat. “Aha!” she said. “Where is she?”
“Who?”
“Who do you think? You smell like a perfume shop.”
So he told her about Baywater Street. She would have found out anyway.
His sister’s lips grew thin and hard, her eyes filled with tears. Different tears.
“The swine! He thinks I’ll be like his colourless Southern belles and turn a blind eye!”
“Why not?” he said. “You don’t love him, do you?”
“But you love your yellow girl, don’t you? I’m doing this for you, big brother. Or are you willing to share her with Pegleg?”
He was staggered that she should even suggest it. But she had no intention of sharing Pegleg either. He pulled himself together.
“You’re not doing it for me, Lida. Your sisterly love doesn’t go that far.”
She gave him a look that was somewhere between pity and contempt. “What do you know about love?” she said. “But you’re right. It’s only partly for you. It’s not that I’m jealous, for heaven’s sake! But he mustn’t think I’d let him get away with anything if only he’d marry me. I’d be pretty stupid if I did that, and I got smart a long time ago. You, Cyril,” and she took him by the shoulders and the moon flashed red in her eyes, “in this world it’s the strong ones that win out. And love? Well, go for love — but if you can’t get love, then go for anything you can get.”
Bugs skewered on thorns — he couldn’t get them out of his mind. He lay on his belly behind the palisade of hurriedly felled trees. In front of him was a green meadow, then a twisted ripple in the terrain that ended in black scrub-oak brush and silence. General Carlin stood not far from Lieutenant Bellman, in his neatly pressed Schlachtanzug, surrounded by his staff officers. The rays of sunlight coming through the pine branches transformed him into a bright blue target, and sparkled for a moment off the field-glasses he had trained on the line of black bushes. That was where the silence before the storm lay hidden. It was half past two in the afternoon. Carlin put his field-glasses back in their case and Lieutenant Bellman heard him say to his aide, “There’s one thing I don’t understand: why didn’t they take advantage of the element of surprise? Nobody expected them here, and they gave themselves away by shooting at the advanced guard, and now they’re waiting. For what?”
