The Bride of Texas (6 page)

Perhaps she was a sorceress. He didn’t know and wouldn’t ask. But it turned out she wasn’t. During drill on the parade ground, Captain von Hanzlitschek showed up — moustache, belly, beady, evil eyes — and strode past the company. The provost raised his voice. The orders came faster and their legs flashed back and forth. “Left turn!” “Right turn!” “Present arms!” And Hanzlitschek stopped, but this time he didn’t begin bellowing orders, as he usually did on the rare occasions he left his office and came out to the parade ground in the rain. He merely stood there and watched. Kapsa felt, then knew, that he was the one being watched. Nasty eyes, sure of their right, their truth, their property —

— he stared back into those same eyes, reflecting the red sunlight coming through the window. With one hand Hanzlitschek
ripped the eiderdown off Ursula, grabbed her by the hair, yanked her off the bed and onto the floor, and Kapsa saw the bullwhip in his other hand, heard the hideous swish and crack, and a bloody welt appeared on Ursula’s back. Hanzlitschek drew his arm back again, another wicked swish, a second welt, but Ursula uttered not a sound. Kapsa leapt out of bed, naked as Adam; the third swishing blow never connected, the tip of the bullwhip grazed Ursula’s white back but the rest of it snaked around his body as his right hand grabbed Hanzlitschek’s wrist, and Hanzlitschek yanked away and turned the whip against him. The next blow caught him on the shoulder and the leather snake cracked across his bare back — his back caught fire, he recoiled, the captain raised his arm and brought the whip down hard on his flaming wounds. He was instantly filled with strength and a bitter, burning hatred. He flung himself on the officer and struck him a cannon-ball blow to the face. Hanzlitschek’s body rose from the ground as though he were being blown out of hell, he spread his arms like a crucified Lucifer, and as he fell the back of his skull struck the sharp point of a decorative oak column on one corner of the commode. As he slid to the floor, the blackness of his eyes seemed to drain away into his head; a shaft of red sunlight caught the glassy eyes, a bat fluttered near the ceiling. Ursula rose, her naked loins glistening golden in the reddish light, and they stood over the dead officer like Eve and Cain in paradise gazing at the dead serpent. He felt not a tremor of fear, not a touch of terror. He had no feelings at all about the corpse that lay there, staring at the ceiling —

— so he numbly lifted the corpse onto his back, as she instructed, and carried it deep into the woods, and there he created a story for those who would, at Ursula’s behest, go looking for the officer. With the heel of the captain’s shoe he gouged a furrow in the moss on a slippery, slanted rock; then he arranged the corpse on the ground with the back of its head against the sharp edge of another rock, a little farther down the slope. He even put the captain’s boots
on his own feet and made a set of prints to the rock, and then laced them back on the dead man’s feet. All this time he never felt a thing, except desperate rage that this fallen angel had driven him out of his paradise
.

It was almost morning before they parted, knowing it would be for ever. At dawn he slipped out into the woods, wearing a pair of the officer’s baggy civilian trousers pulled tight around his waist with a belt, and the officer’s threadbare coat with the officer’s gold pieces in his pocket, and a nest of what looked like crystal eggs. She had gone to fetch all these things in the night
.

Years later, in the barracks of the Thirteenth Army, he began letting his imagination roam. He wrote a letter; no answer came. He waited, then he wrote again. He had never asked her about anything. He had never understood the mysterious little house in the woods, her mysterious visits to the infirmary. She must have been able to work miracles, and she could surely accomplish another one. But no answer came, not even to his third letter
.

Why? Had they discovered what had actually happened in the woods on Gottestischlein? Or had she forgotten? Or was she exercising in some prison courtyard, walking in circles in a canvas skirt? Did she have another captain now? Or a colonel, perhaps? Any general could be proud to have her as a wife. Had he, a mere seven-year private, been a trifle to sweeten her life with the paunch? Had he any grounds at all for hope? Had she been a “von” before she became von Hanzlitschek? Would she ever come to join him? How much more was a sergeant in the Thirteenth U. S. Army than a common soldier in the Royal Imperial Regiment of the Alpine Infantry?

Then the America in him revolted. Havlicek’s articles and Charles Sealsfield’s books had prepared him for America, but in Europe America had been a mythical Utopia on the far side of a Utopian ocean. It had taken necessity born of murder to make it a reality, a real land where farmers didn’t kowtow to officials in the castle, and not just because there were no castles
.

He was broken by sorrow because Ursula didn’t know that this land on the other side of the ocean could be a Utopia for her too. No, he was being unfair. Something had happened, otherwise she would surely have come. He must have been more than just a spoonful of honey to sweeten a bitter marriage. He sat on the bank of the Susquehanna, and waves of remorse and guilt washed over him for thinking ill of her. Something must have happened. He wrote her another letter, and another. Then he stopped writing
.

It was raining on the sycamores. The third time he saw Linda Toupelik, she was in a carriage with the blushing Captain Baxter Warren II at the reins. It was evening, and the house lamps along Bay Street, extinguished when Sherman’s great army rolled into Savannah, were lit again. This time there was no looting — or almost none, except for a grandfather clock here and there. Otherwise there were only polite officers, their presence now acknowledged by the local ladies with solemn nods, and soldiers back from the great picnic in Georgia, their good mood maintained by quantities of voluntarily proffered Negro moonshine, a joyful libation to the troops of the Ruler of the World. The plunking of banjos called from the windows of Madam Russell’s beautiful brothel.

“My sister,” Cyril Toupelik growled. “My sister, the gentleman’s whore. My monstrous little sister.” He turned to watch the lovely monster, her cornflower eyes reflecting the bright brass buttons on Captain Warren’s tunic. Suddenly — and it all happened so fast that again it seemed to the sergeant like a tableau vivant — a man in a green coat hobbled quickly down the three steps from the white house. The sergeant noticed the knob-end of a wooden leg sticking out of one of his trouser cuffs, but otherwise he was a tall, statuesque, downright handsome man with long hair cascading onto his broad shoulders. He stumped past them, and the sergeant saw Cyril step up to the cripple just as he
pulled a pistol from his unbuttoned coat. Cyril’s fist shot up, and the gun went off as it flew through the air. The sound of shattering glass came from across the street, and one of the lanterns outside Madam Russell’s went out. The sergeant glanced at Lida Toupelik and saw her flinch; her eyes seemed to double in size. Then he looked at the captain, who had turned his head with mild interest towards the gunshot. By then Cyril was holding the cripple by the shoulders, so the captain turned back, still glowing with infatuation like a pious convert.

Lida pulled herself together and tossed her golden curls confidently as Cyril said in English to the small crowd that had formed, “He’s had a few too many and he felt like firing a couple of shots in the air, that’s all.”

The crowd looked doubtful, but they’d had a bit too much to drink as well. They started to disperse while the one-legged man stood there, pale as death. Cyril picked up the pistol, stuck it in his belt, took the man by the shoulders, and turned him towards the steps leading to the white building.

From inside the brothel came a spirited version of
When Johnny comes marching home again.…

It was raining on the sycamores.

The cabriolet disappeared around some bushes. Linda Warren’s white veil fluttered in the breeze. The mist over the road was thinning out now, and the men of Mower’s division were marching under the plane trees, their filthy boots tracing regular arcs in the remaining wisps of rapidly dispersing fog as they sang:

Behind them came a squad of Kil’s cavalry, their banner riddled with bullet holes; then a battery of field artillery rattled by, the butt of a huge smoked ham sticking out of a caisson, the black cannon barrels glistening in the rain. Behind them came three scrawny young drummers followed by a solid file of bearded soldiers singing “The Battle Cry of Freedom”. Out of step, tin cups clanking against knapsacks, a frying-pan stuck handle down in the barrel of a rifle, came men from the mountains, men from the plains. Kapsa recalled an ancient, gloomy battalion, gloomy but polished, polished and gloomy, marching smartly in step down an alpine valley, with corseted Imperial officers on horseback. The Eighty-second Illinois began singing too, a terrible disharmony of wonderful voices, and he knew there had probably never been such an army, ever, since the days of Caesar.…

They moved — men, guns, horses — out of step, rolling on like the mighty Mississippi, Sherman’s great army rolling north to Atlanta.

“Look at him there!” he heard Shake say.

Reverend Mulroney was having trouble with his filly. Behind him the engineers were striking the wedding tent; the filly was prancing skittishly and the chaplain was struggling to control her. Shake chuckled and ran over to settle the filly, and the chaplain scrambled up into the saddle.

The rain kept pouring down on the sycamores.

“What struck you so funny?” the sergeant asked Shake later that evening, around the campfire. “The bride was beautiful, wasn’t she?”

“Oh, that!” Shake chortled again. “You can’t have done much church-going, right, sarge?” He turned to rummage in his haversack. “Fact is, what he read the Holy Church won’t allow to be read on any Sunday after Pentecost, or any other time, for that matter.” He took out a well-thumbed Bible, and flipped through the pages. “Listen,” he said. “Here it is: the Book of Ezekiel the Prophet, chapter sixteen, verses thirteen to sixteen. He took a little piece of verse thirteen because he knows damn well you heathens never opened a Bible in your lives.”

The flames flickered across Shake’s moon-face, dancing in his blue eyes like cherubs in swaddling clothes.

“ 
‘Thou wast exceeding beautiful
,’ ” he intoned in the mock singsong of a preacher, then noted in a conversational tone, “Mulroney read that, all right. But the part that comes right after that he kept to himself.
‘But thou didst trust in thine own beauty, and playedst the harlot because of thy renown, and pouredst out thy fornications on every one that passed by; his it was.’ ”

“Stop, you’re corrupting us!” Stejskal chimed in.

“No, wait! Here’s the main thing he left out.” Back to the mocking singsong:
“ ‘And of thy garments thou didst take, and deckedst thy high places with divers colours, and playedst the harlot thereupon; the like things shall not come, neither shall it be so.’ ”

He looked around at his comrades. They were silent. Shake stuck the meerschaum in his mouth and sent a little cloud of blue smoke towards the stars.

Stejskal said, “What I can’t figure is how come you know the Bible by heart, you pagan.”

“Me? A pagan?” Shake replied. “Were you knocked in the head by a cannonball, or what?”

Outside, the moonlight fell on the sycamores.

(illustration credit 1.1)

N
O GENERAL
took part in as many battles as Ambrose; had regulations not required him to be at the command post, he would have spent every minute in the thick of it, with his troops. In Cincinnati, he once told me that he never felt right about it. “Soldiers are dying, and I’m watching this from a distance through a glass. I feel like a dodger. I’ll never get used to it, Lorraine, though it’s logical, of course. But I reckon it’s just as logical to bolt as soon as the Reaper takes the field. No one wants to die.”