The Bride of Texas (36 page)

The buggy rattled down the road towards Austin. The cotton-field
sun was blazing, the air was silent. Rosemary was at the reins. The horses had coloured ribbons tied to their harnesses, the way they used to do it at Mika’s around fair-time. His little sister had embroidered the ribbons a month before, as a birthday present for Rosemary; the Austin district was starting to look more and more like Moravia. Rosemary liked the beribboned fillies. They spoke to her of a land where a harness was inevitable, so to lighten its load they decorated it. In Texas everything was plain, and only the horses were harnessed. And the Negroes, of course. In the fragrant stillness of the bougainvilleas, Rosemary had placed a warm hand on his, and he had turned to her, gazed at her equine beauty, then kissed her
.

Now, silence and the rattle of the buggy
.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Rosemary
.

“About Negroes,” he lied. He was thinking about how nothing at home had prepared him for this. For the affections of a farm girl. A girl from a big estate. But he wasn’t a boy from a small holding any more. Besides, it wasn’t love. Love was when — Rosemary was cheerful, voluptuous, certainly no delicate flower. A pretty little filly in a beautiful red dress. An only daughter. He was a partner in an oil manufacturing company, and then suddenly all the beauties of the black and white world had overwhelmed him
.

“Negroes?” asked Rosemary. She was as pretty as a filly and no delicate flower, but
—

“
Last night your father and I were talking about them, Rosemary.”

They had been standing behind the oil-pressing shed on the hilltop, with a view of the rolling Texas countryside, fields of cotton, a sea of conifers, clusters of cactus, the white shirts of Mr. Carson’s Negroes, and the music of their song:

When Israel was in Egypt land

— the bass voice of Goliath, and then the chorus:

Let my people go …

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Cyril heard Mr. Carson say, and he felt the music pulling him in. These were songs he had always liked, but now that something had happened to him that had never happened before, the music made him feel like crying. A tear ran down his cheek and he wiped it away with his finger
.

“Instrumentum vocale,”
he heard Mr. Carson say. “I studied Roman Law at Cambridge. The Romans called tools, ploughs, wagons
, instrumentum mutum —
mute tools. Horses, cattle, sheep, and mules were
instrumentum semivocale. Servi
— or slaves — were
instrumentum vocale.”
Mr. Carson stopped and listened to the singing again, the bronze voice:

Oppressed so hard they could not stand

and the chorus:

Let my people go!

“But,” Mr. Carson said, “if something is
vocale,
can it still be an
instrumentum?”

“Is that why you’re so good to them?” asked Cyril
.

“I’m not good to them at all,” said Mr. Carson. “Come with me.”

They walked down the path to the cotton-fields. Soon they were strolling beside a line of cotton-pickers. Were the black faces he saw happy? They didn’t look miserable. At the end of the line, a tall young man was working beside a big girl with a nice little protruding behind like his own Dinah’s
.

He shook his head. “You’re good to them!” He had been present when the tall youth had pleaded with Mr. Carson and Carson had complied at once. The bride had cost him six hundred dollars, and he had already had more Negroes than he needed
.

“No, I’m not. If I were, I’d set them free. Someday I will, but not now.” He took Cyril by the arm. “There’s going to be a war, son.”

“Do you think so?”

“What else?” said Mr. Carson. “I got to know those people in Louisiana. They’re stubborn as mules. If they don’t get their own way, they’ll split the Union. And then there’s going to be a war. And these people” — he waved his hand to indicate his Negroes at work in the fields — “in the meantime will be better off, or at least have some security, if they stay with me.”

“But if there is a war, what if they” — he realized that he referred to most of his new compatriots, the Southern whites, as “they”, just as Mr. Carson, who was British, did — “what if they defeat the Yankees?”

Mr. Carson smiled. “That will hardly happen, son. All they have is cotton. The Yankees have factories, and you can manufacture weapons in factories. But even that’s not as important,” he said, “as the fact that the secessionists wring the Bible like a piece of laundry to get a drop of truth they can stomach out of it. And what they get isn’t even truth, it’s self-delusion. The real truth lies with the North, and when all is said and done, that’s more important than factories when it comes to winning. What I mean to say” — Mr. Carson picked the blossom of a cotton plant and stuck it in his buttonhole — “is that, without the factories, truth would be rather academic. The important thing is that the self-delusion of the South doesn’t have any factories behind it.”

“And you think the Yankees care enough about these people” — pointing at the fields of cotton — “to go to war?”

“They won’t go to war over the Negroes,” Mr. Carson said. “But people don’t have to know the truth to be on the side of truth.”

“Now I know what Mr. Carson meant by that,” said Cyril, pointing to the long line of Sherman’s great army moving on Bentonville. “He was a wise man. He could see things others
couldn’t. I still feel ashamed today when I think about it.”

“Can a fellow help what he does?” asked the sergeant, and Ursula’s face flashed in his memory as if illuminated by the torchlight of Sherman’s great army. By now he knew she was still alive.

“Maybe you have to consider other people. Particularly when they mean as much as Dinah meant —” He stopped, and in the half-light the sergeant noticed a trickle of moisture in the stubble of Cyril’s beard. “I wonder what became of her? They say she went to Jamaica. I don’t even know where that is.”

“You’ll find out, don’t worry. The war’s almost over.”

Sherman’s great army was advancing north-west. In the distance, not far away, lay Washington.

“That’s one of the stupidest passages in the Bible,” said Cyril. “About love not seeking its own. It does seek its own,” he said. “It isn’t patient. It does behave itself in unseemly ways, and maybe it even thinketh evil.”

She was no longer a faded picture in a locket tucked away in Kapsa’s knapsack. After all those years she had risen from the dead, and the thought of her still hurt.

Burning snow was falling around them and Madam Sosniowski said, “Ursula? Of course I knew her. When her husband died, she married Baron Hofburg-Ebbe. A diplomat. I think, though I’m not certain, that he’s a consul somewhere in the North.”

“The North?” he breathed. “What do you mean, the North?”

“In the Union,” said Madam Sosniowski. “In New York. Or was it Chicago? I’m not certain. Somewhere.”

Burning snow was falling on Columbia
.

“Heaven knows how the Bible means it,” said Cyril. “But the Bible is right in one thing; what am I without love? Nothing. But I do think evil. If she weren’t my sister, I could throttle Lida. She’ll be punished, though. God will punish her.”

“He already has,” said the sergeant. “She didn’t get Vitek.”

Cyril looked up. “Vitek?” He thought for a moment. “Unless, in His wisdom — but you don’t believe in God, do you?”

“In the priests’ god? No.”

“What could He have punished her for back then? She hadn’t done anything yet. Not till she got here.”

The Negroes were singing as they worked. A cheerful song of despair
.

“It is not entirely out of the question,” said Mr. Carson, “that I am simply rationalizing an evil practice, just as my colleagues do — if they even think about it. Deep in my heart, son, I may indeed have become a slave-driver.”

“No, you haven’t,” said Cyril
.

“I am afraid I have,” said Mr. Carson. “Sometimes I catch myself thinking about them as if they were my children. Children! That’s what
they
call them!”

“That’s different and you know it is. The slave-drivers think of them as children who will never grow up, and you know that they eventually will.”

Mr. Carson squeezed his arm. “I don’t like all of them,” he laughed. “Take Amanda. She’s been pregnant now for — how long? — twelve months. She hasn’t worked in the fields since last harvest.” He laughed some more. “She must take me for a fool.”

“She takes you for what you are,” said Cyril
.

“And she’s actually mistaken,” said Mr. Carson. “Deep in my heart, if I weren’t a slave-driver I’d have set them free as soon as old Whigham” — he paused to listen as a bronze-toned voice sang:

They walked in silence towards the Carson house. It was silent and inviting against the azure sky of north Texas
.

“As soon as old Whigham what?” Cyril asked
.

Mr. Carson stopped. “Where do you think all this comes from?” With a sweep of his arm he indicated the house, the barns, the fields of cotton
.

“You inherited it,” said Cyril
.

“But originally where did it come from?”

“Your —” Cyril hesitated
.

“Great-uncle.”

“Your great-uncle came to America and made his fortune like a lot of others,” said Cyril. “My dad is a rich man too, compared to what he was in Lhota; he’s a property owner. That’s the kind of place America is. And your great-uncle’s son had no children so he left his plantation in Louisiana to you —”

Mr. Carson interrupted him. “That’s it. Old Whigham was my great-uncle’s American partner. He made his fortune too, but he didn’t invest it in land and slaves, he put it into tobacco. My great-uncle bought a plantation. But you know how those two characters originally made their fortunes?”

Cyril shook his head but he could guess. He hoped they might have been pirates, or might have robbed a bank in London and escaped across the sea. Anything but what he already knew they’d done
—

“They owned a ship that carried cargo from Africa to New Orleans. Almost two-thirds of the cargo got spoiled on each trip, so they had to throw it overboard. But the one-third that was left was enough to make their fortune. Two fortunes. Their cargo, son, was
instrumentum vocale.”

“So you’re not thinking about me?” the girl in the red dress asked softly
.

“I am,” he said, and in fact he was, for he was thinking about how to end their relationship, though he didn’t put it that way to himself. He finished telling her about his conversation with her
father, but he knew she wasn’t interested. Not that she was insensitive, but love seeketh its own. He couldn’t think of anything else to talk about. The buggy rattled on. In Austin they bought candles, salt, sugar, vinegar, thread — everything on Mrs. Carson’s list. They didn’t speak. Rosemary gave the order to the shopkeeper for three pounds of salt, and he felt shame, the worm of bad conscience. But he knew what he had to do. There was nothing else to be done —

As they walked back to the buggy, they passed a shop that sold flowers
.

“Wait a minute, Rosemary.”

He returned with a nondescript bouquet
.

The buggy rattled off towards the darkening sky. They were still silent. The horses tossed their heads, the gaily coloured ribbons fluttered sadly in the cooling evening breeze. He stared at her tanned arm, the hand holding the reins, the shapely bosom under the bright red fabric, the pretty face, the breeze tossing the fringe of hair on her forehead. When they pulled up at the house, he leapt down and reached out his hand to help her. She didn’t need it but she took it, jumped down, and the lace on her petticoat flashed white. Then she reached up to the seat for the flowers. She had tears in her eyes. He wished he could turn to stone. She handed him the bouquet
.

“Cyril,” she said, “I don’t know who she is, but give these to her.”

And she walked away towards the white house, straight as a candle in her bright red dress
.

“Love,” said Cyril. “Is there any escape from it? Does anyone ever find true love?”

Ursula.

Who ever found true love?

“But from what you said, Étienne —”

“He too. He too lost everything,” said Cyril.

They could hear the sound of a band coming from the foot of the hill. Saxhorns, trumpets, bass horns. The disparity of a world where everything existed simultaneously. Blazing turpentine forests. Annie, who obediently didn’t wait. Ursula. The general — his beloved general and his great army. It was transformed into truth, with truth’s repeating rifles. Dinah. Lincoln in Washington, which they were getting nearer to every day. All of it, it all belonged together.

A rose in a crown of thorns, and, on the thorns, impaled little beetles foolishly waving their legs in the air.

Shake said, “I signed up even before there was an army.”

“There was always an army,” said the sergeant.

“I don’t mean you. You’re a professional soldier. I mean the ones who signed up after Lincoln’s appeal, like Franta Stejskal. The only reason Joska Paidr’s here is because, when they called him up, he didn’t have the money for a substitute.”

“You’re wrong!” Paidr objected. “I could have found the money. I was doing my duty.”

“Then why didn’t you sign up after Lincoln’s appeal?” asked Houska.

“No one had a duty to join then,” said Shake, “so Paidr wouldn’t have been doing his duty. I signed up back in the fall of ’60, with Lincoln’s famous Slavonic Rifles in Chicago.”

“I know them,” said Kakuska. “They weren’t all that famous.”