Simon the Fiddler

by Paulette Jiles

  This is to give you good cheer and greetings and news of the old Country and indeed I am hoping you are well with this excellent family with whom you are so fortunately situated. This is being written for me by a Friend who writes a good Hand and swears he will write down exactly what I say in all respects, to whom I am quite grateful, since I have joined with him in a small scratch band in Galveston, where we play in various refined places and we are doing well, he is the Fiddler named Simon Boudlin and he plays “Death and the Sinner” so that it brings tears to the eyes.

  Simon laid the pen down and read what he had written. “Ahhh, I don’t know.” He ran both hands through his curling hair. “Is that too obvious?”

  “Dealer’s choice,” said Damon.

  “Well, then leave it.” Simon looked around and realized they had eaten all the fried beef while he wrote.

  And so I come to the close of my Letter to you and hope this has helped to bring you news of the old Country and if I hear of more news I will send it on, for my parents receive news regularly and I meet many Irish here and there. I remain yours truly in deepest respect, Patrick Matthew O’Hehir

  “Not ‘scratch band,’” Damon said. “‘String ensemble’ appeals to the ear.”

  “She’s not going to believe that Patrick plays in any ensemble,” said Simon.

  “But ‘scratch band’ sounds like musical chickens.”

  “It’s my letter,” said Simon. “My name is mentioned in it.”

  “It’s mine, indeed,” said the boy. “Is it not?”

  Simon made motions of tearing at his hair. “I’ll put ‘musical group’ or somebody gets thrown out the window.”

  When it was done, he blew on the ink until it was dry and then folded the letter carefully as he had been taught. He pressed down the crease with the hilt of his knife, tucked in the ends, and wrote what he thought might be her address.

  Miss Doris Dillon

  In care of Colonel Franklin Webb 62nd USCT

  U. S. Army Garrison at the Alamo, San Antonio, Texas

  After that they walked to the seashore, happy with their small conspiracy, then farther down the beach, where some sabal palms grew in a mop-headed cluster, surrounded by sea grape and buckthorn, and with a quick glance around to see if there were any people nearby, stripped naked. They ran shouting into the surf. It lifted them in its blood-warm surging and foam and dropped them and lifted them again. They paid for it with sunburns and salty hair, but when the wind blew on their wet bodies it was so cool it gave them the unusual and startling feeling of shivering.

  The lamps in the saloons burned coal oil or whale oil, the beams overhead creaked in the wind off the Gulf, the streets were incandescent under the gas lamps. Sometimes bats streaked through the white light, moths danced in a city of seagulls and scarred buildings.

  Once as they walked home a midsummer storm broke over them, and for the next few days it rained and blew through the cracks of their small house in torrents. Simon and Doroteo moved their instrument cases here and there until they found leakless places. Simon took his hat in hand and said they had a job at the Jamaica and he was going, they could stay if they wanted. They wearily clapped on their hats, put their instruments under their coats. They followed him out the door, toward the city center once again, where the Jamaica’s patrons were so deeply grateful that anybody had showed up to play on a stormy evening that they made twenty dollars. Simon put yet another five-dollar gold piece and two Federal bills for ten dollars each in his fiddle case.

  When Simon lay down at night he slept as if he were in a coma. People tired him; always had, always would. He wished there were a roof he could go and sleep on but since he got his sleep during the day, he would have been roasted by the summertime Galveston sun or rained on. He was tired of the talking and disheartened by the thought that he was the odd one and the fault did not lie with his companions but himself. When he could, he took his fiddle and went off alone in the early evenings to Fort Point and its sandbagged fortifications now so dusty and unwarlike where the one solitary Union sentry stood on the tower, behind him that extraterrestrial landscape of sky and cloud being assembled in places unknown and sailing eastward. On the headland there was always a wind to blow away the mosquitoes and so he played for himself in blessed solitude those songs he loved that nobody cared to hear. He explored the strange modal scale of “Down in the Tennessee Valley,” which some called “A Man of Constant Sorrow” or “The Farewell Song.” It could lead you astray. It could abandon you in a thicket of sharps and flats, far from the major scales and utterly lost. He retuned from the standard GDAE to a cross-tuning in GGAD that gave him a drone. He paused, a redheaded fiddler poised with his bow on the strings but taut and still. Thinking. When he found the note, it would be perfect. He stood outlined against a falling sun at the edge of what was once again the United States and the sentry stopped his pacing to listen, transfixed.

  At one or two in the morning when they had come home and Damon had perhaps bought half a bottle of cheap liquor to pass around, Simon sometimes talked about his land, and what he would grow on it and the house he would build. Simon did not remember ever living in a house but only himself and the old man in the three rooms in back of the livery barn and so the one he imagined was odd and impractical, but none of the others had the heart to point this out.

  Patrick listened with a deep interest. His mother had been born in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, he said, on an immigrant ship from Ireland, and his father came over not long after with his own parents and they had all gone to work for the Susquehanna railroad. They had hopes of being able to buy an entire ten acres to themselves and they were in a state of perpetual astonishment that around them the native Americans owned twenty, fifty, a hundred acres. They had come to live among the northern Yankees in Pennsylvania, he said, and all those people hated people in the South like burning hell, they despised them, you should hear them talk. Said you all were animals.

  “We are,” said the dark man. “We are beasts of prey, we are slave masters every one, we gorge ourselves on jelled blood and the meat of corpses.” He held the bottle by the neck and turned it up. “Lo, death hath reared himself a throne in a strange city all alone, far down within the dim west . . .”

  Their food had improved as well as their music; Doro spread lard on the hard bread and toasted it, then added a sprinkle of sugar. He often came up with a fruit called guava and more huachinango, oxtails, and shin meat. They cried out their appreciation; he had assigned himself cook’s duties and they wanted to encourage him in this. Then they wiped their mouths on their cuffs and went out into the nighttime city.

  They walked past women in patched frocks whose faces were drawn with hunger creases and cheeks artificially red, calling to them in hopeless voices, past heaps of lumber and glass where repairs were going on. They came to the Bayside Saloon or the Sailor’s Rest or the Jamaica or the What Cheer; they searched out the patrons and the appearance of the place to see what might be awaiting them—a fight or the possibility of good tips. They borrowed bar rags from the bartenders to stick in the bands of their trousers to wipe their hands so they could grasp their instruments. Simon used one as a chin rest. The sweat ran from their faces in a lantern-lit sheen.

  There was also the possibility of yellow fever in the dank miasmas of the gin houses and the funeral processions that trundled down the waterfront toward the island cemetery. Like everyone else on the street, they removed their hats as a hearse went by.

  Now that they were making money Simon’s concern settled on the matter of white shirts. They looked as ragged and filthy as if they had been lost in the woods for some time. If they wanted to garner what money there was to be had here in this city they had to look good, then they would be paid for playing at weddings and receptions and garden parties (if there were any gardens left after the bombardments, if there were heart enough left in the wealthier citizens of Galveston for parties of any kind).

  Simon walked through t
he waves of heat to the warehouses and shebangs down on the waterfront, searching for a washerwoman. He carried all the clothes they had except what they had on their backs.

  There in a little plank shack that had not yet been torn down for firewood a woman dumped loads of laundry into wooden tubs. Water simmered in two great fifty-gallon washpots on outdoor fireplaces. She was thin and young and wore shoes made of leather nailed onto wooden soles. She shoved back a frayed rag she wore over her hair; it promptly fell forward again.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “Yo, ma’am.”

  “Shirts two cents apiece,” she said. “Bleach and ironing extra, and we can talk about how much for repair if you got shirts all torn up.” She pressed two small slivers of soap together, trying to make one lump of them. “And if you’re looking for good-time girls, they ain’t here.” She squinted at him, probably thinking he looked too thin and hungry to be disporting himself amongst the ladies.

  Simon paused in that almost imperceptible hesitation that always fronted his words as if he were waiting, wanting to be sure he would speak into a listening silence.

  “No,” he said. “Not at all.” Then he explained that he had a bundle of clothes for her and also, Did she have any shirts for sale? That people might have left behind?

  “I got shirts from the nun’s hospital that were left behind, after the battle when the Union came back. Their owners gone forever into the dark beyond. You mind bullet holes? Take a look,” she said and threw a tumbled wad of fabric on her plank counter. Simon took up one in his hand; it looked like linen and cotton in a heavy weave. They would do.

  “Confederates, Yankees, who knows?” she said. And then a quote she had most likely heard at the little theater on C Street: “All probably weltering in their gore.”

  He paid out fifty cents in Federal silver and came away with four shirts of a dim whitish color in various stages of repair. Back at the shack he spread the shirts out on the table. No need to tell them they would be wearing dead men’s clothes. “Now here, see what I did for you. No no, don’t thank me, don’t thank me. See here, they’ve all been repaired.”

  They eyed the shirts with suspicion. Patrick muttered about bullet holes.

  “No, they’re just, sort of, random tears and piercings there. Now, we need to put up a notice.” Simon sat on the tar bucket and leaned forward on his elbows. “There are better places than the saloons. We could try, ‘Music provided for weddings, funerals, and garden parties.’”

  “Nah,” said Damon. He held out his shirt and regarded it with a critical expression. “Churches do wedding and funeral music. They, like all of humanity, prefer their own people.”

  “All right, all right.” Simon never had a quick answer for Damon’s depressing observations. “But garden parties.”

  “In this day and time? Ha. Galveston wallows in its self-imposed poverty. What garden parties?”

  Simon’s face grew smooth and cool. After a pause he said, “You wait. You’ll see.”

  MUSIC FOR CONVIVIAL GATHERINGS!

  Musial group lately come from the mainland offers songs and dance tunes of the most refined character! Airs, waltzes, and quick-steps for your evening or afternoon festivity at a reasonable price! Band consists of violin, flute, guitar, and rhythm instruments. Contact S. Boudlin in care of the post office.

  He carefully wrote five copies in his best hand. He put them up in the better parts of town and also on a Hendley building colonnade post on the Strand.

  He took to trudging up the steps of the Customs House every day at two in the afternoon, interrupting his hot, sweating sleep to do so. He came all the way from their collapsing shack out on the seaward side, past other shanties in which all sorts of people had squatted, had strung out their laundry, had built sheds for their pigs and chickens if they had them. They said, Hello fiddler, where you been so long? Hello fiddler, play me ‘Wayfaring Stranger.’ He lifted a hand and went on.

  On the street in front of the post office he looked up; it had been four years since Simon had seen the United States flag on a government building. It flew from the roof of the Customs House against the pure white clouds that sailed up out of the Gulf, against the blue air, with its thirty-five stars and the extravagant stripes. Then he walked gratefully between the shady columns, into the cool building, on to the post office on the first floor, hoping to find some notice that they were wanted.

  This is how they ended up in the garden of one of the great houses on the Strand. It was the Pryor House, an edifice of wealth and pure white walls and the wonders of mowed grass. A note had arrived in General Delivery that they might be needed for an afternoon gathering. Simon raced back to the shack and shouted them all awake and read it aloud.

  Chapter Eight

  He said, “Get up boys, we got to go meet one of them, they want to look us over and be sure we don’t have lice. Get to the pump, would you? Comb your hair.”

  They met with a stern old man named Heidemann who was a majordomo of sorts for the family. They met him at the fortifications and played several pieces for him, pieces that they judged to be elegant and refined. They sang “Bound for the Rio Grande”; Patrick was so nervous he flubbed it repeatedly on the G whistle, but the majordomo couldn’t tell because they were oversinging the boy as loudly as they could, they were in the outdoors near the slapping dirty waves of the harbor, and most people didn’t have a good ear anyway. Heidemann listened with his hands clasped behind his back and asked, “Have you left the Confederate forces? Do you have your discharges and your passes?”

  The boy spun the G whistle between his fingers, sitting in the sand. He said in a nervous, unsteady voice, “Yes, sir, I mean no, sir, we didn’t need any, I was a drummer with Webb, sir, we were with Webb, regimental band, they just released us and said go home.”

  Simon and Damon and Doroteo murmured, With Webb, yes.

  “Trying to make money for our passage home,” said Simon. He knew the man could hear his accent, which was Ohio Valley, but Doroteo sounded Hispanic and Damon’s speech was Southern but as to place indefinable. The boy spoke like Irish immigrants one generation removed speak; a hard r and a lilt.

  “Webb,” said the old man. “Yes, he was down at Brazos de Santiago.”

  “Yes, he was. We were.”

  “But he was in command of colored troops. The Sixty-second. You don’t look colored.”

  “Well. No, they have white officers.”

  “You don’t look like officers either.”

  “Regimental band,” said Simon, and then he became resolutely silent.

  Despite Heidemann’s suspicions they came to an agreement for twenty-five dollars for the evening. He nodded smartly and then he told them,

  “You will do well here if you aspire to more refined music. I tell you, Texas will never be developed except on the coasts. Houston, Galveston, Indianola. It will never be anything inland. There’s no semblance of civilization there. No place to play your music. Lacking in refinement and rainfall, therefore neither crops nor symphonies, no, not ever. Perhaps crude approximations; Indian corn and back-country fiddling but no more, no, not ever.”

  “Thank you for your advice,” said Simon, and then they turned to walk back to their wretched shack on the sea, dodging the wagon traffic, a loose donkey galloping down the street with a man running after it.

  “Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph,” cried the boy. “I’m sorry, I can get it better, I can! I mean ‘Rio Grande.’” He was terrified of another outburst from Simon.

  That sense called Better Judgment came to Simon in a rush and he said, “Sure you can. Don’t worry.” He beat the boy on the shoulder in a comradely way. “You’re good, you can do it.”

  Then a scramble to cut hair, shave, and press down the white shirts. Doroteo borrowed a skillet from the house half a block down, heated it on the fire, and then threw a thin rag over the damp shirts and ironed them down; he fried the rag but the shirts were pressed and unscorched.

  They managed to borrow c
ravats and jackets from the waiters at the Hendley Hotel dining room with extravagant promises to bring them back, and a dime apiece to the barber of the ship Orion recently in from Jamaica and docked at the Kuhn wharf, therefore wanting for coins to spend onshore. The barber cut hair like he was harvesting hay; Damon sat on a coil of rope and the barber made his dark hair fall in hanks. Simon wrote down the titles of songs on the back of a handbill he had torn off a wall. The handbill advertised passenger train fares for Buffalo Bayou and Houston. He scribbled the titles down with a carpenter’s pencil.

  “‘Robin Adair’!” cried Damon. “That’s it! I had forgot the title. It’s English, it will sound reasonably elegant.”

  Patrick whizzed up and down the scale of the G whistle. “Sing it,” he said.

  Damon said, “The first four measures are the same as ‘Ailen Aroon.’ He cleared his throat and sang, “What’s this dull town to me? Robin’s not near; He whom I wished to see, Wished for to hear?”

  “Goddamn, sounds like somebody went and drowned,” said the barber. “Ain’t that a downer.” Barefoot sailors stopped their work with ropes and mops and tools and paused to listen to them. In the intense heat tar dripped in black bullets from the rigging overhead. All up and down the wharf were the ringing sounds of metal ships’ tackle banging against other metal parts and voices from the engine rooms far below. Cries of men loading and unloading from lighters and at the ships’ side the little salt-water waves said wash wash wash.

  “Well, we’re not singing your dirty sailor songs for this job,” said the boy Patrick. The sailors turned to him, surprised at what seemed like a wild outburst from a mere child. Simon started laughing.