The Bride of Texas (27 page)

Standing before the white façade flickering yellow in the flames of burning Columbia, the sergeant finally mustered his courage. A squadron of Kil’s cavalry was trotting down the road, with Kakuska at the rear in his new riding boots and shiny spurs that clearly were not government issue. They were headed off to the north, where the sky on the horizon was already black, with billows of burning snow glowing like a dying comet against the dark.

“Madam,” said the sergeant, and paused as his throat tightened in apprehension. “Madam, did you, when you lived in Helldorf, did you know a” — a final pause before he came out with it, in German — “Frau Hauptmann von Hanzlitschek?”

“Ursula?” asked Madam Sosniowski, and the sergeant’s heart galloped like a horse.

Burning snow was fluttering down on the Congaree River.

(illustration credit 3.1)

V
ALLANDIGHAM
believes — or claims to believe — that our dispute with the South will be resolved not by war, but by peaceful negotiations,” said my husband, Humphrey, over pork chops, which they had naturally complimented me on before getting into the serious part of the conversation. The dinner in honour of Ambrose Burnside had actually been prepared by Jasmine, our housekeeper and general factotum. She had been in charge of the kitchen ever since she had come to work for us, allowing me to limit my culinary activity to making tea, which I know how to do. I had hired Jasmine as a maid, but back at Mr. Carmichael’s mansion in South Carolina, where she came from, she had picked up a great deal from Gospel, who was a champion cook. Mr. Carmichael’s late wife had made a discriminating gourmand out of her husband, and when she died young, a victim of her own culinary skills, Mr. Carmichael was willing to pay the exorbitant sum of five thousand dollars for the famous Gospel from Georgia, though she had only one leg. He came to
regret spending such an outrageous amount; as soon as he brought her to his plantation, Gospel’s culinary skills evaporated — or rather, they appeared to be based uncertainly on magic of some sort, which was apparently affected by her moving to South Carolina.

I knew Ambrose had a soft spot for Negroes. It may even have been hereditary. His father had set out along what they called “the Quaker Road” from his native South Carolina to Indiana, where he had given the slaves he inherited from his parents their freedom. Ambrose continued the tradition in his friendship with his orderly, Robert Holloway, who Ambrose exaggeratedly maintained had saved him from the ravages of dysentery in Mexico. The friendship did not turn Ambrose into a militant abolitionist, but he found slave-owners offensive and he simply couldn’t abide nigger-haters like Vallandigham. So, as he was praising the pork chops to the skies, I decided not to take credit, but to introduce him to Jasmine after dinner. I assumed the girl would be in seventh heaven in the company of a Union general, since she not only had a natural interest, which she shared with her race, in the victory of the North; she had a strong personal interest as well.

“But Vallandigham is wrong,” my husband was saying. “Even if Jeff Davis agreed to peace talks with Lincoln, which I find hard to imagine, he would enter them with some ulterior motive, not an honest desire to come to a settlement. His real intention would be to give his troops a rest, or to export cotton to England undisturbed by hostilities and so forth. He’s crossed his Rubicon.”

“I agree,” said Ambrose.

“There were no fundamental philosophical reasons for the South’s decision to secede,” Humphrey continued. “There is no theory here, either, based on the biblical notion of hewers of wood and drawers of water, or on any paleological
or psychological speculations about the inequality of human races. Slavers know that’s all rubbish, even better than we do. We consider Negroes mostly as concepts. They know them as people of flesh and blood, and they know only too well that they’re human. There’s no philosophy here, general. Slavery is simply very profitable!”

The concept called Jasmine entered with a tray, and I was reminded of her five-thousand-dollar mentor, whose miraculous abilities had suddenly vanished when she was transplanted. I imagined Gospel serving chicken burnt to a crisp, sauces with too much salt, overcooked rice.

“What’s the matter with you, Gospel?” Mr. Carmichael had asked, annoyed.

“It be black magic, massa!”

Mr. Carmichael did not believe in magic, white or black. He saw Negroes as uneducated and therefore primitive people, and believed he had only to invent a fairy-tale that would undo the spell in order to enjoy again the delicacies for which he had acquired Gospel. So with a perfectly straight face he asked Gospel where the black magic was coming from.

“My son Hasdrubal, massa.”

“Oh, is he a sorcerer?” asked Mr. Carmichael.

“He learn it from Nausika, a bad nigger-woman on Massa Roberts’ plantation. She can put the evil eye on anybody. She even bewitched massa.”

“Is that a fact?” Mr. Carmichael still maintained a solemn face. “And just how did she bewitch him?”

“She fixed it so he can’t have no babies,” Gospel replied with equal solemnity.

Mr. Carmichael hesitated, wondering if his cook was as dense as she seemed, or as impertinent as he was beginning to think. He knew Nausika and her five high-yellow children well. All of them had their mother’s huge eyes and Mr. Roberts’s
aquiline nose. They were the only children on the plantation with noses like that, since Mr. Roberts had never had any children by his wife.

“So now your son has put the evil eye on you, Gospel. How?”

“I surely don’t need to explain it to you, massa.”

No, indeed she didn’t. Mr. Carmichael wondered if his cook believed in magic any more than he did. And an unpleasant suspicion began to take hold. “I meant to say, what kind of curse was it?”

“Well, if I get sold and he don’t get sold with me, I can’t never cook another thing, not even a decent mess of grits,” she explained, her face a stony mask of gravity.

Furious, Mr. Carmichael rejected then and there the existence of a causal nexus between lack of education and lack of intelligence. “I’ll show you, Gospel!” he said to himself, but then realized he was helpless in the face of the one-legged virtuoso.

Roberts was a gambler, and had sold Carmichael the cook because he had urgently needed eight thousand dollars. The cook had begged her new owner to buy her son as well. Hasdrubal was young, good-looking: footman material. But Roberts wanted three thousand for him. Carmichael didn’t need a footman, and spending that much money for a field hand went against the grain. So a tearful Gospel went alone to South Carolina, where she fell victim to Hasdrubal’s remote version of black magic.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the spell back in Georgia?” Mr. Carmichael asked angrily.

“I didn’t think Hasdrubal could do it. He never put the evil eye on nobody before this.”

In other words, thought Carmichael, the ploy hadn’t occurred to her until later.

Carmichael knew he was trapped. Gospel was also an excellent seamstress, but Hasdrubal’s magic would undoubtedly paralyse her needle as well, and he had no intention of going around in ill-fitting trousers. Soon the story about the evil eye would spread and nobody would take Gospel off his hands at any price. She stood there looking at him, her expression inscrutable, but he knew what she was thinking.

“And besides, massa,” she said, “I didn’t think you’d believe me. You don’t even believe in the evil eye. Leastwise, you didn’t used to,” she added — solemnly, but with what struck him as triumphant irony.

There was nothing to do but buy himself a footman. Fortunately, Roberts’s luck at cards had changed and in a good mood he let Hasdrubal go for a mere twelve hundred.

“Vallandigham doesn’t understand that it’s the captains of industry who are in control of the war right now,” my husband was saying. “Slavery and capitalism are mutually exclusive in America. Lincoln may not realize all the implications of his famous dictum about how we cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. The captains of industry would take this noble though somewhat abstract thought and give it substance. In the slave half, you have Negro labourers in the fields — and in factories now, too — who won’t go on strike and who are paid in kind; and in the other half, quarrelsome, greedy whites using what amounts to blackmail to drive wages as high as possible. For all his backwoods shrewdness, Lincoln is an idealist, although in his own way so is Vallandigham.”

“Ha!” I interrupted my husband.

“What do you mean by that, Lorraine?” my husband asked sternly.

“A story is what I mean,” I said. “From real life.”

I was a witness of sorts, because the murder victim, Jeremy Lecklider, used to deliver farm produce to our kitchen. He was a shrivelled little man of fifty but, like many with a farm too small to support a hired hand and too large to run without back-breaking drudgery, he looked at least seventy. He lived with his widowed father, who for twenty years had been crippled with gout. At the time of the murder the father was almost eighty-one, and the only tasks his crippled fingers and stiff knees were up to were feeding the chickens, cooking the porridge, and cleaning the shotgun that Jeremy used to hunt grouse with in the fall. Anything heavier or more delicate was left to Jeremy.

They both appeared to be good, quiet people, and bore the futility of their existence — because there was no one to inherit the farm — with Christian humility. Or so it seemed to a woman who wrote romantic stories. And yet, in Jeremy’s story, tragedy smouldered under his apparent resignation.

But no one knew that, especially an authoress who never looked to real life except for useful details about handsome lads and clever lasses and was uninterested in the lives of the elderly. It was only after old man Lecklider’s trial that I thought to try my hand at realism, and then I discovered that it’s easier to write fiction on the basis of imagined experience. So I consigned my unfinished tales drawn from real life to my desk drawer, apparently for ever.

The one person to have any idea of the impending tragedy on Elihu and Jeremy Lecklider’s farm was a travelling salesman who peddled patent medicines for humans and livestock from farm to farm. The evening he arrived on his mule at the Lecklider farm, he spent almost an hour outside an open window listening to an argument between the father and the son.
Finally he decided it wasn’t the right time for a sales call; he could still make it to the neighbouring farm before dark. The next day he returned to the Leckliders’ and found the farmhouse in total silence. He knocked on the door. He knew that young Lecklider would be working in the field, but that the old man would be home, since he had great difficulty moving about, even with the crutches his son had made for him. No one answered. The salesman opened the door and went inside. Young Lecklider was at home after all. He was lying on his back on the floor, and where his head was supposed to be was a bloody pool with fragments of skull and clumps of grey hair in it. Old Lecklider was sitting over the corpse in an armchair, with a shotgun in his lap, staring at nothing.

The Indiana state prosecutor asked Clement Vallandigham to take the case, and he accepted. He wasn’t one to turn down a chance for a public display of his skills. “That was what made me laugh, Humphrey,” I said, turning to my husband. “Vallandigham may be an exceptional lawyer, but would you call him an idealist? He can get a man to the gallows as easily as he can tear him from the hangman’s clutches. It all depends on what suits his purpose at the time.”

“I heard about the case,” said Ambrose. “Vallandigham won it.”

“That’s right,” said Humphrey. “Doesn’t it seem to you, Lorraine, that his almost obsessive devotion to duty is the sign of a certain —”

“Vallandigham wants to be the hero of the day, no matter what,” I said. “He’s prepared to walk on dead bodies if need be, sometimes literally. He got old Lecklider hanged.”