The Bride of Texas (3 page)

The chaplain had improved since Kennesaw Mountain. Not that he’d abandoned his favourite themes, but there were no more notes. Nowadays he spoke of virginity extempore, and sounded to the sergeant like someone reading from one of those blue novels Corporal Gambetta rented out for three cents a day, though the chaplain cleverly shrouded the erotic details in biblical allegory. The sergeant watched the ears of the two men flanking the bride — the groom, Baxter Warren, and the best man, Cyril Toupelik — grow redder and redder.
“How beautiful are thy feet, the joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman”
— even the sergeant could recognize Mulroney’s departure from Ezekiel —
“thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins
 —” sighed the preacher, gazing at the bride with lascivious eyes. None of this brought so much as a blush to the bride’s cheeks.

It was still raining on the sycamores.

At last the blushing groom kissed his pale bride, and the best man kissed his sister and spoke aloud, but in Czech: “Well,
Lidunka, you’ve humped your way into the upper classes after all!” Now it was the bride’s turn to blush, and cold fire flashed in her blue eyes. She turned her back on him and planted a kiss right on the mouth of the diminutive general. Kilpatrick flushed. The sergeant thought it over. That evening, at the campfire, Shake said, “So Kil was one of her …?”

“But he didn’t pan out, he couldn’t have,” declared Kakuska. “He’s the biggest wick-dipper in Sherman’s army. He’ll never get hitched.”

“That’s what I can’t figure,” said Stejskal. “Ugly runt like him, practically a hunchback, and women —”

“He ain’t a runt where it matters,” said Kakuska. “Believe me, I saw it with my own two eyes.” The sergeant had heard the story before — how, one November night, little Kil had come galloping up to the house by the train tracks leading another horse bearing two black girls mounted like men. A platoon of the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin was marching past, led by Corporal Gambetta, and the sight of those dark thighs in the moonlight drew an almost unanimous whistle of appreciation from the unit. Laughing, Kilpatrick hopped down from his saddle and helped the two beauties dismount.

Kakuska saluted and said, “A good night to you, general, sir!”

Kilpatrick’s smile flashed in the gathering darkness. “And to you, corporal.” He turned and ushered the two young women to the other side of the building, where the door was. Soon the upstairs windows were filled with light and Kakuska could hear the tinkling of glass and the sounds of girlish giggles. Later on, silence fell, bedsprings creaked, and conquered women moaned. Then several shots rang out in the distance. Apparently Braxton Bragg’s sharpshooters were practising over near Augusta, or maybe Wheeler’s cavalry had brushed up against Kil’s skirmishers. Kakuska felt horny, and he cursed his general,
though it wasn’t his fault. In the end he relieved himself and fell asleep.

He was awakened by a terrible racket. From the barricades on the other side of the train tracks he could hear the ringing of horses’ hoofs, the clash of metal on metal, shouting, the crack of pistols. He jumped up as someone tossed a burning torch over the fence onto a woodpile near a chicken coop. Terrified chickens flapped and cackled loudly as they shot out the door. Kil’s cavalrymen, who had been sleeping in blankets around the dying fire, woke up. The horses strained at their tethers in panic. On the other side of the house someone slashed at the door with a sword, and an upstairs window flew open. In the moonlight a group of riders carrying a banner with two crossed bands of stars galloped around the fence. Kakuska untied his horse but, before he could mount, a figure in a white nightshirt jumped out of the upstairs window, the nightshirt ballooning, and by the light of the burning woodpile and the full moon Kakuska caught a glimpse of his general’s natural endowments.

“But he sure knows how to brawl,” Kakuska said later. “He was still there come dawn, yelling orders at the troops, in his nightshirt. Finally we fell back to Waynesboro, where the Wisconsins had built light fortifications, and he strutted about half-naked behind the palisades until his orderly found him another pair of trousers. Wheeler took Kil’s own trousers as booty, along with those two black tarts, but they got away from him and when we took Augusta, Kil had them in tow again, this time in a carriage.”

The flames of the campfire flickered on the faces of these soldiers, all of them from a distant land. Long, tall Stejskal, ten years in the land of the Yankees, more than two in the army, a veteran of General Sigel’s Eleventh Corps, a survivor of Chancellorsville. He’d almost met his Maker there, but in the end it
only cost him a silver pocketwatch and twelve bucks and he’d ended up in Libby prison. Actually, he didn’t end up there, because back then they were still exchanging prisoners. He made the whole march from Georgia and now he was in his general’s bodyguard. The sergeant glanced over to Vojta Houska, another South Bohemian. He looked just as Kapsa had always imagined Silly Jack in the fairy-tales — narrow forehead, hair down to his eyebrows, but, like the inveterate fairy-tale hero, he was no coward. He had volunteered for Farragut’s insane expedition along the unnavigable rivers and bayous around Vicksburg. Beside Houska sat Paidr, tireless writer of letters home to his mum in Iowa, letters he’d read aloud at the drop of a hat to anyone who’d listen. Item by item, they contained his entire military career: Gettysburg under General Howard, Chattanooga with the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin, Wauhatchie, McLaren’s nocturnal assault on General Hooker, the battle for Lookout Mountain. Not an undistinguished military record. And Kakuska, whose love of horses dated back to his native village near Tabor in Bohemia, and later the farm near Manitowoc where he’d enlisted when Lincoln issued his first call for volunteers. Why? In his knapsack he carried a picture of his pretty young wife, who had set out all by herself across the pond to join him, and whom he hadn’t seen in almost three years. Why? Once he had tried to get some leave. By then he’d been in the army a year and three months.

“A year and three months?” smiled the benign General Ritchie, famous for having had his life saved by the Bible in his breast pocket. He used to show it around — there was in fact a piece of lead shot, a minnie, buried in it, as though a jeweller had mounted it there. “A year and three months? I haven’t seen my wife in two years, corporal. If a general can lay a sacrifice like that on the altar of the Union, so can a corporal.”

“Well, general, sir,” Kakuska responded circumspectly in
his South Bohemian accent, so that the pious general apparently wasn’t sure he quite understood, “I don’t know you and your missus, but the good God made me and my wife a little bit different.” Perhaps the devout general understood the words but not the idea. The sergeant wondered what the pretty farmer’s wife in Wisconsin was sacrificing on the altar of the Union, but he quickly suppressed the nasty thought and moved his attention to the next soldier. Jan Amos Schweik — known in the army as Shake — veteran of Lincoln’s Slavonic Rifles of Chicago, who, unlike almost everyone else in the company, hadn’t deserted, though there was hardly a greater coward in all of Sherman’s army. Once he had held up an attack at Vicksburg for twenty minutes by starting to pray very loudly; his colonel, who was more pious than General Ritchie and a Catholic to boot, deferred to that sublime piety, distressed by the rosary Shake was shifting through his fingers. Finally, at the sixth decade, he broke into Shake’s pleas to the Almighty with a vigorous “Amen!” and “Forward!”, at which point everyone jumped up and charged the palisades except for Shake, who kept right on praying. Finally a canister shot exploded behind him, pushing him in the direction of the assault. By this time, however, the others were all rushing back, led by the colonel, so Shake ended up leading the retreat. Now he was sitting by the campfire, puffing on an oddly incongruous meerschaum pipe — which he carried in his haversack in three segments — and by the light of the fire his smooth, round face looked like a blue-eyed moon.

The bride emerged from the tent on the arm of the groom, who by now had recovered his normal colour, and the band struck up the Wedding March. The rainbow still hung in the sky, its colours reflected in the bells of the trumpets pointing backwards over the musicians’ shoulders towards the spectators. A cabriolet arrived, drawn by a white horse and driven by
a Negro equerry. The bridegroom helped his bride up onto the seat, then swung up beside her. His youthful face shone with an ingenuous look of bliss.

It was still raining.

On the sycamores.

“God knows where my father is these days,” Cenek Dignowity had continued, back in the trench at Vicksburg. “They say he’s in Washington, drawing up plans to invade Texas. He got away by the skin of his teeth, so they took it out on me and my brother.”

The big guns boomed behind them and the Vicksburg palisades bloomed with fiery grey blossoms.

“Father was a Sam Houston man from start to finish,” young Dignowity explained. “He could hardly have been anything else. He grew up in a garrison town back in Bohemia. He watched them torture soldiers. You know what running the gauntlet is?” The sergeant knew all too well. “So when the tsar’s Russians were advancing on Warsaw, he got all the way across Prussia, to the famous Fourth Infantry Regiment under Romarin. He watched Polish farmers with nothing but scythes with hooks tied onto them mow down regiment after regiment of the tsar’s best cavalry. And the priests were with the revolution. The Fourth Regiment was armed with money the priests collected by selling monstrances to Jews. General Klopocky kept hoping France would lend a hand. No such luck — they had to deal with the enemy on their own. Marvels of courage, they were, but there were just too many Russians, a bottomless supply of cannon-fodder. From the Urals, from Siberia, from the black bowels of that stinking country that thinks it’s the salvation of bloody Slavdom and whoever disagrees is their enemy. Father was one of only ten survivors in Romarin’s regiment,” Dignowity said while Sherman’s cannoneers rained canned hell-fire down on the palisades at Vicksburg. “So he lit out for
America. Here, we think we do things better than anywhere, and if you can do better, we’ll learn from you. Secede from the Union? Considerations for their peculiar institution? Father wasn’t having any of that. He’d fought for the Poles, hadn’t he? So he talked, he made speeches, he argued with the patients in his dispensary, and then —” Dignowity ran his fingers through his hair. “Finally, one afternoon, somebody banged on the back window, damn near broke the glass. It was Judge Collins’s slave Sam — the judge was a Sam Houston man too, but not what you’d call brave — and he says, ‘They’re coming for you, Doc, they want to string you up,’ and sure enough, my father looks out on the square and there’s this mob gathering, and old man Kearney is waving a coil of rope over his head. Father didn’t hang around, he went out the window and onto his horse till all I could see were his coat-tails flapping. That’s the last I saw of him. They say he’s in Washington now, and I sure hope so. I’m going to try to get there to see him, but —” A petard interrupted him; the heavy artillery had joined in the bombardment. Clumps of dirt and splinters of wood from the palisades came flying through the air onto the roof of their trench.

“Peculiar institution,” said Dignowity. “I remember the arguments when it was still okay just to argue. ‘So their skin is the same colour as Balthazar’s?’ yelled my father. ‘So what? He worshipped the Baby Jesus too!’ ”

Another deafening petard. A particularly solid chunk of the fortification rose into the air and they watched as it floated towards them. Everyone ducked. It fell heavily onto the roof and crashed through it. A Balthazar, his eyes wide with fright, landed on the ground in front of them. For a moment he just sat there, stunned by the phenomenal flight, while they stared at him as though he were an apparition. Was this possible?

The Balthazar shook his head. Then, as if he couldn’t quite believe it himself, he said, “I’s free.” He gave his head another
shake and exclaimed, “I’s free!” He jumped to his feet and they burst out laughing. “I’s free!” yelled the Balthazar. Fiery flowers were still blossoming on the Vicksburg palisades.

The cabriolet stopped and the little general strode forward. Two riders were approaching in the rain. The first had the weathered face of a proud beggar, or of an old noncom, the kind who might have led his company into battle under Little Round Top at Gettysburg, into the Wasps’ Nest at Shiloh or Bloody Corner at Spotsylvania, slaughterhouses all of them. His name was Sherman.

Captain Warren introduced his bride.

The sergeant had first seen Linda Toupelik standing between two sycamores on Bay Street in Savannah, an emerald against the white background of a sunlit wooden building. The serpent’s eyes had grazed his for an instant, then moved across the street crowded with ragged men bearing the insignia of the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin, the Fifty-fifth Ohio, and the Thirty-third Indiana, flowing past the white portals of houses set among the green gardens of the city they weren’t allowed to torch. Among them he glimpsed Kakuska with a strange load that looked like a big grandfather clock, but he was more interested in the cornflower gaze, and followed it to the white latticework on the building across the street and the red, gold, and ebony heads of the painted women leaning out of the upstairs windows. Then her gaze slid down the façade to a group of officers in brushed blue tunics. In the sergeant’s eyes they became a frozen tableau vivant like the tinted engravings in
Harper’s Magazine
: Lieutenant Williams, Second Lieutenant Szymanowsky, Captain Bondy, all of them inclined in the same direction, towards the brothel doorway, where the massive madam stood like an evil moon under the sign of her establishment — MADAM RUSSELL’S BAKERY — and beneath it, in smaller
letters,
Horizontal Refreshments
, and all three of them were clutching the arms of Captain Baxter Warren II, who was leaning the other way, his legs taut, his heels braced on the curb, and his head turned at an unnatural angle as the cornflower gaze struck him square in the eyes. Later on, going over the moment in his mind, the sergeant realized that he had taken in the entire scene in a single glance, and that memory had shaped it and mingled it with pictures from
Harper’s Magazine
. But at the same time his glance shot back to the girl in the emerald-green dress against the white façade, and behind him he heard Cyril Toupelik say, “Well, blow me if it’s not our Lida!”