He saw her bend forward to the sheet music on the piano and look at the notes searchingly and then sit back. All her movements were slow and her interest in music was minimal and her skin pink with the heat—her arms and her throat and the crease of her breasts in the low bodice. He turned away for a moment to settle himself, to feel the relief of being inside a house finely appointed with little note of war. All the windows unbroken and the walls unscarred. How had they managed it? One lonely bullet mark on the wood framing of a fanlight. Carpet somewhat worn. Candies bright as toys in dishes. Her dress new and fresh and so was she, so slow, slow as an infant with the same deep impenetrable self-absorption. He stood in the middle of rich textures and clean scents and polished wood flooring, white unstained walls and unbroken glassware. He tipped his head as if he were interested in what she was saying.
She was speaking of her brother and her father, her influence with them. How she could obtain a position for him as a music master. He listened to her spin one fantasy after another; he to take ship with them on the return to New Orleans and then upriver. They would stand together on the rail to watch the great river pass by.
Simon had been proofed against these kinds of offers since he was seventeen and of a mind for any sort of adventure that came his way. An elegant woman on board the Cumberland Star; the steamboat was tied up in Paducah for six days because of low water, himself on the outer edge of full grown and a wizard with an ancient fiddle locally made. Her husband far away in Pittsburgh. There were so many opportunities for a young man like him and she would see to it, she had advantageous connections in Pittsburgh, theater, private groups. He made her head spin. Her cabin was far to the rear and very private. He was lost in her for seven days upriver.
Then there were fantasies that fell apart piece by piece into sly, unanswerable mutations and a rising scale of hysteria. By the time they were fifteen miles from Pittsburgh, it was clear she didn’t know anybody in the theater world there or about music at all and was terrified of her husband. But seven nights in bed with her almost made it worth it, almost. At the landing she sent him off to find a hired coach and then she disappeared. What did he know? He was seventeen. By the time he got back to Paducah he knew quite a lot. It took him a month to work his way home.
He said, in a cool, light voice, “You seem to think I have no life of my own that is not worth abandoning on the instant.”
She shrugged her white shoulders. She got up in a slack, untidy shifting of green silk and hoops, ignoring her hem caught on a corner of the piano bench. Simon waited with an increasing sense of danger until she started to turn and then lay down his fiddle and bow, lifted the bottom hoop free, opened his hand, and let the silk fall.
“Oh, that’s just me,” she said. “Always catching on furniture. There’s too much skirt in this skirt. But St. Louis.”
He said, “You have no influence with your brother or father, Miss Pryor.”
“Oh. Now how would you know one way or the other?” She went to the window where it looked out over the street wall, onto the decorative short palms, and onto the Strand. House windows stared back at them with lantern eyes from across the street. “Come stand beside me.”
He did.
“Why are you in Galveston?” She tucked her arm into his, pulled a ribboned decoration from her hair, and tossed it on the windowsill. “Why are you so rude?”
She was as tall as he was and he could feel her bare arm against the coarse wool of his coat, his ribs. “It’s my invincible will. I crush all before me.”
Her heat touched him and drew unwilled sparks and he listened to her slow laughter. She withdrew her arm, stepped away, back again. A dance. She took up the ribbon curled on its pin and tucked it into his lapel. He caught her hand and closed his own on it and then let go.
“But I do have influence with them! Why would you ignore an offer like that? Are you married? You have children?”
“Not married,” Simon said. “No children. Not that I know of.”
He watched her face as that sank in, watching with his hooded gray-green eyes and only the trace of a smile. She seemed taken aback at first and then made a short, derisive noise that was unbecoming to a young woman in a new silk dress. She waved it away. There was about her an innocent confidence in her own attractiveness in that she did not make flirtatious appeals or give him any of those glances many women relied upon. She didn’t bother.
“You don’t want a life like that. Those women. You play on the waterfront? I think the music is repetitive? Simple and repetitive?”
“A kind of howling,” said Simon.
“Would you not want a better life? It must be painful to be so talented and reduced to, well, howling.” She put her hand on the back of her neck and regarded a brilliant blue-white star that had roamed into the frame of the window.
“I just suffer.” He took a deep breath and blew it out as a person would blow out cigarette smoke. “Miss Pryor, you are inventive. You have any number of music masters to teach you any number of songs. There is no offer. Your brother and your father are not going to arrange any teaching position for me.” She frowned, stiffened. “I hate teaching. I love howling. The evening has been beautiful and so are you. Your friends in St. Louis will be captivated by stories of your adventures in Galveston. This will be at least one of them I would imagine.”
She put a hand to her mouth and wheeled away in a revolving motion of hoops.
“I wanted to help,” she cried. She was near tears. “You are capable of so much more!”
“We are playing at intrigues,” he said. “Or you are.”
He took the ribbon and its pin from his lapel. Wondered how many others she had invited to St. Louis, how many times she had had confrontations with her brother and father over situations exactly like this one. He took one step to close the space between them and pinned it on the deep V of her bodice, put his hand along her bare neck, and kissed her small pink mouth. At first gently and then repeatedly and with more urgency, as a thick sweet fire moved through him without hindrance. His lips parted from hers very slowly, slowly. He sighed out a long breath and pressed his cheek to her hair. Then he drew away. Despising himself for a fraud, he said, “I will regret this the rest of my days. What I could have had. But instead given over to an abandoned life. Good night, Miss Pryor.”
He walked down the hall, past whoever might be invisibly listening, back to the bandstand. Saw they stood waiting, Doroteo with an open case and his guitar still in his hands.
“Sorry. Miss Pryor wanted a private lesson.”
Damon said, “Those private lessons.” He blew a high, piercing C and slid it down into a half note.
Doroteo single-noted a sweet and sentimental melody and batted his eyelids. The boy looked both confused and suspicious.
“What then?” said Patrick.
“On your next birthday,” said Doro, “I am to tell you all. All.”
The boy flushed at their quiet laughter. They got out before some officer in blue demanded their passes or their discharge papers simply because he was drunk and he could. The moon was nearly full and stood over the mineral glitter of the sea, sending out a path across the water, and Venus glowed with white fire. All the palms and live oaks of Galveston ran the sea wind through their fingers and it dried the sweat on their faces. As they packed up, the majordomo came over with their pay. Not only the agreed-upon price of twenty-five dollars but a pale blue handkerchief in which was wrapped a fifty-cent piece.
Chapter Ten
What a wealth of animals.
Doris Dillon is traveling across a new world that seems to have no end and every lift of the land delights her. It keeps on rolling beneath their wheels hour after hour and day after day and there are new, strange things every mile, some that dart away and others standing crowded together, holding up flat hands like dark green banditti in a play. They are called cactus and she has been told not to touch them.
There are remnant spirits in this country from a
nother time. She watches for them in the trembling heat waves of the noontime and she listens carefully during the hot nights with the fernlike leaves of the mesquite overhead and the cook fire dying down. She might as well be on the moon. She is prepared to be astonished; she is eighteen and not long out of County Kerry. A fine thrill runs through her heart when large white birds sailing on a Gulf wind follow them out of the Rio Grande Valley. They seem to take turns as escorts and on their heads a crown of star-white feathers. She realizes that they are the feathers that the Denny’s women put on their hats back home in Ireland, the shameless thieves.
“Those are called snowy egrets,” says the driver. “They are great fliers, only bird better for staying in the air is a buzzard.”
The birds sail away in a high-atmosphere blur of white. They are making sure we leave, she thinks. They will tell the others. Trees become fewer and fewer, and far ahead Doris can see black shapes. Large animals, alert, moving away. She thinks this must be what enchantment is like, when a person is taken into the other world. Her spirits are effervescent now they are away from the colonel; joy comes back to her and unwraps itself gift by gift.
She has always loved animals. She has always been mystified by them, pulling carriages, dragging a plow, the heedful dogs guarding the sheep on the hillsides, her striped cat stalking a rat behind the grain bin. They fascinate her for reasons she does not know, but she knows we owe them for their trust, the ones that have come to live with us. Her father had acquired ten acres of land and a cow that had a calf every year and a sow and an ox to pull the plow and the harrow and the stoneboat and their small cart. He had done it by working himself to the bone, and now she is fairly stunned by these thousands of acres that it seems nobody owns and by the wild animals that live on them.
Since she was small she had been on her feet in the dark early-morning hours, desperately pulling on her boots to go with her father to bring oats and fodder to their ox and to the milk cow. A person says Yosh, yosh to greet them, to ask them to move over. She watched them eat with the candlelight shining in their deep eyes, wept when the calf was sold away, learned to milk and listened to the men talk of remedies for the colic and what to put on a wound. She stood to watch the carriages of the great, like the Dennys for instance, with their four-in-hands, the horses’ hides gleaming like silk trotting past on the road in front of their cottage.
And here they were running free. Long manes and tails floating behind them as they fled the train of commissary wagons heading to San Antonio. Whoever would have thought she would ride in a convoy of wagons like this? Each wagon pulled by four and even six shining horses with rays of light glancing off the hame balls and all the metal parts.
She sits up beside the driver. He is a wide man with a springing dark beard and an old-fashioned courtesy. He is almost shy with this sprightly dark-haired girl and he answers her politely.
“No miss, nobody owns them. Hard to catch, hard to break, but then again, the price is right.”
They were free to anyone. All her life she had known how costly it was to buy a horse, to keep one. So few had them, either to ride or to pull a carriage. A kind of low greed almost overcomes her and for a moment she imagines herself owning one of them, and it would somehow (she was not quite sure how) become tame and carry her over this landscape in a floating gait. The wild horses disappear into the distance in a cloud of dust; faerie enticements.
Her parents had contrived and saved to send her to the nuns and what she loved most about her education at the convent was going to the beehives with Sister Angela, watching the bees dance before the gates of their hive like David before the tabernacle, and the hours of learning music. She was taught on the pianoforte, all the strange arithmetical conclusions of the scales. Once she slipped away down the street to see the farrier place shoes on the feet of a mad, fighting saddle horse, a sight she would never forget. She knew that in the horse’s big muscular soul there were inharmonious clashing notes of broken music. Sister Angela had been very patient with her. A girl mustn’t go alone to a blacksmith shop, my dear.
And a girl perhaps had not ought to go alone into a new world, but she had stepped aboard ship with the wind in her face. Into trouble. She had known she would need allies the moment she understood the sort of man Colonel Webb was. They first journeyed to Camp Thomas in Ohio, and the army wives, who she had met in Ohio and who also had come with their husbands to Texas, had been fair kind to her and so she had made them small gifts; a small personal gift would always earn a person good regard. She knew they were all Protestant and so she made them bookmarks for their Bibles, which she assumed they all read devotedly. She crocheted the edges of the bookmarks and embroidered them with a cross, holding them close to her face to get every stitch perfect. How clever, how kind! they said. So they would remember the colonel’s governess then, and if help was needed someday, it might be theirs to give.
She hears the girl behind, complaining as usual, and it makes her nerves light up like hot wires. Patience, the child is only fourteen and this is an unhappy family. Patience.
“Josephina, my dear, give me your bonnet and I will fix it,” says Doris Dillon. I am to pray for a quiet heart at times like this, but I never remember to remember. She reaches back into the interior, opens her hand. “Give it to me and don’t cause me to fall to cursing in Irish.”
“Oh, you must not,” says Josephina. Her voice is prim and censorious.
“And how would you know, then?”
“I would just be able to tell.”
“What if it were a recipe for fish?” Doris keeps smiling.
“Jo, stop fussing with it,” says Mrs. Webb. The mother and daughter stay in the shade of the awnings. They are not interested in these uninhabited stretches of Texas; they are weary and irritable. “Give it to Doris.”
Doris takes the bonnet, fetches out her kit, and clips the ties loose. She turns them inside out and turns to the girl with what she hopes is a happy expression. “You see, Josephina, this is a needle,” she says. “This is a thread.”
“Oh, ha ha.”
The needle winks bright in the Texas sun and her fine black hair is coming out of its chignon. She manages to restitch the tie even as the wagon crashes over humps of grass and alarming little municipalities of red dirt that the driver says were made by ants.
She is still trying to understand the people here and what a girl can do and what a girl can’t do. For instance, the maid Mercedes, who is from the Spanish people but how the Spanish people got here she doesn’t know nor does she know if she will be allowed to make a friend of Mercedes or not. She has been reprimanded so often.
Colonel Webb has gone on ahead to San Antonio, to rent a house. May a cat eat him and may the devil eat the cat.
All she can think of now is how many horses all these people have, and the wild ones, running across the great bald world in this hot month of June. Running perfectly free. The driver points things out to her: the nests of those snowy egrets, a desert willow heavy with blossom. Who do the cattle belong to? Nobody. Catch them if you can. They have enormous horns, they are in all colors, they are speckled and brindled, black and red, there are white ones with black spots over their eyes like a highwayman’s mask. They are fey and dangerous, she thinks. Those ones would take a horse out from under you before you knew it, Jesus, the horns on them. The wild cattle gallop away into mirages of gilt and silver and screaming dark birds.
Their little excursion wagon, followed by six big commissary freighters, comes over the top of a rise, and she stands to see all the tilting earth go on for miles. Only once before in her life has she seen wild deer, and there just ahead are five of them! All so alike as to be quarter notes on the waving staves of grass.
“Hang on, miss,” says the driver. “We don’t want to lose you.”
“No such luck,” she says with a laugh, but she sits down again and shades her eyes.
Doris is in a state of delight with it all, even in the heat and the sun hot eno
ugh to be splitting stones. She has always known that the animals live between ourselves and the rest of Creation. How like us they are and how unlike. All people are only people, but there are a great plenty of animals of all kinds and they are each one named in the Book of Life.
“And do you often go back and forth?” she asks the driver. “Are there not Red Indians?”
He smiles down at her. “Yes, miss,” he says. “But this road is safe. I go to Galveston next trip.” His attention is taken by his off leader, he calls to her, she tosses her head in irritation. “Galveston, there’s many immigrant ships coming in there, coming and going.”
He clearly wants her to tell him where she’s from, how she got here, but she says, “And do you take people there? As passengers?”
“Sometimes. But they mostly go on Santleben’s stagecoach, service to the coast just started up, getting fancy around here now.”
Santleben’s. Ships leaving for England or the Continent, just in case. She tucks this away as she would her bedding, something to rest upon.
They camp out like Gypsies right in the middle of all this uninhabited land. She braids her thick black hair out of the way and falls asleep listening to distant wolf howls, a weird clacking chitter of long birds soaring overhead. Sometimes she lies on her stomach, lifted up on her elbows in a tumble of blankets and chemise to listen to the night. She wakes up to the smell of smoke and horses. They come to Floresville and then they are only twenty-five miles from San Antonio. She doesn’t want this journey to end.
Mrs. Webb tells her in an absentminded way to keep her bonnet down over her face against the sun. Doris wants to lift her face to it, to flood herself with sunlight. She wants to walk out into the land and reach out to the vigilant deer as they thrash their tails from side to side in alarm. Their tails are as long as her forearm and all white and suddenly, with the sun sinking low, their huge ears glow red as the evening light shines through them.
“Jo, look!” she says. The girl wearily gets up from her trunk in the wagon’s interior and comes to stand at her back.
Simon the Fiddler Page 11
