News of the World

by Paulette Jiles

  He jerked off his hat and shoved it between the butt of the stock and his shoulder. Then without turning his head he held out his hand and a dime-loaded shotgun shell was slapped into it, he shoved it in, shot the bolt home, brought the sights to bear on the scrambling Caddos. Another great bellow like a cannon and silver coins hissed through the air faster than sight and they sparkled and ricocheted all down the ravine. The roar of the overloaded twenty-gauge sounded like a grenade had gone off. Ten-cent pieces slammed edge-on into a wounded Caddo’s backside. A shower of bright flying money tore through the trees lower down and clipped branches and leaves of the live oak, spanged off stone, chipped the skull crown of the Caddo in the rear so that he instinctively turned around to fight and the Captain unloaded on him again. Silver like tearing sequins sliced sideways through their blousy shirtsleeves and turned their hats into colanders.

  By God, I believe that was a good two hundred and fifty yards, the Captain said.

  Finally he leaned back against his red stone barbican. His nerves were glowing like fuses and he was not tired anymore. I got them. I did it. We did it.

  She held up another shell, laughing and smiling.

  No, my dear. He was sucking air. His eyebrow still hurt. We need the money to buy supplies.

  He lay back against the rock breathing slowly. Johanna jumped to her feet, standing straight as a willow wand. She lifted her face to the sun and began to chant in a high, tight voice. Her taffy hair flew in thick strands, powdered with flour, and she took up the butcher knife and held the blade above her head and began to sing. Hey hey Chal an aun! Their enemies had run before them. They had fled in terror, they were faint of heart, their hands were without strength, Hey hey hey! My enemies have been sent to the otherworld, they have been sent to the place that is dark blue, where there is no water, hey hey hey! Coi-guu Khoe-duuey!

  We are hard and strong, the Kiowa!

  Far below the Caddos heard the Kiowa triumph chant, the scalping chant, and when they struck the bottom of the ravine where it bled out into the Brazos they did not even stop to fill their canteens.

  Then she climbed over the lip of rock with her skirts and petticoats wadded into Turkish pantaloons and the butcher knife held high. She was halfway down before the Captain came after her and got hold of her skirt.

  She had been on her way to scalp Almay.

  No, my dear, we don’t . . . it’s not done, he said.

  Haain-a?

  No. Absolutely not. No. No scalping. He lifted her up and swung her up over the ledges of stone and then followed. He said, It is considered very impolite.

  THIRTEEN

  HE REHARNESSED AND took up all his small possessions from the tailgate, slammed it shut. He had to find a place to cross the Brazos soon. Going back downhill the Captain rode the brake. The shafts lunged up around Fancy’s shoulders on the steep grade and the brake chocks screamed on the axles. All the stuff in the wagon bed ended up in a heap against the back of the driver’s seat with Johanna tossed among the tools and food and blankets, holding the revolver. He had unloaded it but she seemed happier with it in her hands. They were frayed and dirty. They both looked like they had been dragged through a knothole. As the wagon plunged downhill among the red rock and stiff brush he prayed they would not break a tie-rod and that the cracked iron tire would hold.

  They made it to the bottom and the road in one piece with all possessions and horses still in hand.

  The Captain’s nerves were humming like telegraph wires in a wind and he knew in a little while he would be close to collapse. He searched every copse of live oaks and when they reached the Brazos, every shadow in the pecan flats. The road ran along the north side of the river, a shy and obsequious road that dodged every bank and lift and wound through the pecan trees and never insisted on its own way. He searched out every road bank ahead of him as they went. He was ready to shoot somebody else if need be. He must slow down. For Johanna, he needed to quiet himself; he must appear calm and assured. The Caddos would bury Almay under a pile of rocks and quietly slip back into Oklahoma. Someday somebody would find the bones and wonder whose they were. Almay would run his child prostitution ring no more, his brains blown out by the coin of the realm, hey hey hey. The Captain’s heart finally calmed.

  That night he dusted his cut forehead with gray wound powder, and then slept like a dead man without his usual war nightmares that should have been brought about by the fight, but somehow they passed him by. Perhaps they sought out someone else. Perhaps he was not on their map this night.

  He woke up to a clean and tidy camp under the pecan trees that stood high and airy above them. He heard the noise of a little stream nearby running into the Brazos and the hush, hush sound of small new pecan leaves in the breeze. He heard Johanna crying out, Eat! Now you eat! And the mare’s bell ringing as the horses grazed. He took the plate from her and ate carefully. The blue smoke from the little stovepipe lay low and drifted. They were all right, he and the girl were alive. They were having a calm breakfast among the pecan trees, new leaves like green dots with their shadows making slow polkas back and forth over them and the Curative Waters golden letters.

  He pressed one hand to his right eyebrow. The cut was a little swollen but all right. He could for a brief time work as hard as a younger man but it always took much longer to recover. He must recover. They had far to go.

  The horses needed rest and care as much as he did. He would have to teach this to Johanna. The Plains Indians did not expend much care on their horses. They rode them hard and as a last resort ate them. He went down Fancy and Pasha’s legs to check for swelling but they were all right. They had last been shod up in Bowie but before long they would need new ones. He straightened up again with some effort; he could almost hear the jointed sound as one vertebrae settled on another.

  He sat on his carpetbag and leaned against a wheel. His mind kept going back to the fight and to put it aside he watched Pasha graze and drank black coffee and smoked his pipe. Johanna played in the stream like a six-year-old. She turned over rocks and sang and splashed. To comfort himself and slow down his mind he thought of his time as a courier, a runner, and Maria Luisa and his daughters. Maybe life is just carrying news. Surviving to carry the news. Maybe we have just one message, and it is delivered to us when we are born and we are never sure what it says; it may have nothing to do with us personally but it must be carried by hand through a life, all the way, and at the end handed over, sealed.

  He was not really rested but well enough. They went on.

  THE NEXT DAY at noon they came to a place called the Brazos ferry. The Brazos unwound slow green coils and smoke from slash fires lay low and drifted at the height of a man’s head. There was no ferry. He could see the ferry landing on the other side, downstream about a hundred yards where the current would push them. The landing looked good; it looked like a hard bottom. The river was up so things might have changed. Loads of sand and silt could have been laid over the landing, big tumbling drowned trees could be below the surface of the river turning like the fabled octopus with grasping arms.

  Once again they had to make a crossing on their own and once again he loosed Pasha and the little mare Fancy plunged in. She fought across the current, they drifted down, Johanna clutched up her skirts and prepared to jump but they made it.

  On the far side they were on the Lampasas Road and would miss Meridian altogether. That was all right. They would soon come to Durand which was larger and had more people, all of them with money in their pockets he sincerely hoped.

  A brief rain; again it was a wet world where each leaf of the live oak, clinging to the twigs throughout the winter, held a drop at its tip. The live oaks never lost their leaves in the winter; he had seen them standing green in a snowfall.

  Johanna bent her head far back to look up into the leafy canopy and the rainy sky. There was a cautious wonder on her face. She said something in Kiowa in a low voice. So much water, such giant trees, each possessing a spirit. Drops like
jewels cascaded from their spidery hands.

  He said, Tree. He took off his old broad-brimmed field hat and ran his hand through his hair, which was as fine as cobweb and as white. Put the hat back on.

  Yes, tlee, tlee.

  He pointed out: Pine. Oak. Cedar. First the general class and then the specific.

  Yes, Kep-den Kidd.

  As they drove, he pointed back to Pasha, to his nose, to the bacon. She seemed to have had some acquaintance with the English language before. Maybe her memory just needed a jog. She said, Hoas, nos-ah, bekkin. Then he rose to his feet. Stend up, she said. He sat down. Sit don. Kontah, sit don.

  Captain Kidd was fairly sure Kontah meant grandfather but whether this was an honorific or a slang term he had no way of knowing.

  He said, Kontah, Opa.

  Yes yes, Kontah Opa!

  Opa, German for grandfather. Well, they were getting somewhere. The word Opa clicked into some otherwise disengaged gear in her mind. Then she became interested in the puzzle of another language, other words, other grammars. She thought for a moment and then said, Cho-henna clepp honts. She clapped her hands. Cho-henna laff-a. She came out with a hearty false laugh, bouncing around on the wagon seat. Then she held up her hands with the fingers spread. Wan, doo, tlee, foh, fife, siss, sefen, ate-ah, nine-ah, den.

  The mouse ran up the clock, he said, and when he saw the dubious look on her face, her anxious need to understand, he patted her hand. It is all right, he said.

  Allite.

  She could not pronounce either the German R nor the English R or one of the two th sounds and perhaps never would. Lain, she said. Watah, plenty good much watah, plenty lain.

  Excellent, Johanna! Excellent.

  Hmmm hmmm hmmm, she hummed to herself and rocked back and forth and then busied herself with tearing off the remains of the lace edging on her dress. She had begun it when she tied up her braid during the fight on the Brazos and had decided to finish the job.

  As long as they were traveling she was content and happy and the world held great interest for her but Captain Kidd wondered what would happen when she found she was never to wander over the face of the earth again, when she was to be confined forever to her Leonberger relatives in a square house that could not be broken down and packed on a travois. He had a failing feeling around his heart when he thought of it. Cynthia Parker had starved herself to death when she was returned to her white relatives. So had Temple Friend. Other returned captives had become alcoholics, solitaries, strange people. They were all odd, the returned captives. All peculiar with minds oddly formed, never quite one thing or another. As Doris had said back in Spanish Fort, all those captured as children and returned were restless and hungry for some spiritual solace, abandoned by two cultures, dark shooting stars lost in the outer heavens.

  And could he abandon her now to her relatives, after they had saved each other’s lives, after the battle they had fought? He had to. They were her blood kin. This was a painful thought but he had had enough of anxiety for a good long while and so he turned his mind back to the here and now.

  In Durand he would have to give a reading of the latest news since they had shot up nearly all their money. The Captain’s previous funds had been destroyed by the War Between the States and several minor debts in property taxes, but minor or not they were debts and by 1866 his deposits and bank stocks were all gone. The local San Antonio Commission for the Support of the Confederacy had threatened him with jail if he would not invest in Confederate bonds and so there it all went. He sold his printing business and paid his debts and took to the road. Maria had died the year before, and it was as if some tether had been loosed, the anchor rope of a hot-air balloon cut free and the Captain rose up and sailed away on the winds of chance. He was nearly seventy-two now and his finest possessions were his gold hunting watch and Pasha and his reading voice.

  Cho-henna estomp choo! She lifted her bare foot and pointed to it and then stamped it on the floorboards.

  Not shoe, foot, he said. He reached back and found one of her shoes. He held it up; a black and confining laced thing with a blunt toe and a one-inch heel. The laces were missing. She had used them for something. Shoe, he said. He pointed to her foot. Foot!

  Fery well, Cho-henna stomp foot! Cho-henna weff hont! She waved her hand. Kep-dun stend up! He stood up. Kep-dun sit don! He sat down. Kep-dun clepp honts! He wearily clapped his hands. Kep-dun laff!

  No, he said.

  Ah ah ah, Kep-dun, pliss!

  All right. He managed to raise a false and hearty laugh. Ha! Ha! Ha! Now, that’s enough for today.

  This made her fall into helpless laughter. Then she cried, Kep-dun heat blek-fass, Cho-henna choot gun (shooting noise), hoas tlot, Kep-dun choot gun (shooting noise again), Wan, doo, tlee, foh, fife, siss, sefen, ate-ah, nine-ah, den.

  Very good, my dear, now let’s be quiet. I am elderly and frail and my nerves fray easily. His scalp still had the running galvanized crawl of pain and his right eyebrow probably needed stitches but was not going to get them.

  Fery good lain, hoas choot gun ha ha ha! Hoas eat blek-fass! Hoas laff! (Here an imitation whinny) and she klepped her honts and laughed again and so they went on down the Lampasas Road through the trees, toward Durand on the Bosque River, with the Kiowa captive girl inventing new and even more improbable sentences and the Captain’s eyes watering with pain.

  Wan foot, doo foots, wan hont, doo honts, doo hoas, big hoas, lidda hoas . . .

  Johanna, shut up.

  Cho-henna chut up!

  As they came within a mile of Durand through the dripping forest of live oaks he saw men riding toward him. He put one hand out to Johanna. She stopped. She became perfectly silent. The men who rode toward them wore ragged clothing and shabby hats but they were well-armed. They had spent all their money on revolvers and the new repeating short-barreled carbines. Spencers, gleaming new.

  The sun had come out and the noon light outlined the men as they rode toward the Captain’s wagon. They sparkled with falling drops from the leaves, shake-down showers. The Captain pulled up. He gazed at them with a steady and unperturbed expression. Behind it he wondered if they had somehow got word of the Great Brazos Ten-Cent Shoot-Out.

  He wondered what they wanted. Where they were from. There was anarchy in Texas in 1870 and every man did what was right in his own eyes.

  One of the men with a trimmed black beard came up alongside the light spring wagon, on the Captain’s side, and his cavalry stirrup with its blunt tapadero made chunking noises against the stopped fore wheel. He looked down at them, at the cut over the Captain’s eye and the spots of blood on his shirt and the muddied wagon spokes. An old man and a girl. The girl had sunk down behind the canted dashboard and only her dirty fingers gripping the wood and her face were visible. The man on horseback was dark-skinned and black-eyed but this did not matter to Johanna, native Americans looked not at the color of skin but at the intentions, the body posture, the language of hands. That was how they stayed alive. Johanna fixed him like a print in her suspicious blue gaze.

  Curative Waters, eh? He regarded the gold lettering on the sides.

  I bought it from the proprietor, said Captain Kidd, who went bust. He kept his voice within the range of reasonable tones. He had the girl to think about.

  Did it have the bullet holes in it already?

  Yes, as a matter of fact it did, said the Captain. He tried to straighten out the wavy brim of his old hat. He had two days’ growth of sparkling white beard and knew he looked like a derelict but he sat straight-backed and tall in his canvas coat and fixed in his mind the revolver on his left on the floorboards under the bacon. He said, It came fully supplied with bullet holes.

  Very curious. And so, where are you headed? said the black-bearded man. His voice was low and rasping.

  Captain Kidd thought about it for a moment and decided to answer him. The scarves of smoke were coming from a campfire, one most likely belonging to these men, nearby, hidden.

 
; Durand, the Captain said.

  That your final destination?

  No.

  So where, then?

  Castroville.

  Where’s that?

  Fifteen miles west of San Antonio.

  That’s a long piece of travel.

  The temptation was great to say Why is it your concern, you filthy ignorant brigand, but he looked down at the girl and smiled his creased smile and patted her inflexible white fingers seized on the dashboard.

  He said, This girl was a captive of the Kiowa, lately rescued, and I am returning her to her relatives there.

  The savages, the man said. He regarded the child, her hair stiff with dirt, skinned knuckles, and a dress smeared with dirt and charcoal and bacon grease where she had wiped her hands. He shook his head. Why they go and steal children I will never understand. Do they not have ary of their own?

  I am as mystified as you are, said the Captain.

  The black-bearded man said, And the Indians know as much about soap as a hog knows about Sunday. Miss? he said. Look here.

  He fished in the watch pocket of his jeans and found a lump of saltwater taffy thick with lint. He held it out, bent from his saddle, smiling. Quick as a snake she struck it from his hand and dropped farther down behind the dashboard.

  Ah. The man nodded. They come back wild. I have heard about this.

  The others had ridden around the wagon. They sat loose and easy in their worn dragoon saddles and did not bother to unlimber either revolver or carbine. Clearly Johanna and the Captain were harmless.

  The Captain then understood they had not heard of the Great Brazos Ten-Cent Shoot-Out at Carlyle Springs. It was two days behind but a good bet was that these men did not travel much beyond this area. As yet there was almost no telegraph service in most of Texas.