News of the World (3 page)

The Texas Rangers lounged against the caissons and listened. They were cool young men and utterly reckless and apparently without fear. The Mexicans hated them and called them
rinches
but if they could have fielded an independent cavalry wing as skilled and as lethal they would have, but they didn't, and so there you were.

The Captain had never met any troops or unit like them. They listened out of courtesy to an older man. And so in the cold night under the high stars of Mexico, he told them what he could. Or what he felt like telling. The Creek and the Choctaw were using smoothbores, he said. His Georgia militia company brought their own rifles and used minie balls, that on their way to Pensacola their wagons had sunk hub-deep in the sand. That his captain had got killed on the second day of the battle and he managed to crawl out and drag him back under cover but he died. And quickly went on: that Jackson was a fearless man, he was a maniac when he was fighting. The question hung unasked in the air: Were you wounded?

And yes, I got shot in the hip, he said. Didn't hit the bone. I didn't know it until later. The Red Sticks had run out of ammunition and they were firing all kinds of things out of those smoothbores. I think I got hit with a spoon.

He paused. The knees of his trousers smoked from the heat
of the fire and his hands were stained with ink. At that time he carried a new Colt revolver and it dragged and was heavy at his belt. The Rangers smoked and waited in silence in the shadow of their hats. Their beards were silky because they were young but when you looked at their faces it seemed they were artificially aged in some way.

They wanted some wisdom, some advice.

You can get hit and not know it, he said. So could the man next to you. Take care of one another.

They nodded and stared at the fire and thought about it. They thought about fighting now in a strange land and against a strange army, one that was stiffly European and formal where the barefoot mestizo privates still were forced to wear neck stocks. Their own opponent was José Mariano Martín Buenaventura Ignacio Nepomuceno García de Arista Nuez, who was a fiercely committed republican and at odds with his own general staff. The Mexican Army was in fact torn into factions by immovable aristocrats and generals with liberal theories.

Afterward, late, when he was alone and the fire of mesquite wood was dying, it came to him that he should take on the task of dispensing these interesting, nay,
vital
facts gleaned from the intelligence reports and the general press. For instance, the struggles going on at the top levels of the Mexican Army. If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place. He had been perfectly serious. That illusion had lasted from age forty-nine to age sixty-five.

And then he had come to think that what people needed, at bottom, was not only information but tales of the remote, the mysterious, dressed up as hard information. And he, like a runner, immobile in his smeared printing apron bringing it to them. Then the listeners would for a small space of time drift away into a healing place like curative waters.

S
HE WALKED ALONGSIDE
the wagon, singing.
Ausay gya kii, gyao boi tol.
Prepare for a hard winter, prepare for hard times. She walked beside the horse barefoot with the soles of her small feet hard as wood. Like all people who do not wear shoes her big toes pointed straight ahead.
Ausay gya kii,
she sang.

As far as she knew she was walking into disaster, into a land blighted and starved. All around in the rolling hills there were neither buffalo nor canyon wrens with their spilling of song. In this land there were no Kiowa or mother or father. She was utterly alone, trapped in peculiar clothing, a dress made of cloth with blue and yellow stripes and a tight waist. She had been laced into a thing that she could only imagine was for magical purposes, meant to confine her heart and her breath in a sort of cage to hold her forever like a shut fist that would never open.

She put her hand on the shaft of the wagon and sang as she walked because it was better than weeping. The land was covered with the short, contorted oaks of the Red River valley, their limbs all so black with rain. The earth rolled loose on either side as if it had been released from the confinement
of towns. It was a puzzling thing as to why they packed up in towns in the way they did. She carried her shoes around her neck with the laces tied together and walked in the felting of wet leaves. She would find out where they were going and then either escape or starve herself to death. It was not worth being alive when one was alone among aliens. People who would kill you, who had killed your dear ones. The Agent had said she was going back to her people. As far as she could tell he was not making a joke.

The Captain sat in the driver's seat of the wagon with his coat collar turned up and the brim of his old field hat down over his forehead. A light drizzle drifted through the landscape of cranky post oak trees whose limbs did not have six inches of straight in any of them. The road rose and fell on the short and choppy hills on the south bank of the Red. His bay saddle horse, Pasha, was tied at the rear of the wagon to a ringbolt and sauntered along, happy and free of a rider. His packhorse, Fancy, was now between the shafts; she had been broken to harness and went along well enough. She looked longingly from one side of the two-track road to the other at the tufts of grass, now just coming up green in late February. To their left was the Red River, a wide sheet of water the color of brick. He pulled up.

He motioned to the girl. She stood beside the packhorse and gripped the harness. She stared at him and did not come any closer.

Look here, he said. He pulled out the Smith and Wesson. He clicked the cartridge cylinder loose and flipped it out, showed her the charges. With a twist of his hand he snapped it back into place. He said, This is in case there's trouble. He stared
about himself in a theatrical manner, mimed caution, held out the revolver toward the trees and made shooting noises. He put it back on the wagon floorboards on his left side with a broad, obvious gesture.

She was still, unmoving. Only her eyes moved.

And this, he said. He pulled out the old shotgun. He reached into the wagon box and took out a handful of shells. He said, In case of attack, this completely inadequate load of bird shot will make a loud noise, if nothing else. The girl watched carefully, confused, as he lifted the shotgun and then her face cleared. He had been holding the shotgun and the revolver left-handed. The Captain turned the shotgun muzzle in every direction with his deep hawk's eyes squinted down the barrel.

He put everything back. He didn't smile at her. He knew better. She stood still as a fallen leaf. He sat, lanky and tall, on the driver's seat and regarded the girl with a calm look until finally she gave him one sharp nod. It seemed to him she understood but was not willing to concede they might be on the same side against anyone or anything.

They went on. He thought about her oddness. What was it that made the girl so strange? She had none of the gestures or expressions of white people. White people's faces were mobile and open. They were unguarded. They flung their hands about, they slanted and leaned on things, tossed their heads and their hats. Her faultless silence made her seem strangely not present. She had the carriage of every Indian he had ever seen and there was a sort of kinetic stillness about them and yet she was a ten-year-old girl with dark blond hair in streaks and blue eyes and freckles.

You, he said, and pointed at her.

She made a small, slight dodging motion to one side. Her loose biscuit-colored hair flew in a wave. Kiowa people never pointed with their fingers. Never. They pointed with gun barrels and with the shaman sticks that threw venomous demons into an enemy's body. Otherwise not. He could not know that.

You, Jo-han-ah, he said. You, Johanna.

She was leaning slightly forward from the waist as if this would help her understand. She held on to the roan mare's back band. The rich scent of the horse and its warm anatomy was the only thing familiar to her in this catastrophic change in her life.

Captain. He pointed to himself.

She walked sideways in order to look at him and after a minute or so she understood that this pointing might not do any harm. He could not be throwing the demons into himself. Surely not.

He tried again. He sat quietly with the reins in his right hand and with his left he pointed to her again. Johanna, he said, patiently. He made an encouraging gesture. He waited.

She let go of the back band and stood still and held up both hands in front of herself with the palms out. He pulled up the little roan mare. She called on her guardian spirit, the one who had told her she must wear two down puffs in her hair along with a golden eagle wing feather as a sign that he would always be with her. They had taken them away. They had thrown it all out a window. But her guardian spirit might still hear her. The old man wanted her to say some enchanted naming word. It might not be harmful.

She said, Chohenna. When she spoke her lower teeth showed white.

He pointed to himself. Captain, he said.

Kep-dun, she said.

He pointed to her again.

She stiffened a moment in fear but gathered her courage and said, Chohenna.

Then he pointed to himself again.

She said, Kep-dun.

Very well. Now, we'll go on.

THEY CROSSED THE
upper Little Wichita only a mile from where it ran into the Red River and they crossed it at a run. The Captain lifted Johanna into the wagon bed, pulled Pasha's lead rope loose and let him go. He found the camp knife, a butcher knife, and stuck it sheath and all into his belt in case he might have to cut Fancy out of her harness. They started a quarter-mile from the crossing at a fast trot and then hit the water at a gallop. Johanna clung to the long seats and waves of spray battered the
Curative Waters East Mineral Springs Texas
gold letters. They slowed as the current stopped them and then it took hold of the little mare and their wagon as well. Crows shot up out of the far bank screaming. Foam churned around them, drift and duff ran on top of the fast water in snaking lines. Briefly the wagon floated. The roan mare snorted, went under, came up and beat at the floodwaters with her hooves. Then she struck hard bottom and they pulled up on the far bank with water draining in streams. Pasha was a constitutionally brave horse and he plunged
in after them without hesitation and struck out and came out a few yards downstream with triumphant little tosses of his head. He shook himself in a flying halo of spray and came trotting to join them and was retied to the wagon. As they went on the Captain cocked his head and listened to a steady clicking sound. He got down and looked at the front wheel. There was a break in the iron tire. Nothing to do about it now; maybe there would be a blacksmith in Spanish Fort.

THAT NIGHT THE
Captain demonstrated to her the little sheetiron stove he had bought along with the wagon. It would make less smoke than a campfire. It was the size of a large ammunition box with a small chimney going up two feet or so, enough to keep smoke out of their faces. He let down the tailgate and patted the stove where it sat, square and black and forbidding.

She had no idea what it was for.

Stove, he said. Fire. He fitted the pipes.

She stood in front of it in her yellow-and-blue-striped dress, her bare feet, the bright taffy-colored hair streaming down her back, damp with the drizzle. In a swift motion she suddenly carried her right arm down in front of herself and then snapped her fingers upward in a blossom of hard nails and calluses.

Ah, said the Captain. Sign. The sign for fire. He knew a bit of the Plains Indians sign language and so he made the sign for Yes.

This was encouraging. They at least had some limited means of speech.

He showed her how the stove worked—the top lid the size of a hand, the draft wheel. He strung up one of the wagon's side curtains between a short, warped post oak and the wagon
side to make a shelter against the drizzle. She watched his every move. Perhaps she was afraid, perhaps she knew she had to learn how these things worked.

The horses were happy with their morales, feed bags holding a hefty portion of shelled corn. The girl stood beside the little mare and ran her hand down the horse's leg. She made a little pitying noise. The mare was young and strong but she had a slightly twisted right foreleg, the hoof turned inward several degrees and because of this the Captain had got her cheap. The girl had spotted it immediately and she patted the mare gently as she and Pasha stood side by side and ground up their corn with a noise like hand grinders.

The Captain found dry sticks in the clusters of tall bear grass and fished his match safe out of his inner coat pocket. He did everything slowly and deliberately. He started the fire. Johanna watched with a cautious expression, a mistrustful look. She bent toward the little stove to peer in the grate and saw the air sucked into it to make the sticks burn with more intensity. Cautiously she patted the top and then snatched her hand back.

Pi tso ha!

Yes, he said. Whatever that means. Hot, I suppose.

He made up coffee and a corn dodger and fried bacon. She sat under the canvas side curtain with her food in her hands for a long time. At last she sang over it, as if adoring it, as if the bacon were a live being and the smoking dodger a gift from the Corn Woman. There was no campfire to throw shadows but there was a half-moon waxing and it seemed to run in reverse between cascading clouds that flowed together and then pulled apart and then ran together again.

The Captain wiped his plate with the cornbread. She might run. She had nowhere to go, however. The Kiowa were across the river and the river was a loose and moving ocean of foaming rusty floodwater nearly half a mile wide that carried off entire trees. She might lay hands on the revolver or the shotgun, and he could wake up in the next world.

The Captain lay back on his old Spanish saddle that he had turned upside down, his head pillowed on the fleecing. He brought out the
Chicago Tribune
and flipped through it by the light of the candle in the candle lantern. She lay rolled in a thick serape called a
jorongo
in a red-and-black diamond pattern and stared at him with her open, flat blue eyes.

He rattled the pages and said, There's a big new packing plant in Chicago. Astounding, isn't it? They feed the cattle in at one end and at the other end they come out in cans.

She never took her eyes from him. He knew she was prepared for some kind of violence. Captain Kidd was a man old not only in years but in wars. He smiled at her at last and took out his pipe. More than ever knowing in his fragile bones that it was the duty of men who aspired to the condition of humanity to protect children and kill for them if necessary. It comes to a person most clearly when he has daughters. He had thought he was done raising daughters. As for protecting this feral child he was all for it in principle but wished he could find somebody else to do it.

You are an immense amount of trouble, he said. We will both be happy when you are with your relatives and you can make their lives a living hell.

Her face did not change. She wiped her nose slowly on her sleeve.

He turned the page. He said, This is writing. This is printing. This tells us of all the things we ought to know in the world. And also that we ought to want to know. He glanced over at her. He said, There are places in the world called England and Europe and In-di-a. He blew smoke from his nose. He probably should not be smoking. You could smell it for miles.

In-di-a, she whispered. She began to place her fingertips together one by one.

He lay back in his blankets and said his prayers for Britt, who was always in harm's way in his travels. For the safety of his daughters and son-in-law and the grandsons, perhaps soon to travel, at his request, the long and perilous journey from Georgia. This would include crossing the Mississippi. For his own safety and that of Johanna, also in harm's way.

So many people, so much harm.

He put his hat over his face and after a while he fell asleep.