News of the World: A Novel (4 page)

He dodged artillery and musket fire at Fort Bowyer in Mobile and then back across the Georgia line to Cumberland Island with his messages in a leather budget both on foot and riding those little Florida horses called Tackies. Two years of directed flight across Georgia and the Alabama country, solitary, with his information in hand. Once he fell asleep exhausted in a big empty ash hopper by a cabin to wake up and find himself in a farmyard full of Brits. He stayed where he was until it was hot noontime, when they all left. If they had discovered him they would have shot him dead in the hopper.

He always recalled those two years with a kind of wonder. As when one is granted the life and the task for which one was meant. No matter how odd, no matter how out of the ordinary. When it came to an end he was not surprised. It was too good, too perfect to last.

He wanted then to go west to the Spanish settlements but he had a widowed mother and younger sisters to look after and to provide for. He was not a man to marry without due deliberation. Twice he deliberated too long and the young women returned his letters and married others. By the time he completed his apprenticeship to a printer in Macon his mother had died and both sisters finally married. After Santa Ana had shot
up San Antonio and burned the bodies of Travis and his men at the Alamo and then got whipped at San Jacinto, he left for Texas.

The second war was President Tyler’s war with Mexico. By that time Jefferson Kidd was nearly fifty and had long settled into life in San Antonio, where he finally met his wife. He had set up his press in the Plaza de Las Islas, which was also called Main Plaza, on the first floor of a new modern building belonging to a lawyer named Branholme. He found type with tildas and the aigu accent and the upside down exclamation and question marks. He studied Spanish so he could print whatever circulars and broadsheets were needed, many for the Cathedral parish. The San Antonio newspaper fed him a great deal of business, as did the hay market and the saloons.

Often on his long rides about Texas with his newspapers in his portfolio and the portfolio in his saddlebags, the Captain fell into memories of his wife. The first day he ever saw Maria Luisa Betancort y Real. This was how the Captain knew that things of the imagination were often as real as those you laid your hand upon. And as for making her acquaintance, seeing and meeting were two different things. She was of an old Spanish family and formal arrangements had to be made for an introduction. There is a repeat mechanism in the human mind that operates independently of will. The memory brought with it the vacuity of loss, irremediable loss, and so he told himself he would not indulge himself in memory but it could not be helped. She was running down Soledad after the milkman and his buckskin horse. The milkman’s name was Policarpo and he had passed by her family’s house without stopping.
Poli! Poli!
She lost a shoe running. She had gray eyes. They were the color of rain. Her hair was curly. Her family’s house was the big
casa de dueña
of the Betancort family at the intersection of Soledad and Dolorosa. The corner of Sad and Lonely.

The Captain walked out of his print shop and took the buckskin’s halter. Poli, stop, he said. A
señorita
wants you. So he recalled it anyway, against his will, every bead on her sash fringe and her hand on his arm to balance herself as she wormed her thin, small foot back into the shoe and then the warm milk pouring into her jug. The milk smelled like cow, the vanilla scent of the whitebrush that the milk cows loved to eat on the banks of Calamares Creek. Her gray eyes.

So he became a man with a wife and two daughters. He loved print, felt something right about sending out information into the world. Independent of its content. He had a Stanhope press and a shop with nine-foot windows that allowed all the light he needed onto the casings and the plates and layout tables. During the Mexican War they said they needed him anyway, even at his age. He was to organize the communications of Taylor’s forces and was given a small hand press to print orders of the day. He had never seen a hand press so small. He wrote up Taylor’s orders and handed them to Captain Walker of the Texas Rangers and Walker’s horsemen galloped with messages between Port Isabel on the Gulf to the Army encampment north of Matamoros, on the Rio Grande.

At one point an aide-de-camp on Taylor’s staff came up with the idea of sending up a hot-air balloon to spy on Arista’s lines and drop propaganda. Finally someone else pointed out that one good shot would bring the balloon down. Others
pointed out that most of the Mexican recruits could not read. A lieutenant-colonel quashed the brainstorm. Never underestimate the ingenuity of the U.S. Army.

Taylor made him a brevet captain in the Second Division so he could organize the couriers and get what he needed: paper, ink, horses. His service in the War of 1812 recommended him for the rank. Ever afterward he was known as Captain Kidd.

And so he was at Resaca de la Palma when one of Arista’s twelve-pound balls came through the staff tent and shattered a table into fragments three feet from him. Oil from the lamps jumped into great transparent dots on the canvas. A major stood arrested with a table splinter through his neck. This collar is too tight, he said, and fainted. Against all odds he lived.

He heard the
centinela alerto
as the men crashed through Arista’s lines and saw them come back cheering with their loot; the Mexican general’s table silver and his writing desk and the colors of the Tampico Battalion. What is the use of winning a battle without loot? You overwhelm them and take their stuff—military basics.

He was with Taylor’s forces at Buena Vista, in the high mountains above Monterrey. They had been shot at all the way from the Rio Grande by either Mexican Army sharpshooters or Apaches, it was a toss-up as to which. The Captain was handed a Model 1830 Springfield flintlock but he had been raised with them and knew them well. He lay in a wagon bed and fired at the gunsmoke and, he hoped, brought down more than one hidden sniper. It was the middle of February of 1847. In the thin air of the mountains outside that Mexican town, with smoke from their campfires rising straight up in the still air, the young
men wanted to know about the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. They wanted to compare their own behavior with that of their forebears. They wanted to know if they measured up, if what they endured was as difficult, if their enemies were as cunning and as brave.

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.

FOUR

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.