News of the World (14 page)

You are joking.

I am not. They are mentally not very fast. They are every one of them one brick short of a load. And when we heard of you coming I said, Well, by God—excuse me young lady—(he touched his hat)—that there must be the Captain come to read his newspapers. And so, me and my brothers, we heard you read in Meridian one time and we were impressed by all the happenings everywhere and everything, and we sure liked your reading.

The others nodded. Johanna saw the man touch his hat and look at her and wondered what it meant. Perhaps a warning. He might throw it at her, he might be directing a curse of some sort at her.

You are very kind, said the Captain.

And I said, I bet the Horrell brothers is going to expect themselves to be in the Eastern newspapers and when they are not they are going to raise Old Jack with the Captain. And besides there's going to be some kind of a meeting about a farmer's union and a dance and they get all excited. Benjamin starts in stuttering.

That's thinking ahead, said one of the others. He turned, loose and supple at the waist, to keep the Captain in view as his restive little horse spun to the left in a quick move to unseat him. He kept it going right on around and brought it back to where it had been in the first place, facing the Captain and said, Quit that you son of a bitch. He touched his hat. Excuse me young lady.

Johanna sat with a stilled face inside the
jorongo,
her favorite cave of red wool, her magical protection.

I appreciate your concern, the Captain said.

Happy to be of service, said the tall one. We are busting cattle out of the brush over there on Bean Creek and we come across old Mrs. Becker going north on the Durand road and she said she seen you and you was worried about some stolen chickens. So we came riding back to find you.

Ah well, a minor matter, said the Captain. He stood beside Pasha and patted his jaw, sat his hat lower on his forehead.

Yes sir. So my brother here said, Well, that's Captain Kidd and we'd best leave our work and go warn him. Those cows can stay laid up one more day. They ain't going to get no wilder than they already are.

Another brother said, Not possible.

A third said, We'll be around here somewhere, you know, for the night.

Kidd nodded slowly. You have no bedrolls, he said.

Yes sir, well, we just lay down on the ground and sleep.

I see. The Captain was silent a moment, puzzling over the Horrell brothers, people whose minds were lost in such delusions, such avid desire for worldly fame.

And what about the English newspapers? said the Captain. Do they expect themselves to be on the front page of the London
Times
?

Sir, said the taller one. The Horrells don't know there
is
a England.

Well. Thank you so much for this excellent information. The Captain stepped into the stirrup and was proud of the fact that at age seventy-one he could step up from the ground onto a sixteen-hand horse. With some pain but no flinching he swung into the saddle. Clearly there was no question of doing a reading at all. He said, I will be sure to park my traps and gear and this delicate young lady nearby the springs and never stir until I can get the hell out of Lampasas.

No, seventy-two. He had just turned seventy-two on March 15, yesterday, as he had turned sixteen just before Horseshoe Bend and at that time it would have been beyond belief that he would even live to see this age, much less be traveling along a distant road far to the west, still in one piece, alive and unaccountably happy.

H
E HAD DECIDED
to avoid the Horrell brothers at all costs, but the Horrell brothers found them.

The Captain was unlimbering where they had parked beside the beautiful Lampasas springs and the giant live oaks that surrounded them. The spring was in a low place, one of the soothing green low places of this high and dry country, and made a reflective pond. The surface tossed glittering reflections against the trunks. On one side was a stand of Carrizo cane, graceful and green. It had tall plumed heads. Great limbs overhead were alive with birds on their spring migration to the north, lately come up from Mexico; the quick and nervous robins, the low song of a yellow oriole, painted buntings in their outrageous clown colors.

The Horrell brothers sat on their horses and watched as the Captain and Johanna began unloading their gear. They rode good horses, Copperbottom breeds, Steel Dust lineage. The Captain could see it in the lines of their bodies. They sat and watched Pasha narrowly as he grazed in the long grasses at the verge of the spring. The live oaks were high overhead and the
evening breeze moved over the surface of the water. The Captain ignored them.

You're the man that reads the news.

Yes, I am.

Well how come we ain't in the news?

I don't know, the Captain said. I don't write the newspapers.

I'm Merritt Horrell and this is Tom and he's my brother, and these are my other brothers here. Mart and Benjamin and Sam.

The five brothers wore various articles of dress that had been pieced together out of military uniforms from both sides, missing buttons and faded to an unvarying slate color. One had two different kinds of stirrups, one metal, one wood, and none of their hats seemed to fit. The youngest, or at least the smallest, no more than fourteen by the look of him, wore a derby far too big for his head and the Captain realized the boy had stuffed the inside band with rags or paper to make it fit. It seemed suspended over his small head. Whatever woman had raised these five boys must now be in the county asylum, if Lampasas County had one, and if they did not, they had best build one soon.

Enchanted, gentlemen, he said. Maybe you
are
in the news. You could well be in the news back in the east. Say, Chicago or the little one-sheet paper in Ball Ground, Georgia. Just think. The Captain shook out his newspapers. Perhaps London or even California.

Well, we should be, said Merritt. He had a dull stare that was also strangely intent. We killed a right smart of Mexicans. You'd think they'd put in something.

He took off his hat and slapped the edge of his hand into the
crown to straighten the crease. He looked as if he had combed his stiff yellow hair with a skillet.

Kidd nodded and said, And nobody objects to your killing a right smart of Mexicans?

Ain't nobody. Merritt replaced his hat and then crossed his hands on the saddle horn. Governor Davis chucked out everbody that was with the Confederacy and never replaced them. Some Army people come around sometimes. I guess they would object probably.

Could be. The Captain reached for a roll of rope and turned and strung it between two trees and began to throw the blankets over it to air them.

Would they be doing a wood engraving of us?

I have no idea.

He looked up and saw Johanna on the far side of the spring, watching from the Carrizo cane. This surprised him. She could move so silently when she wanted. She was an apparition of flying hair and bare feet in the deepening shadows. The cane plumes rose and fell with the chilly breeze, all around and above her head.

Well, said Merritt. Come to the saloon in town, it's called The Gem, the other one is The Great Western, but come to The Gem and read your news. Telling how we pursued the hated Red Man and everthing, how the Higgins brothers cruelly murdered, et cetera. Despite Davis's pitiless state police and like that.

I hope you won't mind if I am late.

No sir, not at all. You come anytime. If people don't want to hear you read about us, well then, we would not object to them leaving.

And so he did not go, but sat up and waited and before nine o'clock by his hunting watch he could tell from the noise in town the Horrells were probably drunk. He could hear them all the way from the springs; sounds of music and shouts, far away and thin. He watched the night world and heard its sounds. He smelled tobacco smoke. He watched Pasha; the horse lifted his head from his grazing and stared across the spring at what Kidd guessed were other horses but did not call out. The Captain saw the glow of a cigarette. The Merritt brothers were there and guarding him and Johanna as they said they would. They would take turns, watch on watch. He did not sleep at all that night but sat leaning against a wheel with his revolver in hand and they left before it was daylight.

T
HEY CAME SOUTH
into the hill country at last. And here everything was still.

He rode Pasha and put a sort of blanket saddle pad on the packhorse under the harness and the butcher knife in his waistband as well as his revolver. If the raiders came he would cut the packhorse out of the harness and throw Johanna on the saddle pad and they would run for it and abandon the wagon. Perhaps looting the wagon would slow them down.

The Comanches mostly came from the north, down from the Red River, across the open arid country around Lampasas. The dust they raised could be seen for miles and so they skirted the towns and forts. When they came on south to the hill country there was concealment and water and isolated farms. They loved the hill country with a raider's passion. Here was fighting and here was loot with no soldiers to stop them.

The world fell away from beneath the wheels of the
Curative Waters
wagon, valley after valley, ridge after ridge falling away to the blue horizon.

As they came to the top of a rise he kept carefully to one side
of the road so they could not be skylighted and stopped. He would sit for fifteen, twenty minutes at a time looking and listening for signs of life, for raiding parties. He listened for the quarreling bark of a squirrel, disturbed by riders. He watched the buzzards circling overhead, looking for both the tight spiral that meant a dead body somewhere, a carcass either human or animal, and also for their sudden dips, for they were curious birds and would drop like stones on those remarkable wings to inspect something new or unusual.

Johanna watched as well. She did not play with her cat's cradles or make up sentences in English. She wore the confining shoes and laid the shotgun longways at her feet. He did not smoke his pipe. The distinctive odor carried for long distances. And also he took in the air for the scent of others' tobacco smoke. Nothing. The wind had dropped. From the rises he inspected the tops of the trees below, both before and behind the rise, the live oak and the bur oak, the occasional hickories in ravines, for movement that was not made by the wind. Nothing. So they went on.

He kept the packhorse's lead in his hand. They started in the early morning when the stars told their way from east to west. They passed abandoned farms, little cabins with stone fencing here and there. Some had been burned down.

They came through the red granite country north of Llano. Mountains of red and pink granite. The valleys were starred with Mexican hat and gayfeather waving in tall magenta rods, bluebonnets by the acre. It was flowering time in the hill country. New grass for their horses, tender growth for the whitetail deer, and at night a ringtail cat with it sixteen-stripe tail and bat
ears and eyes big as buckeyes carefully raised a kernel of corn from the horse's spillage, lifted the kernel to its cat mouth while they silently watched. It sat curious and fearless at the farthest edge of the firelight while Johanna whispered to it in Kiowa, inflections of delight.

They came to a destroyed cabin and he pulled up and then went inside. Broken cups and pieces of dress material torn on a nail. A doll's body without a head. He dug a .50-caliber bullet out of the wall with his knife and then carefully placed it on the windowsill as if for a memento. Here were memories, loves, deep heartstring notes like the place where he had been raised in Georgia. Here had been people whose dearest memories were the sound of a dipper dropped in the water bucket after taking a drink and the click of it as it hit bottom. The quiet of evening. The shade of the Devil's trumpet vine over a window, scattered shadows gently hypnotic. The smell of a new calf, a long bar of sun falling into the back door over worn planks and every knot outlined. The familiar path to the barn walked for years by one's father, grandfather, uncles, the way they called out,
Horses, horses.
How they swung the bucket by the handle as they went at an easy walk down the path between the trees, between here and there, between babyhood and adulthood, between innocence and death, that worn path and the lifting of the heart as the horses called out to you, how you knew each by the sound of its voice in the long cool evening after a day of hard work. Your heart melted sweetly, it slowed, lost its edges.
Horses, horses.
All gone in the burning.

Once at evening they came downhill to a stream crossing where the clear water made its way between great curving bluffs.
Level strata of limestone in stripe after stripe carved back into a deep hollow with the big trees hanging down from overhead. It was like being in a tunnel. Maidenhair fern in bright lime-colored bouquets grew out of the limestone where water seeped through and it smelled of water and wet stone and the green fern. There was a small springhouse made of logs backed into the hollow. He looked into it; little troughs carved in the stone for milk jugs, a square pool for cheeses and perhaps for meat in metal containers. The water was cold.

There were deep holes of water here, quite clear. A big one just downstream of the crossing. From a distance they heard somebody shouting, over the hilltops or from a hilltop. In what language he could not tell. He stood still for a long time and listened. Then the shouting stopped. He and the girl sat in silence for a long time but it did not begin again.

Nevertheless, she needed a swim and a bath with the soap and so he backed the
Curative Waters
wagon into a very small valley that led into the larger stream. He unhitched Fancy and filled the horse's morales with hard corn. He led them far up the narrowing little valley and its thick foliage and tied them and waited until they had eaten and then left them there, hidden. That would keep them safe for the night although they would be hard to handle in the morning after being tied up all night. But he could not take a chance on losing them by letting them free to graze.

He came back to the running stream and sat with his back turned while Johanna jumped into the deep pool and swam in her Bad Water Lady of Durand drawers and shift, silently, carefully. No splashing. Soap bubbles drifted noiselessly down the
stream. He washed his face in a basin and shaved and at supper, cooked over a small fire quickly doused, they sat eating and listening. Raiding parties of young men had their own laws and their own universe in which the niceties of civilized warfare did not count and an old man and a young girl were fair game to them, for in the Indian Wars there were no civilians. After a while the Captain and Johanna went to sit in the springhouse and listen to the soft clatter of running water. In the shadows they could keep watch and perhaps sleep a little. The running water was soothing and sweet.

Two great live oaks overhung the stream from above. They dropped their leaves one at a time into the water. The new leaves were coming in and pushing off the old ones slowly, slowly. They were small and hard. They fell like pennies.

And looking out of the springhouse window he saw one of the great drooping limbs overhead begin to shake. Its farthing leaves came down in a light shower.

He drew in his breath in a small sound. He thought at first the enormous live oak was at last coming loose from its tenuous hold on the bank overhead and would fall. He had seen it happen once before. The girl woke up and came to stand beside him in the shadow and look through the minute window.

Out of the broad limbs a figure dropped. It was so startling that it seemed to take forever. A slim young man with long blond hair fell and fell. He held his bow and quiver overhead with one hand. The moon shone on him as he fell. His hair flowed up over his head like spun flax, a cloud of gold. It was cut short on one side—Kiowa. He struck the water and thin fans like crystal erupted around him.

He then surfaced and skimmed through the water to the bank. He held his weapons over his head.

Captain Kidd turned his hand with the revolver in it so that the barrel pointed out. The water reflections made deep blue planes under his eyes. He wondered if she would betray him. If she would call out to the young captive and his fellows who hid above on the bluff somewhere. If this was his last night on earth. This was what she had wanted so much, to return to the Kiowa and the life she had known. The people whom she considered her people, and their gods her gods.

But when he turned and looked into her eyes she put her hand on his arm. She shook her head once. Then they saw three others drop out of the live oak, one after the other, flinging great screens of water around themselves as they broke the surface and swam to the bank. Soft noises of Kiowa. Quiet murmurs. And then they slipped away.

Perhaps they both had narrowly escaped death—death by arrow, death by beauty, death by night.

AND SO THEY
went on south to Castroville.

They came through Fredericksburg, a small town in the hill country, beleaguered, nervous, inept at defense. The population was almost entirely German. He had heard it called Fritztown. The main street going through town was wide enough for three or four vehicles to pass abreast and was an open invitation for warriors to gallop straight down the middle and fire in both directions if they wished.

Slowly and soundlessly the evening sun poured its red light down the main street. The lights of the hotel came on, dust
bloomed up at Fancy's heels. The Captain took two rooms as usual and paid for baths and a washerwoman. The people came around the green excursion wagon to stare when they heard the Captain and Johanna's names from the hotel owner. The girl was Johanna Leonberger, a captive who had been redeemed for German coin silver. They had heard about the silver from the grandfather of Bianca Babb who had brought his granddaughter back from Indian Territory.

They gave him advice and warnings; of how the captives were strange, how they disliked white people, how they had peculiar eyes and had probably partaken of some secret potion or drug to make them so. That was the only answer, the only reasonable explanation.

The Captain offered to do a reading even though he knew very few people would come because so few people here were conversant with English and especially newspaper English. Or where things were in the outside world. It was in the main to help Johanna learn the proper protocol for sitting at the door and collecting dimes. And in reality, the fewer people to attend, the better. It was a practice session. He put up his advertisements and was given the use of the Vereins Kirche for that night. He asked for a blacksmith to fix his broken tire but the local blacksmith had been killed on the road to Kerrville.

In her room they shared a supper of some German dish made of noodles and ground mutton and a cream sauce. He still could not trust her manners in a restaurant. But she carefully placed her napkin on her knee and lifted each bite on her fork straight up to the level of her mouth and then aimed it straight in.

Is all lite Cho-henna?

I suppose that will do, he said.

She slurped a noodle until it flipped up and struck her on the nose.

Johanna!

She laughed until tears came to her eyes. She wiped her hair out of her face and addressed herself once again to the food. The Captain tried to be stern and then gave up. He set to the dish and the preserved cauliflower to one side with enthusiasm. It had been a long time since he had eaten a well-cooked supper or anything made with milk or cream and they did not have to wash up the dishes in a bucket.

That watch, she said. He took it out of his pocket and opened it.

In thirty minutes, he said, holding it out. We must go read at seven.

It is when the little hand there on seven and big hand on that twelve?

That's it, my dear, he said. Then he pointed down the hall to the bathroom and handed her a towel. Go, he said.

AT THE VEREINS
Kirche, the People's Church, which was both a church and a community hall and a fort if need be, he sat her down at the door with the paint can on a fern stand beside her.

Dime-ah, he said. He held up his hand. Sit. Stay. Then he walked out the door, turned, and walked back in and pretended to notice Johanna for the first time, and said, Ten cents?

She understood instantly and pointed to the paint can. Dime-ah! She said it sternly and with great firmness. And so that evening he read from several Eastern papers while Johanna took up the task of being gatekeeper as if she had been waiting
for something like this all her life. She fixed every person who came in with her glassy blue stare and pointed to the can and said, Dime-ah, tin sintz, a small girl with bottom teeth like a white fence and braided ochre hair and a dress in carriage check. From somewhere she had dredged up yet another word in German and when someone walked past without noticing her she cried out,
Achtung!
Tin sintz!

Joy and liveliness had come back to his readings now. His voice had its old vibrancy again and he smiled as he read the amusing things, the Hindi women who would not say their husband's names, odd telegraph messages caught by a reporter, and recalled how dull his life had seemed before he had come upon her in Wichita Falls. He saw her bright, fierce little face break into laughter when the crowd laughed. It was good. Laughter is good for the soul and all your interior works.

THAT NIGHT HE
walked back to the hotel with her and put her to bed in her own room. She yawned enormously and said, Big hoas liddle hoas, wiped her hands on the bedcover, yawned again. Then she fell back on the bed and was asleep within moments. He tiptoed out. He knew that by the morning she would be sleeping on the floor. But still this was an improvement. Their washed and ironed clothes lay in a bundle at his door so that they could be clean and civilized by morning. He thought about how Johanna was being filed down and her sharp edges ground away. The Captain sat by his lamp and tried to find articles in his newspapers that were not tied to dates; fluff pieces on chemical discoveries and astronomical surprises. Alphonse Borrelly had discovered an asteroid and named it Lydia and the
Earl of Rosse had calculated the surface temperature of the moon at 500 degrees Fahrenheit. That would do in a pinch. He laid out his traveling clothes, the old rough flannel plaid Plains shirt, his lace-ups, his clean socks. It was forty miles of rough country south to Bandera and were they to be killed and scalped their bodies would be found bloody but spruce.