They gave him advice and warnings; of how the captives were strange, how they disliked white people, how they had peculiar eyes and had probably partaken of some secret potion or drug to make them so. That was the only answer, the only reasonable explanation.
The Captain offered to do a reading even though he knew very few people would come because so few people here were conversant with English and especially newspaper English. Or where things were in the outside world. It was in the main to help Johanna learn the proper protocol for sitting at the door and collecting dimes. And in reality, the fewer people to attend, the better. It was a practice session. He put up his advertisements and was given the use of the Vereins Kirche for that night. He asked for a blacksmith to fix his broken tire but the local blacksmith had been killed on the road to Kerrville.
In her room they shared a supper of some German dish made of noodles and ground mutton and a cream sauce. He still could not trust her manners in a restaurant. But she carefully placed her napkin on her knee and lifted each bite on her fork straight up to the level of her mouth and then aimed it straight in.
Is all lite Cho-henna?
I suppose that will do, he said.
She slurped a noodle until it flipped up and struck her on the nose.
Johanna!
She laughed until tears came to her eyes. She wiped her hair out of her face and addressed herself once again to the food. The Captain tried to be stern and then gave up. He set to the dish and the preserved cauliflower to one side with enthusiasm. It had been a long time since he had eaten a well-cooked supper or anything made with milk or cream and they did not have to wash up the dishes in a bucket.
That watch, she said. He took it out of his pocket and opened it.
In thirty minutes, he said, holding it out. We must go read at seven.
It is when the little hand there on seven and big hand on that twelve?
That’s it, my dear, he said. Then he pointed down the hall to the bathroom and handed her a towel. Go, he said.
AT THE VEREINS Kirche, the People’s Church, which was both a church and a community hall and a fort if need be, he sat her down at the door with the paint can on a fern stand beside her.
Dime-ah, he said. He held up his hand. Sit. Stay. Then he walked out the door, turned, and walked back in and pretended to notice Johanna for the first time, and said, Ten cents?
She understood instantly and pointed to the paint can. Dime-ah! She said it sternly and with great firmness. And so that evening he read from several Eastern papers while Johanna took up the task of being gatekeeper as if she had been waiting for something like this all her life. She fixed every person who came in with her glassy blue stare and pointed to the can and said, Dime-ah, tin sintz, a small girl with bottom teeth like a white fence and braided ochre hair and a dress in carriage check. From somewhere she had dredged up yet another word in German and when someone walked past without noticing her she cried out, Achtung! Tin sintz!
Joy and liveliness had come back to his readings now. His voice had its old vibrancy again and he smiled as he read the amusing things, the Hindi women who would not say their husband’s names, odd telegraph messages caught by a reporter, and recalled how dull his life had seemed before he had come upon her in Wichita Falls. He saw her bright, fierce little face break into laughter when the crowd laughed. It was good. Laughter is good for the soul and all your interior works.
THAT NIGHT HE walked back to the hotel with her and put her to bed in her own room. She yawned enormously and said, Big hoas liddle hoas, wiped her hands on the bedcover, yawned again. Then she fell back on the bed and was asleep within moments. He tiptoed out. He knew that by the morning she would be sleeping on the floor. But still this was an improvement. Their washed and ironed clothes lay in a bundle at his door so that they could be clean and civilized by morning. He thought about how Johanna was being filed down and her sharp edges ground away. The Captain sat by his lamp and tried to find articles in his newspapers that were not tied to dates; fluff pieces on chemical discoveries and astronomical surprises. Alphonse Borrelly had discovered an asteroid and named it Lydia and the Earl of Rosse had calculated the surface temperature of the moon at 500 degrees Fahrenheit. That would do in a pinch. He laid out his traveling clothes, the old rough flannel plaid Plains shirt, his lace-ups, his clean socks. It was forty miles of rough country south to Bandera and were they to be killed and scalped their bodies would be found bloody but spruce.
He broke down the .38, cleaned it, reassembled it. He made a list: feed, flour, ammunition, soap, beef, candles, faith, hope, charity.
NINETEEN
FINALLY THEY CAME into the town of Bandera where Polish immigrants labored at a saw mill and lines of freight wagons and their oxen stood in the street to make up a convoy to San Antonio as protection against the Comanche. The great oxen came in teams of six and eight down the main street with their heads tipping from one side to the other with every stride as if they were listening to some unheard music, a ponderous waltz. The people still believed the red men came only on the full moon, despite all evidence to the contrary, and the moon was now well past full and so the people in Bandera lived in delusions of safety.
In Bandera he found that the blacksmith was overwhelmed with work for the freighters, shoeing the teams of oxen and repairing tie-rods and beating out carriage bolts on the anvil. So he let it go; it seemed the cracked iron rim would have to hold a little longer.
The Captain rented the Davenport Mercantile building and for an hour’s reading they made enough to get through the final miles to Castroville. He had mined his newspapers for the last bits of news. Texas finally readmitted to the Union, for instance. He adjusted his reading glasses in the light of the bull’s-eye. Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first professional baseball team, a new concept in sport . . . Ada Kepley, first female law college graduate . . . construction of the new bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn continuing . . . a donkey adopted as the symbol of the Democrat party . . . the Vaudeville Theatre opened on The Strand in London, shocking exposure of female limbs on stage. By this time Johanna had lost her fear of crowds of white people and so she sat at the door and held out the paint can for the admittance fee. The Captain knew she regarded the coins as ammunition as much as a medium of exchange. Her head moved in birdlike jerks from face to face and if anyone tried to get past without paying she seized a sleeve in her small, hard hand and cried, Dime-ah! Chohenna choot!
They did not understand her but the meaning was clear.
THE HILLS FELL away behind them until they were nothing more than an uneven blue line on the horizon. There were no gradual approaches in or out of the hill country. They came down from the hills and then they were in the short-grass prairie in one geological moment. They had descended to a lower altitude and thus the breeze at evening carried the soft breath of the Gulf of Mexico and the lower Rio Grande and the smell of mesquite and the palms of Resaca de la Palma and even the smoke of the cannon those long years ago, almost thirty years. It would stay with him always as everything you ever did stayed with you, every horse you ever saddled, every morning he awoke with Maria Luisa beside him, and every slap of the paten on fresh paper, every time he had thrown open the shutters in the Betancort house, and his captain dying under his hands, always there like a tangle of telegraph wires in the brain where no dispatch was ever lost, what an odd thing, an odd thing. The soft breeze out of the south with its hint of salt lifted Fancy’s mane.
Kep-dun?
Yes, Johanna?
Mine doll.
He thought for a moment. He said, The doll you left up on the Red River.
Yes, mine doll, she looking across. Looking, looking. The girl opened her hands on her lap. You read now Castroville? I say dime-ah, tin sintz?