The Bride of Texas (40 page)

“If only she hadn’t died on me!” said Salek sorrowfully over his two-pint glass of beer, his fifth this afternoon, each one spiked with a shot of gin. Deirdre — who had opened the door at five o’clock one morning, sleepy-eyed but dressed in a grey skirt and faded blouse, while he stood on the step holding the two loaves of warm bread he was supposed to deliver every other day to that large, hungry house on Dearborn Street. On the street was his cart, pulled by an old mule. The morning was as murky as the Vltava River after a rainfall. She had a freckled nose and green eyes
.

“Good morning,” he said in a heavy accent, and she took the loaves from him, yawned, and turned to close the green door while he, enchanted by her reddish braids, went on staring long after the door, with its heavy polished brass knocker, had shut behind her
.

The sergeant felt Vlasta’s eyes upon him, as she kicked up her black-stockinged legs in the smoky mist and the band played the polka
.

“If only she hadn’t died on me!” Two days later, when Salek was delivering the loaves of bread again, he noticed that her thumb was bandaged. He took out a fragrant braided poppyseed roll he’d made especially for her the night before. She shook her head and said something he didn’t understand. He knew only a few words of English, but her speech had an Irish lilt
.

He shook his head too, pointed to her, and said, “Is for you!”

She was startled but then she smiled and took the roll from him. “Thank you!” She hesitated. He was standing there like a lump, unable to think of anything to say in English. She gave him another smile, then turned away and closed the door: two reddish braids tied with green shoelaces, the green door, the brass knocker
.

Two days later: “Was good?” This time she smiled as soon as she opened the door. Another beautiful roll didn’t catch her off guard
.

“Oh yes, it was very good!”

He pointed to his chest and said, as he’d planned to, “Ondra.”

“I’m Deirdre,” she replied and waited
.

“I bring you again, yes?” he said
.

“You’re very kind,” she said
.

No chess master, he hadn’t thought of his next move, but when she turned away he saw that she’d replaced the laces in her braids with shiny green ribbons. Two days later, he brought her a big poppyseed kolach
.

She died less than a year after they were married. It had been a late-evening wedding, with one tallow candle in an out-of-the-way Irish church, the only other glow coming from priest’s red nose. Salek couldn’t afford a better wedding by daylight. The bride wept with disappointment. Deirdre went on living with her master on Dearborn Street and he lived with the baker, Rehacek, in a furnished room. They saved their money and saw each other once a week. Their dream was a bakery of their own, where she would sell bread and pastries
.

“All I have left now is Annie,” sobbed Salek, pouring another shot of gin into the two-pint glass of beer. “If it weren’t for how kind Vlasta is to Annie.…”

The sergeant didn’t press him to continue. Instead, he said, “Don’t you and Vlasta have any children of your own?”

“Thank heavens, no,” said Salek. “I’m sure about Aninka. I know she’s mine. If Vlasta and I had — I mean, if Vlasta had a child — I couldn’t be sure.” The sergeant saw a black-stockinged leg flashing through the smoke. The grey eyes, darker than the smoke, caught his for an instant
.

“I’ll divorce her, I will!” Salek said bitterly. “But what about Annie?”

The memory of Salek’s sad voice was driven out by Shake’s high-pitched tenor, and the sergeant’s mind returned to the present, to the campfire a few miles from Bentonville.

“Nobody ever said so out loud,” Shake was saying, “but
deep down we were all surprised that Salek stayed with us. Especially Mihalotzy. By that time Salek was pretty well off, better than Honza Talafous, and nobody thought Honza’s sudden concern for his family’s welfare was odd. We all knew he had a prosperous shop on Randolph Street. Or Kabrna, whose cigars were selling so well that he’d hired twenty people. Nobody even thought it was strange when Kabrna tried to get the Austrian consul to get him out of military service. But he wasn’t the only one in Chicago to give the Czechs a bad name.”

“What about you?” asked Paidr.

“Me? I was the wonder of the town,” said Shake.

“You mean,” Kakuska said, “the whole town wondered about you.”

“But I knew they’d wonder and I wanted them to wonder,” said Shake. “I like being the centre of attention. Besides, everyone knew I’d bought some armour, so I had no reason to be afraid.”

“They say you wore it backwards at Perryville,” said Kakuska sarcastically.

“I didn’t know how to put it on properly,” said Shake. “It was supposed to fasten in the back with a buckle, but I couldn’t reach around to do it up.”

“Why didn’t you get help?” asked Fisher.

“I didn’t want to be laughed at,” said Shake. “So I put it on backwards and buckled it in front, and then I couldn’t get it turned around properly. But it saved my life all the same.”

“Is that so? When?”

“During the attack on Perryville. I got a direct hit but the armour held fast.”

“If you try to tell me someone on our side accidentally shot you in the back,” said Houska, “you’re going to get a direct hit in the nose from my fist.”

“I’d just turned around to urge my fellow soldiers on,” said
Shake calmly. “I got shot right in the back — a solid shot, my friends. I lay there, stunned.”

“But in one piece,” said Kakuska.

“Take a sniff!” warned Houska, sticking a clenched fist under Shake’s nose.

“Why don’t you still wear it, if it saved your life?” asked Paidr.

“I don’t have it any more,” said Shake. “You remember the winter we had in ’63? It got rusted.”

“I said, take a sniff!” Houska challenged him again.

“I want to hear more about Salek,” the sergeant said, averting the impending conflict.

“He was practically a wealthy man,” said Shake. “You don’t think that grocery store of his was something he earned by the sweat of his brow, do you?”

The sergeant cast his mind back to Chicago, back to that afternoon before the dance, when Cup-Salek was bragging about business and took him on a tour of the bakery
.

“You need to be a little bit lucky and a little bit shrewd,” he said. One morning five wagons loaded high with sacks of flour had stopped in front of his bakery, when it was still tiny
.

“What’s this?” he asked the driver
.

“You ordered flour?”

“Yes.”

“Well, here it is,” said the driver, handing him a purchase order. It said, “2000 sacks of flour”. The last two zeros had been squeezed in before the word “sacks”
.

“The wheat crop that year was excellent,” Salek-Cup explained to Kapsa. “Flour was going cheap. But I had an almanac from back home that had long-term weather predictions in it.” So he said nothing and had them carry the flour into the bakery. When they ran out of space, he rented the empty shop next door. Then he went to the wholesaler’s, but entered by the back door so that the
agent who had taken his order didn’t have a chance to sneak away. The agent was a little guy with a tic, and Salek towered over him menacingly
.

“He knew I always paid cash,” said Salek, “and never took anything on credit, so he thought I was feeble-minded. I held the purchase order under his nose and said, ‘Look, you made a mistake.’ He turned pale. I said, ‘I wanted twenty thousand sacks, not two thousand.’ ‘You — you don’t need that much,’ stammered the agent. ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘I may have overdone it a little. So I’m only going to pay you for the two thousand. But I want the discount for twenty thousand. After all, it was your mistake.’ The discount he gave me was so big that each sack of flour only cost me a few pennies. And the almanac was right. Next year the harvest was terrible, and the price of flour went way up.” Salek moved from the little shop on Goat Street to the one on the corner of Clinton and Randolph
.

“What was wrong with that?” asked Fisher. “If anyone was dishonest, it was the agent.”

“But it wasn’t honest work,” said Shake. “It was cunning.”

“Is it dishonest to be cunning?” asked Paidr. “If it were, you’d have been in jail long ago.”

“You’re quite right,” said Shake. “I’ve gone to pot mentally since I joined the army. Sometimes working with your mind can be honest, yes — and you can make more that way than working with your hands.”

“Making shady deals isn’t working with your mind,” said Paidr.

“What is, then?”

“Teaching, maybe,” said Paidr. “Or preaching. Priests work with their minds.”

“What makes you think priests are honest?”

“Watch what you say!” the devout Houska broke in, brandishing his large farmer’s fist an inch from Shake’s nose.

The sergeant intervened again. “So why didn’t Salek quit Lincoln’s Rifles when the shooting started? You say he was richer than Kabrna or that butcher.”

“That’s what surprised everyone,” said Shake. “It’s like the Copperheads used to say: rich men wage wars, poor men fight them.”

“Not always,” Zinkule chimed in. “Especially the ones who inherit their money. Look at General Millgate — he put up a whole regiment out of his own pocket, never took pay, and to top it all, he lost a leg at Shiloh. The real weasels are the ones who never made a cent till the war started. But worst of all are the substitutes. They get paid to take someone’s place, get whatever bonus they can for it, then desert and sign up all over again. Some of them have done it ten times over, I’ve heard.”

“You’re right,” said Shake. “The rich-by-inheritance have military honour in their blood. But the ones who’ve earned their money by mental work or by being smart appreciate it more, and they try to stay alive to enjoy it.”

“You think poor men don’t want to stay alive?” grumbled Houska.

“Wealthy men have more to lose,” said Shake. “All the poor man has is his life, and that’s not something you can bargain with. That’s why poor men are so eager to join the army. Their lives are worth something for a change.”

“Poor men are stupid,” declared Zinkule.

“Are you saying I’m stupid?” Houska turned to him angrily.

“You’re an exception,” Shake said hurriedly. “Like Salek was. But why?” He looked at his stupid companions, and the sergeant was compelled to wonder just what America would be like without their kind of stupidity. “Did you know that Salek was the very first American Czech to divorce his wife?” asked Shake.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” said Houska.

“Not in the church you can’t. He got a civil divorce. It just goes to show you that, for all he’s a Christian, Salek had grounds for divorce that were stronger than his fear of burning in hell.”

“He sure did,” said Kakuska. “She screwed every Czech in Chicago.”

“She wasn’t that patriotic,” said Shake. “She put out for Polacks too, and even for married men without a single drop of Slavic blood.”

The sergeant said nothing. He knew more about it than Kakuska.

And he knew why the general was so quick to dismiss the likelihood that Slocum’s battalion would encounter Johnston’s infantry at Bentonville, instead of just a few squadrons of Wheeler’s cavalry. Less than a year after the general had chosen him to join his staff, the sergeant had come to understand the two faces of war. In his first fifteen years of soldiering — first under Windischgraetz and his beadle, von Hanzlitschek, and then in tiny outposts of the small regular army of the United States — he had been exposed to only one of them: the face seen by the foot-soldier and the noncom. He brought one thing from the Royal Imperial Austrian Army that served him well in America: drill. All he had to do was replace von Hanzlitschek’s brutal and punitive style with straightforward discipline — though the bellow remained. He soon became a drill sergeant. When the war started, he mastered the art of transforming rural romantics and urban adventurers into soldiers, men who no longer saw military orders as an imposition on their personal liberty as Americans, and who came (kicking and screaming) to the conclusion that courage would lead to victory far more quickly if it was shaped by some good old-fashioned Austrian-style authority.

The face of war that the foot-soldier and the noncom saw was the face of confusion, marches here and there for no apparent purpose, building fortifications, tearing them down, skirmishing, confusion in which death was imminent and victory remote, and it all seemed like pricking an elephant with a hatpin. The sergeant knew this face of war all too well, but in this new American war not everything he had learned from von Hanzlitschek still applied. Rifles had a greater range and accuracy than they had had at the barricades in Prague, and they could be reloaded faster. In Europe the slow advance against a kneeling enemy (though here the enemy didn’t kneel but lay flat on his belly, in a rifle pit or behind a palisade) became, at the range of a hundred yards, an awkward charge with ranks closed tight together, crouching elbow to elbow. Here —

In the American war, new weapons were constantly appearing on the battlefields. Once, at the Yazoo River, they brought something to Sherman’s tent that seemed at first like an expensive joke. The muzzle of an ordinary breech-loader was mounted on a two-wheeled gun-carriage. Attached to the weapon at the breech was a tin funnel topped with a rectangular box. It looked like an oversized coffee-grinder, with a crank handle on one side and a rudder-like device protruding from the hind end. The artillery officer who had come to demonstrate the weapon took it down into a narrow valley that formed a natural shooting-range, and had a row of empty biscuit barrels placed on the opposite slope; then he stood behind the device. He grasped the rudder while an artillery sergeant took hold of the crank. The general’s staff formed a semicircle around them and the general positioned himself beside the man with the crank. He nodded for them to begin.