News of the World (17 page)
Authors: Paulette Jiles
Johanna turned and put her arms around the Captain's neck. We will come to visit often, she said. You are my cuuative watah. Then she began to sob.
Yes, he said. He shut his eyes and prayed he would not start crying himself. And you are my dearest little warrior. You must not cry. He pressed the watch into her hand. I would like for you to have it. Time seems to have been sweeping ahead very fast these last years. How many years I worried about you and also delighted in your company. And now it is time for me to give you away.
AFTER SHE AND
John Calley were married she went with him on the next drive, all the way to Sedalia, Missouri, driving a light four-wheel buggy. It was a life she could love. And so Johanna and John Calley rode the cattle country of Texas together into the next century. And lived to see an airplane land in Uvalde. They held hands alongside their two grown children to see it strike the Texas earth and the pilot walk away from the wreckage as if he had done it on purpose.
The Captain drifted into a very old age and worked again at the Kiowa dictionary until he found it hard to see. Often he remembered her cry at the Great Brazos River Ten-Cent Shoot-out. It had been a war cry, and she had been only ten, and she had meant it.
Britt Johnson and Paint Crawford and Dennis Cureton were killed by the Comanche in 1871, on a freighting trip near Graham in North Texas. They were caught on the only open stretch between Graham and Indian Mound Mountain. They were buried where they fell and there their gravestone stands to this day.
Simon and Doris raised a family of six children, all of whose names started with the letter
D
. They were all musicians and the family traveled around North Texas bringing Irish jigs and cowboy ballads to barn dances and fairs for many years. The Horrells continued their crime spree in central Texas and New Mexico until several of them were killed in the great Lampasas Square Shoot-Out in 1877 and they finally made the Eastern papers.
San Fernando cathedral received a new front with twin towers but the old sanctuary and dome over the altar, built in 1733, remained unchanged. The
camposanto
graves had to be moved south of the San Antonio River but many of the original Spanish settlers had been buried under the floor and so there lie the bones of the Betancorts, perhaps content at last in this New World with the bells of San Fernando ringing out the aves and the angeluses. The bones of the Kiowa warriors did not lie in the earth but in the stories of their lives, told and retoldâtheir bravery and daring, the death of Britt Johnson and his men, and Cicada, the little girl taken from them by the Indian Agent, Three Spotted's little blue-eyed girl.
In his will the Captain asked to be buried with his runner's badge. He had kept it since 1814. He said he had a message to deliver, contents unknown.
Anyone interested in the psychology of children captured and adopted by Native American tribes on the frontier should read Scott Zesch's book
The Captured.
It is excellent. His book documents child captives from the Texas frontier, including his own great-great-uncle, and in each instance gives the background of death and terror these children endured before they were adopted or claimed within the tribe. There has not been a definitive study of the psychological strategies these children adopted in order to survive but one would be welcome. They apparently became Indian in every way and rarely readjusted when returned to their non-native families. They always wished to return to their adoptive families, even when they had been with their Indian families for less than a year. This was true for both the Anglo, German-Anglo, and Mexican children taken. I think the words of my Irish character Doris Dillon best expressed it. I'll let you find her words in the story.
As always much gratitude to my agent, Liz Darhansoff, and editor, Jennifer Brehl, who gave their immediate and unstinting support to this story.
Thanks to June and Wayne Chism for the story of Wayne's ancestor Caesar Adolphus Kydd, who was the original reader of the news in small towns in North Texas in the 1870s and was the inspiration for the Captain both in
The Color of Lightning
and in this book.
PAULETTE JILES
is a poet and memoirist. She is the author of
Cousins,
a memoir, and the bestselling author of the novels
Enemy Women, Stormy Weather, The Color of Lightning,
and
Lighthouse Island.
She lives on a ranch near San Antonio, Texas.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at
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The Color of Lightning
Stormy Weather
Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Kola
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.
NEWS OF THE WORLD
. Copyright © 2016 by Paulette Jiles. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Map by Nick Springer, copyright © 2016
Springer Cartographics LLC
EPub Edition October 2016 ISBN 9780062409225
ISBN 978-0-06-240920-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-06-257389-6 (international edition)
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