The Bride of Texas (55 page)

“I don’t know,” said General Carlin.

“They’re spies,” said Slocum. “Their task is to mislead us. Why would Johnston have his whole army waiting for us, when all he has behind him is a river with a single bridge?”

The deserters maintained that Johnston’s aim was to destroy Jeff Davis’s Fourteenth Corps. By itself, their version was not improbable. It only became suspect when Slocum considered it alongside different assessments of the situation, assessments that became certainties in the mind of a confident commander-in-chief. The deserters claimed to be Union soldiers taken prisoner at Resaca. In order to stay out of Andersonville Prison, they’d convinced the interrogating Rebel officers that they were Copperheads, followers of Vallandigham who had never wanted the war with the Confederacy in the first place, and that, now that Vallandigham had been silenced, they wanted to fight on the Confederate side for the old rights guaranteed by the Constitution. So the Rebels had taken them into their army, and since then they’d been waiting for a chance to desert. It had finally come, at Bentonville.

“They’re spies,” Slocum insisted. “I’ll have them shot.”

“I don’t know,” said General Davis.

From not far off came the crash of cannon. A shell fell close to the edge of the woods and exploded. They heard the shrapnel tearing the leaves off the trees. Someone cried out.

“I don’t know,” said Davis. “Why would he just send Hoke?”

They glanced at the prisoners, who were standing almost at attention, their faces paper-white in the light of the rising sun.

Refreshed, the girl returned, sat down on the stool, kicked her bare feet a couple of times, placed the book on her lap, and searched with her finger for the place where she had stopped reading
.

If the war had turned out differently, the old country wouldn’t be the American republic it had turned out to be — a dream that had never crossed his mind on that slow sail across the Atlantic, with the wily Fircut, to where a war awaited him and then a long life. Would the expeditionary forces of some Northern States of America have fought in the war that happened much later in Europe? If they had, would the Confederate States of America have sent proud descendants of the victors of ’65 to bolster the other side, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy? Even in the new century, officers battling on the side of the imperial armies would have been accompanied by black servants. If his general had lost
.

But Sherman could never have lost. Nor could Shake, Kakuska, Paidr, Houska, Javorsky —

The little girl resumed her reading:

“Whereupon General Slocum issued the order for the remainder of the Fourteenth Corps to advance and dig in, and simultaneously, the order for the Twentieth Corps to leave the rear and reinforce the advance units that were in a frenzy of palisade-building.”

Slocum, Davis, and Carlin stared at the deserters.

“Stand them up against the wall,” said Slocum. “Of course —”

Major Tracy of Slocum’s staff emerged from the bushes on the opposite side of the clearing. He approached the three men with the paper-white faces. The cannon were still firing. Major Tracy spoke with them for a while and then walked over with one of the spies, or whatever they were.

“I know this man,” Tracy said to Slocum. “We grew up together, general. He’s telling the truth.”

Slocum examined the prisoner. Sunburned skin showed
through the days-old growth of whiskers, and his nose was red and peeling.

“Johnston’s there with his entire army?”

“Yes, sir. General Hoke’s division is right in front of you. North of it is General Stewart’s Army of Tennessee. General Hardee is supposed to make up the left flank but he hasn’t arrived yet. General Bragg’s main force is in Bentonville and General Johnston —”

“OK,” Slocum interrupted. “Lieutenant Foraker!” He looked around. A clean-shaven young man jumped up off a stump. “You’ll ride to General Sherman!”

Ten minutes later, the courier galloped off to Howard’s camp with a second, pessimistic dispatch. General Slocum was urgently requesting reinforcements.

The white boy wasn’t really that white, at least not in the more visible places. The Texas sun had baked him to a reddish-brown colour, as it did all the white trash. Once in a while she would catch a glimpse of them stripped to the waist and washing themselves at the pump or in the creek: reddish-brown faces and necks, torsos white and freckled, mostly the arms too — just the hands were reddish brown, as if they were wearing brick-coloured gloves. Some were furry like bears, and all of them had some hair on their chests. The only truly white ones were young ladies like Hortense de Ribordeaux, because they never went anywhere without a parasol, and even so, when she was undressed, her face was darker than her milk-white breasts, so that she had to use talcum powder to make it the colour of alabaster. Dinah examined herself in Étienne’s mirror, where she was changing before meeting the white boy. She was the colour of tea with milk. The sun merely made her slightly darker, and she didn’t have the silly white shirt the poor farmers had, or the brick gloves on
her hands. She was the colour of tea with milk all over. A nigger. She doused herself with the French perfume issued to the house niggers after the father of Étienne’s fiancée visited the Ribordeaux household, wrinkled his nose, and said, “You can smell a nigger at a hundred paces! We make our house niggers use perfume, even the men. I can’t abide the stink of niggers!” So she covered herself with perfume, though who knew — maybe the white boy liked the spicy smell of sweat. He certainly didn’t look like a plantation fusspot
.

She also got herself a book from massa’s library:
Poems for Every Occasion.
She wasn’t at home with poetry. All she had ever read were French romance novels. But she liked the look of the book, with lots of gilt curlicues on the binding. Having learned from novels that punctuality did not become a lady, she resisted her inclination to be on time, and stepped into the arboretum like a countess, a whole five minutes late, smelling of sandalwood at a hundred paces
.

The young man was sitting there, waiting for her. He had even brought flowers. He had a small nose and a broad face. In fact, he looked a lot like his sister. He even had the same eyes. But, unlike his sister, he had the brick-coloured skin of white trash. And his blue eyes “looked at her with veneration.”

“Bonsoir,
” she said
.

He jumped up and gave her the flowers. He hadn’t picked them in some meadow. This kind didn’t grow in meadows
.

“Oh! They are beautiful!” she said, like a countess, and he actually cleared his throat: “I’m — I’m glad you came.”

“Me too,” she said, with unaristocratic enthusiasm. He said nothing. Birds were singing all kinds of songs in the surrounding treetops. After a pause, she asked, “Do you like poetry?”

“Poetry?” he replied, taken aback
.

“Yes, you know, poems.” She handed him the gilt-lettered volume. “There are beautiful poems in this book,” she said. “They’re for reading on every occasion.”

“Oh,” he said. He turned the book over in his hands and examined the back cover
.

“Read me one,” she urged. She was a black countess and he would be Étienne reading sonnets to Miss Blue-eyes. But he wasn’t
.

“I don’t think I know how,” he said dubiously
.

“Give it a try!”

He opened the book at random and made a heroic effort to read the first poem his eye lit on:

He gave her a miserable look: “I don’t read much English, miss. I just speak it some.”

Miss!

“No, you read beautifully,” said the countess. “Are you from the North?”

“No, from Moravia.”

“Where’s that?”

“That’s in Europe. Across the sea.”

“Ah,” she said. “So you’re from France?” There was France, she knew, and there was Africa. Both of them were over the sea. Each of them somewhere else probably
.

“No, not France. Austria.”

“Ah!” Where was that? Somewhere far away. Austria. They must have black countesses there. “Do they have niggers there?”

He shook his head. “No. I never saw one till I came here.”

“Ah!” A world with no black folks. Where could that possibly be?

Later on he told her where. And he also told her about the little cottage where they had all slept in one room. Lida on the bench
.

“Lida?”

“My sister. She calls herself Linda here.”

“Ah!”

And how they had toiled and drudged and never got ahead. And farmer Mika, and how they had sailed to America. And seen their first Negroes
.

“And you saw me, white boy!”

“Yes, I saw you. But you aren’t a nigger.”

“Yes I am,” she said. “But you love me anyway, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do! I love you very much, my sweet-smelling tea-rose!”

“That’s sandalwood,” she said
.

But back in the arboretum he hadn’t said a word. He was no Étienne
.

And she was no Miss Blue-eyes
.

She took the gilt-covered book from his hands and patted his cheek
.

“Dinah.…”

Nor was she a countess. She put her arms around his neck, pressed her black lips to his, and they kissed and then they made love on the green lawn by the arboretum. She hoped the foul-minded Benjamin wasn’t spying on them from some place, but nobody sneezed. Only the song of birds hung in the air, and the fragrance of perfume issued to niggers to quench the stench of sweat
.

At home, his little sister sniffed the air meaningfully: “Big brother! You’ve been to a house of shame!”

Lieutenant Bellman couldn’t get the dead bugs impaled on the branches out of his mind. On the orders of General Slocum, the men wrestled boulders and the trunks of hurriedly felled pine trees into place. Like frozen waves on a green sea, palisades and stone earthworks quickly sprang up in the hilly countryside checker-boarded with black hedges and interspersed with
pine groves and steaming marshes, to hinder the progress of the wild Southern troops under Johnston, Taliaferro, Bragg, Hardee, and Wheeler. Slocum was finally convinced of their presence. On his orders General Morgan’s division had made a quick, strenuous march forward from the rear of the long column that, only an hour earlier, had been winding through the countryside like a lazy snake. Now they were digging in at the front. The sun stood high in the sky among white clouds that cast their moving shadows on the ground, now and then extinguishing the delicate glitter of dew in the grass. In the melancholy Carolina landscape, men in tattered uniforms toiled as if their lives depended on it, erecting formless structures — traps for other men, Lieutenant Bellman thought — while deep in their souls they were eaten alive by the question: Why? Why so late, when the end is already —