The Bride of Texas, page 58
“But there was a happy ending,” Bozenka reassured herself, glancing at the famous author. The Negro woman in the iridescent silk was still talking and gesticulating eagerly.
Mr. Ohrenzug hesitated. “It’s all in how you take it. She had the footman’s mother on her side, the one who’s responsible for the dishes making your mouths water,” he said, looking around the table.
Shake declared, “The lady’s cooking is beyond reproach. What I don’t understand, though —”
“She gets it straight from God,” Colonel Ohrenzug interjected hastily. “You don’t need schooling for that. In fact, you can’t learn to cook like this in any school.”
Shake looked him firmly and silently in the eye. In a nervous tone, the colonel asked, “Would you like some more?”
“Did I hear you say this Jasmine opened a restaurant?” asked Shake.
“So to speak.”
“And you also said the footman’s mother is on her side?”
“I did,” admitted Mr. Ohrenzug, and stopped short.
“What I don’t understand, then,” said Shake, without taking his eyes off the colonel, who lowered his gaze, “is why the mother stayed with you when her daughter-in-law opened a restaurant and her son waits on tables there.”
“He’s really a bouncer,” Mr. Ohrenzug explained. “What I mean to say is, it’s not all that fancy a restaurant.”
“Are you saying that your cook refused to work in a low-class place?”
“That’s what I’m saying. She resents it that Jasmine is —” He halted.
Shake was still looking into his eyes. He asked, “Where is this place?”
“I’m not exactly sure. Some place between Dearborn and Clark.”
Houska, who was busy cleaning his plate, looked up as though he wanted to say something. But Mr. Ohrenzug, with considerable effort and forced levity, quickly changed the subject: “Things looked pretty dim for the girl,” he said, nodding towards the booth where the famous author was shaking hands with the man with the weather-beaten face. The Negro woman had stopped gesturing and was gazing at the man as though he were the president. “To that fool over there” — the colonel nodded towards the handsome doorman — “the Chicago chambermaid seemed like a better match. Both girls were good-looking, both were pale yellow, and both were chambermaids. Bee was employed by a general’s wife. The two girls got into a fight over him, and Bee whipped Jasmine. Trounced her! Almost tore one of her ears off. She’d have lost it for sure if Dr. Walenta hadn’t sewn it back on. Meanwhile, the general’s wife started planning a wedding.”
The sergeant noticed Bozenka frowning at Ohrenzug. “For Bee and Hasdrubal?” she asked.
“Yes. For Bee and Hasdrubal.”
“So Jasmine can’t be the Carolina Bride,” Bozenka remarked sadly.
“She was some Bee!” chuckled the colonel. “She should have been called Hornet! The big fight happened the night before the wedding. The general was off on one of his frequent business trips, bragging about his glass eye somewhere in Albany, and the wedding dress was laid out on the double bed he shared with his wife. Jasmine’s dress couldn’t compare. The general’s wife and Bee were as close as sisters. And what do you think happened?”
In a shed in the courtyard where Gospel had put her, Jasmine was thinking of poison and considering suicide, but a sudden outburst in the general’s home made her prick up her good ear. It was female voices screaming in the master bedroom — the general’s wife and Bee. “Pandemonium broke loose,” continued Mr. Ohrenzug. “Twice a male voice grumbled something amid the female screams, but each time Jasmine could hear a resounding slap. Bee has a nasty temper.”
“So what was wrong?” asked Vojta Houska. All three women looked at him as if they couldn’t believe their ears. Padecky tried to comment but couldn’t; his mouth was full of sauerkraut.
“It’s obvious,” said Shake.
With a painful gulp Padecky swallowed the sauerkraut and went into a rage.
“As close as sisters? She was an officer’s slut!” he yelled. “But what can a fellow expect from women? Vipers is what they are, each one as bad as the next!” He seemed to be responding to some profound experience, rather than sounding off for the sheer pleasure of it as he normally did.
“Calm down, Padecky!” Ruzena scolded him.
“Why should I calm down?”
“Not every woman is a bitch,” said Molly.
“That, from you, who —”
“She doesn’t mean herself,” Bozenka tried to help out. “I mean to say —”
“— a merry widow?!” Padecky roared.
“Was sagt er?” Schroeder asked.
“Who was she?” asked Shake.
Padecky looked startled. “Who was who?”
“The one,” said Shake, “who makes you damn the whole female race.”
Padecky stiffened. “You knew her?”
“No, I didn’t,” said Shake. “I haven’t the faintest idea who she is.”
“So why are you asking? And why don’t you mind your own business, dammit? And why am I getting so excited if you don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“You’re shouting,” said Shake. “It’s upsetting the customers.”
“What customers?” Padecky looked around. The people looking at them seemed more interested than upset.
“So will I ever find out what the fight was about?” asked Houska.
Almost softly, Padecky said, “You? Probably not.”
The door opened to the drumbeat of rain. The sergeant turned and saw a tall, straight figure with a gigantic general’s moustache, but it was just Stejskal, who had made sergeant too by the war’s end and had become one of General Williams’s bodyguards. Beside him was a tiny, wiry fellow who also wore an immense moustache. They approached the table and joined them.
“But there was a happy ending, wasn’t there?” insisted Bozenka.
In the booth, Jasmine was pouring a drink for the man with the weather-beaten face, from a carafe of lovely liquid that gleamed in the candlelight.
“It depends on how you take it,” said Mr. Ohrenzug. “Bee packed up that very night and left by carriage. A week later she came back for her wedding dress. Now she’s married to some consul in the Republic of Haiti, they say. Dr. Walenta fixed up the general’s wife — he was already experienced in that kind of thing — and Hasdrubal got off unscathed. When he saw that things were getting serious, he didn’t hang about for a third slap in the face.”
For a while no one spoke. Then Houska said, “Aha!”
They all turned to look at him, but Houska didn’t notice. He said, “But it’s odd she married him, if he cheated on her like that.”
“Don’t you know women, stupid?” exclaimed Padecky.
“I don’t,” said Houska. “That’s why I’m asking.”
“Maybe she’s the Carolina Bride after all, then,” said Bozenka. “They don’t say love can move mountains for nothing.”
The sergeant took a swig of his beer. He had secretly poured a shot into it from the little bottle he’d refilled at the bar earlier, and now he allowed his thoughts to flow back and forth through time. Ursula, Josef, burning turpentine forests, Vitek.
It was Martin Touska who spread the news back in Lhota. Vitek’s neighbour Vantouch brought it back from town, where he’d gone to the mill. Touska sat in the driver’s seat of the buggy, his empty right sleeve pinned up, but it didn’t matter. Lida had long since been “out of sight”, but the rest of the proverb didn’t apply to Vitek. He had almost made up his mind, but his father wasn’t letting him have any money. The fellow with one arm was like a sign: an idea, a possibility, opened up. Vitek ran away. The crimps were in the district capital. A month later Vitek was in the Tyrol, in two he was on a ship, in half a year he was undergoing trial by fire in Matamoros, in the hot and humid summer of a faraway land, but near the place where she had disappeared from sight, so love does move mountains. Then he met Josef in Matamoros, and Josef told Cyril, and Cyril told the sergeant. By then Mother Toupelik had died. The turpentine forests were burning. After that, Cyril too vanished in the tropical shade of war — Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados.
He heard Stejskal’s voice making introductions: “Jake Duty. The one who laid the mine at Petersburg. They made him a first lieutenant for that.” The whisky rose to the sergeant’s head.
“I looked it over through a crack in the palisade,” said the diminutive man with the big moustache, “and I said to myself, if we tunnel under the parapet and pack a big enough charge inside, we can blow up the whole damned fortress, leave a big hole like pulling a giant’s tooth.” He sniggered. “We were going to do something like that, only smaller, at Vicksburg, but the Rebs got the same idea. There we were, digging a shaft; I stopped for a nap and what did I hear — a shovel scraping. I look around, all our crew are taking a snooze —” The little guy tipped up his beer stein, took a huge swallow, and began to choke.
Ruzena pounded his back with her fist, but Stejskal shook his head. “It’s no use, his lungs are full of dust from working in the mines.” The little fellow was desperately gasping for breath. “Come on, Jake,” said Stejskal, helping him to his feet. They all watched as Stejskal took his friend towards the room marked “Gentlemen”.
“All the same, colonel,” Shake piped up, “if the cook and her son were so close —”
“They had a disagreement,” Mr. Ohrenzug interrupted, his face reddening.
“What about?”
“She —” Mr. Ohrenzug turned a shade darker. “She wanted him to marry Bee. He could be living in a consulate in Haiti today, if —”
“I thought you said she favoured Jasmine,” Bozenka said.
“Did I say that? I must have been mis —”
“And if Hasdrubal had married Bee, how could she have been a consul’s wife in Haiti?” asked the sergeant’s wife.
Mr. Ohrenzug said feebly, “I suppose I.…”
“Mr. Ohrenzug, you’re lying through your teeth!” Molly Schroeder said sternly. The sergeant furtively poured another shot into his beer while his wife scowled at the colonel. He took a swig and the voices faded.
When Lida (or Linda) went home to her mother’s funeral, she was pregnant again, this time with Baxter Warren III, a son and heir. Once again she gave Cyril her word of honour. He didn’t believe her, but she said, “Why would I lie to you, Cyril, tell me that? She was really gone. In Savannah I could easily have said I had troubles enough of my own. But I didn’t, I really tried to keep an eye on her for you.”
“But why, Lida? Why?”
“Well,” said his sister, fashionably dressed now, rich — that time in Washington she had also had a mourning ribbon on her hat — “partly on account of you. That tea-rose of yours, heaven knows what kind of abracadabra —” She looked across the fields towards the de Ribordeaux plantation in the distance, past the graveyard where a fresh mound of soil lay on the family grave where they had laid their mother to rest beside their father. “I could have made him sell her south, you know. But I went through all that rigmarole with the blacksmith’s wife —”
“Crash!” he heard Jake Duty exclaim. Kapsa hadn’t noticed him return to their table. “Crash!” Jake repeated. “The head of the tunnel started shifting and in the light of my lantern I saw a fellow in butternut with a spade. Like I said, they’d had the same idea and we were tunnelling under the parapet from opposite sides. So I swung at him with my pickaxe, he swung back with his spade — and boys, we fought the Rebs underground, hand to hand.”
“Did you take any prisoners?”
“We fought off their attack, but we had to retreat. Our plan was blown and any more digging was out of the question. But at Petersburg I saw the chance right off, as soon as I took a look through the crack in the palisade. Somebody behind me says, ‘Think we could do it?’ I turn around and there’s Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Pleasants. All of us in the Forty-eighth Pennsylvania were black-coal miners from the Schuylkill. ‘You bet, colonel!’ I say. ‘What about ventilation?’ he asks. ‘You’d have to dig almost two hundred yards.’ ”
Cyril never told Lida about the bug the blacksmith’s wife had planted in his ear. He went back to Chicago, where he was a partner in a machinists’ firm, but the idea was firmly planted. They say love moves mountains. “God knows,” he admitted to Kapsa, “maybe she just gave up. Besides,” he said sadly, “I’m not of the same blood she is.”
“As if that mattered!” the sergeant said.
“God knows,” said Cyril, and left.
The sergeant got up and walked towards the gentlemen’s room, stopping at the bar on his way.
When she saw him, Ursula exclaimed, “Ach, Tasche! Kapsa! Mein lieber Mann!” and she took him by the hands. “All that is not true,” she said.
“It’s not,” he replied. “But I never even thanked you, Madam —”
“Ursula.”
“Ursula.”
“And what about me? Who should I have thanked?” She smiled, and that was that. Something rose up in him, a strong sensation, gratitude, but that was that.
Then he said, “This cheque really belongs to you. I couldn’t even manage to hang onto your precious gift.”
“But the jewels brought you luck.”
“That they did,” he said.
“I gave them to you. And now they’re actually back in the family.”
“But this cheque —”
She interrupted him: “You said you have a daughter?” So the nest of crystal eggs would buy a dowry for Terezka. He looked into her eyes. Gottestischlein. She stepped closer to him, then they embraced, and as they were kissing, his mind turned into a kaleidoscope — the soothing sweet water, the miracle, and how she said in her sweet German, so unlike that of Hauptmann von Hanzlitschek, “Oh, you dear man! You’re even making progress with the German language!” Then the bloody welt on Ursula’s back where the bullwhip struck … he felt the happiness that could not have been real rising in him, centering on his underbelly — and she extricated herself from his embrace, and whispered passionately, gently, joyfully, “Danke, thank you, mein lieber Mann, thank you, thank you, thank you!”
He came to his senses, felt ashamed, then grateful, then joyful. He walked out of the house, glanced back at the two-headed eagle, and never saw her again. It was with the last, whispered, gentle, passionate words that she had remained alive in his mind.
He came out of the gentlemen’s room and saw his general, hesitated, and returned to his table.
“A thunderclap!” Jake Duty was saying. “An explosion like the world never saw before or since. A huge mass of earth, dirt, palisades, cannon, and Rebels flew straight up in the air, with a column of fire and a head of smoke like a great mushroom. Then it all fell back down again, men — whole ones and parts — a caisson wheel, a horse’s quarters with a leg attached —” Cornflower-blue serpent’s eyes. How was it Bozenka put it? Some proverbs prove true, some don’t. “The plan,” he heard Jake Duty go on, “was to launch an attack through that gaping hole. And it should have worked, they could have been in Petersburg in an hour, but the blast was so awful that everyone was scared. To top it off, our artillery cut loose and made a racket like the world had never heard. Ledlie’s division was supposed to lead the assault but they stood there with their mouths hanging open, and when they finally got moving, instead of securing the gap, they jumped into the crater and started helping the wounded and buried Rebels. It wasn’t until two more divisions joined them that the shooting started in The Crater, and soon it was such a mess that nobody knew who anyone was. To top it off, General Ledlie stayed out of it, probably because he’d been drinking under the palisade, shitting bricks. Small wonder. Then a well-drilled nigger division came marching into all that madness as if they were on the parade ground and, on top of everything, they were singing! Of course, their commander turned them loose into that madhouse by themselves, while he stayed under cover, boozing with Ledlie. Some commanders we had! Burnside wanted to send the niggers in first, partly to prove to the doubting Thomases that they were as good as anyone else, and in fact he’d drilled them to do this for two weeks before. But then Burnside thought it over and instead he sent the white divisions, who hadn’t trained for it. He bungled it the way he did at Fredericksburg.”
“Remember? Remember, buddy? Perryville. And us among all those awful bubbles!” It was a happy Salek-Cup. How things changed. Somebody called it the alchemy of time. The sergeant took a drink of his fortified beer. That was alchemy too. They had fought at Perryville with their tongues hanging out. All that was left of it were the tales of Jan Amos Shake. Cup, first widowed, then divorced, now happy again —
“An apartment house?” asked the sergeant.
“He has two of them, in Prague. One in Zizkov district, one in the Lesser Town,” said Cup. “And a fruit and vegetable store on the Small Square. My father-in-law and I, we’re colleagues,” he declared happily. “Both of us were patriots, we belong to the Sokols. Me in Chicago, him in Prague. The first time I saw Jirinka, my second wife, was with the Sokols —”
“And how come you weren’t afraid to go home for the Sokol Assembly?” the sergeant interrupted him. “After all, they’re such patriots and you’re a deserter. You bombarded the Lesser Town.”
