The Bride of Texas (16 page)

“Look at them!” he fumed. “Do they think we can’t shoot
straight, Captain Dilgher?” he barked. “Unlimber your cannon. I want to see them drop!”

“Yes, sir!” replied the captain, formerly one of Sigel’s officers back in Baden. His white shirt-sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, perhaps to indicate that operating a cannon was hard work as well as risky. He gave the order to fire in a private code he had laboriously taught the thick-headed farm boys from Ohio, and to Zinkule, the mystic, it sounded like diabolical abracadabra. Two slow claps, three rapid ones, and two more slow ones, the boys set the gun for proper elevation, the cannon roared —

— and on top of Pine Mountain the fighting bishop, General Polk, was felled by a cannonball that went right through him
.

When they read about it in one of the Rebel newspapers, Zinkule adapted the facts to suit his theory better. “The cannoneer says, ‘Abracadabra,’ and more than a mile away General Polk drops dead — the shot goes through him from his right hip to his left — and he’s a bishop!” he said, his eyes wide, his index finger in the air. “One day a cannonball rips the head off a liberated slave, the next day it drills a hole through a bishop. When we pray, we say, ‘The Lord Jesus descended from heaven to earth to lead the people from the left side to the right.’ The cannonball goes into his right side and exits from the left. It’s back to front, like the crucifix is upside-down at a witches’ sabbath, and like —”

The bride’s moans rose above the sound of creaking bedsprings
.

“He’s really giving it to her!” said Paidr
.

Just then, Kabinus whinnied like a horse
.

“She’s the one giving it to him!” said Stejskal
.

“Read the signs,” the mystic declared
.

Houska had just climbed up the hill to the tree with the alluring red berries and begun picking the fruit when he heard a loud
crack. The red crown of the tree toppled over onto him as he was stuffing a handful into his mouth. Down inside the palisades, they could see a cannonball rolling down the hill towards them, and at that moment a swarm of iron bees buzzed over the hilltop. Houska dropped to the ground and rolled down the hill like a barrel of beer, and was greeted by a volley of laughter. Although he had had only a handful of the fruit, he, like Svejkar, fell victim to the Georgia quickstep
.

“Strange are the ways of the Lord,” said Shake
.

Strange things indeed happened at the foot of Kennesaw Mountain
.

The massa’s whisky put them to sleep. They stretched out on the parlour floor and, when they woke up in the morning, each of them had one of the massa’s pillows under his head. The Negress might be in a sulk, but she had taken pity on these soldiers who spoke a strange language
.

The staircase creaked. Vendelin Kabinus, who seemed only half present, was coming down the stairs. The remains of a ham lay on the table, and when Kabinus was done with it only the bone was left for his bride to gnaw on. That day, they began the strenuous march to Savannah. Four hours later, when Colonel Connington ordered a rest and they all collapsed in the grass beside the road, Kabinus kept on marching. For a minute Lieutenant Bondy stared in amazement at the marching groom (the bride in the turban, furnished with a letter to the Wilber sheriff that Shake had translated into English for Kabinus, was hard at it again back in the master bedroom) and then he yelled, “Kabinus!” When the private didn’t respond, the lieutenant ran after him, took him by the shoulder, and turned him around. Kabinus was still marching, this time in the opposite direction. As he was about to pass them, Shake
stuck out his foot and tripped him. Kabinus fell flat on his face, looked up, blinked, and said, “Boys, I’m so tired I could cry!”

It was the longest sentence he uttered during the whole march through Georgia
.

From the depths of the elegant house came the sound of profanity. The Reverend Mother Baptista’s face stiffened. General Logan appeared between the brass lanterns, his moustache bristling like Hauptmann von Hanzlitschek’s. He was clutching Sherman’s letter and uttering words that the sergeant wouldn’t have dared use in the presence of ladies.

Then Logan saw the Reverend Mother Baptista, and the gentleman in him prevailed.

“Forgive me, madam,” he said. “Or Reverend Mother. This house belongs to the traitor Preston, and was to be burned down. Were it not for this letter” — he shook the paper under the scowling nun’s nose — “the job would have been done today. So kindly forgive me my use of certain expressions.” He looked around. The wind had picked up and the burning flakes of cotton were swirling through the air like swarms of lightning bugs. “It would have made a splendid torch!” He pointed at the devil’s fist smouldering on the horizon. “But if General Sherman wishes otherwise — so be it!” He pushed the paper into the Reverend Mother’s hand and jumped into the saddle. The group of officers followed; the foot soldiers formed a ragged line and, enveloped in smoke and soot, marched off behind the riders. A group of Negroes emerged from the intact Methodist church across the street, singing:

On horseback, the general seemed larger than life. The soldiers didn’t look back, marching eastwards through the smoke and the burning snowflakes.

Somewhere deep inside himself, the sergeant heard a different song, in a different language which was — perhaps still — his own.

In his mind he saw a skull split in two by a cavalryman’s sabre, the grey bubble of the student’s brain. Hauptmann von Hanzlitschek; the bloodied grocer, his lips a barely perceptible line; the gauntlet formed by his fellow soldiers armed with willow switches. He gave his head a shake, then saw General Kilpatrick hunched over on horseback beside the pontoon bridge as his cavalry galloped across it. The general was looking down at a crater in the road, the mangled corpses of the sergeant’s fellow soldiers scattered on either side, farmers’ brains splattered across the South Carolina mud. The general yelled, “When I annihilate that hellish cesspool of secession, Johnny Reb, there won’t be much of you left to wipe out!” He saw the towering General Slocum staring at the astonished face of a dead soldier from Ohio, the bottom half of whose body was missing. “This is no way to make war!” Then the sergeant saw his own general writing an order, his gaunt face crumpled into a scowl. “Nothing but war matériel and public —” and a courier rushed in with news that Rebel mines buried in the road by the pontoon
bridge over the Savannah River had exploded as a platoon of the Eighth Ohio was approaching the bridge, tearing seven soldiers to pieces. Sherman tossed the uncompleted order on the floor. Behind him, General Howard made the sign of the cross: “This is no way to make war!” Sherman dipped his pen and began a new sheet, and Howard opened his Bible. He read softly,
“ ‘Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it.’
 ” Sherman stopped writing and engaged in a struggle with the Lord, while General Howard prayed softly. Then Sherman reached under the table, picked up the discarded order, dipped his pen in the ink, and went on writing — “buildings in Columbia should be burned.” The sergeant knew that the fire that had destroyed a third of the city was the will of the Lord, not that of General Sherman. In Charleston, in the home of a brother of a friend of the general’s, a white-collared Episcopalian clergyman had stood in the corner of the room. Sherman was saying his farewells when the clergyman said, “General, could you please order your men not to destroy our seminary library? It contains many rare volumes of American history and the history of the classical world, and European history —” The general spun around. A week earlier, Father Toomer Porter had still been preaching, and the sergeant wondered what his sermon had been about. The rough face scowled. “Have no fear,” he said. “But since you have so many history books,” he continued bitterly, “you should have seen to it that your students read them better. They might have learned enough history to keep them from starting a war.”

Logan’s soldiers marched through the fire, smoke, and dusk. Voices came from the Methodist church behind them:

“Madame Sosniowski,” asked the sergeant, “have you ever lived in Helldorf, in the Tyrolean Alps?”

Burning snow was falling on the Congaree River.

Cyril had shown up that night and, over the night sounds of Savannah coming through the window, the Negro bands, the cries of delight from the gay ladies of Madam Russell’s Bakery and the Dutch Maids Riding School, had told the story of his little sister while Kakuska snored away in the corner over the disassembled cuckoo clock. Cyril reminisced about that time long ago, before they had left for America. Kapsa knew the countryside Cyril was talking about. He was from a different region, but the miles and the years had shrunk the tiny land into a single bittersweet picture of fragrant manure piles and dark forests, of tiny mountainous fields beneath a brutal August sun, torture chambers where old, overworked men of thirty had one foot in the grave. A brief youth, a brief old age. He knew the life. He had never felt homesick for the mushroom-filled forests, the undulating foothills, young women redolent of fresh wild thyme — not even in the garrisons of Louisiana, Dakota, or California, or in the rocky valleys of Arizona. He longed neither for the old country nor for Annie, torn from his grasp by the army, by a realistic father, by obedience; he couldn’t even remember what she looked like. Ursula was the only one he ever missed. For years he had nightmares about what had become of her, her years in prison or possibly her last few moments on the gallows. But eventually Ursula too became no more than a picture in a locket at the bottom of his knapsack, beneath a pile of images from his new life. Gradually even the locket faded into
half-memory, and besides, there were the cyprians in establishments like Madam Russell’s, and skilful professionals from Mexico, and once he’d even been consoled by a Czech woman in Chicago, the wife of a buddy, but it wasn’t consolation he was after, just relief. The land itself was his consolation. Unlike the country he came from, this land was endless. He had marched through it, ridden over it on horseback, by railroad, from garrison to garrison. A kaleidoscopic land. The army — once a trap in which his brief, almost happy youth had ended — became a mother to him, the Thirteenth Regiment of the United States Army —