They were all talking and wrestling with the side curtains in a flurry of skirts and petticoats. The Irish girl sat up front beside the driver and had bent back to help with the curtains, her skirts gripped in one hand against the Gulf morning breeze. The big horse in the shafts trotted out smartly. Behind them came the freight wagons bristling with soldiery. It was a long way to San Antonio and attacks from the Lipan Apache or Comanche were not out of the question.
Simon wiped his face with his shirttail and then quickly took his fiddle from his case. Water and soapsuds ran down his neck. They were coming toward him from out of the fortress, crossing the dry resaca. He must send her a message somehow, that the song had been for her and her alone, that he wished her to remember him. He stepped forward to the side of the road, tightened his bowstring, and began to play “Death and the Sinner” without even tuning up. It was a haunting Irish slow air and he sent it out to Doris Dillon note after note, phrase after phrase, out over the river and the deafening silence of a new-made peace.
She turned, squinting out from under a heart-shaped bonnet to see the slight fiddler with his curling mop of reddish hair playing alone under the palm trees, facing her. As they passed close, she leaned out of the driver’s seat to listen, with a delighted expression on her face. She lifted her hand to him in a small, shy gesture. Somebody reached out from behind her and pulled her arm down. She turned front again and all her body told of her exasperation, but then she glanced over her shoulder at him, with a very small wave, a fugitive smile. And then they went on to San Antonio. Simon bowed his formal bow and when he lifted his head all he saw were dust and glinting trace chains and men moving slowly past to the equipment stacks.
Simon felt elated, suspended somehow. She had looked at him, waved to him; she had smiled. He sat down under the palms where he had made his small camp, and with a feeling of unmerited joy he began to put together his possessions. He considered them, and what he was to do and where he was to go on his journey to getting his land and acquiring the good regard of Miss Dillon. He had saved exactly thirty dollars in Spanish pesos over the last few years. He kept them in twists of muslin in his rucksack so they would not chink and then the twists rolled in a sock. Mexican pesos were the currency of much of the southwest and Felipe Quinto’s haughty Spanish face seemed to give them even more value. Simon was under no illusions that he would receive back pay from the Confederate Army and did not even want to ask in case he had to write his name down somewhere.
He had left Kentucky determined to buy a piece of land in Texas and somehow he would find it. Somebody would mention it, somebody would be lamenting they couldn’t sell it, but somewhere he would hear about it and it would be meant for him and the black-haired girl who was from Ireland and indentured to an uncharitable beast of a colonel for three years.
He thought, That’s just fine. She’s not promised to somebody else and that gives me time to make money and find someplace, and she can’t marry anybody else in the meanwhile. If she can avoid worse from the man.
He stood for a moment to see the crowd of surrendered Confederates packing their gear, tents coming down, the tent ropes coiled. The war was finally over. A great otherworldly hand had swept across the South and destroyed so much and what now was to happen to others he did not know, but as for himself he flew a private ensign with several imperatives written upon it, one of which concerned music.
He jammed the fiddle case in his rucksack along with the disassembled revolver, his odds and his ends. He rolled his blankets into a long tube and slung it over one shoulder, tied the ends together on the other side. It seemed strange to see the American flag floating over the walls of Fort Brown, over the end of the greatest conflict America or any country had yet endured, all her flags folded now into one. He pulled on the Kentucky hat, no longer a soldier for the Confederacy. He started to walk out of the muster area in front of Fort Brown and was quickly stopped by a Union provost marshal’s man.
“Where are you going, son?”
“Galveston,” said Simon.
“Yes, but you have to be written down for discharge and you have to have a pass.”
“Yes, sir,” said Simon. “Where do I go?”
The officer said, in a careful, patient voice, “See that line of men in Confederate uniforms? They are all waiting in front of that tent to have their names checked against the muster rolls. Then they are given a discharge paper and a pass. Go there.”
“Yes, sir.”
Simon started off for the row of slouching, patient men. As soon as the officer had his attention taken away by a nearby argument Simon ducked out behind several commissary wagons, threaded among the Yankee tents, and found the road going east toward the mouth of the Rio Grande.
Half a mile down the road he heard a noise behind him and turned quickly.
It was the Yankee drummer boy, Damon, the black sergeant, the Zouave, and the guitar player from Colonel Benavides’s regiment, who lugged his guitar in a case.
“Well, good morning you-all,” said Simon. His strongly planed face, now furred with a day’s growth of beard, lit up with a pleased expression.
“Hey hey, wait up!” the drummer boy shouted. “Where you off to?”
Simon gestured up the road. He said, “They are going to come and make you all stand in line in the hot sun here before long. As for myself, I am on my way to Galveston.”
The banjo player said, “Not me. But I just come to give you a dollar out of my pay from the dinner. You got a long hard road ahead of you.”
Simon said, “That is damn kind of you.” He took the silver piece and lifted his hat. But the drummer boy, who said his name was Patrick, declared he was coming along with Simon; so did Damon and so did the Tejano guitar player.
“I ain’t ready to go home yet,” said the boy. “I aim to have some adventures here before long.” He was carrying his bodhran in one hand, his rucksack on his back, and the pair of bones in one pocket. He rattled his thumb down the bodhran’s head. “I got my discharge and my pass and I aim to see some of this old world before I go back.” He did a quick reel step.
“The Federals gave you your discharge just like that?” said Damon. He gazed down at the boy. He had traded his top hat for a Hardee hat with a frayed brim and it shadowed his face.
“Said I never should have been in in the first place.” The boy had ears like a carriage with its doors open, big Union-issue boots, a short nose, and a wide slot of a mouth. He kept on dancing as if the percussion of his boots on the road were more than enough, tune or no tune. “That I was a mere child. Glad to get shet of me.”
“I cannot go,” said the Zouave. “Ze banjo man cannot go and me eye-zer. I must return to my regiment zere in Bagdad across the rivaire. But, please, take zis my dollaire as well for you good leading us last night et also you idees about ze shirts, very esmart, et alors, adieu mon vieux et bonne chance.”
So they said farewell to the banjo man and the Zouave. The two of them turned back toward the fort and Simon, Damon, the Tejano, and the boy started out for the Gulf of Mexico one foot after another in the searing heat. They carried with them their meager possessions, their blanket rolls over their shoulders, convinced that in Galveston were saloons and hotels, all in need of musicians, all filled with various sorts of people with money in their pockets. Simon would earn good hard silver there and eventually show up in San Antonio dressed to the nines with land of his own and he would sweep off his hat: Miss Dillon, I hope you remember me.
They said their names: Damon Lessing, Doroteo Navarro, Patrick O’Hehir, and Simon Boudlin. They stopped to shake hands all around and then went on.
“I knew Walters wasn’t your real name,” said Damon. “I have a keen intuition in that regard.” They marched forward down the hot and sandy road.
Simon said, “Very well, then, does your intuition tell you how we can get to Galveston?”
“Of course,” said Damon. “By water. Walking up the coast all the way to Galveston is for m
admen and jackrabbits. We need a boat.”
“Yes, but I’m still waiting for a more specific idea,” said Simon. They trudged on. “As to how to get a boat.”
“We steal a boat from the Yankees there on the island. I know the place well. I worked the coastal ships for a year. The Yankees got me in New Orleans. Conscript labor. So I got away from them. Get away from one, grabbed by the other. The Confederates got me after I escaped the Yankees.”
This was more than Simon had heard the dark man say about himself since he had first met him in the regimental band tent. “How do we get across to the island?” The heat of the day increased; the south Texas brush country around them was dense with the ganglia of creosote bush and acacia, all starred with thorns.
“They are ferrying stuff over to the mainland now that they got Fort Brown,” said Damon. “Stores from Brazos de Santiago. Their endless cornucopia of food. We could hide on some boat tonight, one going over. We don’t want them to see us crossing over. Then when we steal a boat, they won’t figure out who did it. That substantial enough for you?”
“It is. I still have your revolver. It’s in two pieces in my rucksack.”
“Keep it, son. I don’t want to get caught with it.”
“All right then.”
Simon lifted the rucksack higher on his square, bony shoulders. They came upon various sorts of people traveling back and forth between Brazos de Santiago Island and Fort Brown; provisions and equipment carried in the freight wagons, empty wagons going back for more, Yankee infantry on their way to the fort and people who seemed to have no particular identity or purpose in life slogging along like automatons in the heat. Men without uniforms or wearing parts of uniforms and men clad entirely in rags, who were most likely Confederates.
When they came to the shore Simon glimpsed a long stretch of perfectly white sand and beyond that the white foam of the surf. They did not pause to enjoy the scenery but hid themselves among the dunes in the palmetto and salt grass. They were deadened by the heat. Simon pressed into the shade of a palmetto and undid his vest and shirt, flung his arms out. One inch beyond the shade and the sand was too hot to lay your hand on. By late afternoon they were nearly comatose. Boats and men and supplies were arriving, the boats bouncing on the gentle rollers while men in small lighters carried stuff ashore in a variety of packets and barrels. Others waded in carrying bundles on their heads.
The sun sank into the west, into the great unknown inland stretches of Texas, throwing out long shadows, flooding the coast with dark. Then a wind came up. They all made small hushed noises of relief. Simon crawled to the rim of the dune and parted the sea-grape and grass stems to look out upon the Gulf of Mexico; at a long white band of surf and a blue sea horizon without end. The breakers rolled in according to some great unknown accounting or a score past comprehension and every wave top glittered with red.
Simon had seen many mezzotints of shipwrecked sailors on rafts amid the mighty billows being tossed upon the stormy main, and he had imagined ocean waves as perpetually cone-shaped. It seemed to him the waves would then arrive at a given shore as a collection of triangles. Then they would fall flat on their faces, dissolve, and their place would be taken by yet another rush of water, et cetera. Spiky. He had imagined waves as spiky water. But what he saw were long rolling terraces of blue water that rose and fell into sparkling foam in hushing sounds, over and over. They had no end. He could have watched forever.
He had found his girl, the war was over, he had not gotten killed, and now he was before the great gulf itself. He felt cautiously happy; he felt that life was going to be all right. It was all going to work out for him. Maybe. He laid his hands on his rucksack and the fiddle case. It was going to work out; dreams of the good life in someplace far and secreted from the chaotic world, its wars and imperatives, and it struck him that to live near this body of water would be the right place. Fish. Sea winds. The unrolling surf. He clasped a sea-grape vine in his sand-crusted hand and thought, Maybe somewhere near here, Galveston maybe, where the ships from England come in now the blockade is off. A thought-picture of her walking beside him in this air laundered bright with salt wind, new strings in his fiddle case, Colonel Webb’s foul designs foiled, and out on the ocean, a ship flying a flag with two sharps; mountain music.
When the Dipper stood overhead, so immense, so distant and brilliant, they waded into the surf and slipped aboard a big forty-foot lugger. Simon shoved his gear over the gunnel and then in the noise of breakers and men shouting at one another, he slid over on the rise of a wave. The others were over as well. They hid among pallets and empty barrels. Simon pulled a piece of canvas over himself. It was a stroke of good luck that, in the dark, an officer came and ordered the crew to sail immediately for Brazos de Santiago. They were way behind schedule, the officer shouted. Listen, even now you can hear the wagons coming down the road from Fort Brown to take on freight.
So in the black night the crew clambered aboard the empty lugger, raised sail, and hauled up the gaff rig. In this dark confusion Simon and the others were not noticed. They rocked across the two miles of salt water to the docks at Brazos de Santiago Island. The watch lights on the docks seemed to float on the water; first as dim sparks and then as warm yellow light throwing deep shadows between the warehouses. Simon and the others managed to slip overboard and crawl ashore in the surf without being seen. Simon carried the fiddle case on top of his head, squashing his Kentucky hat. When he reached the shore, he kneeled for a moment with the white waves breaking around his thighs, distrustful, trying to make out where they were going. The Tejano grabbed him by the collar and whispered to him to get up and run.
They spent a few hours dozing in the lee of a barracks wall, huddled together with their clothes draining salt water. When the tide was sliding out lower with every wave Damon got them to their feet and they crept to the docks. They found a twenty-foot dinghy or catboat, which the Federals were using as a tender. They loaded their gear with great delicacy to avoid making any noise; Simon came aboard last, easing over the gunnel like a wary cat with Damon hissing hush hush at them all.
Then Damon sat on the one thwart and took up the oars. He rowed them out into the Gulf for some distance; at last the few sparks of light from the island dwindled and disappeared.
Stepping the mast took some effort even with Damon’s instructions, which soon turned to exasperated shouts. Then the sail; it was gaff-rigged and they fell afoul of what seemed to be hundreds of square yards of canvas and limitless amounts of rope. The boy drummer was struck on the head by the boom but his Union Army cap softened the blow even as he shouted in pain and started cursing. The wind stayed steady and Damon put the cutter on a beam reach as they sailed north on the east wind. The height of the waves increased. By dawn they were out of sight of land, plunging up and down on a rolling sea.
“We don’t want to be out of sight of land,” said Simon. “Turn this thing west.”
“Where’s that?” said Patrick. “Oh God.” His hand went to his mouth and he bent over, turned to the gunnel, and vomited into a wave.
Damon shook his head. “Just don’t throw up in the boat, young’un.”
“West is opposite the side the sun is coming up,” said the Tejano. He sounded discouraged. “¿Y saben que? We don’t have any water.”
“Or a bottle to put it in.” The boy had turned a greasy color, like pork fat, and he dipped up water with his forage cap to pour on his head and then lost it into the sea. “Ah shit,” he said. “Well, just shit.”
“Look around,” said Simon. He lay in a heap with his shirt and pants soaked and his rucksack and blanket roll at his back. “May be supplies under the cuddy.”
They found two wooden canteens, one full, the other half-empty. The Tejano took over the tiller and turned the catboat to catch the wind on their tail so that they sailed more or less to the west. This made the catboats’ motion even worse, bucketing straight up the waves and plunging down again. The sun rose into the sky and b
ecame smaller and the waves shot intense heat reflections into their faces. The motion sent the boy doubling over the side again, retching. A gull hung in the air over them, its head bent down to see who they were, what they were doing, and in its still, stiff airborne stasis it turned its head from one side to the other as if searching their faces each in turn.
At least there was a wind. Simon pulled his Kentucky hat over his face and rolled his sleeves down. Having been on the Ohio River a good many times, he knew what water reflections could do, especially to skin like his. He threw his Confederate cap to Patrick and told the boy to tie his kerchief over his head and let it hang down behind and shade the back of his neck.
“Well hell’s bells, what about this?” said the boy. He put on Simon’s cap and then over that the bodhran. He clutched it by the crossbar and held it over his head. “This here is like a big Texas hat, idn’t it?”
The hours grew hotter and brighter. Simon hung on to the gunnel and watched the strange unstable world of Gulf water rushing past them, a place that was without footing or rest, all the same color and swept by salt wind. He bent over the side, watching shafts of weird light sent into the deep by the white-hot noontime sun.
Sometime in the afternoon his mind turned back to the girl and so he called to Patrick to ask if he knew aught of her. Where Colonel Webb and his family were going. He had heard it from the sergeant but he wanted a second opinion.
“San Antonio, they say,” said the boy. They were all speaking loudly against wind and water. “To go into garrison there.” He held the bodhran against the sun and squinted. He was trying not to throw up again.
“That’s right,” said the Tejano. “Everybody was asking because of the girl. And me too, one of these days. Going to San Antonio.” He shut his eyes against the glare. “It’s Spanish anyway. So far.”
Doroteo wore a wide-brimmed hat of palm straw and he was down to his blue-striped shirt. His coat and pants were regulation Confederate gray, but he had cut all the insignia off his jacket. He held the tiller in one hand and his guitar case in the other. He rocked to the motion of the waves, trying to save the case from falling into the water in the bottom of their boat. Damon tipped his hat to the back of his head to protect his neck and stared down at his two different shoes, exhausted.
Simon the Fiddler Page 5
