News of the World(45)
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.