News of the World: A Novel (17 page)

Grandfather was hungry, that was what was wrong, he was hungry and she would soon have him fixed up with roasted chicken with an egg cooked in the rib cage.

He said, Old people cry easily, my dear. One of the afflictions of age.

You-all hungli. She patted the hen’s corpse with a hearty feathered sound. Is all lite Cho-henna?

Yes, he said. It’s all right.

SIXTEEN

T
HEY WENT DOWN
the road, which was now the Lampasas Road with Durand somewhere behind them, and the sun came up bloody red in a clearing sky. The country was high and flat with only an occasional shift in the landscape. They were exposed. They were the only thing moving in all that horizontal world. They came to Cranfills Gap and stayed the night on the Leon River at a campsite that looked as if it were frequented by convoys of freight wagons. He hoped some would pull in so he could ask for news of Britt but none came, there were only the deep narrow tire tracks and flat spaces in the dirt where somebody had thrown out a bucket of dishwater, a dead campfire. They turned the horses out to find what new grass they could, though the freighters’ teams had nearly eaten it all up.

There he had his roasted chicken and slept heavily. He dreamed of an armed man in the shadows that had about him some terrible noxious smell, and then the man was rising out of the Leon River, amphibious and not entirely human. The Captain sat upright and grasped the coat where his revolver was wrapped but waited it out. This always happened to him
when there had been some conflict. First on the Brazos and then Durand. The dreams had just caught up with him now. He knew them of old. Maria Luisa had learned to slide out of bed and stand several feet away and say, over and over, Jeff. Jeff.
Querido.
Jeff. And he would come out of an intensely real dream where he was fighting for his life, sometimes at Resaca, sometimes on the Tallapoosa, sometimes in broken streets that appeared to be a bombed city with house-to-house fighting as it had been in Monterrey.

Perhaps it was something like this that changed the captive children forever; the violence they had endured when they were captured, their parents killed. Perhaps it sank down in their young minds and stayed there, invisible and unacknowledged but very powerful.

He had no one to awaken him now in a soft voice. He let go of his rolled coat and closed his eyes and quieted himself and lay back down and slept again.

All the next day they stayed in camp and he slept most of it away under the awning. Then they drove into Cranfills Gap with its one store and bought supplies and a little twenty-five-gallon water butt, filled it and went on.

They made twenty miles the next day, a very commendable day’s travel. It was because the road was flat and the surface of a good sandy consistency and Fancy was well-rested. The Captain felt much better. Their English lessons continued. She could now count to a hundred and lace her shoes, when he could convince her to wear them, and sing the first verse of “Hard Times.” She could tell the hour and the minute hands on his watch. She was full of roast chicken and energy. Time,
Kontah
! Is time, is time. She stood up on the driver’s seat and did the Rabbit Dance, the Kiowa children’s dance, and when he finally told her to quit it, she jumped down and ran alongside and found the lid of a tin of salve with a bee impressed on it and so made buzzing noises as she flew it up and down.

They passed only two farm wagons and another company of cavalry in all that way. The cavalrymen were being moved from San Antonio to Fort Sill and the major reminded the Captain to be careful. There were raiders, he said, in the hill country.

Then why don’t you do something about them? the Captain said.

I am under orders, sir. We don’t just go wandering about and do whatever we like. The major pressed his heels to his horse and rode on. Johanna sat quietly in the back and watched after them as they went on north.

They camped near the town of Langford Cove and he felt entirely recovered.

At Lampasas was a great good spring of water. He had passed by there several times. It would be a good place to shake out their blankets and take their ease. They were now in a high, flat country, where trees were scarce and the brush all spiky with thorns and new leaves.

Four years ago he had come up this road to North Texas. It was a year after Maria Luisa died. He had moved out of that graceful Spanish town of San Antonio with its two-story stone buildings and the ornate cast-iron balconies, their cottage roofs shingled with slate. The old Spanish houses all had their backs to the river. The owners of those homes carefully kept record of their descent from the original settlers from the Canary Islands
who had come in 1733, the Betancorts, the Reales, they had retreated behind polished wooden window bars. They retreated into the cool of tiled floors. Into the gestures of fans and mantillas and morning mass at San Fernando, increasingly hemmed in by German Catholics and Irish Catholics in the pews, people with incomprehensible languages. Spain, Daughter of Light, Defender of the Faith, Hammer of the Moors, sadly faded.

He recalled excursions on the river, the girls so like their mother with gray eyes and dark curling hair and boats passing by offering melons. The immense cypresses. The one that was a hundred feet tall knee deep in the San Antonio River. Joyous memories.

When he met her he had been setting up his own print shop on Plaza de Armas, slinging ink and type, deeply engaged in the process of making words appear on paper. He could pick up a stick of type and read it backward, he knew from the sound of the paten if it would be a good print or not. He knew his inks and his papers. He delighted in these perfectly printed messages to the world even if he were not carrying them personally.

What good was a beautiful town like that when she was not there? He turned his face to the sky in an effort to clear his head. They went away and never said another word to you again. In some strange way it made him mad. Not a word, not a sign. No messages from the Other World, or perhaps there were signs and he did not see them. He watched two caracara eagles sailing on their black pirate wings, their red hoods and white vests, and heard Johanna singing “Hard Times”:
Iss the song and the sigh of the willy . . .

Weary, he corrected her, smiling.

Yes Kep-dun, is willy, sigh of a willy.

They were only a few miles from Lampasas now; around them the creosote bushes were stiff as bones. Their rounded leaves vibrated in the wind. To the north streams of cirrus were like a frosted sandstorm, veils of high-borne mist poured out of the Polar regions. Perhaps more storms to come.

Soon they would come to the hill country. It was scored by deep canyons and high bluffs. Clear streams cut through layers of limestone. There would be more cover there for raiding parties of Kiowa and Comanche but they would deal with that when they came to it. They pressed on. The wheels of the excursion wagon lifted a spume of dust in yellow and pink. For a long time he could see no other wagons but themselves.

But after a while they came upon an elderly lady in a gig. He could see it from a long way off as a jiggling dark roundish thing like a beetle that resolved itself into a vehicle with the quavering legs of a long bony horse pulling it. An accordion top rose over the two wheels.

Well, here is somebody, she said. She pulled up beside them. She was trim and small and wore a new-fashioned pancake hat in straw tipped rakishly to one side. Her white hair was done up in a roll all around the bottom of her head and she wore tight brown driving gloves.

Yes ma’am, and where are you going?

I am going all the way to Durand. I believe I can make it in three days. People have tried to discourage me from this journey but I ignore them. I have a lawsuit to pursue.

I see, said the Captain. From . . . ?

Lampasas.

Then you will do me a favor, please. He reached down for his canvas bag of coins. I would be obliged if you would take these two fifty-cent pieces to the fellow at the stave mill there in Durand. The one that makes the brooms.

That animal, she said. Whatever you are paying him for he doesn’t deserve it. I have half a mind to refuse.

I wish you wouldn’t. We inadvertently came away with two of his hens and I would not be known as a chicken thief. It has been bothering me.

There is no chicken in Texas worth half a dollar in silver, sir.

I consider it an apology, of a sort.

You have a tender conscience.

Chicken thieves are not highly regarded.

True. Give it here, then.

He stepped down and brought the coins over to her. Many thanks, he said. He lifted his sweat-stained old field hat.

And where are you going?

To Castroville, the Captain said. I’m a seed buyer.

Very well. That girl has a peculiar stare. Is she disturbed in her mind in some way?

The Captain got back into the wagon and picked up the reins from the driver’s post. No, he said. I wish you a safe journey.

AT NOON HE
put the saddle on Pasha. He would ride alongside the packhorse’s head. This was not friendly country. As he put the saddle on he finally gave in to old age and reached for one of the sheep fleeces out of their stack of blankets and threw it across the saddle seat. So much more comfortable than the hard leather. Johanna watched, her dark blue eyes mild and
understanding now that the strange old woman was gone. He snapped a lead on a ring of Fancy’s driving bridle and held the lead in one hand as they went on. Their water bottles were full. It would do. They would be at Lampasas soon. Pasha’s easy smooth walk was a joy to ride and the Captain could not help but pat his neck and fool with his mane and try to get it to lie all on one side.

THERE WAS QUITE
a lot of trouble in Lampasas. He knew this from when he had passed through years earlier. It was one of those feuds between two families, each with a large number of sons. It seemed to be one of the rules or laws of human nature. The boys all grow up together and then they become young men and they fight, at first in play, and then somebody gets hurt, and before you know it the revenge drama is on.

Around them the dun-colored pelt of grasses shone in the thin sunlight as if it were studded with mica and quartz and now with the days growing longer the first green shoots grew up beneath. He began to see more people on the road going toward Lampasas. As best he could calculate it was a Saturday and perhaps the people in this region found it their custom to come to town to shop or celebrate or seek out company on a Saturday and stay all night to sleep off a hangover or go to church in the morning or both.

It was now the second week in March and a time of tender growth, when it slowly dawned on people that the world would not always be cold and brown. This high level country was like something unexpectedly and suddenly loved and responding to the bounty of young rain and longer hours of sunlight.
Awake, awake, ye drowsy sleeper. The wind was fresh and wet. They drove through the Brooke crossing of the Lampasas River. As in all semi-arid regions the green was all in the riverbeds, the ravines, the stream crossings where water gathered and the wind sailed overhead. Thick colonies of Carrizo cane grew in the little valley of the Lampasas and they shook their glossy plumes in concert.

When they reached the level again, the Captain and Johanna came across a group of four men on horseback, with stampede strings hanging down their backs and hair-tassels at the end of the strings. They were all armed. They pulled up their horses strung straight across the road. They were the people now being called “cowboys,” an occupational specialty that moved into place as the buffalo were shot in their millions.

He pulled up Pasha and Fancy. Johanna would be troubled and so he got down and came to stand beside her where she sat on the front seat. After a moment’s stillness she stood up and vaulted over the backrest with her skirts flying and dropped down in the wagon bed between the water butt and the box of food and cooking supplies. She took to the
jorongo
as an otter slides into his hole.

Curative Waters, said one of the men.

Bullet holes, said another.

They wore broad-brimmed hats against the relentless sun, the brims shading the V of skin showing in their open shirt collars. They carried reatas at the right-hand side of their saddles. All of them right-handed. They were riding Mother Hubbard saddles with big flat horns and a flank cinch. Bunches of piggin’ strings tied on the left side.

Where y’all coming from?

Durand, the Captain said. And we are headed to Castroville, fifteen miles west of San Antonio. Would you like me to get out a map and show you?

No sir, said another. I know where it is. Shooter Weiss gets seed from there. He paused. I don’t know how to spell his name. He’s a Kraut.

Then it would be S-c-h-u-t-e-r, said the Captain. Now, is there any particular reason you are blocking my road?

They turned to one another and their horses shifted. They were small horses with thick, long manes and tails that swept the road. Mustangs. The horses had sloped back ends like whippets.

There’s been a lot of raiding between here and Castroville, said one. The Comanches and the Kiowa are driving people out of the hill country. They got cover down there. Can’t see them coming, like up here. It’s almost empty down there. People driven out. You had best take care.

I will.

Well, are you going into Lampasas?

That’s where this road goes. And since it is apparently the only one, I did not contemplate riding straight off into the trackless wilds of Lampasas County. Is there some other road you could recommend?

The tallest one among them said, Sir, I remember you from when you read your newspapers there one time in Meridian. I was most interested to hear all the news. So I tell you what. You might not want to go into Wiley and Toland’s saloon, it’s called The Gem. I am telling you because you ought to know that the
Horrell brothers find refreshment there when they are not out shooting down Mexican persons.