Paulette Jiles - News of the World

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:

THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE

CROSSROADS OF CIVILIZATION

Refuge of all the arts against the ravages of time

ARMOURY OF FEARLESS TRUTH

AGAINST WHISPERING RUMOR

INCESSANT TRUMPET OF TRADE

From this place words may fly abroad

NOT TO PERISH ON WAVES OF SOUND

NOT TO VARY WITH THE WRITER’S HAND

BUT FIXED IN TIME HAVING BEEN VERIFIED IN PROOF

Friend you stand on sacred ground

THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE

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.

THE

LATEST NEWS AND ARTICLES

FROM THE MAJOR JOURNALS OF THE CIVILIZED WORLD

CAPTAIN JEFFERSON KYLE KIDD

WILL READ A COMPENDIUM

FROM SELECTED NEWSPAPERS AT 8:00 P.M.

AT THE BROADWAY PLAYHOUSE

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.