News of the World(10)

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.





FIVE

THE NEXT DAY they went on toward Spanish Fort. The road wound along the south edge of the river in the great valley of the Red. More than a mile away south was the rise of land and the bluffs. At some distant time the river had been there, tearing away land; over the centuries it moved like a big red snake from one side of its valley to the other. The rain had stopped for now.

The Captain was unhappy about her walking but she would not ride nor would she put on her shoes. She watched the river. She well knew that on the other side was Indian Territory. Her mother was over there, her father, perhaps brothers and sisters and all her kin group, her clan within the tribe, perhaps a young man to whom she might have been promised. The black trunks of the live oak were twisted and wiry as chimney brushes. A good place for an ambush. He wished he had a dog. He should have got a dog from somebody.