The Bride of Texas (35 page)

He stared at the eagle over the entrance to the little stone building. It was holding a bundle of arrows in one claw, an olive branch in the other. It was so different from the eagle on von Hanzlitschek’s cap, and on the banners that had fluttered over the conquered barricade that cannoneer Salek, as black as a demon, had destroyed with well-placed shots from Windischgraetz’s heavy artillery. But Kapsa still couldn’t make up his mind
.

Rain, snow, hailstones. For three days the engineers worked on a pontoon bridge over the Pee Dee River between North and South Carolina, and Kakuska got another glimpse of little Kil in his night-shirt. This time it didn’t fly up, but by now Kakuska knew what he knew; he just grinned to himself when the jealous Lieutenant Jamison wondered out loud what the Columbia beauty Kil had just bundled into a confiscated carriage saw in that dwarf with a monkey’s forehead. Between wild forays into the countryside in pursuit of General Wade Hampton’s scattered troops, Kil fed the beauty delicious meals cooked by his French chef. When she was satiated, he would close the tattered curtains on the carriage. Kakuska couldn’t see inside, but he knew better than the rest what the homely general was using to charm his high-class whore.

They crossed the Pee Dee River and stirred things up. Hampton divided his Confederate cavalry into small units that rode through the countryside in the cold downpour, attacking, skirmishing, withdrawing, attacking again — something they’d become virtuosos at during the four years of warfare. Kil’s
veteran cavalry swarmed towards Fayetteville but they were harassed and impeded by a rash of attacks, and forced to counter-attack. At one point they had taken a prisoner, an unhorsed cavalryman who now trotted along tied behind the carriage with Kil’s whore inside, a black driver in the driver’s seat and, beside him, the French chef, smoking a Russian cigarette that some kindred spirit had taken from the prisoner, along with his riding boots, also imported from Russia — a gift from the tsar’s army to the worthy Confederate cause. Now the prisoner was stumbling along in Irish boots of untanned leather, cursing Kil, the whore, and the chef.

Before they put him to work helping to push the carriage out of the mud, they learned from him that the main body of Wade Hampton’s corps was behind them. Kil knew he now had a chance to surround Hampton, cut off his approach to Fayetteville, force him to battle, and then destroy him. He broke up his cavalry into three brigades and fanned them out across the countryside, with orders to secure all access roads to Fayetteville and, as soon as they made contact with Hampton’s massive corps, to snap the fan shut like a trap. But Hampton either anticipated Kil’s plan and changed direction, or got lost in the fog that set in after the rain and hail that evening when Kil’s carriage and staff arrived in Solomon’s Grove. The same fog veiled their camp, like blue-grey cotton wool soaked in twilight.

Kil had chosen Solomon’s Grove because he only needed to post sentries at the west end of the village, since approaches to the east, south, and north were protected by swamps. But the swamps generated fog. The captive cavalryman took advantage of it, gnawed through the rope tying him to the carriage, and vanished into the mist, leaving behind the pair of bloody Irish boots. But then, the sergeant thought, half the Confederate army was used to fighting barefoot.

Kil established his headquarters and his bedroom (but mostly his bedroom) in a small stone cottage in the heart of the village, and the cavalrymen settled down in a circle around the house. They were expecting a peaceful though somewhat chilly and damp night, and for the first time in several days they undressed down to their underwear (if they had any). They wrapped themselves in horse blankets and were soon fast asleep.

Kakuska crawled into the empty carriage.

Night began to fall, a peaceful night with the swamps exhaling fog that rose to drown the Carolina stars, and the moon along with them.

The dawn came, scarcely worthy of the name. The light was dull and veiled in fog and the first illumination came from small fires started, with much coughing and farting, by men hungry for breakfast. Kakuska was still asleep. A small detail of sentries coming off duty emerged from the mist and quickly found places to sit around the barely flickering fires. Someone under the carriage sneezed and Kakuska awoke, still dreaming of Wisconsin and Bozenka’s warm embrace. But when he looked out of the carriage, he saw Kil’s bugler wetting his lips and raising his battered horn, and blowing not “Reveille” but “Attack”. Kakuska jumped up but immediately fell back into the velvet cushions as the bugle call was answered by a terrible din. It was as though the gates of hell had opened: the Rebel war yell. He groped for his rifle.

Horses tore through the fog from the south and west. Swords flashed, pistols cracked, and the air was filled with bloodcurdling shouts. Out of the house, where moments ago, Kakuska knew (with some envy), his commander had been tupping his whore, flew a familiar figure clad in a night-shirt. The figure raced towards the tethered horses, which were whinnying and straining at their ropes, as riders raced through
the camp. Three Rebel horsemen stopped the figure, shouted something at it, and then galloped off. The night-shirt swung onto a horse and rode north towards the swamps.

It was only after the fray that Kakuska learned of the foolish mistake Wheeler’s horsemen had made after wading through an apparently impassable swamp. They must have taken the man in the night-shirt for a villager; the fog probably obscured Kil’s face with its characteristic nose. “Where’s General Kilpatrick spending the night?” one of the three riders had yelled at the general. “That way!” Kil had shouted, “less than half a mile from here!” Then he had leapt on his horse and ridden off to hide in the swamp.

From his vantage-point in the carriage, Kakuska could see Wheeler’s horsemen plunging this way and that way through the fog. By the light of the fires, men dressed only in drawers crawled out of their blankets, some of them holding their hands over their heads. The main cluster of riders galloped through the camp, then turned and galloped back. Behind them ran the Rebel prisoners they had freed. Meanwhile, a few of the men in drawers had come to their senses and picked up their weapons, and bullets whistled through the foggy dawn. Another night-shirt emerged from the stone house. This one was silk, and in it Kil’s woman ran through the rain of bullets to the carriage. Perhaps she thought she could drive to safety, but when she saw that the horses were unhitched she turned and started back, halting when a group of Rebels galloped past, firing as they rode. A Rebel officer leapt off his horse and dragged the girl to safety in a ditch, then ran back to his horse, but as he was riding off he suddenly threw up his hands, toppled off his mount, and lay on the ground. Another clutch of riders, rifles blazing, came galloping in from the opposite direction. Kakuska raised his repeater to his shoulder and knocked two of the riders off their horses with three shots in
rapid succession. He noticed a blonde head peeking cautiously out of the ditch. Curiosity, he thought to himself, but then he had to turn his attention to more Rebel horsemen riding in from the south. For the next while, he and his rifle were fully occupied and he forgot about the girl.

The fog grew thicker with gunsmoke. Wheeler’s cavalry was still charging through the encampment like demons. Despite the fog, however, Kakuska and many of his comrades, who were now fully awake, could see that there weren’t as many riders as the noise had suggested. They also saw that the Rebels were armed with single-shot carbines that were hard to reload on a moving horse. Kakuska, concealed in the carriage, fired away as if he were in a shooting gallery. The sun, now higher in the sky, burned off the last wisps of fog. Suddenly, from the west, another bugle sounded the attack.

Around the campfire at Bentonville, Kapsa picked up the story from there, because he had been riding behind the bugler and little Kil, now in his coat with the night-shirt still showing beneath it. They arrived after it was all over, when the repeaters had already done their work. The sergeant saw men dressed in their underwear advancing south towards the swamps. A few had put on their clothes by now, while others were just pulling on their trousers. As the sergeant stepped over a corpse, he glimpsed a general’s stars in the firelight. Moving aside to make way for a small herd of stampeding horses — one of them still dragging a dead rider with his foot caught in a stirrup — they continued south, then took cover because bullets were swarming out of the swamp. A line of grey uniforms advanced towards them but the repeaters toppled them like playing-cards, and when they fell the swamp swallowed them up. The sergeant heard someone shout, “This ain’t fair!” He saw the man stand up, drop his carbine, and dive into the swamp; an instant before it swallowed him, the back of his head blossomed
red and disappeared. The repeating rifles kept firing away, and before long a bloody mass of Wheeler’s riders lay piled up on the edge of the swamp. There were no more Rebel yells, only moaning.

Kakuska jumped out of the carriage. He saw the girl climb out of the ditch and run towards the stone house, her nightgown clinging to her body. The gunfire fell silent, and he could even hear some indecent remarks directed at the fleeing little whore; the survivors had regained their composure. Then, in an ankle-length coat with his night-shirt showing at the hem like a fancy petticoat, Kil strode in from the swamp.

They counted a hundred and thirty dead Rebels, sixty of them in the bloody cluster at the edge of the swamp. There was no telling how many the marsh had swallowed up. Retreating to the west, the horsemen of Humes’s brigade drove a hundred and three of Kil’s riders ahead of them into captivity. General Humes himself lay in front of the stone house with a bullet in his head. They found two other dead Confederate generals, Hannon and Hagan, and when they counted the fallen officers they realized that the Rebel brigade must have withdrawn without its commanders.

“The Battle of Kil’s Night-shirt” — which was how the infantry late-comers christened the encounter, and how it entered history — was not a strategic success for the North. It opened the way of retreat to Fayetteville for General Wade Hampton and the fan did not snap shut as planned. Hampton repositioned his forces, waited for Sherman’s army in Fayetteville, and finally withdrew to Bentonville.

The rain, snow, and hail were soon overtaken by the fire in the turpentine forests.

The torchlight parade at the foot of the hill as Sherman’s army advanced on Bentonville; the fragrance of turpentine resin; the forest on the horizon in glorious flames.

“It wasn’t easy for me,” said Cyril. “There was nothing like it at home. What did we know!” He sighed. “Life was regimented. Getting a girl from one of the big farms was out of the question. Look how Lida ended up. But here?”

The clanking of tin cups tied to knapsacks. From the north-east, where the torchlight parade became a thin golden line, came the sound of singing:

“It’s different here,” came Cyril’s voice out of the dusk and the tang of turpentine. “I mean, nothing is fixed. There are no rules. Things are exactly the opposite for Lida and me. What she ran into at home, I didn’t run into till I got here. But there are no rules about that either. Not really.”

“Maybe,” said the sergeant, remembering how their old homeland had been a land of iron certainties. Here there were no guide-posts. But most of those old certainties — all of them, maybe — hadn’t been worth a damn. Here there was no framework, nothing. Everything was an unknown. Yet almost everything — maybe everything — had some value. It was a game of chance.

“So you weren’t really in love with Rosemary?”

“Now I know I wasn’t,” said Cyril. “And that’s the strange part. Now I’m fonder of her than I ever was then. But” — Cyril leaned his head on his hands — “the Devil only knows!”