The Bride of Texas, page 45
“We were all naked, though,” said Stejskal. “Now you’d stand out like a sore thumb with all of us dressed. Everybody would be aiming at you.”
A group of officers walked over and stopped while a black-bearded colonel glanced at the platoon with the naked man in its midst and snapped, “What’s this?”
Then a breeze carried the smell to the officers. The colonel swallowed whatever it was he wanted to say, waved his hand dismissively, and spurred his horse. The rest of the staff followed him. They saw a long-haired captain pull out a handkerchief and press it to his nose.
When the sound of hoof-beats faded, Stejskal said, “No, it won’t work. You know why, Franta? Everybody will think we all shit our pants in advance.”
“On the other hand, we could blame it on Franta,” said Shake.
“Blame what?” asked Houska.
The Third Company marched up behind them and its captain was annoyed at them for just standing around and getting in the way. Then he got a whiff of the breeze himself and yelled a hasty order, and they set out. Zinkule tried to line up behind the last trio, but the captain of the Third Company yelled at him so loudly that he crept back into the ambulance cart. The card-players pulled up their handkerchief masks again and went on playing.
“Is it a big city?” asked Lida.
“It’s a port city. Very impressive. The house is on Bay Street.”
“Does it belong to you?”
“Yes. Uncle Jean-Paul left it to me.” He paused. “But Linda —”
“Is it ready to move into?”
“The caretaker used to be overseer in our plantation in Louisiana. He and his wife are living there, in retirement.”
“Fine,” she said.
He looked unhappy. “Linda, darling, I’m really not certain —”
“You want to or not?” she interrupted him pointedly. He had returned the ring to his fiancée. The lady and her father had left the very next morning. The arrogant footman had ridden in front, looking offended.
“I want to,” he said. “My mother’s jewels are yours.”
She had seen them gleaming in their cases — necklaces, a diamond tiara, jewellery carried across the Atlantic many years earlier from a land that did not tolerate the faith of the women, now long dead, who had owned it. Rings, bracelets, some of them purchased later in the jewellery stores of New Orleans, a few of them for the more recent owner, now also deceased. “For your bride,” said Lida.
“Linda —”
She broke in: “How much are they worth?”
“I don’t know. A lot.”
“Good,” she said. “We won’t sell them. Pawn money will support us until your papa changes his mind.”
She was gambling everything on that. Despite the distance across the Atlantic, she saw that it was the same the world over. If the old veteran Vitek’s father had hired hadn’t come hobbling up when he did, she might not even have had to go to America. Vitek was Mika’s only son. There were no other heirs.
Pegleg’s sister, Hortense, was married and apparently expecting already. But Pegleg too was an only son. The old world and the new, as Papa de Ribordeaux had proved when he summoned her father and gave him his ultimatum, were the same, though separated by oceans and continents. She was going for broke because she had nothing to lose.
Nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Fortune favours the fearless, as the Czech saying goes.
She had been Mrs. de Ribordeaux for several months, bound in wedlock in a Savannah church — although in her mind only one thing in the world had bound her inseparably, and she had already been separated from that — when the letter arrived. She grinned; Papa must be changing his mind. But it was still too soon. The letter was just a first step towards getting back his inheritance.
“Hortense,” her husband sobbed, “Hortense is dead.”
“How did it happen?” She could hardly conceal her pleasure.
“In childbirth,” said Étienne. “The baby died too.”
Perhaps there is a God after all, thought Lida. The lovesick Father Bunata’s good and kind Lord God.
Étienne was no longer just the only son. He was now the only living heir. Now it was a matter of time.
Then the Lord God played another cruel trick on her.
It was twilight. The eastern sky was turning dark and the stars were coming out. The smoke dissipated as night fell, but there were still flashes coming out of the woods and from positions near the ground. They were close to the battle now. Whenever there was a lull in the noise they could hear a tired echo of the Rebel yell, but it was soon drowned out again by the crack of muskets and the thunder of cannon. On they marched, at a half-trot, while Shake cursed. He was cursing because K Company of the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin had slogged through North Carolina like a pack of mules, and now they had to step in and bail out a fop like General Carlin, doing the dirty work for his men so they’d be fresh and rested for the march into Washington and would look the way the ladies of Washington imagined Sherman’s great army to be. “And not like the pack of exhausted mules they actually are,” Shake complained.
“Calm down,” said Stejskal. “We’re worn down and worn out, but we’ll still look better in Washington than Carlin and his dandies.”
“If we look like anything at all,” stated Fisher.
For a while no one said anything, and they could only hear the occasional clink of a rifle against a canteen, and the breathing of men who were exhausted but sustained by a second wind.
The order to halt came down and the lieutenant trotted off to the head of the column. By now they were very close. They could hear officers’ voices nearby; units were beginning to spread out in the dusk, the first of them already disappearing among the trees. A shrapnel shell exploded, but it was still pretty far away.
“Neighbours, I got a premonition,” Houska ventured.
“You know where you can stick it,” growled Paidr.
Shake sniffed the air loudly. “We should have brought Zinkule along. We could have undressed some poor corpse along the road and made him decent. He’d come in handy now.”
“Is it a punch in the face you want?” said Houska angrily. “If anybody’s scared shitless here, it’s you!”
“Figuratively, you’re right,” replied Shake. “Neighbours, I often thought about it whenever I saw the rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in the air. If I’d a brave bone in my body, I’d have deserted long ago.”
Somewhere in the distance, not far away, several projectiles exploded one after another like flashes of lightning in the sky, and a weak Rebel yell sounded. The lieutenant came running back and commanded, “Follow me!”
They plunged into the forest but they were moving more slowly now. It was hard to see the ground. Then a few kerosene lanterns appeared up ahead. They soon reached an area cut out of the darkness by a yellow glow. Several men — in shirts so bloody they looked as if someone had poured a bucket of gore over them — were working in such a frenzy that they seemed like madmen. Saws rasped on bone. Without a word they advanced more quickly, because some of the light from this place of weeping and gnashing of teeth illuminated the ground between the moss-covered tress. As the flashes of light came closer, they could see a palisade occupied by a handful of ragged soldiers.
“We’re relieving the unit in this area,” said the lieutenant.
They flopped down on their stomachs.
“High time!” snarled a bearded soldier wearing an illegible insignia, as he walked quickly away from the palisade.
They peered over the rough, ill-trimmed log fortifications. Half a mile or so ahead of them they could see the flickering lights of battle. Small black figures were running across a meadow to the woods on the hill. The Rebel yell now sounded like the plaintive cries of dying men.
Shake leaned against the palisade beside Houska and philosophized, “No offence, Vojta. Let’s not leave this world in a state of disagreement. What do you say?”
“Who’s arguing?” asked Houska.
“Me,” said Shake. “The difference is that I’m shit-scared and pretty soon I’m going to need Zinkule here to cover up for me!”
“Just wait till after the battle,” Houska snapped at him, “I’ll bust your mouth like I’ve been promising since Savannah!”
“Tell the truth, Vojta,” said Shake. The shooting machine on the hill across the meadow rattled into action again. “You said you had a premonition.”
“That’s right.” Houska placed the musket on the palisade in front of him, pulled out a handkerchief, and blew his nose. “It’s a strong one, Amos. I think Ruzena is going to leave him.”
Shake was taken aback. “Leave who?”
“That Ferda fellow, the one she married,” said Houska, putting his handkerchief away. “When I get home from the war, I’ll be a hero. And what will he be? Nothing but a plain ordinary yellow-bellied war-dodger.”
“But what does it mean?” Lida wanted to know.
“Lincoln’s getting cold feet,” said Captain Culloch. The empty sleeve of his threadbare uniform was tucked behind his faded gold belt, and he twirled a glass of bourbon on the smooth tabletop with his left hand, which had the three middle fingers missing.
They were sitting in the Grenier Hotel and Lida was frowning.
“It’s supposed to win him the full support of the abolitionists,” said the captain, “because discontent is spreading through his Yankee empire. Have you heard of the Copperheads?”
Lida shook her head.
“They’re openly opposed to the Emancipation Proclamation,” said Captain Culloch. “They say the question of the peculiar institution is up to the individual states, not the federal government. So Lincoln has no choice, that’s why he’s betting on the abolitionists. We, Madame de Ribordeaux, can only watch with pleasure. When our enemies fight among themselves, we —”
She had stopped listening. In her mind she could hear Filly-face, the woman Cyril had jilted for his yellow rose, saying, “Daddy says the South can’t win. We live in an age of machines, and the North has machines and keeps inventing new ones. Have you heard about the one Mr. Gatling invented?” She had shaken her head. “It’s a rifle with ten barrels,” said Filly-face. “It shoots more than two hundred rounds a minute, my daddy says —”
The Emancipation Proclamation did not bring Papa de Ribordeaux to his senses. They pawned the tiara. Months flew by. They argued more and more. Pegleg started drinking heavily. They stopped talking except to argue.
Finally, the letter came.
The clock struck again, eleven. The sergeant rose, walked over to the chest, took a bottle out from under the folded shirts and underwear, and poured himself a generous drink. The glass depicted President Lincoln collapsing to the ground, his white vest displaying a red badge of courage. Glass in hand, the sergeant gazed at another Lincoln. This one was leaning out of a tiny window on the clock face, waving the Stars and Stripes in time to the music as brightly painted hand-carved figurines in the uniform of the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin band played “The Stars and Stripes Forever”. One little figure was pushing and pulling the slide on a wooden trombone, and beside him two other red-cheeked musicians were puffing away at a trumpet and a tuba. On the right, a figure with a fat wooden belly was pounding on a big drum. The bells of the trombone, the tuba, and the trumpet were turned so they pointed backwards, because the woodcarver had remembered marching behind bands like that on his way to battle. Now, on a farm a few miles from Manitowoc, Vojta Houska spent long winter evenings carving these cheerful clocks, which he sent as Christmas presents to his old buddies from the Twenty-sixth. “I got the idea from old Kakuska, may he rest in peace,” Houska would say. “Remember how he made spurs out of clock gears in Savannah?”
The sergeant recalled the memorable day after Appomattox, when the band marched back and forth across the camp with a sauced-up General Mower leading them himself, a big drum on his belly. He remembered Cyril, who was God knew where on the other side of the world, and Dinah, who was simply God knew where, and how Cyril had told the story of showing her a classified ad in a section called Escaped Slaves that said, “Gabriel escaped with a very good bassoon.” He had laughed, and Dinah had retorted, “What are you laughing for, white boy? He wants to get to Canada, where they say our kind get to play in army bands!”
“On the bassoon? Hardly. In a castle orchestra, maybe.”
“Have they got castles in Canada?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. They have a queen.”
“So Gabriel’s going to play in the queen’s band in Canada.”
The little carved band finished playing, and Lincoln withdrew behind a shutter that had a picture of the American eagle on it. The sergeant settled back in his armchair, picked the book off the chair where the child had sat earlier, took a drink, and started reading:
“Dusk had fallen when the Rebel troops circled around our positions and unexpectedly struck from behind. All we did, however, was to jump over the palisades and fight from the other side. At that point, General Hardee committed an incomprehensible error. If he had divided his forces and used only half of the men under his command to hit us from behind, we could hardly have successfully defended ourselves, having to fight onslaughts from both directions. As it was, however, standing and kneeling once again in a double rank, we laboured like the ideal diligent soldier boys, so that after the victorious battle, our commander Colonel McClurg was absolutely truthful when he declared, ‘I have rarely been witness to gunfire so incessant, so merciless. It seemed to me beyond human endurance. The soldiers under my command, veterans of dozens and dozens of terrible battles, had never before experienced anything resembling the carnage at Bentonville.’ It was only when night fell and Hardee learned that fresh units had arrived as reinforcements to Carlin’s divisions that he ordered his troops to withdraw to their original positions. Hence Colonel O’Carleen of the Confederate Army was also correct when he wrote in his memoirs, ‘We came, we attacked, we fought, we accomplished nothing.’ ”
“Daddy!”
His daughter stood in the doorway in her nightgown. He tried to hide his glass under his chair, and spilled whisky on the floor. “What’s happening, Terezka?”
“I can’t sleep,” announced the child. “Something keeps bothering me.”
He was worried that his story about the three disembodied heads might have given the child nightmares, but she said, “Is it true that you never fired a shot in the war?”
The white bride rode off in the cabriolet, the radiantly innocent Baxter Warren II by her side, towards the bristled array of bayonets floating forward through the morning fog as Logan’s division of Sherman’s great army marched on.
“I once knew a girl who lived on Goat Street —” Shake said.
And Stejskal interrupted him: “It really is nice, though, a Moravian girl finding happiness in Savannah, Georgia!”
But Cyril knew there had only been one happiness, and she had been robbed of that. Whatever had become of Vitek? She had no idea, there in Savannah, and if she couldn’t have Vitek then at least she would have a substitute happiness, the kind that would enable little Deborah to find a happiness of her own. And no Mika, no de Ribordeaux, could —
The letter had arrived too late.
“Go alone,” she said. “I would be in the way.”
“But he wants to reconcile with you.”
“It’s you he wants to reconcile with,” she said. “You are his heir.” Then she added, “If there’s anything left to inherit.”
That startled him. “You don’t believe the war is —”
“Of course not,” she stopped him. “Go and come back.… If you want to.”
It was the worst time in her life. Except of course for that day in Amberice. Once again she was gambling everything. True, Papa de Ribordeaux had come to his senses, but Pegleg arrived at the plantation just in time to close his father’s eyes. Cirrhosis of the liver caused by excesses of cognac, a heart steeped in the smoke of thousands of cigars, the spectre of emancipation, the death of Hortense and her baby, though it was just a girl. His world and all his erudite theories had collapsed, a world of murders and bloodhounds and people like wily old Uncle Habakuk, and underneath all the learned knowledge had been the awareness that it had to end, but if only the end could have come later. Later. Pegleg, evidently by the miracle of passion or love, managed to return to Savannah. The inheritance was worthless. Sherman fought for Kennesaw Mountain and Lida knew she was gambling on the wrong card.
But fortune favours the fearless.
Sherman’s great army marched up to Savannah and in fifteen minutes took Fort McAllister by storm. By the grace of Tecumseh Sherman, General Hardee led most of his troops across a bridge that had been built by slaves. The next day, the same men who had built it were singing,
Massa Sherman come to Savannah
And he set us free.…
Étienne, steeped in bourbon, was babbling and stammering about evenings made hellish by quarrels, about Linda, who was cruelly withdrawing from him, about having lost everything in the world. Cyril kept topping up his glass, horrified, hardly recognizing him. What had become of Dinah? But the cripple was beyond reach. Cyril put off asking him any further questions till morning, and left the drunken wretch on the chaise-longue in the parlour of his mansion (all that was left of the inheritance), and went to drink himself into oblivion in the little house where Kakuska was manufacturing spurs out of clock gears for the battle of Columbia, for the final battle at Bentonville.
Captain Baxter Warren II was in command of one of the companies that stormed Fort McAllister, the last obstacle that stood between Sherman’s great army and the saloons and whorehouses of Savannah. On the way to Madam Russell’s Bakery, where he had every intention of losing his virginity, his eyes fell on Linda Toupelik, and he changed course. Instead, he lost his virginity in the Grenier Hotel.
