The Bride of Texas (19 page)

The train sounded close at hand, and the gendarme finally made up his mind. He stepped over to Lida and took her by the arm. “Fräulein, how old would you be?”

“Six!” hissed the girl
.

“Let her go!” the Oberleutnant said, ominously but not persuasively. “Do you know who I am?”

“I do, sir,” said the gendarme, “But the law is the law. The Reverend Father here will be my witness.” He gave Lida Toupelik’s arm a tug, and she grabbed Vitek and hung on. Vitek threw a punch at the gendarme, but the gendarme was well trained and ducked the blow
.

“In the name of the law,” he said, raising his rifle, “you are under arrest!” And he slammed Vitek across the head with the stock
.

Vitek went down
.

Lida pushed the priest away, and he attempted no more than to make the sign of the cross in her direction. She just stuck her tongue out at him
.

She returned to Lhota alone. Well, not quite alone, for she had a shadow. The old soldier hobbled along behind her the whole way, and slept at the door of the stable where she spent the night. By midnight the following day they were in Lhota. The old soldier got his bonus. Old Mika went to the town jail to pick up his son in the buggy. Lida stopped going to mass. Within a month, she knew that the Patroness of Fortunate Conception had done her work well
.

Dr. Sosniowski had treated the Polish wounded. Finally there were more wounded than able-bodied, and he was captured by the Cossacks with a rifle in his hands. They exiled him to Siberia for ten years. Because he was an educated man, the tsar (who didn’t believe in equality between the classes) allowed his young wife to accompany him into exile. They rattled across the vastness of Russia in a carriage, in the company of indifferent, desperate, and desperately rough Russian soldiers. It took them three months to get to a remote village in the far northern reaches of the taiga, where smelly muzhiks caught scrawny fish in a half-frozen river and the couple had to report each week to the tsar’s local agent, who reeked of vodka. There were four other exiles in the village: a writer, two lawyers, and a mad priest. They were all Russians. The writer owned a handful of books: Voltaire, Rousseau, a Russian translation of Tom Paine, and the Declaration of Independence. Dr. Sosniowski was often in poor health. His wife looked after him as best she could, and brought him remedies from an old vodka-soaked herbalist, but they always made him feel worse; in the
end she tended him only with love. It wasn’t even physical love any more, because in exile it was mainly the soul that clung to life.

“We often talked about the brutality of the Cossacks,” she said as they approached the white school. “And also about America.”

“We’re fighting this war to rid America of everything that’s like Russia,” said the sergeant.

“But must you fight it so brutally?”

“The more brutal it is, the shorter it will be,” he replied, quoting his general again. “And Sherman’s not a murderer. He does everything he can so as few of his men are killed as possible. He’s convinced that the life of one soldier is worth more than —” He looked around. On the bank of the Congaree River, a luxurious summer place stood burning as the fiery snow floated down on it. “— than this. Sherman isn’t a killer. He destroys things, maybe, but he doesn’t kill. Not like the Russians. Just remember.”

She sighed. “Perhaps you are right.”

The sergeant’s anger quickly subsided. “He gets no pleasure out of destroying things, either,” he added. “He does what he has to, to end the war fast. Sometimes people suffer. But he finds no pleasure in their troubles. Never!”

That was not entirely true.

In the long run — in the very long run — the conception was indeed a fortunate one. Otherwise old Toupelik would never have got moving, if only because there wasn’t the money. It was haying time again, and this time it was he who appeared at the edge of Mika’s field. And it was old Mika who laid aside his scythe, knowing that only something urgent would make the man leave his
work at midday and trudge the three kilometres through the July heat from his three roods square to the farmer’s ample fields. In any case, Mika knew what had brought him. Now, in the middle of haying, it couldn’t be anything else
.

“Father’d been thinking about America for a long time. Everyone who was poor thought about it,” said Cyril. “But two things got in their way. One was money. Boat tickets for five adults cost a fortune. The other thing was that people didn’t know much about America; the Austrian authorities saw to that. They hardly ever let the papers write anything about America, and when they did it was usually an article translated from a German newspaper about the horror emigrants could expect to face, how many died on the voyage, and how those who survived were scalped by Indians. But some things got through to the general public.” Cyril laughed. “I know you’ve been here since ’50, but you did say you used to read Havlicek’s newspaper —”

“I did,” said the sergeant. “That’s what got me thinking about going to America in the first place. Except I was in the army.”

“Lesikar and Klacel,” said Cyril. “Those two are the ones to blame, or give the credit to, depending on your point of view. Klacel was a monk and a jack-of-all-trades. He wrote poems, and later on, they say, he and his abbot played God. They used to experiment with peas in the monastery garden; then Abbot Mendel wrote it up in German. Lesikar was my father’s third cousin. He was a tailor and farmed a small piece of land, but he got mixed up in politics, so, after the revolution of ’48 fell through, the gendarmes never gave him any peace. Lesikar had piles of books, and that’s mainly what they were after. He was hand in glove with some woman writer called Bozena Nemcova, a real beauty, and Lesikar told me later on, when we were in Texas, that she had a fun-loving little snatch. But she was involved in politics too, and so was her husband. Anyway, Lesikar put one over on the gendarmes. He put the banned books in a box in the root cellar, then he borrowed some
harmless books from an old woman in the neighbourhood who was a Protestant like him, and stuck them in his shelves. The gendarmes went straight for his books, but what could they do to him for stuff like
The Courage of Brunclik, The Farmer’s Almanac, The Loves of Countess Tubing,
or
Jirik’s Vision
?
They confiscated a dream book
, Your Dreams Explained,
but he got it back later — with illegible German scrawls in the margins, and one dream blacked out with India ink. Even they couldn’t arrest him for a single dream in a seven-hundred-page book. Anyway, Lesikar dissolved the censor’s ink with Hoffman drops, and guess what the page said? “If you dream of seeing a jackass on the throne, misery will engulf the land.”

Outside, banjos were kachinking. “I’d have arrested him,” the sergeant said. “After all, that dream came true, didn’t it?”

“They didn’t arrest him, but they kept harassing him,” Cyril continued. “So, just for the fun of it, he kept adding to his collection
. The Glory of the House of Hapsburg, Amusing Incidents in the Life of the Monarch.
And for all he was a Protestant
, The Meaning of the Five Stars in the Crown of our Patron Saint, St. John of Nepomuk.
The gendarmes weren’t interested in any of them. So after a while they left him alone, and he gave the old woman back her dream book, and to be on the safe side he kept
Amusing Incidents,
and he even dug up a copy of its sequel
, Sad Moments in the Life of the Monarch.
Once he stopped by our place before he left for Texas, in ’50, and he translated passages from one of his subversive books for us
, Das Kajutenbuch
by Charles Sealsfield. Lesikar said Sealsfield was a Czech whose real name was Karel Postl, but he started calling himself Charles Sealsfield after he came to America. He was one of the first; he came here sometime in the ’20s. Lesikar translated bits of what he wrote about Texas. And that was what put the bug in Father’s ear about coming to America.” Cyril fell silent for a while, and they listened to the Negroes singing
.

“That’s it,” nodded Cyril. “Printing articles about America in the newspapers was forbidden, but Lesikar got a crafty idea. Back then, Klacel was editor of
The Moravian News.
It used to come to our village. Mika would read it and then pass it on to his neighbours, including my father. Lesikar got his hands on a letter from Reverend Bergman, a Lutheran pastor from Skruzna who’d emigrated to Texas in ’50, got the job of pastor for the German Lutherans in Cat Springs in Austin County, and started writing letters back home about what life was like in Texas. The letters passed from hand to hand but only a few people ever got to read them, so Lesikar and Klacel decided to publish one in
The Moravian News
in a section called ‘From our Readers’. Lesikar figured that a letter wasn’t news, but to help them get away with it they published an anti-emigration article in the same issue to pacify the censor. It worked. True, they never let them print anymore of his letters, but one was enough. It put the Texas bug in a lot of people’s ears. The paper got into every village and pretty soon the letter had done its work. In spite of the horror stories, people began emigrating in droves. Lesikar went too. Fine, but to emigrate you had to have a little money, at least, and Father didn’t have a bean. Our cow was dead, we couldn’t afford another one, the crop had failed three years in a row, and boat tickets for five adults were out of the question,” said Cyril
.

“But they say every cloud has a silver lining,” Cyril said, “and it sure was true for us.”

For me too, thought the sergeant. If the Hauptmann hadn’t gone snooping and — well, slipped on the moss — or if his suspicions of cuckoldry had been dampened by alcohol and the sergeant had been able to spend months in the paradise called Gottestischlein, and then if von Hanzlitschek’s regiment had been transferred somewhere else, he’d have been out of sight. He would never have thought of deserting, and being out of her sight would have put him out of her mind.…

Then, Cyril explained, two things happened to decide matters. First, Lida was pregnant, and something had to be done about it. Cyril could see that his father was making up his mind about something. The crimps were snooping around the district, and Cyril’s own future was inevitable: he was about to turn twenty, so it would be a soldier’s white tunic for him. But he had no idea what his father had in mind. Old man Toupelik wasn’t one to confide in his family
.

Then the second thing happened. It turned out his distant cousin in faraway Texas hadn’t forgotten him. The day before Toupelik abandoned the mid-afternoon haying and walked almost three kilometres to the edge of Mika’s field, a letter had arrived from Lesikar. Toupelik read it aloud to his family over their dry potatoes:

“Cat Spring is neither a town nor a village, as we understand them. The countryside is wild and beautiful with numerous trees, hills, and enchanting valleys, and there is a winding road all the way to Galveston, though no railroad as yet. It was not easy here at first, dear cousin, but beginnings are always difficult. We lived in a simple log cabin that we built without using a single nail. It had only holes for windows, and the doors were made of scraps of wood or pieces of cloth, regular lumber being scarce. None of this was to my dear wife’s liking, but she never once complained, and I sought
and found solace in our freedom. I never once felt homesick, for in my case there was nothing I could do to be of any aid to my former homeland, nor could it have helped me one iota. I relish the liberty and freedom here. I am not one of those people who, I dare say, are immature, who cling to their mothers’ apron-strings. I have never complained and our circumstances have constantly improved. The only thing we missed were our Czech books. But there have to be some sacrifices, and otherwise I was doing well. Wheat thrives here, and so do rye and corn, but the most highly valued crop is cotton. In two years I was able to buy seventy acres of land.”