That night he dusted his cut forehead with gray wound powder, and then slept like a dead man without his usual war nightmares that should have been brought about by the fight, but somehow they passed him by. Perhaps they sought out someone else. Perhaps he was not on their map this night.
He woke up to a clean and tidy camp under the pecan trees that stood high and airy above them. He heard the noise of a little stream nearby running into the Brazos and the hush, hush sound of small new pecan leaves in the breeze. He heard Johanna crying out, Eat! Now you eat! And the mare’s bell ringing as the horses grazed. He took the plate from her and ate carefully. The blue smoke from the little stovepipe lay low and drifted. They were all right, he and the girl were alive. They were having a calm breakfast among the pecan trees, new leaves like green dots with their shadows making slow polkas back and forth over them and the Curative Waters golden letters.
He pressed one hand to his right eyebrow. The cut was a little swollen but all right. He could for a brief time work as hard as a younger man but it always took much longer to recover. He must recover. They had far to go.
The horses needed rest and care as much as he did. He would have to teach this to Johanna. The Plains Indians did not expend much care on their horses. They rode them hard and as a last resort ate them. He went down Fancy and Pasha’s legs to check for swelling but they were all right. They had last been shod up in Bowie but before long they would need new ones. He straightened up again with some effort; he could almost hear the jointed sound as one vertebrae settled on another.
He sat on his carpetbag and leaned against a wheel. His mind kept going back to the fight and to put it aside he watched Pasha graze and drank black coffee and smoked his pipe. Johanna played in the stream like a six-year-old. She turned over rocks and sang and splashed. To comfort himself and slow down his mind he thought of his time as a courier, a runner, and Maria Luisa and his daughters. Maybe life is just carrying news. Surviving to carry the news. Maybe we have just one message, and it is delivered to us when we are born and we are never sure what it says; it may have nothing to do with us personally but it must be carried by hand through a life, all the way, and at the end handed over, sealed.
He was not really rested but well enough. They went on.
THE NEXT DAY at noon they came to a place called the Brazos ferry. The Brazos unwound slow green coils and smoke from slash fires lay low and drifted at the height of a man’s head. There was no ferry. He could see the ferry landing on the other side, downstream about a hundred yards where the current would push them. The landing looked good; it looked like a hard bottom. The river was up so things might have changed. Loads of sand and silt could have been laid over the landing, big tumbling drowned trees could be below the surface of the river turning like the fabled octopus with grasping arms.
Once again they had to make a crossing on their own and once again he loosed Pasha and the little mare Fancy plunged in. She fought across the current, they drifted down, Johanna clutched up her skirts and prepared to jump but they made it.
On the far side they were on the Lampasas Road and would miss Meridian altogether. That was all right. They would soon come to Durand which was larger and had more people, all of them with money in their pockets he sincerely hoped.
A brief rain; again it was a wet world where each leaf of the live oak, clinging to the twigs throughout the winter, held a drop at its tip. The live oaks never lost their leaves in the winter; he had seen them standing green in a snowfall.
Johanna bent her head far back to look up into the leafy canopy and the rainy sky. There was a cautious wonder on her face. She said something in Kiowa in a low voice. So much water, such giant trees, each possessing a spirit. Drops like jewels cascaded from their spidery hands.
He said, Tree. He took off his old broad-brimmed field hat and ran his hand through his hair, which was as fine as cobweb and as white. Put the hat back on.
Yes, tlee, tlee.
He pointed out: Pine. Oak. Cedar. First the general class and then the specific.
Yes, Kep-den Kidd.
As they drove, he pointed back to Pasha, to his nose, to the bacon. She seemed to have had some acquaintance with the English language before. Maybe her memory just needed a jog. She said, Hoas, nos-ah, bekkin. Then he rose to his feet. Stend up, she said. He sat down. Sit don. Kontah, sit don.
Captain Kidd was fairly sure Kontah meant grandfather but whether this was an honorific or a slang term he had no way of knowing.
He said, Kontah, Opa.
Yes yes, Kontah Opa!
Opa, German for grandfather. Well, they were getting somewhere. The word Opa clicked into some otherwise disengaged gear in her mind. Then she became interested in the puzzle of another language, other words, other grammars. She thought for a moment and then said, Cho-henna clepp honts. She clapped her hands. Cho-henna laff-a. She came out with a hearty false laugh, bouncing around on the wagon seat. Then she held up her hands with the fingers spread. Wan, doo, tlee, foh, fife, siss, sefen, ate-ah, nine-ah, den.
The mouse ran up the clock, he said, and when he saw the dubious look on her face, her anxious need to understand, he patted her hand. It is all right, he said.
Allite.
She could not pronounce either the German R nor the English R or one of the two th sounds and perhaps never would. Lain, she said. Watah, plenty good much watah, plenty lain.
Excellent, Johanna! Excellent.
Hmmm hmmm hmmm, she hummed to herself and rocked back and forth and then busied herself with tearing off the remains of the lace edging on her dress. She had begun it when she tied up her braid during the fight on the Brazos and had decided to finish the job.
As long as they were traveling she was content and happy and the world held great interest for her but Captain Kidd wondered what would happen when she found she was never to wander over the face of the earth again, when she was to be confined forever to her Leonberger relatives in a square house that could not be broken down and packed on a travois. He had a failing feeling around his heart when he thought of it. Cynthia Parker had starved herself to death when she was returned to her white relatives. So had Temple Friend. Other returned captives had become alcoholics, solitaries, strange people. They were all odd, the returned captives. All peculiar with minds oddly formed, never quite one thing or another. As Doris had said back in Spanish Fort, all those captured as children and returned were restless and hungry for some spiritual solace, abandoned by two cultures, dark shooting stars lost in the outer heavens.
And could he abandon her now to her relatives, after they had saved each other’s lives, after the battle they had fought? He had to. They were her blood kin. This was a painful thought but he had had enough of anxiety for a good long while and so he turned his mind back to the here and now.
In Durand he would have to give a reading of the latest news since they had shot up nearly all their money. The Captain’s previous funds had been destroyed by the War Between the States and several minor debts in property taxes, but minor or not they were debts and by 1866 his deposits and bank stocks were all gone. The local San Antonio Commission for the Support of the Confederacy had threatened him with jail if he would not invest in Confederate bonds and so there it all went. He sold his printing business and paid his debts and took to the road. Maria had died the year before, and it was as if some tether had been loosed, the anchor rope of a hot-air balloon cut free and the Captain rose up and sailed away on the winds of chance. He was nearly seventy-two now and his finest possessions were his gold hunting watch and Pasha and his reading voice.
Cho-henna estomp choo! She lifted her bare foot and pointed to it and then stamped it on the floorboards.