He began to read to his audiences of far places and strange climates. Of the Esquimaux in their seal furs, the explorations of Sir John Franklin, shipwrecks on deserted isles, the long-limbed folk of the Australian Outback who were dark as mahogany and yet had blond hair and made strange music which the writer said was indescribable and which Captain Kidd longed to hear.
He read of the discovery of Victoria Falls and sightings, real or not, of the ghost ship The Flying Dutchman and an eyewitness account of a man on the bridge of that ship sending messages by blinking light to them, asking about people long dead. And before these tales for a short time Texans quieted and bent forward to hear. The rain fell, or the snow, or the moon glared down and the lamps failed but they did not notice. At each stop, for an hour or so, Captain Kidd arrested time itself.
The Captain never did understand what had caused such a total change in a little girl from a German household and adopted into a Kiowa one. In a mere four years she completely forgot her birth language and her parents, her people, her religion, her alphabet. She forgot how to use a knife and a fork and how to sing in European scales. And once she was returned to her own people, nothing came back. She remained at heart a Kiowa to the end of her days.
After three years his daughters and his son-in-law and his two grandsons returned to San Antonio, established possession of the now-empty Betancort house, and began the long and nearly hopeless process of trying to recover the Spanish Lands. Emory went in debt for a new press and took over Leon Moke’s clothing shop and turned it into a print shop. Olympia sighed and drifted about the rooms of the old Betancort palacio until she finally married again, which was a relief to everyone. Elizabeth raised her boys and had a desk in a corner of the long comedor overflowing with platte maps and yellowing land records.
When they returned, Captain Kidd finally came in off the roads of Texas. She had made a wanderer of him but all things come to an end. San Antonio had grown and many of the old and beautiful Spanish houses were torn down. The people were despoiled of their lands in ways that broke his heart. Captain Kidd and Johanna came to live with Elizabeth and Emory and their children, his grandsons, he to be old and she to stare into a future unknown. He advised Emory at the print shop where his son-in-law worked with deep interest and delight in his new Babcock cylinder press while the Captain sat at a desk littered with composing sticks and inspected each new print run. Johanna tried to pretend to be a white girl, for his sake. She joined other girls in their excursions on the river, their dancing lessons, and put up with the indignity of riding sidesaddle. She gazed with deep envy at the Mexican women and girls half-naked in Alazan Creek and San Pedro Springs, washing clothes. They slapped water at one another, wrung out their hair, waded with their skirts up around their waists. She sat stiffly in her riding habit and her smart little topper and watched them and rode home and then tried to appear cheerful at dinner, carefully managing her knife and fork and the minute coffee spoon. The Captain sighed heavily, his hands in his lap, staring at his flan. The worst had happened. He did not know what to do.
One day John Calley of Durand came riding into the town and stopped to visit with the Captain. His memory of the dignified old gentleman shouting for silence and reason in the mercantile store in Durand had never faded. He stood with his hat shading his face in the hot street named Soledad at the Betancort double doors. Then the small door set inside the big one came open. A short maid peered out and behind her stood a slender girl of fifteen or so with thick yellow hair braided in a crown. She had blue eyes and a scattering of freckles across her nose. She wore a dress in dark gray with a yellow figure in the weave, a long sweep of hems. Her nails were shell pink and perfectly clean.
Y qué? said the maid in a rude and suspicious voice. Hágame el favor de decirme lo que quieres, se?or.
Yes? The girl said. Ah you looking for someone?
For a moment he was at a loss for words. Finally: Would you be Johanna, the captive girl the Captain was returning?
Yes, I am Johanna Kidd. She had a small, dubious smile for this stranger in tall traveling boots and a worn duster over his arm.
Calley took off his hat. He couldn’t stop looking at her. This had grown out of that grimy ten-year-old staring like a wild animal over the dashboard of the spring wagon, her hair in ragged braids. He remembered how she had slapped the taffy out of his hands.
He said, Ah, yes, well, I stopped by to pay my respects to the Captain. I, ah, happened to be in San Antonio to see about, well, cattle. He paused. Yes, cattle.
Cettinly. She stepped back and lifted one hand to the interior of the old house. She said, He is in the patio just now. Please come in.
He paused with one boot in the air. He said, Do you by any chance remember me?
She regarded him carefully. He stood large and travel-stained and entranced in the cool of the tile-floored hall as she raked him over with a blue stare. I am so sorry, she said, but I am afraid I do not. This way.
His boot heels clicked on the tiles as he followed her and in the sunlight of the patio he saw the Captain reading a thick leather-bound book. After he and the Captain had conversed there in the cool shade of the mimosa, the old man still straight as a wand, he asked if he might call again and so he did. And when he did he brought several newspapers for the Captain and a small, intricate arrangement of dried roses he thought Miss Kidd might like.
Johanna, she said, is very well to call me.
Calley sat down at Elizabeth’s small piano and played “Come to the Bower” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and did not look up from the keyboard but waited to see if she would come to him and before long she stood at his shoulder. He moved over on the piano bench and after some hesitation she sat down beside him with a graceful arrangement of her skirts and for the first time smiled at him. He taught her the songs, picking them out note by note.
It was for him a long and magical afternoon: the cries of the milkman coming down the street with his quiet gray horse shouting Leche! Leche bronca! and somebody calling for Timotea at the big wooden Veramendi doors and the Devil’s trumpet vine with its blatant red cornets drooping over the closed shutters and making shadowy gestures as the wind came up off the river behind the house. Calley sang in his off-key raspy voice, She walks along the river in the quiet summer night . . . and then forgot the lyrics but was fairly sure it had something to do with stars, bright. After a while he stopped and just sat and looked at her.
The Captain stood at one of the tall windows, a window that started at the floor and went up to nine feet, and watched the milkman and his horse walk past one of the old Spanish houses that were being demolished, past the new brick buildings around the Plaza de las Islas, into the hot afternoon, into history.
When Calley finally had to leave at sunset she stood at the door with his hat between her two hands like a great felted cake.
She said, carefully, Heah is you hat. We would be very heppy if you would come to dinnah.