The Bride of Texas (37 page)

“But they could have been. In any case,” said Shake, “they were one of the first militias.”

“There wasn’t a war in the fall of ’60,” said Kakuska. “It was easy to sign up then. Any spineless fool can play soldier in peacetime.”

“And what do you think I’m doing here?” asked Shake. “Playing soldier?”

“Weren’t your famous Lincoln’s Slavonic Rifles founded by some valet?” asked Kakuska. “Some Hungarian?”

“He was a Slovak,” said Shake. “That’s like a Czech, and vice versa. Mihalotzy. He was about as Hungarian as Tonda Pokorny of the Eighth New York or Honza Fiala of the Seventh. Or as much as you’re an Austrian, Kakuska. His real name was Mihalik, probably. They made him a Hungarian when he joined the army.”

“They’d have made him into a Mitchell, not a Mihalotzy,” said Kakuska.

“I mean the Hungarian army. Geza Mihalotzy. He was mixed up in the trouble in ’49. That’s why he had to hightail it to America.”

“And take a job as a valet? Here?”

“What did you do when you came here, stupid?” asked Paidr.

“Same thing I did at home,” said Kakuska. “Worked like a dog.”

Kapsa knew that Kakuska had been brought to the States when he was twelve. His dad had worked like a dog back home and had worked just as hard here. In Kapsa’s mind, his buddy Kakuska was part of a cluster of memories — not all of them pleasant — of the time when he’d travelled to Chicago from his garrison in Ohio, after getting a letter signed “Andrew Cup”.

The first thing he looked at was the signature, because he never got letters. A postscript explained the name: “alias Ondrej Salek, I changed my name to what it means in English, since all my customers are American anyway, so now I’m Andrew Cup; at least it doesn’t bring Austria to mind, and everything I suffered there.”

In his mind’s eye, Kapsa recalled a black-smudged beanpole holding a ramrod in the smoke of Windischgraetz’s cannon as they pounded the barricades to smithereens. And then he remembered that Sunday afternoon in New York City, on Broadway, when Mrs. McCormick, Fircut’s landlady, said, “That spalpeen! Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” Kapsa said. “We were supposed to meet last night at the Bohemian Casino and he never showed up. I thought I’d find him here.”

“Did he rob you blind too?” the old Irishwoman snapped. The question made his heart sink. He had almost convinced himself that Fircut was honest, and hadn’t shown up because he was ill
.

“Daylight robbery it was. He walked away with the silver crucifix my dear late husband brought over from Kilkenny and treasured till the day he died. Never sold it even when we was deep in debt. May the Good Lord punish him! Would you take a look at this?” She led him into the parlour and pointed at a chest with metal reinforcements. A hole had been freshly chopped in its side. “This is what he was doing yesterday afternoon while I was at mass. He knew I was away at church every Saturday afternoon. Two hundred dollars in cash and the crucifix he took. What’s he stolen from you?”

“Nothing,” he lied, and felt all his hope vanish. He knew that he and Tuma had waited in vain at the casino. “He just borrowed a few dollars,” he added, so the Irishwoman wouldn’t feel so bad. He stumbled out into the street, not caring where he went or how, and on the corner of Third Avenue and Twentieth Street he ran into Salek
.

“Good to see you, Honza!” Salek said. “They say there’s a Czech tavern around here some place, the Bohemian Casino. Ever heard of it?”

“Why would you want to go there?” He was rather abrupt with Salek. Suddenly everyone in the world seemed suspicious
.

“I’m sick of all this American grub, and they say they cook our kind of food there. If I don’t get some good plain Czech food soon, I’ll starve to death!”

He went back to the beginning of the letter: “Frkac told me you might have joined up. So I thought to write you that if you ever
find your way to Chicago, you’re always welcome. I have a grocery store at the corner of Clinton and Randolph and, besides, me and a fellow named Franta Rehacek have opened a bakery. I got married, too, but take it from me, never marry a widow. I’ll tell you all about it if you ever happen to find yourself in Chicago, there’s lots to tell but I’m not much for letters.”

So Fircut was in Chicago; it was half a day by train from Carlington barracks. He put in for some furlough. The letter had been following him around for six months — it was simply addressed to him “Care of the U. S. Army” — but the army mail was reliable; slow but reliable. The army was small then, too, with barely eighteen thousand men. Supposing Fircut had done his dirty work in Chicago and then disappeared again? But this was a clue he couldn’t ignore. He realized he had no proof that Fircut had done anything wrong. Maybe he’d just give him a good thrashing; he was back in shape now. Maybe. But more likely just look him in his sneaky butler’s face, catch his shifty butler’s eye, and say, “Frkac, you’re a real spalpeen!” He had to go to Chicago
.

“Yes,” he had said in New York City to Ondrej Salek — later Andrew Cup — “down this street a bit and you’ll see it on the corner. They have a Czech lion on the sign, but the sign is in English. ‘Bohemian Casino’.”

“And do they have Czech food?”

“They sure do.”

“Then let’s go,” said Ondra
.

He shook his head. “I’ve just come from there,” he lied. They stood and talked a little while longer
.

“Are you working?”

“Not just now,” Kapsa said
.

“Well, if worst comes to worst, they’re still hiring at the brickworks. But I wouldn’t unless it does come to the worst,” said Salek. “Touzimsky’s a slave-driver. Maybe I’ll go to the harbour, sign on with the longshoremen. But I’m not staying at the brickyard much
longer. So — only if worst comes to worst, Honza.” Off he went, in search of real Czech home cooking. Kapsa started walking, but he didn’t know where he was going. It was Sunday afternoon in Manhattan and he was all alone. It took him a while to pull himself together. A week? Two? He’d lost track. He was looking for Fircut, although he didn’t really care any more. He stopped in at the Casino everyday, but Tuma just shook his head. Soon he realized that it was foolish to expect Fircut to show up. The hole in Mother McCormick’s wooden chest spoke for itself. Still, he kept wandering the streets from tavern to tavern, from one side of town to the other, and once he passed a one-storey stone building with an American eagle over the door. At first he put the idea out of his mind, for he still thought of the army as a black Austrian hell. Then one morning he woke up in a flophouse in the Bowery with only a few cents in his pocket. It was a maddeningly sunny morning, the city was humming. He realized that it must be his destiny. He got up and walked slowly through the busy streets to the building with the eagle. It was different from the Austrian eagle, although it too had talons and a sharp hooked beak. It felt like destiny. Home? He had no home. He had lost it far away a few years back, in the narrow streets of Helldorf, in the gauntlet and the bloody bench and Ursula, who was certainly dead, and must have died an awful death. And in the storms of the North Atlantic. He hesitated one more time. Should he try the brickyard? Was this the worst it could get? He returned to the shelter of the eagle’s wings, and a week later he was in uniform
.

The grocery store on the corner of Clinton and Randolph had large windows made of smaller panes of glass in shiny red frames. Outside the store there were sacks of potatoes, onions, beans, and flour under a wooden awning supported by red poles. A long sign that said in yellow letters: “ANDREW CUP — Vegetables, Fruits, Groceries” was affixed to the awning. Inside, the counters were stacked
with produce from Iowa vegetable gardens, along with bunches of bananas and pyramids of oranges. A tall man wearing a black suit with a canary-yellow vest and a massive, glittering loop of chain that ended in his watch pocket walked through the strings of coloured beads that curtained the doorway. Salek, now known as Cup, was wider and bulkier than he had been, with a moustache that extended across his face and vanished into thick black hair hidden under a yellow hat. Holding his arm was a woman dressed in lace. As the two of them emerged into the sunlight, she opened a parasol. It cast a shadow on her face, and from that shadow peered a pair of curious eyes. That was when Salek saw him
.

“Honza! Wonderful to see you!”

He saluted. “Sergeant Kapsa, at your service.” The woman held out a small hand in a mesh glove, and he saw a familiar invitation in her grey eyes. He could guess what Cup’s “lots to be told” would be about
.

They bounced along the streets of the big city, the woman inside the carriage, Kapsa up beside Salek in the driver’s seat, where he listened to the grocer’s success story interspersed with commentary on the sights. For the moment, he put all thought of Fircut aside. They were approaching the outskirts of the city; the buildings thinned out and the street, which was still under construction, suddenly ended in a dirt road with houses scattered along it. On their right was a lake so enormous it could have been the sea, with blue water stretching to the horizon. Salek finished his success story and began talking about the Kakuskas, who were holding the christening of baby Anna, old Bartolomej Kakuska’s newborn daughter. They turned into a driveway leading to a small white frame house surrounded by beds of red and white carnations. Over the door was a sign that said THERESA KAKUSKA, MIDWIFE. They pulled up in front of the house
.

“They’re doing well now,” said Cup-Salek. “But that’s mainly her doing. Old man Kakuska’s a hard worker but he’s got no
ambition. Been working in Calwell’s frame factory for ten years now, and he finally made foreman. But she brings in most of the money. She’s the first Czech midwife in Chicago. She has plenty of American customers too, and she managed to stake their oldest son, Jakub, to some property in Wisconsin. This is his second year farming. He’ll be here for the christening.”

The house was long and narrow and had obviously been built in stages — the embodiment of American progress. The front section was actually nothing more than a wooden shack. Behind that was a section built of bricks with a veranda facing west
.

In the shack section stood the housewife, midwife, and mother of the baby, who now lay sound asleep wrapped in a white binding quilt edged with pale blue lacing. Around her stood other members of the family: the grizzled and bony father, Bartolomej; the attractive daughter Molly in a calico dress, beside a rather slick-looking young man who turned out to be her fiancé, Franta Kouba; the younger son, Vavrinec (now known as Larry), who had just finished his apprenticeship as a gunsmith; and the novice farmer, Jakub, who had indeed come all the way from Manitowoc, Wisconsin, for his baby sister’s christening. The occasion was special because, as Tereza declared with a solemn gesture towards the infant, “This is our first little American!” There had been an earlier American-born baby, Matej, but he had survived only two days
.

Jakub showed Kapsa and Salek through the house. “Dad and I hammered this front section together first, every evening for a week, but it was on Sixth Street then. It had no floor, it just sat on the ground like a doghouse or a shed. But it was home, a roof over our heads. We were happy, but happiness — well, it never lasts long.”

“We arrived in Chicago completely beggared,” Kakuska said. “All I had left was a silver half-dollar and a two-dollar bill I hid in my clothes. We’d been three months on the ocean, hungry and
thirsty most of the time, but the thirst, my friend, was the worst. And then, wouldn’t you know it, just as we docked in New York, some people on the boat broke out in a rash and a bunch of them died — and the boat was put in quarantine. For ten days. Some poor wretches breathed their last looking out at America, at Manhattan. We survived, praise God. But the shipping company had to pay our room and board for the extra days. We had no money left, except for what I’d hidden in my clothes, and I wasn’t going to part with that for anything. We had train tickets paid all the way to Chicago, and we needed the money for those first days there. They accepted our feather beds as security, but we were real greenhorns and of course we never saw the feather beds again, and all we got in exchange for them was one salt fish a day and a slice of bread each.”

At first they slept in a dormitory that a philanthropist had built for Czech immigrants — a single large room, a stove for cooking in the centre, broad bunks along the walls for eating, sitting, and sleeping. They shared it with six other immigrant families, but at least they had a roof over their heads
.

“We’ll be grateful to that kind man till the day we die,” said Tereza. “Next day Father went to the docks and got a job unloading the ships. It was hard work. I didn’t have the connections to practise midwifery yet, and besides, I was carrying Matej at the time. Father didn’t make much, but we saved enough for lumber and Father and Jakub put up this shack. They built it on the prairie, not far from the dormitory. But we were happy. We were in America, and we knew this was only the beginning.”

One afternoon, someone came pounding on the door. Tereza, eight months along, opened the door, and there were two men dressed in knickerbockers and tweed caps
.

“We’d like to talk to Bartholomew Kakuska,” said one of them in an official-sounding voice. Tereza was frightened by the tone and put her hand on her stomach
.

“Not home. Is working,” she said
.

“What — time — will — he — come — home?” said one of the men. He looked disdainfully around the single room until he saw a printed picture of George Washington carefully nailed to the wall under a crucifix they had brought from home with a painted metal Christ on it. The contemptuous expression faded. Molly, who was fifteen, walked in from the vegetable garden, where she had been hoeing
.