The Bride of Texas (65 page)

The clock struck again, eleven. The sergeant rose, walked over to the chest, took a bottle out from under the folded shirts and underwear, and poured himself a generous drink. The glass depicted President Lincoln collapsing to the ground, his white vest displaying a red badge of courage. Glass in hand, the sergeant gazed at another Lincoln. This one was leaning out of a tiny window on the clock face, waving the Stars and Stripes in time to the music as brightly painted hand-carved figurines in the uniform of the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin band played “The Stars and Stripes Forever”. One little figure was pushing and pulling the slide on a wooden trombone, and beside him two other red-cheeked musicians were puffing away at a trumpet and a tuba. On the right, a figure with a fat wooden belly was pounding on a big drum. The bells of the trombone, the tuba, and the trumpet were turned so they pointed backwards, because the woodcarver had remembered marching behind bands like that on his way to battle. Now, on a farm a few miles from Manitowoc, Vojta Houska spent long winter evenings carving these cheerful clocks, which he sent as Christmas presents to his old buddies from the Twenty-sixth. “I got the idea from old Kakuska, may he rest in peace,” Houska would say. “Remember how he made spurs out of clock gears in Savannah?”

The sergeant recalled the memorable day after Appomattox, when the band marched back and forth across the camp with a sauced-up General Mower leading them himself, a big drum on
his belly. He remembered Cyril, who was God knew where on the other side of the world, and Dinah, who was simply God knew where, and how Cyril had told the story of showing her a classified ad in a section called Escaped Slaves that said, “Gabriel escaped with a very good bassoon.” He had laughed, and Dinah had retorted, “What are you laughing for, white boy? He wants to get to Canada, where they say our kind get to play in army bands!”

“On the bassoon? Hardly. In a castle orchestra, maybe.”

“Have they got castles in Canada?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. They have a queen.”

“So Gabriel’s going to play in the queen’s band in Canada.”

The little carved band finished playing, and Lincoln withdrew behind a shutter that had a picture of the American eagle on it. The sergeant settled back in his armchair, picked the book off the chair where the child had sat earlier, took a drink, and started reading:

“Dusk had fallen when the Rebel troops circled around our positions and unexpectedly struck from behind. All we did, however, was to jump over the palisades and fight from the other side. At that point, General Hardee committed an incomprehensible error. If he had divided his forces and used only half of the men under his command to hit us from behind, we could hardly have successfully defended ourselves, having to fight onslaughts from both directions. As it was, however, standing and kneeling once again in a double rank, we laboured like the ideal diligent soldier boys, so that after the victorious battle, our commander Colonel McClurg was absolutely truthful when he declared, ‘I have rarely been witness to gunfire so incessant, so merciless. It seemed to me beyond human endurance. The soldiers under my command, veterans of dozens and dozens of terrible battles, had never before experienced anything resembling the carnage at Bentonville.’ It was only when night fell and Hardee learned that fresh units had
arrived as reinforcements to Carlin’s divisions that he ordered his troops to withdraw to their original positions. Hence Colonel O’Carleen of the Confederate Army was also correct when he wrote in his memoirs, ‘We came, we attacked, we fought, we accomplished nothing.’ ”

“Daddy!”

His daughter stood in the doorway in her nightgown. He tried to hide his glass under his chair, and spilled whisky on the floor. “What’s happening, Terezka?”

“I can’t sleep,” announced the child. “Something keeps bothering me.”

He was worried that his story about the three disembodied heads might have given the child nightmares, but she said, “Is it true that you never fired a shot in the war?”

The white bride rode off in the cabriolet, the radiantly innocent Baxter Warren II by her side, towards the bristled array of bayonets floating forward through the morning fog as Logan’s division of Sherman’s great army marched on
.

“I once knew a girl who lived on Goat Street —” Shake said
.

And Stejskal interrupted him: “It really is nice, though, a Moravian girl finding happiness in Savannah, Georgia!”

But Cyril knew there had only been one happiness, and she had been robbed of that. Whatever had become of Vitek? She had no idea, there in Savannah, and if she couldn’t have Vitek then at least she would have a substitute happiness, the kind that would enable little Deborah to find a happiness of her own. And no Mika, no de Ribordeaux, could —

The letter had arrived too late
.

“Go alone,” she said. “I would be in the way.”

“But he wants to reconcile with you.”

“It’s you he wants to reconcile with,” she said. “You are his heir.” Then she added, “If there’s anything left to inherit.”

That startled him. “You don’t believe the war is —”

“Of course not,” she stopped him. “Go and come back.… If you want to.”

It was the worst time in her life. Except of course for that day in Amberice. Once again she was gambling everything. True, Papa de Ribordeaux had come to his senses, but Pegleg arrived at the plantation just in time to close his father’s eyes. Cirrhosis of the liver caused by excesses of cognac, a heart steeped in the smoke of thousands of cigars, the spectre of emancipation, the death of Hortense and her baby, though it was just a girl. His world and all his erudite theories had collapsed, a world of murders and bloodhounds and people like wily old Uncle Habakuk, and underneath all the learned knowledge had been the awareness that it had to end, but if only the end could have come later. Later. Pegleg, evidently by the miracle of passion or love, managed to return to Savannah. The inheritance was worthless. Sherman fought for Kennesaw Mountain and Lida knew she was gambling on the wrong card
.

But fortune favours the fearless
.

Sherman’s great army marched up to Savannah and in fifteen minutes took Fort McAllister by storm. By the grace of Tecumseh Sherman, General Hardee led most of his troops across a bridge that had been built by slaves. The next day, the same men who had built it were singing
,

Étienne, steeped in bourbon, was babbling and stammering about evenings made hellish by quarrels, about Linda, who was cruelly withdrawing from him, about having lost everything in the
world. Cyril kept topping up his glass, horrified, hardly recognizing him. What had become of Dinah? But the cripple was beyond reach. Cyril put off asking him any further questions till morning, and left the drunken wretch on the chaise-longue in the parlour of his mansion (all that was left of the inheritance), and went to drink himself into oblivion in the little house where Kakuska was manufacturing spurs out of clock gears for the battle of Columbia, for the final battle at Bentonville
.

Captain Baxter Warren II was in command of one of the companies that stormed Fort McAllister, the last obstacle that stood between Sherman’s great army and the saloons and whorehouses of Savannah. On the way to Madam Russell’s Bakery, where he had every intention of losing his virginity, his eyes fell on Linda Toupelik, and he changed course. Instead, he lost his virginity in the Grenier Hotel
.

She hadn’t even had to concoct a story, as Shake assumed she had. Baxter was an innocent, a true son of the land where he was born. “Your mother couldn’t read?” Lida was astounded
.

“No, she was from Ireland and she never went to school,” he said. “I taught her to read myself.” He swallowed. “I wrote to her about you.”

“Nice things, I hope,” she said, “or else!”

“I told her they married you off against your will. That happened to her too. Ma was fifteen when it happened.”

“But you were —”

“Her first husband died on the boat. She married my pa in America and went with him to California. Pa’s a Forty-niner.”

“You mean there was a rebellion here then too?” she asked
.

“No. What was here was gold,” said Baxter Warren II
.

So she didn’t have to concoct a story, she just mixed some realities and some silences about her life into a cocktail for innocents. Later, she realized she needn’t have bothered. Even had she told
him the pure, unvarnished, European truth — about Vitek, old man Mika, the veteran, and Deborah the illegitimate, instead of Deborah with Huguenot blood coursing through her veins (she explained it to him just as Pegleg had explained it to her), which appealed to him, for all he knew of history was the Pilgrim Fathers, and in his veins there was an American aversion to oppression — even had she told him the naked truth, she wouldn’t have offended against any taboo. For despite his name, which to Lida’s Central European ears sounded so aristocratic, Baxter Warren II was a young man at the very beginning of his line, in a land at the very beginning of its history. A robber baron, he respected only money, which he possessed, and had opinions only about freedom. Freedom was the Union, that was what he had gone to war for. But Lida’s cocktail was better, after all, than the bare truth about her big brother and his
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
love story, better than silence around Vitek, Mika, and the causal chain of hatred that had led her to gamble on the wrong card. Instead of the truth and nothing but the truth, she offered a slight fabrication — an overbearing farmer father, a rich Southern bridegroom, a daughter Deborah with Huguenot blood, and a hatred of the peculiar institution that had frustrated her unfortunate brother’s love, a hatred that focused on her unloved, imposed, wealthy (she failed to add that he was wealthy no longer) husband
.

“You’ll get a divorce,” said Baxter Warren II
.

But fortune favours the fearless
.

The maid banged on the white door of the white house. There was no response — nothing but silence
.

“He’s probably asleep,” she said. “But it’s after ten.”

Across the street, Madam Russell’s Bakery was just waking up. A sleepy houseboy was sweeping the sidewalk. A woman with a large bosom appeared in an open second-storey window
.

“He’s probably stinking drunk,” said the soldier with the terrible
accent. “If it was me, I’d be drunk. She’s a real looker, too! What else can he do but get drunk?” He pushed the maid aside and pounded on the door with his fist. Nothing. “Wait here,” he said to the girl, and stepped over the low white fence protecting a flowerbed that ran around the house
.

“Captain!” squealed the whore in the second-storey window. “One of your soldiers is trying to break into Mr. de Ribordeaux’s house!”

A fellow in shirt-sleeves appeared in the window. All he could see was the maid, who was sitting on the doorstep. The soldier had vanished around the corner of the house
.

Two large shuttered windows faced out onto the garden. The soldier looked around. There was a love-seat in a bougainvillea-covered pavilion. He carried it to one of the windows, climbed up, opened the shutters, and peered in. It took a while for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Something was lying on the carpet in front of the dining table. It looked like a club of some sort, but he soon realized what it was, for a year earlier he had spent a month in hospital with an infected thigh wound. Then he looked up at the ceiling. He jumped off the bench, ran around the front of the house, yelled at the maid to get out of the way, then threw himself against the front door
.

The half-dressed captain in the second-storey window across the street yelled, “Private! What’s the meaning of this?”

The soldier looked around and saluted, more in mockery than in respect. The officer wasn’t in uniform, but it could only have been an officer; the civilians of Savannah hardly had time for tarts
.

“He could still be alive!” he yelled back with his heavy accent. The soldier, whose name was Frank Vorastek, was a solid blacksmith’s apprentice from Manitowoc, Wisconsin. With good food and plentiful exercise during the march through Georgia, he had regained the strength he had lost in hospital. The door gave and he stumbled inside
.

On the floor lay a wooden leg and overhead, suspended by a rope like a strange butterfly’s cocoon, hung a man with one leg, his swollen purple tongue protruding from his mouth. Two days before, he had learned of the existence of Captain Baxter Warren II, having observed him and Lida, as the sergeant had, through a window of the Grenier Hotel. He had confronted her, she had denied nothing, a final quarrel had erupted, and he had attached himself to her like a Pinkerton agent; then Cyril had intervened on the main street of Savannah and saved her future husband’s life. Later, up to his gills in bourbon, the cripple had wept on Cyril’s shoulder, babbling about the hellion named Linda and how he had lost everything he loved in the world. Cyril kept topping up his glass, horrified, hardly recognizing the man. He left the poor drunken wretch on the chaise-longue in the parlour of the big house — where next morning Lida would send Private Vorastek and the maid from the Grenier Hotel to get her things — and went to drink himself into oblivion as well, in the little house where Kakuska was making spurs out of clock gears
.