The Bride of Texas (44 page)

“And a bubble burst and translated it into English, right?” said Fisher.

“Wrong,” said Shake. “I translated it into English. Shryock ordered us to resume firing, but meanwhile a bubble of dust had drifted over and hidden the wall, and by the time it burst the hats were gone. Bragg had ordered a tactical retreat.”

The sergeant glanced down the row of campfires that lay across the dark landscape like a fiery arrow pointing at Bentonville. The war was ending. Somewhere beyond the tip of that flaming arrow, General Johnston was devising some desperate defensive action, Wheeler’s wild riders were galloping
about, and a nervous Leonidas Polk was counting heads in his battalion, mired in the blood-drenched Carolina mud.

Benjamin ran down the hill to the plantation house: “They’re coming! They’re coming!” So they lined up outside, at the foot of the front steps. As the youngest, Dinah stood at the end of the line, in a new black silk dress and a new starched white apron. She was curious about young massa. She had last seen him four years before, when she was twelve and wasn’t even allowed to stand in the line of the house niggers to wave goodbye, so she had waited with a bunch of the other children by the road for young massa, proud on his horse, in a grey top hat and grey boots with red cuffs. Riding behind him was Gideon, happy to have been chosen to go to Paris
.

Now Gideon sat dejected on the jump-seat and young massa was inside the coach, sunk back in the pillows, looking grim. Before the coach came to a stop, Gideon jumped down and put down the step. He wore soft leather riding boots and was dressed in red livery. The coach stopped. Old Moses, who had been riding beside the driver, took up a position by the step; young massa reached out, put his left arm around Moses’ shoulders, hopped onto the step, and lowered himself to the ground. His left leg was gone. With Gideon and Moses supporting him on either side, he moved slowly towards the house, with old massa behind him, a pained expression on his face
.

They didn’t know if they should cheer his arrival, so they were silent and grave. Old Abe bowed. “Welcome home, massa!” But young massa barely nodded. He hobbled past the line, up the steps, and through the front door. The left leg of his white riding pants was pinned up in the back
.

Dinah felt sorry for him. She pictured it in her mind. The horse had broken its leg jumping a wall and had gone down so fast massa hadn’t had time to pull his foot out of the stirrup. The bones
in his leg were so badly smashed not even the famous Paris surgeon could save it. That was the story. But Gideon couldn’t hold his tongue, and the day after they came back everyone knew the truth. It had happened in a duel, and the duel had been over a woman, of course. Dinah imagined someone fighting over her. She had read about such things in the French novels that belonged to Mademoiselle Hortense de Ribordeaux, who had just gotten married and gone off to live in Louisiana
.

“It was Count Lissex,” said Gideon
.

“Lissieux,” she corrected him
.

Gideon exclaimed, “Listen, girl, was it you in Paris or me?” He looked at her as though he had never properly seen her before. “Tell me your name, anyway.”

“Dinah. I never been to Paris, but you say it Lissieux. He’s famous. He fought three duels.” She counted them off on her fingers: “Baron Fleury, Prince Jean-Paul de la Roche, and the Spaniard Don Carlos.”

“What is this nonsense?” he interrupted her. “Massa, he only fight one duel. I never heard of no Jean-Paul!”

“I read about it!”

“Whereabouts you read it? The newspaper? We don’t get no Paris newspapers here.”

“No, it was in a novel that Miss Hortense had —”

“A novel!” Gideon exclaimed. “My, ain’t we smart!”

Young massa lay on the big four-poster canopy bed smoking slender Parisian cigars, staring out the open window at the dismal trees with their beards of moss. He did not come down to dinner. Gideon took it to his room on a wheeled cart, while old massa sat alone at the huge dining table, between the candlesticks, permanently grim. When she came upstairs with the coffee, she saw that Gideon had just been whispering something in young massa’s ear, and massa watched her so intently as she walked over to the table that she felt self-conscious and almost tripped over the carpet
.

“You speak French?” he barked at her abruptly
.

The man’s tone scared her. She should have kept it to herself. What if — “No sir, massa.”

“She lying,” said Gideon. “She corrected my French.”

“Don’t lie
, ma petite,
” said Massa, still gazing at her
.

“I’m not lying, sir,” she said, pouring the coffee with a trembling hand
.

“Fais tomber une goutte de cognac dans mon café,”
said massa. She walked over to the liquor cabinet and opened it
.

“You are lying
, ma petite,
” he said. “Where did you learn French?”

She finally told him, but it was like pulling teeth
.

“ ‘You see, Cyril, I was scared to tell him. There’s a kind of law about it. Negroes can’t learn how to read and write and speak French. Our massa doesn’t respect the law much, but I thought to myself, he may not like it.’ ” Cyril said later, quoting her. In his mind the sergeant rearranged the story into scenes and dialogues, evocations of nights and events
.

That evening after dinner, Beulah, the cook, who was in charge of the girls like her in the big house — the kitchenmaids, parlourmaids, chambermaids — told her, “You gonna take care of young massa. You bring him his food, his drink, and” — she made a face — “you empty his thunder-jug.”

“Me?”

“Who else? You the youngest.”

“On top of that,” said Benjamin, “you’ve got the prettiest tits.”

“But it’s mainly because she knows French,” said Gideon. “Young massa won’t feel like he back in Texas so much.”

“He didn’t lose his leg in Texas.”

“He lost his heart in Paris. Dinah gonna read him love stories.”

“Read?” smirked Sarah. “That I want to see.”

Benjamin licked his lips. “Me too!”

She emptied his chamber-pot, but massa read his books to
himself. He didn’t read a lot. Mostly he sat in his armchair staring out the window. And he drank a lot. She brought him cognac and carried out the empty bottles. Once a week Dr. Webber came from Austin to examine his stump. The wound was still slightly infected and she changed his dressing twice a day, bathed the stump in a cleansing solution, and rubbed ointment on it. She felt sorry for young massa but she never said anything, because he never spoke to her. He would just look at her, watch her nursing his wound, follow her with his eyes as she walked across the room. She was aware of his attention. She knew that he watched her carrying out the dirty bandages, that he watched her from the window as she walked among the trees with a basket of apricots from the orchard. She watched him, too. She would stand by the dining-room window as he hobbled across the lawn swinging on his crutches like a pendulum, a slender French cigar clenched between his teeth. Then he stopped using the chamber-pot. She thought nothing of it until the day he began talking to her. She had come in with his cognac and caught him staring at a picture. He quickly stuck it in the drawer of his nightstand and let her pour him some cognac. As she was gathering up the coffee service she saw him looking at her more intently than usual. The next morning she came to change the bedsheets when he was downstairs, and she opened the drawer. The picture was there, in an ebony frame, face down. She turned it over and was startled. Her first impression was that the picture was of her. Instead of a black dress and starched apron, however, the woman wore a gown like the ones the ladies used to wear when the Ribordeaux held a ball. The complexion of the skin in the décolletage was a bit lighter than hers, but not much. She stared at the picture and lost track of time
.

“That’s not you,” she heard a voice from the door saying. She looked up, unperturbed
.

“Forgive me, Massa Étienne. The drawer was open —”

“Don’t lie,” he said, and swung into the bedroom on his crutches
.

She put the picture back in the nightstand, but before she could shut the drawer he said, “Give it here!” He sat down in the armchair, rested the crutches against the armrests, and stared at the portrait. “Come over here!” She came nearer. “Closer,” he said. “I want to take a good look.”

She leaned over the chair, and he held the picture close to her face
.

“This could be you if you weren’t black,” he said. “As a matter of fact, you’re not even that black. Maybe she wasn’t completely white. I couldn’t have brought her to Texas.”

Much later, he told her that the woman’s name was Doña Jorge de Castiello and that her colour came not from the sun of Southern Spain — because since she was five she’d lived in Paris, where her father was a diplomat — but from the Moorish blood in her veins. She could hardly become a Texas bride. Besides, she had lost interest when he lost his leg, even though it was on account of her
.

“Who is she?” Dinah asked
.

“A countess.”

“Can a Negro woman be a countess in Europe?”

He didn’t reply. She knew that the idea of a Negro countess violated the hypotheses that existed as absolute truths over glasses of bourbon and cigar smoke. “Come up after supper,” he said
.

She knew what that meant
.

Reading aloud from French romances
.

That evening, a moon hung over the blossoming cotton-fields like an etching illustrating the French novels Mademoiselle de Ribordeaux had used to read, tearfully mouthing each syllable. Dinah had read over her shoulder and then, later, borrowed them without permission and reread them by the light falling on the front lawn from the big windows of the master bedroom, where old massa was reading something, though not French romances
.

She knew there was nothing she could do. That was just the way it was. Black countesses only existed in Europe. But being sixteen and full of those French romances, she decided that, while she did it, she would be a French countess
.

He was lying on the bed, already naked, and he said, “Take off your clothes.”

The moon over the cotton-fields shone on the muscular body of the young man with one leg. His stump was healing well now. The day before, a cabinet-maker from Galveston who also manufactured artificial limbs had measured it
.

She pulled her dress over her head, removed her corset and her underwear. Aroused, he said, “Come here. Sit down on me.”

He grasped her by the hips, lifted her up, and lowered her down slowly. She was a virgin and she hissed with pain. Massa started to writhe, his palms on her breasts
.

The white moon was shining, a night bird called out, and the cotton rustled in the breeze. The novels never described this moment, but if they did it surely wouldn’t be like this. That night she didn’t become a black countess. He kept his eyes closed the whole time. But then, perhaps I am, she said to herself. It hurt a lot, as she had known it probably would. Later on, she would enjoy it. Before she left his room that night, she changed the bedclothes. Of course, the washerwoman, Mother Terrill, had to tell everyone
.

“He really give it to you,” Benjamin sniggered
.

“I give it to him. His stump started bleeding.”

She would never again say anything so cynical. But then, he had merely asserted his right of ownership, and besides, it was only painful for her, and nothing more. Later on, they always did it the same way. They could have reversed positions, but he would have been too aware of his stump. He would embrace her, hold her close, and even kiss her. She enjoyed it, but he was the one who began falling in love
.

Of course, she never thought it could be anything else, as it
might have been with the real black countess in Europe, the one he saw behind his closed eyelids. Soon, though, he stopped closing his eyes. When he married — the stump would be no obstacle; the plantation was the second-largest in the state and he was the only son — three things could happen. He could put her away in a little house in Austin, or maybe farther away, in Galveston, and under one pretext or another come to see her once or twice a month, and his wife would be either stupid enough to believe him or smart enough not to pry. The second possibility was that she would not exist for the wife; she would be no more than a piece of property kept in one of the shacks on the plantation to soothe his nerves, the way he kept French cigars in a humidor. The third and worst possibility: Étienne would fall in love with his wife, and Dinah would be demoted back to the status of a chambermaid who did nothing but make beds and serve cognac and empty the chamber-pot again. When time passed, and along with it the charms that reminded him of his Moorish countess, she would end up with the others in a shack on the plantation, perhaps the mother of a few of his bastards, perhaps along with the children of a Negro husband
.