The Bride of Texas (79 page)

Houska gave a low whistle.

“Houska, shush!” said his pretty wife, Ruzena.

“Don’t be vulgar!” said Salek. “You’re not in North Carolina any more.”

“It’s my asthma,” said Houska, and they all turned to watch the lady walk through the frosted-glass doors, past the Negro doorman, who bowed to her, and past the restaurant owner,
who attempted a similar bow but couldn’t quite do it because of the rheumatism in his back. The lady entered the restaurant, the music, and the dense cigar smoke.

(illustration credit 9.1)

Shake approached the owner and handed him a book.

“For your newly arrived nephew,” he said.

Puzzled, the restaurant owner looked down at the book, and then he remembered. “Oh, yes, yes. Much obliged to you. What do I owe you?”

“That’s all right, I’ll take it out in drinks,” said Shake. “And in food.”

He kept watching the red-haired lady. She gave off a coppery glow as she made her way among the tables.

“Who is she, colonel?” Bozenka Kapsa asked Mr. Ohrenzug.

“Some woman author,” replied the restaurateur. “They say she’s famous.”

They stared at the lady, who shone like a candle. At a booth at the head of the dining room, beneath portraits of Lincoln and Grant, a youngish high-yellow woman also dressed in iridescent taffeta got up and ran over to the author. The lady opened her arms and they floated towards each other like two glittering birds, down the aisle between the richly laid tables under the red, white, and blue streamers. They met in the middle of the dining room and fell into each other’s arms.

“And who’s the other one?” asked Bozenka.

The sergeant felt a spasm, as though he’d been struck by a minnie. He had never seen Cyril’s yellow tea-rose; he had only an imaginary picture of her in his mind, drawn from Cyril’s sorrow and from people they saw in deserted plantation houses. This was what she would have looked like, though she would have been younger back then.

“Her?” he heard Mr. Ohrenzug say. “She runs a sort of — well, it’s a restaurant too, on South Street. She’s the one who told me that this author woman is so famous.”

A new guest walked through the door, and the doorman bowed to the sound of the little tin drums.

Burning snow was falling on the Congaree River
.

“She died?” Cyril’s voice cracked. The sergeant saw the old Negro woman nod. He looked around. A drummer boy was marching down Carolina Avenue; his drum — riddled with bullet-holes — sounded hoarse, almost malevolent. He looked about twelve years old. A general’s field-glasses stuck out of his back pocket and a smoking cigar protruded from his boyish lips. Behind him, under a ragged banner, marched a platoon of bearded men carrying a long pole on top of which was a dummy made of cotton-filled burlap sacks topped with a painted tin pirate’s head. They had cut the effigy down somewhere in a looted tavern and hung a sign around its neck that read JEFF DAVIS. A red-bearded soldier in the first rank, right behind the drum, tossed an empty bottle at the window of an ornate building across the street, but he missed and the bottle shattered against the wall. A young Negro in a lace shirt that was too small for him jumped out of a group of dancing blacks on the sidewalk and placed a fresh bottle in the bearded soldier’s hand. The damaged drum sounded as though it were drumming a man to the gallows. The sergeant had witnessed a number of executions, and they were always worse than any death in war
.

“From the de Ribordeaux plantation in Texas? No. Weren’t nobody. And Missy Ribordeaux, she died. Who? Some old white lady? Sorry, massa,” said the Negro woman, “my memory is full of holes.”

A pipe joined the drum. Cyril took off his cap and wiped his forehead. “It would have been an older white woman,” he said. “Not old. Just older than her. And she wouldn’t have been a lady, more like white trash. She was supposed to bring her here, to Miss de Ribordeaux.”

The Negro woman thought hard, the drum pounded, the pipe trilled. “About three years ago, you say?”

“It would have been in the summer of ’61,” said Cyril, “at the very start of the war. And she wasn’t a lady. Her husband was a blacksmith in Austin.”

“The last company Missy Ribordeaux have was almost a year ago, and she wasn’t no white trash, it was Miss Sullivan from the Glenwood plantation.”

“No, that’s not it. This would have been right at the beginning of the war. And she wouldn’t have been a lady.”

The old woman closed her dim eyes. “Sorry, massa, my old head. Beginning of the war, you say — like before Massa Lincum —?” She opened her eyes. “Long about then Missy stopped walking. She’d just sit here in the armchair, never move,” and she pointed behind her at the big room full of furniture. By the leaded glass window stood a velvet armchair with a lace antimacassar on the back. Burning snow was falling outside the window, and the drum was pounding
.

“A white lady,” repeated the old Negro woman pensively
.

“She wasn’t a lady,” Cyril insisted
.

“Once, towards fall, Missy de Ribordeaux had a visit from the widow of Mr. Lemaître — used to be overseer at her cousin M. de Ribordeaux’s plantation. But” — she paused, the drum sounded — “she wasn’t no white trash. I don’t know, massa,” she said anxiously. “I’m awful sorry I can’t help Massa Lincum’s soldiers. It’s just this old head of mine.…”

“I swear to you, big brother, I swear to you,” Lida said miserably, clutching a basin with some solution in it while a wounded man behind her moaned, “by everything that’s holy —”

“What’s holy to you?” he interrupted her, but his voice was as full of misery as hers. A strange light flashed in his sister’s eyes
.

“I swear by his memory,” she said softly, almost in a whisper
.

They paced in the smoke and noise of the house where the sergeant’s general had set up his quarters
.

“Why?” said Cyril. “She must have made it up. Otherwise I’d have killed her.”

“Her story’s too complicated to make up,” said the sergeant
.

“Protect Dinah?” said Cyril bitterly. “She should have left her in Austin, in that little house. In the end, she badgered Étienne all the way to Savannah. And when he got there she badgered him to death.”

“That was before she knew the old man was going to disinherit him,” said the sergeant. “She didn’t want Dinah anywhere near Étienne. You know what she’s like —”

“To Columbia!” Cyril struck himself in the forehead. “That’s more than a thousand miles! Did she expect me to believe that?”

“In the summer of ’61 it wouldn’t have been so hard. By train from Vicksburg.…”

They walked around the demolished building, which had taken a direct hit by Captain DeGress. An old Negro man was gathering bricks from the ruins and piling them on a cart
.

“Maybe Dinah ran away from the blacksmith’s wife on the trip,” said the sergeant
.

“Then she’d have been waiting for me in Austin.”

“She didn’t make it. Something —” He stopped short
.

“They caught her,” said Cyril bitterly. “Without papers!” He looked around at the burning cotton floating down over the scorched roofs. “Where could she be?” he wailed
.

“It’s still harder to believe that Lida lied,” the sergeant said softly. Although, he thought, a thousand miles is a long way. But at the beginning of the war, a blacksmith’s wife and a black slave girl
travelling together? Still, the men of the South are gallant. And she had sworn to Cyril, on the memory of —

Cyril sat down on a pile of bricks and put his head in his hands
.

“Cyril, my friend,” said the sergeant, “maybe she found a place to hide and she’s waiting till the war is over. It’s almost over now.”

Burning snow, on the Congaree River
.

The sergeant stepped over to the window, leaned his forehead against the cool glass pane with the raindrops running down it. The rain tapped on the brass lamps. The band was playing and couples in evening dress were swirling around the dance floor. The famous lady author was dancing with an officer, and his own Bozenka was dancing with Houska. Padecky was clutching a beer stein, his stiff leg stretched out in the aisle between the tables, a hazard to guests on their way to the dance floor. Scowling, Padecky watched Molly Kakuska on the arm of Schroeder in his colonel’s uniform. She looked offended but she carried herself like the great lady she was quickly becoming back home in Milwaukee. She disappeared from Padecky’s sight on the crowded dance floor, and he glowered around the room as though looking for someone.

“If they so much as stick their noses in here,” he raged, “I’ll tear them off and feed them to the dogs! This is an American party, and subjects of the emperor are not welcome!”

“They had wives, children, and businesses,” said Shake.

“And their pants were full of shit,” declared Salek.

“Ja, das war wirklich unerwartet und — unangenehm,”
said Ursula
.

“Sorry,” said the sergeant in English. “I forgot my German over all those years.”

“Unexpected, and unpleasant,” said Ursula, placing a finger on the back of his hand. She wore a beautifully engraved wedding band on her third finger, and on her middle finger was a huge stone that looked like a glass egg. One from the nest that Fircut —

“Mein lieber Mann,
” she said. “You still understand that much
, nicht wahr
?” He turned his hand over and tried to clasp her fingers but Ursula pulled her hand away, laughed, and continued in English. “My husband didn’t understand it right away. He knew them both. One of a consul’s duties is to keep an eye on people like that. Our agents often filed reports on them. They never missed a gathering.”