News of the World: A Novel (3 page)

He would sell the wagon in Castroville or San Antonio if he ever got there and in the meantime it would be a luxury to travel in a vehicle with a spring seat to take the ruts and the hammering. His roan mare packhorse could pull it and his bay saddle horse could come behind.

It would also allow him to keep the girl within sight. He wished he knew her name in Kiowa. He would call her Johanna, as if it mattered. She didn’t know the word “Johanna” from Deuteronomy.

Captain Kidd changed to his duck coat and trousers of jeans cloth, a double-breasted plains shirt. He put on his old traveling hat with the uneven brim. He laid his black reading suit in careful layers into his carpet bag and his good black hat for readings into a tin hatbox. A hat can, as the cowboys said. Young people could get away with rough clothing but unless the elderly dressed with care they looked like homeless vagabonds and at every reading he must present the appearance of authority and wisdom.

He packed up his newspapers and his cutthroat razor and its cake of soap, the brush, his shot box with powder and caps and wads and the spring-loaded powder charger. Into the bed of the
Curative Waters
wagon he threw his shotgun, purchases of tinned butter and dried beef, bacon, two sheepskins, a small box of medical supplies, a keg of flour, water bottles, a candle lantern and candles, a small stove. Then his portfolio with his newspapers and a map of the roads of Texas, which he rarely used. Finally his riding boots and his saddle and blankets. He
lifted the girl into the wagon bed and made “stay” motions with his hands. Then he went looking for Britt.

THEY WERE PARKED
in front of a general merchandise store. Dennis and Paint were trying to even out their loads in both wagons. Britt’s boy was there with them; he worked hard and quickly and seemed to look constantly and anxiously at his father. Dennis supervised the loading. They had to cross the upper Little Wichita and they did not want the wagons to go down by the head. Their teams were big strong bays. Admirable horses.

The Captain said, Britt, which roads are open?

Britt climbed up to the driver’s seat on one wagon with his boy at his side and Dennis was at the reins in the other. Paint sat beside Dennis smoking a cigar with great enjoyment. A light rain was still drifting down into the colorless late-spring world of North Texas and its low and restless sky.

Britt said, Take the road alongside the Red east to Spanish Fort, Captain. They say it’s not flooded yet, and then from Spanish Fort the southeast road to Weatherford and Dallas is good. Get to Spanish as quick as you can and away from the Red because it’s still coming up. From Weatherford and Dallas you can get directions for the Meridian Road heading south.

Very well, said the Captain. I am obliged. He thought about his solitude. About his thin, lean life and the coal gas. He said, The Meridian Road heading south.

Britt had a military bearing and the attentive gaze of a man who had spent long hard months with a scouting company. He bent down from the wagon seat and held out his hand.

And sir, let me see that Slocum you got.

Captain Kidd pulled aside his threadbare canvas chore coat and reached behind and drew out the revolver. He handed it to Britt butt-first. Water dripped from his bare hand.

Britt turned it over. He said, Captain, this is the kind of thing I got for Christmas when I was ten. It doesn’t even have standard charges. Britt laid the Slocum at his side and then drew out his own Smith and Wesson and handed it to the older man. I owe you, he said, for taking that maniac. What else are you carrying?

A twenty-gauge. Captain Kidd tried to keep from smiling. A younger man with all the latest devices, taking care of the doddering old.

Watch your right side.

I’m left-handed.

All the better.

Captain Kidd reached up and shook hands with Britt and watched them leave. The two long, narrow wagons were weighted with their loads and the teams of big bay horses leaned into their collars and plumed out smoke and pulled until the back bands stood up off their spines. The wheels moved through the red mud of the street at first slowly, one spoke rolling up after another. Dennis sang out to his team in his high, thin voice,
Walk on, walk on!
And Britt stood braced behind the driver’s seat with the reins in his hands and his big hat flinging water and called his horses by their names encouragingly and then the two freight wagons began to move at a walking pace.

The Captain unwound his long reins from the driver’s post and at first his little packhorse mare sulked and refused and danced around in the harness, which she did not like, but at last leaned forward and pulled.

The Captain called out, Am I not good to you, then, Fancy? Do I not feed you and put shoes on your feet? Move on, girl!

Several people standing out of sight in doorways watched them leave. Some were shaking their heads at the sight of the old man and the ten-year-old girl wild with dread, her new dress splattered with Red River mud and her hems coated in a slurry of iron-red mire. And there were other, more covert faces, looks of interest and of greed; the pale-haired man with his neck bound in a blue-patterned neckerchief and tobacco smoke drifting from his nose.

Britt and his two wagons went south down Childress Street toward the lower Little Wichita, and the Captain and the captive girl set out east toward Spanish Fort. The wheels threw up spinning arcs of slurry and water that planted polka dots all over the wagon sides. The Captain and Johanna would travel through the Cross Timbers to Spanish Fort and then on south to Dallas and eventually four hundred miles farther south, down into the
brasada,
the short-brush country of San Antonio, with its slow, uncoiling alluvial rivers and its great live oaks in the valleys, its slow uncoiling people.

The man with the pale hair dropped his cigar butt in a puddle. With him were the two others, Caddos who had slid in a sideways direction from the tribal lands, and as they drifted they had gathered trouble and a great deal of peculiar knowledge about human beings, what human beings would do or say under extreme duress. It was not something you could do anything with but it interested them all the same.

THREE

T
HE CAPTAIN STARTED
out his headlong rush toward military rank with the Georgia militia in the War of 1812, which had stretched out to 1815. He had just turned sixteen. His militia had traveled west to the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama under Jackson. Jefferson Kyle Kidd was at that point nothing but a private who had lifted his hand to vote for a man named Thompson for captain. They were sitting on piles of rails in the Georgia hill country, the day before they were to leave out. After putting their supplies, arms, ammunition, and personal kits together, then finding horses, they realized that it was necessary to hold elections for officers. That in fact they needed officers. That one had to say Yes Sir and No Sir and make a salute and present a military bearing. Two of the officers they had elected last year weren’t standing and three had moved to Tennessee. They were confused as to the purpose of sergeants and corporals and so decided to forego them. He himself was a Georgia hill country person and spoke that way and thought that way for all of his life, the habits and intonation would stay with him always. He lifted his hand for Thompson.

On March 27, 1814, at the battle itself, he was hit on the outside of the right hip, leaving a long sear of fragmented flesh and torn homespun and bright red blood. He and the Georgia boys were with Coffee’s forces south of the bend. They had pulled down the timbers of a cabin for breastworks. He didn’t even know at first he had been shot. He was lying beside two boys from his county firing over the timbers where a large soap kettle had rolled out of the fireplace. Round after round from the Creek and Choctaw across the river struck the kettle and made it ring like a bell so that it was hard to hear Thompson lying out in front and crawling toward them, toward cover.

Finally Sherman Foster called to him, Jeff, Jeff, that’s Captain Thompson out there!

The Red Sticks, the Muskogee Creek Indians, across the Tallapoosa were laying in a very accurate fire. They had the range on the cabin and the soap kettle and, he now realized, Thompson. All the Red Sticks had were smoothbores but those great .72 caliber balls could kill you just as dead as a rifled gun. The barrels of their guns on the other side of the river looked as long as wagon tongues. He wrapped the firing mechanism of his flintlock rifle in his kerchief and laid it down in the sand. He pulled the powder horn and powder-measure strap off over his head. Shucked off his cartridge box and crawled out to get his captain. Even though it was late March the Alabama sun blazed and roasted everything in its light. The river itself was like some kind of running metal. The smoke of their firing lay in planes. There was no wind. Now Thompson was silent. Why had he gone out there, past the barricade? Everything was the
color of a biscuit, the color of yellow sunlight and the sulphur shades of gunpowder smoke.

He slid between two collapsed timbers and when he reached for Thompson’s outflung arm the sand erupted around him as if tiny explosive charges had been set underground. The firing was continuous. He laid hold of the bloodied arm and its torn shirtsleeve and dragged Thompson back into the shelter of the crisscrossed cabin timbers. He pulled him over a broken mirror and a calendar and some spoons. Thompson’s boot heels caught the calendar and its pages rolled over—March and April and May.

When he got him back under cover the captain was dying. It was a strange thing to roll a man’s body over on its back and look for signs of life. A thing invisible. He had been hit in the V of his throat.
Where’ve you been all the day, Randall my son? O Mother, make my bed soon for I am sick to my heart, and I fain would lie doon.
He had heard that song all his life and now he knew what it meant. He tore open Thompson’s military jacket, his shirt; he saw life draining away, draining away.

You’re hit, Sherman said. Look at you, you’re hit.

I am? Jefferson Kyle Kidd, sixteen years old last week, lay back in the yellow dirt and looked down his own body, the homespun brown pants and square-toed boots and his lanky long legs, the spreading red stain on the outside of his right hip. The weave of the homespun had been driven into his flesh. I’m all right, he said. It’s all right.

Later they had to pull his pants off and truss up the bandage around his hip bone and his crotch, which was embarrassing, but it healed well.

He was elected sergeant because they were told they needed one. Sherman moved up to lieutenant and Hezekiah Pitt was made captain to replace Thompson. So there he was with a rank he knew nothing about.

After the battle he sat in a tent with some of the officers of the Thirty-ninth U.S. Infantry to ask them about the duties of a sergeant and made a list. He was anxious to do well and to get everything right. They laughed at him; elected sergeant and not even twenty years old yet. Such was the militia. They laughed at the way he spoke. They were men from Maine and New York, they said
noiss
and
reaftah
and
keaf.
He bent tight to the paper so they could not see his puzzled expression and eventually figured out these words meant
nurse
and
rafter
and
calf.

He wrote down, in a neat list, all the obligations of a sergeant because written information was what mattered in this world, from after-action reports to scout maps to the list of company clerk duties. Then the Georgia and Tennessee militias and the Army regulars started out for Pensacola. They were in the country the people called Alabama, and the United States government called Mississippi Territory.

Since he had carried himself well at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend and was of age he was forwarded to the Thirty-ninth Provost Marshall’s Department. They needed him. He was a big tall cracker. It was a long march to Pensacola. They marched south out of the Alabama hill country and down into the sawgrass country, through wastes of fan palm standing at a height to rake at his hip wound, all of it covered in green briar vines that grew thorns on every inch of their whipcord trailers and all along the march the company musician played “Stone Grinds
All” and “Little Drops of Brandy” on his breathless Irish tin whistle in the key of D, over and over. At Pensacola the Army put him to transporting prisoners. He hated it.

He learned all the devices of interrogation and the secret codes with which his British prisoners communicated with one another, how to use wrestling holds on a fighting prisoner, a thumb lock. He learned the uses of manacles and leg irons, the maintenance of prisons in the hot sands of the Florida gulf. Within a few months he talked his way out of the Provost Marshall’s unit and its commanding officer’s managerial hands and into the message corps. The runners.

Then at last he was doing what he loved: carrying information by hand alone through the Southern wilderness; messages, orders, maps, reports. Jackson’s army had no other signal capacity, not like the Navy. Captain Kidd was already over six feet tall and he had a runner’s muscles. He had good lungs and he knew the country. He was from Ball Ground, Georgia, in the Blue Ridge, and covering ground at a long trot was meat and drink to him.

At that time his hair was a deep brown tied up in a pigtail and nothing pleased him more than to travel free and unencumbered, alone, with a message in his hand, carrying information from one unit to another, unconcerned with its content, independent of what was written or ordered therein. He ran at the far fringe of Jackson’s Tennessee Regulars and their crossed white bandoliers. He saluted the adjutant at a staff tent, received instructions, stuffed the messages in his bag, and he was off.

A lifting, running joy. He felt like a thin banner streaming, printed with some regal insignia with messages of great import
entrusted to his care. He was given a runner’s corps badge made of silvery metal. He smeared bacon fat on it and dusted it over so it would not shine and give him away as he jogged on through the hills, through the sand and fan palms of the coast. They gave him a flintlock pistol to carry but it was heavy and the gooseneck cock was always catching on something so he pulled the load and carried it in his knapsack.