The Bride of Texas (5 page)

“… and they make better spurs” — it was Kakuska speaking — “than the government-issue ones.” Kakuska searched through his collection of shiny gears and picked out a fine small-toothed one. “This should do it!” he said, and pulled off his boots. In the distance the band was playing “Aura Lea”. The sergeant looked out the window at the stars. The stench of the rags binding Kakuska’s feet struck his nostrils.

After he first set eyes on Linda Toupelik, Kapsa was carried along in the procession of revellers at the end of Bay Street. He walked slowly past the cheery houses, their gardens full of bright evergreens, the sun shining on the sycamores, and past brother and sister framed in the white portico. Cyril was waving his fists in the air. His lovely sister was standing with her back to him. Kapsa walked on. Unenticingly seductive voices came from the brothel, where Baxter Warren II still stood transfixed in the doorway. Kapsa walked to the end of the street, then turned and pushed his way back against the current of Sherman’s marching troops, drawn by the emerald-green dress. He pretended not to notice as he walked by, but just then Lida turned on Cyril and hissed at him like a snake, “Shut up this minute, Cyril, d’you hear?” Cyril’s voice broke — was it anger? Sorrow? “You shameless wench, …” he heard him breathe. Linda Toupelik spun around, and when the sunlight caught her tossing curls they seemed to burst into flame. The flames vanished inside the door, the door closed, leaving the furious Cyril — or was he just desperate? — alone on the portico.

“Cyril,” Kapsa said hesitantly.

Cyril turned and looked at him blankly. Then he shrugged, shook his head as if to regain his senses, stepped down onto the sidewalk. “Come on! Let’s get out of here.”

“Where to?

“Still got that demijohn?”

And now Cyril lay like a corpse on a cot in the back, while Kakuska, bootless feet wrapped in his foul puttees, replaced the old rowels in the spurs on his riding-boots with gear-wheels from the grandfather clock.

Outside the window, moonlight fell on the sycamores.

It was raining.

They stood in front of the wedding tent and stared after
Sherman, with Logan beside him, trotting back towards the low bank of fog and the sound of clanking mess tins. The banner of the Nineteenth Michigan was slowly floating past above the mist. Mr. and Mrs. Baxter Warren stood beside the cabriolet watching the general ride off. A moment before, the bride had dropped a curtsy, the kind the officers’ wives used to make in the Jesuit barracks. Sherman’s leathery face crinkled into a fleeting smile, he kissed the bride, the band broke into “Glory! Glory!”, the general swung onto his horse and rode off. A drenched and dirty little mutt ran up out of nowhere, sniffed at Shake, and tried to sink its teeth into his calf. Fortunately, his leg was encased in heavy cowhide.

“God alive!” exclaimed Shake. “What a country! Even the dogs have ghosts!”

“What are you talking about?”

“That mutt’s a ghost!” Shake stared in astonishment as the small dog ran off, stopping only long enough to cast a baleful look back. There was no doubt he was staring straight at Jan Amos Shake.

“I’ll be hornswoggled!” Shake declared. “In this war anything’s possible. Even the dogs are coming back from the dead!”

And Kapsa recalled his own brush with death.

Every day the doctor looked in to see if he was still alive and, since he was, ordered them to bring him his rations. When a week had passed and he still hadn’t kicked the bucket, the regimental physician himself turned up, examined his back, prescribed compresses, and muttered, “It’s amazing, lad, you’ve risen from the dead!”

But it was she who had healed him, with her living water, and then, when the fire in his back had subsided, with the cooling warmth of her body. He never asked her how it could have happened, where the guards had gone, but he couldn’t have asked her
anyway, for she spoke no Czech and the only German he knew was the gibberish of military orders. He knew only that her name was Ursula, not why she was Hanzlitschek or why she was the way she was (but that was obvious: he was lucky with women, though they never brought him luck), or where Hanzlitschek was (he was probably in the officers’ casino; his monumental belly betrayed a beer drinker). Late in the summer, Kapsa returned to his regiment and spent a month in desolate and futile longing. He felt the terrible loneliness of a soldier confined to the company of men. He would catch an occasional glimpse of her walking across the parade square to town. They always exchanged encouraging glances, but it was the same as before, before she had happened, before she had become a wellspring of healing water. Now glances were no longer enough. At times he’d see her with the captain in a carriage, or with the captain’s miniature double in the park, but she was always with other wives and she could do no more than add an occasional smile to her glance. He began to doubt that it had ever happened
.

One day when he was off duty they called him to the gate. “You have a visitor,” the sentry told him. Who could it be? Someone all the way from Bohemia? “If I were you,” said the sentry, “I’d stay put, if I were you. This kind of thing leads to missing lights out. And you know what that leads to.”

He told the guard to go to hell and went to the front gate. There he found a pretty girl in a Tyrolean dirndl. He was lucky with pretty women, but they never brought him luck
.

“Herr Kapsa?” He nodded. “Tomorrow evening you’re to be at Gottestischlein at seven o’clock
. Um sieben Uhr.
”

“What?”

“Gottestischlein. Do you know where that is?

“Ja,
but who —?”

“Wiedersehen!”
And the vision in white kneesocks turned and quickly walked away. This time, he thought to himself, a pretty girl has brought me luck
.

He was mistaken, but he didn’t know it yet. Later on, in America, he would realize he hadn’t been mistaken after all. It had just been luck of a different kind
.

Kakuska strutted back and forth across the room, jingling his new spurs. He stopped and raised one heel, then the other, admiring the spinning little gearwheels.

“What do you think?”

“The most expensive spurs in Sherman’s army.” The sergeant grinned, pointing to the pile of precision parts spilling out of the blue kerchief and the beautifully finished clock case with its bevelled glass window. “What are you going to do with this?”

Kakuska glanced at the remains of his spur-making. “That’s good for nothing now.”

The black small hand was pointing to twelve. Noon or midnight? The big hand was bent at right angles to the clock face, pointing at nothing. “That’s for sure,” the sergeant said.

Houska was asleep face down on the table. Kakuska tipped the demijohn back and took a swig. “Well, I’m off,” he said, and strode towards the door. “Good-night.”

“Night,” said the sergeant. He walked to the door with Kakuska and stood in the doorway, listening to the jingle of the spurs fading in the darkness. Somewhere far away, a band played “The Girl I Left Behind Me”. Moonlight fell on the sycamores. An owl flapped silently across the face of the moon. “Anything’s possible in this war!” Shake had said at Kennesaw Mountain. They’d been waiting for orders to attack when an owl flew out of a pine, followed by three crows. The owl turned and gave the first crow a peck. The other two attacked the owl. It defended itself bravely. In the quiet before the storm, wild birds’ voices hooted and cawed and feathers flew as the birds battled overhead. “Even the birds are at war!” Shake had exclaimed. Now, as Shake examined the shank of his boot for
teethmarks, the band played and Sherman and Logan vanished like ghosts into the low fog. Another flagstaff with a banner and perch floated above the fog. This time there was no squirrel on it, but a bald eagle. The Eighty-second Illinois. Sherman’s great army was rolling towards Augusta.

“It must be that cur from the farm in Burnville!” Shake complained.

“Animals don’t haunt you if you disturb their graves,” the sergeant said.

“It was the other one, then, the one in Cedartown. He looked just like him, two peas in a pod. And his mistress pitched a tomato at me.”

“In case you’ve completely forgotten your catechism,” said the sergeant, “dogs don’t have souls.” He remembered all too well the bummers’ foray, when Shake had ended up with a tomato splattered in his face — the girl in the white dress had a good arm and true aim, but pretty soon her pride gave way to weeping, her narrow shoulders shook, and they both stared at her with growing shame as the effects of the whisky wore off. Shake’s face looked like a clown’s, and the smoking pistol was still in his hand as he stood over the little dog’s corpse.

“I’m an Emersonian now,” said Shake. “The whole universe is filled with one big soul, and all the little souls, even dog souls, come from the big one!”

“We got orders to shoot every hunting dog,” Shake had explained. She stood in tears on the path to the plantation house while Shake held the little pug by its embroidered leash. “It’s your own fault, you taught them to go after people and it’s too late to break the habit now.” Behind Shake’s back, Fisher had just wrung the neck of a gabbling goose and Stejskal was coming from the house with a big box of cigars.

“But this isn’t a hunting dog,” the girl wailed. “It’s Tippy, he’s a lap-dog.”

Shake glanced down at the growling little beast, then at the plantation belle, flushed red with anger and dismay. “Sure,” he said, “but how do we know he won’t grow up to be a mastiff?” With a deliberately mean look on his face, he put the pistol to the little dog’s head, took a step towards its mistress, and tripped. The gun went off. The girl reached into the basket on her arm and then Shake was standing there looking like a circus clown. She turned away proudly, and then broke down in tears. The pug’s legs twitched. From around the corner of the big white house came a Negro family laden with bundles. They headed towards the road to join the procession of creaking wagons full of worthless booty, munitions, and provisions. The oxen moved their heads from side to side, the tattered remains of women’s hats and silk ribbons dangling from their horns. A soldier limping beside a wagon wore a huge medallion on a glittering chain around his neck. Behind a group of Negroes came a soldier holding a bayonet with a roast suckling pig skewered on it. Sherman’s great army was rolling towards Atlanta. Stejskal pried the box open with his bayonet and pulled out a cigar almost as big as a police truncheon.

The sergeant hadn’t seen the tragedy at Burnville, but he’d heard about it around the campfire. The woman was no longer young, and the plantation house had burned to the ground but it was still smouldering. She was sitting on a bench in the garden with three paintings leaning against the rose-bushes beside her. A bummer was walking off with a fourth that depicted a naked woman on a huge seashell. The three paintings the bummer had left behind were portraits of old men in lace collars. The woman sat motionless, watching them contemptuously. Shake poked the toe of his boot into a rectangle of freshly turned earth, then pulled the ramrod out of his gun, stuck it into the middle of the damp rectangle, and gave the woman an enquiring look. For all he could read from her face, she might
have been a sphinx. Shake scowled and poked the ramrod around. It struck something solid.

“Rings on my fingers, bells on my toes, and I shall have music wherever I goes!” Fisher sang. The woman didn’t budge, so they set to work. In their lust for booty, they failed to notice that the wooden box their spades turned up bore traces of having already been forced open. They removed the lid, also overlooking how easy this was. In the box was a little dog, stiff with rigor mortis. “Poor Dribble,” the woman said finally. “I see he is destined never to rest in peace. You gentlemen are the fourth ones today.”

Irritated, they slammed the lid shut. Shake felt like kicking a hole in one of the portraits, but he held back and instead drew a pair of charcoal spectacles on one of the old men. The sun, low on the horizon, was turning a fiery red, and thin columns of smoke were rising from the smouldering house. The woman sat as still as a statue. No, a pug would not grow up to become a mastiff. But they did set dogs on them. She sat like a statue by the portraits of her forefathers. Like a statue face to face with violence.

God knows, he said to himself. It was raining on the sycamores. The band was playing. The two-wheeled carriage started down the path, and Linda Toupelik turned and waved. Blue serpent’s eyes under the arch of a rainbow.

She was waiting for him. He couldn’t see her until he had climbed all the way to the top of the hill called Gottestischlein, God’s Little Table, and then there she was, sitting on a bank of moss among the pine trees. Ursula’s grey eyes had probably followed him all the way from the outskirts of the alpine valley town in the reddening sun, for it had been early autumn then too. Deeper in the woods was a little habitation, a strange, improbable place, too fancy for a gamekeeper’s lodge, too modest for an aristocrat’s summer home. It had only two rooms — one with a pot-bellied stove,
some dishes, pots, pans, and kettles, and a tall grandfather clock, the other with a modest four-poster bed freshly made up with sheets of fine linen, and a porcelain washbasin in a carved oak commode. It made no sense as a place to live, but he asked no questions. He could see Gottestischlein from his barracks window. Later, on evenings when she couldn’t get away, he would lie on his bunk and stare at the wooded hill, and the house would glow in his mind like a holy chapel. On evenings when she couldn’t come, he would wonder whether his tearful mates hadn’t actually been flogging a corpse on that slab, and whether this wasn’t really heaven, for although he neglected church and read godless books, perhaps he had never truly wronged anyone. Like everything wonderful, heaven was measured out in tiny portions, the evenings she could come. The cottage glowed among the pines beneath the dark, looming crags of the Alps, white-capped in the early autumn of that miraculous year, and she was the lovely messenger who brought him luck. But no, it wasn’t heaven, for like a cold pistol at the back of his neck he could feel the chill certainty that it couldn’t last as heaven must last. He was neither lucky nor dead, but luckily, unluckily, alive, since misfortune is always a matter of time and time is always short
.