Paulette Jiles - News of the World

They ducked under the side-curtain awning.

Doris pulled off her dripping straw hat and said, Hello!

Johanna glanced at the Captain as if to ask if he, too, saw this female apparition and then returned her gaze to Doris without saying a word.

Doris carried a small bundle. She unwrapped it and held it out to the girl with a bright smile. It was a doll with a china head and painted dark eyes. It wore a dress in a brown and green check and shawl and its shoes were painted black on china feet. Johanna reached out one dirty hand from under her blanket and took the doll by the foot. She held it around the body for a moment. It was like the taina sacred figure that was taken from its wrappings only at the Sun Dance. She looked searchingly into its eyes. Then she propped it against one of the side benches and opened both her hands to it and said something in Kiowa.

Hmm, said Simon. He stood under the stretched canvas and tousled his hair to shake off the wet. He had left his fiddle safe in his tiny room over the wagon maker’s. He wore an old 1840s infantry coat with a high band collar. Its surface was a series of patches, some of which overlapped. My word. I believe she is addressing it. The fiddler held out his hands to the heat of the little stove, and worked his stiff fingers open and shut to loosen the joints.

Doris found the ironstone plates in the cook box. She said, she is like an elf. She is like a fairy person from the glamorie. They are not one thing or another. She laid out the plates wherever she could find room on the tailgate and on tops of boxes.

Simon regarded the light of his life with a solemn expression. Doris, he said, your Irish comes out at the strangest times.

Don’t stare at her, said Doris. That is what she is.

She thinks it’s an idol, said Simon. The Captain bent over the tailgate searching through his carpetbag and listened to them.

Aye, perhaps, said Doris. She shoveled food onto the plates and laid whatever utensil she could find on each one; the two forks, the camp knife, a serving spoon and then lifted her head to look at the girl; so alone, twice captured, carried away on the flood of the world. Doris’s eyes burned suddenly with tears and she lifted the back of her hand to her eyes. But I think not. The doll is like herself, not real and not not-real. I make myself understood I hope. You can put her in any clothing and she remains as strange as she was before because she has been through two creations. Doris laid a plate before the girl. Doris’s hair was Irish black with blue lights in it, a rare, true black. She was a small woman and her wrists were ropy with muscle and hard work. She said, To go through our first creation is a turning of the soul we hope toward the light, out of the animal world. God be with us. To go through another tears all the making of the first creation and sometimes it falls to bits. We fall into pieces. She is asking, Where is that rock of my creation?

The Captain took out shaving gear. He went to the far side and hung his mirror on a bolt end and shaved. He said, Miss Dillon, you know this how?

An Gorta Mor, she said. In the famine children saw their parents die and then went to live with the people on the other side. In their minds they went. When they came back they were unfinished. They are forever falling. She shook out her wet, pinned-up skirt and watched as Johanna carefully ate pieces of bacon with her hands.

Well, I don’t know what I can do about it. The Captain came back around, put away his gear, and sat on the flour keg. He bent his long, elderly body with a light creaking of the spine and went through his newspapers. He had to make a living. This was intriguing but first he needed to hear the coins falling into the paint can; then he could listen to mysteries about unfinished children, trailing their griefs and ragged edges.

And the newspapers, they say nothing about this at all or about the poor at all, Doris said. There are great holes in your newspapers. Nobody sees them. God sees them.

The Captain ate his supper and then crossed his knife and fork on his plate and put the plate on the tailgate. Yes, I am sure He does. At any rate, she has to go back to her family. It’s only my concern between here and Castroville.

Who are her people?

Germans.

Ah! Doris clapped both hands over her face for a moment and then dropped them in her lap. And so now that’s three languages the child must know. She wiped her hands on flour sacking. Leave her with us, Captain. We will take her.

Simon stopped eating. He drew in his lower lip and raised both eyebrows in an expression of surprise.

Doris said, She is like my little sister that died.

Ahem, Doris, my dear, said Simon. And so we will be married next month with a child already.

Doris lifted her slim shoulders. The priest, she said, has seen everything.

The Captain thought, The girl is trouble and contention wherever she goes, wherever she lands. No one wants her for herself. A redheaded stepchild destined for the washhouse.

Miss Dillon, that is generous of you but I must return her to her relatives as I said I would do, and for which I took a coin of fifty dollars in gold.

Simon’s relief was plain in his face.

The girl shrank away into the interior, against the backrest, and hid in the thick jorongo.

CAPTAIN KIDD HAD changed into his reading clothes in the back of the Masonic Hall. They were a decent black frock coat, knee length, single-breasted, a matching vest, a white shirt in silk and cotton figured with a lyre design in silk of the same color—that is, a bit yellowed. He had one of the new ascots in black silk and a low-rise rounded silk topper. He stuffed his stained traveling clothes into the carpetbag and then went out and stepped up on the dais. He placed his bull’s-eye lantern to the left on a wooden box (it said Kilmeyer Beer 50 bttls ), so it would shine on his newspapers.

He greeted the crowd and listened to the clink of dimes and five-cent pieces, two-cent pieces, pennies, and sometimes quarters into the paint can and if it was a quarter people made their own change. There were a good plenty of people. Mist was still coming down in minute blowing drops from the clouds that raced through the sky over Spanish Fort. He unfolded the London Daily News. He would give them a few paragraphs of hard news and then read of dreamlike places far removed. This was the arrangement of all his readings. It worked. The lantern beam shone sideways onto his face, casting brilliant lunar cells of light on his cheekbones through the lenses of his reading glasses. He read an article concerning the Franco-Prussian War. It involved delicate Frenchmen, scented with toilet water, being whipped soundly at Wissembourg by huge blond Germans who were fat and strong on sausages. The outcome was easily predicted. The audience sat rapt, listening. News all the way from France! Nobody knew anything about the Franco-Prussian War but all were jointly amazed by information that had come across the Atlantic to them, here in North Texas, to their town alongside the flooding Red River. They had no idea how it had got here, through what strange lands it had traveled, who had carried it. Why.

Captain Kidd read carefully and precisely. His eyeglasses were round and rimmed in gold over his deep eyes. He always laid his small gold hunting watch to one side of the podium to time his reading. He had the appearance of wisdom and age and authority, which was why his readings were popular and the reason the dimes rang into the coffee can. When they read his handbills men abandoned the saloon, they slipped out of various unnamed establishments, they ran through the rain from their firelit homes, they left the cattle circled and bedded beside the flooding Red to come and hear the news of the distant world.