The Bride of Texas (74 page)

“You never took your vows. And anyway, why didn’t you study for the priesthood in America? A confession would have put things right.”

“It was too late. I should have gone back to the seminary in Prague when the thing with Rebecca was over. It would have delivered me from temptation.”

“Hardly,” said the sergeant. “You aren’t the deliverable kind.”

“I don’t mean Rebecca, or women in general. I mean the American war.”

“How was the war a temptation?”

“It shook my faith,” said Shake. “After I was discharged, I could never have become a priest anymore.”

Train whistles hooted. A young Negro couple walked by arm in arm. By their fruits ye shall know them, the sergeant thought to himself. He said, “You may still change your mind. I agree with Monsignor Kotrly, you’d be good in the pulpit. Sure your beliefs were shaken by what you saw, but you could still bring others to the faith.”

A week later, in Iowa City, Shake was run over by a train
.

“No,” said the general. “My order is: withdraw to your initial positions. And that is an order, captain; that applies to General Mower as well.”

The sun filled the glade with yellow-green light, and shone through the smoke of the battlefield till it seemed to be pouring molten gold on it. Rain was still falling in some places and a rainbow arched across the countryside.

“Yes sir!” said the captain. “Of course, the bridge has really been —”

“I said that’s an order!” the general interrupted. “Now, ride!”

“Yes, sir!” The captain strode over to the horse on the edge of the clearing, jumped into the saddle, and disappeared in the woods.

The general turned to Captain Foster. “And Howard will stop Blair’s corps. Mower will withdraw to his initial positions. He won’t need help from Blair’s two remaining divisions to do that.”

The second courier rode off among the trees.

The general pulled a cigar out of his pocket and looked around. Logan stepped over to his commander and held what was left of his burning cigar butt to the general’s. “All right, Billy,” he said. “You’re commander-in-chief. But why did you do it?”

The general raised his creased, weather-beaten face to the sky and the sun. “Hardee attacked from the flank and thrust at Mower’s rear. If he’d managed to cut the division off, he might have destroyed it, the way Johnston tried to destroy Morgan.”

“Yes, but Hardee could only have succeeded if Mower didn’t retreat and didn’t get reinforcements.” Logan looked towards the sun too. It was going behind a cloud. “I don’t understand you, Billy,” he went on. “Let’s say Hardee did have a chance to destroy Mower’s division. But you had a chance to destroy
Johnston’s whole army. You know that. That single bridge was the only way out of a trap and Mower was just about to take it.”

The general said nothing. He just stood there, his head enveloped in a dense cloud of cigar smoke.

“You could have won a great battle, Billy. You never won one like that before, and now you probably never will. This was your last chance.”

“Precisely,” said the general. “The thing is this, Johnny: we don’t need to win battles any more. We’re winning the war.”

The sun emerged, molten gold, from behind the cloud and illuminated the puff of tobacco smoke, so it looked as if the general were standing with his head in a bluish lantern.

Looking over the hedge, Houska saw Shake jump from the crown of the pine tree, grab the Rebel rider around the neck, and pull him off his horse. After that, Houska had to turn his attention to the cavalry bearing down on Mower’s line of riflemen, and it was only the concentrated fire, with Houska’s generous contribution, that forced the riders to turn and, in a broad arc, disappear into the other side of the forest. A dead horse lay on the meadow in front of Houska, surrounded by fallen soldiers. Then he saw Shake again, running towards the hedge, stooped under the weight of a rider he was carrying on his back. He pushed through the hedge and Houska rose and went over to his buddy.

“Amos,” he said to Shake, “you’ve got guts. Jumping on him out of the tree like that!”

“What?” said Shake. He was breathless. The wounded rider was not a small man.

“Jumping on him from up in that pine tree and pulling him off his horse!”

“Oh, that,” said Shake.

The captain stepped over to them. “A prisoner?”

Shake dumped the wounded man onto the ground. The cavalryman swore fiercely. He turned out to be a major.

“Captain,” said Houska, “Private Shake jump out of tree and pull him off horse to ground!” His moon-face radiated admiration, even if his English left something to be desired.

“What?” asked the captain.

Houska pointed to Shake. “He shoot. From top of tree. Then jump. Pull major off horse. Take prisoner.”

The captain turned to Shake. “Is that true, private?”

“Well —” Shake cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said, and then he added, “more or less.”

A new assault by Hardee’s cavalry interrupted them, and after that no one pursued the details of Shake’s actions.

Each of them got a goose leg; the rest they cut up and shared, stuffing themselves to bursting. Now they were passing around a gallon of confiscated bourbon.

“If Shake were telling it,” said Paidr, “I’d know it was a tall tale. But you, Vojta, you tell things straight, don’t you?”

“Is that your way of saying I’m lying through my teeth?” snarled Houska. “I saw it with my own two eyes.”

“You’re going to have to get a pair of spectacles when you go home, my friend,” said Paidr. “From what I saw” — he glanced at Shake — “the branch busted under you, right? And the major more or less broke your fall.”

“I swear that you are more or less mistaken,” said Shake, and took a swig of bourbon.

“Swearing falsely is a sin,” said Paidr. “A fellow who goes to war in armour, and wears it backwards so he can urge the rest on with his back to the enemy, can’t possibly be much of a hero.”

“Well,” said Shake, taking his meerschaum out of his knapsack and screwing it together, “as far as heroism goes, it’s like Hegel says: everything turns into its opposite.”

“Hegel who?” asked Stejskal.

“He’s a — a wise man,” said Shake, holding up his meerschaum for Paidr to light. “He saw God as something like a government official, and imagined heaven as a Prussian barracks.”

“Look!” called Zinkule, who was still forced to keep his distance. He was pointing to the path below the hillside.

General Alfred Terry’s Second Division was approaching. Unlike the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin, the soldiers had freshly issued blue uniforms. And they were black.

The sergeant and his buddies stared at them in silence. The vigorous young men marched as if on parade, their faces solemn. They looked nothing like the enlisted men sipping bourbon around the flickering campfire, nothing like Sherman’s great army. Nor did they resemble the Negroes that the sergeant and his men had seen on the long march across America that was now coming to an end.

They stared without a word. When the last foursome had passed, the sergeant pulled a new bottle out of his knapsack and passed it around.

The war was over.

(illustration credit 7.1)

M
Y FLAGGING
self-confidence was revived when I realized that the therapeutic power of my little novels had helped Maggie overcome the worst. I wondered initially if she had somehow discovered that Laura A. Lee was in fact her old friend Lorraine from Liberty, and if this — rather than anything inherently good in my writings — was why she devoured them. But Maggie assured me she had had no idea about my sinful intellectual life; it was the Roman bust in my parlour that made her put two and two together, though the bust had received only a passing mention in the novel
Heart of Marble
, when the poor but clever young Barbara received it as a gift from James Connington III, the handsome antique collector. Maggie always was good at noticing details.

Humphrey didn’t think my literary efforts amounted to much, intellectually. Of course, he had nothing against my contributing to the family finances (in fact I made more than he did), but he would still make fun of my novels and declare
he could write nonsense like that himself. Sometimes he would grow solemn and deliver a half-sermon, half-lecture on the noble role of literature, which was only worthy of the name, he would say, when it either held a mirror up to life and the world — and as he spoke he would pull volumes of Thackeray and Hawthorne out of his shelves and hold them up in both hands, like a Catholic priest raising the host — or responded to serious questions about the meaning of life and the world — at which point he would hold up Emerson and
Faust
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which I had never finished (and thus didn’t know whether Faust succeeded in duping the Devil or not), for I didn’t care much for Faust or his sweetheart. The third category of acceptable literature Humphrey referred to in a condescending tone: “If women must write,” he said, “then” — and he picked up
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
— “for the less intellectually mature reader, they must enlighten him on matters worthy of his attention.”

For a while I tolerated his pleasure in being didactic, but it annoyed me. Eventually I took him at his word and made him sit down and write a novel himself. The result was
Dawn on the Prairie
, a romance about a trapper’s daughter and a professor of entomology. He wrote it under the pen-name of Lorraine Everett, and it was so awful that I had to threaten to take Laura Lee to another publisher before Mr. Little finally agreed to publish it, and then he was so upset he had to spend two weeks recuperating on Cape Cod, drinking heavily. Humphrey meanwhile strutted around like a peacock, and when he had finished the proofreading I visited Boston again and the publisher — who by now had returned from Cape Cod, unrefreshed and still upset — told me, with some reluctance, “Mrs. Tracy, your friend Miss Everett has dealt with the proofs of her book the way Balzac is said to have done. When we finally finished with the galleys and page proofs, we had been through
what amounted to three different books. Could you please explain to your lady friend that changes this extensive are far too costly and that I will have to deduct at least fifty per cent of her advance to cover the corrections?”