Paulette Jiles - News of the World

He bent over with his hands on his knees to relieve his back muscles. He was stiff from the long night’s drive. Everything hurt. He straightened up and turned to her with the wrapped bacon in his hand. She took it from him, dropped the tailgate, and laid it down.

I cook! She smiled up at him. Then she held out a piece of divinity candy. Good horse lady, she said. Eat, Kep-dun. Her little face was round as an apple.

He returned the smile. Yes, very good, he said. He ate the piece of divinity and the sugar hit his bloodstream in a rush. He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his white hair. His coat hung open to the morning wind. He felt in his pockets for his pipe.

The girl collected dry wood in her skirt as if happy to discover that skirts were good for something after all. He handed her the match safe and she started the fire in the little cookstove. With the butcher knife she expertly carved the bacon. She sang to herself. This was life as she knew it, and it was good. No roofs, no streets. Her new-washed taffy hair flew in loose ribbons in the morning breeze. Every so often she lifted her head to run her gaze over the live oaks around them and listen for an enemy presence. Then she went back to slinging rashers into the skillet.

The Captain stuffed tobacco into his kaolin pipe. And here he was in his mild and mindless way still roaming, still reading out the news of the world in the hope that it would do some good, but in the end he must carry a weapon in his belt and he had a child to protect and no printed story or tale would alter that. He considered the men who must be following them and also that the smell of tobacco smoke carried far and wide, far more than meat smoke, so on second thought he laid down the pipe.

He unharnessed Fancy and tied her beside Pasha and rubbed them both down with a rice-straw brush. If the Captain and Johanna had to run for it they would do better on horseback than in the wagon. He paused over the saddle and blankets. Not yet. But he found Pasha’s riding bridle in the heap of tack and laid it over a wheel where it would be ready to hand.

He pulled on his riding boots with the undershot heels and then his spurs and shoved in the toggles to fix them and keep them from ringing. From his pockets he took out his gold watch and some pennies and his penknife and laid them on the tailgate. He wanted nothing about him that would clink, make a noise. He took out the revolver and once again made sure every chamber was full. He put it back into his waistband. The eight-inch barrel made it feel like he was carrying an axe handle. Whitewing doves sat up in the oaks and shifted from one pink foot to another and bobbed and sang because they wanted to come to water at the spring but were afraid.

The Captain wished he could go back down to the road to see how much of the wagon was visible from there. He guessed probably the top boards. He did not know how soon Almay and his friends might have started from Dallas after them. Probably at about seven-thirty, eight in the morning when he did not show up at the Tyler Stage Roadhouse. When they saw no tracks on the Meridian Road, he hoped they would have doubled back to the Waxahachie Road and stayed on it. With luck they would be far away to the east bumbling along and crying out, Where did they go? Where did they go? But they would wise up soon enough and they were on horseback and therefore faster.

He did not go down. They might catch him down there on foot with a long climb back up to the wagon among the rocks. He lay on his stomach and watched the road. It was red dirt, two tracks with a strip of mullein and Indian grass in the middle. He could see two sections through the trees, one about a half-mile away and another piece just below.

He wiped at his tired eyes and then took up his guard duty again. In the increasing light of day the Captain thought he saw the moving and reflective slash of a horse’s tail. The doves became silent. Hm, he said. He climbed up to the wagon seat for a better view.

It was perhaps fifty degrees. A thin watery sun laid its gunmetal shine on the country below. The hills were ridges widely separated from one another in great tree-covered waves, as if they were drifting apart from one another across the stone underpinnings of the earth. On the horizon of cedar-covered hills, a thick billowing of smoke rose into the sky. Somebody was burning slash or stubble about three or four miles away.

The little stove erupted in a singing clatter of broken pipe and scattered coals. The hurtling skillet lid sailed away over a wave of flying hot grease. Another earsplitting Bang! Bacon and coffee spun into the air.

The girl was under the wagon in less than a second. The Captain fell sideways off the seat. He landed on his left side. It was quicker and safer than standing up to climb down. He scrambled under the wagon. Another round hit the sideboards above him and splinters sprayed into the air. He thought of the flour keg with the .38 ammunition in it.

They won’t want to kill the horses and they won’t want to take a chance on killing the girl. He lifted himself on his elbows and made a reassuring gesture. She was flat on her stomach and her face was turned sideways to him, keeping her eyes on his square old hawk’s face. They were lying among rocks and small spiny agarita; a lizard fled in a running of dark chevrons. They’re firing up from the ravine. They have rifles.

The Captain crawled from under the wagon to the edge of the caprock and found a notch in it. He pulled out the revolver. Another shot from the right, different place. They had both been from the right. So where was the third man? He spat on his hand and then smeared it on his revolver barrel and then sifted dust over it. The Smith and Wesson with its long barrel was accurate but nowhere near as accurate as a rifle. And it didn’t have the range. Their rifles were good for two hundred yards or more. They could stay out of range and blast away at him till the cows came home.

The shotgun was good only for close work; he had only fifteen shells of light Number Seven, what they called turkey shot or dove shot, which would at most pepper somebody’s face with a permanent tattoo unless you jammed it right up against them at face-to-face range and that was a situation he would not be likely to survive. In the shot box were powder and caps and hulls to make up more shotgun shells, as if it mattered. He lay still and felt running tremors in his belly. Fear for himself, for the girl. Help me.

He turned and saw Johanna crawling toward him, dragging the box of .38 ammunition. She had got it out of the flour keg. It was covered with flour, so were her hands.

He took the box and then pointed sternly to the wagon. She wriggled back.

This was not the first time that someone had wanted to kill him but the other times had been what one might call fair fights. The two rifle shots sounded to the Captain as if they had come from Henrys. A Spencer made a flatter, barking sound. But it could have been the gunpowder they were using. He smelled the gunpowder smoke rising up from below in long windless strands that snarled in the cedar. His mouth was dry. They had been traveling the entire night and he was weary and the cloudy light was diffuse so it was difficult to see.

He had not thought they would turn so quickly to murder. He had thought if they caught up, they would bluster, threaten, offer a certain amount in silver, perhaps even claim they were the girl’s relatives. He saw himself pointing the long barrel of the Smith and Wesson into their faces and saying something like, Begone or I will blow you through. This was clearly not going to happen. Human aggression and depravity still managed to astonish him. He had been caught by surprise.

The girl was under the wagon. She was listening. Then she lifted her hands and whipped her long hair into a braid and tied it off with a piece of lace edging she tore from her skirt. She was not astonished. Not at all.