News of the World(30)
THIRTEEN
HE REHARNESSED AND took up all his small possessions from the tailgate, slammed it shut. He had to find a place to cross the Brazos soon. Going back downhill the Captain rode the brake. The shafts lunged up around Fancy’s shoulders on the steep grade and the brake chocks screamed on the axles. All the stuff in the wagon bed ended up in a heap against the back of the driver’s seat with Johanna tossed among the tools and food and blankets, holding the revolver. He had unloaded it but she seemed happier with it in her hands. They were frayed and dirty. They both looked like they had been dragged through a knothole. As the wagon plunged downhill among the red rock and stiff brush he prayed they would not break a tie-rod and that the cracked iron tire would hold.
They made it to the bottom and the road in one piece with all possessions and horses still in hand.
The Captain’s nerves were humming like telegraph wires in a wind and he knew in a little while he would be close to collapse. He searched every copse of live oaks and when they reached the Brazos, every shadow in the pecan flats. The road ran along the north side of the river, a shy and obsequious road that dodged every bank and lift and wound through the pecan trees and never insisted on its own way. He searched out every road bank ahead of him as they went. He was ready to shoot somebody else if need be. He must slow down. For Johanna, he needed to quiet himself; he must appear calm and assured. The Caddos would bury Almay under a pile of rocks and quietly slip back into Oklahoma. Someday somebody would find the bones and wonder whose they were. Almay would run his child prostitution ring no more, his brains blown out by the coin of the realm, hey hey hey. The Captain’s heart finally calmed.
That night he dusted his cut forehead with gray wound powder, and then slept like a dead man without his usual war nightmares that should have been brought about by the fight, but somehow they passed him by. Perhaps they sought out someone else. Perhaps he was not on their map this night.
He woke up to a clean and tidy camp under the pecan trees that stood high and airy above them. He heard the noise of a little stream nearby running into the Brazos and the hush, hush sound of small new pecan leaves in the breeze. He heard Johanna crying out, Eat! Now you eat! And the mare’s bell ringing as the horses grazed. He took the plate from her and ate carefully. The blue smoke from the little stovepipe lay low and drifted. They were all right, he and the girl were alive. They were having a calm breakfast among the pecan trees, new leaves like green dots with their shadows making slow polkas back and forth over them and the Curative Waters golden letters.
He pressed one hand to his right eyebrow. The cut was a little swollen but all right. He could for a brief time work as hard as a younger man but it always took much longer to recover. He must recover. They had far to go.
The horses needed rest and care as much as he did. He would have to teach this to Johanna. The Plains Indians did not expend much care on their horses. They rode them hard and as a last resort ate them. He went down Fancy and Pasha’s legs to check for swelling but they were all right. They had last been shod up in Bowie but before long they would need new ones. He straightened up again with some effort; he could almost hear the jointed sound as one vertebrae settled on another.
He sat on his carpetbag and leaned against a wheel. His mind kept going back to the fight and to put it aside he watched Pasha graze and drank black coffee and smoked his pipe. Johanna played in the stream like a six-year-old. She turned over rocks and sang and splashed. To comfort himself and slow down his mind he thought of his time as a courier, a runner, and Maria Luisa and his daughters. Maybe life is just carrying news. Surviving to carry the news. Maybe we have just one message, and it is delivered to us when we are born and we are never sure what it says; it may have nothing to do with us personally but it must be carried by hand through a life, all the way, and at the end handed over, sealed.
He was not really rested but well enough. They went on.
THE NEXT DAY at noon they came to a place called the Brazos ferry. The Brazos unwound slow green coils and smoke from slash fires lay low and drifted at the height of a man’s head. There was no ferry. He could see the ferry landing on the other side, downstream about a hundred yards where the current would push them. The landing looked good; it looked like a hard bottom. The river was up so things might have changed. Loads of sand and silt could have been laid over the landing, big tumbling drowned trees could be below the surface of the river turning like the fabled octopus with grasping arms.
Once again they had to make a crossing on their own and once again he loosed Pasha and the little mare Fancy plunged in. She fought across the current, they drifted down, Johanna clutched up her skirts and prepared to jump but they made it.
On the far side they were on the Lampasas Road and would miss Meridian altogether. That was all right. They would soon come to Durand which was larger and had more people, all of them with money in their pockets he sincerely hoped.
A brief rain; again it was a wet world where each leaf of the live oak, clinging to the twigs throughout the winter, held a drop at its tip. The live oaks never lost their leaves in the winter; he had seen them standing green in a snowfall.
Johanna bent her head far back to look up into the leafy canopy and the rainy sky. There was a cautious wonder on her face. She said something in Kiowa in a low voice. So much water, such giant trees, each possessing a spirit. Drops like jewels cascaded from their spidery hands.
He said, Tree. He took off his old broad-brimmed field hat and ran his hand through his hair, which was as fine as cobweb and as white. Put the hat back on.