The Bride of Texas (60 page)

Butler decided to investigate. He crept up behind the hedge by the field where Mister Williams was overseeing the hands. There
he saw one beauty dreaming under the hedge. He left her alone and crept on, and found another one, and more — seven of them sound asleep
.

When he got to the seventh sleeper, he stood up and revealed his presence to Williams. He summoned him to the big house for a talk, and there, in the absence of field Negroes, raked him over the coals and cut two dollars off his wages. But the house niggers were at the keyhole, and the news was whispered back down from the big house to the field hands’ cabins
.

“Didn’t Uncle Habakuk feel bad that he cost those women their good times?” asked Cyril
.

“No, because now they started getting presents from Mister Williams — calico for dresses, rings for their ears, and things. And on Saturday nights they’d try to see who could catch the handsomest nigger at the dance, and sometimes they even got into fights over it.”

“But they did have to work in the fields.”

“Everything has its price,” shrugged Dinah. “But that’s when Uncle Habakuk launched the next part of his plan.”

Part Two of the plan was founded on Uncle Habakuk’s culinary knowledge. He was expected not only to eat with the overseers but to serve them as well, so he took some of the tiny dried flies that he’d used to stuff the rain-worms, and put them in with the pepper in the pepper shaker. After a while on that diet, Williams added some older and less attractive hands to his harem. Not only were the fields full of sleeping women, but they were the scene of other activities that kept work from getting done. News of the despised overseer’s extraordinary capacities took the usual route back to the ear of Mrs. Butler — who was quite a beauty herself
.

“Fred, what kind of a fellow is that overseer, that Williams person?”

Butler immediately became jealous, and this was part of Uncle Habakuk’s plan. “Why do you want to know?” he asked warily
.

“Well, I’ve heard the niggers say all sorts of things about him.”

“What sorts of things?”

“All sorts,” said Mrs. Butler, and in a delicate phraseology acquired from novels she acquainted her husband with his overseer’s gargantuan appetites
.

There was another talk in Butler’s study, noisier this time, and the news reached the cabins quickly. Butler had nothing against fornication with the young women who were his property, “But not in the fields, not in full view of the niggers, and not during working hours!!!” He hollered at Williams so loudly that the maid listening at the keyhole felt her ears ringing
.

Meanwhile Butler began to nurse a grim suspicion about his lovely wife. The next day he went to the field. Uncle Habakuk noticed him hiding behind a clump of trees, and rubbed his hands in glee
.

Butler came to the conclusion that Williams was probably not suited for work on a plantation where the lady of the house was the beautiful Florence
.

And that was when Uncle Habakuk struck
.

From Beulah, the lady’s maid (he was sleeping with her, and used to bring her grasshoppers braised in cognac that Beulah had stolen), he found out that the chronically jealous Butler regularly and covertly checked the secret desk compartment where his wife kept her correspondence. (After she read a short story by the writer with the elegant name, she hid her private correspondence in her husband’s desk, in a drawer he never opened — where he kept the Bible.) And so one afternoon when Miz Florence was off visiting her friend Lillian (who had a handsome brother) on the next plantation, the plantation house shook with an outburst of Butler’s rage. Soon Othello the footman was running to the fields with more alacrity than usual, and soon afterwards Williams was seen hurrying to the big house
.

Without a word, Butler showed Williams a love letter addressed
to “My dearest Florence”, full of suggestive insinuations (the latter had originally contained a long quotation from Ovid’s
Ars amatoria,
but Uncle Habakuk had realized in time that the overseer didn’t have the same classical education he had, and had rewritten it), along with a beautifully sketched portrait of Florence Butler nude from the waist up. Uncle Habakuk’s imagination, fuelled by Florence’s décolletage, was amazingly true to life. The second letter Butler showed the perspiring Williams was the overseer’s own complaint against the unfair cut in wages. Fortunately for Uncle Habakuk, Butler was not a close observer of handwriting, so to him the two letters seemed to have come from the same hand. The poor overseer was entirely ignorant of Uncle Habakuk’s literacy and his past career as a portraitist, so he couldn’t come up with a satisfactory explanation. In any case Butler was so angry that nothing would have satisfied him. Butler shouted at him and then resorted to physical violence, since challenging his wife’s seducer to a duel was out of the question; the overseer was too far beneath him socially. That same evening the disheartened Williams left Butler’s plantation, never to return. The crafty Florence convinced her husband that the love letter had been written by a famous New Orleans painter of miniatures called Besançon, who had recently attempted (unsuccessfully) to seduce her and was now trying to get revenge. The painter’s social position did permit a duel, in which Butler lost an ear and Besançon a brand-new jacket from Paris, which the enraged plantation-owner slashed to ribbons with his sword. As for Uncle Habakuk, he went back to fiddling at the Saturday-night dances. He reopened his insect catering business, which he brought with him to Mr. de Ribordeaux’s, to whom Butler sold him to cover the debts incurred by Miz Florence’s passion for betting at horse races. Then Uncle Habakuk moved to Texas with his new owner
.

“Let me touch you,” said Cyril, “to make sure I’m not dreaming.”

“Not here where everybody can see us,” said his girl. They heard
a clatter of hoofs, and a little gig appeared with a snooty-looking black footman in livery sitting beside the driver. A pretty young lady with a blue parasol sat in the gig
.

“Miz Scarlett,” whispered Dinah
.

“Who’s that?”

“You know, the girl Massa Étienne’s engaged to marry.”

“He’s engaged to her?”

“He probably never told your Lida about that,” said Dinah, “but he is.”

General Carlin stood staring through his field-glasses at the meadows beyond the palisade. The two men in the blood-soaked shirts were discussing something nervously. Groans came from the woods behind them, and the stretcher-bearers ran over from the palisade. The man they were carrying on the stretcher was holding onto his abdomen with both hands. Blood and a phlegmy substance oozed between his fingers. The grey line had stopped. The Rebels had taken cover behind the conquered palisades and the remnants of the wall, and in the underbrush. General Bate was nowhere to be seen. Several batteries of Rebel artillery were moving north, and there was a racket from that direction that sounded like a load of rocks rolling down a steep paved street. Sparse smoke from small-arms fire rose from a low, wooded knoll.

“Morgan,” Carlin said to his aide. “They got around him and he attacked their flank. Now they’re concentrating on him.”

“Are we going to counter-attack, sir?” the aide asked.

Carlin looked around. Exhausted soldiers were resting among the trees. Nearby lay a caisson, one wheel ripped off; two men were lifting it, a third was removing the spare wheel.
Several others were reloading their rifles. Carlin looked back at the hillside that lay before their palisade.

“You’ll ride to General Slocum for orders. Attacking now wouldn’t make sense. We have to regroup.” He looked across the field. “Hardee’s doing the same thing. And he outnumbers us. We have to hold him at this line, no matter what.”

The two blood-soaked men came up to him again. Carlin shook his head. “No. We need every man we can drum up. Unfortunately, the wounded will have to stay where they are.”

He stopped to think, looked over at Lieutenant Bellman. “Lieutenant!”

Bellman snapped to attention.

“Pick five men. If the Rebs break through this line, those men will stay with the wounded and be taken prisoner along with them. I doubt the Rebs have any medics to spare.”

He brought the field-glasses back to his eyes. Grapeshot was still raining down over the groves on the hills to the north, and he could hear the constant clatter of rocks rolling on paving-stones. The sound of the cannonade was becoming a deep bass growl.

“Good God!” said General Carlin. “I haven’t seen this kind of concentrated fire since Gettysburg.”

The lieutenant hurried over to the men who were left of his platoon.

General Meade dismounted and walked up the steps to the main platform, where the unkempt beard of the sergeant’s general was reflected in the new president’s top hat. Abe Lincoln had been buried for twelve days now, and this morning they’d taken down the black banners from the buildings and raised the Stars and Stripes to the top of the flagpoles. The sun shone on the flags flying in the hot late
May wind, while a steel river of bayonets — Grant’s army — flowed past the platform where the sergeant stood with Cyril and Shake, a new medal glinting on a new uniform. Meade’s corps filed past in ranks of twelve, marching in regulation twelve-inch paces to the tune of “Yankee Doodle” coming from the polished horns of Meade’s big battalion band. There were wild cheers, fluttering handkerchiefs, glistening top hats, the rustle of bright ladies’ dresses under beige and pale blue hats, and suddenly the sergeant caught a glimpse of her. She had the countenance of a young, suffering Madonna, but what gazed out from under the shadow of her broad hat was hard defiance. In the brilliance of gay ribbons — white, blue, yellow, pink, and other festive colours — her white hat bore a ribbon of black, a ribbon of mourning. The defiance was hardened by humiliation, by repeated misfortune
.

Such as when they’d been harvesting the corn. She was working in the field shoulder to shoulder with her father, her mother, Josef, and the two servants, Washington and Jefferson. Little Deborah was sitting on the edge of the field, throwing a stick for their dog, Spot. Lida was dressed in a coarse linen blouse and skirt, her hair stuck to her forehead. She was shiny with sweat, and she poked out her tongue to catch the salty drops of sweat running down her nose
.

Whatever was going through her head?

She saw a gig moving lightly and noiselessly along the road, almost floating, as if made of nothing — shiny gloss on fine wood. It was driven by a black coachman who had a liveried black footman beside him with a supercilious manner, his arms folded and concealing his white-gloved hands. Unexpectedly, the gig stopped and the footman leapt down in his glittering uniform of red and gold, braid and buttons and buckles. He put a tiny stool on the ground, then reached out a strong gloved hand to help a young lady in a pale green dress with a pretty — no, a lovely — face, powdered in the noonday heat. Green eyes, green parasol. She stood at the edge
of the road, surveying the cornfield, until her haughty gaze fell on Lida. Lida straightened up and brushed her hair out of her face. Their glances met. The green eyes looked Lida over thoroughly and mockingly, then looked at her father, who was already standing on the path asking, “Can I help you, ma’m?”

She examined him, her eyes contemptuous, even hostile, and she replied, “Perhaps.”

Then she turned, placed a hand on the Negro’s muscular arm, and gracefully got back into the delicate gig. Like a black and gold bird, the Negro flew back to his seat beside the coachman. The gig floated away with a clatter of hoofs
.

Who was she?

Lida felt a suspicion, but the heat and the toil drove it out of her mind
.

Cyril saw her too, that unfeeling, suffering face beneath the hat with the mourning ribbon. Whatever was going through her head anyway? Her husband, Baxter Warren II, wore the brand-new uniform of a colonel in the volunteers; his face was unclouded by any knowledge of complex realities, and radiant with the bliss of victory. He had passed through the war unscathed, just as he had passed through his entire life with only minor scratches, and now he had his lovely reward at his side. When he had cast a questioning glance at the black ribbon, she had replied coldly, “I know they took them all down today. But I’m not going to forget.”