News of the World(15)
The Captain took out shaving gear. He went to the far side and hung his mirror on a bolt end and shaved. He said, Miss Dillon, you know this how?
An Gorta Mor, she said. In the famine children saw their parents die and then went to live with the people on the other side. In their minds they went. When they came back they were unfinished. They are forever falling. She shook out her wet, pinned-up skirt and watched as Johanna carefully ate pieces of bacon with her hands.
Well, I don’t know what I can do about it. The Captain came back around, put away his gear, and sat on the flour keg. He bent his long, elderly body with a light creaking of the spine and went through his newspapers. He had to make a living. This was intriguing but first he needed to hear the coins falling into the paint can; then he could listen to mysteries about unfinished children, trailing their griefs and ragged edges.
And the newspapers, they say nothing about this at all or about the poor at all, Doris said. There are great holes in your newspapers. Nobody sees them. God sees them.
The Captain ate his supper and then crossed his knife and fork on his plate and put the plate on the tailgate. Yes, I am sure He does. At any rate, she has to go back to her family. It’s only my concern between here and Castroville.
Who are her people?
Germans.
Ah! Doris clapped both hands over her face for a moment and then dropped them in her lap. And so now that’s three languages the child must know. She wiped her hands on flour sacking. Leave her with us, Captain. We will take her.
Simon stopped eating. He drew in his lower lip and raised both eyebrows in an expression of surprise.
Doris said, She is like my little sister that died.
Ahem, Doris, my dear, said Simon. And so we will be married next month with a child already.
Doris lifted her slim shoulders. The priest, she said, has seen everything.
The Captain thought, The girl is trouble and contention wherever she goes, wherever she lands. No one wants her for herself. A redheaded stepchild destined for the washhouse.
Miss Dillon, that is generous of you but I must return her to her relatives as I said I would do, and for which I took a coin of fifty dollars in gold.
Simon’s relief was plain in his face.
The girl shrank away into the interior, against the backrest, and hid in the thick jorongo.
SEVEN
CAPTAIN KIDD HAD changed into his reading clothes in the back of the Masonic Hall. They were a decent black frock coat, knee length, single-breasted, a matching vest, a white shirt in silk and cotton figured with a lyre design in silk of the same color—that is, a bit yellowed. He had one of the new ascots in black silk and a low-rise rounded silk topper. He stuffed his stained traveling clothes into the carpetbag and then went out and stepped up on the dais. He placed his bull’s-eye lantern to the left on a wooden box (it said Kilmeyer Beer 50 bttls), so it would shine on his newspapers.
He greeted the crowd and listened to the clink of dimes and five-cent pieces, two-cent pieces, pennies, and sometimes quarters into the paint can and if it was a quarter people made their own change. There were a good plenty of people. Mist was still coming down in minute blowing drops from the clouds that raced through the sky over Spanish Fort. He unfolded the London Daily News. He would give them a few paragraphs of hard news and then read of dreamlike places far removed. This was the arrangement of all his readings. It worked. The lantern beam shone sideways onto his face, casting brilliant lunar cells of light on his cheekbones through the lenses of his reading glasses. He read an article concerning the Franco-Prussian War. It involved delicate Frenchmen, scented with toilet water, being whipped soundly at Wissembourg by huge blond Germans who were fat and strong on sausages. The outcome was easily predicted. The audience sat rapt, listening. News all the way from France! Nobody knew anything about the Franco-Prussian War but all were jointly amazed by information that had come across the Atlantic to them, here in North Texas, to their town alongside the flooding Red River. They had no idea how it had got here, through what strange lands it had traveled, who had carried it. Why.
Captain Kidd read carefully and precisely. His eyeglasses were round and rimmed in gold over his deep eyes. He always laid his small gold hunting watch to one side of the podium to time his reading. He had the appearance of wisdom and age and authority, which was why his readings were popular and the reason the dimes rang into the coffee can. When they read his handbills men abandoned the saloon, they slipped out of various unnamed establishments, they ran through the rain from their firelit homes, they left the cattle circled and bedded beside the flooding Red to come and hear the news of the distant world.
And now he took them away to far places and strange peoples. Into mythic forms of thought and the structures of fairy tales. He read from the Philadelphia Inquirer of Dr. Schliemann’s search for windy Troy somewhere in Turkey. He read of the telegraph wires successfully laid from Britain to India, an article in the Calcutta Times forwarded to the London Daily Telegraph, a technological advance that seemed almost otherworldly. As he glanced up it seemed to the Captain that he saw the blond man again or at least the glint of ash-blond hair just at the borders of his light. This went into his mind and then out of his mind as he grappled with the big four-sheets of the Boston Daily Journal. To finish, he read of the unfortunate Hansa crushed in the pack ice in its attempt on the North Pole, the survivors rescued by a whaler. This was proving the most popular as he could see by the small gestures of the audience; they bent forward, they fixed their eyes upon him to hear of undiscovered lands in the kingdoms of ice, fabulous beasts, perils overcome, snow people in furry suits.