The Bride of Texas (21 page)

Flaming snow was falling on the Congaree River. Madam Sosniowski was reminiscing about Siberia. Her husband had become desperately ill and even the most basic treatment had been unavailable. After six years the tsar, who still didn’t believe in equality between the classes, took pity and let him go home. Dr. Sosniowski, however, didn’t want to live in Galicia any more; it was too close to his vanquished Poland. He got a letter from a fellow student who had built up a practice in Helldorf but then married a wealthy Bavarian woman. Dr. Sosniowski bought him out and paid the debt over time.

In Helldorf his thoughts were increasingly on America. He got himself the English originals of the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, and together they studied English, read de Tocqueville — in the original because, of course, they both knew French. They had a child — a little girl — and then another. When he’d paid for the practice, he sold it and they emigrated to America. That was in 1850.

“But why did you come here, to the South?”

“We had a friend here, the only person we knew in America. He’d fought in ’30, and after the defeat he was lucky enough to get out. You saw him in front of General Hampton’s house.”

The sergeant wasn’t ashamed. He was never ashamed of his general’s army. Glancing back, he caught one of the Irish soldiers drinking from a bottle. Grinning at the sergeant, the soldier quickly hid the bottle and gestured with his hand. The sergeant turned back to Madam Sosniowski.

“What does your husband think of this war?”

Madam Sosniowski looked at the burning city, sighed, and said, “My husband died less than a year after we arrived. Siberia had destroyed his health. For him, America came too late.”

The general knew that depriving his soldiers of the right to write home would have been like arming them with popguns instead of rifles. Letter-writing went on everywhere — at campfires, in tents by candlelight, even outside in the pale light of the full moon. Houska, sitting beside the sergeant, had several pages of a letter laid out on his knapsack, and the sergeant knew what his comrade’s problem was. The elder Houskas couldn’t read or write but they were famous throughout Wilber County as scandalmongers and gossips who left the reading up to their children. Not only were Houska’s nine brothers and sisters literate, but the family gift of the gab had transformed their literacy into a passion for letter-writing. Each of them, from forty-year-old Lojza down to eight-year-old Ferda, sent Houska at least one letter a month, and although they all lived in the same village near Wilber, Houska never thought of simply writing one letter to the whole family. To make matters more complicated, the youngest could only read English, and Houska had to employ the linguistic services of Shake, who was a powerhouse in that language. Houska only knew enough English to understand orders and the names of the foodstuffs the sutlers sold around the camp. He wrote often to a fiancée too, but behind Houska’s back Shake expressed some doubts about her ability to read and write; instead of answering his letters, she sent him jelly doughnuts that always went stale before they arrived. Shake was wrong — the fiancée eventually did write Houska a letter — but it was a letter of farewell.

During the assault on Kennesaw Mountain, Houska fell stunned into the bushes. When he came to, the Rebels had counter-attacked, leaving him lying in a noman’s land which for the moment happened to belong to the Confederacy. So he stayed in the
bushes and watched events unfold from behind a tree. A Rebel soldier stopped a few steps from his hiding-place. On the ground in front of him lay a bulging military knapsack with a Rebel flag sewn on the pocket. The man may well have been a gallant soldier in the cavalier tradition, but he looked like the King of the Beggars. His feet were bare; his trousers, once long, now barely reached below his knees, with a few tatters of the original legs reaching his ankles. He was shirtless under a tunic patched with butternut cloth. He wore a partially scorched straw hat, and to Houska he looked like one of the scarecrows he remembered from the fields around his native village near Tabor. Then a canister exploded nearby. A fragment whistled through the undergrowth, ripped open the knapsack, and embedded itself in Houska’s tree. The knapsack yielded up its contents like guts spilling out of a slaughtered animal. The Rebel swore angrily and, with canisters now exploding all along the edge of the woods, started examining what turned out to be a sartorial treasure trove. Houska knew he wasn’t dreaming — in this war, after all, everything was possible — but later on, when he told the story, he said he felt like an intruder at a nancy-boys’ bazaar. The ragged soldier pulled something white out of the pile of things on the ground and unfolded it, and Houska saw a fine set of Confederate officer’s linen underwear, complete with a blue embroidered monogram. The Rebel set it down carefully on the grass, checking it thoroughly for bloodstains. Next he held up a shirt with a ruffled lace front. One by one, more quickly now, he unfolded the garments — there was even a moustache band and a mesh nightcap and a spotty, hand-coloured daguerreotype of a pale beauty who looked as if she had the measles. Finally the Rebel pulled out a bottle with a label on it. Act Two of the performance began. The crack of rifle fire was still coming from the trenches where Houska’s buddies were bathed in sweat, while behind them, like Roman tubas, the Parrot guns roared defiantly. The ragged Rebel seemed deaf to all this. He quickly stripped to the
skin and pulled on the white underwear (he wore none of his own), and before long Houska was staring at a man in a lace shirt, and trousers with crimson cording and razor-sharp creases made by some Negro orderly. Next came the headgear, a brimless top hat with a broad red band and a red, white, and blue plume. Finally, the man put on a double-breasted frock-coat with two rows of gold buttons down the front and thick gold epaulettes, and he was just buckling on a belt woven with gold threads in it when all hell broke loose overhead and the first ranks of dishevelled Rebels started running past in retreat. The attack had been repelled. The Rebel sat down on the ground and struggled to get his feet into the fine leather boots with shiny knee protectors. More Rebels rushed past. Many were limping and bleeding, and one carried on his back a comrade with an arm missing, probably shot off by a cannon-ball. Blood was spurting from the stump, leaving a glistening red trail on the grass. The once-beggarly Rebel, now properly shod, jumped to his feet just as the fleeing ranks began to thin. He took one more look at the picture of the girl with the spotty red cheeks, tucked it inside his shirt, stuffed the bottle in the ample coat pocket, and grabbed his musket. Houska decided to act. Aiming his rifle directly at the gilt belt, he stepped out of the bushes and in a heavy Czech accent said, “Hands up!”

A few days later the Rebel was traded for Sergeant Karpeles. They let him keep the uniform and the picture of the red-cheeked beauty, but Houska confiscated the whisky. It went the rounds at the campfire, and the only one to suffer any ill effects was Kakuska
.

According to Stejskal, Kakuska was like a wild stallion who won’t carry on with mares outside his own herd. He had remained faithful to his wife, despite the services offered in city bakeries and by the women in their camp like Easy Lizzie, or the aptly nicknamed
Bubbly Babsy. Kakuska suffered passively at first, then mustered the courage to ask General Ritchie for furlough. That didn’t work, and afterwards he suffered twice as much. But unless onanism is considered infidelity, he remained a good Catholic spouse. They drank the captured whisky and, because there were five of them and only one bottle, no one got really soused. There was just enough to make the familiar conviction that all was well with the world rise from their stomachs to their heads. Kakuska drank his share and for a while he was silent like the rest of them, enjoying that pleasant world where distant cannon-fire can sound almost playful. But all at once he jumped up, looked around with a wild expression on his face, then tore off among the trees. The next day they found out that he’d ended up in the infirmary. As long as he was under medical care they couldn’t explain his sudden flight, and more or less accepted Zinkule’s explanation that Kakuska had been temporarily possessed by a demon distilled into the Tennessee whisky. Two days later he got out, however, and the mystery of his disappearance was cleared up
.

When he vanished among the trees, Kakuska had not been headed for the latrines, as the many who had been stricken by the Kansas quickstep assumed. Instead, he ran straight to the creek and jumped in. But it was shallow — and it was summer in Georgia, and the water wasn’t cold enough. So Kakuska climbed out and chinned himself frantically on an overhanging branch until it broke under his weight, dropping him to the ground, where he began doing grunting push-ups. He called so much attention to himself that, by the time he set out on a marathon sprint through the encampment, he had a mob of followers curious to know what he’d been drinking. At the other end of the camp he ran into Bubbly Babsy, who was just emerging from Colonel Curtiss’s tent, and flung himself on her. Bystanders jumped him and subdued him after a lengthy struggle, then dragged him off to the infirmary. There Kakuska found himself in a straitjacket. But Dr. Blake, observing
his most evident symptom, brought Kakuska’s torment back to its normal state with a medication of his own devising
.

So they deliberated on the dangers of whisky and arrived at an essentially racist theory which Houska was the first to voice, although he hadn’t thought it up. It was based on a lesson that the lad from Wilber County had learned from Doc Paddock, an Irishman whose clinic, where he also lived, was on the second storey of the first building ever built in Wilber, right over the Homestead Saloon. Doc Paddock’s choice of location was deliberate: the saloon was his main source of clientele
.

One of the casualties was Houska, when a conversation over a glass of whisky between him and a Norwegian farmer, Olaf Heglund, ended prematurely in a ripped ear. (Heglund was now serving with the Fifteenth Wisconsin, and when the two men had resumed the conversation after Chancellorsville the outcome had been reversed.) The bill for the surgery on Houska’s ear came to an exorbitant ten dollars, an amount he didn’t have on him — he had rarely seen that much cash in one place — so he offered instead two paintings he happened to be carrying with him in a laundered potato sack. Actually, the paintings were the reason he had walked the twelve and a half miles from Bee Grove to Wilber that day; they were to be a gift for his father’s sixtieth birthday, and Houska’s brother Vincek had commissioned a jack-of-all-trades called Josef Prokes (whose affinity for rye whisky was the main reason he was master of none) to paint his father’s portrait on the basis of a youthful daguerreotype. In addition to doing portraits, Prokes also painted stage sets for an amateur theatrical group called Wilber Thalia, and on Saturday nights he played the accordion at the Homestead Saloon and took his pay in rye. He also built houses, made furniture and shoes, and distilled slivovitz, some of which he consumed himself; the rest he sold in Chicago. When Vincek found out how much Prokes charged — two dollars
for a portrait measuring three feet by five — he had the artist do his portrait as well, and when they were done he sent his younger brother to pick them up
.