News of the World (15 page)

He broke down the .38, cleaned it, reassembled it. He made a list: feed, flour, ammunition, soap, beef, candles, faith, hope, charity.

F
INALLY THEY CAME
into the town of Bandera where Polish immigrants labored at a saw mill and lines of freight wagons and their oxen stood in the street to make up a convoy to San Antonio as protection against the Comanche. The great oxen came in teams of six and eight down the main street with their heads tipping from one side to the other with every stride as if they were listening to some unheard music, a ponderous waltz. The people still believed the red men came only on the full moon, despite all evidence to the contrary, and the moon was now well past full and so the people in Bandera lived in delusions of safety.

In Bandera he found that the blacksmith was overwhelmed with work for the freighters, shoeing the teams of oxen and repairing tie-rods and beating out carriage bolts on the anvil. So he let it go; it seemed the cracked iron rim would have to hold a little longer.

The Captain rented the Davenport Mercantile building and for an hour's reading they made enough to get through the final miles to Castroville. He had mined his newspapers for the last bits of news. Texas finally readmitted to the Union, for instance.
He adjusted his reading glasses in the light of the bull's-eye. Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first professional baseball team, a new concept in sport . . . Ada Kepley, first female law college graduate . . . construction of the new bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn continuing . . . a donkey adopted as the symbol of the Democrat party . . . the Vaudeville Theatre opened on The Strand in London, shocking exposure of female limbs on stage. By this time Johanna had lost her fear of crowds of white people and so she sat at the door and held out the paint can for the admittance fee. The Captain knew she regarded the coins as ammunition as much as a medium of exchange. Her head moved in birdlike jerks from face to face and if anyone tried to get past without paying she seized a sleeve in her small, hard hand and cried, Dime-ah! Chohenna choot!

They did not understand her but the meaning was clear.

THE HILLS FELL
away behind them until they were nothing more than an uneven blue line on the horizon. There were no gradual approaches in or out of the hill country. They came down from the hills and then they were in the short-grass prairie in one geological moment. They had descended to a lower altitude and thus the breeze at evening carried the soft breath of the Gulf of Mexico and the lower Rio Grande and the smell of mesquite and the palms of Resaca de la Palma and even the smoke of the cannon those long years ago, almost thirty years. It would stay with him always as everything you ever did stayed with you, every horse you ever saddled, every morning he awoke with Maria Luisa beside him, and every slap of the paten on fresh paper, every time he had thrown open the shutters in the Betancort house,
and his captain dying under his hands, always there like a tangle of telegraph wires in the brain where no dispatch was ever lost, what an odd thing, an odd thing. The soft breeze out of the south with its hint of salt lifted Fancy's mane.

Kep-dun?

Yes, Johanna?

Mine doll.

He thought for a moment. He said, The doll you left up on the Red River.

Yes, mine doll, she looking across. Looking, looking. The girl opened her hands on her lap. You read now Castroville? I say dime-ah, tin sintz?

No, Johanna. Not anymore. The Captain's heart seemed to be shaky and somewhat erratic. Not anymore, my dear.

She sat close to him on the driver's seat and put her hand in the crook of his arm. Yes, she said.

No. He pointed ahead.
Onkle
, he said.
Tante
.

She felt the arrival of something chilling, something wrong. Something lonely. He was the only person she had left in the world and the only human being she now knew. He was strong and wise and they had fought together at the springs. She ate with a fork now and wore the horrible dresses without complaint. What had she done wrong? Something was wrong. They drove through a cheerless flat landscape of mesquite and brush and the occasional fields. White people passed them in wagons. The break in the iron tire made a sound like an infinitely slow clock: click, click click.

Kontah
laff! she cried out. Ha! Ha! Ha! He turned and saw tears running down her small face and the freckles stood out
brightly in sweat and heat. She drew up her checkered skirts and wiped her face.
Kontah?

You'll adjust, he said in a firm voice. I have accepted a good round fee as well as given a promise to return you to your relatives. I am a man of my word.

Kontah
klepp honts! She tried to smile.

And to do otherwise would be dishonorable and it would be robbery. No, I am not going to klepp my honts.

Her head dropped now until her taffy-colored hair fell in a curtain over her hot face. She understood his tone of voice and the stiffness of his arm. Somewhere ahead were strange white people she could only remember as if in poorly lit lantern slides called aunt and uncle and that they were going to them. The rest she could figure out for herself but not why, or where
Kontah
would go. The wind brought no news of her people. They were gone forever. She drew her hand away from his arm and her skirt hems rolled in the breeze. Still she wept. The broken tire rim counted out the hours and miles, click click click.

They left the north-south road from the hill country to the San Antonio road and turned off to the west. They drove through a country now being sliced up by plows. Those plowing in the fields turned to look at the
Curative Waters
wagon and stared after them as they passed.

Castroville was a collection of stone houses with high-pitched roofs, some big square two-story ones with gallerias all around the second story, long windows, the women shaking out dust cloths and rugs from the balconies and powdering the heads of people on the street. It looked like all the engravings that the Captain had seen of European villages except for the
cactus and the mesquite growing in yards. In their custom they lived in villages and then went out every day to work in their fields. The Captain had shed his canvas coat on the first day of April and now drove in gartered shirtsleeves and galluses. Down here in the flat land it was very warm and any wind was welcome. At least he had brought them through alive, the horses in good condition.

They passed the inn and gristmill where it sat on the Medina River among wild pecan trees. A seminary of the Order of Mary Immaculate took up an entire three acres and in every street abided the careful and precise pacing of life as it was lived in Alsace-Lorraine. The big warehouse of the Huth Seed Company was cavernous and dim with shade. Pasha tied behind called out to other horses but finally gave it up because there were now so many.

Captain Kidd was told that Wilhelm and Anna Leonberger lived fifteen miles farther on to the west, in a daughter community called D'Hanis. That the graves of the Leonberger couple and their little daughter were at St. Dominic's church there. He did not tell anyone of Johanna's captivity or her parents. They would come in crowds. They would come bearing cakes and pies and featherbeds. The little boys would whistle and the girls stare at her expressionless face and the adults would speak to her in the Alsatian dialect. As they drove on west beyond Castroville, on the dusty caliche road, the towering steeple and the roof of St. Dominic's rose from the level horizon.

They stood before the graves. The Captain took off his hat and put it over his breast as he had been taught to do so long ago, the proper behavior. The girl looked at the headstones and
their weeping angels with some curiosity, mostly indifference, and then turned to look all around herself at a country tamed and torn with plows and weighted down with stone buildings.

We go back Dallas? she said. I don't like here. She was composed and quiet and she would try one last time. I don't like here, pliss Kep-dun, pliss.

We can't, my dear. He stepped into the driver's seat and took up the reins. We just cannot.

Still she stood by the grave and then lifted her head to the flat countryside. A woodenness came over her. A Kiowa's first and last resort was courage. A Kiowa did not beg or plead or appease. She knew at the bitter end she could starve away the despair, deny any sustenance to surrender. She wiped her face again and climbed up into the wagon.
Ausay gya kii, gyao boi tol.
Prepare for a hard winter, prepare for hard times. She braided her hair as if for battle. And so she became quiet and stilled.

They rode on in silence, through the bright, dry landscape and through the hot afternoon hours, click click click.

The Captain stopped a man on horseback.

He said, Sir, I would be grateful if you would do me a favor. I would be willing to pay you whatever you ask.

And what would that be?

The man sat his horse easily as it turned and twisted. The man wore a white shirt and dark vest with his wool suit coat tied behind the saddle. He regarded the Captain, a distinguished-looking man, clearly an
Amerikaner
, in a wagon with gold lettering and bullet holes.

The Captain said, Give me directions to Wilhelm and Anna Leonberger's farm and then ride on ahead of me and give them
the message that Johanna Leonberger, who is the daughter of Jan and Greta, missing these four years, is come from captivity among the Kiowas.

For a moment the man stared at him and then at Johanna. She looked back at him with eyes blue and hard as delft.

Then he cried out, God be praised!

The man shouted this out to the sky and without another word he turned his horse and went galloping away down the road and the last the Captain saw of him he had turned south, beyond St. Dominic's. Springtime birds shot up out of the tall grass and to his right lay that long blue serrated line of the hills they had just left, distant and somehow safe.

THEY CAME DOWN
a long straight road that led to the Leonberger farm. He got down first and held out his hand to Johanna. The girl had become blank again, blank as bone. Without moving her head she turned her eyes to look at her relatives' farm. The stone house with its long front porch running the length of the building, the sort of porch Texans called a galleria, a paling fence, chickens, farm tools, a barn, mesquite trees, dogs, the blazing sun. The man the Captain had sent ahead stood smiling and holding his horse's reins. He was staring at Johanna. Nobody said anything. Dogs came to surround them and terrify them with barking.

Raus! Raus!
A man came out and beat the dogs off with a riding quirt. Johanna's head snapped up at the sound of the German language and then, as if they had just appeared, looked from right to left at the farmhouse and the outbuildings and the broad sweep of the south brush country with the mesquite
beaten back to the field edges and the flowering huisache, the tall candelabra of yucca blooms, thick and fleshy and white.
Tante
, she whispered.
Onkle.

Captain Kidd took off his hat. He said, I am Jefferson Kyle Kidd, and I have returned your niece, Johanna. She was ransomed by Indian Agent Samuel Hammond at Fort Sill, Indian Territory.

He handed over the papers and stood in silence as if in a winter blizzard. His throat hurt. He was tired. His eyebrow hurt and the sharp pains had begun to creep around on his skull. His hands looked as bony and wrinkled as those of a catacomb mummy. Johanna crossed the driver's seat to drop down beside him on the ground.

Anna Leonberger came out to stand beside her husband. Captain Kidd waited for another interminable few seconds while the man read the papers. The Captain said, finally, I have brought her all the way from Wichita Falls on the Red River.

Ja
, yes, is what Adolph says. Wilhelm Leonberger motioned with one hand toward the messenger without looking up. He was still making his way through the paper. He was a slight blond man with a tanned face in brown planes. He turned to look at Adolph and then back to the Captain. He said, We send up fifty dollar in gold.

Yes, said Captain Kidd. I bought this wagon with it.

Wilhelm looked at it and the gold lettering,
Curative Waters,
and the bullet holes. He said, And the harness too?

Yes.

You have receipt?

No, said Captain Kidd. I do not.

Wilhelm regarded Johanna. She stood with one hand on Fancy's harness, barefooted, her shoes tied around her neck, and she was gripping the back band so tightly her knuckles were white. Her hair was braided up and around her head. Her dress skirts in madder and yellow carriage check lifted and fell in the flatland wind.

Wilhelm said, Her parents were done murder by the Indians.

I heard that, said the Captain. Yes. A tragedy.

The man who had served as messenger had an anxious look on his face. He said something loud and cheerful in Alsatian and then lifted his shoulders to the Captain.
We are not all like this,
the shrug said.

All right, vell then, come in, I suppose.

The messenger bit his lip in dismay and hesitated and then mounted and rode away.

I
T DID NOT
matter what the Captain said to Wilhelm Leonberger, that the girl needed quiet and peace and a gradual adjustment to her new circumstances, that she thought of herself as a Kiowa and must slowly be brought to learn European behavior all over again, that she had changed guardians three times now and needed reassurance. He knew that the news was too good, too electrifying to keep to oneself. Soon they would come, probably with the priest, they would come with songs and praise and thankfulness and sausages and cakes
mit schlage über.
They would cry out words in German to her, to see if she remembered. They would hold out to her tintypes of her parents, a dress she had had when she was six.
Remember? Remember?

The Captain sat on a horsehair sofa with a cup of strong coffee in one hand and a seed cake in the other. Johanna had fallen into a corner on her haunches with her hands clasped around her ankles and her skirts bunched up in her elbows, staring at all the things the white people collected and put inside their immovable houses. The daguerreotypes, which to her were strange metal plates with odd arrangements of blacks and
whites. The doilies, the carpet with violently orange and garnet flowers, glass in the windows and ironstone dishes standing up on a sideboard like plate armor, fragile little side tables. There were drapes hanging in front of the windows against all logic. She did not know why one would make windows in a stone wall and put glass in them and then cover them over with cloth.

Get up, the woman said. Get up now.

Johanna regarded her with a serious and searching gaze and then turned away.

We found them with the brains out, said Wilhelm. My brother and his wife. The savages spill out the brains and then stuff in the grass. In the skull. Like hen nest.

I see, said the Captain. His coffee was growing cold. With some determination, he drank it.

Her mother they outrage.

Terrible, said Captain Kidd.

Then kill in pieces.

Unspeakable. He shook his head. His stomach felt suddenly unstable.

Anna was a thin woman, defined and accurate in her gestures. She was dark with the smooth olive skin and black eyes of Bavarians. She turned her head slowly, slowly, and looked at the girl defiantly sitting on the floor in a welter of madder-and-yellow-checked skirts, the lace edging torn off, hard bare feet, her hair spraying out of its braids, and then pressed her lips into a tight line and regarded her shoe toes.

Anna said, The little sister they kill by the troat being cut. They hang her by a leg on the big tree on the Sabinal where is the store there. Anna shut her hands together. No chasing
will catch them. The men all chased. They rode their horses to death to chase.

I understand, said the Captain. He dabbed at his lips. The coffee was strong enough to stand a spoon in.

So. Anna looked down. She wiped at her eyes with her wrist. She is glad to come back then, from the savages.

They all turned and looked at the little captive. She was singing to herself, slowly, very low, her head nodding a beat at a time, some song in Kiowa. A curse, perhaps, on the enemies of the
Coi-gu
, a plea to the sun which is the father of all things, praise for the Wichita Mountains, a call for help.

She must learn to work again, said Wilhelm. She must learn our ways again. He took a deep breath. We have no children except for a nephew of us who is now working at the cattle establishment of the Englishman in Frio Town. We are prepared to take her in. My wife needs help. There is much work to be done. She doesn't like a chair for sitting? Look at her on the floor.

She thinks she is Indian? asked Anna. She slid her eyes sideways to look at Johanna again. Get up, she said. Johanna ignored her.

I'm afraid so, said the Captain. I hope you will take that into account. She is only ten.

The child must be corrected strong.

I think she's already been through that.

Anna nodded. She is not too small to do her share.

Certainly not, said the Captain.

Wilhelm paused with his mouth slightly open. He was puzzling over something. They waited, as if suspended on strings
while his lips worked. Finally he said, And so you have no receipt for the purchasing of that vagon?

No.

THE CAPTAIN SPENT
the night lying like a plank on a hard bed upstairs but Johanna would not be moved from the
Curative Waters
wagon bed and her big red
jorongo.
The next day, when all the people came she darted into the barn, swarmed up the ladder with her skirt front tucked into her belt, showing her ankles and shins, and would not come down. When they tried to climb halfway up the ladder and speak to her in German she hurled down a sickle and a barking spud.

Leave her alone, said Captain Kidd. Can you not just leave her alone for a while?

And so the community of D'Hanis celebrated the return of one of their own from the hands of the savages without her. Kind, well-meaning people whose labor had brought about the elegant stone church of St. Dominic's, and graceful stone houses with long gallerias, gardens grown from seeds of the celebrated Huth Seed Company of Castroville, peonies big as cabbages and cabbages the size of butter churns. The priest shook the Captain's hand heartily for several moments, clapped him on the shoulder and expressed his thanks, his admiration, said God surely had protected them that long way. He had an Irish accent. They laid out long tables in the yard, spread with Alsatian foods, smoking briskets in the Texas style, and dishes made of potatoes and cheeses and cream.

Adolph the messenger came to sit beside the Captain. He was a broad-shouldered man with the inevitable squared head
of Germany. The dogs had been beaten back under the wagons and lay there with tails thumping steadily in the dust. A bright blue scrub jay darted down to land on the fence palings and look at the food with one eye first and then the other eye, overcome with admiration for the rich look of Alsatian cooking.

The man said, Wilhelm and Anna, they work hard.

The Captain lifted a fluffy biscuit. He said, I'm listening.

They had their nephew staying with them but he ran off. Down to the Nueces strip.

Frio Town.

The same.

Because they worked him like a Turk.

Yes.

The Captain said, What can be done?

Nothing. The man gestured with his big-boned hand toward the crowd with a fork. Everyone has come to celebrate her return. They will go home and talk about it forever, unto the next generation. But they will not come here and ask about her welfare. They will not intrude into the family circle of the Leonbergers and find out if she is in fact being well-treated. Is it not the same with you English?

Unfortunately.

Not anywhere. Not English or Spanish or German. So it is with the world. I am German myself and I tell you, these people can be hard. He let out a long breath. I chased the Indians when they took the girls, killid her parents. I killid my best horse. He blew his lungs out on Bandera Pass.

You did your best. The Captain laid a hand on the man's shoulder and then got up and sat his plate on the tailgate of a
wagon. I must go, he said. Thank you for the warning. But I am helpless here.

They have no adoption papers.

Who would care? The priest?

Yes. He would be the one to prepare them I suppose.

Will they adopt her?

The tall man leaned back in his chair and turned his head to look at Wilhelm and Anna. They sat among the crowd of friends and neighbors, stern and cold as if they were at a judicial hearing. The Captain saw that few people were talking to the couple. The guests were laughing and joking among themselves, happy, talkative, and some few were glancing toward the big pole barn where Johanna hid, but they were not talking with the Leonbergers.

The messenger said, No, I do not think they will. Because then they would be legally obligated to support her and according to custom to provide her with a dowry. They did not adopt the nephew.

Well, said the Captain. I understand. He was tightening up inside somehow, his throat seemed to thicken.

The man took hold of the Captain's sleeve. He said, You cannot leave her here.

The Captain felt something close to despair. He said, Thank you sir. Perhaps I could at some time stop for a visit. Now I must be going.

He had to leave, quickly, before tears started running down his face.