Since she was small she had been on her feet in the dark early-morning hours, desperately pulling on her boots to go with her father to bring oats and fodder to their ox and to the milk cow. A person says Yosh, yosh to greet them, to ask them to move over. She watched them eat with the candlelight shining in their deep eyes, wept when the calf was sold away, learned to milk and listened to the men talk of remedies for the colic and what to put on a wound. She stood to watch the carriages of the great, like the Dennys for instance, with their four-in-hands, the horses’ hides gleaming like silk trotting past on the road in front of their cottage.

And here they were running free. Long manes and tails floating behind them as they fled the train of commissary wagons heading to San Antonio. Whoever would have thought she would ride in a convoy of wagons like this? Each wagon pulled by four and even six shining horses with rays of light glancing off the hame balls and all the metal parts.

She sits up beside the driver. He is a wide man with a springing dark beard and an old-fashioned courtesy. He is almost shy with this sprightly dark-haired girl and he answers her politely.

“No miss, nobody owns them. Hard to catch, hard to break, but then again, the price is right.”

They were free to anyone. All her life she had known how costly it was to buy a horse, to keep one. So few had them, either to ride or to pull a carriage. A kind of low greed almost overcomes her and for a moment she imagines herself owning one of them, and it would somehow (she was not quite sure how) become tame and carry her over this landscape in a floating gait. The wild horses disappear into the distance in a cloud of dust; faerie enticements.

Her parents had contrived and saved to send her to the nuns and what she loved most about her education at the convent was going to the beehives with Sister Angela, watching the bees dance before the gates of their hive like David before the tabernacle, and the hours of learning music. She was taught on the pianoforte, all the strange arithmetical conclusions of the scales. Once she slipped away down the street to see the farrier place shoes on the feet of a mad, fighting saddle horse, a sight she would never forget. She knew that in the horse’s big muscular soul there were inharmonious clashing notes of broken music. Sister Angela had been very patient with her. A girl mustn’t go alone to a blacksmith shop, my dear.

And a girl perhaps had not ought to go alone into a new world, but she had stepped aboard ship with the wind in her face. Into trouble. She had known she would need allies the moment she understood the sort of man Colonel Webb was. They first journeyed to Camp Thomas in Ohio, and the army wives, who she had met in Ohio and who also had come with their husbands to Texas, had been fair kind to her and so she had made them small gifts; a small personal gift would always earn a person good regard. She knew they were all Protestant and so she made them bookmarks for their Bibles, which she assumed they all read devotedly. She crocheted the edges of the bookmarks and embroidered them with a cross, holding them close to her face to get every stitch perfect. How clever, how kind! they said. So they would remember the colonel’s governess then, and if help was needed someday, it might be theirs to give.

She hears the girl behind, complaining as usual, and it makes her nerves light up like hot wires. Patience, the child is only fourteen and this is an unhappy family. Patience.

“Josephina, my dear, give me your bonnet and I will fix it,” says Doris Dillon. I am to pray for a quiet heart at times like this, but I never remember to remember. She reaches back into the interior, opens her hand. “Give it to me and don’t cause me to fall to cursing in Irish.”

“Oh, you must not,” says Josephina. Her voice is prim and censorious.

“And how would you know, then?”

“I would just be able to tell.”

“What if it were a recipe for fish?” Doris keeps smiling.

“Jo, stop fussing with it,” says Mrs. Webb. The mother and daughter stay in the shade of the awnings. They are not interested in these uninhabited stretches of Texas; they are weary and irritable. “Give it to Doris.”

Doris takes the bonnet, fetches out her kit, and clips the ties loose. She turns them inside out and turns to the girl with what she hopes is a happy expression. “You see, Josephina, this is a needle,” she says. “This is a thread.”

“Oh, ha ha.”

The needle winks bright in the Texas sun and her fine black hair is coming out of its chignon. She manages to restitch the tie even as the wagon crashes over humps of grass and alarming little municipalities of red dirt that the driver says were made by ants.

She is still trying to understand the people here and what a girl can do and what a girl can’t do. For instance, the maid Mercedes, who is from the Spanish people but how the Spanish people got here she doesn’t know nor does she know if she will be allowed to make a friend of Mercedes or not. She has been reprimanded so often.

Colonel Webb has gone on ahead to San Antonio, to rent a house. May a cat eat him and may the devil eat the cat.

All she can think of now is how many horses all these people have, and the wild ones, running across the great bald world in this hot month of June. Running perfectly free. The driver points things out to her: the nests of those snowy egrets, a desert willow heavy with blossom. Who do the cattle belong to? Nobody. Catch them if you can. They have enormous horns, they are in all colors, they are speckled and brindled, black and red, there are white ones with black spots over their eyes like a highwayman’s mask. They are fey and dangerous, she thinks. Those ones would take a horse out from under you before you knew it, Jesus, the horns on them. The wild cattle gallop away into mirages of gilt and silver and screaming dark birds.

Their little excursion wagon, followed by six big commissary freighters, comes over the top of a rise, and she stands to see all the tilting earth go on for miles. Only once before in her life has she seen wild deer, and there just ahead are five of them! All so alike as to be quarter notes on the waving staves of grass.

“Hang on, miss,” says the driver. “We don’t want to lose you.”

“No such luck,” she says with a laugh, but she sits down again and shades her eyes.

Doris is in a state of delight with it all, even in the heat and the sun hot enough to be splitting stones. She has always known that the animals live between ourselves and the rest of Creation. How like us they are and how unlike. All people are only people, but there are a great plenty of animals of all kinds and they are each one named in the Book of Life.

“And do you often go back and forth?” she asks the driver. “Are there not Red Indians?”

He smiles down at her. “Yes, miss,” he says. “But this road is safe. I go to Galveston next trip.” His attention is taken by his off leader, he calls to her, she tosses her head in irritation. “Galveston, there’s many immigrant ships coming in there, coming and going.”

He clearly wants her to tell him where she’s from, how she got here, but she says, “And do you take people there? As passengers?”

“Sometimes. But they mostly go on Santleben’s stagecoach, service to the coast just started up, getting fancy around here now.”

Santleben’s. Ships leaving for England or the Continent, just in case. She tucks this away as she would her bedding, something to rest upon.

They camp out like Gypsies right in the middle of all this uninhabited land. She braids her thick black hair out of the way and falls asleep listening to distant wolf howls, a weird clacking chitter of long birds soaring overhead. Sometimes she lies on her stomach, lifted up on her elbows in a tumble of blankets and chemise to listen to the night. She wakes up to the smell of smoke and horses. They come to Floresville and then they are only twenty-five miles from San Antonio. She doesn’t want this journey to end.

Mrs. Webb tells her in an absentminded way to keep her bonnet down over her face against the sun. Doris wants to lift her face to it, to flood herself with sunlight. She wants to walk out into the land and reach out to the vigilant deer as they thrash their tails from side to side in alarm. Their tails are as long as her forearm and all white and suddenly, with the sun sinking low, their huge ears glow red as the evening light shines through them.

“Jo, look!” she says. The girl wearily gets up from her trunk in the wagon’s interior and comes to stand at her back.

“What?”

“The sun is shining through their ears, like a red lantern, you see?”

Josephine turns away without answering and says, “Mama, she says the sun is shining on the deer’s ears.”

A long pause. “The deer’s ears? Yes. Well. I am at a loss for words.”

“So are they! Um . . .” Doris’s laugh trails off.

“I don’t know how long I am to endure this endless gushing over every cactus and every bird, Doris. You are a governess, not an entertainer.”

“Yes, ma’am.”