The Bride of Texas (84 page)

“I thought you said she favoured Jasmine,” Bozenka said.

“Did I say that? I must have been mis —”

“And if Hasdrubal had married Bee, how could she have been a consul’s wife in Haiti?” asked the sergeant’s wife.

Mr. Ohrenzug said feebly, “I suppose I.…”

“Mr. Ohrenzug, you’re lying through your teeth!” Molly Schroeder said sternly. The sergeant furtively poured another shot into his beer while his wife scowled at the colonel. He took a swig and the voices faded.

When Lida (or Linda) went home to her mother’s funeral, she was pregnant again, this time with Baxter Warren III, a son and heir. Once again she gave Cyril her word of honour. He didn’t believe her, but she said, “Why would I lie to you, Cyril, tell me that? She was really gone. In Savannah I could easily have said I had troubles enough of my own. But I didn’t, I really tried to keep an eye on her for you.”

“But why, Lida? Why?”

“Well,” said his sister, fashionably dressed now, rich — that time in Washington she had also had a mourning ribbon on her hat — “partly on account of you. That tea-rose of yours, heaven knows what kind of abracadabra —” She looked across the fields towards the de Ribordeaux plantation in the distance, past the graveyard where a fresh mound of soil lay on the family grave where they had laid their mother to rest beside their father. “I could have made him sell her south, you know. But I went through all that rigmarole with the blacksmith’s wife —”

“Crash!” he heard Jake Duty exclaim. Kapsa hadn’t noticed him return to their table. “Crash!” Jake repeated. “The head of the tunnel started shifting and in the light of my lantern I saw a
fellow in butternut with a spade. Like I said, they’d had the same idea and we were tunnelling under the parapet from opposite sides. So I swung at him with my pickaxe, he swung back with his spade — and boys, we fought the Rebs underground, hand to hand.”

“Did you take any prisoners?”

“We fought off their attack, but we had to retreat. Our plan was blown and any more digging was out of the question. But at Petersburg I saw the chance right off, as soon as I took a look through the crack in the palisade. Somebody behind me says, ‘Think we could do it?’ I turn around and there’s Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Pleasants. All of us in the Forty-eighth Pennsylvania were black-coal miners from the Schuylkill. ‘You bet, colonel!’ I say. ‘What about ventilation?’ he asks. ‘You’d have to dig almost two hundred yards.’ ”

Cyril never told Lida about the bug the blacksmith’s wife had planted in his ear. He went back to Chicago, where he was a partner in a machinists’ firm, but the idea was firmly planted. They say love moves mountains. “God knows,” he admitted to Kapsa, “maybe she just gave up. Besides,” he said sadly, “I’m not of the same blood she is.”

“As if that mattered!” the sergeant said
.

“God knows,” said Cyril, and left
.

The sergeant got up and walked towards the gentlemen’s room, stopping at the bar on his way.

When she saw him, Ursula exclaimed, “Ach, Tasche! Kapsa!
Mein lieber Mann!”
and she took him by the hands. “All that is not true,” she said
.

“It’s not,” he replied. “But I never even thanked you, Madam —”

“Ursula.”

“Ursula.”

“And what about me? Who should I have thanked?” She
smiled, and that was that. Something rose up in him, a strong sensation, gratitude, but that was that
.

Then he said, “This cheque really belongs to you. I couldn’t even manage to hang onto your precious gift.”

“But the jewels brought you luck.”

“That they did,” he said
.

“I gave them to you. And now they’re actually back in the family.”

“But this cheque —”

She interrupted him: “You said you have a daughter?” So the nest of crystal eggs would buy a dowry for Terezka. He looked into her eyes. Gottestischlein. She stepped closer to him, then they embraced, and as they were kissing, his mind turned into a kaleidoscope — the soothing sweet water, the miracle, and how she said in her sweet German, so unlike that of Hauptmann von Hanzlitschek, “Oh, you dear man! You’re even making progress with the German language!” Then the bloody welt on Ursula’s back where the bullwhip struck … he felt the happiness that could not have been real rising in him, centering on his underbelly — and she extricated herself from his embrace, and whispered passionately, gently, joyfully,
“Danke,
thank you
, mein lieber Mann,
thank you, thank you, thank you!”

He came to his senses, felt ashamed, then grateful, then joyful. He walked out of the house, glanced back at the two-headed eagle, and never saw her again. It was with the last, whispered, gentle, passionate words that she had remained alive in his mind
.

He came out of the gentlemen’s room and saw his general, hesitated, and returned to his table.

“A thunderclap!” Jake Duty was saying. “An explosion like the world never saw before or since. A huge mass of earth, dirt, palisades, cannon, and Rebels flew straight up in the air, with a column of fire and a head of smoke like a great mushroom.
Then it all fell back down again, men — whole ones and parts — a caisson wheel, a horse’s quarters with a leg attached —”
Cornflower-blue serpent’s eyes. How was it Bozenka put it? Some proverbs prove true, some don’t
. “The plan,” he heard Jake Duty go on, “was to launch an attack through that gaping hole. And it should have worked, they could have been in Petersburg in an hour, but the blast was so awful that everyone was scared. To top it off, our artillery cut loose and made a racket like the world had never heard. Ledlie’s division was supposed to lead the assault but they stood there with their mouths hanging open, and when they finally got moving, instead of securing the gap, they jumped into the crater and started helping the wounded and buried Rebels. It wasn’t until two more divisions joined them that the shooting started in The Crater, and soon it was such a mess that nobody knew who anyone was. To top it off, General Ledlie stayed out of it, probably because he’d been drinking under the palisade, shitting bricks. Small wonder. Then a well-drilled nigger division came marching into all that madness as if they were on the parade ground and, on top of everything, they were singing! Of course, their commander turned them loose into that madhouse by themselves, while he stayed under cover, boozing with Ledlie. Some commanders we had! Burnside wanted to send the niggers in first, partly to prove to the doubting Thomases that they were as good as anyone else, and in fact he’d drilled them to do this for two weeks before. But then Burnside thought it over and instead he sent the white divisions, who hadn’t trained for it. He bungled it the way he did at Fredericksburg.”

“Remember? Remember, buddy? Perryville. And us among all those awful bubbles!” It was a happy Salek-Cup. How things changed. Somebody called it the alchemy of time. The sergeant took a drink of his fortified beer. That was alchemy too. They had
fought at Perryville with their tongues hanging out. All that was left of it were the tales of Jan Amos Shake. Cup, first widowed, then divorced, now happy again —

“An apartment house?” asked the sergeant
.

“He has two of them, in Prague. One in Zizkov district, one in the Lesser Town,” said Cup. “And a fruit and vegetable store on the Small Square. My father-in-law and I, we’re colleagues,” he declared happily. “Both of us were patriots, we belong to the Sokols. Me in Chicago, him in Prague. The first time I saw Jirinka, my second wife, was with the Sokols —”

“And how come you weren’t afraid to go home for the Sokol Assembly?” the sergeant interrupted him. “After all, they’re such patriots and you’re a deserter. You bombarded the Lesser Town.”

“I’m Andy Cup now,” said Salek, “and I have the papers to prove it. American papers. So I was in the artillery — I was young and foolish. Besides, that was a long time ago.”

They were sitting in Slavik’s Tavern, and they were older now, the farmer and the wholesaler
.

“Aren’t you too old for Jirinka?”

“I’m an American,” Cup said proudly. “I served honourably in the great war for liberty!”

The sergeant looked around. “Not that her restaurant is such a bad place,” said Mr. Ohrenzug, getting himself in deeper and deeper. “It’s just in a bad neighbourhood.”

“Funny I don’t know it,” said Shake. “I associate exclusively with poor people.”

“Where did you say it was?” asked Houska.

“Somewhere between Dearborn and Clark,” said Mr. Ohrenzug.

“Isn’t that Little Cheyenne?” said Houska, then stopped.

Ruzena asked, “What’s Little Cheyenne, Houska?”

“But that was before we got married,” said Houska.

“Ah,” said Shake.

“You know that part of town, Mr. Shake?” asked Ruzena.

“That was before you two got married,” said Shake.

“Married or not,” Houska’s wife retorted, “we were engaged, Vojtech and me, during the war.”

“But then you married Freddy!” Houska protested.

“But I divorced him because of you!” snapped the angry Mrs. Houska. “And now he’s a candidate for the Sixth District in Berwyn!”

Bozenka, who had been listening closely, said, “Well, I don’t think she’s going to be the Carolina Bride after all. This doesn’t sound like the kind of story Mrs. Lee writes.”

The famous author sat at the head table in the dining room with her head in her hands. But then she stood up and tossed her head abruptly, setting the red curls in motion. The man with the weather-beaten face rose as well, and bowed. The author took his arm and they walked onto the dance floor and began dancing a jig to the music of Mates’s band.

Those strange paths across the mountains.

“There was that one letter,” said Lida. “Somebody was supposed to have seen her in Jamaica.”

“So the blacksmith’s wife —”

“I don’t know,” said Lida. “A drowning man will grasp at straws.”

Some proverbs prove true, some don’t.

The sergeant rose.

“And then nothing? No news from Jamaica?”

“Nothing,” said Lida. “It’s been three years now. Poor Cyril. Strange stars we had in our sky, didn’t we, sergeant?” She stood there in her green hat on the corner of Randolph and Green, Cup’s brightly coloured oranges like burning torches behind her, the cornflower eyes from that distant land, the turpentine forests, here now for ever
.

“Not necessarily,” Mr. Ohrenzug consoled the sergeant’s
wife. “It’s a fine place, otherwise. They have a salon band from New Orleans. Imported —”

“Have you been there, Mr. Ohrenzug?” Bozenka asked him.

“Strictly out of professional curiosity,” said Mr. Ohrenzug. “You can go there just for a drink. A glass of wine, I mean. Some of the ladies even speak French. It’s just that patois of theirs, but still —”

“There’s one thing I still don’t understand,” Shake said. “Where did she get the money?”

Mr. Ohrenzug flinched. “The capital came from Dr. Walenta,” he replied hastily. “I suppose he got the idea when he was stitching up her ear.”

“So she certainly isn’t the Carolina Bride,” said Bozenka flatly.

The sergeant began walking over to the VIP table, then hesitated. The famous author was returning from the dance floor and he heard her tell the man with the weather-beaten face, “I don’t know if I’ll ever write anything again, general. I had apparently written everything I knew how to write. Then I tried something … I tried hard. But what I wanted doesn’t count. What counts is what I accomplished.”

The farmhouse door was opened by the rosy-cheeked woman in the picture, the one with the miniature portrait of her husband in the background, painted by the jack-of-all-trades from Wilber. He knew then that his footsteps hadn’t been guided here merely by the people who gave him directions at forks in the road. She wept wretchedly, inconsolably. Finally, however, she allowed herself to be consoled
.

His wife.

“No, general,” the famous author was saying. “Burnside should not have let them draw lots. He should have picked the most experienced commander for the attack, and Ledlie was
certainly not the right one. He just drew the short straw. But why did he fail so miserably?”

“Why indeed?” said the man with the weather-beaten face. “Burnside was a capital fellow. But he bit off more than he could chew.”

“I don’t know about that,” said the famous author. “I only know how important it was to him that this battle create not only a breakthrough in the Rebel line at Petersburg, but also a breakthrough in the technology of warfare —”
He saw him on his huge horse, Sam, his staff closing the gap and falling behind like a pendulum in the burning snow
. “And that the battle at The Crater be associated for ever with his Negro division. He was genuinely proud of them. He respected them. It’s a story that goes way back, back to the Mexican War, even further, in fact. And you gentlemen did not permit it.”

The sergeant plucked up his courage.

“That was why there was the foolishness of drawing lots,” said the famous author.

“Meade was afraid,” said his general. “If there had been a massacre, the reporters would have accused Grant of sending the coloureds to certain death to spare the whites.”

“So at the last minute you changed Burnside’s orders, and now the reporters are accusing you of regarding the coloured soldiers as trash,” said the author. “You were afraid to trust them with an untried task.”

“You can’t win,” said the general, scowling.
To General Logan he had said, “We don’t need to win battles any more.” Then Terry’s Negro Second Division had been marching past in their new blue uniforms and Lida had said, “What can you know, Cyril?”
What could he know? The sergeant stepped over to the booth, and out of the corner of his eye he noticed the rapid approach of Mr. Ohrenzug, who had put on his spectacles and had finally noticed the presence of the man with the weather-beaten face. The
sergeant snapped to attention. “General, sir!” he said hoarsely. The weather-beaten face turned to him and he knew the general was searching his memory. Lida in her hat with the black mourning band and, marching past the reviewing stand, Sherman’s army. The general looked into his eyes.