Paulette Jiles - News of the World

Finally the Captain went to heave out the flour keg. He took out the box of .38 shells and put it under the seat.

Everything good, he said to Johanna. He beat the flour from his hands. Here, my dear, do something. Try to get this stove going.

Yes, Kep-dun, yes yes.

She darted under the oaks, still barefoot, to gather firewood. Lightning cracked overhead with a noise like artillery while its blinding neurons of fire ran to every quarter of the sky. Spanish Fort was busy with freight wagons and supply establishments, with longhorn herds milling outside the town waiting to cross and anxious men conferring under canvas as to when the flood would subside. Trying to figure out how to get them over the Red before they ate up all the grass on this side of the river and starved.

CAPTAIN KIDD LEFT her feeding sticks into the toylike cast-iron stove and walked back into town grasping his hat brim. He found the man who took care of the Masonic Lodge and arranged to rent it that night. Then he walked about town to put up his bills. If he did not have the girl to care for he would not have to stay at the wagon, he could rent a room with a kerosene lamp and curtains and take a bath and he could eat in a restaurant. God above knew what she would do if presented with a dinner on a plate. In the light mist he tacked up each notice with four tacks. He had learned long ago that anything less left his advertisements prey to the wind and they invariably ended up in the hands of people who needed the paper to write grocery lists on, or for other purposes.

He came upon a fiddler he knew. Simon Boudlin sat behind the glass window of a storefront that was both a ladies’ millinery and a meat market. Simon sat in the window with his chin on his fist and his fiddle under one arm as if he were a display. He was watching the world go by. He was a short man but he carried himself as if he were six feet tall; he had straight, broad, and perfectly square shoulders and slim hips. His thick hair was a halo of unruly brown burrs, and he was freckled as a guinea egg. Simon lifted his fiddle bow by the frog and tapped on the glass. Captain Kidd saw him and went in.

Simon.

Captain.

Are you playing tonight? Because I am reading.

Where?

At the Masonic Lodge.

The Captain joined Simon in the window on another chair and laid his tack hammer and the sheaf of advertisements on the floor. He wiped off his old field hat with his sleeve.

No, it’s all right, said Simon. I have already played. No competition. He smiled. He had two teeth broken out of his jaw on the left side but you couldn’t see it unless he smiled and then deep parentheses formed on either side of his mouth. He worked sometimes for the wheelwright and a wheel had come off the lathe where they were boring out the hub box and struck him in the jaw. Why are you here? He was not talkative until he had something to say. He was a careful listener and cocked his head like a titmouse, which he did now. Raindrops slid and sparkled on the glass and beyond it people wavered past with their heads down.

I am on my way to Dallas and then on south, said the Captain. Coming from Wichita Falls.

You got across the Little Wichita, then.

Yes, and I think so did Britt Johnson and his crew. They went straight south. So you have nothing to do?

Simon shook his head. I just played for the Fort Worth Dancing School master. They had the dancing school in the back, here. He pointed with the bow. The fellow who was supposed to play guitar for them was tuning his guitar there at the church on the piano and he got it an octave too high and busted every one of his strings. Simon bent his head down and laughed. Bang bang bang one after the other, you’d think he would have figured it out. He wiped his hand down his face to stop himself from laughing at the guitar player’s misfortunes. Well, well, I did it myself once, long ago. And so! They came and got me out of the wheelwright’s to play for them. You see. He plucked a curled shaving from his pants leg.

Well then, listen. Captain Kidd shifted from one foot to another and briefly wondered if Johanna might have already absconded into the woods. He regarded his boots. His pants. Mud to the shins. Several women were buying ground meat, a man churned it out of a big-spouted grinder in a red sludge. On the other side of the store a girl and her friend were trying on hats. From the rear of the store came the light voices of yet more girls and the sound of several young men whose voices were very low and at other times broke and vaulted up the register. They came filing out carrying their dancing slippers. The Captain lifted his hat to them. Listen, he said. He groped around in his head for sentences and phrases and words to explain the situation.

I’m listening, I’m listening, said the fiddler. He lightly tapped the head of the bow on the floor between his feet. Some song was running through his head.

The thing is, I am returning a girl who was a Kiowa captive to her people, down south near San Antonio, and she’s in the wagon there, in that bur oak stand behind the livery barn, cooking dinner in my wagon.

Simon looked out the rainy glass at the vehicles passing by, the men and women hurrying along the raw, new boardwalk.

You jest, he said. That’s four hundred miles.

No, I do not.

How old is she?

Ten. But Simon, she is wise in the ways of battle and conflict, it seems to me.

Simon watched a cowboy walk by with his hat slanted against the increasing rain and his boots shining with wet.

The fiddler nodded and said, They are always at war.

Be that as it may. She has lost all acquaintance with the uses and manners of white people and I need somebody to keep watch on her while I do my reading. You and your particular friend Miss Dillon would do me a great favor if you would sit with her while I read. I am afraid if I left her alone she might go bolting off.

Simon nodded slowly like a walking beam. He thought about it.

She wants to go back to them, he said.

She apparently does.

I know of a person who was like that, said Simon. They called him Kiowa Dutch. He was blond-haired completely. Nobody knew where he had been captured from, or when. He didn’t either. I played for a dance there at Belknap when they brought him in. He got away from the Army fellows who were returning him and he is up there yet.

I think I heard about him, said the Captain. He drummed his fingers on his knee. You know, it is chilling, how their minds change so completely. But I have taken on this task and I have to try.

Simon lifted his fiddle and ran the bow across the strings. His fingers, hard and coarse with joinery work, blunt at the tips, skipped on the strings and a tune emerged: “Virginia Belle.” She bereft us when she left us, sweet Virginia Belle. Then he stopped and said, Sorry. I can’t help it. So yes. I will go and get Doris. He sat for a moment considering where Doris might be. Probably attending a lady named Everetson who was ill with a fever. A yawn overtook him and he lifted the back of the fiddle over his mouth the way nonfiddlers would cover a yawn with their hand. He said, Captain, you have taken on a heavy load here, I’m afraid. He tapped his fiddle bow on his shoe.

For an old man is what you mean.

Simon stood and then bent to his case, flipped a piece of waxed silk around his instrument, and laid it in the velvet. Click click he snapped the catches shut. He straightened.

Yes, for an old man is what I mean exactly.

THE CAPTAIN AND Simon and Doris all hurried through the drizzle to the stand of bur oaks. Between their overhead of rust-colored leaves and the canopy and stretched side curtains, the wagon was dry enough. The girl had made them a supper of cornbread and bacon and coffee and was sitting cross-legged between the long seats like a Hindu yoga with it spread before her. In the lantern light the gold letters of Curative Waters shone brightly.