The Bride of Texas, page 47
The little stockade was nothing more than a rough-hewn log shack, almost completely dark inside because the shutters were pulled to and the only light came through the loopholes. A bunch of musicians, the unit band, huddled on the floor, and what little daylight there was reflected off the bells of their instruments. It looked as though they were sitting among many glimmering lanterns.
A cannon went off outside; the negotiations were over. The trombone player lubricated his slide with tobacco juice, and slid it back and forth as if he were playing. The sergeant looked through a loophole and saw the first canisters exploding at a safe distance from the trench in front of the stockade. The trench was almost crowded. The sergeant imagined what would happen when the artillery found the proper range. He looked back inside the room. The man with the trombone was still working the slide in and out, for the same reason that General Burnside always tugged at his monumental side-whiskers in battle, or Captain Smith had kept twirling his amazing moustache around his moistened finger at Vicksburg. Watching the musician calm himself, the sergeant had an absurd idea. It slipped his mind right away, because Chalmers’s cannoneers had found their range and the first cries of pain were coming from the crowd in the trench. Fragments of iron buried themselves in the walls and roof of the stockade, and through the crack the sergeant could see a jagged line of dismounted cavalrymen rounding up a handful of inexperienced scouts of the Sixty-sixth Indiana. The battle had begun.
For almost four hours the fighting shifted back and forth across the meadows around the depot and the little stronghold. Chalmers wasn’t expecting a lot of resistance; he was aware of his numerical advantage, and though he knew his experienced cavalry would have to deal with the green troops of the Sixty-sixth, he wasn’t counting on facing the Thirteenth Regiment of the regular army, with Chickasaw Bayou, Arkansas Post, Deer Creek, and the bloody massacre at Vicksburg behind it. All those had been fought in full view of General Sherman, and here too the general watched from the woods south of the depot as assault upon assault on the green meadows failed, and the depot and the stockade remained in the hands of his guard unit.
Only one little square on the chessboard changed figures. The cannon found the range of the train, and when several wagons caught fire the Rebels attacked from two directions. Only a hastily armed group of wounded had remained in the train and they were unable to defend themselves for long. Through his field-glasses the general saw the Rebels herd them out of the wagons, line them up in a rough formation, and drive them, limping and stumbling, into the wood, where a new unit was just emerging.
From the stockade, the commander of the Thirteenth, Captain Smith, saw them too. The men in the rifle pits had just beaten back another assault, and the sergeant couldn’t tear his gaze away from a cavalryman with a bloodied leg dragging himself back across the meadow towards the shelter of the woods like a half-crushed beetle. The ball had apparently struck an artery because a red fountain was spurting from the wound. The cavalryman didn’t get far before he fell face down in the grass and lay still.
The sergeant heard Captain Smith’s voice ordering Lieutenant Griffin to counter-attack. He turned from the loopholes and saw the band, their instruments glimmering in the dull light, and the trombone player trying to calm himself. The commander of the Thirteenth was nervously buttoning and unbuttoning his grimy uniform.
From a rise in the woods, the general trained his field-glasses on the log shack. The door opened and Lieutenant Griffin appeared, followed by a sergeant and then, one by one, the soldiers of the Thirteenth. They spread out and ran towards the train. Intermittent puffs of smoke poured from the stockade’s loopholes as the troops inside covered Griffin’s assault.
Suddenly the stockade became a music box.
The general turned to his aide. “Do you hear that?”
The aide nodded.
They both listened. The band was playing “Rally Round the Flag, Boys!” The general smiled.
“Now, that’s what I call soldiers. The Thirteenth are bored in there —”
A stray shrapnel shell exploded above the treetops and both men ducked. Then the general raised his field-glasses again and saw a private in A Company swing his rifle and slam it down on the head of a Rebel officer who was firing a pistol from the train steps. He saw the officer fall and watched the private step over him and push his way to the wagon — apparently, or so it seemed, to the rhythm of the music still emanating from the stockade.
“But Daddy, that wasn’t heroism, was it?” asked the little girl uncertainly. “Ordering a band to play?”
“Probably not,” admitted the sergeant. “But the general was amused. And it got me transferred to his staff.”
“And you never smacked anyone in the head with a rifle butt like Mister Zinkule?”
“No,” said the sergeant. “All I did was slap a man in the face.”
“A Rebel officer?”
“No,” said the sergeant. “His name was Vallandigham.”
The stable was silent and smelly. Cyril leaned back against the wall, sniffing occasionally at a handful of hay he clutched in his right hand. Pain shot through his left arm, which was splintered and bandaged. He was poking his nose in the hay to mask the stench of rotting flesh given off by gangrene-infected amputees.
The military chaplain was mumbling over a doomed Rebel casualty in the corner — both his legs were gone and pus was soaking through his bandages. A wounded man on a filthy straw mat beside him was rubbing a clove of garlic between his fingers and raising them to his nose. The Irish priest had been summoned by an orderly on the request of the dying Rebel. Cyril knew the priest. One time, back in South Carolina, he had been passing by their campfire when Shake and Zinkule were arguing about the Immaculate Conception. Zinkule claimed it referred to the conception of Christ, and Shake said it was the Virgin Mary.
“Father! We need some theological guidance,” Shake had called out to him, and the clergyman stopped, sat down with them at the campfire, listened to the dispute, and then said Shake was right.
“We often encounter that error among laymen,” he said. “Are you a faithful Catholic?”
“I’m a Catholic, yes,” Shake replied. “But I have a mortal sin on my conscience.”
The priest dropped his voice. “Would you like to confess?”
“It’s not something I can atone for by confessing,” said Shake. “The only way would be to make restitution.”
The priest frowned. “Don’t you believe in the grace of God?”
“Ah, but I do,” Shake said. “If I didn’t, I’d have gone crazy long ago.”
Cyril buried his nose in his handful of hay. He caught a whiff of potato leaves and his inner eye took him from the stinking stable to an autumn evening in the mountains, and little fires burning. But why? Suddenly the priest stood up and looked around, and the campfires went out. He came over to Cyril.
“Good evening, father,” said Cyril.
“You’re one of the Bohemian bunch, aren’t you?” asked the chaplain. He looked at the dying amputee, then back to Cyril. “The fellow barely speaks English.”
“Is he a goner?” asked Cyril.
“I’m afraid so,” said the priest. “He’s delirious. He’s babbling, it could be something about Texas, it’s hard to understand. But I’m sure he’s Bohemian.”
“OK,” said Cyril, and he rose painfully and, holding his arm out at his side like a broken wing, walked over to the man. The Rebel’s eyes were closed; his skin showed a deathly white through the stubble on his beard. Cyril felt as if he were hallucinating, perhaps from the stink of rotting limbs, the fragrance of the hay, the smell of burning leaves. He leaned close to the dying man’s face. “Jesus!” he gasped in Czech. The dying man opened his eyes. “Mary, Mother of Jesus!”
He turned and hobbled quickly, almost running, to the farmhouse where they had put the wounded officers. In the kitchen, Captain Warren sat at the table with a bandage wrapped around his head. It wasn’t a serious wound. During an assault by Hardee’s cavalry a minnie had grazed his skull; he had lost consciousness and had come to just in time to hear the jaded doctor say, “It’s nothing, just a concussion.” Now he sat at the table with Lida and Lieutenant Ferguson, who had sprained his ankle at Bentonville. They were playing Marias, a card game from Austria that the captain’s wife had introduced them to.
Regardless of what he thought of her, Cyril had to admire his sister. “I’s with Massa Captain Warren now!” Sarah declared proudly. She was a black woman whose owner had fled with Hardee, and she patted Deborah’s head. The little girl grasped her pudgy hand. “Now that Massa Fitzsimmons is gone, I’s with Massa Captain Warren and Miz Fitzsimmons!”
“You are indeed,” said the innocent.
“I’m with Captain Warren too,” said Lida, pressing up against her husband. “And I won’t let him go!”
At the time, neither Sarah nor Baxter Warren II knew that she meant it literally. But when Sherman’s great army set out to the north-east, and Captain Baxter Warren II with it, the ambulance at the rear of the captain’s company was empty except for Lida, wearing the grey dress of a nurse. The captain protested, but in fact he was glowing with pride. What other man in Sherman’s army had a wife like her? The ambulance gradually filled with casualties, and his exotic wife bandaged bleeding bullet wounds and sword cuts as if she had been doing it all her life. They had left Deborah in safety under the protection of the captain’s sister, Mrs. Fitzsimmons, whose foolish husband had joined the retreating Hardee. Both of them were under the protection of Sarah, who was now working for Captain Warren. Although she was free, she had decided to remain a nanny to children of the wealthy. She had never done anything else and didn’t want to start now.
“Lida,” whispered Cyril.
His little sister, playing-cards fanned out in her hand, turned her eyes to him.
“Yes?” Then she noticed Cyril’s face and added, “What’s the matter, Cyril?”
“Come with me,” he said softly.
She collapsed. The doomed Rebel had died without opening his eyes. The Irish priest made the sign of the cross over him, and Lida broke down and cried, in awful, racking sobs. Under the grey fabric of her nurse’s uniform, the farm-girl’s sturdy shoulders heaved with a bottomless, endless agony. Captain Warren stood helplessly over her. Cyril met his unknowing eyes.
“It’s her older brother,” said Cyril. “God only knows how he ended up here, of all places. My God!”
God only knew, not Cyril. But it was Vitek, inexplicably here in North Carolina, a few miles from Bentonville.
Cyril looked at his sister, and for a second he thought Linda’s heart might break.
But her heart didn’t break. She wouldn’t give God that satisfaction. Her heart had already been broken, years ago, in the country she had had to leave alone, without the man who now lay dead at Bentonville. But like a broken bone her heart mended, and afterwards it grew stone-hard, as healed bones sometimes do.
Around midnight it started to rain. The battle had slowed down. Now and then, when the rain let up, the sergeant could hear the creaking of axles; vehicles at the rear of the Rebel line were on the move in the darkness. The general had been right. Johnston was taking advantage of the cover of night and retreating to the bridge across Mill Creek. That would mean the war was over.
Shake had fallen asleep on the palisade. He was having a beautiful dream. Suddenly he was what he had never become, and he was celebrating the May Mass in gold-embroidered vestments. He had just turned to the missal and started back to the Epistle side of the altar when a rose-bush popped out of the carpet on the steps, spread rapidly, and soon covered the Epistle side with scarlet blossoms that gave off a pungent fragrance. He turned and the same thing was happening on the Gospel side. He turned towards the worshippers but he couldn’t see them, for the entire altar was surrounded by rose-bushes. They smelled so strong that he felt faint and began to panic. He turned quickly back to the altar, climbed the tabernacle, and scrambled up the gilded baroque façade, where statues of Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Saint Cyril, and Saint Methodius gazed out at him from their niches. Suddenly, like snakes, rose-covered boughs emerged above their heads and began twining down the altar. Startled, Shake fell to the altar, and the rose boughs attacked him from all directions, twining around his arms and legs like vines, and the odour became so strong that it was practically a stench — he woke up. Behind him on a tree stump sat a man dressed in tails. A Negro who looked familiar was sprinkling him with liquid from a tiny gilt flagon. Shake decided that he was still asleep and had just moved from one dream to another.
Then he heard Paidr say, “I’ll be damned, Franta! You’re all we needed here!”
“You bet you need me,” said the fellow in the formal suit. “I’m not wounded, so my place is with my unit.”
The Negro stopped sprinkling Zinkule and corked the bottle. The cruel smell of roses awakened everyone around them.
“Franta!” exclaimed Javorsky. “Is that you?”
“Who do you think it is?” the fellow in the tail-coat replied irritably.
“What’s that you’re wearing?” Houska chimed in.
“Tails,” replied Zinkule tersely.
“You sure you’ve come to the right place? This isn’t a fancy-dress ball,” said Paidr.
“It’s all Breta could find,” said Zinkule.
“He’s in the right place, all right,” said Shake. “It looks like the devils will dance here tonight.”
As if in response, the thunder of artillery-fire rolled in from the right, where Howard’s wing had joined Slocum during the night.
Long after the war, the younger Toupelik son Josef told the story. That was after Cyril had gone back to the de Ribordeaux plantation. It was being managed, more or less, by the Negroes, since there was no one left of the family and no one knew who the new owners would be, or even who should be selling it to whom. Nobody knew anything: neither Beulah, nor the foul-mouthed Benjamin. Uncle Habakuk was dead, and Samuel, the footman, was now a groom in the stable, still wearing his faded livery, though there was no one left to be escorted anywhere. Cyril had come because he hoped Dinah would do the same. She must know that if he survived he would try to find her. But where should he start?
And Josef said, “It was on my first trip to Matamoros. I got myself hired on with the ox teams, otherwise I’d have gotten drafted into the army too. That way I was exempted.”
They had been transporting bales of King Cotton through the wastelands of South Texas to the Rio Grande, because all the Confederate ports were blocked by the Yankee flotilla, and unless the Rebels could export their cotton to Europe there would be no arms, nothing. The Southerners had hoped that old aristocratic Europe — England and France — would come to the aid of the new aristocratic Americans, but for Europe it was simply business. Perhaps Maximilian, the new Mexican emperor, who was also a Hapsburg, would be an ally. But that hope too proved illusory. “Well,” said Josef, “he had barely ten thousand men, about one Confederate division. And a lot of them were like him — looking for a free ticket to America so they could go off on their own.”
In Matamoros they unloaded the cotton, found a stable for the oxen, and went into town — that is, into the taverns. Josef and Matej Vosahlik picked a tavern on a square, ordered something they had never heard of called tequila, and were soon in seventh heaven. Then a soldier began to irritate them, a noncom with stripes on his sleeve and a silver bird on his cap.
“What does he keep gawking at me for?” Josef asked Vosahlik.
“Maybe he knows you from some place,” said Matej.
“That’s impossible,” said Josef. “He’s the first Mexican I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”
“Except he’s no Mexican,” said Matej, who had been in Matamoros twice before. “He’s Austrian.”
“Balls!” Josef snapped. “What would an Austrian be doing here?”
Matej, who was an old hand, explained to him that there was an Austrian expeditionary army in Mexico under the command of Count Thun-Hohenstein; it had come to help the archduke, now Emperor Maximilian, occupy a precarious throne. And Josef looked back and said, “He keeps staring at me. Is he a nancy-boy?”
The Austrian noncom rose — the two-headed bird on his cap glinted and flapped its wings, or so it seemed to them — and addressed them in Czech: “Look here, I heard you. You talk our language.” Then he turned to Josef. “Aren’t you one of the Toupelik boys?”
“Everything gets perverted into its opposite,” said Shake. “Courage turns into cowardice, cowardice turns into courage.”
They were back around a campfire again, many days later. Three geese were roasting on a spit. Breta was catching the dripping fat in a ladle and basting the golden-brown birds with it.
“That’s what Hegel says,” added Shake.
“How about translating that into Czech for us?” said Javorsky.
They were all wearing the new uniforms that General Schofield had brought to Goldsboro. Even Zinkule, although he was still — through no choice of his own — sitting apart from them with a little bottle in his knapsack. Now and then he would take it out and sprinkle something onto a handkerchief and tuck the handkerchief inside his shirt.
“It doesn’t need translating,” said Shake. “It just needs interpreting. To make it simple, the skirmishers were shocked when the smell of roses hit their nostrils, and when the smell was followed by Zinkule jumping over the parapet in his tail-coat they were scared out of their wits. So the three of us, Breta, Vojtech, and me, took advantage of the element of surprise, and out of sheer courage — without being ordered to — jumped over the parapet and gave chase. But when we got to the edge of the woods, Rebel cavalry burst out of the trees and cut off our line of retreat. So we had to advance until we found a hiding-place in the rushes of a swamp. We caught our breath and then it started to pour, so we took advantage of that and set out for the woods to the south, towards our line, until we got within range and saw the Stars and Stripes flying over the palisade. We ran towards it but we were met by gunfire. Thank God their aim was rotten.” Shake paused, reached out and poked the closest of the geese, then licked his finger and said, “A little while longer and we’ll have a feast.”
