“Oh God,” he said. “He’s turning into a critic!”
“Well, bugger me,” said one of the sailors. “Your soul to the devil.”
“He’s gone mad,” said Damon. “He has a religious mania. And you, barber, just cut my hair, would you? Here’s the bridge: Where’s all the joy and mirth, made this town heaven on earth, O they’ve all fled with thee, Robin Adair. Yeah, so, it’s weepy and woeful and they’ll all fall to bawling over their dead relatives killed in the recent unpleasantness. Moldering in the grave.”
“After they weltered in their gore,” said Simon. “Give it a go in G, Patrick, and the rest of us will sing it.” He lifted his chin to Damon. “Take the melody.”
“Why should I?” Damon said. “You have a good voice.”
Simon got a grip on himself. After a pause he said in a reasonable voice, “No. I’ll do high harmony.”
After six tries they got it right; crisp and sharp. By that time, they had their hair cut and the sailors were asking where they would be performing.
“Nowheres they’re going to let you lot in,” said Patrick, and they quickly climbed down the ship’s boarding ladder to the wharf, ragging on Patrick all the way back to the shack.
Simon tore off his patched checkered shirt, now with clips of red hair scattered all over it, and fanned himself with the handbill that had the words to “Robin Adair” written on its backside.
He said, “Listen, Damon, next time I tell you to try a song, do it. Do you hear me?”
“No,” said Damon and threw his hat across their cluttered room. “No, I am fucking deaf, Simon.”
“Stop!” Doroteo shouted. He who so rarely spoke, the quiet one, cut the tension with a hard, precise shout. Then he began to polish his boots with a combination of axle grease and stove blacking. He said, “We must play the varsoviana. I will eshow you.” He finished with his boots, wiped his hands, and then plucked at his guitar strings carefully. Chord after chord, striking out the tune with his thumb.
Simon calmed himself, made himself listen. Suddenly he raised his head. “Why hell, that’s ‘Put Your Little Foot.’”
“I have no idea what you call it up here in English, but it is a dance of dignity and gracefulness and there is no putting little feet.”
“They’ll fall to dancing,” said Damon. “Grandmothers will cry out, despairingly. ‘Dance O maiden feet along the strand so cool and sweet . . .’”
Simon suddenly needed to get out of the stifling shack and the talking. It hit him as if a heavy weight had fallen on his head. He went out the door for the pump. He walked in the burning sun of late September stripped to the waist, with the checkered shirt dragging in his hand.
He knew this poem would go on to describe the maiden feet rotting in the grave and worms crawling out of jewel-like eyes and towers falling into a sullen sea. He poured dipper after dipper of cool water over his head. As he walked back past sun-bleached, unpainted wooden dwellings, some abandoned, some being lived in, he fought to get his hands into the shirt armholes and with gratitude heard Patrick tell Damon to give it a rest, just give it a rest.
They walked down the Strand in the heat of the day, managed to find the three-story house. It was embellished with gables and Palladian windows and quoins. There was a wall around the front lawn. A black servant in a white coat opened the cast-iron gate for them and they were then rushed in a body to the rear garden.
Simon looked around at the astonishingly level grass, the spindly chairs and overhead palm trees, the tables being set out. They all felt stiff and unnatural in their borrowed coats and borrowed cravats, their new-ironed white shirts with repaired bullet holes. They were cautious in this place and among these people; they were fresh from nights in low dives and fending off drunken sailors who wanted to buy them drinks, or fight them, or stagger up and demand to play their instruments. And three of them had been in the Confederate forces.
There were a number of early arrivers in Union blue; officers with a lot of ornamentation on their sleeves. Simon walked smartly to the majordomo to ask him in a confident voice about someplace private to tune their instruments and rehearse. With luck they would be told to go someplace near the kitchen. The old majordomo, with his face of worn stonework, lifted a hand to indicate a separate building behind a stand of laurel trees and said,
“Pump. Kitchen. Woodshed. Facilities.” Then he turned on his heel and began to pursue a boy who stumbled along carrying wreaths of paper flowers, crying out, “You will ruin them, you little fiend!”
They laid down their instruments on the stage, shoved through the hedge of laurel, and ducked into the kitchen. The smell of good cooking made them faint.
There were four women in there: a black cook who was very thin, her head in a snow-white cloth, eyeing them distrustfully, and another black girl rolling out dough with a bottle in lieu of a rolling pin while two young white women loaded hors d’oeuvres on trays.
“Hey hey, we’re the music this evening,” said Simon and then they bore down on the food like Comanches. They ate a good third of the appetizers—bone marrow on toast, tiny meatballs swimming in a red sauce, herring in a peppered cream, tubes of rolled ham and the German Harzer cheese on toasted rye bread—in the space of fifteen minutes while the cook looked on in astonishment. Doroteo picked up a marrow on toast and inspected it carefully, as if searching for recipe guidance. The boy Patrick swallowed miniature sandwiches entire; Damon delicately lifted a pig-in-a-blanket, regarded it, and then ate it. He put another one in the pocket of his borrowed coat. Simon saw the cook turn to snatch up three bottles of wine and drop them into the water butt.
“My lord!” cried one of the serving girls.
“Starved,” said Damon.
Simon devoured another meatball. “Living on our wits,” he said. “Starving. Stove up with heat and insufficient food. Now, tell me, what song would you like to hear?” Simon smiled at the girl who had said My lord. “We will play it for you.” He leaned forward from the waist. “And that is just between us.”
The girl flushed. She was dark, with bright red cheeks like the Creoles of New Orleans. She rolled her black eyes to one side in a fit of thinking, wiped the flour from her hands, and said,
“Ummmm . . . I bet you don’t know ‘La Savane’?”
Simon saw her lift a hopeful face to him and then she laughed a small laugh and looked down. She took out a pale blue handkerchief and fanned herself with it to cover her shyness, her embarrassment.
“That I do,” Simon said. He paused with a meatball in the air. “My own version. I will play it for you if you keep the food coming. It’s in G-flat major.” Then his face grew abstract with inner musical calculations.
“T’inquiete pas!” she cried. “It’s for me, homesick.” She lifted a floury hand. “For somebody that, so, he and me, we love that song together. He is in New Orleans. He is not here. Play it for me and I would bring you all the food you like.”
“Jesus,” said Damon. “Can you play it in another key besides G-flat major? That’s six flats.”
“Do you know it?”
“No, but I could hit harmony notes once I hear the first part, if you play it in D.”
“I know it,” said Doroteo. “Do not fear, Simon, I will back you up.”
“Good. No,” said Simon. “I’m sticking with the G-flat major, that girl wants to hear it so bad, and I ain’t going to mess it up trying to change keys on it. You do the best you can with your G whistle.”
Simon sat on a keg to eat Harzer cheese with chopped bacon and fresh spinach, bent over, thinking of the intricate geography of “La Savane.” It was an old Creole song. Simple, but you could do variations on it until the cows came home. The others regarded him with some anxiety as they ate. He had earned them a full meal of mouth-watering food, and even though the food was all somehow very miniature, their bodies were responding like sea anemones in a current, the flavors new and delectable.
They were finally evicted from the kitchen and
hustled to the bandstand. The stage had been thrown together with pallets and covered with a tarpaulin. Fortunately, it was in the shade of several live oaks. They unshipped their instruments. Simon made sure his bridge was straight and got out his A fork and rapped it against the hard-shell fiddle case. They all listened intently, as if hearing a voice from a distant star. They then made droning, plucking noises; Doroteo quickly tuned one string against another all the way down E-A-D-G-B-E with a final triumphant ping on the high E, and then ran his forefinger to the twelfth fret and struck out the harmonics. Simon worked his tuning pegs, tuning off his A string. He tightened the hair of his bow and rosined it, glancing covertly at every face, every uniform in the crowd. The habit of years.
As they stood carefully poised, listening to one another’s instruments, a young man who said he was Mr. Albert Pryor Jr. came upon them in a rush. He stopped and gazed at them with suspicion. Then a young woman with light-brown hair, in a swinging flare of pale green hoopskirts, walked slowly to stand at his side. Junior did not introduce the young woman but he turned to her and said, “Hello, Sis, is it all going all right?”
Apparently everything was going all right.
“Now what are you playing?” He turned back to the musicians. “We want nothing low.”
“Low?” cried Damon. “Us? Are you referring to sailors’ verses or those frenetic Southern mountain jigs so beloved of the poor whites? Of course not.” He did a little toss of his head and smoothed down his greasy waiter’s cravat.
“Well,” said young Pryor, and then stopped. He blinked. Damon did not.
Simon said, “Yes. Well, we thought ‘Lorena’ and ‘Robin Adair’ and then some Steven Foster. Maybe ‘Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair’ and ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ and then a varsoviana, leading with the guitar.” He half-turned and opened up one hand to the Tejano.
Doroteo bowed.
“And then some light airs, maybe ‘The Parting Glass’ . . .”
“Is that Irish?”
Simon paused and then said in a positive voice, “No, it is not. It is Scottish, as a matter of fact. I know my music, sir.”
“Maybe a tune that is a little livelier?”
“‘The Glendy Burke.’”
“Well, that will do, I suppose.”
“It all sounds very nice.” The sister turned on them a gracious, hesitant smile. They all bowed. Then she lifted an admonitory forefinger. “There’s a new song, come down from the North. They’re playing it in Omaha and St. Louis. Very pretty, it’s called ‘Red River Valley.’ Do you know it?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t,” said Simon.
“It’s very popular with the cavalry. Oh, I should play it for you . . .” She looked around distractedly. “It would be so lovely on the violin. This is our winter house and we’ve just come back and we wanted a song that was new and special.” Then she said, “I’ll sing it.”
“You will not,” said her brother. “Singing some cavalry song here at our garden party! Stop it.”
He took his sister’s arm and they strolled away. The musicians tugged at their coat hems, snatched down their cuffs, and started out with the modestly lively tune called “The Glendy Burke.”
The back lawn filled up. Where had people hidden these light dresses and fashionable small hats, how had the men come by unworn suits of black and waistcoats in worked silk during the blockade and the two battles of Galveston? The listeners put down their cups of tea or glasses of lemonade and clapped for a moment and then went back to talking and gliding across the leveled grasses.
They went through all their modestly lively tunes very quickly and Simon said, “Let’s do them all again.”
That got them through the first hour and a half. By this time, they were wet with sweat and Damon wiped it from his brow with his sleeve; Simon opened his vest and shirt as far as he dared. The boy laid down his drum and disappeared into the crowd and came back with clean bar rags and handed them around. Doroteo wiped down his frets. It came on evening and the sea light was low and the grateful wind picked up off the Gulf to come rushing across the island and into the broad, elegant Strand. Much stronger beverages were being added to the men’s drinks and so nobody was leaving. Damon ate the pig-in-a-blanket from his coat pocket. The junior Pryor wandered up.
“Excellent, you are doing very well. Will you have a drink?”
“Thank you, no,” said Damon. He wiped his hands on a bar rag.
“What can I do for you?”
Simon thought, Keep those Union officers away from us, but he said, “We’re doing fine, much appreciated.” Then he said to the others, “I am going to play ‘La Savane’ in G-flat major, follow if you can.”
And he sailed out upon that particular sea with his bow leaping like a dolphin in the bow wave of a fast ship, into the four parts that he had learned at the cost of fifteen cents from a man named LaPlante there in Paducah, nearly two years ago, when Nathan Bedford Forrest stole all their horses and burned down their barn.
Everyone stopped to listen. Even in their excited, urgent talking, their news of the occupation, gossip of the sudden new alignments of loyalties and prestige, new sources of wealth, still they listened to the phrases of melody that somehow fitted together as constellations fit together far away in the deeps of space, shining over the Gulf.
Simon at last lowered his bow and when he looked up, he saw the Creole girl holding a tray of smoking brisket, staring at him enraptured. The tune had been for her and her lover far away in New Orleans, and in the garden cressets he could see that her eyes shone with wet. He smiled at her, laid his bow alongside his leg, and bent in a very slight bow.
Chapter Nine
With the onset of night, the moon rose out of the Gulf as if spying covertly on the world of ocean. People were scattering. The musicians began to open their instrument cases, take a small drink. As Simon returned from the facilities behind the kitchen building, buckling his belt, the thin cook stood in front of the kitchen water butt as if still guarding the wine she had dropped into it and said, “She wants to see you.” She nodded slowly, knowingly, at Simon’s surprise.
“Sorry, who?”
“Miss Pryor. She said she wants to show you that song.”
Simon straightened his coat. “What song?”
“She said ‘Red River Valley.’ In there.” The cook gestured toward a rear entrance to the house. Simon picked up his fiddle and bow and walked to it; the entrance way was, like the rest of the house, elegant. It was arched over with rustic-cut stone and a set of steps led upward, into an empty hall. One gaslight burned. Down at the end of the hall a doorway was open.
He watched her slow, reasoning gesture, a light tap at the air.
“No, he was right. I shouldn’t be singing cavalry songs.”
Miss Pryor put one hand on the keys but did not press them. Simon stood at the left side of the piano in a loose slant with his bow held straight down his leg. The fiddle was under his arm and the atmosphere in the drawing room was immobile as a lantern slide. The Gulf air seemed to have come to a halt at the tall open window. An oil lamp burned under a milky shade.
“Maybe not,” he said and waited. He had followed her invitation; it seemed this was a secret escapade that he might hear her sing “Red River Valley” after all but now this. She’d sent the message by the cook. The cook; take note. In his walk down the hall he felt the silence of the house, not as if it were empty, but as if someone stood silently behind one of the many doors, listening. He said, “You don’t have to sing it, Miss Pryor. You might single-note it on the keys.”
She lifted her bare shoulders. “I don’t really know where to start. I suppose . . .” She struck F. “No. Not there.” Her hair was a bright, clear brown. She sat at the piano bench and lifted her face to him. “What do you play, usually? You are very good.”
“What do I play.” Simon watched her tap her fingers on the keys, making no sound. “Why do you want to know?”
“Oh!” She snatched her ha
nds down into her silk lap. “Well. Because you’re so accomplished and—that was rude.”
He bent his head briefly and said, “Yes, it was. Still.”
“Because there are so many places you could perform.” She doesn’t want to know what I usually play. “Or teach.” She gave him a broad smile and lifted one hand and shook down a bracelet. “You could, say, travel to cities other than this one. St. Louis? And teach.”
He moved his head against the constriction of the cravat and let several seconds pass like a bright wire hand on his personal clock that ticked away in silence. “Teach who?”
“Me.” She said it almost defiantly. He had been rude once and might be so again; with his thin refined face and pale damp skin and the deep eyes so guarded that he might have just been turned out of the spirit world for transgressions unknown. She had had contacts with the spirits and they had given her various permissions, certain promises. “We have to return to St. Louis shortly.”
“What is shortly?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know, just fairly soon I suppose.” She waved away dates, times, the hard data of the world. “We do chemicals.” Once again a lengthy consideration. “Pryor Chemical Company.”
And you want a pet violinist to play . . .
“To play some of the modern pieces. The ones that express lightness of heart, the finer emotions, perhaps yearning, such as those by the Italian composers. I like those. Do you know them?”
She was soft as down and he had not touched a woman in a long time, especially not one this delicate. Someone who took pains and care to attend to herself and her hands, carefully choose the right color of dress and have it made with a very low bodice. Off the shoulders.
“Which ones? For instance.” Simon touched the fiddle strings with his thumb, as if to silence them, as if they might be resonating to something in his body without his permission. “I’m in the dark here.” Not really.
“No, I don’t really know them. I should work at it more. I’m incurably lazy.”
Simon the Fiddler Page 10
