The Bride of Texas (14 page)

Sherman’s soldiers had nailed an irregular row of silver salvers to a fence surrounding a deserted warehouse. Behind it was a tall building spouting a column of flames that looked like the hand of Satan reaching for heaven. Fifty yards from the fence stood a ragged line of threadbare soldiers, half of them shoeless, one with a dead goose tied to the back of his belt by its neck. They were shooting at the plates, and they looked like a firing squad except that each of them had a bottle at his feet.
The sergeant watched the rifle barrels wobble, perhaps to the rhythm of the dancing flames reflected in the polished silver targets. A short distance away stood another threadbare soldier, holding aloft a sword that had once belonged to a general, with a general’s spyglass sticking out of his pocket. He barked an order and there was a ragged chatter of musket fire, but only two of the plates were struck. It must have been the whisky.

“So this is Sherman’s great army,” said the lady, shaking her head.

“Ma’am, are you by any chance German?” asked Kapsa. “Or Austrian?”

Burning snow was falling on the Congaree. It fell too on a black and white procession that emerged from around the corner of a building devastated by cannon fire and headed towards the house the lady had stopped in front of. It was one of the many manor-houses that, in the sergeant’s mind, blended into a white avenue of luxury stretching from the Georgia line to Savannah, then through South Carolina to this burning corpse of a city. This house appeared to be undamaged except for the symbolic statue on the gable, which an exploding shell had reduced to a scorched wire skeleton of uncertain significance, one arm raised to the black sky, the other still gloved in plaster. They stopped. A group of officers galloped up to the house, among them General Logan. The sergeant recognized him by his drooping moustache, like two Turkish scimitars pointed downwards, parallel to the sharp grooves of his frown. Two sentries — who were sober, and looked as if they belonged in a different army — saluted, and the general and his escort walked in through the doorway between two etched-glass lanterns with brass fittings.

The lady looked at the intact building and the sergeant now remembered where he’d seen her. “No, I’m Polish,” she replied. “My name is Sosniowski.”

Ursula in the park with the miniature Hanzlitschek and the little girl whose bonnet had fallen off. Two ladies and their wailing offspring. He saw her again with Ursula in the municipal park, and one evening, after the miracle at Gottestischlein, he asked, “Who is that lady in the park?” He spoke a halting German which had begun to differ from the harsh, parade-ground vernacular of her husband, for he was spending his free time studying a German grammar for beginners. The lady herself was of no particular interest to him; he was merely avid to know anything that had to do with Ursula
.

“Which lady in the park?” she asked
.

“The one with the little girl and the pug dog,” he said
.

Ursula laughed and it sounded like sleigh-bells. “Oh, you dear man! You’re even making progress with the German language!”

“For you,” he replied solemnly. More sleigh-bells, and the hand that had recently spread healing water on his burning back now stroked his hair
.

“She is Frau Doktor Sosniowski,” said Ursula in the deepening twilight, which cast the only shadow on his paradise, that brief interval in which Hanzlitschek drank beer in the officers’ mess. By now, since the sun was almost setting behind the Alps, he was probably tucking into his first nightcap. Ursula rose and, as she put on her clothes, she explained that the woman was the wife of a Polish doctor from Austrian Galicia. They had moved into the garrison town about twelve years before, and she was Ursula’s good friend. “It was she who gave me the salve for your back. Her husband knew what it was for. He’s a good man. They have endured a great deal.”

She never told him what it was they had endured, and he didn’t really care. The red fringe of sunset was shrinking behind the
mountain peaks; Hanzlitschek would be finishing his second nightcap, and wouldn’t down the third one till he got home. The sergeant watched Ursula through the window as she ran down the hill and disappeared into the outskirts of Helldorf. Soon after that, Hanzlitschek appeared in paradise with a bullwhip
.

The black and white procession came to a halt in front of the manor-house. It was a cluster of little girls in soiled white dresses, surrounded, like the border on a funeral notice, by nuns in black habits. Their heads were bowed meekly, their gowns speckled with holes made by burning snowflakes. The procession was headed by a statuesque Mother Superior with a face that was anything but meek, just like the lady he’d finally remembered was — or had been — Frau Doktor Sosniowski.

“Is this the residence of General John S. Preston?” the Mother Superior asked a second lieutenant who was leaning against a pillar.

“No, Reverend Mother,” replied the officer. “This is the headquarters of General John Alexander Logan, Commander of the Fifteenth Corps of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army.”

“You are mistaken, lieutenant.” The tall nun pulled a piece of paper out of her sleeve. “I have here a letter from your General William” — she made a slight pause — “Tecumseh Sherman, in which he assigns me General Preston’s house as compensation for my convent school, which your soldiers set ablaze after General William Tecumseh Sherman promised me that both our convent and our school for young Catholic ladies would remain unharmed.”

The lieutenant, nonplussed, took the paper.

“My name is Sister Baptista Lynch,” the nun continued as he tried to decipher the general’s scrawl. “Years ago, in Ohio, I taught Miss Minnie Sherman, daughter of your General Sherman —”

The second lieutenant yanked himself erect and ran into the house. They could hear him calling, “General! Just a moment!”

Sister Baptista looked around and saw the lady. “Ah, Madam Sosniowski! I do hope your academy has been spared such barbarism!”

The sergeant listened and remembered.

General Sherman finished reading the letter, and said, “It’s true, she did teach Minnie, and now she suddenly remembers. In ’61, though, she conveniently forgot, just like her brother, Patrick Lynch, the Bishop of Charleston.” He turned to Colonel Ewing. “He’s a friend of my wife’s.” He stared out the window at the burning city. “He also bears part of the blame — and no small part — for this devastation.”

“Tecumseh Sherman,” said Mother Baptista contemptuously. “He and his bandits — they’re like the Roman soldiers who ridiculed Our Lord Jesus Christ,” and she made the sign of the cross. “Would you believe it, madam? They blew their cigar smoke in the sisters’ faces — and the little girls’ faces too — and they laughed at us. They said, ‘We’re just as holy as you are, Reverend Sister! And, now what do you think of God? Ain’t Sherman greater?’ ” The Mother Superior made the sign of the cross again. “Tecumseh Sherman. The pagan name suits him all too well.”

The sergeant had never seen his general pray. Except maybe once —

“That was only on account of old Abe,” insisted the newly pious Zinkule. “Sherman is in league with the Devil.”

“How would you like a punch in the nose?” Houska offered
.

“Leave him alone,” said Stejskal. “He may be right.”

“I am,” declared Zinkule. “Remember Kennesaw!”

“And what’s there to remember from Kennesaw?” Houska asked suspiciously
.

“Things happened. Mysterious things.”

They were sitting in the parlour of yet another white manor-house somewhere near Savannah — the sergeant had lost count already. A large, scowling Negress towered over them, sulking because they had kept her from relieving the daughter of the house of some bed linens she was about to carry up to the master bedroom, where Vendelin Kabinus was about to deflower his new bride. Her wedding dress had belonged to the daughter of the house, whose husband-to-be was off fighting with Hood’s army to the south, and it was quite dirty but still manifestly white. The bride’s freshly scrubbed skin, on the other hand, was as black as tar
.

“Woman! You’re free now!” Stejskal snatched the comforter the black woman was still holding and put it on the rest of the linen in the daughter’s arms. “You’re not a slave any more, you have to drop those slave habits.”

“I’s part of the family,” the black woman protested
.

“You are? Let her take it anyway. She’s younger than you are.”

The Negress pouted, and Houska said, “Isn’t this a waste of fine sheets, messing them up on a wedding night?”

“It’s none of your business,” said Stejskal. “Do you have any idea what this means to Vendelin? He had to travel halfway around the world and fight his way from Wilber to Southern Georgia before he managed to talk anyone into it.”

The plantation-owner’s wife walked through the parlour. She was taking a blanket, as they had ordered her, to the rear of the house, where the Negro members of the family were sleeping. During the entire march from Georgia, Vendelin Kabinus had scarcely spoken; according to some, he had delivered one brief and not entirely coherent speech. That was when he fled inside his tent to escape the young vivandière that Kapsa and Svejkar had bribed. That was also when he explained the reason for his continuing chastity, which had always mystified them. How could he ever get a woman to marry him, he said, not to mention seduce her, when
he had no idea what to talk to her about? He didn’t know what he would talk to his bride about either, but that didn’t trouble him because he spoke no English. Shake, whose Yankee tongue was nearly as smooth as his Czech one, had arranged the marriage. One of the few times Kabinus had spoken during the march through Georgia had been when he saw a young black girl in a green turban eyeing Sherman’s troops. “What a piece!” he’d said, and that was all Shake needed to hear. He delegated himself to propose to her on Kabinus’s behalf. Stejskal put her age at seventeen, Shake at twelve, and when Reverend Mulroney asked her just before the ceremony, she said, “I ain’t exactly sure. My ma says I’s sixteen.” Shaking his head, Mulroney recorded her age in the marriage registry as sixty
.

They thought of the incredible things that had happened at the foot of Kennesaw Mountain, and the sergeant knew that Zinkule was right to imply that the general’s display of piety in the Methodist church in Memphis was not religiously motivated. The general was simply a patriot like himself
.

He had attended the Methodist holy of holies because of a sermon of Bishop Lynch’s, published in the Charleston newspaper, about the states’ inalienable right to freedom. The sergeant had read it and thought that he would be inclined to live among the subjugated Czechs if Austria were free, not as it was now, but as America was. He couldn’t understand how two freedoms could be so different. And what kind of freedom was Bishop Lynch talking about? He glanced at the Negress in the corner of the dining room, taking out her rage on a silver tray so that, when they left the following day, her master would count that tray among the damages caused by the Unionists, along with the voluptuous nude statue that the virtuous Zinkule had covered with whitewash
.

The sermon had unexpectedly driven the general to visit the nearest church. With an escort of four men from his personal bodyguard (two Czechs, two Irishmen), he sat in the front pew, and when the preacher, unnerved by his presence, concluded his circumspect sermon with a prayer for unspecified “soldiers on the field of battle” but without the usual prayer for the victory of an unspecified side, the general rose and, in a voice he usually only employed to be heard above artillery fire, launched into the prayer prescribed by the Union Army Command for the battlefield: “Almighty God, I beg you, grant strength, health, and long life to the President of these United States of America, Abraham Lincoln!” The soldiers thundered “Amen!” in two accents, and the preacher braced himself to be arrested
.