The Bride of Texas (59 page)

His girl told him that Uncle Habakuk had learned how to draw as a boy on the plantation of Massa Ripley, a real strange bird in North Carolina: a patriarchal abolitionist plantation-owner. Ripley was killed suddenly when his carriage overturned, and he didn’t leave a will — just a young son, James, at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who had managed to rack up a gambling debt of two thousand nine hundred dollars and get expelled, thanks to the company he kept — a poet with the elegant name of Edgar Allan Poe. Fortunately for the young rascal — unfortunately for Habakuk, who was only fourteen and nobody’s uncle yet — James inherited the whole plantation, and offered Uncle Habakuk to his creditor as payment for the gambling debt, along with two handsome maids whom the creditor sold at a profit, keeping Uncle Habakuk as his personal servant. The creditor, young Master William Smithson, was, unlike young Master James, a fairly good student. Uncle Habakuk slept on a cot at the foot of the bed in his room when William and his cronies played cards and argued philosophy, so Uncle Habakuk got an education by listening and by reading Master Smithson’s books while he was away at classes. Massa Ripley had taught him to read. Master Smithson liked to draw too. He used to copy birds and plants from a book by a man called Audubon. When William had gone to classes, Uncle Habakuk would borrow a sheet or two from the large amounts of drawing-paper that Smithson kept around. He didn’t draw birds and flowers, though; he sketched the faces of the debating card-players from memory. One day Master Smithson caught him at it.
Fortunately he was in a good humour that day — the night before there hadn’t been much discussing, and he had made fifty dollars — so he didn’t punish Uncle Habakuk. Instead he started showing him off. He got him to draw portraits of his friends and enemies, and soon the university was flooded with Uncle Habakuk’s work. In time, Master Smithson started taking him along to the big houses on nearby plantations, and to the homes of Charlottesville merchants, where Uncle Habakuk drew portraits that enhanced the beauty of the young ladies. He had an almost supernatural ability to draw the homeliest, plainest girl so that she looked like herself but also like a princess
.

But the lot of a servant is seldom happy. Master Smithson got himself in the bad books of the stern and uncharitable Zebulon McIntyre, professor of classical languages and history, and persuaded Uncle Habakuk to draw the Latin scholar as Nero, in the nude and engaged in an act of love that may have been common enough in antiquity but was officially deemed not to exist on the campus of the University of Virginia. Professor McIntyre suited the role of Emperor Nero very well; he was a fleshy epicure who seemed to be modelled out of goose-fat, and was renowned on campus for his capacity for lobster tails and his love of roast pork. There was a pigsty behind his two-storey house, one of the several residences connected by the student dormitory, and the hogs would snort their comments on his students’ halting translations of Homer and Horace
.

The portrait of Nero in action circulated until it reached McIntyre. It found him suffering a mild case of food poisoning from tainted lobster
.

McIntyre was no abolitionist. Although Uncle Habakuk had acted on the instructions of his owner, and although McIntyre originally demanded young Smithson’s expulsion from the university, the affair was finally resolved by Smithson discreetly shifting his winnings at cards into McIntyre’s pocket. Like it or not — since
otherwise he would have had to forgo a classical education — he also had to sell Uncle Habakuk to an infamous slave-trader named Forest, who in turn unloaded him to Frederick Zeno Butler, a Louisiana tobacco farmer. Butler, who was dead set against slaves being able to read and write, wasn’t told of Uncle Habakuk’s talents. But Forest wasn’t risking anything. Butler’s distaste for literate slaves was his best guarantee that Uncle Habakuk would keep his education to himself
.

The wounded men in the ambulance cart slowly rattling its way along the road to Bentonville had been playing cards since morning. There were only five of them. Four sat in front with kerchiefs tied across their noses and mouths. The kerchiefs were badly stained, but none of the stains was blood. The fifth man, Zinkule, sat at the opposite end of the cart. He was stark naked, stubbornly scrubbing himself with a piece of rag he kept dipping in a basin of strange-smelling water. His injury was different.

The night before, he had been sprayed by a skunk.

The bald-headed Sergeant Zucknadel wasn’t seriously wounded either. He larded his conversation, full of conversational obscenities, with a stream of heartfelt invective against the Czech nation. He had broken his leg when it got wedged between the logs that K Company had laid across the muddy road. In barely comprehensible English he damned the slipshod handiwork, and when he found out that a Czech squad was responsible for the carelessly laid corduroy he started to curse them as
das boemische Gesindel —
Bohemian scum — and heaped abuse on every famous Czech he’d ever heard of — John of Nepomuk, Jan Hus, Saint Wenceslas, and Princess Libuse. In the scuffle that followed, the outraged Prussian was
overpowered by the Czechs and was saved from their rage only by his injury. Houska, patriot that he was, put it succinctly, even if his logic left something to be desired: “If he didn’t have a broken leg, I’d bust the other one too!”

The German’s anger was not an expression of a bloodthirsty will to fight, frustrated by a broken bone. It turned out that the noncom was worried that the war would end soon and now, thanks to Czech carelessness, he wouldn’t be able to march in the victory parade before the president, with troops he’d intended to train in the genuine Prussian
Paradeschritt
.

By then Paidr couldn’t stand it any more, and bellowed at the injured man, “You’re a Forty-eighter, aren’t you?”

“Klar bin ich ein Achtundvierziger!”
Zucknadel said at the top of his voice.
“Und was soll sein?”
Or, roughly, “Damn right! So what?”

To enlighten the ignorant Prussian, Shake presented what verged on a scholarly lecture on the ideals of 1848. The Prussian mind, however, remained obstinately unenlightened. It perceived no difference between the beauty of democratic ideals and the equally radiant beauty of high-stepping army boots. The row started up again. It got so loud that they never heard the clatter of cannon-fire coming from Bentonville shortly after dawn, and it came to a head when Sergeant Zucknadel furiously opened his stuffed rucksack and pulled out a spotless sergeant’s coat with shiny buttons and silver braiding. The Prussian had carried this dress uniform with him all the way from Perryville, through the main battlefields of the war, inspired by the vision of a closing
Parademarsch
reviewed by the president of a newly united Union. This masterpiece of the tailor’s art succeeded in silencing the ragtag crew of Company K, and that was when the sound of cannon-fire got through to them. They listened, bewildered. It grew to the continuous roar they had last heard at Atlanta. Even Zucknadel quit swearing.

Finally Shake ventured, “Pack up the uniform, sarge. The parade’s been indefinitely postponed.”

Zucknadel grumbled but took the tunic, folded it with care and love, and gently put it back in his rucksack. The rest of them listened. The cannonade showed no signs of letting up.

Stejskal turned to Shake. “That armour, rusty or not, you shouldn’t have got rid of it.”

“I think it was a stupid thing to do too,” said Shake. As they listened, they could hear new cannon joining the fray.

A Negro rushed up to the cart, out of breath, carrying a steaming basin. “Here, pop,” he said to Zinkule in colloquial Czech, “I’ve got some fresh brew for you.”

Zinkule dumped out the old basin and took the fresh one from the Negro. They could smell a blend of skunk spray and that other oddly piercing aroma.

“It’s not helping much, Breta,” Zinkule told him.

The Negro flared his nose and sniffed. “You don’t smell nearly so bad no more, pop. I’ll find you a new set of blues some place. Two, three more days and you’ll be able to get dressed again.”

Resigned, Zinkule slipped the rag back into the basin. The smell of the potion hit them again. Hard to tell if it smelled good or stank.

“I don’t know, Franta,” said Paidr. “Maybe you just need to wait, get unstunk by yourself. This is sort of like going from the frying-pan into the fire.”

The rumble of cannon ahead of them grew louder. An officer on horseback was galloping towards them, down the long, slow column of creaking wagons.

“Mister Williams the overseer tormented Uncle Habakuk something awful,” Dinah continued. A fat caterpillar was crawling across her skirt. She wrinkled her nose, picked it up gingerly, and tossed it away. “See, that’s just the kind of ugly creature Uncle Habakuk had to eat whenever Mister Williams caught him doing anything bad at all. Especially loafing. But instead of curing him of his laziness, it did the exact opposite. Caterpillars, centipedes, moths, earthworms, maggots, and mashed blowflies —” she counted them off on her fingers. “He ate them all.”

Cyril said, “Until he really got sick.”

“Oh no. Uncle Habakuk got used to it, it was Mister Williams who didn’t. Whenever Uncle Habakuk stuffed himself with those creepy little things — he liked daddy longlegs the best; when he chewed them their legs would stick out of his mouth, twitching — Mister Williams threw up, which always made him furious.”

Perhaps it was all true. Perhaps it was a little more than the truth. So he said, “And five pregnant women threw up every time Mister Williams did.”

“Oh no,” she said, “they all got used to it too. Because when Uncle Habakuk took a liking to eating insects, he decided to make a business out of it. He started selling roasted grasshoppers at Saturday-night dances; they tasted something like almonds. And when customers acquired a taste for those, he began to get fancy. Pickled centipedes, earthworms stuffed with ants’ eggs, fat caterpillars like those that feed on onions. His greatest success were rain-worms stuffed with some kind of tiny fly that migrates up from Mexico. Whenever he had those, the dancers got so happy that some of them forgot their manners and didn’t even get drunk. They’d just disappear outside into the bushes, as often as five times in a single evening. So on top of being known as a famous fiddler, he got a name for being an expert insect chef.”

“Why didn’t Butler put him to work as a cook?”

“Massa Butler had no idea, of course,” said Dinah. “He was
just glad his niggers were having fun Saturday night. He thought that it made them more pious and enthusiastic when they sang hymns in church on Sunday, and that by Monday they’d go back to work in his tobacco-fields fresh and happy. Except in the end,” she said, “everything fell apart. Mister Williams realized he wasn’t getting anywhere, all he’d done was create a bug-eating nigger, so he changed his tactics. He forbid Uncle Habakuk to play the fiddle on Saturday nights, made him quit selling fried insects, and forced him to eat supper with the overseers. It worked. The food he had to eat at the overseers’ table made him sick. The tongue paste didn’t impress Mister Williams any more, so Uncle learned from a nigger on a neighbouring plantation how to dislocate his wrist. But that made it hard for him to play the fiddle, so he decided he’d be better off working. The weak stomach he got from the overseers’ food and not being able to play at Saturday dances were too much for him, so he came up with a plan.”

He based it on Williams’s outstanding weakness: women. Williams left most of his not inconsiderable wages in cat-houses, but even that wasn’t enough for him. He had several favourites among the female field hands, and he rewarded them by allowing them to sleep in the shade of the tobacco leaves for several hours each day while the rest had to hoe away in the hot sun. The slaves grumbled about this in their cabins at night, but none of them ever thought of going to Butler to complain; they were too scared of Williams. Justice had to wait until the classically educated, musically and artistically gifted, and vengeful insect chef finally resolved to spread the word. Shrewdly, he put a word in the ear of one of the house niggers about why work wasn’t getting done in the tobacco-fields. As he expected, the whispers went straight to the ear of Mrs. Butler. She passed the story on to her husband, who could tolerate a lot from his niggers, but not shirking work
.