The Bride of Texas, page 50
Captain Mihalotzy was chatting with the ladies, twirling his waxed moustache around his finger as if he were in the lounge bar at the opera in Pest. Something had to happen because, on battlefields, shots are fired.
“Did Lusk fire a shot?” asked Houska.
“What else?” said Shake. “Not only that, his aim was excellent, though as a matter of fact he didn’t take aim. He hit the figure not in the heart but in the right knee, and when he did there was a shriek of pain.”
“The shot ricocheted?” said Stejskal.
“No, it went through the sign. The trouble was, Padecky had gone behind it to take a leak, because there was a lineup for the toilet.”
“Did you wear the red trousers at the funeral?” Fisher asked.
“Padecky wasn’t killed,” said Shake. “But he was still out of commission when we were unexpectedly called up not long afterwards. The ball had hit his left knee and it was still in plaster. Fortunately they didn’t have to amputate, but even when he got better his leg was as stiff as a stump and he limped. And Vasek Lusk didn’t go to war with us either, for all he had soldiering in his blood.”
“Why not?” asked Stejskal. “That sort of thing can happen to anybody. I had a rifle go off in my hand three times, and once I shot Captain Lidwell’s cigar to bits as he was about to stick it in his mouth, and his beard caught fire from the burning tobacco.”
“What did he give you?” asked Houska, intrigued.
“I had to walk around the camp for three days with a sign that said, I ALMOST SHOT CAPTAIN LIDWELL. The sign was in two sections, like a sandwich board, but some wag got hold of it at night and added, TOO BAD YOUR AIM AIN’T BETTER! to the back half and I never noticed, not even when so many of my buddies started ribbing me. Usually it’s just a few jackasses who laugh. Finally Colonel Brummel stopped me and he wouldn’t believe I didn’t know about it, so he stuck me in a disciplinary squad for a week and I had to work on the palisades with three deserters who’d been condemned to death and then pardoned by Lincoln.”
“What happened to Lusk?” asked Zinkule.
“Nothing. He ran away and disappeared,” said Shake. “He probably withered away from shame.”
The bridge was already in full sight, and the rain had started to come down harder again. For two hours now they had been marching double-time and running, and they’d been through several skirmishes. They kept encountering groups of armed men trying to link up with larger units to create a continuous line of defence. One wandering squadron of Wheeler’s cavalry managed to slow them down, but they wiped it out of the way. General Mower was still marching in the ranks of the company heading his division. They forded a marsh, crossed a rise, and there was the bridge. Ambulances were slowly trundling across it, and sparsely placed riflemen lay in hurriedly dug pits along the banks of the creek, defending the gateway to safety. As soon as the first blue line appeared over the rise, they opened fire.
The order came to retreat. Behind a cluster of rocks, Shake said to Houska, “Is this enough for you? Or, as a man who wants to return home a hero, do you have higher standards?”
“Always the joker. Just wait, some day you’ll be laughing on the other side of your face,” said Houska, rolling over on his back. “Something’s going on in the rear,” he said.
Shake turned to see an officer gallop across the meadows among the soldiers, and stop in front of Mower’s staff. Shake glanced at the sky. The clouds were breaking up. He saw Mower making authoritative gestures, then saw orderlies scatter in all directions. The lieutenant commanding the company they had joined hollered, “Fall back!”
“What for?” snapped Houska.
“A soldier doesn’t question, a soldier obeys!” said Shake, rising.
They soon found out why. Strong squads of Rebel cavalry had attacked the division’s left flank from the front and Mower was concentrating all his forces against them.
They were running towards a few isolated trees where they were to take up defensive positions when they caught sight of the Rebel cavalry, a cluster of wild riders galloping up to the trees, their reins in their teeth, beards flying in the wind. Each rider had a heavy navy pistol in each hand and was blazing away. The squad scattered. Shake ducked to the right of the lead rider, and as he did so he glimpsed Houska diving into the grass, Zinkule’s tails fluttering, and Breta on one knee, firing at the second wave of riders. One of them veered to the left and cut off Shake’s retreat to the hedge the rattle of gunfire was coming from. Shake hesitated; the rider swung his horse around and started towards him. Shake, his rifle slung over his back, sprinted towards a grove of pine trees and clambered up one of them. The rider didn’t waste a shot on him, but just rode around the grove to join the next wave of attack. From his perch in the pine tree, Shake saw Hardee’s wild warriors gathering for a fresh assault. He heard gunfire and the boom of cannon around him, all the way to the north. Suddenly the clouds parted, the sun came out, and a rainbow formed over the heads of the wild riders. Shake looked around. He could see several dead men on the grass between the grove and the hedge, and a horse lying on its side. The rider placed a navy pistol to the horse’s head and fired; the horse jerked and went limp and the rider dropped behind it for shelter.
In an irregular line of running soldiers, Houska and Breta arrived at the hedge just ahead of Zinkule. Shake remembered his rifle and took it off his shoulder. The cavalryman behind the horse had his back to him, a good target. Shake took aim and pulled the trigger. The recoil knocked him out of the tree.
The man behind the dead horse jerked and went stiff. Hardee’s riders were just launching a new attack through the grove, and Shake fell right on top of them.
“The catastrophe came the day after Vasek Lusk put Padecky out of action. In the morning Hubatty delivered fifty-one pairs of red trousers, but there was no drill that afternoon. The tavern was packed but the trousers lay neatly folded in a pile in the corner and everyone ignored them. Why? Because Padecky wasn’t there to reassure us that the situation wouldn’t lead to war.”
“You mean it was after the South fired on Fort Sumter?” asked Paidr.
Shake nodded. “Three days later, on April 15, Lincoln issued an appeal for seventy-five thousand three-month volunteers, and the day after, April 16, Lincoln’s Slavonic Rifles were issued ammunition, twenty-eight cartridges in all, and we marched off to the field of honour and glory.”
“Twenty-eight cartridges for the whole company?” Stejskal asked. “The army wasn’t that short of ammunition back then. That’s less than one cartridge per man.”
“Not for Lincoln’s Slavonic Rifles it wasn’t,” said Shake. “Only fourteen of us marched onto the field of honour, and two were Hungarian, one was a Czechified German, and one a Jew. All the rest decided to forgo the glory. They had families, livelihoods, rheumatism, or the red trousers were either too loose or too tight. Geza Mihalotzy almost became the first casualty of the war, because when only twelve of us, plus Tonda Kovacz, showed up at the tavern on the thirteenth he practically had a fit. It was Schroeder who finally saved him, except —”
The absent soldiers sent their daughters and wives to the tavern, some with verbal messages, some with written resignations. Mihalotzy was outraged and later he personally made the rounds of the Czech community till long after midnight. In some places they came to the door when he knocked, in others the men were terribly ill and in bed. Some gave an excuse that was so lame that he said later he’d “punched them in the mouth”. Next morning, Schroeder found him at Dr. Walenta’s, covered with blood (not his own) and sodden with booze. “The excuse,” said Shake, “was so feeble that only the Czechs could have come up with it. No other nationality I know of has that kind of logic.”
The suckling pig broke the spit it was on. They jumped up and rescued the meat from the fire with sticks, and forgot to ask about the excuse that could only have occurred to a Czech. Years later, Kapsa would find out anyway, but not from the lips of Jan Amos Shake, who by then had vanished into the Czech anthill of the Windy City, not to be seen by the sergeant until a quarter of a century later, in Milwaukee. No, the sergeant heard about it from the lovely wife of the Austrian consul in Chicago, a woman he had once known and had long presumed dead.
“Schroeder had a newspaper with Lincoln’s appeal in it,” said Shake, as pieces of the suckling pig, lightly powdered with ash, rapidly vanished into the ironclad stomachs of the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin. “He waved it in Mihalotzy’s face and exclaimed joyfully, in German, of course, ‘Don’t worry about it, captain, sir’ — he was a soldier in spirit already — ‘if you don’t insist on having Czechs — and you can’t any more because where will you find Czechs to replace the deserters? — I’ll fill your ranks quicker than you can wink!’ And so,” Shake said sadly, “before long a full company of Lincoln’s Slavonic Rifles was marching off to war, but they weren’t Slavonic any more, just Lincoln’s. The Slavs were in the minority. There were only twelve of us, and sixty-eight Germans.”
“At least you had the red trousers,” said Paidr.
“Unfortunately, we didn’t,” said Shake. “The Germans wouldn’t wear them. Schroeder arranged for the issue of brand-new blue field uniforms, so we marched into combat wearing what any ordinary Union Army infantry regiment would wear.”
“What didn’t the Germans like about the red trousers?” growled Houska.
“They were all seasoned veterans. They said they weren’t going to risk their necks just to be dressed up fancy.”
“At least you had your armour,” said Paidr.
“At least I had my armour,” Shake conceded. “Colonel Ohrenzug palmed off the red trousers on a company of Italian volunteers. Most of them lost a leg, or both legs. The trousers turned out to be a perfect target.”
The sergeant arrived in Milwaukee by the noon train, and was annoyed that Terezka wasn’t at the station to meet him. But her husband, Premysl, was there, and in the carriage on the way to the Schroeders’ residence he apologized for the inconsiderateness of the sergeant’s beloved daughter, who had never disappointed her father like that before. When the carriage drew up in front of the big house with the carved balustrade over the entrance he still felt peeved, but his irritation vanished in the foyer when Terezka welcomed him with the usual embrace and kiss and he saw his granddaughter, Heidemarie, standing on a stool in front of a mirror while Identity, the black maid, tied red bows embroidered with doves into her blonde braids. The child wore a folk costume and, although the sergeant didn’t know much about folklore, he thought it might be the kind he’d seen his mother wear to church in Eastern Bohemia, except for the green dirndl with the beautiful alpine chamois embroidered on the back.
“Oh, Daddy!” sighed his daughter in a mixture of American Czech and English, “I’m a nervous wreck! Will Heidi look pretty on the stage, do you think?”
The little girl’s grey eyes gazed at her grandfather. The eyes, the dirndl, and the blonde hair evoked in him a vivid memory of a long-forgotten alpine valley, with brief, beautiful sunsets among tall, snow-covered peaks.
“She will indeed,” he said quickly. “But what she’ll look like in this get-up is another question.”
The child was wearing riding boots, the kind Kilpatrick had worn many long years before — a little smaller, but also with spurs.
From his daughter’s somewhat confused and nervous chatter, the sergeant gathered that a group of Czech itinerant players were in Milwaukee for a Sunday matinée. They were going to put on the hit play of the Prague season, Our Braggarts, and they had recruited a group of local Czech kids to appear in the tavern brawl scene as the progeny of a dishonest tailor.
“Aren’t they supposed to be poor children?” the sergeant asked his daughter.
“Oh, I know that,” said Terezka, “but Daddy, surely you don’t want Heidemarie to be on stage looking like some beggar’s brat!”
Heidemarie looked like the brat of a rich farmer. That didn’t trouble the sergeant, but the dirndl did. It seemed too far removed from how people dressed in a Czech village.
“Well,” said Terezka, “I wasn’t sure about the dirndl either, but it was a birthday present embroidered by her great-aunt in the Tyrol, and Grandpa Schroeder won’t hear of her going on stage without it.”
The man she spoke of strode into the room. He was no longer the slim surveyor who had walked into the Kakuska cabin with bad news all those years ago, and no longer the vigorous corporal who not long afterwards had fought mit Haecker, and then mit Sigel, and finally mit Grant. Now he was partner in a brewery and a prime consumer of his own brand of beer, called Milwaukee Bock. Milwaukee Bock was very nutritious.
He gave his granddaughter an admiring look and asked Kapsa in German, “Nu, how does she look?”
“She looks — interesting,” said the sergeant. The little boots didn’t fit the Czech costume. But somehow he didn’t mind. He looked at the girl, and suddenly he didn’t mind the dirndl either. When all was said and done, the child was one-quarter German and —
The stout grandfather lifted the cherubic little girl with his meaty hands, rested her on his forearm, and gazed at her fondly. “Du mein Roeslein,” he said, “My little rosebud,” “du siehst wie eine kleine Prinzessin aus” — “you look like a little princess.”
“Grandpa,” squealed Heidemarie in English, “you stink like a beer barrel!”
“What!” chuckled the old man.
“That’s what Mom says. Like a beer barrel!”
The sergeant sighed, but then he smiled. When all was said and done, the child was an American.
The old German, who was also a veteran of the rebellion of forty-eight, had loved his wife, Molly, née Kakuska, and when she died before she turned thirty-five it seemed for a while that he would soon follow her. But it’s hard to drink yourself to death with beer, and Schroeder only managed to get immensely fat. Time, the great physician, finally healed his wound, and he transferred his devotion to his son, Premysl, who, despite his legendary Czech name, was going to be German if his dad had anything to say about it. He succeeded only in part. When Molly died, her son spoke broken German, fairly good Czech, and excellent English. Having inherited a penchant for Czech girls from his father, he courted the sergeant’s daughter in American Czech and eventually married her. The mulish grandfather did succeed in getting them to christen their first-born daughter Heidemarie, to compensate for her father’s Czech name. But while the little girl knew fragments of her mother’s native tongue, the only German she picked up was a few expressions that her grandpa strictly forbade her to use.
According to the script of the play, poor tailor Fiala had seven children. But because the Czechs of Milwaukee were breeding profusely and the proprietor of the itinerant theatre company didn’t dare alienate his potential audience, Fiala brought eighteen youngsters onstage in the first act. And while the play called for the tailor’s progeny to appear only in Act One, the mothers and fathers didn’t feel that was enough, so the director included the children in the tavern scene in Act Two, although only seventeen appeared; one little fellow had been so nervous before the second act that he’d wet his pants. None of this mattered; the play’s realism had already been sabotaged when the children described in the script as “hungry babes of the poor tradesman” had appeared looking more like pages and little ladies-in-waiting at the coronation of the Queen of England. One lad was even dressed in a faithful replica of the Union Army uniform that Kapsa had worn years earlier.
To prevent the children from getting in the way during the dramatic tavern scene — which took place in what looked like a Wild West saloon — the director seated them along the bar, and the actor playing Ehrmann, the Jewish tavern-keeper, kept pouring them ginger beer. Thanks to the anti-Semitic imagination of the play’s author, Ehrmann wore a red wig and a nose enlarged with some kind of putty, and this caricature was enhanced by the requisite gestures and posture: the wringing of hands, the ingratiating stoop, the slavering mouth. The actor playing him did it all with bravura artlessness. But the sergeant noticed that he was pouring — or rather sprinkling — something from a pocket flask into the children’s glasses of ginger beer, something too golden to be lemonade. When he set it on the bar, the sergeant saw that the label on the flask read “Black Crow Whiskey”.
At that moment, behind the exaggerated gestures, the false nose, and the red wig, the sergeant recognized an old friend.
“Me? No! What woman would want me, when I don’t want a woman?” said his old friend Shake, minus the false nose and with a head as bald as if he’d used Fircut’s potion on it. The Black Crow sat on the bench between them and they could smell in the air the pleasant aroma of the final decade of the century: coal smoke from the Milwaukee railroad station. “Married? No,” said Shake, “I’m a classic example of a man with a broken heart and a guilty conscience.”
“Whose heart did you break and why did you jilt her?” asked Kapsa. “You never admitted to anything like that during the war.”
“During the war I was young and taciturn,” said the veteran. “Now I’m a garrulous old man. I feel the pangs of guilt not because I deflowered a virgin — although Rebecca was a virgin to end all virgins — but because her biblical beauty made me renounce my biblical calling.”
