The Bride of Texas (39 page)

They hadn’t admitted to Tuma that they were deserters. Fircut had passed himself off as a nouveau-riche merchant who had outgrown Austria. He had cast Kapsa as the heir to a fortune left to him by a wealthy aunt. He embellished his story with frequent references to the captain’s cabin, implying that their only contact with life in steerage on their way across the Atlantic was the stench they could smell on their walks on deck
.

“You’re right,” said Fircut. “But there’s one matter I must take care of. It concerns a certain lady and her late husband. My friend Kapsa here knew them both well.” He placed his hand on Kapsa’s shoulder. “I’m still owed a fair sum of money. But my friend Kapsa here has been a big help. The Austrian consul can hardly refuse me now, especially since the Austrians stand to make some tax on the money, but even so.…”

“Well” — Tuma glanced at Fircut suspiciously — “I don’t know about things like that. All I did was confiscate the regimental treasury. But like I say, the building next door is for sale cheap. It’s a good location and it’s a gold mine. I need backers and I’d prefer my own countrymen.”

He got up and went back to the bar
.

“Well,” said Fircut, “what do you think? Should I write a love letter to the consul?” He grinned. “Of course, you’re beyond the imperial jurisdiction. But what about her? What’s her name? Not that it wouldn’t be easy to find out.”

“I’ll throttle you!” Kapsa growled
.

“That would make it a double murder,” Fircut smirked. “You won’t tell me? No matter. As I say, it won’t be hard to find out.”

Kapsa finished his drink and poured another, emptying the bottle
.

He gave up
.

After that, all he could remember was sitting on a bench on the edge of a park. He remembered triple gold balls over the entrance to a shop. That was Friday afternoon. He remembered Fircut coming up to the bench, and hearing the sound of the chimes as the shop door opened and closed
.

“Here’s the ticket,” Fircut said. “Look, I’m putting it in your wallet.” He flashed a piece of paper
.

Then a ride — in a hack? — and being carried — did Fircut carry him? — and then darkness. He woke up in a doss-house
.

The next evening he and Tuma waited in the tavern for Fircut to show up. He never did
.

Kapsa still had the ticket. He hadn’t looked at it yet, but he had it
.

Twelve dollars was all he had left now — ten, actually. He’d bought dinner and a bottle of whisky at the Bohemian Casino
.

Then he found out about the hole in Mother McCormick’s chest
.

He still had the ticket
.

By Monday he had only six dollars left. The rest had gone for whisky and food after his encounter with Salek. At eight o’clock he was standing beneath the gold balls on Sixth Street. A gilt sign in the window said PAWNSHOP — COHEN AND SON, and behind it, in the sleepy morning sun, he could see a dusty violin along with some alarm clocks, mandolins, and a faded frock-coat on a chipped mannequin sporting a real monocle set in a wooden eye socket. Moments later, Cohen arrived and opened his shop. Kapsa hurried inside with him, almost knocking him over from behind. He handed the pawnbroker the ticket
.

“Two dollars at forty percent a month,” said Cohen. “That’s eighty cents. You pawned it Friday evening, Saturday, Sunday — I have to count Monday too — that’s a tenth of a month — eight cents, counting Friday. That’ll be ten cents. Two dollars and ten cents altogether.”

And he placed a silver cigar-holder with an ivory snake coiled around it on the counter
.

Kapsa handed him the money and stuck the cigar-holder in his pocket
.

Rain and more rain. It was a warm rain, as in South Carolina, but wet enough to put out the fires in the turpentine forests. Now they were just smouldering. The nature of the terrain had changed. The endless wagon-train of Sherman’s great army now wound its way among pine groves, along carpets of logs laid down by the engineers where the road became marshland, across freshly repaired bridges spanning flooded rivers, through meadows just starting to turn green, northward towards Goldsboro. The sergeant was galloping ahead with a dispatch for General Davis from Sherman, who was riding on his huge horse, Sam, beside General Slocum, in the ranks of Howard’s Twelfth Corps. Davis’s Fourteenth Corps, with General Morgan’s division leading it, was up ahead, snaking its way deeper and deeper into North Carolina. By morning, the sergeant arrived at the house where General Davis was conferring with Major Belknap. The major’s foragers had met a man going to Springfield on a mule. He’d been more than willing to talk, because he owned a small farm south of Raleigh, and hoped the war would end before Sherman’s bummers got to it. The man had confirmed that a large force led by General Joe Johnston was gathering at Bentonville, with every indication that they were preparing for a battle.

But Sherman no longer believed that General Johnston or his subordinate commanders had large forces at their disposal. Hundreds of miles and three months had gone by since Kennesaw Mountain, since the bitter battles over Atlanta. His own
army was now moving into North Carolina in three long columns — Slocum’s battalion in the north, Howard’s to the south, and Schofield’s closer to the coast. They were marching at some distance from each other, like three independent armies rather than a single one, and in all that time they had had only minor skirmishes with Hampton’s and Wheeler’s cavalries. Spies and prisoners brought them tales of an epidemic of desertion infecting the Confederate infantry, with only Wade Hampton’s skirmishers remaining immune, the cream of the cavalry patrolling the margins of the Rebel army. Most of its infantry was dying of attrition.

Sherman had always tried to avoid major battles; he left those to Grant out in the wilderness, where regiments numbering tens of thousands rolled over one another, bleeding each other dry on carefully constructed palisades and earthworks, and filling their trenches with fresh blood from units that were marched to the battlefronts past corpses there had been no time to bury properly. Spring downpours washed them out of their shallow graves, leaving half-decayed skulls to grin at the earnest newcomers as if to say: soon you’ll look like us.

Sherman no longer believed in the power of huge, ponderous armies engaging in monstrous battles that had no decisive outcome. The sergeant would listen to him when he joined them around the campfire and philosophized about war, while Lieutenant Williams surreptitiously took notes in a leather-bound book. “Let’s give Pyrrhus credit where credit is due,” said the general. “He was a soldier, and a brave commander. But what kind of general pays for every five feet his troops advance — and five feet is the height of a very small soldier — with a dead man or a cripple? War is an art, a terrible art. It ought not to exist at all but, since it does, it ought to be practised as an art. It is not an exercise in mass execution, the winner being he who has more men to sacrifice and more executioners who are, in
turn, also condemned to die. To my mind Pyrrhus was an executioner of that calibre,” said the general, placing a cigar in his mouth and enshrouding his creased face with smoke. “Caesar was the real artist,” he said from behind the smoke. “His soldiers were superlative marchers first, and only then soldiers.”

And yet, mused the sergeant, looking over the newspaper that had caught up with them north of Savannah, the general had the reputation of being a gambler, an adventurer, even a madman. Counter to the rules of war, he had plunged into the backwoods of Georgia, cut himself off from his supply routes and lines of communications, and driven his soldiers on long daily marches to the south. As they went they plundered the countryside and impoverished the farmers, so as not to have to wait for the arrival of unwieldy supplies. They did not have to rely on vague, uninformed orders from strategists working in safety far from enemy territory. They did not allow the Rebels time to manoeuvre or concentrate their strength and force the hand of battle, which could transform an art into a bloodbath on some fixed field of glory and of death. Kil’s skirmishers and armed bummers spearheaded Sherman’s army and rode in small battle groups threading through the countryside. And so the great but agile army drove quickly and deeply into Georgia, then on to South Carolina, and then northward. The general avoided major battles, not because he feared them, but because he was an artist practising an art that, although it shouldn’t exist, did exist, and demanded artists, not bloodied tyros, to be properly applied.

Sometimes the sergeant was ambushed by memories of long-ago times in the one-room schoolhouse of his childhood, where their patriotic teacher, Erazim Kozel, used to tell them stories of another great military leader, Jan Zizka of Trocnov. Under the Georgia stars, the sergeant imagined Zizka’s fifteenth-century battle-carts filled with stones, careering down
the hillside and crashing into the ironclad phalanxes of crusaders, smashing swaths of death through their ranks. What if his general had that kind of battle-cart? What if Georgia and the Carolinas were full of smooth, steep hillsides? What if the general had light wagons, perhaps powered by steam instead of oxen — wagons that could ply the roads of the Carolinas like gunboats plying the Mississippi, and carry soldiers armed to the teeth with repeating rifles. The sergeant shook off the idea, but the vision of an army with armed wagons arrayed in small battle groups like Kil’s cavalry, penetrating like lightning in all directions throughout the burning Carolinas, made him shake his head again. He knew that Sherman’s headlong drive into the unknown was a lesser risk to life and limb than the slow, prudent, well-supplied steamroller that called itself the Army of the Potomac.

Even less did the general believe in a grand pitched battle now, in the twilight of the war. He simply waved his hand and sent the sergeant with instructions to General Davis to keep a sharp eye out.

The sergeant caught up to General Davis at dinner-time in a charming farmhouse about twenty miles outside Bentonville, where he was in the company of General Carlin and an alarmed farmer who hadn’t the slightest desire to see his land become a field of glory.

“It weren’t,” said the farmer, “I mean, it weren’t just the cavalry. There was infantry too, three regiments at least, gentlemen. I seen them yesterday, moving towards Bentonville.”

“All Morgan came across was cavalry,” said General Carlin.

“It was them set fire to my barn at Pete’s Bend this morning,” said the farmer. “They were covering the infantry. I seen them yesterday. They come back to give the infantry time to gather at Bentonville. I’m telling you, gentlemen, there’s a
battle brewing. If it happens here — and I’m damned sure it will — it’ll cost me a lot more than an old barn.”

On his way back to General Sherman, the sergeant rode with General Davis and his aide. Sherman heard his account of the conversation with the farmer, and Major Belknap brought up his own experience with the man on the way to Raleigh.

But just as Sherman didn’t believe in big pitched battles now, in the twilight of the war, he was convinced that the other side didn’t believe in them either.

“No, Jeff,” he told Davis. “Johnston won’t risk a battle, with the Neuse rising at his back and only one bridge across it, if I can believe my scouts. There’s no infantry standing in our path, Jeff. All they have is a few squadrons of cavalry. Sweep them aside and you’re fine. We’ll meet tomorrow at Cox’s Bridge.”

“ ‘If I were to tell you!’ ” The sergeant impatiently knocked the ash off his cigar into a tin ashtray fashioned to resemble a heart pierced by an arrow. “You keep saying, ‘If I were to tell you.…’ All right, tell me!”

So Salek told him. The tavern was in a large building on the corner of Randolph and Desplaines. The owner stood behind the bar in a cloud of smoke with just his head showing, a scimitar moustache, his hand on the tap guiding the draught beer into quart-sized mugs. A band was playing a loud polka on the podium, also surrounded by a cloud of smoke: a flugelhorn, a clarinet, a tuba, violin, drum, and an accordion. On a plank floor in front of the band, couples were swirling energetically to the music. A Czech Sunday in Chicago. Act One of Salek’s Chicago story hadn’t been Czech, but his present wife, Vlasta, was — Vlasta who never left the dance floor, and whose grey eyes kept firing shafts at
the sergeant as he tapped his ashes into the tin-heart ashtray. Act One had been Deirdre
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