News of the World (6 page)

On into town, down Trinity Street, full of white men wearing their tight-fitting clothing and women in dresses that were architectural constructions of cloth and whalebone. Johanna gazed with some interest at two black women carrying shopping baskets with the heads of alarmed hens sticking out. Finally the Captain came into Gannet's livery stable yard and there stepped down.

The stableman took hold of Fancy's driving bridle and cried, Whoa there! As if the weary little roan were about to charge through the back end of the fairway.

Hang on to her there, said the Captain. She's about to go completely wild on you.

Fancy hung her head and rolled her tongue under the straight bar of the driving bit and then yawned.

Never know, the man said. Unpredictable, new horse, never saw it before. He hiccupped.

Yes, said the Captain. You must only see new horses three or four times a day.

The man unhitched the little roan and took the harness from her back. The Captain could smell alcohol on the man's breath.

Mrs. Gannet came out of the feed storage room with three empty flowered feed sacks in her hands. Her bonnet sat on the
back of her head and the strings hung down over her shoulders. Still very trim, the Captain thought. Girlish waist.

Captain Kidd! she cried. She smiled and came to stand with one hand on the
Curative Waters
wagon's side to see the girl staring out of the red wool with eyes like a carp. She turned to the Captain with an interrogative look. As he explained he stood at the high back wheel with one arm on it, taller than Mrs. Gannet by a head. Even as he told his story he wondered that she ran the livery stable by herself. He was worn and stained with Red River sludge and he had to go about buying newspapers in what he stood up in. No help for it.

San Antonio! said Mrs. Gannet. God above. That is very far, Captain. And you'll be alone on the roads. There's news of more raids all through the country. She turned to the stableman to see what he was doing. The Captain knew that raids were how she had become a widow. A year ago they had found Mr. Gannet in several pieces along the Weatherford road and none of them had any clothes on them. She said, Wait for a convoy, will you not?

Yes, yes, he said. We'll see. It will be all right. He saw her dubious expression. I'm armed, he said. A sidearm and a shotgun. And now I have to go find the latest newspapers and a hotel. May I leave her with you for a few hours? I don't think she'll run away and go flitting about Dallas. In Spanish Fort there was someplace to go. The river. Here, she's deep inside enemy territory so to speak. He ran his blue-veined hand over a two-day growth of silver grizzle. I'm a mess, Mrs. Gannet.

She laughed and said for the Captain to go about his business, she could look after the girl. If he would care to change in
the feed room she would send out his traveling clothes to Mrs. Carnahan and also she would ask Mrs. Carnahan if she had a secondhand dress to fit the girl and perhaps other necessary garments. The girl needed a change of clothing. He reached for his portfolio and looked down at her. Widowed, no more than forty-five. Painfully young. She had eyes of a leaf-colored hazel and a good smile.

I am very grateful, the Captain said. He lifted his hat to her, replaced it. I will settle up when we leave tomorrow.

He turned to Johanna and was surprised when her small hand appeared out of the
jorongo
and reached for his. She was very frightened and perhaps thought she was to be handed over to yet another stranger. He smiled and put his hand on her forehead, briefly, in lieu of patting her cheek, which was hidden behind the red wool.

It's all right, he said. It's all right.

He took out his hunting watch. Then he put it back. Johanna had no idea of time. It was pointless to tell her he would be back in an hour. So he just said,

Sit. Stay.

T
HE CAPTION CHANGED
, left his traveling clothes with Mrs. Gannet, and went back out onto the street. He took his portfolio of newpapers under his arm and then engaged two rooms in a hotel on Stemmons Ferry Road; it was a balloon-frame building with thin walls and flowered grain sacks for curtains but he was as yet unsure how much money he would make from his reading. Baths were fifty cents, an outrageous price, but he paid it and sat for fifteen mnutes in the hot water and then shaved.

He found the proprietor of the Broadway Playhouse sitting in the Bluebonnet Saloon having an early drink and engaged the small theater for the night. He wrote it down and had the man sign it in case he got too drunk and forgot.

He went on down Trinity to Thurber's News and Printing Establishment where he was greeted and seduced by the smell of ink and the noise of the press coming from the rear. It was a Chandler and Price hand-fed paten press, slowly chunking out page after page of announcements or advertising. All around were sticks of type and the bindery equipment, the perforating machine. A sign on the wall:

The Captain took a deep breath to subdue the sudden bitter slash of envy and then felt more or less all right. Thurber greeted him and inquired after his health, his readings, his journeys, and the Indian threat from the north. Did he not find traveling onerous? The Captain fixed Thurber with his dark eyes and said no, he did not, and assured him that he, Jefferson Kyle Kidd, had not yet been forced to confine himself to a bath chair or an invalid's bed and when he did he would notify Thurber with a postcard. Thank you, sir, for your concern.

The Captain stalked around the print shop and gazed at the layout tables and type cases. Thurber clasped his hands behind his back and rolled his eyes at his two printer's devils. Then the Captain bought a sheet of letter paper and an envelope, and
the latest editions of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and the
Chicago Tribune,
the
London Times,
the
New-York Herald,
and
El Clarion,
a Mexico City newspaper. He would sit at peace in the hotel room, under a proper roof, and find articles of interest in the English-language papers and then translate some articles from
El Clarion.

Then he went down Trinity to the
Dallas Weekly Courier
offices, much refreshed from having snarled at Thurber, to sit with their Morse operator and take news from the AP wire. The fee was reasonable. The wire from Arkansas and points east was still operating. The Comanche and Kiowa had learned to cut the wire and then repair it with horsehair so that it would not transmit but no one could tell where it had been cut. They well knew Army orders came over the telegraph wires.

He took out the thick sheaf of printed notices and handbills from his portfolio and, there in the
Courier
offices, inked in the last line.

He walked around the streets of Dallas tacking up his notices as he went. These small towns in North Texas were always hungry for news and for a presenter to read it. It was so much
more entertaining than sitting at home reading the papers, having only yourself or your spouse to whom you could make noises of outrage or astonishment. Then, of course, there were those who could not read at all or only haltingly.

He worried all up and down every street and with every tack he drove in. Worried about the very long journey ahead, about his ability to keep the girl from harm. He thought, resentfully,
I raised my girls. I already did that.
At the age he had attained with his life span short before him he had begun to look upon the human world with the indifference of a condemned man.
Who cares for your fashions and your wars and your causes? I will shortly be gone and I have seen many fashions come and go and many causes so passionately defended only to be forgotten.
But now it was different and he was drawn back into the stream of being because there was once again a life in his hands. Things mattered. The strange depression and spiritual chill he had felt back in Wichita Falls was gone. But still he objected. He was an old man. A cranky old man.
I raised two of them already.
A celestial voice said,
Well then, do it again.
The Captain had to admit that this was his own inner voice, which always sounded something like that of his father, the magistrate, who had often recalled to his son the law under the Crown, in Colonial North Carolina, his voice speculative and gentle and lightly agreeable with drink.

THE COOL SPRING
wind skipped from roof to roof and dived down into the streets and flung women's hems up in rolling loops. The Captain could see his breath. He pulled the tattered muffler close around his throat and shoved his good black hat
down over his white hair. Texas weather was changeable as the moon. He bought barbecue and bread and a dish of sodden, unhappy-looking squash and carried it all back to the livery stable stacked in a tin pail.

Kep-dun! He heard her voice in a loud happy cry.

Yes, Johanna, he said.

Mrs. Gannet looked over the edge of a box stall with her bright hazel eyes and wide smile. He could just see the top of Johanna's head. Mrs. Gannet told him all was well, that the girl took some comfort in the horses, and that they were learning all their names. The Captain found this a relief. His new-washed traveling trousers and two old shirts had been hung to dry over the wagon's dashboard and his socks and unmentionables discreetly steamed, still hot from the tub, on the tie-rods beneath. The girl's new secondhand clothing had been packed in the ammunition box.

He opened the dinner pail on the lowered tailgate. Mrs. Gannet went back into her office. The Captain watched her go. A strand of her dark brown hair had fallen from the confines of her bonnet and her dress skirt moved very nicely without hoops.

Then he turned to Johanna.

Dinner, he said, carefully.

Dinnah! The girl smiled and showed all her row of bottom teeth and gathered up her skirts to climb a wheel by the spokes into the wagon.

He and Johanna sat on the side seats and he watched as she took the camp butcher knife to cut off a great piece of the smoking barbecued meat, tossed it from hand to hand crying Ah!
Ah! and when it was cool tossed it expertly into her mouth. Barbecue sauce flew. The Captain paused with his fork halfway to his mouth and watched her. She cut another piece and began tossing it; her fingers were slick with fat and there was red barbecue sauce up to her wrists.

Stop.

He put down his fork and wiped her hands with the napkins that had come with the dinner and placed the fork in her hands. He grasped her small fingers, fork and all, in his bony and veined hand and pushed the tines into the brisket and then lifted it to her mouth.

She regarded him with that flat and vitreous stare that meant, he had learned, that she neither understood nor liked what she was seeing. She took the fork as one would grasp an ice pick and stabbed it into her dinner. She wrenched a piece loose and ate it from the tines.

No, my dear, he said. He put his hand over hers, once again placed the fork correctly, and once again lifted it to her mouth. Then he sat on his own side of the wagon and saw her struggling with the fork, the knife, the stupidity of it, the unknown reasons that human beings would approach food in this manner, reasons incomprehensible, inexplicable, for which they had no common language. She tried again, and then turned and threw the fork into a box stall.

The Captain's shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch under his black formal coat. He was suddenly almost overwhelmed with pity for her. Torn from her parents, adopted by a strange culture, given new parents, then sold for a few blankets and some old silverware, now sent to stranger after stranger,
crushed into peculiar clothing, surrounded by people of an unknown language and an unknown culture, only ten years old, and now she could not even eat her food without having to use outlandish instruments.

Finally he took his satchel in one hand, tucked his portfolio under his arm, and beckoned to Johanna. He saw her look down at her stained hands and there were tears on her cheeks.

We're going to try to get you into a hotel room, he said in a firm voice. And you are going to have to stay there without breaking out the windows while I prepare my reading.

He took hold of her greasy small hand and they started off down the street.