News of the World: A Novel (22 page)

She never learned to value those things that white people valued. The greatest pride of the Kiowa was to do without, to make use of anything at hand; they were almost vain of their ability to go without water, food, and shelter. Life was not safe and nothing could make it so, neither fashionable dresses nor bank accounts. The baseline of human life was courage. Her gestures and expressions were not those of white people and he knew they never would be. She stared intently when something interested her, her questions were forthright and often embarrassing. All animals were food, not pets. It took a long time before she thought of coins as legal tender instead of ammunition.

In her daily company he found himself also ceasing to value these things that seemed so important to the white world. He found himself falling more deeply into the tales of far places and strange peoples. He asked the news shops to order for him papers from England and Canada and Australia and Rhodesia.

He began to read to his audiences of far places and strange climates. Of the Esquimaux in their seal furs, the explorations of Sir John Franklin, shipwrecks on deserted isles, the long-limbed folk of the Australian Outback who were dark
as mahogany and yet had blond hair and made strange music which the writer said was indescribable and which Captain Kidd longed to hear.

He read of the discovery of Victoria Falls and sightings, real or not, of the ghost ship
The Flying Dutchman
and an eyewitness account of a man on the bridge of that ship sending messages by blinking light to them, asking about people long dead. And before these tales for a short time Texans quieted and bent forward to hear. The rain fell, or the snow, or the moon glared down and the lamps failed but they did not notice. At each stop, for an hour or so, Captain Kidd arrested time itself.

The Captain never did understand what had caused such a total change in a little girl from a German household and adopted into a Kiowa one. In a mere four years she completely forgot her birth language and her parents, her people, her religion, her alphabet. She forgot how to use a knife and a fork and how to sing in European scales. And once she was returned to her own people, nothing came back. She remained at heart a Kiowa to the end of her days.

After three years his daughters and his son-in-law and his two grandsons returned to San Antonio, established possession of the now-empty Betancort house, and began the long and nearly hopeless process of trying to recover the Spanish Lands. Emory went in debt for a new press and took over Leon Moke’s clothing shop and turned it into a print shop. Olympia sighed and drifted about the rooms of the old Betancort
palacio
until she finally married again, which was a relief to everyone. Elizabeth raised her boys and had a desk in a corner of the long
comedor
overflowing with platte maps and yellowing land records.

When they returned, Captain Kidd finally came in off the roads of Texas. She had made a wanderer of him but all things come to an end. San Antonio had grown and many of the old and beautiful Spanish houses were torn down. The people were despoiled of their lands in ways that broke his heart. Captain Kidd and Johanna came to live with Elizabeth and Emory and their children, his grandsons, he to be old and she to stare into a future unknown. He advised Emory at the print shop where his son-in-law worked with deep interest and delight in his new Babcock cylinder press while the Captain sat at a desk littered with composing sticks and inspected each new print run. Johanna tried to pretend to be a white girl, for his sake. She joined other girls in their excursions on the river, their dancing lessons, and put up with the indignity of riding sidesaddle. She gazed with deep envy at the Mexican women and girls half-naked in Alazan Creek and San Pedro Springs, washing clothes. They slapped water at one another, wrung out their hair, waded with their skirts up around their waists. She sat stiffly in her riding habit and her smart little topper and watched them and rode home and then tried to appear cheerful at dinner, carefully managing her knife and fork and the minute coffee spoon. The Captain sighed heavily, his hands in his lap, staring at his
flan.
The worst had happened. He did not know what to do.

One day John Calley of Durand came riding into the town and stopped to visit with the Captain. His memory of the dignified old gentleman shouting for silence and reason in the mercantile store in Durand had never faded. He stood with his hat shading his face in the hot street named Soledad at the
Betancort double doors. Then the small door set inside the big one came open. A short maid peered out and behind her stood a slender girl of fifteen or so with thick yellow hair braided in a crown. She had blue eyes and a scattering of freckles across her nose. She wore a dress in dark gray with a yellow figure in the weave, a long sweep of hems. Her nails were shell pink and perfectly clean.

Y qué?
said the maid in a rude and suspicious voice.
Hágame el favor de decirme lo que quieres, señor.

Yes? The girl said. Ah you looking for someone?

For a moment he was at a loss for words. Finally: Would you be Johanna, the captive girl the Captain was returning?

Yes, I am Johanna Kidd. She had a small, dubious smile for this stranger in tall traveling boots and a worn duster over his arm.

Calley took off his hat. He couldn’t stop looking at her. This had grown out of that grimy ten-year-old staring like a wild animal over the dashboard of the spring wagon, her hair in ragged braids. He remembered how she had slapped the taffy out of his hands.

He said, Ah, yes, well, I stopped by to pay my respects to the Captain. I, ah, happened to be in San Antonio to see about, well, cattle. He paused. Yes, cattle.

Cettinly. She stepped back and lifted one hand to the interior of the old house. She said, He is in the patio just now. Please come in.

He paused with one boot in the air. He said, Do you by any chance remember me?

She regarded him carefully. He stood large and travel-stained and entranced in the cool of the tile-floored hall as she
raked him over with a blue stare. I am so sorry, she said, but I am afraid I do not. This way.

His boot heels clicked on the tiles as he followed her and in the sunlight of the patio he saw the Captain reading a thick leather-bound book. After he and the Captain had conversed there in the cool shade of the mimosa, the old man still straight as a wand, he asked if he might call again and so he did. And when he did he brought several newspapers for the Captain and a small, intricate arrangement of dried roses he thought Miss Kidd might like.

Johanna, she said, is very well to call me.

Calley sat down at Elizabeth’s small piano and played “Come to the Bower” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and did not look up from the keyboard but waited to see if she would come to him and before long she stood at his shoulder. He moved over on the piano bench and after some hesitation she sat down beside him with a graceful arrangement of her skirts and for the first time smiled at him. He taught her the songs, picking them out note by note.

It was for him a long and magical afternoon: the cries of the milkman coming down the street with his quiet gray horse shouting
Leche! Leche bronca!
and somebody calling for Timotea at the big wooden Veramendi doors and the Devil’s trumpet vine with its blatant red cornets drooping over the closed shutters and making shadowy gestures as the wind came up off the river behind the house. Calley sang in his off-key raspy voice,
She walks along the river in the quiet summer night . . .
and then forgot the lyrics but was fairly sure it had something to do with stars, bright. After a while he stopped and just sat and looked at her.

The Captain stood at one of the tall windows, a window that started at the floor and went up to nine feet, and watched the milkman and his horse walk past one of the old Spanish houses that were being demolished, past the new brick buildings around the Plaza de las Islas, into the hot afternoon, into history.

When Calley finally had to leave at sunset she stood at the door with his hat between her two hands like a great felted cake.

She said, carefully, Heah is you hat. We would be very heppy if you would come to dinnah.

John Calley decided to remain in South Texas and gather wild cattle out of the area around Frio Town, south of San Antonio in the brush country, in the notorious Nueces Strip. The reason few people did that was that it was an area devoid of law and not for the faint of heart, but if a man could stay alert and live long enough he could gather enough wild cattle to make a small fortune. It depended on how well you could shoot and how deeply you did or did not sleep. He hired men like Ben Kinchlowe who was hard as nails and spoke both English and Spanish and was accomplished in the handling of both cattle and revolvers. He branded all he gathered with a road brand and went north and after two trips John Calley was a made man.

He and Johanna were married in the Betancort house according to the old Southern custom of being married in the bride’s home and in January. Johanna and the Captain sat up in her bedroom, on the bed, waiting to be called downstairs. There Calley waited in a stiff black cutaway and striped ascot with the Episcopal minister from St. Joseph’s. Her hands were shaking.

She sat close beside him as if for protection against an
unknown future; she smelled of the whitebrush blossoms that grew along Calamares Creek and orange water and the starch of her gown.

Kontah,
she said. Her voice quavered. Tears stood in her eyes unshed.

It’s all right, Johanna.

I have nevah been marriet before.

No! Really?

Pliss, Kep-dun. She pressed with a trembling hand at her elaborate braiding and the veil pulled over a rim of beaded wire. Don’t make chokes. I am faint. John has never been marriet before eithah. Her round face was red and the freckles stood out like spotting on a hill country peach.

By God let us hope not.

Kontah,
what is the best rules for being marriet?

Well, he said. One, don’t scalp anybody. Two, do not eat with your hands. Do not kill your neighbor’s chickens. He tried to keep his tone light. His throat was closing up and he made harsh noises as he cleared it. As for the positive commandments, you two will figure them out for yourselves. It will be all right, it will be all right.

He slipped the old gold hunting watch out of his pocket and clicked it open and held it out to her.

She wiped at her eyes and looked down at it and said, It is eleven. Time,
Kontah.

Elizabeth called up the stairs and then ran up, holding her skirts. She put in her head and she was smiling. Johanna, she said. Are you ready?

Johanna turned and put her arms around the Captain’s neck. We will come to visit often, she said. You are my cuuative watah. Then she began to sob.

Yes, he said. He shut his eyes and prayed he would not start crying himself. And you are my dearest little warrior. You must not cry. He pressed the watch into her hand. I would like for you to have it. Time seems to have been sweeping ahead very fast these last years. How many years I worried about you and also delighted in your company. And now it is time for me to give you away.

AFTER SHE AND
John Calley were married she went with him on the next drive, all the way to Sedalia, Missouri, driving a light four-wheel buggy. It was a life she could love. And so Johanna and John Calley rode the cattle country of Texas together into the next century. And lived to see an airplane land in Uvalde. They held hands alongside their two grown children to see it strike the Texas earth and the pilot walk away from the wreckage as if he had done it on purpose.

The Captain drifted into a very old age and worked again at the Kiowa dictionary until he found it hard to see. Often he remembered her cry at the Great Brazos River Ten-Cent Shoot-out. It had been a war cry, and she had been only ten, and she had meant it.

Britt Johnson and Paint Crawford and Dennis Cureton were killed by the Comanche in 1871, on a freighting trip near Graham in North Texas. They were caught on the only open stretch between Graham and Indian Mound Mountain. They were buried where they fell and there their gravestone stands to this day.

Simon and Doris raised a family of six children, all of whose names started with the letter
D
. They were all musicians and the family traveled around North Texas bringing Irish jigs and cowboy ballads to barn dances and fairs for many years. The Horrells continued their crime spree in central Texas and New Mexico until several of them were killed in the great Lampasas Square Shoot-Out in 1877 and they finally made the Eastern papers.

San Fernando cathedral received a new front with twin towers but the old sanctuary and dome over the altar, built in 1733, remained unchanged. The
camposanto
graves had to be moved south of the San Antonio River but many of the original Spanish settlers had been buried under the floor and so there lie the bones of the Betancorts, perhaps content at last in this New World with the bells of San Fernando ringing out the aves and the angeluses. The bones of the Kiowa warriors did not lie in the earth but in the stories of their lives, told and retold—their bravery and daring, the death of Britt Johnson and his men, and Cicada, the little girl taken from them by the Indian Agent, Three Spotted’s little blue-eyed girl.

In his will the Captain asked to be buried with his runner’s badge. He had kept it since 1814. He said he had a message to deliver, contents unknown.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

Anyone interested in the psychology of children captured and adopted by Native American tribes on the frontier should read Scott Zesch’s book
The Captured.
It is excellent. His book documents child captives from the Texas frontier, including his own great-great-uncle, and in each instance gives the background of death and terror these children endured before they were adopted or claimed within the tribe. There has not been a definitive study of the psychological strategies these children adopted in order to survive but one would be welcome. They apparently became Indian in every way and rarely readjusted when returned to their non-native families. They always wished to return to their adoptive families, even when they had been with their Indian families for less than a year. This was true for both the Anglo, German-Anglo, and Mexican children taken. I think the words of my Irish character Doris Dillon best expressed it. I’ll let you find her words in the story.