News of the World: A Novel (6 page)

I did not.

Were your boys in the conflict?

I don’t have any.

Are you armed?

All I have is a twenty-gauge shotgun.

Let me see it.

Captain Kidd drew out the old shotgun and worked the bolt and caught the shell as it flew out. Bird shot. He stood in the wagon bed and handed it over. Johanna had in some way fed her
thin body almost completely under the wagon seat and again drew up the thick red wool Mexican blanket over her head. She drew the revolver close to her and stared at the wagon floorboards and listened to every nuance, every tone in the men’s voices. It was clear that the Captain was not going to let them have her. The Army man was a man with a hard voice but now his voice dropped and became more conversational.

How is it charged? the lieutenant said.

Number Seven bird shot.

Can’t do much with that. I suppose it’s all right. The lieutenant handed it back. You don’t carry a rifle or a handgun?

Well hell no, said the Captain. He slid the shotgun back into the wagon bed. I might run into some Comanches and they’d take it away from me. He brought out his tobacco and filled his pipe. They might shoot me with it, he said. He struck a match.

There was no point in saying anything about the gaudy and corrupt Reconstruction government running Texas, the mindless law against carrying handguns, even up here on the frontier.

Johanna listened as the Captain’s voice developed an edge. He was being insulting to the soldiers. Her eyes brightened.

Yes, very funny, said the lieutenant. He ran his eyes over everything in the wagon bed; the provisions and blankets, the little iron stove, the portfolio of newspapers, a sack of cornmeal, the sack of dimes and other coins, his shot box with the paper hulls and bird shot, a small keg of flour. He glanced at a flitch of bacon beside the wagon seat on the left side. The lieutenant regarded the flour keg and said, What’s in that?

Flour.

Very well. I suspect they’ll rescind that law here before long. I know people need sidearms to defend themselves.

Surely not, said the Captain.

The lieutenant ignored this. And you are going where?

Weatherford, Dallas, then south to Castroville and San Antonio.

Very well. A long way. Good day, sir. I wish you a safe trip.

SONS OF BITCHES
, he said. You can come out now, Johanna. You can reappear like the flowers in May. They aren’t going to slap you in leg irons and throw you into a cell. He smoked his pipe as he flicked the reins. The pipe had been carved from kaolin into the shape of a man’s head and in the damp air the smoke hung unmoving so that they traveled on away from it and left it behind them hanging in the air. Johanna?

From behind him he heard, Kep-dun.

Don’t stick a knife in my back. Don’t let me hear the dreaded click of a cocked revolver hammer. Let us flounder on through life here as best we might.

Kep-dun!

She sprang lightly over the back of the driver’s seat and sat down beside him. She held the revolver in one hand between her knees. She made several signs of which he only understood one, which was “good” and the other “let loose” or “free.” Something like that. She smiled for the first time. There was no sign for “thank you.” There was no word in Kiowa for “thank you.” People should know that the one was grateful, because you know you have done something good, something
commendable and there is no need to belabor the point. Kiowa is a tonal language and it sings up and down the complex verbs, and that by itself should be enough to express gratitude at being saved from the men in blue coats with the big long Army revolvers like hog’s legs on their thighs, with their coats and pants all exactly the same, which was in itself unnatural. He had faced them down and saved her. She tilted her head to one side to regard him with a bright look on her small round face.

Yes, let loose, he said. Free. He carefully took the .38 from her hand, clicked on the safety, and returned it to the left side of the seat and put the flitch over it again.
She knew how to take the safety off,
he thought. He smiled back at her in a rather stiff grimace.

She wrestled with the yards of unfamiliar skirts and settled herself and smiled a small, slight smile at the sepia-toned, dripping world of the Red River valley. It was more a lift of the powdery blond eyebrows than a smile. She said something in Kiowa in a happy tone.
My name is Ay-ti-Podle, the Cicada, whose song means there is fruit ripening nearby.
She gestured back toward the big bay saddle horse and tossed her hair back. It was as if she wanted to include Pasha in this newfound happiness.

Ah, Cho-henna, he said. He turned and looked down at her. If the officer had reached for her he had no doubt she would have cocked the revolver and shot him point-blank.

He said, Your relatives are going to be so happy to get back their sweet precious lamb.

Kep-dun! she said, brightly, and patted his bony hand.

Cho-henna, he said.

SPANISH FORT WAS
a mile from the river inside a great bend. The Red River was the boundary between Indian Territory and that which was not Indian Territory. They had passed through a tangled country of short, sharp hills with knobs of stone on top of them that stood like monuments, like curtain walls. As they went on toward Spanish Fort they passed them by at walking speed and stared at them as if watching distant castles. A storm rolled up out of the northern March sky, out of the plains.

They came to the town of Spanish Fort in the late afternoon. It was also known as Red River Station and with its two names it was busy. There had been at one time some sort of defensive works here, perhaps Spanish, perhaps not, but they were long gone. The Captain held the reins taut and dodged other vehicles. Johanna at first sat in the back, far inside the bulk of the Mexican-made
jorongo;
she clutched it tight around her so that she was the shape of a lime kiln in bright red and black.

The Captain’s excursion wagon made sharp noises as the shafts turned on the fifth wheel beneath his feet. They locked wheels briefly with a freight wagon and it took the driver and the Captain and several bystanders to get them backed and free. Pasha sat back on his halter rope but didn’t break it. By this time the Captain was red mud to the knees. Red mud crusted the laces on his old lace-up boots. The streets were filled with layers of wood smoke as supper was now in preparation in the houses and establishments of the town.

He turned his head to look up at second stories and at the people in the second stories doing what he could not tell other than arguing and slamming the windows shut against the wind. Horse soldiers rode by in twos. The wind came running at them
from the northwest at full charge and blew off people’s hats and tore at clotheslines. Town noises bit at the Captain’s nerves and so what must it be like for her? He turned to pat her on the back, thudding gently on the thick red wool. She glanced up at him with fright on her face.

There was a great barn on the far edge of town that served as a place to park but it was full of every imaginable four-wheeled conveyance. Not far away was the U.S. Cavalry encampment, so he drove into a tight grove of bur oaks beyond the edge of the town. There he put up the overhead canopy and then one of the side curtains, and the other side curtain he stretched out as an awning over the tailgate. He belled Fancy and then hobbled both her and Pasha and set them loose to graze. He stood for a moment to watch Pasha, with his thick, curved neck and large eyes. He was both smooth and calm. He remembered seeing the horse in a lot of twenty to be sold in Dallas. He had instantly turned away because if the dealer had seen the look on his face the price would have gone up a hundred dollars.

Finally the Captain went to heave out the flour keg. He took out the box of .38 shells and put it under the seat.

Everything good, he said to Johanna. He beat the flour from his hands. Here, my dear, do something. Try to get this stove going.

Yes, Kep-dun, yes yes.

She darted under the oaks, still barefoot, to gather firewood. Lightning cracked overhead with a noise like artillery while its blinding neurons of fire ran to every quarter of the sky. Spanish Fort was busy with freight wagons and supply establishments,
with longhorn herds milling outside the town waiting to cross and anxious men conferring under canvas as to when the flood would subside. Trying to figure out how to get them over the Red before they ate up all the grass on this side of the river and starved.

SIX

C
APTAIN KIDD LEFT
her feeding sticks into the toylike cast-iron stove and walked back into town grasping his hat brim. He found the man who took care of the Masonic Lodge and arranged to rent it that night. Then he walked about town to put up his bills. If he did not have the girl to care for he would not have to stay at the wagon, he could rent a room with a kerosene lamp and curtains and take a bath and he could eat in a restaurant. God above knew what she would do if presented with a dinner on a plate. In the light mist he tacked up each notice with four tacks. He had learned long ago that anything less left his advertisements prey to the wind and they invariably ended up in the hands of people who needed the paper to write grocery lists on, or for other purposes.

He came upon a fiddler he knew. Simon Boudlin sat behind the glass window of a storefront that was both a ladies’ millinery and a meat market. Simon sat in the window with his chin on his fist and his fiddle under one arm as if he were a display. He was watching the world go by. He was a short man but he carried himself as if he were six feet tall; he had straight, broad,
and perfectly square shoulders and slim hips. His thick hair was a halo of unruly brown burrs, and he was freckled as a guinea egg. Simon lifted his fiddle bow by the frog and tapped on the glass. Captain Kidd saw him and went in.

Simon.

Captain.

Are you playing tonight? Because I am reading.

Where?

At the Masonic Lodge.

The Captain joined Simon in the window on another chair and laid his tack hammer and the sheaf of advertisements on the floor. He wiped off his old field hat with his sleeve.

No, it’s all right, said Simon. I have already played. No competition. He smiled. He had two teeth broken out of his jaw on the left side but you couldn’t see it unless he smiled and then deep parentheses formed on either side of his mouth. He worked sometimes for the wheelwright and a wheel had come off the lathe where they were boring out the hub box and struck him in the jaw. Why are you here? He was not talkative until he had something to say. He was a careful listener and cocked his head like a titmouse, which he did now. Raindrops slid and sparkled on the glass and beyond it people wavered past with their heads down.

I am on my way to Dallas and then on south, said the Captain. Coming from Wichita Falls.

You got across the Little Wichita, then.

Yes, and I think so did Britt Johnson and his crew. They went straight south. So you have nothing to do?

Simon shook his head. I just played for the Fort Worth
Dancing School master. They had the dancing school in the back, here. He pointed with the bow. The fellow who was supposed to play guitar for them was tuning his guitar there at the church on the piano and he got it an octave too high and busted every one of his strings. Simon bent his head down and laughed. Bang bang bang one after the other, you’d think he would have figured it out. He wiped his hand down his face to stop himself from laughing at the guitar player’s misfortunes. Well, well, I did it myself once, long ago. And so! They came and got me out of the wheelwright’s to play for them. You see. He plucked a curled shaving from his pants leg.

Well then, listen. Captain Kidd shifted from one foot to another and briefly wondered if Johanna might have already absconded into the woods. He regarded his boots. His pants. Mud to the shins. Several women were buying ground meat, a man churned it out of a big-spouted grinder in a red sludge. On the other side of the store a girl and her friend were trying on hats. From the rear of the store came the light voices of yet more girls and the sound of several young men whose voices were very low and at other times broke and vaulted up the register. They came filing out carrying their dancing slippers. The Captain lifted his hat to them. Listen, he said. He groped around in his head for sentences and phrases and words to explain the situation.

I’m listening, I’m listening, said the fiddler. He lightly tapped the head of the bow on the floor between his feet. Some song was running through his head.

The thing is, I am returning a girl who was a Kiowa captive to her people, down south near San Antonio, and she’s in
the wagon there, in that bur oak stand behind the livery barn, cooking dinner in my wagon.

Simon looked out the rainy glass at the vehicles passing by, the men and women hurrying along the raw, new boardwalk.

You jest, he said. That’s four hundred miles.

No, I do not.

How old is she?

Ten. But Simon, she is wise in the ways of battle and conflict, it seems to me.

Simon watched a cowboy walk by with his hat slanted against the increasing rain and his boots shining with wet.

The fiddler nodded and said, They are always at war.

Be that as it may. She has lost all acquaintance with the uses and manners of white people and I need somebody to keep watch on her while I do my reading. You and your particular friend Miss Dillon would do me a great favor if you would sit with her while I read. I am afraid if I left her alone she might go bolting off.

Simon nodded slowly like a walking beam. He thought about it.

She wants to go back to them, he said.

She apparently does.

I know of a person who was like that, said Simon. They called him Kiowa Dutch. He was blond-haired completely. Nobody knew where he had been captured from, or when. He didn’t either. I played for a dance there at Belknap when they brought him in. He got away from the Army fellows who were returning him and he is up there yet.