The Bride of Texas (80 page)

“It’s easy to beat your gums so patriots will buy more of your sausages, right?” hollered Padecky in Slavik’s Tavern. “But when the going gets tough —”

“It’s easy for you to talk, neighbour,” said Talafous the butcher. “Now, with your leg, you don’t have to go to war —”

“What do you mean, don’t have to? Can’t, Ferda! I can’t! That’s a Jesus big difference! If I could” — Padecky slapped his plaster-encased knee and howled with pain — “I would, wife or no wife, kids or no kids —”

“I rather enjoyed reading the reports,” said Ursula, smiling. “I’m not exactly an admirer of the house of Hapsburg, even though I married a member of the imperial diplomatic corps. But I didn’t marry again because I was forced to, as I was when I was sixteen —”

“It’s not just the cowardice!” Padecky yelled, his eye lighting on Molly, who was all dressed up and looking lovely on the arm of the portly officer. She had noticed Kapsa, Bozenka, and Shake, and was pulling Schroeder over to their table. But Padecky snapped at her as she went by, “Not here, you don’t!”

Molly was startled. “Why not?”

“You know perfectly well why not!” Padecky exclaimed. “Your husband is barely cold in his grave —”

“I got the letter. General Schofield signed it himself.” Molly blushed. “Franta died in September of ’64.”

“Died!” hollered Padecky. “They tortured him to death at Andersonville! Franta’s a martyr! And you’re a martyr’s widow. The cannon-fire barely dies down and you —”

“Was sagt er?”
Schroeder couldn’t understand this tirade in Czech.

“And a bloody German at that!” Padecky ranted on. “One bloody German torments her husband to death at Andersonville and she can’t wait to marry another one!”

“He was Swiss,” Molly objected. “And Fritz here fought the whole war on our side. With Haecker. And that Wirz fellow got hanged after the war!”

The colonel understood only that they were talking about him. He smiled.
“Jawohl,”
he nodded,
“mit Haecker.”
He started counting on his fingers, comfortably mixing his mother tongue with English. “And
mit Siegel und
in the end
mit General Burnside
at The Crater, where
mein Glueck
left me and I got
eine kugel in den Arm.”

Schroeder’s bullet in the arm shut Padecky up for a minute. He stared at the German with the expression of someone proved wrong, then growled at him in Czech, “You could at least learn to talk right, instead of your gobbledygook. After all, you’ve got yourself a Czech girl!”

Shake asked, “What do you speak at home, Molly?”

She blushed. “Well, German,” she admitted. “Fritz isn’t good with languages.”

“Jawohl,”
nodded the colonel complacently.

“So my husband told them he didn’t understand them, and he quoted something to the butcher from his informant’s report,” Ursula said, raising her coffee cup. The glass egg on her finger glittered and Ursula noticed the sergeant’s glance. “You see,” she smiled, “my jewels brought you luck. Of course
, mein lieber Mann,
I don’t know if it still is luck —?” The sergeant turned red and Ursula quickly touched his sleeve with her bejewelled hand. “Aren’t you sweet?
Wie damals,
like back then … but that’s so long ago. Today it is just
eine Legende,
a — legend?”

“I —” The sergeant’s voice cracked. “I’m married now. And I love her. Very much!” He felt like a wretched sinner, but he had had to come here
.

And Ursula said, “I also married again, for love. That doesn’t — or should we forget about it all?”

“No,” he said quickly. “Forgetting would be impossible.”

“Na, siehst du,
you see?” she said. “Let us remember, and be glad of our good fortune. You survived the war, I survived —” She stopped and looked at him. “It was by a hair, though, you know?”

He knew. The old nightmares flashed through his mind
.

“But back to my husband. In his official capacity, I mean,” said Ursula. “He quoted what the butcher had said publicly about the emperor on June 6 of ’63, the day you celebrate your heretic, John Huss. And then he said to the butcher and the cigar-maker, ‘And now, gentlemen’ — pretending not to understand — ‘you presume to restore your allegiance to the Hapsburg line?’ The two of them looked at each other and the one who makes cigars, I forget his name, said, ‘If it’s about that speech he made, your honour, Mr. Talafous just said that to help out his business.’

“Did they actually intend to go back to Austria?” asked the sergeant, amazed
.

Ursula laughed
.

“Of course not. They just wanted to become subjects of our most merciful Emperor and King Franz Josef here in America. Then they could claim the status of naturalized aliens, and President Lincoln’s conscription order wouldn’t apply to them. They came to this country for economic reasons, and as economic émigrés, the cigar-maker said, they had no involvement in American internal political disputes.”

The sergeant didn’t say anything. Images of war flashed through his head. His fellow soldiers, Houska, Kakuska, Paidr.… Then he closed his eyes, opened them again, and asked:

“Did your husband restore their status as subjects?”

“He sent their request to Vienna,” said Ursula. “There was no precedent. Vienna didn’t know what to do with it, and in the meantime another thirty or more of your countrymen applied for the same thing, some of them from as far away as Minneapolis.”

“So they got conscripted?”

“Vienna finally decided that if the applicants paid a stamp tax proportionate to their income, from five to fifty gulden, they’d be restored as imperial subjects. So the two of them bought the stamps — each of them paid the fifty gulden, I think, and most of the others did too. Business was brisk at the consulate.” Ursula laughed. “But the Chicago sheriff got wind of it, and all the newly restored imperial subjects were notified that if they were citizens of the United States before their status as imperial subjects was restored, military service was compulsory for them both in Austria and in America. There was a huge outcry, and you can imagine the crowd that rushed the consulate.”

Now the sergeant laughed. “Who was Austria at war with?”

“Denmark,” said Ursula. “It was a brief war, so there was no danger there. But in Chicago the pot was boiling. The Copperheads were revolting and the Union suffered a big defeat at Chancellorsville. Lincoln needed soldiers.”

“So they had to go after all!”

“Most of them paid for substitutes,” said Ursula
.

“At least they gave something for the Union cause,” said the sergeant. “And the other fifty gulden for Austria, that must have stuck in their craw all right. After all, what worried them most was losing money. Their problem was more greed than fear.”

“I don’t think so
, mein lieber Mann,
” said Ursula. “You know better than most that there was reason to fear.”

The rain rattled down on the lanterns. The sergeant turned and sat back down at the table but he wasn’t listening to the conversation. He was hearing Cyril, and where was he now?

She wasn’t an old woman, forty perhaps, and rather pretty — a stout, tanned villager — but her eyes reminded Cyril of the Madwoman of Cachtice, who killed young women and bathed in their blood. Behind her, her new husband was pounding something flat on his anvil, and the woman stood leaning on a pitchfork
.

“If you believe some Negro witch more than you do a white woman,” she said to Cyril, “then —” He looked into those eyes, and he had to look away
.

“She didn’t say you never brought her there, she just said she couldn’t remember. She said she’s getting forgetful.”

“She certainly is. Head like a sieve,” said the woman. He didn’t believe her. Eyes like that were not to be believed. “Young Ribordeaux paid me and he paid me well. I’m not in the habit of taking money and not delivering.”

Cyril realized she was laughing at him. What did she care about his tea-rose? About whether she arrived or got lost along the way? If the girl ran away, how could anyone fault a blacksmith’s wife? If she sold her — everything could be fixed to hide the truth. And who could prove anything against her today? Her eyes showed — what? That she was capable of anything. The anvil rang like a bell in the courtyard. Was it sounding an alarm?

“Mrs. Smith,” he said. “Look here, if she ran away from you along the way —”

Rain drummed down on the lantern lids.

“No,” said Josef. “Miss Rosemary didn’t go back to England with Mr. Carson. She got married.”

“Married,” Cyril repeated absently. He suddenly felt a longing to see the girl with the face of a pretty pony, her red dress like a red butterfly. Another world. “She and her husband — are they still running the Carson plantation?”

“Oh, no,” said Josef. “She married some Yankee captain. I heard they have a business in Indiana. But she came to ask after you before she left, to find out if you came home safe from the war.”

“She did?” whispered Cyril
.

“Yes. And she sends you her regards.”

Little tin drums. Burning snow.

“She ran away from you, more likely,” the woman said maliciously. “You’re telling me some brother of hers in Chicago wants to find her?”

“That’s right!” Cyril replied, irritated. The woman’s nasty eyes stared right through him. “And even if it weren’t, it’s none of your business.”

“Well, if you say so,” she said scornfully. “All right, then. Tell her brother that Columbia was full of good-looking house-nigger boys. Pretty as pictures. And you know what they say,” she said mockingly. “Birds of a feather.…”

Cyril felt weak. It isn’t possible, is it, that such mean eyes could —

“Of course,” said the blacksmith’s wife, “I’m just guessing what probably happened.”

The big Negro opened the frosted-glass door wide. The rain was still coming down and the lamps clattered like little tin drums. He shut the door again and looked around the restaurant. Mr. Ohrenzug joined the table. He was wearing a formal set of tails with the Slavonic linden cockade sewn beneath his heart like a medal, and he put Shake’s book down on
the table in front of him. The famous lady author caught their attention again. She walked past their table with the pretty Negro girl, and they had their arms around each other’s waists.

“I read one of her novels. It was called
She Played It Safe,”
said Bozenka, quoting the title in English. The sergeant thought his wife pronounced it as if she’d been born in America. He felt proud, and then a memory flashed through his mind: a sad, tragic memory, but funny all the same. He remembered Shake asking, “Who speaks English best, the doctor, your old lady, or you?” and poor Kakuska.… Apparently the doctor’s English had been at fault, or else Bozenka had made immense progress when they opened the English school in Manitowoc and she got a wonderful teacher, Miss Woodford, who spoke no Czech but lent her books, turning her into an ardent wintertime reader, since in spring, summer, and fall she was too busy on the farm.

“Some sort of foolishness,” said Padecky.

“I’ll have you know it’s not,” objected Bozenka. “Read it, Mr. Padecky, I’ll lend it to you.”

“Not interested,” snapped Padecky.

Molly Schroeder retorted pointedly, “You would be if you knew how to read.”

Padecky’s temper rose. “What do you mean, Molly? You trying to say I don’t know English? My English is plenty good enough for that kind of nonsense.”

“That’s not what I said,” replied Molly sweetly. “But you still can’t read anything but Gothic script.”

Padecky grabbed the book from the table in front of Mr. Ohrenzug, opened it, put his finger on the first line on the page, and opened his mouth. Then he gradually turned purple; he snapped the book shut and shoved it across the table, where it came to rest against the beer stein in front of the sergeant. Kapsa picked it up.