The Bride of Texas (57 page)

“I will,” said Cyril. He looked at old man Lesikar. What Lesikar had seen on his way to Austin had been the last straw, the last stain on the sweet face of America. It was a slave auction, with able-bodied mulatto women for sale. On command they would
stand up and strut back and forth, displaying their breasts, then turning so the buyer could see the curve of their buttocks. Behind a screen stood some elderly slaves having their grey hair blackened to drive up their price. It offended everything that old Lesikar had come here for, and he raged inside. And Cyril had a piece of paper in his pocket, with an address on Baywater Street written on it, a reference to a dry chrysanthemum, and in his ears Lida’s uncertain voice: “You wouldn’t stay here with her, would you?” So the last stain on the sweet face of America affected him too, Cyril Toupelik, and his tea-rose, who didn’t even have a surname of her own, just the trademark “de Ribordeaux”
.

In the little house on Baywater Street, they wished for war
.

But first: “He’s going to sell me, I know it. This here, Baywater Street, this won’t last long. Your sister will figure it out, but he won’t sell me to you. He’ll be jealous of you. He’ll sell me the way Massa Leclerc sold Auntie Penelope.”

She knew nothing. Europe wasn’t even a word for her, much less an idea. Just France. She was full of stories no one had ever written. Not yet. Maybe sometime, years later, but by then they’d be half fiction
.

“Auntie Penelope,” she said, “was in the same predicament as me, except she didn’t have you. But she did have two children with Massa Leclerc, a boy and a girl. And when Massa Leclerc got married, nobody had to tell his new wife who Auntie Penelope was. She drove her out of the house into the fields. The children too. She ordered the overseer to keep them strictly in line.”

“Lida wouldn’t do that,” he said. “Lida goes after what she wants, but she’s not mean. She knows what meanness is because she’s felt it herself.”

“But she’s going to want to get rid of me, and he won’t sell me to you. He’ll sell me exactly the way Massa Leclerc sold Auntie Penelope, though no one was jealous of her. He sold her and her two children to his cousin, who was a Methodist minister in Georgia.
Actually, he gave them away. Reverend Leclerc just paid for the journey. And he was good to them. And me” — she wiped away a tear — “I’m going to end up the same way. If I’m really lucky. Just you wait and see.”

“No you won’t,” he said. “There’s a war coming. The Yankees will win it. You’ll be just as free as me or Lida or Étienne. Nobody will ever be able to sell you again.”

“War,” she whimpered. “You’ll have to join up. And maybe they’ll kill you.”

He took her in his arms. She was trembling, weeping, her shoulders quivering. He had never seen her like this. She had always been cheery, sassy, imperturbable
.

“The hell I knew her,” he said as the turpentine woods blazed on. “She laughed so she wouldn’t have to cry.”

“They won’t kill me,” he said. “I’ll run away. We’ll run away together. The Yankees will win. They have more men and cannon, and besides, they’re in the right. Nobody will ever be able to sell you again, my sweet rose. It’s war. Too bad it didn’t start a long time ago!”

They invoked war, while outside the window the river rolled lazily past, warm and southern, and the breeze caressed the moss dangling from the mournful trees. They invoked war and dreamed of running off together
.

That night, when he got home, his sister was waiting up for him. She sniffed his coat. “Aha!” she said. “Where is she?”

“Who?”

“Who do you think? You smell like a perfume shop.”

So he told her about Baywater Street. She would have found out anyway
.

His sister’s lips grew thin and hard, her eyes filled with tears. Different tears
.

“The swine! He thinks I’ll be like his colourless Southern belles and turn a blind eye!”

“Why not?” he said. “You don’t love him, do you?”

“But you love your yellow girl, don’t you? I’m doing this for you, big brother. Or are you willing to share her with Pegleg?”

He was staggered that she should even suggest it. But she had no intention of sharing Pegleg either. He pulled himself together
.

“You’re not doing it for me, Lida. Your sisterly love doesn’t go that far.”

She gave him a look that was somewhere between pity and contempt. “What do you know about love?” she said. “But you’re right. It’s only partly for you. It’s not that I’m jealous, for heaven’s sake! But he mustn’t think I’d let him get away with anything if only he’d marry me. I’d be pretty stupid if I did that, and I got smart a long time ago. You, Cyril,” and she took him by the shoulders and the moon flashed red in her eyes, “in this world it’s the strong ones that win out. And love? Well, go for love — but if you can’t get love, then go for anything you can get.”

Bugs skewered on thorns — he couldn’t get them out of his mind. He lay on his belly behind the palisade of hurriedly felled trees. In front of him was a green meadow, then a twisted ripple in the terrain that ended in black scrub-oak brush and silence. General Carlin stood not far from Lieutenant Bellman, in his neatly pressed
Schlachtanzug
, surrounded by his staff officers. The rays of sunlight coming through the pine branches transformed him into a bright blue target, and sparkled for a moment off the field-glasses he had trained on the line of black bushes. That was where the silence before the storm lay hidden. It was half past two in the afternoon. Carlin put his field-glasses back in their case and Lieutenant Bellman heard him say to his aide, “There’s one thing I don’t understand: why didn’t they take advantage of the element of surprise? Nobody
expected them here, and they gave themselves away by shooting at the advanced guard, and now they’re waiting. For what?”

“Hardee’s men proceeded with effort, hindered by marshes that did not appear on the maps, which, as stated earlier, were far from reliable in other aspects as well,”
read the girl
. “They only arrived at the assault site in the late afternoon, to take their places on the right wing and provide power for the vice that General Johnston intended to use to pulverize Carlin’s division. Moreover, they were delayed by the fact that the only road leading from Bentonville to the battlefield was blocked by the rear guard of General Hoke, whose corps formed the axis of the vice. The left arm consisted of units under the command of General Bragg. The latter, his senses muddled by the fierce battle that ensued when Carlin’s reconnaissance units encountered the enemy, was convinced that the axis of the vice — Hoke’s corps — would be annihilated by the counter-attack from Carlin’s regrouped units, so he called desperately for reinforcements. Then General Johnston — who would later admit it was an error in judgement — ordered Hardee, who had only just arrived, to send McLaws’s regiment to reinforce Hoke. That left the right flank with only the division of Tali — Tali-for —”
faltered the girl
.

The sergeant prompted her: “Taliaferro.”

“Taliaferro,” she repeated in her earnest schoolgirl voice. The sergeant recalled his general bent over the map and Slocum’s dispatch, which had just been delivered by Lieutenant Foraker, and which the general had read aloud to his staff: “I consider it crucial that the right flank be repositioned forthwith to join us under cover of darkness. Also send all munitions and all available empty ambulances.” The sergeant had noticed how the general nervously ran
his fingers through his reddish beard while reading about empty ambulances, and he knew what factor would determine the general’s decision. In the final analysis, it was always the same determining factor
.

“I have reliable reports,” continued Slocum, “that I am facing the concentrated units of Hardee, Stewart, Lee, McLaws, Hill, and Hoke.” The general ran his fingers through his beard again
.

“McLaws, guided by the same inexact and perplexing map,”
read his daughter
, “wandered for a long time among the marshes and swamps unrecorded on the map, before he finally took his place for the attack. So it happened that it was not until a quarter past three in the afternoon that all of Johnston’s units were in place and the planned assault could begin. Concealed behind hastily erected palisades, they faced the units of Carlin’s division, reinforced by General J.D. Morgan’s Second Division. Also approaching the battlefield was Slocum’s corps, with the divisions of Williams and John W. Geary as well as that of W.T. Ward, released for the purpose from its role of accompanying and guarding the munitions and supply train. That was the situation on the battlefield at fifteen minutes past three o’clock, when the Confederate troops launched their attack.”

First, metal showered down on the palisades in the pine groves, and on the stone barricades zigzagging across the open fields. Next, the defenders heard the delayed din of cannon. Then came the Rebel yell, a long ah-aah-aaaah! — the awful battlefield chant of this four-year-old war and perhaps its last cry. And finally they appeared, led by officers on horseback. They were dressed in rags, terribly handsome under their tattered company banners, marching quickly forward, rank upon ordered rank, with the long strides of veterans who had been
through everything, Shiloh, Antietam, Perryville, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg,
morituri
from the Devil’s colosseum.

They were handsome and tragic, strange “artists for art’s sake” of death. They were fighting only for honour now, their ranks depleted by growing desertions, men abandoning even honour and going home to defend their small farms, every man for himself. Leading them on a black horse, crutches clipped to his saddle, the one-legged General Bate galloped across the field towards Lieutenant Bellman, brandishing a ludicrous bare sword. Behind him the banners of rapidly advancing divisions, regiments, companies, flapped in the dazzling spring afternoon sunlight, as the troops marched with the confidence of veterans of obscure places that were now entries in the Devil’s dictionary of history — Little Round Top, Resaca, Lookout Mountain. Under those tattered banners their divisions had the strength of regiments, their regiments the strength of companies, their companies the strength of a mere handful of undermanned squads. And yet above them the terrible Rebel yell still sounded, and before them boomed the metallic explosions of canisters. Before he knew it, the lieutenant was running close behind the fleeing veterans of those same battlefields, leaping with them over the palisades, while behind them veterans were climbing over the palisades they were abandoning. General Bate kept twisting in the saddle, urging on his ragged, sunburned soldiers with his sword and a loud holler, all needlessly, for they knew all was lost, the Confederacy and the human property that most of them had never owned anyway. All was lost but honour. And they fought for that, professionally — that is, courageously. They fought for honour.