News of the World: A Novel (7 page)

I think I heard about him, said the Captain. He drummed his fingers on his knee. You know, it is chilling, how their
minds change so completely. But I have taken on this task and I have to try.

Simon lifted his fiddle and ran the bow across the strings. His fingers, hard and coarse with joinery work, blunt at the tips, skipped on the strings and a tune emerged: “Virginia Belle.”
She bereft us when she left us, sweet Virginia Belle.
Then he stopped and said, Sorry. I can’t help it. So yes. I will go and get Doris. He sat for a moment considering where Doris might be. Probably attending a lady named Everetson who was ill with a fever. A yawn overtook him and he lifted the back of the fiddle over his mouth the way nonfiddlers would cover a yawn with their hand. He said, Captain, you have taken on a heavy load here, I’m afraid. He tapped his fiddle bow on his shoe.

For an old man is what you mean.

Simon stood and then bent to his case, flipped a piece of waxed silk around his instrument, and laid it in the velvet. Click click he snapped the catches shut. He straightened.

Yes, for an old man is what I mean exactly.

THE CAPTAIN AND
Simon and Doris all hurried through the drizzle to the stand of bur oaks. Between their overhead of rust-colored leaves and the canopy and stretched side curtains, the wagon was dry enough. The girl had made them a supper of cornbread and bacon and coffee and was sitting cross-legged between the long seats like a Hindu yoga with it spread before her. In the lantern light the gold letters of
Curative Waters
shone brightly.

They ducked under the side-curtain awning.

Doris pulled off her dripping straw hat and said, Hello!

Johanna glanced at the Captain as if to ask if he, too, saw this
female apparition and then returned her gaze to Doris without saying a word.

Doris carried a small bundle. She unwrapped it and held it out to the girl with a bright smile. It was a doll with a china head and painted dark eyes. It wore a dress in a brown and green check and shawl and its shoes were painted black on china feet. Johanna reached out one dirty hand from under her blanket and took the doll by the foot. She held it around the body for a moment. It was like the
taina
sacred figure that was taken from its wrappings only at the Sun Dance. She looked searchingly into its eyes. Then she propped it against one of the side benches and opened both her hands to it and said something in Kiowa.

Hmm, said Simon. He stood under the stretched canvas and tousled his hair to shake off the wet. He had left his fiddle safe in his tiny room over the wagon maker’s. He wore an old 1840s infantry coat with a high band collar. Its surface was a series of patches, some of which overlapped. My word. I believe she is
addressing
it. The fiddler held out his hands to the heat of the little stove, and worked his stiff fingers open and shut to loosen the joints.

Doris found the ironstone plates in the cook box. She said, she is like an elf. She is like a fairy person from the
glamorie.
They are not one thing or another. She laid out the plates wherever she could find room on the tailgate and on tops of boxes.

Simon regarded the light of his life with a solemn expression. Doris, he said, your Irish comes out at the strangest times.

Don’t stare at her, said Doris. That is what she is.

She thinks it’s an idol, said Simon. The Captain bent over the tailgate searching through his carpetbag and listened to them.

Aye, perhaps, said Doris. She shoveled food onto the plates and laid whatever utensil she could find on each one; the two forks, the camp knife, a serving spoon and then lifted her head to look at the girl; so alone, twice captured, carried away on the flood of the world. Doris’s eyes burned suddenly with tears and she lifted the back of her hand to her eyes. But I think not. The doll is like herself, not real and not not-real. I make myself understood I hope. You can put her in any clothing and she remains as strange as she was before because she has been through two creations. Doris laid a plate before the girl. Doris’s hair was Irish black with blue lights in it, a rare, true black. She was a small woman and her wrists were ropy with muscle and hard work. She said, To go through our first creation is a turning of the soul we hope toward the light, out of the animal world. God be with us. To go through another tears all the making of the first creation and sometimes it falls to bits. We fall into pieces. She is asking, Where is that rock of my creation?

The Captain took out shaving gear. He went to the far side and hung his mirror on a bolt end and shaved. He said, Miss Dillon, you know this how?

An Gorta Mor,
she said. In the famine children saw their parents die and then went to live with the people on the other side. In their minds they went. When they came back they were unfinished. They are forever falling. She shook out her wet, pinned-up skirt and watched as Johanna carefully ate pieces of bacon with her hands.

Well, I don’t know what I can do about it. The Captain came back around, put away his gear, and sat on the flour keg. He
bent his long, elderly body with a light creaking of the spine and went through his newspapers. He had to make a living. This was intriguing but first he needed to hear the coins falling into the paint can; then he could listen to mysteries about unfinished children, trailing their griefs and ragged edges.

And the newspapers, they say nothing about this at all or about the poor at all, Doris said. There are great holes in your newspapers. Nobody sees them. God sees them.

The Captain ate his supper and then crossed his knife and fork on his plate and put the plate on the tailgate. Yes, I am sure He does. At any rate, she has to go back to her family. It’s only my concern between here and Castroville.

Who are her people?

Germans.

Ah! Doris clapped both hands over her face for a moment and then dropped them in her lap. And so now that’s three languages the child must know. She wiped her hands on flour sacking. Leave her with us, Captain. We will take her.

Simon stopped eating. He drew in his lower lip and raised both eyebrows in an expression of surprise.

Doris said, She is like my little sister that died.

Ahem, Doris, my dear, said Simon. And so we will be married next month with a child already.

Doris lifted her slim shoulders. The priest, she said, has seen everything.

The Captain thought,
The girl is trouble and contention wherever she goes, wherever she lands. No one wants her for herself. A redheaded stepchild destined for the washhouse.

Miss Dillon, that is generous of you but I must return her to her relatives as I said I would do, and for which I took a coin of fifty dollars in gold.

Simon’s relief was plain in his face.

The girl shrank away into the interior, against the backrest, and hid in the thick
jorongo.

SEVEN

C
APTAIN KIDD HAD
changed into his reading clothes in the back of the Masonic Hall. They were a decent black frock coat, knee length, single-breasted, a matching vest, a white shirt in silk and cotton figured with a lyre design in silk of the same color—that is, a bit yellowed. He had one of the new ascots in black silk and a low-rise rounded silk topper. He stuffed his stained traveling clothes into the carpetbag and then went out and stepped up on the dais. He placed his bull’s-eye lantern to the left on a wooden box (it said
Kilmeyer Beer 50 bttls
), so it would shine on his newspapers.

He greeted the crowd and listened to the clink of dimes and five-cent pieces, two-cent pieces, pennies, and sometimes quarters into the paint can and if it was a quarter people made their own change. There were a good plenty of people. Mist was still coming down in minute blowing drops from the clouds that raced through the sky over Spanish Fort. He unfolded the
London Daily News.
He would give them a few paragraphs of hard news and then read of dreamlike places far removed. This was the arrangement of all his readings. It worked. The lantern
beam shone sideways onto his face, casting brilliant lunar cells of light on his cheekbones through the lenses of his reading glasses. He read an article concerning the Franco-Prussian War. It involved delicate Frenchmen, scented with toilet water, being whipped soundly at Wissembourg by huge blond Germans who were fat and strong on sausages. The outcome was easily predicted. The audience sat rapt, listening. News all the way from France! Nobody knew anything about the Franco-Prussian War but all were jointly amazed by information that had come across the Atlantic to them, here in North Texas, to their town alongside the flooding Red River. They had no idea how it had got here, through what strange lands it had traveled, who had carried it. Why.

Captain Kidd read carefully and precisely. His eyeglasses were round and rimmed in gold over his deep eyes. He always laid his small gold hunting watch to one side of the podium to time his reading. He had the appearance of wisdom and age and authority, which was why his readings were popular and the reason the dimes rang into the coffee can. When they read his handbills men abandoned the saloon, they slipped out of various unnamed establishments, they ran through the rain from their firelit homes, they left the cattle circled and bedded beside the flooding Red to come and hear the news of the distant world.

And now he took them away to far places and strange peoples. Into mythic forms of thought and the structures of fairy tales. He read from the
Philadelphia Inquirer
of Dr. Schliemann’s search for windy Troy somewhere in Turkey. He read of the telegraph wires successfully laid from Britain to
India, an article in the
Calcutta Times
forwarded to the London
Daily Telegraph,
a technological advance that seemed almost otherworldly. As he glanced up it seemed to the Captain that he saw the blond man again or at least the glint of ash-blond hair just at the borders of his light. This went into his mind and then out of his mind as he grappled with the big four-sheets of the
Boston Daily Journal.
To finish, he read of the unfortunate
Hansa
crushed in the pack ice in its attempt on the North Pole, the survivors rescued by a whaler. This was proving the most popular as he could see by the small gestures of the audience; they bent forward, they fixed their eyes upon him to hear of undiscovered lands in the kingdoms of ice, fabulous beasts, perils overcome, snow people in furry suits.

Simon came in the rear door of the Masonic Lodge just as he was replacing his newspapers into the portfolio.

Sir, the girl’s gone.

Nothing galvanizes people like news of a missing child. The Captain swept everything into his portfolio, his newspapers and eyeglasses, the bull’s-eye lantern with its smoldering wick, and the money tin; jammed his silk hat on his head; and ran to the door and straight out into the rain.

They had fallen asleep, he and Doris, sitting on the shot box and the flour keg, leaning together against the big rear wheel in front of a good fire. Something made Simon wake up and she was gone.

She had left on foot. The doll was gone too.

It is easier to track a barefoot person than somebody with shoes. The toes dig in with four distinct marks and the big toe like a misplaced thumb broad alongside. The bull’s-eye lantern
beam picked up her prints on the sloppy, red-clay road going out of Spanish Fort, east toward the river. The river which was joyous in its escape from banks and boundaries, which had become a rolling inland sea. They could hear it from half a mile away. The rain increased, lightning came cracking down out of the northwest as the new storm front moved in on them in the night. The lantern lit the million billion drops that came down in colors of steel and ice. She had followed the ruts in the wagon road that led to the river. The track wound about among the post oak and bur oaks, twisted trees with fright wigs of dry leaves and soon the track would come to the edge of the flood.

The Captain walked bent over and rained upon. His joints hurt. He needed to find somebody younger to take her south and deal with this kind of thing. Somebody agile and patient and strong.

He and Simon the fiddler soldiered on.

She’s gone and it’s my fault! Simon slapped himself on the thigh. It made a wet smack. Captain, I am so sorry!

He had to shout over the noise of the rain. He gripped his hat brim and ran alongside the Captain.

Never mind! the Captain shouted back. Can’t be helped!

He would as soon have Simon with him as anybody. Despite his short stature the fiddler was very strong and a hard fighter and a good shot. They ran on into the rain as if into a thicket. They bulled their way through. They tripped over the cut stumps where someone had cleared ground and tangled themselves in the parasitic love vine. They came upon Pasha and Fancy grazing, and were snorted at. The Captain felt himself growing thinner even as they walked. A man his age should
have more weight on him, he should be in a hotel room in Spanish Fort after a good supper and leaning on the sill with tobacco smoke rolling out of his nose, watching the dim lights in the windows and counting his money. This was unfair.

They stopped when they saw the glinting water. There at its edge, on a lift of red stone no more than thirty yards ahead, stood Johanna, wet as a dishcloth and her skirts heavy with rain. She clutched the doll to her chest. In the explosive lightning flashes the Captain could see, on the far side of the flood, a party of Indians. They were on the move. They had probably been flooded out of their campsite. The Red was still rising. Entire pecan trees rolled and ground like mill wheels in the current. The Indians had stopped to look across, perhaps at the distant lights of Spanish Fort, and Johanna was calling to them in Kiowa but they could not hear her. It was too far, the river was too loud.

Johanna! the Captain called. Johanna!

She put down the doll and shouted at the Indians with her hands around her mouth. What could she possibly think would happen? That they would come for her? She was shouting for her mother, for her father and her sisters and brothers, for the life on the Plains, traveling wherever the buffalo took them, she was calling for her people who followed water, lived with every contingency, were brave in the face of enemies, who could go without food or water or money or shoes or hats and did not care that they had neither mattresses nor chairs nor oil lamps. They stood and stared across the water at her like creatures of the
sidhe,
wet and shining in every flash from overhead. They stood among their jackstrawed tipi poles heaped on horses, drenched
children gazing at her out of buffalo robes on the travois, the men ahead and at the side with their weapons wrapped in whatever would keep them dry. One of them shouted back over the water. The lightning made them appear in every detail like an intaglio and then disappear and then reappear again.