News of the World: A Novel Read Free

drizzle of freckles across her cheekbones and her fingers were blunt as noses with short nails lined in black.
    Can’t locate any. Hard to find somebody to trust with this.
    Captain Kidd nodded. But you’ve delivered girls before now, he said. The Blainey girl, you got her back.
    Not that far a trip. Besides I don’t know those people down there. You do.
    Yes, I see.
    Captain Kidd had spent years in San Antonio; he had married into an old San Antonio family and he knew the way, knew the people. In North and West Texas there were many free black men, they were freighters and scouts and now after the war, the Tenth U.S. Cavalry, all black. However, the general population had not settled the matter of free black people in their minds yet. All was in flux. Flux: a soldering aid that promotes the fusion of two surfaces, an unstable substance that catches fire.
    The Captain said, You could ask the Army to deliver her. They take charge of captives.
    Not anymore, said Britt.
    What would you have done if you hadn’t come across me?
    I don’t know.
    I just got here from Bowie. I could have gone south to Jacksboro.
    I saw your posters when we pulled in, Britt said. It was meant.
    One last thing, said Captain Kidd. Maybe she should go back to the Indians. What tribe took her?
    Kiowa.
    Britt was smoking as well. His foot on the drawbar was jiggling. He snorted blue fumes from his nostrils and glanced at the girl. She stared back at him. They were like two mortal enemies who could not take their eyes from one another. The endless rain hissed in a ground spray out in the street and every roof in Wichita Falls was a haze of shattered water.
    And so?
    Britt said, The Kiowa don’t want her. They finally woke up to the fact that having a white captive gets you run down by the cav. The Agent said to bring all the captives in or he was cutting off their rations and sending the Twelfth and the Ninth out after them. They brought her in and sold her for fifteen Hudson’s Bay four-stripe blankets and a set of silver dinnerware. German coin silver. They’ll beat it up into bracelets. It was Aperian Crow’s band brought her in. Her mother cut her arms to pieces and you could hear her crying for a mile.
    Her Indian mother.
    Yes, said Britt.
    Were you there?
    Britt nodded.
    I wonder if she remembers anything. From when she was six.
    No, said Britt. Nothing.
    The girl still did not move. It takes a lot of strength to sit that still for that long. She sat upright on the bale of Army shirts which were wrapped in burlap, marked in stencil for Fort Belknap. Around her were wooden boxes of enamel washbasinsand nails and smoked deer tongues packed in fat, a sewing machine in a crate, fifty-pound sacks of sugar. Her round face was flat in the light of the lamp and without shadows, or softness. She seemed carved.
    Doesn’t speak any English?
    Not a word, said Britt.
    So how do you know she doesn’t remember anything?
    My boy speaks Kiowa. He was captive with them a year.
    Yes, that’s right. Captain Kidd shifted his shoulders under the heavy dreadnought overcoat. It was black, like his frock coat and vest and his trousers and his hat and his blunt boots. His shirt had last been boiled and bleached and ironed in Bowie; a fine white cotton with the figure of a lyre in white silk. It was holding out so far. It was one of the little things that had been depressing him. The way it frayed gently on every edge.
    He said, Your boy spoke with her.
    Yes, said Britt. For as much as she’d talk to him.
    Is he with you?
    Yes. Better on the road with me than at home. He’s good on the road. They are different when they come back. My boy nearly didn’t want to come back to me.
    Is that so? The Captain was surprised.
    Yes sir. He was on the way to becoming a warrior. Learned the language. It’s a hard language.
    He was with them how long?
    Less than a year.
    Britt! How can that be?
    I don’t know. Britt smoked and turned to lean on the wagon tailgate and looked