The Bride of Texas (62 page)

The girl stopped reading. “Garter?” She turned her eyes, a forget-me-not blue, to the sergeant
.

“Mmm, that,” said the sergeant, quickly trying to think of a way to explain such a human object in such inhuman surroundings, “that must be a mistake of Colonel Bellman’s.”

“It’s not a mistake,” said the girl. “It says right here: ‘a lady’s pink garter’.”

“No, it must be a mistake,” said the sergeant. “In a battle like that, you can think you see things you don’t,” he said. “A battle is like a bad dream, and memory mixes things up too. After years go by, you don’t know what really happened to you and what you just imagined. Soldiers have bad dreams too, you know, Terezka? Once I dreamed —” he said, and he became so caught up in the memory that he almost forgot he wasn’t telling stories to a bunch of his buddies around a campfire but to a child, though she was a farm child and accustomed to seeing a hog killed with a blow to its head or her mother slitting the throat of a terrified chicken, and one morning she had even seen their tomcat crawling home from the woods on its two front legs, having lost its hind legs in some nocturnal forest tragedy, and he had had to shoot the cat with his old army pistol and she had been inconsolable. “It was before Atlanta — I cut the heads off three Rebel officers with a single stroke of my sword, and during the entire assault those three heads rolled along behind me, yelling the Rebel yell and snapping at my heels.” The girl was staring at him, horrified, and he realized that he shouldn’t be telling her a story like this, even if it was God’s truth. “You see, Terezka, it was just something I imagined. It was a bad dream. And yet now, years later, I sometimes get the feeling that it actually happened. Sometimes, before I fall asleep, I even believe it.”

“But what if it really did happen, Daddy?” asked the girl, fearfully
.

He smiled. “It didn’t,” he said
.

“How do you know, if you’re not sure yourself?”

“Because I was only a sergeant in the war, child,” he said. “I didn’t carry a sword. Only in my dreams.”

The little girl looked up at him doubtfully
.

“Don’t worry, Terezka,” he said. “Your daddy never cut anybody’s head off. I just shot a rifle, and the last time I did that was at
Collierville in ’62. After that, I was with General Sherman’s staff, and from then on I never fired a shot.”

Reassured, the child turned back to the book, but she didn’t resume reading right away. She looked at her father, obviously thinking things over
.

“Well, but that’s different,” she said, “bad dreams. But why has —” But thinking and expressing complex ideas in Czech was too hard, so she switched to English. “Why did Colonel Bellman dream about a lady’s garter?”

“It —” he began in Czech, but, unable to come up with something sensible to tell the child, he finally said, “I really don’t know. Stop asking questions and keep on reading!”

“Well,” she said, “what if all the rest of it was just a dream too?”

“Just read, please!”

“All right,” said the child compliantly, and she began reading military jargon and style in a halting voice
. “At four-thirty in the afternoon, General Braxton Bragg’s battalion joined the fray on the battlefield and the battle resumed with renewed fury.”

But the sergeant wasn’t listening any more. The memories drifting through his mind were of things and events he could never tell his daughter about. Memories of the books in Corporal Gambetta’s private lending library, with pictures handled so often that the ladies on them were actually clothed again, in grubby fingerprints. And reminders of women, both remote and agonizing. His mind wandered all the way to the little house on Gottestischlein — and he felt a wave of shame. He felt even guiltier than Zinkule had when the sergeant once caught him staring at a piece of lace torn from a petticoat. Zinkule had blushed and stuck the lace in his pocket. “Okay, Franta, just wait, you’ll get your chance,” he had said
.

He didn’t know if Zinkule had finally got his chance, or what it would have been if he had
.

“Father did bring me clothes,” said Cyril. “But he had to bring them to the Fayetteville jail. They caught me right after I jumped out the window. It was all Ribordeaux’s doing, of course. He and Colonel Fenton were hand in glove, and Fenton was commander of the band of Rangers in charge of conscripting soldiers around Austin. Father tried arguing with them — said we were aliens in Texas and didn’t intend to settle there, so that, according to the law on transient aliens, the most I had to do was serve in the state militia, not the regular army. They just laughed at him. ‘So why did you buy a farm here, and twenty acres of woods this year, so that you have a hundred acres all told?’ He told them he was going to sell it all after the war and move to Iowa. He shouldn’t have said that. The Ranger lieutenant jumped right on it. ‘Oh, to the Yankees, is that it? You, sir, are not a transient alien; you, sir, are a hostile alien!’ Father saw he’d made a mistake, so he quickly invented a brother in Iowa and, to make things more convincing, a sweetheart for me. Naturally it was no use. They took my shirt and trousers from him and booted him out. Literally. And they left me sitting there for three weeks with nothing but bread and water while they were out trolling for others. When they had collected enough of us, they escorted us to the Galveston training camp. I finally gave them the slip and travelled by night north to Austin. It took me two weeks to get there, almost two months after they picked me up.”

It had been a foolish plan, though he’d almost pulled it off. It was autumn, and the Germans in the counties around Austin were on the verge of revolt. Central Texas was full of German villages, and because they were interspersed with Czech villages the revolt spilled over to the Czechs, although they were inclined neither to rebellion nor to war. Pro-Union petitions were circulated, some brave souls convened public meetings, and at one meeting in Austin there was talk of organizing armed units, even a cavalry, to stand up to
the conscription units. A.J. Bell, commander of the crimps, had already asked General Magruder for reinforcements, and rumour had it that a regiment of the regular Army of the Confederacy was on its way to Austin, Lafayette, Washington, and Lavaca counties. Getting through hornets’ nests like those with a light brown girl in tow was a fantasy he could support only by day, in brief, wild, runaway dreams when he lay sleeping in the forest undergrowth, waking up every few minutes. By night, moving northward, he thought it might be nothing but a pipe-dream. All the same, he kept going. Perhaps he just wanted to see his tea-rose. He kept on moving
.

There was no light in the little house on Baywater Street. He knocked, but no one answered. He walked round to the back, broke a thin pane of glass, and climbed inside. The house had only one room. He opened the shutters and the darkness gave way to moonlight and he could see that the room was empty. A bare mattress on the bed. Nothing in the chest in the corner, not a trace of any of the clothes that belonged to the girl who had lived there two months before
.

It was almost morning. He lay down on the bed and, in brief snatches of sleep, he went on in his fancy to the de Ribordeaux plantation. Daylight dawned, and he knew it was only a pipe-dream. But when darkness fell again, instead of heading north to the Oklahoma Territory and on to Kansas and the Union Army, he set out for the de Ribordeaux place
.

He strode carefully through streets lit only by the lights from house windows, and when he got to the Davidson Hotel he saw, in a circle of brighter light, the familiar black carriage — a cage on wheels. A Negro in livery was dozing in the driver’s seat
.

He looked around, walked across the street, and gave the Negro’s foot a pull. The coachman opened his eyes and stared at Cyril as though he’d never seen him before. Of course, in the two weeks on the road from Galveston his beard had grown, and in wrinkled trousers and a dirty shirt he must have looked like a beggar
.

“It’s Cyril,” he whispered. “Towpelick.”

“Oh, Massa Cyril!” the Negro said out loud. “I couldn’t hardly recog —”

“Shhh! Where’s Dinah? What happened to her?”

“Dinah got sold, massa,” he whispered
.

“Sold? Who bought her?”

“Nobody knows. They said she gone all the way to Columbia.”

The fantasy collapsed, and hope along with it. It wasn’t strong enough to support a journey to Columbia. And the coachman was still whispering. “Massa Étienne gone too.”

“Where? Why?”

The Negro told him. Quarrelsome voices came from inside the hotel, above the sound of clinking glasses
.

So he set off northward and, as the miles passed, his sorrow, deep as a well, filled with growing hatred
.

In the spring of ’63, he arrived
.

When the gunfire from Morgan’s division reached another fortissimo, Carlin decided to counter-attack. The whistle of bullets filled the air around them like a swarm of wasps. The first line fell like dominoes, and Lieutenant Bellman was relieved when he heard the signal to retreat. They leapt back over the palisades and lay down behind them. Before the counter-attack, they had sent Bellman’s squad farther north, to a hilltop position that overlooked a group of hills in the distance, where Morgan’s defence was. It was five in the afternoon. Metal flowers kept blossoming over the hilltops, and scattering fragments into the woods.

“Hardee’s got reinforcements from Bragg or Taliaferro, so he didn’t have to weaken the line against us,” said one of the staff officers.

General Davis nodded.

“How long can their ammunition last?” the general asked. “They’re firing those cannonades as if the war were just beginning, and not —”

“They’re on their last legs,” ventured one staff captain.

“Who knows?” Davis and Carlin again turned their field-glasses to the hills, where the metal flowers were blooming and fading in the growing dusk. Under the gathering clouds, Morgan’s savage shooting machine rattled away.

General Davis listened to the noise of the machine. “They have two firing lines,” he said. Four years of war had taught him to see with his ears. “If Morgan can hold out, all will be well.” The machine was going at full blast. “If not, they’re whipped. We have no reserves to send in, not so much as a single regiment. They’ll have to help themselves.”

The machine ground on and on.

“Who knows how long Morgan’s ammunition will hold out.”

“— your father!”

Whatever had been going through her head? A Negro regiment marched by in perfect ranks of twelve, with white officers on horseback, and the joyful breeze of victory blew the black mourning ribbon into her face. She pushed it back.

He tried to kneel before her, but his wooden leg made it awkward. So he reached out to take her hand, but instead she took his hand in both of hers, and squeezed it so hard he grimaced in pain. “And your father sent Rangers after my brother Cyril and now he’s locked in Fayetteville jail!”