The Bride of Texas (54 page)

She walked through the orchard thinking about the white boy who talked funny and called her miss. He spent all his time back there by the stables, putting some kind of machinery together, and whenever she walked by — which was more than she needed to — something strange happened: she had the feeling that his eyes were not undressing her. She knew what the undressing looks were like. Now and then Étienne had visitors from neighbouring plantations, young dandies from Galveston, and she heard them joking
about her to Étienne, and he would laugh and not say a thing. This young white boy, covered with black axle-grease, was something different. When he stared at her over the oily metal plates his two helpers were struggling with, it made her feel like a black countess, or a countess in the novels in Mademoiselle de Ribordeaux’s bookshelf, at whom the cavaliers always “gazed with veneration”. That was it. The white boy looked at her “with veneration”. He had already asked her twice to meet him in the evening after she was done working. She hadn’t been able to because Étienne had wanted her. But yesterday Étienne had told her he was going to Galveston for three days. If the white boy should ask her again.… She walked past the blossoming cactus plants and realized how unhappy she’d be if he didn’t
.

In the morning, when she was cleaning Étienne’s room — he had ridden out early in the carriage — she thought of those letters. After what had happened the previous night, she wanted to be clear about things, so she searched through the drawers in his writing-desk. There they were: ivory-coloured sheets of paper with the name of some town and a picture of church towers and bridges across a river printed across the top. They were written in a large calligraphic hand, four letters in total, the English funnier than the brother’s. “Dear Mister de Ribordeaux,” said the first one. “Thank you for the letter. I cant meet you day time but tomorrow Tuesday at seven o’clock I coming to were Hardy Creek turn south at weeping willow tree. sincerely, Linda Towpelick.” So the boy’s name was Towpelick. The rest of the letters were shorter, but all the more eloquent. They started “Dear Étienne,” followed by a time and a place, and ended “Your Linda.” The last one had been delivered the previous afternoon by Jefferson, one of the men Carson had lent to the Towpelicks. It read: “Seven o’clock Cobson’s Grove.”

“I swear I never snooped around in Lida’s things,” Cyril declared one of those turpentine evenings. “But she left the letter lying on the chest. She knew it was nothing but gibberish to Mother and Father, and anyway she didn’t have to keep secrets any more, like back home.”

The letter contained a poem but Cyril didn’t understand much of it yet. “Lida? Whatever English she knew she had learned from Washington and Jefferson. They followed her around like puppies. One time in Austin she bought herself a textbook for newcomers, but she learned a lot more from those two lovesick servants. I read that poem over and over until I knew it by heart. Finally I figured out what it was all about. Of course, Lida knew the first time she read it — if she ever read it, for all she had to do was look at the letter. It was obviously a poem. What else can a poem from a young man mean?”

“Do you still remember it?” asked the sergeant.

So Cyril recited it. At the other end of camp, a band was playing taps.

“Yesterday they were smooching down by the weeping willow,” Benjamin said in the kitchen. “I got an awful sneeze and it scared them off.”

“Just be glad he didn’t break your back with his wooden leg!” Uncle Nero grinned
.

“He never seen me. I scuttered down the ravine and on out of there,” said Benjamin, “so I missed watching him screw her.”

“Massa he never do it like some white trash,” said Uncle Nero. “Down by the creek.”

“You don’t think so? Just ask this little girl here.” He turned to Dinah. “Go on, tell Uncle Nero!”

Before she could say something sassy, Uncle Nero said sternly, “I don’t abide no dirty stories.”

“Anyway,” said Benjamin, “now they got scared off the willow tree, they’ll find somewhere else.”

Cobson’s Grove was a miniature French park, one of de Ribordeaux’s flights of sentiment, like his big library full of French novels that, for the most part, only Dinah had read. There was an arboretum with a gazebo, where Hortense de Ribordeaux had spent hot afternoons perspiring over her reading lessons. There were places to hide all around the gazebo. That evening, from one of those places, Dinah heard Étienne reading English poetry, and through the leaves she saw him try to steal an ordinary kiss from Miss Blue-eyes between sonnets. But Miss Blue-eyes wouldn’t let him. She told him to read her another poem instead
.

Dinah was amazed. Was this the way white folks did it? Just the way they did in novels? She recalled his crude command to her that first night and practically laughed out loud. Étienne was so comical now. After all kinds of flirtatious toing and froing she finally let him kiss her, but the moment Étienne put away the sonnets and reached for her bodice she stood up and said she had to go home. The moon had barely risen. Étienne got up too, and limped obediently beside her to the buggy. Miss Blue-eyes climbed in and snapped the reins, but by then Dinah was running along the hedge in the little park, then between the cabins and back to the big house
.

That night she tried to control herself, but she cried out again. She owed her pleasure to little Miss Blue-eyes. And this time she even caught herself closing her eyes and imagining it was the white
boy under her. She was feeling something strange, and she had no idea that it was happiness. That afternoon the white boy had asked her a third time. This time she had said yes, and had invited him to the arboretum. Étienne was going to Galveston the following day
.

The sergeant watched his daughter through half-closed eyes as she struggled with the dry sentences of the colonel’s memoirs by the light of the kerosene lamp
. “The advanced guard of General William Passmore Carlin’s division encountered the North Carolina division of General Robert F. Hoke. The latter, having taken advantage of the cover provided by the dense scrub oak which bordered both the road to Bentonville and the fields surrounding the Cole plantation, had taken a position as the axis of a vice that was meant to pulverize Carlin’s division. The right arm of the vice was the army of General A.P. Stewart, positioned in the bushes and groves to the north of the road, while the left one was to be the corps commanded by General William Joseph Hardee, which, according to Confederate General J.E. Johnston’s plan, would locate along the south side of the road. General Johnston, however, had formulated the plan on the basis of maps of dubious precision, since more precise ones were not available, and thus, to his dismay, General Hardee discovered that the distance he and his men were to cover on their march towards Bentonville was twice that indicated by the maps. When General Carlin’s advanced guard came in contact with Hoke’s units, only the northern arm of the vice — A.P. Stewart’s Tennessee army — was in the position called for in Johnston’s general plan. Once the assault of Carlin’s advanced guard was thwarted, neither Hoke nor Stewart proceeded with a counter-attack but instead waited in anticipation of the arrival of Hardee’s units. Thus
Johnston’s carefully formulated plan collapsed even before it could be implemented.”

The girl put down the book. “Daddy, can I have a drink of cider?”

“Apple juice,” the sergeant corrected her and closed his eyes. He could see Carlin’s soldiers, whipped by the hot breath of battle, retreating behind bushes and stone walls. Not an orderly retreat, but it had been weeks since they had danced to the roaring music of cannon and sought shelter from the rain of canisters all around them. They re-formed their ranks behind the bushes and the walls, and attacked again. The countryside, flooded with morning sunshine, was blanketed with running men, and gunfire began crackling in the bushes opposite them. Small clusters of grey-clad soldiers broke out of that cover to counter-attack. The blue of the Union uniforms had faded to a dull grey-blue on the early spring march through the Carolinas, so to General Carlin, watching through his field-glasses, the battling soldiers became a jumbled, indistinguishable mass, punctuated by the gleam of a bayonet or the flash and puff of a gunshot
.

“Apple juice,” the girl corrected herself
.

“Go ahead,” said the sergeant. “You read very nicely.”

The child’s smile was lovely. If the war had turned out differently — if —

The sergeant would live to a ripe old age. He would die content in his ninety-seventh year. By then the Austrian Empire was history, and all of them — Ursula, Shake, Paidr, Javorsky, Salek-Cup, Houska — all of them were dead, alive only in the memories of an old soldier. An American-style republic was born back home in the old country, but the sergeant’s home had long been America. Or so it seemed to him when another child, a great-granddaughter, read an American newspaper to him, because by then his eyes truly were failing him. Padecky, Stejskal, Fisher, Zinkule — all gone, vanished with a vanished age, forgotten, alive only in the flickering and
dying memory of an old sergeant. But if the war had turned out differently — would there have been that new American republic in old Europe?

It wasn’t a battle yet, only a prolonged skirmish, but the cannon were firing hungrily. Braxton Bragg, with his inclination to confusion, was in command of Hoke’s division, and he sent General Johnston a request for reinforcements just before the blue ranks wavered, stopped, and turned tail. The path of their retreat was littered with the corpses of men bitterly struck down in the final days, the early spring days, of the terrible war which, had it turned out differently —

The morning courier galloped across the greening meadows, avoiding marshland, taking cover behind scrub-oak hedges, carrying Slocum’s dispatch to Sherman.

Three Rebel soldiers, followed by some men in faded blue uniforms, jumped the stone wall and surrendered. General Slocum looked them over suspiciously. “People who can bury a mine in the ground, and then in safety enjoy the prospect of an infantryman treading on that mine and seeing it blow him to pieces — people who can fight with that kind of base perfidy —” The general waved dismissively. “Are these soldiers? NO! Where would we be if, instead of real soldiers, we had only these spineless cowards who commit cold-blooded murder from a distance!”

Sunbeams shone through bursting buds on the trees. Slocum and his staff sat on tree stumps in a clearing while on the other side, guarded by soldiers with bayonets, stood the three musketeers with their improbable tale. Slocum frowned as he regarded them. “According to them, Howard is supposed to turn around and concentrate all his forces on Bentonville — where, granted, there may be more than a few squadrons of Wheeler’s cavalry — and Hoke’s division, or part of it, is there too. But in my opinion that’s all. They’re trying to tell me that
as soon as Howard clears the field, Johnston is going to pull some kind of devilry like an outflanking manoeuvre?”