The Bride of Texas (63 page)

“I’ll get him out, Linda!”

“Don’t you be a fool too,” she said. Cyril’s tea-rose, her benign
rival. But Dinah belonged to Cyril. Pegleg’s traditional Southern sexual morality was an affront to both her and her brother. And now Cyril was doomed. They’d kill him in the war, and if not, if he came home — because some of them would come home — Pegleg’s Southern mores were an affront. Then she thought of a solution
.

“Linda! Darling!”

“Cyril is gone,” she said. “You have other things to worry about, don’t you?” She squeezed his hand again, then let go. He caught her hand and began kissing it
.

“What are you going to do?” she asked frostily
.

He glanced into her eyes, then looked away. He mumbled something
.

“Say it out loud.”

“I’ll give her back the ring.”

She took his hands again. There was nothing on his right hand, and only the large, angular signet ring he used to seal his correspondence was on his left
.

She dropped his hands. He reached guiltily into his pocket and took out a gold band set with a impressive diamond
.

She grinned to herself. She had never thought people like Étienne and Scarlett exchanged engagement rings. It was beyond her world, beyond her experience. It suddenly made her angry. “You’re a coward, Étienne!”

“Forgive me, Linda! Darling! I swear to you, first thing tomorrow —”

“Today,” she said. “Not tomorrow. It’s not late yet. Only seven. You eat dinner at nine, no?”

His fear was obvious. He was foolish, spineless, crippled. But he would be her husband
.

“And by the way —” she said
.

The girl read on, but the sergeant wasn’t listening — he was seeing. The Thirteenth Ohio was indeed firing in two ranks. Sergeant McAdams, whose reminiscences Colonel Bellman had translated into his officer’s diction, was kneeling in the front rank. He kept shooting till the magazine of his repeater was empty, then passed it back behind him without looking, felt Mike Huddleston take it and place a loaded one in his open hand. It was still hot. He started firing again. The ragged line of Bragg’s veterans advanced towards them, running across the meadow at a slow trot, past the shadows of shorn pine trees that formed dark stripes on the sunny grass. As they ran forward the shooting machine mowed them down, but more kept advancing. The sun was dropping low in the west. The big standard-bearer coming towards McAdams flew into the air, a tangle of intestines unravelling from a gaping wound in his belly. Before the banner hit the ground it was caught by another ragtag soldier, who had a bandage around his forehead displaying a darkened badge of honour. Sergeant McAdams passed the empty rifle behind him, someone grabbed it, his hand closed again on the butt of a loaded one. Mike’s hot breath in his ear said, “For God’s sake, Mac, the rifles are too hot!”

“So spit on your hands,” hollered McAdams, and shot down the new standard-bearer
.

In the end, the Rebels withdrew. Piles of corpses lay not twenty yards from the palisades, among them painfully wounded men writhing and thrashing or lying still and moaning
.

They were ordered to collect ammunition from the casualties. Sergeant McAdams went from corpse to corpse, rolling some of them over to get the bullets out of their cartridge boxes and stuffing them inside the knapsack he had brought along, or, when it was full, into his pockets. A wounded man tried to sit up, but fell back into the blood-soaked grass. He was screaming, “Oh, my God, won’t anybody help a poor widow’s son? God! God!” Sergeant McAdams crawled over to him. The man opened his eyes wide
and stared at him. “No help, God?” he whispered. “For the son of a poor widow!” McAdams saw that the man’s side was torn open and blood was streaming from a wound in his abdomen. “None,” he said to the wounded man. “And even if there was, I’d have no time.” The wounded man’s eyes stared at him in horror, but if they saw anything it was more likely some merciless, unchristian God. “You aren’t going to need your bullets any more, friend. So let’s have them!” said McAdams, reaching for the Rebel’s cartridge box and stuffing the bullets into his pockets. Then he noticed that the wounded man had a knapsack on his back. Dozens of dead men and a vast supply of ammunition lay all around, but McAdams’s pockets were full already. “You aren’t going to need that knapsack either.” He tried to roll the wounded man over onto his belly and pull it off his shoulders. The man screamed in pain, until his words were literally drowned by the blood spurting from his mouth
.

The cannon in the groves and behind the stone walls down in the valley opened fire, and the Rebel yell echoed against the hillsides. The ranks rose again
.

Sergeant McAdams jumped up and, bending low, dashed towards the barricade. Metal insects whirred past him. One bit him in the leg and he keeled over. Mike Huddleston dragged him to safety over the palisade
.

“I don’t want to read any more,” said the girl. “It’s too scary!”

The sergeant returned to the present. The clock was striking nine. I’m an old fool, he told himself. I have no business asking her to read that. He had thought that, like most such books of memoirs, this one too would resemble the coloured prints he had framed and hung on the walls of the room
.

“Couldn’t he have helped him?” asked the child. “What would happen to his poor widowed mother? She was left alone with the farm.”

“Well, maybe they didn’t have a farm,” said the sergeant. “And
it wasn’t always possible to help, child. Back then there wasn’t anything they could do for that kind of wound. And it was in the middle of a battle —”

“Then why didn’t he at least give him a drink of water?” asked the girl indignantly. “That’s what you do for wounded soldiers, you give them water.”

The picture on the wall over the little girl’s head depicted a soldier in a colourful, clean zouave uniform offering a drink from a canteen to a prone Confederate soldier wearing an equally clean uniform. Neither man bore a badge of honour or courage on his forehead. In the air above them, right next to the sun, a canister was picturesquely displayed in mid-explosion
.

“— you’ll sell that black concubine of yours!”

He blushed like a little boy
.

“Southern ladies can maybe accept such customs,” she said, “but I am not a Southern lady.”

But I will be someday
.

He began assuring her that he’d sell Dinah to a slave-dealer the very next day, just as he’d said he would when he’d lied about it, but this time he would really do it, and he wouldn’t even know where she ended up
.

Lida interrupted him. “You won’t sell her to a dealer!”

He was taken aback. “Why not? It would —”

“Because I say!”

“Well then,” he said uncertainly, and then he remembered. “But before, you said you had a buyer.”

“Now I have no buyer. You must find one.”

“That won’t be hard.”

“But don’t sell her to some young rooster,” Lida said with sudden intensity. “Or to an old one either. Sell her to a widow who
will be kind to her. And who has enough money so she won’t hire her out to some rooster.”

“And did you believe her?” asked the sergeant. Kakuska dropped a cog-wheel and it fell with a tinkle on the pile of other clock parts on the floor.

“No,” said Cyril. “But what if she was telling the truth?” He was babbling already. The gift of whisky was keeping its promise. “What if my tea-rose” — his eyes filled with tears — “what if she —” There was yearning in the groggy voice, or was it anger? Probably a little of both. Cyril fell asleep. The sergeant glanced out the window. A fire was blazing somewhere off in the distance, and the Negro voices were singing:

Columbia, thought the sergeant. So far away.

Pegleg’s face was still red
.

“I have a spinster aunt. But she has more than enough servants. I don’t know if she’ll want to buy her.”

“Then give her away as a Christmas gift.”

The aunt’s address was simple — the de Ribordeaux residence on Main Avenue — that was how she memorized it. But Cyril didn’t believe her. Not till Columbia — and then he never set eyes on his sister again until near Bentonville
.

A few days afterwards, Dinah set out on the long journey to the home of wealthy old Mademoiselle de Ribordeaux, who lived on the backside of hell
.

Beyond the peaks and the rolling hills that stretched like a stage set all the way to Bentonville, two kinds of smoke drifted
skywards: the thinner smoke from rifle-fire, its constant clatter drowned out by the thunder of the cannon, and clouds of darker smoke rising from artillery batteries. The two kinds of smoke met and mingled above a forest that was still beyond the range of vision. But because all of them were old hands at war, they didn’t need sight to see. When the courier had galloped up to the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin with Slocum’s order to drop what they were doing and march to the aid of the beleaguered division, anxiety had spread through the ranks, because every soldier had secretly hoped to spend what was left of the war in the rear, where, at worst, they might work themselves to death laying new corduroy roads. Because they were old hands at war, the dance of smoke over the distant hilltops and the din of battle, which hadn’t been that loud for a long time, spoke to them with perfect clarity. Shake put into words what nobody needed to explain: “Davis is in a fix.”

A problem arose. When they had formed roughly into ranks, the naked Zinkule jumped off the ambulance cart with a rifle in hand and insisted on going with them.

“Are you crazy, Franta?” Shake held his nose. “A forced march? In your condition?”

“I’m not wounded,” insisted Zinkule mulishly, trying to hide his genitals with his musket.

“In a certain sense you are,” said Shake.

“It’s just that I smell bad, that’s all.”

“But you make it harder for others to fight,” said Shake. “It’s as if you had your leg shot off and we had to carry you.”

“I don’t have anything shot off!”

“But you’re buff-naked, Franta,” said Houska.

Zinkule’s clothes had been burned in the campfire, and everyone else was in rags. Sherman’s great army had run out of uniforms. The new ones weren’t due to arrive until General Schofield brought them to Goldsboro.

“It wasn’t that long ago we were all fighting buff-naked,” said Zinkule, and he was right. They had been bathing in a creek when they were attacked by Wheeler’s cavalry. There was barely time to grab their rifles and shoot back. The skirmish lasted about a minute. The cavalry rode past, shooting as they rode, hitting nothing at all, and then galloping away out of range.

“We were all naked, though,” said Stejskal. “Now you’d stand out like a sore thumb with all of us dressed. Everybody would be aiming at you.”