Castroville is a stone-built settlement on the Medina River that becomes the destination of Jefferson Kyle Kidd’s journey with Johanna Leonberger and the setting of a painful, incomplete return. Its European-looking streets, village life, and nearby graves of Johanna’s relatives promise a reunion with family history; Johanna’s response makes clear that a place can be identified as home by others without feeling like one to the person brought there.

Setting and Built Character

Castroville appears as a collection of stone houses with steep roofs, including large, square two-story dwellings with galleries running around their upper floors. Long windows open toward streets where women shake dust cloths and rugs from balconies, sending dust down onto passersby. To Kidd, the buildings resemble engravings of European villages, though cactus and mesquite in the yards mark the difference. The town’s arrangement reflects a village pattern in which people live together and go out each day to work their fields.

The surrounding landscape is both cultivated and distinctive. As Kidd approaches, plows are cutting up the country, and people working in the fields stop to watch the green excursion wagon pass. The town lies in warm, flat country: by April 1 Kidd has shed his canvas coat and is driving in shirtsleeves, with a welcome wind relieving the heat. On the Medina River, an inn and gristmill sit among wild pecan trees. Nearby, a seminary belonging to the Order of Mary Immaculate occupies three acres; the passage associates the streets’ measured pace with life in Alsace-Lorraine. The large, shaded warehouse of the Huth Seed Company is another prominent feature. Pasha calls to the many horses tied there, then falls quiet.

Arrival on the Road South

Castroville is named as Kidd’s destination while he is traveling with Johanna, whom he describes as a seed buyer’s companion rather than disclosing the purpose of their journey. After a dangerous encounter on the road, the two continue south toward the town. They pass through Fredericksburg before reaching Castroville; the narration distinguishes the two places, describing Fredericksburg as a predominantly German town and Castroville through its stone architecture, agricultural surroundings, and village customs.

Their arrival is also a public spectacle. Once the hotel owner makes Kidd and Johanna’s names known, people gather around the wagon. They have heard that Johanna was redeemed with German coin silver, a story passed along through the grandfather of Bianca Babb, whose granddaughter had been brought back from Indian Territory. The rumor has preceded the travelers, turning their arrival into an occasion for local curiosity. Kidd knows that further disclosure would bring crowds bearing cakes, pies, and featherbeds, while boys whistle, girls stare, and adults address Johanna in the Alsatian dialect. He therefore does not tell people about her captivity or her parents.

The Graves and Johanna’s Refusal

Kidd learns that Wilhelm and Anna Leonberger lived fifteen miles west, in the daughter settlement of D’Hanis, and that the Leonberger couple and their little daughter are buried at St. Dominic’s church there. He drives Johanna onward along a dusty caliche road. The church’s roof and towering steeple rise above the level horizon, bringing the promised family destination into view. At the graves, Kidd removes his hat and holds it against his breast, following the proper behavior he was taught long ago.

Johanna looks at the headstones and their weeping angels with curiosity, but mostly indifference. Her attention turns outward to the plowed, stone-built country around her. She understands that the people ahead are an aunt and uncle she can remember only dimly, and that they are the people to whom Kidd is taking her; she cannot understand where Kontah will go. The wind brings no news of her people. Believing them gone forever, she weeps, then asks to return to Dallas and pleads that she does not like the place. Her composure does not make the refusal less definite: the visit has located her relatives’ graves, not restored a home she recognizes.

Inn, Return Journey, and Narrative Significance

Kidd turns back east, covering the straight twenty-two miles to Castroville. He stays at the inn on the Medina, where the gristmill wheel tumbles through the night over the river’s green alluvial water. The next morning he shaves closely, puts on his black reading clothes, and continues to San Antonio. Castroville is thus both a destination and a point of retreat: the journey west reaches the graves, while the return to the inn precedes Kidd’s move onward.

The town’s significance lies in the contrast between communal recognition and Johanna’s own sense of belonging. Residents know the story of her redemption and are ready to welcome the returned captive, while her response at the graves remains detached and her wish is to leave. Castroville’s European-looking architecture and the nearby family burial place make ancestry visible, but they cannot undo the distance between Johanna’s remembered life and the future others have arranged for her.