The Bride of Texas (11 page)

Then the Fifteenth Army Group thundered onto the bridge. The sergeant looked back and he saw the first four men, four bearded soldiers in Sherman’s great army, which had broken stride so as not to rock the bridge — but being out of step was hardly unusual for them — and ahead of them, striding beside his horse, was Captain Baxter Warren II, under the banner of the Ninety-second Iowa, carried by Sergeant Waleski. Sergeant Waleski had no ears. He’d lost one in the Battle of Warsaw, in Poland, and the other at Fort Donelson. Kapsa looked back again. The Fifteenth Army Group wound across the countryside like a snake with quills, grey bayonets aimed at grey clouds overhead. An unfinished fortress dominated the landscape.
Yesterday, they had watched from its tower as Negroes from Columbia helped themselves to sacks of corn and hams piled neatly by the railroad depot. Just below the fortress, Captain DeGress had unlimbered a battery of twenty-pound Parrot guns and was lobbing shot into the town as clusters of Butler’s Cavalry appeared and reappeared in the streets. Sherman had put down his field-glasses and ordered the captain to stop firing, and to put the fear of God into the black looters instead; those hams and that corn were the property of his army. South Carolina, drenched, grey, the unfinished fortress standing there like an old Roman ruin under clouds that ran from grey all the way to black. But there were no signs of a snowstorm anywhere. A strange war. The sergeant turned, spurred his horse, and saw a swirl of snow envelop the general. Everything was topsy-turvy. The white flakes were not falling from the sky but rising from the ground like feathers, as the north wind swirled them into tiny cyclones. Then they fell onto the Congaree River.

Soon the sergeant was caught in the snowflakes too. For a moment they made it hard for him to see the generals cantering away, Sherman’s sweaty hat in the lead and, farther off, the unfinished Confederate government building in the centre of town. A snowflake got up his nose and he sneezed.

King Cotton. Someone had torn the king’s ermine robe into shreds and tatters. A foul smell hit him, and he saw smoke rising from the town. A flash of flame burst through the wall of smoke. Burning cotton fell on the Congaree River.

By night-time, the air was alive with sparks swirling and falling towards the dark waters.

Zinkule believed in ghosts — and in premonitions, prophetic dreams, telepathy, and miracles. He had come to this state after an
act of heroism at Kennesaw Mountain, important enough to have been mentioned in the colonel
’
s report. “Although lying on the ground, semi-immobilized by a canister exploding nearby,” the colonel had written, “Corporal Zinkule brought down a Rebel flag-bearer with his bayonet and took possession of the banner.” Shake maintained that the report was essentially true, except that Zinkule had been stunned not by an exploding canister but rather by a Minnie that ricocheted off a rock, hit him on the head, and knocked him down. Yes, Zinkule had been on the ground, and yes, the Rebel sergeant had ended up on his bayonet, but the Rebel had actually skewered himself. It had happened like this: Shake, lying unhurt beside Zinkule and merely scared out of his wits, had decided to flee the field of glory, but as he was getting to his knees the standard-bearer, thinking him dead, stepped over him and tripped over his rising behind. He fell and impaled himself on Zinkule’s bayonet. The Rebel flag fluttered down on top of Zinkule and, when he recovered enough to stand up, he got tangled up in it, lost his bearings, and set out towards where he thought the enemy was. Shake tagged along because he saw that in fact they were heading back towards the reserves. Shortly thereafter, the rest of the unit arrived running. Nobody noticed anything amiss, and Zinkule got the glory for capturing the flag. Shake maintained that he himself should have got the credit, since he had set the action in motion, or his behind had. But he couldn’t be bothered making the effort to get his name in the report.

Zinkule, meanwhile, took the incident as a sign and started believing in his dreams, in which he was always dying a hero’s death, and he recounted them at great length around the campfire. Finally Salek got so fed up that he told him, “If you don
’
t watch out, you’ll wind up like the village idiot in Brnives. Remember him?” Zinkule shook his head. “Surely, you old fool, you remember the petrified devils in the chapel under Saint Prokop
’
s church in Sazava?” Zinkule shook his head again, so Salek went ahead with
the story: “Once Saint Prokop was serving mass there, and these two devils come in and start tempting him, so Saint Prokop makes the sign of the cross over them and they turn into stone. They’re still there today. They look more like bears, but in fact they’re devils. One time —”

When they ushered the lady in to see Sherman, the sergeant suddenly felt that maybe Zinkule was on to something. Was this a sign? A vision? He knew he’d seen her before, but he couldn’t remember where. He cast his mind back through the confusion of his life. When had he met her? A long time ago, that was for sure, but where? Then she spoke to the general.

“I am surprised and indignant, general,” she said, “that your army should behave so towards a conquered people who have surrendered their city and do not resist. I have always told people we had nothing to fear except the accidents of war — but I do not consider the deliberate burning of a city an accident.” Her tone was haughty, her accent heavy. What sort of accent was it? He couldn’t put his finger on that, either.

The general looked at the lady. He was exhausted and had to force himself to remain calm. Dawn was coming and the sky was red, but it wasn’t just the sunrise, it was the fires that the fire brigades hadn’t managed to put out yet. The general’s face was like a desert gullied with dry river-beds. Outside, they could hear the crackle of burning beams.

“I have told my friends,” the lady went on, “private property and women would be protected when you came. But no, instead of this —”

He knew the general was sensitive to criticism, but deep in his heart he also knew the general was right. It was a different war now. Even the Southern officers, who used to consider digging trenches cowardly and undignified, now dug in when canned hell started exploding overhead. There had never been anything as horrifying as Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, when
the neat ranks of Georgians were mown into huge bloody heaps by canisters at short range and volley after volley from repeating rifles, when musket balls and shrapnel ripped into corpses and the wounded alike. The general was determined to end that horror once and for all, and he had a single recipe. The sergeant agreed with him.

“Instead of this, you have waged warfare,” the lady continued contemptuously, “that is a disgrace to our history.”

“What do you mean by that, madam?” the general growled finally, with barely suppressed anger.

“I mean exactly what I have said.”

The general was silent. He was always civil with women, and it wasn’t just because he had spent long years in the South. The general really liked women — not the way Kilpatrick did, but the way most of his soldiers did. Gentle female beauty was a light beyond the black smoke of the barking Parrot guns.

The general looked at the cigar smouldering in the ashtray, and killed it. The air in the room was already hazy, and the smoke hung over the table like mist over the pond in far-away Roznice. The general had probably never set foot outside America, the sergeant thought, or seen a country where churches were made of stone, not wood, where black cathedrals stretched to touch the sky in mountain valleys. But in fact he had, as a young man. Around the campfire once, while chewing on hardtack and smoked meat, Sherman had told a tale about eating in a fancy restaurant called Faroux, at the foot of a mountain called Sugar Loaf, in Rio de Janeiro. They had been rookie officers, fresh out of West Point and sailing round Cape Horn to join their garrisons in the backwoods of California. Until this point, their idea of the height of elegance had been the Willard Hotel in Washington, with its brass spittoons. Now their dreams of a new world, hovering above the fruit on the table, were interrupted by the arrival of the bill, worked out in a foreign currency
and presented to them on a small silver tray by a dark-skinned waiter. The general’s eyes had twinkled in the light of the campfire at Kennesaw Mountain. He was describing the panic that came over the young officers as they looked at the size of the bill and dug deep into their pockets. All they could come up with were a few gold coins, adding up to less than a couple of saw-bucks. The general laughed, took a bite of meat, and puffed on his cigar. The dark-skinned waiter had come back with a mountain of copper and gold coins on the silver tray. “There was almost seven thousand rei in change!” In the firelight the general’s face looked haggard and gaunt, like the face of a hungry beggar. “A dollar was worth about a thousand rei in those days,” he laughed, gazing off into the distance. It was the only time he’d ever been away from his beloved America. Their guide had taken them to the nearby Rua da Ouvadar to see a local speciality: artificial flowers made of brightly coloured parrot plumes. “But it was the sight of those lovely girls making the flowers,” mused the general, “those beautiful Brazilian girls, so clever with their hands, that ebony hair” — a sharp glance from General Howard, who had just joined the campfire, reminded him that he was a married man. General Howard was the kind of fellow who would skip the parts of the Bible that a good Christian could only read as allegory; he would not have understood that his commanding officer was reminiscing about an aesthetic, not a carnal, experience. He would not have understood that in the twilight of memory, mulatto girls weaving flowers out of parrot plumes glowed like a bright beacon beyond the ugly confusion of battle. Like the beacon — no longer carnal — named Ursula.

“I thought you commanded an army of disciplined soldiers,” the lady continued, while the sergeant searched his mind further. “But what I have seen with my own two eyes, general.… My late husband was also an officer. Whenever possible, his soldiers were expected to mind their manners, but
also their appearance. His officers knew how to keep discipline. I know that soldiers everywhere like to have a drink, but what I saw yesterday and today in Columbia.… Those are not soldiers. They are riff-raff.” She said the word with disgust. “Inebriated, ragtag soldiery, general.… I even saw an officer who was no longer in control of himself.”

The sergeant, still searching his mind, recalled one of many images from a night that had etched itself into his memory: the huge General Giles A. Smith on his motionless black horse, lit by flaming buildings on both sides of the street, raising to his lips a bottle glinting gold with whisky. He emptied it, tossed the bottle into the fire, and shouted, “Down with the Confederacy!” Then he glanced at an old Negro who was holding another bottle up for him. The old man’s eyes were wide with admiration. “Well, what do you say, Sambo? What do you think of the night?”

“I thinks the day of redemption and jubilation has come, massa,” the old black man said respectfully.

“You speak of a disgrace to American history, madam.” The general’s voice was cold. “But it appears you have not considered that this city which ‘surrendered without a fight’ was only recently spoiling for a fight. Not so long ago this very state of South Carolina drowned out all the sensible and loyal voices in the South, madam.” He put the cigar back in his mouth but did not light it. The lady was immobile, reminding the sergeant of those proud plantation women they had seen on the march through Georgia, then to the sea and Savannah, then through South Carolina. They all had a similar look about them. The general said, “It was your own cavalry in retreat that set fire to the cotton. But the stocks of whisky, cussed big stocks of whisky for a God-fearing city like this, madam, were left untouched. Now, if I were a suspicious man —” He fell silent.

The general’s train of thought led the sergeant to recall another scene. “What do you expect?” the general had practically shouted at Mayor Goodwin. “What can I expect? What can anyone expect?” That was before dawn, when the mayor had come running to the house where Sherman had spent a sleepless night and begged him to do something about the fires, the looting, and the pillaging. “What do you want? You set fire to the cotton, but you leave enough whisky to last ten years!” “I begged them, general, and so did General Beauregard. We pleaded to be allowed to destroy it, pour it out, set fire to it instead of the cotton. Because I knew what it could —”

The sergeant could read the general’s thoughts. “Let me tell you, madam, I had the opportunity to talk to many of your soldiers, those taken prisoner. Many, perhaps most of them, were sick to death of the war. Had it been up to them alone, perhaps — but it was you, the ladies of the South, who kept egging them on to fight a war in which they were already whipped. And still you drive them to persist” — he put the extinguished cigar back into the ashtray — “to the bitter end. Perhaps you do so because you yourself have never experienced what that phrase conceals.”