The Bride of Texas (17 page)

— so that when Cyril told the story about Zalesni Lhota, a picture came to his mind, a bitter greyness shrouded the dawn, and he felt not a hint of homesickness. He only felt again, for the thousandth time, a sense of home. The rasping scream of the cicadas joined in the exotic music of the bands in the beautiful city of Savannah, under the fabulous sky with its plethora of stars. This was home now. Before this he’d never really had a home, just the kind of bad dream Cyril was talking about — a crofter’s cottage, a piece of land three roods square, an ill-used father, and a headstrong sister.

Lida had been different then, very different. Blue eyes that were more like turquoise dandelions, with an innocence that had captivated Vitek Mika of the Mika estate. The Toupeliks owned only the tiny field and a cottage. A little world of its own. “It couldn’t have happened,” Cyril was saying. “Besides, you had to have an official form for everything. The groom had to be exempted from military service or discharged, and by that time he’d be a pretty old bridegroom. And he had to have an official document saying he had the means to support his bride. Of course, everything was possible with bribery and barter. I could never have married there; the
most I could hope for was a roll in the hay with the hired girls. Remember all the ones that got pregnant? My uncle Thomas and his regiment were in Kutna Hora for three years, and during that time there were so many illegitimate kids born, they started calling it ‘Bastard Hill’. Seven hundred, my uncle said. Of course, that wasn’t a problem with Vitek. But Lida didn’t have a dowry. How could she, with our place only three roods square? Things were going from bad to worse for us. We’d had crop failures three years in a row, then our cow died. Little Josef and I had to pull the plough for father, and Josef wasn’t even fourteen. And then —” Old man Mika became suspicious of his only child, his only son and heir. And Cyril began to suspect his sister. The Toupeliks all slept in the same room, for the cottage had only one. Mother and Father on the bed, Cyril and little Josef on a ledge above the tiled stove. Lida slept on a bench in the corner. At night she began going to the outhouse, and she’d always tie a skirt around her nightshirt. It was perfectly clear to him what was going on. But the mother and father were heavy sleepers, and suspected nothing
.

Lida wouldn’t come in from the outhouse until after midnight; then she’d slip out of her skirt and very quietly climb back onto her bench. Little Josef slept the deep sleep of an overworked child. When they stopped ploughing at noon and took out their dry bread and onion, he’d barely finish eating before he lay back on the grass between mouthfuls and was dead to the world. Only Cyril knew what she was up to. His young body could take the extra work it had to do now that the cow was dead. He also drew strength from his passion for Marie, the hired girl on the Mika farm, except that Marie had a soldier who was supposed to come home in two years, and she was one of those stubborn maids who frittered away their Sundays off by praying in church, and spent all her free time on winter evenings reciting litanies, and attended the May masses in the spring: a bull-headed faith, but what else was there? She was so different from Lida, who went to church on Sunday only out of
duty, and had no time for litanies. One night, as soon as Lida closed the cabin door softly behind her, he got up and watched her run past the outhouse towards the woods
.

That night, picking his way through the low spruce trees and occasionally catching a glimpse of Lida’s bare feet flashing in the moonlight on the path, he suddenly saw the shadow of old man Mika behind a tree on the other side of the path. He stopped. Lida disappeared among the taller spruce trees and the old man came out onto the path and followed her silently. Then Cyril lost sight of him too, and he ran down the forest path because he was certain of the reason for Lida’s nocturnal outings. He’d been certain before, he merely hadn’t known who the fellow was
.

Then he saw old Mika creeping into the underbrush on the edge of the tiny meadow. He left the path on the opposite side and crept through the brush as stealthily as the old man
.

There they were. They stood so close that they looked like a single entity, protected by the night and the woods, protected, they thought, by their parents’ heavy sleep after hard labour, one soul but not yet one body in the middle of the tiny meadow, observed only by owls. Under the harvest moon they melted into each other, lulled by the soft woodwinds of the nocturnal birds
.

Slowly, with the tenderness that precedes a frenzy, they lay down on a patch of moss. He glimpsed Lida’s thighs as Vitek lifted her skirt — and a brief, incestuous pang tingled in his crotch — but old Mika burst out of the bushes and, with his strong farmer’s grip, tore his only son and heir from the undowried thighs. He heard a resounding slap
.

“Father!” That was Vitek’s voice
.

“Silence!” The bark of a drill sergeant. Mika twisted Vitek’s arm up behind his back and drove him wordlessly down the path towards the village and their farm
.

Lida pulled down her skirt and sat up. Cyril jumped out of the bushes and ran over to her. Her teeth were chattering and she was
trembling violently but she wasn’t crying. Was it fright that made her shake? Terror? He knelt beside her, put his arm around her. She showed no surprise at his presence, and it was a while before she could even weep. “Oh God, Cyril, you won’t tell on me, will you? Say you won’t tell.…” He assured her he wouldn’t, and kept reassuring her all the way down the path and across the fields to the cottage. “Promise me, Cyril — as silent as the grave!” The incestuous desire had been no more than a momentary lunacy and a brief vision of white thighs in the moonlight. She was his sister, after all
.

It wasn’t until years later, in Texas, that he figured out that it hadn’t been fright or terror that had made her quake. That night, she had been touched by a terrible Austrian form of death. The death of the pursuit of happiness
.

He didn’t tell on her. How could he? But next day, though it was haying time, the farmer appeared in the Toupeliks’ field and called out to Cyril’s father. The father put down his scythe and walked over to the hedgerow. Cyril stopped work as well. Little Josef, in the middle of binding a sheaf, dropped to the stubble-covered ground and fell asleep. Lida turned white as death, and glanced at Cyril. Was it fright or hatred? Then she bent over a sheaf, picked up a piece of straw, and bound the sheaf. Her entire body was trembling, as it had the night before. The rich farmer was talking urgently to the poor farmer by the edge of the field. Of course, Cyril knew what he was saying. Then the father returned, his face a deep, dark red, but he said nothing. He picked up the scythe and set to work again. He didn’t say a word until that evening
.

Cyril’s father was good-natured, but there was a tradition in such matters. He ordered everyone but Lida to leave the cottage. Outside they could hear her whimpering, and the whistle of Father’s strap. Mother crossed herself, and little Josef asked, “What has Lida done?” And Cyril replied, because that too was part of the tradition, “Quiet! You’re too young to understand.” So now little Josef knew too, for he was a country boy, and already twelve. Father
called them back inside. They sat down to supper and ate their potatoes in silence, without sour milk, because the cow had died. Lida lay on the bench, facing the wall, her entire body heaving and shuddering
.

The memory of running the gauntlet flashed through the sergeant’s mind, and the red gash on Ursula’s white back. It was a tradition. The faded side of the locket. He gave his head a shake, and looked over at the diligent Kakuska, his clockwork gearwheels gleaming brassily in the candlelight. The hullabaloo outside, in Savannah. “Shut up this minute, d’you hear, Cyril!” Blue eyes, no longer innocent — serpent’s eyes now, cruel, and the Negro voices outside the window,
 … and before I’d be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave.…
Plunking banjos, cicadas, moonlight pouring down on the sycamores.

Something had happened. At mass on Sunday, his sister usually stifled yawns or flirted with the boys across the nave, and paid attention only when the singing began. This Sunday she remained on her knees for the whole mass except when the liturgy required her to stand. This went on Sunday after Sunday. On the opposite side of the church, in the corner, there was another kneeler, another rosary passing through the unaccustomed fingers of Vitek Mika. Then came spring
.

Can piety be evil?

“I’d never been on a pilgrimage, there wasn’t time for it,” said Cyril. “It never entered my mind that Lida would try to put one over on God just to get her own way.”

“What else could she do?” asked the sergeant. “And what did they plan to do, anyway?”

“To run off to America. What they forgot was that money can buy anything. And it looked like real one hundred per cent repentance. Mother watched her like a hawk at mass but Lida never even glanced at Vitek. In autumn, Mother heaved a sigh of relief because Lida’s screwing about hadn’t had any consequences.”

In the spring, Lida began making her case
.

“Lida, you’ve never ever been the slightest bit interested in pilgrimages, and now you want to go all the way to Amberice?”

“I have to beg forgiveness from the Virgin Mary,” she said, without as much as a blush. Her eyes weren’t yet reptilian, but they were no longer innocent either
.

“Father wouldn’t hear of it. So my terrible little sister —”

“Terrible?” said the sergeant. “Isn’t she just pitiful?”

Cyril gave a nasty laugh. “Wait till you hear. So she managed to bewitch the padre. He was young, and of course he was crazy about her, but he was a good priest and didn’t let on. She bewitched him, all right. He came to see us to plead her case. Said he’d keep an eye on her himself, since he was going to lead the procession to Amberice that year. Keep an eye on her! The very first night — it was three days’ walk to Amberice, the fourth day was for prayers, and then three days back, that meant six nights spent sleeping in barns, the women in one, the men in another, and of course Father Bunata couldn’t stay with the women. Keep an eye on her! Mother Fidelia of the Franciscans was chaperoning the women, but she had trouble with her feet and by evening all she could think of were her bunions.”

“Wasn’t it risky? Couldn’t they have waited till they were out of the country?”

“They were young. And besides, how could they know that Father Bunata wasn’t the only one keeping an eye on them? An old army veteran named Svestka went along on the pilgrimage, for money. Old man Mika’s money.”

“Odd that old man Mika let them go in the first place,” said the sergeant
.

“Could you ever stop someone in Austria from going on a pilgrimage? Lida, maybe. She wasn’t of age yet. But Vitek was twenty-two. He didn’t ask his father, he just signed up. They were going after the crops were in, so what could old Mika do? Besides,
when Father Bunata was at the Mikases’ for Sunday dinner he had nothing but good to say about Vitek, how he’d changed so much for the better, what a devout lad he was now, how he helped carry the banner in the Corpus Christi procession. Bunata certainly knew what had happened between Vitek and Lida. There was no chaplain in Lhota, so he was the only one to hear confessions —”

“What makes you so sure they confessed to him?” the sergeant interrupted him
.

Cyril frowned and thought it over. “Well,” he replied, “I was an altar boy as a child. I’d never have thought of not confessing. But you see what she’s like? She may well have lied. And you don’t even know why I’m telling you all this. Isn’t it awful? Adding the sin of sacrilege to fornication.”

“But was it fornication?” asked the sergeant
.

Cyril waved a hand dismissively. “Well, anyway,” he said, “old Mika was left with no choice but to hire a spy. But the spy wasn’t that good, and they almost got away with it.”

Amberice was only three kilometres from the district capital, where the train to Vienna stopped. That would be the escape route. But they couldn’t wait. Three nights in a row they snuck out of the barns. Mother Fidelia was asleep, a victim of her bunions, and old Svestka was asleep too, drowned in the gin he’d bought with Mika’s money. In the woods that lined the road to Amberice, Vitek and Lida at last became more than just one soul. Services were held from early in the morning of the fourth day, in the Church of the Holy Mother on the Hill, who, among her other titles, was the Patroness of Fortunate Conception. It was as though God, deceived as he was, was having his little joke. Lida sat conspicuously in the first row, clearly visible to Father Bunata. The priest warmed to her unearthly piety, sensing that God was bestowing a special mercy upon her. He sang the litany in his lovely, resonant tenor: “Hope of sinners … Sweet Virgin of virgins … Virgin of the Immaculate Conception.…”