The Bride of Texas, page 42
The portrait of Nero in action circulated until it reached McIntyre. It found him suffering a mild case of food poisoning from tainted lobster.
McIntyre was no abolitionist. Although Uncle Habakuk had acted on the instructions of his owner, and although McIntyre originally demanded young Smithson’s expulsion from the university, the affair was finally resolved by Smithson discreetly shifting his winnings at cards into McIntyre’s pocket. Like it or not — since otherwise he would have had to forgo a classical education — he also had to sell Uncle Habakuk to an infamous slave-trader named Forest, who in turn unloaded him to Frederick Zeno Butler, a Louisiana tobacco farmer. Butler, who was dead set against slaves being able to read and write, wasn’t told of Uncle Habakuk’s talents. But Forest wasn’t risking anything. Butler’s distaste for literate slaves was his best guarantee that Uncle Habakuk would keep his education to himself.
The wounded men in the ambulance cart slowly rattling its way along the road to Bentonville had been playing cards since morning. There were only five of them. Four sat in front with kerchiefs tied across their noses and mouths. The kerchiefs were badly stained, but none of the stains was blood. The fifth man, Zinkule, sat at the opposite end of the cart. He was stark naked, stubbornly scrubbing himself with a piece of rag he kept dipping in a basin of strange-smelling water. His injury was different.
The night before, he had been sprayed by a skunk.
The bald-headed Sergeant Zucknadel wasn’t seriously wounded either. He larded his conversation, full of conversational obscenities, with a stream of heartfelt invective against the Czech nation. He had broken his leg when it got wedged between the logs that K Company had laid across the muddy road. In barely comprehensible English he damned the slipshod handiwork, and when he found out that a Czech squad was responsible for the carelessly laid corduroy he started to curse them as das boemische Gesindel — Bohemian scum — and heaped abuse on every famous Czech he’d ever heard of — John of Nepomuk, Jan Hus, Saint Wenceslas, and Princess Libuse. In the scuffle that followed, the outraged Prussian was overpowered by the Czechs and was saved from their rage only by his injury. Houska, patriot that he was, put it succinctly, even if his logic left something to be desired: “If he didn’t have a broken leg, I’d bust the other one too!”
The German’s anger was not an expression of a bloodthirsty will to fight, frustrated by a broken bone. It turned out that the noncom was worried that the war would end soon and now, thanks to Czech carelessness, he wouldn’t be able to march in the victory parade before the president, with troops he’d intended to train in the genuine Prussian Paradeschritt.
By then Paidr couldn’t stand it any more, and bellowed at the injured man, “You’re a Forty-eighter, aren’t you?”
“Klar bin ich ein Achtundvierziger!” Zucknadel said at the top of his voice. “Und was soll sein?” Or, roughly, “Damn right! So what?”
To enlighten the ignorant Prussian, Shake presented what verged on a scholarly lecture on the ideals of 1848. The Prussian mind, however, remained obstinately unenlightened. It perceived no difference between the beauty of democratic ideals and the equally radiant beauty of high-stepping army boots. The row started up again. It got so loud that they never heard the clatter of cannon-fire coming from Bentonville shortly after dawn, and it came to a head when Sergeant Zucknadel furiously opened his stuffed rucksack and pulled out a spotless sergeant’s coat with shiny buttons and silver braiding. The Prussian had carried this dress uniform with him all the way from Perryville, through the main battlefields of the war, inspired by the vision of a closing Parademarsch reviewed by the president of a newly united Union. This masterpiece of the tailor’s art succeeded in silencing the ragtag crew of Company K, and that was when the sound of cannon-fire got through to them. They listened, bewildered. It grew to the continuous roar they had last heard at Atlanta. Even Zucknadel quit swearing.
Finally Shake ventured, “Pack up the uniform, sarge. The parade’s been indefinitely postponed.”
Zucknadel grumbled but took the tunic, folded it with care and love, and gently put it back in his rucksack. The rest of them listened. The cannonade showed no signs of letting up.
Stejskal turned to Shake. “That armour, rusty or not, you shouldn’t have got rid of it.”
“I think it was a stupid thing to do too,” said Shake. As they listened, they could hear new cannon joining the fray.
A Negro rushed up to the cart, out of breath, carrying a steaming basin. “Here, pop,” he said to Zinkule in colloquial Czech, “I’ve got some fresh brew for you.”
Zinkule dumped out the old basin and took the fresh one from the Negro. They could smell a blend of skunk spray and that other oddly piercing aroma.
“It’s not helping much, Breta,” Zinkule told him.
The Negro flared his nose and sniffed. “You don’t smell nearly so bad no more, pop. I’ll find you a new set of blues some place. Two, three more days and you’ll be able to get dressed again.”
Resigned, Zinkule slipped the rag back into the basin. The smell of the potion hit them again. Hard to tell if it smelled good or stank.
“I don’t know, Franta,” said Paidr. “Maybe you just need to wait, get unstunk by yourself. This is sort of like going from the frying-pan into the fire.”
The rumble of cannon ahead of them grew louder. An officer on horseback was galloping towards them, down the long, slow column of creaking wagons.
“Mister Williams the overseer tormented Uncle Habakuk something awful,” Dinah continued. A fat caterpillar was crawling across her skirt. She wrinkled her nose, picked it up gingerly, and tossed it away. “See, that’s just the kind of ugly creature Uncle Habakuk had to eat whenever Mister Williams caught him doing anything bad at all. Especially loafing. But instead of curing him of his laziness, it did the exact opposite. Caterpillars, centipedes, moths, earthworms, maggots, and mashed blowflies —” she counted them off on her fingers. “He ate them all.”
Cyril said, “Until he really got sick.”
“Oh no. Uncle Habakuk got used to it, it was Mister Williams who didn’t. Whenever Uncle Habakuk stuffed himself with those creepy little things — he liked daddy longlegs the best; when he chewed them their legs would stick out of his mouth, twitching — Mister Williams threw up, which always made him furious.”
Perhaps it was all true. Perhaps it was a little more than the truth. So he said, “And five pregnant women threw up every time Mister Williams did.”
“Oh no,” she said, “they all got used to it too. Because when Uncle Habakuk took a liking to eating insects, he decided to make a business out of it. He started selling roasted grasshoppers at Saturday-night dances; they tasted something like almonds. And when customers acquired a taste for those, he began to get fancy. Pickled centipedes, earthworms stuffed with ants’ eggs, fat caterpillars like those that feed on onions. His greatest success were rain-worms stuffed with some kind of tiny fly that migrates up from Mexico. Whenever he had those, the dancers got so happy that some of them forgot their manners and didn’t even get drunk. They’d just disappear outside into the bushes, as often as five times in a single evening. So on top of being known as a famous fiddler, he got a name for being an expert insect chef.”
“Why didn’t Butler put him to work as a cook?”
“Massa Butler had no idea, of course,” said Dinah. “He was just glad his niggers were having fun Saturday night. He thought that it made them more pious and enthusiastic when they sang hymns in church on Sunday, and that by Monday they’d go back to work in his tobacco-fields fresh and happy. Except in the end,” she said, “everything fell apart. Mister Williams realized he wasn’t getting anywhere, all he’d done was create a bug-eating nigger, so he changed his tactics. He forbid Uncle Habakuk to play the fiddle on Saturday nights, made him quit selling fried insects, and forced him to eat supper with the overseers. It worked. The food he had to eat at the overseers’ table made him sick. The tongue paste didn’t impress Mister Williams any more, so Uncle learned from a nigger on a neighbouring plantation how to dislocate his wrist. But that made it hard for him to play the fiddle, so he decided he’d be better off working. The weak stomach he got from the overseers’ food and not being able to play at Saturday dances were too much for him, so he came up with a plan.”
He based it on Williams’s outstanding weakness: women. Williams left most of his not inconsiderable wages in cat-houses, but even that wasn’t enough for him. He had several favourites among the female field hands, and he rewarded them by allowing them to sleep in the shade of the tobacco leaves for several hours each day while the rest had to hoe away in the hot sun. The slaves grumbled about this in their cabins at night, but none of them ever thought of going to Butler to complain; they were too scared of Williams. Justice had to wait until the classically educated, musically and artistically gifted, and vengeful insect chef finally resolved to spread the word. Shrewdly, he put a word in the ear of one of the house niggers about why work wasn’t getting done in the tobacco-fields. As he expected, the whispers went straight to the ear of Mrs. Butler. She passed the story on to her husband, who could tolerate a lot from his niggers, but not shirking work.
Butler decided to investigate. He crept up behind the hedge by the field where Mister Williams was overseeing the hands. There he saw one beauty dreaming under the hedge. He left her alone and crept on, and found another one, and more — seven of them sound asleep.
When he got to the seventh sleeper, he stood up and revealed his presence to Williams. He summoned him to the big house for a talk, and there, in the absence of field Negroes, raked him over the coals and cut two dollars off his wages. But the house niggers were at the keyhole, and the news was whispered back down from the big house to the field hands’ cabins.
“Didn’t Uncle Habakuk feel bad that he cost those women their good times?” asked Cyril.
“No, because now they started getting presents from Mister Williams — calico for dresses, rings for their ears, and things. And on Saturday nights they’d try to see who could catch the handsomest nigger at the dance, and sometimes they even got into fights over it.”
“But they did have to work in the fields.”
“Everything has its price,” shrugged Dinah. “But that’s when Uncle Habakuk launched the next part of his plan.”
Part Two of the plan was founded on Uncle Habakuk’s culinary knowledge. He was expected not only to eat with the overseers but to serve them as well, so he took some of the tiny dried flies that he’d used to stuff the rain-worms, and put them in with the pepper in the pepper shaker. After a while on that diet, Williams added some older and less attractive hands to his harem. Not only were the fields full of sleeping women, but they were the scene of other activities that kept work from getting done. News of the despised overseer’s extraordinary capacities took the usual route back to the ear of Mrs. Butler — who was quite a beauty herself.
“Fred, what kind of a fellow is that overseer, that Williams person?”
Butler immediately became jealous, and this was part of Uncle Habakuk’s plan. “Why do you want to know?” he asked warily.
“Well, I’ve heard the niggers say all sorts of things about him.”
“What sorts of things?”
“All sorts,” said Mrs. Butler, and in a delicate phraseology acquired from novels she acquainted her husband with his overseer’s gargantuan appetites.
There was another talk in Butler’s study, noisier this time, and the news reached the cabins quickly. Butler had nothing against fornication with the young women who were his property, “But not in the fields, not in full view of the niggers, and not during working hours!!!” He hollered at Williams so loudly that the maid listening at the keyhole felt her ears ringing.
Meanwhile Butler began to nurse a grim suspicion about his lovely wife. The next day he went to the field. Uncle Habakuk noticed him hiding behind a clump of trees, and rubbed his hands in glee.
Butler came to the conclusion that Williams was probably not suited for work on a plantation where the lady of the house was the beautiful Florence.
And that was when Uncle Habakuk struck.
From Beulah, the lady’s maid (he was sleeping with her, and used to bring her grasshoppers braised in cognac that Beulah had stolen), he found out that the chronically jealous Butler regularly and covertly checked the secret desk compartment where his wife kept her correspondence. (After she read a short story by the writer with the elegant name, she hid her private correspondence in her husband’s desk, in a drawer he never opened — where he kept the Bible.) And so one afternoon when Miz Florence was off visiting her friend Lillian (who had a handsome brother) on the next plantation, the plantation house shook with an outburst of Butler’s rage. Soon Othello the footman was running to the fields with more alacrity than usual, and soon afterwards Williams was seen hurrying to the big house.
Without a word, Butler showed Williams a love letter addressed to “My dearest Florence”, full of suggestive insinuations (the latter had originally contained a long quotation from Ovid’s Ars amatoria, but Uncle Habakuk had realized in time that the overseer didn’t have the same classical education he had, and had rewritten it), along with a beautifully sketched portrait of Florence Butler nude from the waist up. Uncle Habakuk’s imagination, fuelled by Florence’s décolletage, was amazingly true to life. The second letter Butler showed the perspiring Williams was the overseer’s own complaint against the unfair cut in wages. Fortunately for Uncle Habakuk, Butler was not a close observer of handwriting, so to him the two letters seemed to have come from the same hand. The poor overseer was entirely ignorant of Uncle Habakuk’s literacy and his past career as a portraitist, so he couldn’t come up with a satisfactory explanation. In any case Butler was so angry that nothing would have satisfied him. Butler shouted at him and then resorted to physical violence, since challenging his wife’s seducer to a duel was out of the question; the overseer was too far beneath him socially. That same evening the disheartened Williams left Butler’s plantation, never to return. The crafty Florence convinced her husband that the love letter had been written by a famous New Orleans painter of miniatures called Besançon, who had recently attempted (unsuccessfully) to seduce her and was now trying to get revenge. The painter’s social position did permit a duel, in which Butler lost an ear and Besançon a brand-new jacket from Paris, which the enraged plantation-owner slashed to ribbons with his sword. As for Uncle Habakuk, he went back to fiddling at the Saturday-night dances. He reopened his insect catering business, which he brought with him to Mr. de Ribordeaux’s, to whom Butler sold him to cover the debts incurred by Miz Florence’s passion for betting at horse races. Then Uncle Habakuk moved to Texas with his new owner.
“Let me touch you,” said Cyril, “to make sure I’m not dreaming.”
“Not here where everybody can see us,” said his girl. They heard a clatter of hoofs, and a little gig appeared with a snooty-looking black footman in livery sitting beside the driver. A pretty young lady with a blue parasol sat in the gig.
“Miz Scarlett,” whispered Dinah.
“Who’s that?”
“You know, the girl Massa Étienne’s engaged to marry.”
“He’s engaged to her?”
“He probably never told your Lida about that,” said Dinah, “but he is.”
General Carlin stood staring through his field-glasses at the meadows beyond the palisade. The two men in the blood-soaked shirts were discussing something nervously. Groans came from the woods behind them, and the stretcher-bearers ran over from the palisade. The man they were carrying on the stretcher was holding onto his abdomen with both hands. Blood and a phlegmy substance oozed between his fingers. The grey line had stopped. The Rebels had taken cover behind the conquered palisades and the remnants of the wall, and in the underbrush. General Bate was nowhere to be seen. Several batteries of Rebel artillery were moving north, and there was a racket from that direction that sounded like a load of rocks rolling down a steep paved street. Sparse smoke from small-arms fire rose from a low, wooded knoll.
“Morgan,” Carlin said to his aide. “They got around him and he attacked their flank. Now they’re concentrating on him.”
“Are we going to counter-attack, sir?” the aide asked.
Carlin looked around. Exhausted soldiers were resting among the trees. Nearby lay a caisson, one wheel ripped off; two men were lifting it, a third was removing the spare wheel. Several others were reloading their rifles. Carlin looked back at the hillside that lay before their palisade.
“You’ll ride to General Slocum for orders. Attacking now wouldn’t make sense. We have to regroup.” He looked across the field. “Hardee’s doing the same thing. And he outnumbers us. We have to hold him at this line, no matter what.”
The two blood-soaked men came up to him again. Carlin shook his head. “No. We need every man we can drum up. Unfortunately, the wounded will have to stay where they are.”
He stopped to think, looked over at Lieutenant Bellman. “Lieutenant!”
Bellman snapped to attention.
“Pick five men. If the Rebs break through this line, those men will stay with the wounded and be taken prisoner along with them. I doubt the Rebs have any medics to spare.”
He brought the field-glasses back to his eyes. Grapeshot was still raining down over the groves on the hills to the north, and he could hear the constant clatter of rocks rolling on paving-stones. The sound of the cannonade was becoming a deep bass growl.
