The Bride of Texas (2 page)

The actions of the Kakuska family of Chicago are well documented, including the moving of their cottage; among the twelve strong men who carried it were Matej Barcal, Frantisek Hejduk, Kristuvek, and Jakub Padecky. Even the Czech-speaking black slave Breta who helps Zinkule cleanse himself of skunk stench is real, although he has no name in my source
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On the other hand, Lida Toupelikova, her brother Cyril, and her lost love Vitek Mika are characters I lifted from a nineteenth-century Czech magazine story, “Reunion on Texas Soil”, written by Josef Bunata and published in Chicago in 1898. It is a simple, rather Victorian story which sheds much light on the life of the early Czech settlers in Texas
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Of the two important non-Czech characters, Mme Sophie Sosniowski (sometimes spelled Sosnowski) actually ran a school in Columbia and asked Sherman for protection; Ursula von Hanzlitschek never existed
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Fictional are the de Ribordeauxs and their black slaves Dinah and old Uncle Habakuk. But very little in the latter characters’ stories is my fantasy; there were slaves who outwitted their masters, and there were slave girls who learned a lot by listening to their young mistresses’ tutors. Finally, I have used the word Negro thoughout this historical novel because it was the term used at that time by both African-Americans and whites
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(illustration credit frw.2)

I
T WAS RAINING
on the sycamores. A fog crept along the ground from the Salkehatchie River and out of it came the sound of tin cups clanking against haversacks. The soldiers themselves were invisible except as shadows, with the occasional flash of a bayonet when the sun broke through the clouds. Above the low blanket of fog, a flagstaff floated slowly forward, and on top of it, on a horizontal perch, sat a wet red squirrel scratching its ear with a hind leg. A piglet squealed. Still it rained on the sycamores.

“The Fifteenth,” said Sergeant Kapsa. “Logan. Good chance the old man will show up after all.”

“Who is he, anyhow?” asked Kakuska. “A nephew twice removed?”

Kakuska pointed a bandaged hand at the white tent and said, “Kil’s inside there. They can start now.”

They both looked at the tent. Beside it, under a canopy the engineers had put up when the rain started, stood the bride. She wore a snow-white dress, and Kapsa deliberately avoided looking at her face. He understood why Vitek had been blinded by the girl’s loveliness, the cascade of gold setting off her cornflower eyes, serpent’s eyes though they were. It wasn’t the colour — Kapsa had never in his life seen a snake with blue eyes. But that day in front of the shop on Savannah’s Bay Street
with the sign saying MADAM RUSSELL’S BAKERY, when she had cast a sharp, narrow look at her brother, she had hissed like a snake, “Shut up this minute, Cyril, d’you hear?” Cyril had repeated, “You shameless wench.… For her! You say you did it for her sake?” The cornflower-blue concentration of — what? Selfishness? The eyes she had narrowed when she hissed, “Shut up this minute, Cyril!” were not the pools of girlish innocence that had once reflected the clouds over Mount Radhost. And now the sergeant knew why.

“See? He got himself a new one!” Kakuska’s voice drove away the memory, and the sergeant watched the diminutive cavalryman in a general’s uniform stride over to the canopy. The incessant South Carolina rain falling on the sycamores around the tent had faded his uniform, but hadn’t had time to saturate his black plumed hat.

“He could have been shorter by a head, my friend,” he heard Kakuska say. “Last time I saw his old hat, it was flying over me like a crow, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a sword graze that shiny noggin of his.” Kakuska chuckled. “I watched the hat spin away and thought: his head could have been in it, and goodbye Kil. Well, next thing I knew, this fool thing happened,” and he raised his bandaged left hand.

With a flourish more typical of a Southerner than a Yankee officer, the tiny general swept off his splendid hat and bowed deeply before the bride. Even from behind, the sergeant could see the carefully brushed whiskers on either side of his face — whiskers that would do even that dandy Burnside proud.

Yesterday, Sherman had run out of his tent calling, “General Logan! Come here!” Logan had turned and, with two of his staff officers, marched past the sergeant, who was standing guard, into Sherman’s tent. There they’d been treated to Kilpatrick’s story-telling prowess, and so had the sergeant, since Sherman’s voice carried right through the canvas walls. Everyone knew
Aiken had been a catastrophe, and if some frightened rebel in the last bunch of sixty-year-old conscripts hadn’t opened fire prematurely, the tiny general would have been caught in an ambush and Kakuska’s vision might have come true, except that Kakuska would have been done for too. Kilpatrick’s version, however, was very different. Though short on tactical information, it echoed with the clang of blades, the flowery oaths of General Wheeler’s retreating cavalry, and the neighing of their horses — and above all this, the reassuring voice of the diminutive Kil, ordering the retreat. Why both sides were retreating wasn’t clear. And not a word about the hat. After the fray, the ambulances brought in one load of dead cavalrymen and two loads of their severely mangled comrades. Kakuska sat beside the driver, carefully resting his left elbow in his right palm, his left hand pointing skyward and wrapped in a dirty rag that turned out to be his puttee.

“Don’t know how I’ll ever live this one down,” Kapsa heard him say.

“What do you mean, live it down?” he asked. “Now, being shot in the hind quarters, that.…”

“Getting your trigger finger shot off?” wailed Kakuska. “Can you think of anything worse?”

Looking at Kakuska’s hand, now wrapped in clean white calico, the sergeant made a face. Ever since Fort Donelson, a strange epidemic of shot-off fingers had plagued the Union army. At Vicksburg they’d heard about it from young Dignowity, who had deserted to the North on principle. Before that he’d been assigned to the sharpshooters in Waul’s Texas Legion, after word got out that he’d once won a hunting competition in San Antonio. “The minute I was in uniform,” Dignowity had explained as they stood under cover, watching the Vicksburg palisades, “my eyesight got worse. Never did hit one of those fingers. But the Rebs thought it was great. Best target practice
in the world. Really!” Dignowity slapped his thigh like a farmhand. “Some Yankee was always poking his finger up over the parapet, like he was trying to tell which way the wind was blowing. Trouble was, there wasn’t so much as a breeze. So we’ll do them a favour, said the Rebs. One more Yankee with an honourable discharge, and one less finger on the trigger.”

“But they shot off your left one,” said the sergeant. “So it ain’t part of the epidemic.”

“Well, I guess that’s so,” said Kakuska with a rueful look at the bandage. “Do you think I’ll have to see this war through?”

“You were awful keen to get into it,” said the sergeant. “Surely you’re not going to quit now?”

It was still raining on the sycamores, but the sun broke through right over the tent, making it gleam white, and as the wedding party lined up, a rainbow appeared in the sky, arching over the lovely bride with the serpent’s eyes. A hand in a cavalryman’s glove pointed to the heavenly phenomenon and a murmur of excitement rippled through the company. From the low fog along the road they could still hear the tinkle of tin cups and the muffled, rhythmic thud of marching feet. By now the squirrel’s flagstaff was far down the road. The animal itself had scrambled down and vanished into the fog.

Kapsa and Kakuska stood up and walked over to the tent. Behind the canopy a wet band huddled in the rain, the bells of their instruments freshly polished. Towering over the wedding guests ahead of him was the tall figure of Franta Stejskal, who had mended his ragged uniform for the occasion. The holes were patched with scraps of green velvet, apparently the remains of some plantation lady’s evening gown, but their unseemly contrast to the faded hue of his coat was lost among the older patches, which reflected all the colours of the heavenly phenomenon overhead except red. Stejskal’s comrade, Vojta Houska, exhibited no such respect for the bride, for a hairy
white thigh showed through a tear in his trouser leg. The last member of the threesome concluding the short procession had patched the seat of his trousers with two crossed stripes of bright blue silk that bore a remarkable resemblance to the bars on the Confederate flag. The sergeant wondered if this was pure coincidence. Hardly, knowing Jan Amos Shake.

“A Czech day,” grumbled Kakuska.

“A Czech bride,” said the sergeant, and they joined the threesome. A lieutenant unfurled a fancy parasol and held it over the bride, and the sergeant tried to remember where he had last seen that article of Southern finery. It was pink with little blue flowers on it, with a strip of white lace around the edge. The inside was lined with blue satin set with tiny gold stars that glistened over the bride’s coiffure. Then the scene came alive in his mind. A funny war — horrible, but funny all the same. Shake, the clown, loping among stinking corpses of mules, wearing a lady’s huge yellow chapeau with bright green plumes and carrying the very same parasol that was now protecting the bride’s immaculate dress as she crossed the open space between the canopy and the tent. Behind Shake had been an indignant Negress — a handsome, pale brown hunk of woman holding her skirts above her knees so you could see an occasional flash of white underwear — screaming something in a dialect the sergeant didn’t understand, but he didn’t need to, it was obvious. Then Shake tripped, the hat fell off and rolled in the dust, and the brown beauty let go of her skirt and dived for the hat while Shake covered his face with his hands, thinking she was about to tackle him. But she just picked up the plumed chapeau and dusted it off. Shake got up and stood there warily while the woman shook her fist at him. Finally he understood what she was saying: “Robbing us poor niggers. My Sunday go-to-church hat!”

“Sorry, ma’am, sorry!” Shake muttered, and the woman’s gaze fell on the parasol he had dropped in the dust.

“You-all can keep that,” she said, and strode off, carrying the hat before her like a holy relic. They watched the proud figure walking away towards the white plantation house, and it occurred to the sergeant that perhaps she had beaten the scavengers to it and helped herself to her mistress’s chapeau and the fancy dress she was wearing. But God knew. She was obviously a house nigger, the aristocracy of the slave world.

That was the last time he’d seen the parasol, until it resurfaced above the golden locks of Linda Toupelik.

Kakuska said, “Another Moravian girl finds happiness.”

“And another Yankee dunce sticks his head in the yoke,” Shake grumbled, then added, “and it’s going to be one hell of a yoke, my friend. A Moravian yoke.”

The parasol was snapped shut and the bride, on her brother’s arm, followed the groom into the tent, accompanied by the diminutive Kil. There was room inside for the groom’s fellow officers, but the enlisted men had to stay outside in the rain. The front of the tent was open, though, so they could see old Reverend Mulroney waiting behind the prie-dieu, holding his well-thumbed Bible and smiling an appropriate smile.

It was still raining on the sycamores.

Then the clergyman’s gaze fell on the bride, and suddenly his smile didn’t seem so appropriate to the sergeant after all. It was as if the chaplain were looking at one of those smutty pictures Corporal Gambetta carried in his haversack and rented to soldiers for a penny when they felt the need to take off into the bushes. The minister looked from bride to groom and, when he spoke, his voice confirmed the sergeant’s suspicion.

“Dearly beloved,” he intoned, “listen while we read from the Book of Ezekiel the Prophet, chapter sixteen, verse thirteen,” and there was a gleam in his eyes as he recited in a singsong voice,
“Thou wast exceeding beautiful, and thou didst prosper into a kingdom.…
”

Shake gave a quiet chuckle.

“What is it?” whispered the sergeant, but Shake placed a finger on his lips and listened to the chaplain, who was speaking the words as if he had a mouth full of butter. The sergeant decided he’d better start paying attention too. He recalled the preacher’s first sermon for the military, before Kennesaw Mountain — the one that had made him famous, practically a legend. Mulroney had joined the army in a fit of patriotism, forsaking the safety of his parish, where his duties had included caring for the spiritual welfare of the wards of Mrs. Terrence-Willoughby’s Academy for Young Ladies, a responsibility that had certainly not prepared him for life in the army. On the eve of the bloody massacre he chose the loss of virginity as the subject for his maiden sermon. With a sheaf of yellowing paper trembling in his fingers, he stumbled over every other word, even though he was reading from his notes. As a matter of fact, since everyone’s sphincter muscles were clenched in dread of the upcoming battle, it wasn’t such a bad topic. There was none of the usual coughing and throat-clearing, and Lieutenant Matlock even quit picking his teeth with a splinter of wood, as was his custom when listening to the word of God. Even the colonel listened with interest, at least as long as the preacher stuck to virginity, its loss, and the social and physical consequences thereof. But then Mulroney switched to the consequences that lay in the hereafter, and unfortunately he departed from his yellowed notes. Perhaps it had finally dawned on him that when he’d written this sermon so many years ago, he hadn’t done so with an audience of soldiers in mind. Now he addressed his warning to men who, in his words, had sunk so low as to rob some poor maiden of her maidenhead or, worse, had actually paid money to commit a mortal sin. The association between virginity and sin was pretty flimsy, but the clergyman made up for it with a colourful description of the
torments awaiting the sinner in hell. That was when the colonel began coughing meaningfully, louder and louder, until the reverend noticed and returned to his notes, concluding with a fervent plea to virgins to preserve their treasure till marriage. Then a cannonade sounded from beyond the woods. Sergeant Kapsa thought the colonel had been set coughing by the mention of sin for sale — he was a notorious customer of the camp followers, regardless of their colour — but he was wrong; the colonel’s displeasure was moral and praiseworthy. He thanked the chaplain — very curtly — and in his most sonorous voice announced that of course those boys who went straight from the impending battle to the other world would, without exception — deflowered virgins notwithstanding — go straight to heaven. The soldiers’ sphincter muscles tightened again, and all thought of the succulent pleasures of peacetime vanished.