News of the World

by Paulette Jiles

  It was late evening when he came across the San Martin Street Bridge and then Calamares Street and into the Plaza de Armas. The Spanish Governor’s palace, built in 1749 in ruins. There in the wide Plaza de Armas, Military Plaza, were lines of wagons bringing in grain and vegetables and hay to be sold there, and the chili stands with their piles of fruit and simmering cauldrons of chili now lit by lanterns with colored shades. Packed around the square were the commercial establishments, The Vance House, Lessner and Mandelbaum hide dealers, Rhodes and Dean tinware, clothing shops, billiard rooms, carriage repositories. The Captain put the excursion wagon with its promises of curative waters and its bullet holes in a carriage repository and stabled Fancy and Pasha in Haby’s stables, each one devouring a great net bag of hay. He checked in at The Vance House and passed a fitful and unhappy night.

  The next day he walked out into the Plaza and saw his old print shop next to Advocate Branholme’s building. It was now full of broken carriage wheels to be repaired and parts of some kind of machinery. He cupped his hands around his face and looked in; dust on the floor, the Stanhope press sold and gone and probably taken to pieces for parts, a bag of wool scraps, a shoe.

  He went next door to Branholme’s law office.

  Branholme was in, and stood when he saw the Captain. He spoke for thirty minutes or so with the young lawyer about adoption, about the legal status of returned captives, about the Printing Bill.

  Branholme said, In a few years perhaps they will rescind the bill. After Davis is gone and after the military is no longer in power. Then it might be feasible to start up your business again. And as for the captives, well, they belong to their parents or guardians.

  Captain Kidd then rode Pasha through the traffic, away from the center of town and down the San Antonio River to the ruins of Mission Concepción. Somewhere under layers of legalities they had land there. It was his favorite of all the old missions even though now the main sanctuary was abandoned and scarred with people’s names carved into the plaster. He would leave it to Elizabeth. He knew Señor De Lara all too well. The man was a scholar and an expert in Spanish Colonial land grants and his first words would be, But you do not stand to inherit, sir. Only your daughters, and so I will discuss it with them.

  He rode back and went to the post office and inquired for letters. He sat down on the steps with the four pages from Elizabeth. He knew her handwriting immediately.

  They would come back in two years. Dearest Papa you know we long for Texas but . . . She wrote of the long journey and of their weariness, of Olympia’s delicacy. They were lacking money and would need to buy horses and who knew how they would now get across the Mississippi? If he had money to send them for the trip, they needed it. Would it be possible to rent the old Betancort house? They were, after all, Mama’s people. She had written already to Sr. De Lara concerning the Mission Concepción land.

  Newspaper readings would not be well attended here or any big city to the south and east. All the larger cities of Texas had a daily distribution of newspapers fresh from the coast. They came in on the boats at Galveston and Indianola and others came down on the train from St. Louis. Strange to think of children being kidnapped by the Comanche and Kiowa, of attacks by raiding parties, while the telegraph and the steam locomotives marched out of the maw of Progress but so it was. His readings were popular only in small towns in the north and west, like Dallas and Fort McKavett, places near the frontier.

  So he bought a new set of newspapers from the Southern cities, the Memphis Daily Appeal, the Columbus, Georgia, Bugle, along with those from cities in the northeast. He returned to The Vance House and sat up late with his newspapers and smoked and paced the room. He could not sleep. Finally he went down to the lobby and sent a boy out for a pint of whiskey from Milligans. You could trust their whiskey. He loved this town and its river. It was very old. He looked out at the oil-burning streetlamp through the glass of whiskey to see it shiver in tones of gold and brass. And so am I, he thought. But I am not a cripple and I am not stupid.

  THE NEXT MORNING he drove down the Castroville Road with Pasha tied on behind as always. He did not know what to tell himself except that perhaps Anna and Wilhelm just needed the right kind of information or the ability to imagine what it was like for a child taken captive and then redeemed and then adopted by virtual strangers, yes adopted, you miserly coldhearted beasts. He would try. Reason, bribery, whatever it took.

  Then he would go on north.

  It was night by the time he had reached D’Hanis. He turned down the Leonberger farm road and thought that perhaps by this time they would be happy to get rid of her. Maybe not. He had no idea one way or the other. He doubted if they could make her work. Perhaps with severe beatings.

  As he came toward the farm he stopped by a grove of mesquite trees. He could see a light shining in the farmhouse window. He sat quietly for a while with his knuckles under his nose, thinking.

  Then he saw Johanna alone in the flat, grassy field. She had several heavy leather halters over her shoulder and walked clumsily because of a bucket she held in both hands. They had sent her out into the field alone, after dark, to get the horses. She trudged through the April grass. She was calling to the horses in Kiowa, softly, secretly. She was staggering on the uneven ground, under the weight of the halters and a wooden bucket of shelled corn and her ragged taffy hair flew in strands around her shoulders. She was only ten, sent out into the dark with twenty pounds of halters and corn and the heavy wooden bucket. Into a landscape she did not know.

  He stood up. He called to her. Johanna, he said.

  She turned. She stopped and stared at the wagon and at Pasha and himself on the seat. The tall grasses hissed around her skirt hems, the same dress; they had not even offered the girl a bath and a change of clothes.

  Kep-dun! A low cry. She turned toward him and paused and then came staggering closer. Oh, Pasha want to eat! Allite? She held out a handful of corn. I giff Pasha, allite? It was the only ploy she could think of to make Kontah stop, to make herself welcome, wanted.

  He saw dark red stripes across her forearms and hands. It was from the dog whip. The anger that overtook him nearly froze him in place. It almost shut him down. Then he said, calmly, Let’s go. It’s all right. Let’s just go. Drop that goddamn bucket.

  He wrapped the reins around the driver’s post and stepped down. She dropped the bucket and came running. She grabbed hold of the top rail of the fence and vaulted over it into the road. Her skirts swung up in a flying fan and she landed on her feet.

  Kontah, she said. Grandfather. I go with you. She began to cry. I go with you.

  Yes, he said. He put his arm around her and then took the halters and hurled them out into the dirt of the road. The Captain turned the Curative Waters wagon back toward the north. He said, And if anybody objects we will shoot them full of ten-cent pieces.

  TWENTY-TWO

  HE AND JOHANNA drove north again from San Antonio to Wichita Falls and Bowie and Fort Belknap. They traveled sometimes in convoy with the freighters or the Army. He was the man who read the news and she the little captive girl whom he had rescued and who it was said had crept up Indianwise on the depraved animal named Almay as he lay in his hoggish den and before the Captain could restrain her had beaten him to death with a bag of quarters. But look at her now, she has cleaned up quite nicely, uses soap, wears shoes, keeps the Captain’s money. They could be seen in wintertime eating houses at a back table as she bent over her book, printing out her letters with a carpenter’s pencil on the reverse of one of the Captain’s handbills as he patiently guided her hand; A is for Apple, you see my dear, and B is for Boy. When they passed through Dallas the Captain found that Mrs. Gannet had taken up with a man much younger than the Captain, a man only sixty-two, who wore thick glasses and had a waist size of at least forty-four but he lived in Dallas and would stay in Dallas and not go wandering.

  Colonel Ranald Mackenzie drove the last holdouts among the Comanche and the Kiowa to earth in P
alo Duro Canyon and thus the Indian Wars came to an end. The Captain and Johanna moved at a reasonable pace through the volatile land of Texas collecting dimes and evading trouble and the Captain read in his clear voice of the new world that had come about while the Americans were fighting their Civil War, of steamships and asteroids and a machine called a typewriter, the new four-in-hand ties. Crime was always popular; shameless sinners, amazing graces. He had the iron tire fixed and sometimes when he was studying over his newspaper articles Johanna would come to stand at his side, take up his watch from where he had laid it on the tailgate, and say, Kep-dun. Time.

  Yes, my dear, he said and gathered his marked articles for the reading.

  Then they traveled over to the cotton country of Marshall and down to Nacogdoches. And in that town the people came also to hear news from El Clarion in Spanish, men in stiff formal black suits and hats in the old Spanish style, rancheros holding on to their lands against all odds, against all Anglos. They lifted their hats to the girl and called her La Cautiva.

  From there they arrived in East Texas where the former slave population was at last turning to their own lives. Johanna and the Captain drove south along the coast to the Gulf to see the salt sea bringing in its sand-loaded waves and rainbow Portuguese men o’ war lying like celluloid cabbages on the beach. At every reading she sat sternly in front of the paint can collecting the money. Gradually she learned the English language and always spoke it with a clipped accent and always had difficulty with the letter R. He wrote down words in Kiowa to begin a dictionary of the language but was puzzled as to how to indicate the myriad specific tones and so laid it aside.

  The wandering life was amenable to her. Watching the world go by from the safety of the canopy and side curtains, a new town and new people every thirty miles. Bright springs under the shade of the live oaks in the coastal country and sometimes waterless stretches in West Texas from Kerrville to the Llano, and from there to the Concho and Fort McKavett, Wichita Falls and Spanish Fort to see Simon and Doris and their two children.

  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 sunli
ght 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.