The Bride of Texas (68 page)

“He’s in the right place, all right,” said Shake. “It looks like the devils will dance here tonight.”

As if in response, the thunder of artillery-fire rolled in from the right, where Howard’s wing had joined Slocum during the night.

Long after the war, the younger Toupelik son Josef told the story. That was after Cyril had gone back to the de Ribordeaux plantation. It was being managed, more or less, by the Negroes, since there was no one left of the family and no one knew who the new owners would be, or even who should be selling it to whom. Nobody knew anything: neither Beulah, nor the foul-mouthed Benjamin. Uncle Habakuk was dead, and Samuel, the footman, was now a groom in the stable, still wearing his faded livery, though there was no one left to be escorted anywhere. Cyril had come because he hoped Dinah would do the same. She must know that if he survived he would try to find her. But where should he start?

And Josef said, “It was on my first trip to Matamoros. I got myself hired on with the ox teams, otherwise I’d have gotten drafted into the army too. That way I was exempted.”

They had been transporting bales of King Cotton through the wastelands of South Texas to the Rio Grande, because all the Confederate ports were blocked by the Yankee flotilla, and unless the Rebels could export their cotton to Europe there would be no arms, nothing. The Southerners had hoped that old aristocratic Europe — England and France — would come to the aid of the new aristocratic Americans, but for Europe it was simply business. Perhaps Maximilian, the new Mexican emperor, who was also a Hapsburg, would be an ally. But that hope too proved illusory. “Well,” said Josef, “he had barely ten thousand men, about one Confederate division. And a lot of them were like him — looking for a free ticket to America so they could go off on their own.”

In Matamoros they unloaded the cotton, found a stable for the
oxen, and went into town — that is, into the taverns. Josef and Matej Vosahlik picked a tavern on a square, ordered something they had never heard of called tequila, and were soon in seventh heaven. Then a soldier began to irritate them, a noncom with stripes on his sleeve and a silver bird on his cap
.

“What does he keep gawking at me for?” Josef asked Vosahlik
.

“Maybe he knows you from some place,” said Matej
.

“That’s impossible,” said Josef. “He’s the first Mexican I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”

“Except he’s no Mexican,” said Matej, who had been in Matamoros twice before. “He’s Austrian.”

“Balls!” Josef snapped. “What would an Austrian be doing here?”

Matej, who was an old hand, explained to him that there was an Austrian expeditionary army in Mexico under the command of Count Thun-Hohenstein; it had come to help the archduke, now Emperor Maximilian, occupy a precarious throne. And Josef looked back and said, “He keeps staring at me. Is he a nancy-boy?”

The Austrian noncom rose — the two-headed bird on his cap glinted and flapped its wings, or so it seemed to them — and addressed them in Czech: “Look here, I heard you. You talk our language.” Then he turned to Josef. “Aren’t you one of the Toupelik boys?”

“Everything gets perverted into its opposite,” said Shake. “Courage turns into cowardice, cowardice turns into courage.”

They were back around a campfire again, many days later. Three geese were roasting on a spit. Breta was catching the dripping fat in a ladle and basting the golden-brown birds with it.

“That’s what Hegel says,” added Shake.

“How about translating that into Czech for us?” said Javorsky.

They were all wearing the new uniforms that General Schofield had brought to Goldsboro. Even Zinkule, although he was still — through no choice of his own — sitting apart from them with a little bottle in his knapsack. Now and then he would take it out and sprinkle something onto a handkerchief and tuck the handkerchief inside his shirt.

“It doesn’t need translating,” said Shake. “It just needs interpreting. To make it simple, the skirmishers were shocked when the smell of roses hit their nostrils, and when the smell was followed by Zinkule jumping over the parapet in his tail-coat they were scared out of their wits. So the three of us, Breta, Vojtech, and me, took advantage of the element of surprise, and out of sheer courage — without being ordered to — jumped over the parapet and gave chase. But when we got to the edge of the woods, Rebel cavalry burst out of the trees and cut off our line of retreat. So we had to advance until we found a hiding-place in the rushes of a swamp. We caught our breath and then it started to pour, so we took advantage of that and set out for the woods to the south, towards our line, until we got within range and saw the Stars and Stripes flying over the palisade. We ran towards it but we were met by gunfire. Thank God their aim was rotten.” Shake paused, reached out and poked the closest of the geese, then licked his finger and said, “A little while longer and we’ll have a feast.”

“You were so crazy scared,” said Salek, “you couldn’t tell the Stars and Stripes from the Confederate rag.”

“Not so, friend,” said Shake. “It was the Stars and Stripes all right, but the ones flying it couldn’t tell us from the Rebels, and who could blame them? When they’ve got a fellow in tails and a nigger with a rifle coming at them — and remember, word had got out that Jeff Davis had finally ditched his theory and armed the slaves. And everybody knew the South had finally run out of uniforms. So in the end it was a Carolina skunk that
prevented us from rejoining the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin. On the other hand, it got our names written into the annals of the most famous chapter of the Battle of Bentonville.”

“Even if their aim was rotten,” said Paidr. “But, as usual, you high-tailed it out of there.”

“And so would you!” Houska said angrily. “We didn’t know their aim was rotten. There were only the four of us, and any damn fool could have hit us in that downpour just by accident.”

“That’s God’s truth,” said Shake. “We were simply forced to retreat back towards the enemy again. But the rain made it so hard to see that we weren’t sure which way we were going. Every so often, flustered riders would appear from behind the curtains of falling water and then disappear again, but they never seemed to be on our side, so all we could do was retreat one way, then the other, until we got our directions confused. We knew we were in North Carolina, but that was about all.”

“Never seemed to be on our side?” Paidr repeated scornfully. “How could you tell, when it was pissing rain and you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face? Do Southern fillies smell different from Northern ones?”

“They do!” Zinkule chimed in.

“Look at who’s the expert!” said Paidr. “How could you smell anything besides yourself?”

“I couldn’t,” said Zinkule. “Southerners look different. When they charge, they hold the reins between their teeth and shoot with both hands. At least that’s what they did at Bentonville. They think they’re hot and they’re barely out of kneepants.”

“By then you must have been near Hardee’s wing,” said the sergeant. “So you’d have retreated some distance. Three miles, if not more.”

“You lose track of time and distance when it’s pouring like that,” said Shake, taking another poke at the goose.

“When you’ve got a fire under your butt and you’re shitting your pants,” said Paidr, “you can work up to speeds that brave men can only dream of.”

“Fire under our butts? In that rain?” Shake said incredulously.

“That’s just a way of putting it,” said Paidr. “Have you forgotten everything Czech?”

“What was driving us was the desire to get back to our side,” said Shake. “But we’d lost our bearings and we were getting farther away instead. When it was obvious we weren’t getting where we wanted to be, we decided to hide in the woods, wait till nightfall, and follow the stars west.”

“And it was a cloudy night,” said Paidr.

“Probably,” conceded Shake. “But we found our troops at four in the afternoon — not our own unit, but General Mower’s famous division.”

“Pop,” said Breta, “I’m ringing the dinner bell.”

“Matej ran away that night,” Josef continued, while Mother Toupelik piled food on their plates. Everyone was there but Lida. In a month she was expecting to give birth to Baxter Warren III in San Francisco (she gave birth instead to Linda Warren II, but two years later a third male Warren generation would finally see the light of day, followed by Maureen, named after her grandmother). “On those earlier trips Matej had heard there was a Yankee consulate in Matamoros, and if you signed up there they’d send you north by boat. If you enlisted in the army, that is. I knew Matej was going to run off. We were best friends and we’d planned to run off together, but when Vitek showed up out of nowhere —”

“But how did he get to Hardee? All the way from Texas, in the spring of ’64?” Cyril asked. He was still astonished
.

“I don’t know that part of it,” said Josef. “They took him on with the ox teams in place of Matej. He gave me money to get him some civvies in Matamoros, which I did. But as soon as we got to Galveston, the Rebs grabbed us for the army. By then they were taking anybody they could get. They put us in General Kirby Smith’s army and sent us with General Taylor to Louisiana, where General Banks was on the offensive. I lost track of Vitek at Shreveport. What happened to him after that I don’t know. He hardly knew any English at all. I got slightly wounded, and when I rejoined my company half of them were gone already. They’d sent them somewhere else, or they’d deserted —”

“Wait a minute,” Cyril interrupted. He desperately hoped for a moment that, just as Vitek had been blown to Bentonville by the winds of a crazy war — though late, when it was practically a lost cause — perhaps his own Dinah might have been carried by the same madness of coincidence, or by the laws of love, or of the novels she so loved to read —

But his tea-rose was lost. She seemed to have vanished into the huge maw of the rebellion. Nothing of her remained, not a trace, not a thing
.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Did you tell Vitek that Lida had escaped to Savannah?”

“I didn’t know that then. Not even Father knew. She just left him a letter saying she was marrying de Ribordeaux and taking Deborah with her. She never said where she was going. Maybe she forgot in the rush.”

Had Vitek found out somehow? During the march through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, all the way to Savannah? And why hadn’t he stayed there? Had he deserted from Kirby’s army as he had from Thun-Hohenstein’s expeditionary force? Or had they driven him there in some ravaged outcast unit, and then across a hastily constructed bridge with Hardee’s troops, through South Carolina and North Carolina, until his trek ended when he
got his legs shot off during the last desperate charge at Bentonville?

Cyril never did find out. But that was how it came about that, during the Washington parade, Lida pinned a black mourning ribbon to her hat in memory of her dead “brother”
.