News of the World(14)

Simon looked out the rainy glass at the vehicles passing by, the men and women hurrying along the raw, new boardwalk.

You jest, he said. That’s four hundred miles.

No, I do not.

How old is she?

Ten. But Simon, she is wise in the ways of battle and conflict, it seems to me.

Simon watched a cowboy walk by with his hat slanted against the increasing rain and his boots shining with wet.

The fiddler nodded and said, They are always at war.

Be that as it may. She has lost all acquaintance with the uses and manners of white people and I need somebody to keep watch on her while I do my reading. You and your particular friend Miss Dillon would do me a great favor if you would sit with her while I read. I am afraid if I left her alone she might go bolting off.

Simon nodded slowly like a walking beam. He thought about it.

She wants to go back to them, he said.

She apparently does.

I know of a person who was like that, said Simon. They called him Kiowa Dutch. He was blond-haired completely. Nobody knew where he had been captured from, or when. He didn’t either. I played for a dance there at Belknap when they brought him in. He got away from the Army fellows who were returning him and he is up there yet.

I think I heard about him, said the Captain. He drummed his fingers on his knee. You know, it is chilling, how their minds change so completely. But I have taken on this task and I have to try.

Simon lifted his fiddle and ran the bow across the strings. His fingers, hard and coarse with joinery work, blunt at the tips, skipped on the strings and a tune emerged: “Virginia Belle.” She bereft us when she left us, sweet Virginia Belle. Then he stopped and said, Sorry. I can’t help it. So yes. I will go and get Doris. He sat for a moment considering where Doris might be. Probably attending a lady named Everetson who was ill with a fever. A yawn overtook him and he lifted the back of the fiddle over his mouth the way nonfiddlers would cover a yawn with their hand. He said, Captain, you have taken on a heavy load here, I’m afraid. He tapped his fiddle bow on his shoe.

For an old man is what you mean.

Simon stood and then bent to his case, flipped a piece of waxed silk around his instrument, and laid it in the velvet. Click click he snapped the catches shut. He straightened.

Yes, for an old man is what I mean exactly.


THE CAPTAIN AND Simon and Doris all hurried through the drizzle to the stand of bur oaks. Between their overhead of rust-colored leaves and the canopy and stretched side curtains, the wagon was dry enough. The girl had made them a supper of cornbread and bacon and coffee and was sitting cross-legged between the long seats like a Hindu yoga with it spread before her. In the lantern light the gold letters of Curative Waters shone brightly.

They ducked under the side-curtain awning.

Doris pulled off her dripping straw hat and said, Hello!

Johanna glanced at the Captain as if to ask if he, too, saw this female apparition and then returned her gaze to Doris without saying a word.

Doris carried a small bundle. She unwrapped it and held it out to the girl with a bright smile. It was a doll with a china head and painted dark eyes. It wore a dress in a brown and green check and shawl and its shoes were painted black on china feet. Johanna reached out one dirty hand from under her blanket and took the doll by the foot. She held it around the body for a moment. It was like the taina sacred figure that was taken from its wrappings only at the Sun Dance. She looked searchingly into its eyes. Then she propped it against one of the side benches and opened both her hands to it and said something in Kiowa.

Hmm, said Simon. He stood under the stretched canvas and tousled his hair to shake off the wet. He had left his fiddle safe in his tiny room over the wagon maker’s. He wore an old 1840s infantry coat with a high band collar. Its surface was a series of patches, some of which overlapped. My word. I believe she is addressing it. The fiddler held out his hands to the heat of the little stove, and worked his stiff fingers open and shut to loosen the joints.

Doris found the ironstone plates in the cook box. She said, she is like an elf. She is like a fairy person from the glamorie. They are not one thing or another. She laid out the plates wherever she could find room on the tailgate and on tops of boxes.

Simon regarded the light of his life with a solemn expression. Doris, he said, your Irish comes out at the strangest times.

Don’t stare at her, said Doris. That is what she is.

She thinks it’s an idol, said Simon. The Captain bent over the tailgate searching through his carpetbag and listened to them.

Aye, perhaps, said Doris. She shoveled food onto the plates and laid whatever utensil she could find on each one; the two forks, the camp knife, a serving spoon and then lifted her head to look at the girl; so alone, twice captured, carried away on the flood of the world. Doris’s eyes burned suddenly with tears and she lifted the back of her hand to her eyes. But I think not. The doll is like herself, not real and not not-real. I make myself understood I hope. You can put her in any clothing and she remains as strange as she was before because she has been through two creations. Doris laid a plate before the girl. Doris’s hair was Irish black with blue lights in it, a rare, true black. She was a small woman and her wrists were ropy with muscle and hard work. She said, To go through our first creation is a turning of the soul we hope toward the light, out of the animal world. God be with us. To go through another tears all the making of the first creation and sometimes it falls to bits. We fall into pieces. She is asking, Where is that rock of my creation?