News of the World(8)
The Texas Rangers lounged against the caissons and listened. They were cool young men and utterly reckless and apparently without fear. The Mexicans hated them and called them rinches but if they could have fielded an independent cavalry wing as skilled and as lethal they would have, but they didn’t, and so there you were.
The Captain had never met any troops or unit like them. They listened out of courtesy to an older man. And so in the cold night under the high stars of Mexico, he told them what he could. Or what he felt like telling. The Creek and the Choctaw were using smoothbores, he said. His Georgia militia company brought their own rifles and used minie balls, that on their way to Pensacola their wagons had sunk hub-deep in the sand. That his captain had got killed on the second day of the battle and he managed to crawl out and drag him back under cover but he died. And quickly went on: that Jackson was a fearless man, he was a maniac when he was fighting. The question hung unasked in the air: Were you wounded?
And yes, I got shot in the hip, he said. Didn’t hit the bone. I didn’t know it until later. The Red Sticks had run out of ammunition and they were firing all kinds of things out of those smoothbores. I think I got hit with a spoon.
He paused. The knees of his trousers smoked from the heat of the fire and his hands were stained with ink. At that time he carried a new Colt revolver and it dragged and was heavy at his belt. The Rangers smoked and waited in silence in the shadow of their hats. Their beards were silky because they were young but when you looked at their faces it seemed they were artificially aged in some way.
They wanted some wisdom, some advice.
You can get hit and not know it, he said. So could the man next to you. Take care of one another.
They nodded and stared at the fire and thought about it. They thought about fighting now in a strange land and against a strange army, one that was stiffly European and formal where the barefoot mestizo privates still were forced to wear neck stocks. Their own opponent was José Mariano Martín Buenaventura Ignacio Nepomuceno García de Arista Nuez, who was a fiercely committed republican and at odds with his own general staff. The Mexican Army was in fact torn into factions by immovable aristocrats and generals with liberal theories.
Afterward, late, when he was alone and the fire of mesquite wood was dying, it came to him that he should take on the task of dispensing these interesting, nay, vital facts gleaned from the intelligence reports and the general press. For instance, the struggles going on at the top levels of the Mexican Army. If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place. He had been perfectly serious. That illusion had lasted from age forty-nine to age sixty-five.
And then he had come to think that what people needed, at bottom, was not only information but tales of the remote, the mysterious, dressed up as hard information. And he, like a runner, immobile in his smeared printing apron bringing it to them. Then the listeners would for a small space of time drift away into a healing place like curative waters.
FOUR
SHE WALKED ALONGSIDE the wagon, singing. Ausay gya kii, gyao boi tol. Prepare for a hard winter, prepare for hard times. She walked beside the horse barefoot with the soles of her small feet hard as wood. Like all people who do not wear shoes her big toes pointed straight ahead. Ausay gya kii, she sang.
As far as she knew she was walking into disaster, into a land blighted and starved. All around in the rolling hills there were neither buffalo nor canyon wrens with their spilling of song. In this land there were no Kiowa or mother or father. She was utterly alone, trapped in peculiar clothing, a dress made of cloth with blue and yellow stripes and a tight waist. She had been laced into a thing that she could only imagine was for magical purposes, meant to confine her heart and her breath in a sort of cage to hold her forever like a shut fist that would never open.
She put her hand on the shaft of the wagon and sang as she walked because it was better than weeping. The land was covered with the short, contorted oaks of the Red River valley, their limbs all so black with rain. The earth rolled loose on either side as if it had been released from the confinement of towns. It was a puzzling thing as to why they packed up in towns in the way they did. She carried her shoes around her neck with the laces tied together and walked in the felting of wet leaves. She would find out where they were going and then either escape or starve herself to death. It was not worth being alive when one was alone among aliens. People who would kill you, who had killed your dear ones. The Agent had said she was going back to her people. As far as she could tell he was not making a joke.
The Captain sat in the driver’s seat of the wagon with his coat collar turned up and the brim of his old field hat down over his forehead. A light drizzle drifted through the landscape of cranky post oak trees whose limbs did not have six inches of straight in any of them. The road rose and fell on the short and choppy hills on the south bank of the Red. His bay saddle horse, Pasha, was tied at the rear of the wagon to a ringbolt and sauntered along, happy and free of a rider. His packhorse, Fancy, was now between the shafts; she had been broken to harness and went along well enough. She looked longingly from one side of the two-track road to the other at the tufts of grass, now just coming up green in late February. To their left was the Red River, a wide sheet of water the color of brick. He pulled up.
He motioned to the girl. She stood beside the packhorse and gripped the harness. She stared at him and did not come any closer.