John Calley decided to remain in South Texas and gather wild cattle out of the area around Frio Town, south of San Antonio in the brush country, in the notorious Nueces Strip. The reason few people did that was that it was an area devoid of law and not for the faint of heart, but if a man could stay alert and live long enough he could gather enough wild cattle to make a small fortune. It depended on how well you could shoot and how deeply you did or did not sleep. He hired men like Ben Kinchlowe who was hard as nails and spoke both English and Spanish and was accomplished in the handling of both cattle and revolvers. He branded all he gathered with a road brand and went north and after two trips John Calley was a made man.
He and Johanna were married in the Betancort house according to the old Southern custom of being married in the bride’s home and in January. Johanna and the Captain sat up in her bedroom, on the bed, waiting to be called downstairs. There Calley waited in a stiff black cutaway and striped ascot with the Episcopal minister from St. Joseph’s. Her hands were shaking.
She sat close beside him as if for protection against an unknown future; she smelled of the whitebrush blossoms that grew along Calamares Creek and orange water and the starch of her gown.
Kontah, she said. Her voice quavered. Tears stood in her eyes unshed.
It’s all right, Johanna.
I have nevah been marriet before.
No! Really?
Pliss, Kep-dun. She pressed with a trembling hand at her elaborate braiding and the veil pulled over a rim of beaded wire. Don’t make chokes. I am faint. John has never been marriet before eithah. Her round face was red and the freckles stood out like spotting on a hill country peach.
By God let us hope not.
Kontah, what is the best rules for being marriet?
Well, he said. One, don’t scalp anybody. Two, do not eat with your hands. Do not kill your neighbor’s chickens. He tried to keep his tone light. His throat was closing up and he made harsh noises as he cleared it. As for the positive commandments, you two will figure them out for yourselves. It will be all right, it will be all right.
He slipped the old gold hunting watch out of his pocket and clicked it open and held it out to her.
She wiped at her eyes and looked down at it and said, It is eleven. Time, Kontah.
Elizabeth called up the stairs and then ran up, holding her skirts. She put in her head and she was smiling. Johanna, she said. Are you ready?
Johanna turned and put her arms around the Captain’s neck. We will come to visit often, she said. You are my cuuative watah. Then she began to sob.
Yes, he said. He shut his eyes and prayed he would not start crying himself. And you are my dearest little warrior. You must not cry. He pressed the watch into her hand. I would like for you to have it. Time seems to have been sweeping ahead very fast these last years. How many years I worried about you and also delighted in your company. And now it is time for me to give you away.
AFTER SHE AND John Calley were married she went with him on the next drive, all the way to Sedalia, Missouri, driving a light four-wheel buggy. It was a life she could love. And so Johanna and John Calley rode the cattle country of Texas together into the next century. And lived to see an airplane land in Uvalde. They held hands alongside their two grown children to see it strike the Texas earth and the pilot walk away from the wreckage as if he had done it on purpose.
The Captain drifted into a very old age and worked again at the Kiowa dictionary until he found it hard to see. Often he remembered her cry at the Great Brazos River Ten-Cent Shoot-out. It had been a war cry, and she had been only ten, and she had meant it.
Britt Johnson and Paint Crawford and Dennis Cureton were killed by the Comanche in 1871, on a freighting trip near Graham in North Texas. They were caught on the only open stretch between Graham and Indian Mound Mountain. They were buried where they fell and there their gravestone stands to this day.
Simon and Doris raised a family of six children, all of whose names started with the letter D. They were all musicians and the family traveled around North Texas bringing Irish jigs and cowboy ballads to barn dances and fairs for many years. The Horrells continued their crime spree in central Texas and New Mexico until several of them were killed in the great Lampasas Square Shoot-Out in 1877 and they finally made the Eastern papers.
San Fernando cathedral received a new front with twin towers but the old sanctuary and dome over the altar, built in 1733, remained unchanged. The camposanto graves had to be moved south of the San Antonio River but many of the original Spanish settlers had been buried under the floor and so there lie the bones of the Betancorts, perhaps content at last in this New World with the bells of San Fernando ringing out the aves and the angeluses. The bones of the Kiowa warriors did not lie in the earth but in the stories of their lives, told and retold—their bravery and daring, the death of Britt Johnson and his men, and Cicada, the little girl taken from them by the Indian Agent, Three Spotted’s little blue-eyed girl.
In his will the Captain asked to be buried with his runner’s badge. He had kept it since 1814. He said he had a message to deliver, contents unknown.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
Anyone interested in the psychology of children captured and adopted by Native American tribes on the frontier should read Scott Zesch’s book The Captured. It is excellent. His book documents child captives from the Texas frontier, including his own great-great-uncle, and in each instance gives the background of death and terror these children endured before they were adopted or claimed within the tribe. There has not been a definitive study of the psychological strategies these children adopted in order to survive but one would be welcome. They apparently became Indian in every way and rarely readjusted when returned to their non-native families. They always wished to return to their adoptive families, even when they had been with their Indian families for less than a year. This was true for both the Anglo, German-Anglo, and Mexican children taken. I think the words of my Irish character Doris Dillon best expressed it. I’ll let you find her words in the story.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always much gratitude to my agent, Liz Darhansoff, and editor, Jennifer Brehl, who gave their immediate and unstinting support to this story.
Thanks to June and Wayne Chism for the story of Wayne’s ancestor Caesar Adolphus Kydd, who was the original reader of the news in small towns in North Texas in the 1870s and was the inspiration for the Captain both in The Color of Lightning and in this book.