News of the World(50)
Colonel Ranald Mackenzie drove the last holdouts among the Comanche and the Kiowa to earth in Palo Duro Canyon and thus the Indian Wars came to an end. The Captain and Johanna moved at a reasonable pace through the volatile land of Texas collecting dimes and evading trouble and the Captain read in his clear voice of the new world that had come about while the Americans were fighting their Civil War, of steamships and asteroids and a machine called a typewriter, the new four-in-hand ties. Crime was always popular; shameless sinners, amazing graces. He had the iron tire fixed and sometimes when he was studying over his newspaper articles Johanna would come to stand at his side, take up his watch from where he had laid it on the tailgate, and say, Kep-dun. Time.
Yes, my dear, he said and gathered his marked articles for the reading.
Then they traveled over to the cotton country of Marshall and down to Nacogdoches. And in that town the people came also to hear news from El Clarion in Spanish, men in stiff formal black suits and hats in the old Spanish style, rancheros holding on to their lands against all odds, against all Anglos. They lifted their hats to the girl and called her La Cautiva.
From there they arrived in East Texas where the former slave population was at last turning to their own lives. Johanna and the Captain drove south along the coast to the Gulf to see the salt sea bringing in its sand-loaded waves and rainbow Portuguese men o’ war lying like celluloid cabbages on the beach. At every reading she sat sternly in front of the paint can collecting the money. Gradually she learned the English language and always spoke it with a clipped accent and always had difficulty with the letter R. He wrote down words in Kiowa to begin a dictionary of the language but was puzzled as to how to indicate the myriad specific tones and so laid it aside.
The wandering life was amenable to her. Watching the world go by from the safety of the canopy and side curtains, a new town and new people every thirty miles. Bright springs under the shade of the live oaks in the coastal country and sometimes waterless stretches in West Texas from Kerrville to the Llano, and from there to the Concho and Fort McKavett, Wichita Falls and Spanish Fort to see Simon and Doris and their two children.
She never learned to value those things that white people valued. The greatest pride of the Kiowa was to do without, to make use of anything at hand; they were almost vain of their ability to go without water, food, and shelter. Life was not safe and nothing could make it so, neither fashionable dresses nor bank accounts. The baseline of human life was courage. Her gestures and expressions were not those of white people and he knew they never would be. She stared intently when something interested her, her questions were forthright and often embarrassing. All animals were food, not pets. It took a long time before she thought of coins as legal tender instead of ammunition.
In her daily company he found himself also ceasing to value these things that seemed so important to the white world. He found himself falling more deeply into the tales of far places and strange peoples. He asked the news shops to order for him papers from England and Canada and Australia and Rhodesia.
He began to read to his audiences of far places and strange climates. Of the Esquimaux in their seal furs, the explorations of Sir John Franklin, shipwrecks on deserted isles, the long-limbed folk of the Australian Outback who were dark as mahogany and yet had blond hair and made strange music which the writer said was indescribable and which Captain Kidd longed to hear.
He read of the discovery of Victoria Falls and sightings, real or not, of the ghost ship The Flying Dutchman and an eyewitness account of a man on the bridge of that ship sending messages by blinking light to them, asking about people long dead. And before these tales for a short time Texans quieted and bent forward to hear. The rain fell, or the snow, or the moon glared down and the lamps failed but they did not notice. At each stop, for an hour or so, Captain Kidd arrested time itself.
The Captain never did understand what had caused such a total change in a little girl from a German household and adopted into a Kiowa one. In a mere four years she completely forgot her birth language and her parents, her people, her religion, her alphabet. She forgot how to use a knife and a fork and how to sing in European scales. And once she was returned to her own people, nothing came back. She remained at heart a Kiowa to the end of her days.
After three years his daughters and his son-in-law and his two grandsons returned to San Antonio, established possession of the now-empty Betancort house, and began the long and nearly hopeless process of trying to recover the Spanish Lands. Emory went in debt for a new press and took over Leon Moke’s clothing shop and turned it into a print shop. Olympia sighed and drifted about the rooms of the old Betancort palacio until she finally married again, which was a relief to everyone. Elizabeth raised her boys and had a desk in a corner of the long comedor overflowing with platte maps and yellowing land records.
When they returned, Captain Kidd finally came in off the roads of Texas. She had made a wanderer of him but all things come to an end. San Antonio had grown and many of the old and beautiful Spanish houses were torn down. The people were despoiled of their lands in ways that broke his heart. Captain Kidd and Johanna came to live with Elizabeth and Emory and their children, his grandsons, he to be old and she to stare into a future unknown. He advised Emory at the print shop where his son-in-law worked with deep interest and delight in his new Babcock cylinder press while the Captain sat at a desk littered with composing sticks and inspected each new print run. Johanna tried to pretend to be a white girl, for his sake. She joined other girls in their excursions on the river, their dancing lessons, and put up with the indignity of riding sidesaddle. She gazed with deep envy at the Mexican women and girls half-naked in Alazan Creek and San Pedro Springs, washing clothes. They slapped water at one another, wrung out their hair, waded with their skirts up around their waists. She sat stiffly in her riding habit and her smart little topper and watched them and rode home and then tried to appear cheerful at dinner, carefully managing her knife and fork and the minute coffee spoon. The Captain sighed heavily, his hands in his lap, staring at his flan. The worst had happened. He did not know what to do.