News of the World

by Paulette Jiles

  He took hold of her greasy small hand and they started off down the street.

  NINE

  THE CAPTAIN WENT out and locked the hotel room door behind him. He stood in the hallway. He could hear her begin a Kiowa chant. This could mean anything. It could mean she was resigned, it could mean she was going to hang herself with the curtain cording, or set the place on fire, or go to sleep.

  At least she didn’t have a weapon.

  At the desk he laid down the key and said, She was a Kiowa captive. I am returning her.

  But Captain! You’d think she’d be happy! The young man at the desk had protuberant eyes and in his hands was a false mustache. He was shaping it with a pair of nail scissors. You’d think she’d be skipping about and clapping her hands! That sounds like she is about to stab herself! It’s operatic!

  I know, said the Captain.

  Where is she going?

  To near San Antonio.

  You mean you are putting up with that all the way to San Antonio? Perish and forbid!

  Young man, stop speaking in exclamation points. I have no idea what to do about it.

  The desk clerk breathed out, long and carefully, with his eyes closed. He often played bit parts at the playhouse, usually a page or a messenger. He said, Go get Mrs. Gannet to stay with her. We can’t listen to this all night.

  THE CAPTAIN SAW that Mrs. Gannet had quite a lot of rich brown hair knotted in complex braids coiled all around her head. She had taken off her bonnet to beat it on a stall rail to knock the dust off. She was instructing the stableman in a method of removing Chicago screws from a bridle.

  Yes ma’am! he said, and turned and crossed one leg over another and fell down. Well Billy be-goddamn bangtree, he said. Legs, floor, unexpected. His words were slurred.

  Peter, she said. You are swearing. Get up.

  Things! he said. Under hay. Trip a person.

  Well then, pick them up, she said, gently. Yes, Captain? She tried to smile.

  The Captain stood formally with his hands crossed in front of him. He asked her to come and stay the night with Johanna but did not, of course, mention the other reason, which was that it would be delightful, yes, enchanting to think of her sleeping in the room next to his. He offered her a dollar to compensate.

  Captain, please, she said. I am delighted to help.

  That evening was the first time in the last week he could, he hoped, rest without cares, without tension and fear. Fear that the girl would run away and be lost and die of hunger, would try to swim the Red to get back to her Kiowa family. For the first two days he had wondered if she might attempt to kill him. Or herself.

  Mrs. Gannet had come prepared to spend the entire night with her nightgown and other articles in a small brass-clasped thing that looked like a green fabric saddlebag. He opened the door to the room where Johanna sat on the floor cross-legged, rocking herself. Mrs. Gannet drew a light and delicate piece of divinity from her jacket pocket and held it out. Johanna fixed her blank stare on it. The Captain saw her make the sign for “poison.”

  He said, Eat half of it, Mrs. Gannet.

  She understood immediately and bit half of the white candy and said, Mmmmm!

  Johanna reached up and took the other half from her in a glacially slow movement and bit down on the taste of vanilla and sugar and egg white, felt the light crinkling of divinity shell in her mouth. She ate it unsmiling. The Captain knew Mrs. Gannet had made it that afternoon, for Johanna. Divinity was very difficult to make. He backed out slowly and heard the lock click to.

  The walls of the hotel were made of cheap deal board and he could hear everything from the room next door and wished he could not. He sat down to outline his articles in ink, his pen nib scratching across the rough newsprint with a noise like avaricious mice. He blew on the ink and then laid the newspapers aside and took up the letter paper to write to his daughters in Georgia. The room smelled of new, raw lumber and the harsh soap they had used to wash the quilts and sheets.

  My dearest daughters Olympia and Elizabeth, he wrote.

  Kep-dun! Johanna banged on the wall. She was sobbing.

  He banged back. Cho-henna, he said.

  My greetings and constant love to Emory and my grandchildren. I am well and continue to make my rounds with the news of the day and as always am well-received in the towns of which we have more than a few now as the Century grows older and the population increases so that large crowds come to hear reportage of distant places as well as those nearby. I enjoy good health as always and hope that Emory is doing well using his left hand now and look forward to an example of his handwriting. It is true what Elizabeth has said about employment for a one-armed man but that concerns manual labor only and at any rate there should be some consideration for a man who has lost a limb in the war. As soon as he is adept with his left I am sure he will consider Typesetting, Accounting, Etc. & Etc. Olympia is I am sure a steady rock to you all.

  Olympia’s husband, Mason, had been killed at Adairsville, during Johnston’s retreat toward Atlanta. The man was too big to be a human being and too small to be a locomotive. He had been shot out of the tower of the Bardsley mansion and when he fell three stories and struck the ground he probably made a hole big enough to bury a hog in. The Captain’s younger daughter, Olympia, was in reality a woman who affected helplessness and refinement and had never been able to pull a turnip from the garden without weeping over the poor, dear thing. She fluttered and gasped and incessantly tried to demonstrate how sensitive she was. Mason was a perfect foil and then the Yankees went and killed him.

  Olympia was now living with Elizabeth and Emory in the remains of their farm in New Hope Church, Georgia, and was quite likely a heavy weight. He put one hand to his forehead. My youngest daughter is in reality a bore.

  There was a pounding on the wall: Kep-dun! Kep-dun!

  He got up and pounded back. Cho-henna! he said. Go to sleep!

  The Captain heard a soothing voice on the other side of the wall. The way one spoke to restless horses: firm, low-voiced. Commands that were somehow gentle. Earlier he had heard Mrs. Gannet and the girl going down the hall to the bathroom. A small shriek of fear as the toilet flushed. You could hear everything in this hotel. He wished he had spent more money and had taken rooms in one of the big stone hotels where one’s privacy was assured.

  . . . your husbands having been both of old Georgia State regiments would be true to their comrades and so it was fate and the Will of the Almighty had led you all to go back to Georgia to fight in the War and thus into the heart of the Burning but considering what has occurred to other families we return thanks for our dear ones who are still with us. I know travel is extremely difficult at present but once you are here things will be better.

  He paused, went back, and blotted it out from “and thus” to “Burning” with a corner of torn paper, then struck through it, held the paper slantwise to the light, and saw that it was unreadable. Good. No dreadful memories or things that would induce weeping.

  The recent houses of Senate and Representatives of the State of Texas have passed a law forbidding the population to carry sidearms, that is handguns, but at present . . .

  He started to write about the Comanche and Kiowa raids across the Red River, but saw that once again his news was falling into the alarming, the frightening, and he wanted his daughters and Emory and the children to come back to Texas. They had lived through enough. Their journey to Texas would be difficult as most bridges in the South had been blown up or burned during the war and the railroads and rolling stock shelled to pieces. There was no public money to rebuild. It was not only Sherman. It had been General Forrest who had blown up most of the railroads between Tennessee and Mississippi to keep the Yankees from using them. At any rate, they were all in tatters. Food and clothing were still scarce. They would have to apply for passes from the Union Army to travel the rutted and cratered roads, probably in two wagons with only one man for two women and two children and that man with only one arm. They
would have to cross the Mississippi at Vicksburg if there was a ferry. They would have to carry money to buy food and forage while the roads were crawling with highwaymen.

  . . . but at present we do well without sidearms and there is no legal constriction against smoothbores and so from time to time I enjoy a supper of Quail and Duck. The trumpeters and the whooping cranes are coming back and settle on the Red in their passage. Now my dearest ones enough Gossip, I must come to the important part of my Relations to you which is that I consider you would all do well here in Texas rather than in the Ruined and Devastated States in the East and please consider the land owing to your late Mother. If you all were to return I would be happy once again in the company of my daughters and son-in-law and my grandsons, and since Elizabeth has always been enamored of the process of Law she could begin the legal Discovery and then turn it over to a lawyer adept at fixed-asset litigation.

  Yes I know the Spanish land has long been a Chimera in our family but indeed it is there and requires much research. If you would begin the process by writing to Sr. Amistad De Lara, Land Commissioner and archivist of the Spanish Colonial Historical Records, Bexar County Courthouse, and be sure you spell your mother’s maiden name correctly, Srta. Maria Luisa Betancort y Real, and the inherited land is una liga y un labor, which means, and I hope you remember your Spanish, both grazing land and garden land, which was legally separated from the Mission Concepcion, that is, Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepcion de Acuña (spell it correctly and remember the accents) for Sr. De Lara is a stickler. We have the casa de dueña in San Antonio still as it has been continuously occupied by Betancort descendants who are there now, aged as mummies and complaining because they cannot get white bread and must subsist on tortillas.

  Your mother’s grandfather, Henri Hipolito Betancort y Goraz, bought the liga and the labor from the mission but the laws of the Spanish Crown said that all titles had to be registered in Mexico City, a journey of two months at least so it was never registered there and so there are problems with clear title. Not to speak of the fact that after 1821 the Land Registration offices in Mexico City then fell under the Republic of Mexico, notoriously corrupt and I have heard extremely careless with their filing systems. So a shaky title to these lands here came under the Republic of Texas and then the United States and then the Confederacy and now the United States again. There are stacks of moldering papers in Sr. De Lara’s offices. You will love it, Elizabeth. You were born to be an ink-stained wretch, my dear.

  I believe the labor is on the San Antonio River 5 mi. south of Concepcion and the liga is on the Balcones Heights amounting all told to more or less three hundred English acres. The Valenzuela family were running sheep and goats on it but last I heard they had deserted the area.

  Kep-dun!

  He heard a low sobbing. He bent his head to the paper. He thought Indians never cried. It pulled him away from these legal land questions. It tore his heart.

  He closed his eyes and laid down his pen and tried to calm himself. So much had fallen to the old since seven hundred thousand young Southern men were casualties of war. Out of a population of a few million. He must arrange for his family to be together again, he must enter into litigation, he must make a living with his readings, he must deliver this child to her relatives who would no doubt be utterly appalled by what she had become. For a moment he was completely at a loss as to why he had agreed to take her to Castroville.

  For Britt. A freed black man. That’s why.

  In the next room, something broke. More quiet tones from Mrs. Gannet, the unflappable.

  No use trying to write anymore.

  Your affectionate father, Jefferson Kyle Kidd.

  He heard the loud objections in Kiowa as the girl was dragged down the hall to the bathing facilities. One cannot think with a ten-year-old Kiowa-German captive throwing soap and ceramics. After a while they came back and there was more sobbing. Then Mrs. Gannet began to sing.

  He bent his head and listened. She had a good voice, a clear light soprano. She sang “Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross” and then “It Is Well with My Soul.” He slowly shifted the letter paper and began to fold it. When peace like a river attendeth my way . . . very good. At age seventy-one he deserved peace like a river but apparently he wasn’t going to get it at present. The town of Dallas beyond the window raised up its new raw-lumber buildings and the air was woven with crashing wheel noises and shouts of the men at the ferry landing. What must the girl think of these man-made bluffs and rigidly straight byways? The sobbing died down. Mrs. Gannet sang “Black Is the Color.” Not an easy song to sing unaccompanied. An old folk song in the Dorian mode. The girl was listening. It was much closer to the Indian way of singing. The unexpected turns and strange Celtic intervals. He wondered why he had not in the past year offered his attentions to Mrs. Gannet and then he knew why. Because his daughters felt he should remain forever loyal to the memory of their mother and if they found out about it Olympia and Elizabeth would have had a galvanized tin hissy, one apiece.

  At last it was quiet on the other side of the deal board wall. He turned down the kerosene lamp. Nearly eight. Showtime.

  TEN

  A LOW TRAVELING TIDE of gleaming white clouds told of more rain to come. There was good seating at the Broadway. That meant people were more comfortable and would therefore be patient and listen longer. The Captain brought his own bull’s-eye lantern as always. He set it on a plant stand to his left, opposite to that of right-handed readers, and trained the light on the dense gray print. He laid down his small gold hunting watch at the top of the podium. At the front double doors two U.S. Army men were stationed, as there were whenever there was a public meeting at any time. Texas was still under military rule.

  This might end in a few months if Washington would seat the Texas delegation. The recent election for Texas governor had not been between the old Southern Democrats and the Union-loyal Republicans. No indeed. The old Southern Democratic party was finished in Texas. The fighting was between two factions within the Republicans. The one led by Davis was extreme in its demand for dictatorial powers. The one led by Hamilton, not so much. Both were robbing the state blind. There was no point in appealing to one’s congressman to help clear up land titles in the state. They were too busy lining their pockets. Clearing the Betancort land title would take up Elizabeth’s time for years. She would enjoy it very much.

  There was a good crowd and he heard the coins ringing into his paint can at the entrance. He greeted the crowd as always, with a statement of thanks to the proprietor of the Broadway, a comment on the state of the roads from Wichita Falls to Spanish Fort and then here. Then he shook out the London Times. It was in this way he asked people to enter another realm of the mind. Places far away and mysterious, brought to them by details which they did not understand but which entranced them.

  He read of the attempt by the British Colonial government to enumerate the peoples under their rule, a census, in short, and the rebellion of the Hindu tribes against the census takers because married women were not permitted to say aloud the names of their husbands. (Nods; they are all beyond rational thought in those far countries.) He read about a great windstorm in London that toppled chimney pots (What is a chimney pot? He could see it on their faces.) and then of the new packing plants in Chicago which would take any amount of cattle if they could only get them. In the crowd were men who were contemplating driving cattle all the way to Missouri if they could evade the savage tribes and they listened with deep interest. The Captain read of the Irish pouring into New York City, ragged crowds unloaded from the passenger steamer Aurora, of the railroad driving into the plains of the new state of Nebraska, of another eruption of Popocatépetl near Mexico City. Anything but Texas politics.

  Someone called, Why are you not reading from Governor Davis’s state journal?

  The Captain folded his newspapers. He said, Sir, you know very well why. He leaned forward over the podium. His white hair shone, his gold-rim glasses wi
nked in the bull’s-eye lantern beam. He was the image of elderly wisdom and reason. Because there would be a fistfight here within moments, if not shooting. Men have lost the ability to discuss any political event in Texas in a reasonable manner. There is no debate, only force. In point of fact, regard the soldiers beyond the door.

  He slapped his newspapers into the portfolio. He said, I am an aggregator of news from distant places, and as for the Austin paper and the Herald, you can read them for yourselves. The Captain shut the flap on his portfolio and buckled it tight. And fight among yourselves on your own time and not during my reading.

  He heard hear, hear! from among the wet and shining heads of the men who held their hats in their hands and from some of the women in their pancake hats and their bonnets.

  He blew out the bull’s-eye lantern and took it and the portfolio and stepped down from the stage. Among the crowd filtering out he saw, with a dropping feeling, the pale-haired man and the two Caddos he had last seen in Wichita Falls and perhaps Spanish Fort. He knew the Indians were Caddos because of their blunt-cut hair, sliced off just at the jawline, their shirts of a dark blue with a tiny print of yellow flowers. The Caddos liked printed calico. The blond man sat relaxed in a theater chair with an ankle cocked up on the other leg and his hat on the point of his knee. He was watching the Captain.

  As the Captain stepped down from the lectern people came to their feet; some followed him. He shook the hands that were held out to him and accepted thanks and compliments. Everybody smelled like wet wool and camphor and a sneezing small woman said, Thank you, Captain, and shaking her hand gave him a moment’s pleasure, to see her bright cheeks. Perhaps he had taken her away from worry and preoccupation for a short while, what the Captain called the “hard thoughts.” And a man with a grave look and a silver lapel badge in the shape of a shamrock from Hancock’s Second Artillery Corps, Union. The Captain shook his hand firmly. No matter what side you were on, if you had survived Gettysburg you were to be congratulated. Perhaps he had briefly escorted the man’s mind into the lands of the imagination—far places, crisp ice mountains, falling chimney pots, tropical volcanoes.