The Bride of Texas (15 page)

They mused about the curious things that had happened to them at the foot of Kennesaw Mountain. Late on the afternoon of June 22, the veterans of Carter Stevenson’s Confederate division had moved up along both sides of the Powder Springs Road to engage with Alpheus Williams’s division. It was an old-fashioned attack, elbow to elbow, perhaps because they were veterans, but in Zinkule’s eyes there was no accounting for it. Williams’s division, supported on the right by Milo Hascall and on the left by John Geary, had the advantage of numbers. General Hood, who had ordered the attack, must have lost his mind. Otherwise his order could only be explained as inspired by a malicious God who was siding with the Union on Kennesaw Mountain. The Union artillery let Stevenson’s men advance to within five hundred yards of their position before they cut loose with all forty cannon and hammered them, first with conventional ammunition and then, because that didn’t stop them, with explosive canisters. Those forty cannon fired a record ninety salvoes a minute, yet the grey-clad ranks, with gaps
like a mouthful of rotten teeth, got to within fifty yards of Williams’s fortifications before the butchery was ended in a hail of minnies. Only then did the Rebels retreat to a muddy hollow, regroup, and attack again. The next fusillade they faced was worse, Paidr swore later, than the one at Chickamauga or on Missionary Ridge at Gettysburg. They retreated again, with more gaps in their ranks, and then attacked a third time. It couldn’t have been mere insanity on Hood’s part, Zinkule maintained. The barking of the cannon became the roar of a wild beast, and the madmen got to within thirty yards of the fortifications, where they were cut to ribbons. The survivors fell back a third time to the gully, where it was already dark. Soon darkness descended on Williams’s palisades as well. But before it did, the rocks on the hillside glowed red with blood. In the dark, Rebel litter-bearers carried the moaning and the silent wounded back into the gully. Paidr climbed over the palisade and gave some water to a groaning Rebel lying a short distance from the barricade; when he had taken a sip of the lukewarm water in Paidr’s canteen, he gave up the ghost. Paidr set out down the hill and didn’t return until he ran into the Rebel litter-bearers. On the way back, his foot caught in the strap of an abandoned knapsack, and when he’d untangled it he took the knapsack back with him. Next morning, when the first rays of sunlight emerged, Paidr opened the knapsack and turned pale at what he found inside. There was a scrap of newspaper with a sketch of a man resembling Lincoln, and surely meant to be Lincoln, judging by the name printed under the picture in angular German script. But that wasn’t what horrified Paidr. After all, there were Germans on both sides, and in the North there was an entire German division under the command of the Prussian General Franz Sigel — or so Stejskal, who had served under him briefly, claimed. No, what horrified him was the poem under the crude image of Lincoln. It too was printed in German script, but the words were Czech
.

Paidr read it out loud:

“Boys,” said Paidr, his voice catching, “there’s Czechs on the other side too. Maybe we did this one in yesterday —”

“Why did he join up?” growled Stejskal
.

“Join up?” said the sergeant. “Why do you think he carried this around in his knapsack?”

And he repeated the line to himself:

Like the ancient fabled Phoenix, Freedom —

He tried to understand the different freedoms: Bishop Lynch
’
s
freedom and the freedom of the black bride. That night the conundrum kept him awake, and in the morning he decided that there should be two different words for it
.

Houska thought it over. At the top of the hill, bright cherries were glistening temptingly. Cherries in July? In Georgia? Houska’s boyhood cravings were awakened. They were sitting in trenches at the bottom of the hill, and above them hung this bounteous tree with its mysterious red fruit, a perfect target. Hood’s artillery were watching from the opposite hillsides. Houska’s mouth was watering. Later, Shake claimed Houska should been court-martialled for trying to poison himself with inedible fruit — how could they possibly have been cherries, when the birds were ignoring them? But Houska started crawling up the hill towards the Tree of Paradise
.

A bit farther on, at the foot of Kennesaw Mountain, Svejkar became the victim of an uncanny incident. One of Hood’s sharpshooters had fired on Lieutenant Bondy in his observation post among the rocks, after he carelessly let his field-glasses catch the sun. The poorly aimed musket-ball glanced off the granite cliff face just above a ledge where Svejkar was tanning his stomach; it ricocheted upwards at an absurdly sharp angle, then fell back and landed directly on Svejkar’s solar plexus, fortunately striking the book lying on his chest while he dozed. That, together with the projectile’s decreased velocity, cushioned the impact, like General Ritchie’s famous Bible — except that Svejkar had borrowed his book from Gambetta and it wasn’t suitable for public display. He had to pay Gambetta a whole dollar for the damage, and on top of it all, the incident gave him a savage case of the runs
.

Strange things had indeed happened at the foot of Kennesaw Mountain. Fisher, for instance, had managed to avoid the battle at the village of Dallas, though not deliberately, for he was frozen by supernatural terror. At the moment the order to attack arrived, Fisher was aiming his musket at a Rebel in a flagrantly piratical hat, when he realized that the man was aiming his musket directly back at Fisher. Before Fisher could pull the trigger, he saw a flash in his sights and the butt of his musket kicked him in the shoulder. Squinting down the barrel, he saw that a bulge had appeared in it. He dodged behind a boulder and discovered that the pirate’s shot had gone straight into the muzzle of his own musket; since it was of a larger calibre, it had plugged the barrel like a cork, making the weapon almost useless. Fisher mounted his bayonet and listened in disgust to the racket his unit was making as they advanced to a low stone wall a hundred yards ahead. He poked his musket out from behind the boulder, then peered carefully over the edge. The pirate must have been waiting for him to emerge, for he saw another flash and the musket flew out of his hands. By now Fisher was terrified — the pirate had hit the very tip of the bayonet, and a minnie was impaled on the point of his bayonet like a sugar plum. He retreated behind the boulder again and gave up all thought of heroism. Indeed, he experienced a sudden conversion to Zinkule’s faith. He now believed that there was indeed some kind of black magic going on out there beyond the boulder. When the rest of the men set out from the low wall they had just taken, he remained behind his cover, stunned by metaphysical terror
.

Despite his absence from the battle, the attack made him famous throughout the regiment. The amazing musket travelled from hand to hand, until Colonel Connington confiscated it for his collection of war memorabilia, which included a tiny bottle containing his own little finger, bitten off by a Washington society lady who had come out to observe the first battle of Bull Run and, when her carriage had suffered a direct hit, had bolted in terror
towards the Rebel lines; Colonel Connington had grabbed her and tried to prevent her from screaming with his hand
.

“The Devil is on Sherman’s side,” Zinkule insisted solemnly
.

“How would you like a punch in the nose?” Houska asked again
.

“He is!” the mystic repeated
.

“So you think Lucifer is helping our sacred cause?” chimed in the normally taciturn Javorsky. He took everything seriously. “Whose side is God on, then?”

“Both,” said Shake. “God, as you know, is a Jew, and wants to be on good terms with everybody.”

“Are you asking for a punch in the nose too?” asked Houska
.

“What leads you to draw such erroneous conclusions about my desires?” countered Shake
.

“Seriously, friends,” said Zinkule, “the signs are obvious.”

“You mean hell is on our side?” Javorsky asked ominously
.

“No, Jindra,” said Zinkule, rolling his eyes to the ceiling as if he were in the midst of a vision. “God Almighty sides with our cause as such. It’s just that Sherman has the Devil on his side, because he’s sold his soul just like Faust did. The signs are obvious.”

Upstairs in the master bedroom, the bedsprings began creaking as though an elephant were rolling around on them
.

“Vendelin is vandalizing the bed,” said Shake
.

“Put two and two together,” Zinkule went on. “What happened the day before the canister buried Honza Dvorak? And what happened the day after?”

They recalled the resurrection of the boy from Milwaukee. He was sniping at Rebels from a spot below a rocky overhang when a Rebel cannoneer made short shrift of the overhang with a supernaturally well aimed shot. It lodged in a crack below the overhang and exploded, burying Dvorak in a rock slide. When they tried to free him, Rebel fire forced them to take cover. Fisher tapped out a message with a pebble on rocks, and called out, but no sound came
from the stony sarcophagus and he assumed the sharpshooter had been crushed to death. Then some Rebel skirmishers showed up outside their palisades and they had to deal with them. The Rebels forced them to retreat to their second line of defence, and they opened fire from there, driving the Rebel swarm back behind their own palisades. The sarcophagus, with Dvorak inside, ended up in no man’s land. As night fell they exchanged a few more volleys, then it was dark, and next morning they pushed the Rebels back once more. Scarcely had they caught their breath when they heard the rattle of stones, and Dvorak emerged from his tomb with nothing worse than a monumental bump on his head
.

“What happened the day before?” asked Paidr
.

“The nigger, remember?” Zinkule was still gazing at the ceiling. “All the omens are there for the reading.”

Now the sergeant remembered. A shirtless Negro in tattered trousers, with his hat deferentially clasped to his bare chest, had stood in a meadow about ten feet from Sherman. The general took a step towards him, and then several things happened at once: he slipped on a slimy mushroom and sat down with a thump, there was the sound of a pine tree snapping in two, the general looked up to see the Negro standing there headless. Behind him a black cannonball was rolling away in the grass, and along with it a bloodied black head
.

“Read the signs!” Zinkule urged. “The Devil is protecting Sherman. That poison mushroom was the Devil’s work.”

“How do you know it was poison?” asked Stejskal. “How do you know what kind of mushrooms grow in Georgia?”

The mystic ignored him. “Read the signs, friends,” he said. “And the very next day —”

The next day, the general had been inspecting his forward lines. Not half a mile away stood Pine Mountain, and on its summit he could see a group of officers in grey. They were unrecognizable at that distance, but their nonchalance irritated Sherman
.