San Antonio is a place of return and reckoning for Jefferson Kyle Kidd. Its river, bells, shaded streets, and bustling Plaza de Armas restore familiar pleasures, but the city he revisits has changed: his former print shop is derelict, old Spanish houses are disappearing, and the landholding community’s losses shadow his reunion with home.

A Spanish town remembered

Four years before his return, Jefferson Kyle Kidd had left San Antonio for North Texas, a year after Maria Luisa died. He remembered a graceful town of two-story stone houses, slate-shingled cottage roofs, and ornate cast-iron balconies. Many of the old Spanish houses turned their backs to the river; behind polished wooden window bars and tiled interiors, their owners maintained records of descent from the Canary Islands settlers who arrived in 1733, including the Betancorts and the Reales. The passage presents this inherited world as increasingly hemmed in by German and Irish Catholics whose languages seemed incomprehensible to the older community. The fading of Spain’s former grandeur is registered not only in political memory but in the changing sound and character of the town. The San Antonio River carries a more intimate set of memories. Kidd recalls excursions with the girls, who resembled their mother in their gray eyes and dark, curling hair, and boats passing with melons for sale. He remembers the immense cypresses, especially one a hundred feet tall and standing knee-deep in the water. These recollections are joyful, but they belong to a family life that has been broken by Maria Luisa’s death and Kidd’s departure. The river makes the city a repository of personal memory as well as a recognizable landscape.

Streets, squares, and return

When Kidd comes back, San Antonio welcomes him through ordinary encounters and familiar sounds. At the ford over Alazan Creek, Mexican women wade through the water with baskets of wet clothes on their heads, calling to one another and wringing out their long black hair in the warm April air. They tease him in Spanish, assuming he cannot understand; when he replies in their language, their surprise turns into laughter and splashed water. Their welcome makes his return feel lived rather than ceremonial. He is also glad to hear the bells of San Fernando and is hailed by an old-haired acquaintance from a buggy. The town’s architecture shapes his route inward. Narrow streets run between stone houses whose courtyards hold the cool; elsewhere, second-story wrought-iron balconies cast lacy shadows on the walls. In the evening he crosses the San Martin Street Bridge, passes along Calamares Street, and reaches the Plaza de Armas, also called Military Plaza. The Spanish Governor’s palace, built in 1749, stands in ruins, while the square remains a working center: wagons bring grain, vegetables, and hay for sale, and lantern-lit chili stands sit among shops, billiard rooms, and carriage businesses. Kidd leaves the excursion wagon, marked by its promises of curative waters and its bullet holes, at a carriage repository, and stables Fancy and Pasha at Haby’s. The square’s commerce is busy and practical, set against visible remnants of an older order.

The print shop and what remains

The Plaza de Armas had once been the site of Kidd’s own print shop. When he first met Maria Luisa, he was setting it up beside Advocate Branholme’s building, absorbed in the craft of making words appear on paper. He knew type well enough to read a stick backward and judged the quality of a print by the sound of the press’s platen. His knowledge of inks and papers was not merely trade experience: he delighted in producing messages for the world, even when he was not personally carrying them along the roads. On his return, that former workplace offers a stark measure of change. Kidd finds it filled with broken carriage wheels and machinery parts; dust covers the floor, the Stanhope press is gone, and scraps of wool and a shoe lie among the remnants. What had been a place of skilled production has become storage for damaged and discarded things. The contrast is sharpened by his continued attachment to printing: later, living with his family in San Antonio, he advises Emory at a different print shop and watches with interest as Emory works with a new Babcock cylinder press. The old shop’s abandonment does not erase Kidd’s craft, but it makes the city’s return inseparable from the loss of the life he once built there.

A changed home

San Antonio has grown by the time Kidd settles there again with Johanna Leonberger, Elizabeth, Emory, and their children. Many of the old and beautiful Spanish houses have been torn down, and the people have been dispossessed of their lands in ways that break his heart. The family occupies the now-empty Betancort house, while Elizabeth works among maps and yellowing land records in the long comedor as the family undertakes a nearly hopeless effort to recover the Spanish lands. The house therefore offers shelter, but its contents also preserve an unresolved struggle over inheritance and property. The city’s familiar public life exposes the distance between Kidd and Johanna’s experience of home. She joins girls on river excursions, takes dancing lessons, and rides sidesaddle, trying to present herself as a white girl for his sake. Yet she watches Mexican women and girls washing clothes at Alazan Creek and San Pedro Springs with deep envy. At dinner she carefully manages her knife, fork, and minute coffee spoon; Kidd, looking down at his flan, can only sigh. San Antonio is again his home, and it is the setting of his renewed work and family life, but return does not restore what was lost. Its streets and waters bring back memory while making visible the gap between the life expected of Johanna and the identity she has retained.