Simon the Fiddler

by Paulette Jiles

  “Stop mucking around in that, you sons of bitches!” a sergeant yelled at them. Simon dodged a galloping team of artillery horses and sought shelter from further conflict at an abandoned provisions wagon. He sat under the tail of it and considered the revolver—how much it was worth, where he could sell it, and how he could start in again on the long road to contriving and saving for another fiddle. Then a deep discouragement came over him and it was a heavy feeling like he had rarely experienced in his life.

  The next day, Colonel Santos Benavides and his Tejano Confederate troops arrived as reinforcements. At ten o’clock Simon heard ear-splitting thunder very close by and threw himself flat on the ground. It was Colonel Rip Ford with French artillery from across the river. Colonel Ford had gone over and borrowed the Frenchmen’s cannon. In a screaming tide of men and a thick screening of powder smoke they drove the Federals back to their island. Colonel Ford rode into the surf and sabered a Yankee struggling for a boat so that his head half came off and the next wave rose up marbled with his heart’s blood. Then Giddings’s regiment stood on the shore of Texas and danced and waved their regimental flag, making rude gestures at the Yankees fleeing across the water.

  And then they surrendered.

  The day they surrendered was perfectly clear and it had turned hot. Simon and the other men of Giddings’s regiment were mustered to march to Fort Brown several miles farther west up the river. This had been the Confederate fort, this was where they would formally surrender. Damon handed Simon his big G whistle, bent over, and blew the spit from his D. The musicians were put behind the colors, dressed right, and started out in a rolling step. With the two pennywhistles and the drummer and bugler doing their best, they played “The Braes of Killiecrankie,” that terrible lament of an old Scots battle where the clans had fought against one another and left bodies strewn in pieces all over a rocky battlefield. He and Damon had to fake the low notes but Simon heard many of the men behind him singing the words; they knew it, they had always known it would come to this.

  If you had been where I have been

  ye would not be so cantie-o,

  if you had seen what I have seen

  in the braes of Killiecrankie-o.

  Simon was drained when they got to Fort Brown. It took a lot of wind to keep playing that big G and he hadn’t eaten for some time—he couldn’t remember when exactly. Outside the earth walls of the fort, Colonel Giddings and Colonel Benavides turned in their muster rolls and called for the men to unload and stack arms. Somewhere along the way General Kirby Smith had taken the Confederate and Texas colors and crossed over into Mexico and it was said he and his men kept on riding toward Veracruz.

  Simon wandered winded and gasping until they were told to form up. He did not have a long gun to stack in the arms pyramids, as did everyone else, but he stood to attention in his shabby trousers and suspenders and butternut forage cap to watch. The Confederates from Giddings’s unit and Benavides’s infantry pulled themselves once again into a military stance as the sergeants screamed out “Prepare SLINGS!” and then “Stack ARMS!” In groups of four the men stacked arms to make pyramids of four long guns each while the Union soldiers stood at attention to watch, somewhat abashed, as they knew they had not won against these surrendering men.

  Simon stood unmoving in the rear rank. People noticed movement. He was determined not to be noticed. He had disassembled the big revolver and hidden it in his rucksack. He was thinking that if they caught him with it, what the hell, life could not get much worse than it was at present.

  Then Simon saw a Yankee soldier standing around with a fiddle case under his arm and Simon’s hat perched on top of his head because Simon wore a six and three quarters hat size, which was small, and the soldier had a big round head like a pumpkin. Both hope and rage came to him in the same instant. The sun was blinding there on the flat stretch of land before the fort where palm trees lifted their arms restlessly and old smoothed river rocks gleamed. Simon threw off his rucksack and left the ranks at a flat-out run straight for the soldier.

  “Get your filthy hands off my fiddle, you son of a bitch!”

  The soldier turned to see Simon running at him and threw out a hand. “What? What?”

  Simon picked up a fist-sized rock, stood back on his right leg, wound up, and threw. It struck the soldier on the bridge of his nose with the force of solid shot. The hat flew off and the big man sat down in the dirt. Blood burst out of his nose in a spewing gush. Then, since the soldier presented such an easy target, Simon kicked him in the head with the heel of his boot. The man fell flat, making vague movements with one hand. Simon took up his hat and his fiddle case and felt whole again. Then he stood and waited for whatever would happen next.

  What happened next was a Federal provost marshal and two privates took him in an armlock. They had him bent over and stumbling toward the garrison punishment cells.

  It was a dignified and amiable surrender as far as the officers were concerned. They were all to have a dinner together at the Fort Brown officers’ mess and for a formal dinner, musicians are needed. Simon spent two hours in the punishment cell; a long two hours. He sat with his hands loose between his knees in a dim light and the sweat seemed to jell on his body. He tried to think where it would be, how he could get it back, how long he was going to be left in this hole without food or water. The piss bucket buzzed with flies.

  He heard steps and the clank of keys coming down the corridor. He lifted his head but remained expressionless, watching the soldiers’ shadows preceding them.

  “Well, fiddler.”

  A private turned the key in the lock and its sharp cry pierced the air.

  “That’s me.”

  “You’re wanted.”

  “Good to hear.” Simon stayed where he was. “For what?”

  The soldier pulled the cell door open. “Get your ass out of there and you’ll find out.”

  He was escorted to the food storage room next to the kitchen, where five others sat with various instruments. They shoved him in the door. After a moment a sergeant arrived and threw down Simon’s fiddle case, his hat, and his rucksack. Simon took up the case without a word and instantly sat down, opened it, and in an interior tidal wave of relief that was beyond his ability to describe saw that the Markneukirche was intact, that his extra strings and his tuning fork were there, his rosin, his scores with his scribbled notes all over the staves, his bow in one piece. There were the slices of shriveled apple. He sat for a moment with his head in his hands. Thank you, God, he thought. Then he looked up.

  They were turning up dippers of water, eyeing one another. They sat on barrels of flour, big tins of meat. A little Union drummer poured a dipper over his head and sat with eyes closed in relief as the water ran down inside his blue collar. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old. His thatch of dirty yellow hair stuck up in sweaty points.

  They had to get quiet. A quiet inside themselves. They had to make up a band. It was the only reason they had let Simon out of that shithole and had given him his fiddle back. They had to think music. The heat was that of burning suns, lakes of hellfire. Simon knew somebody had to take charge. He figured that person was himself. He took the dipper from the child drummer, poured water over his own head, and said, “Listen, you all.” He hitched his suspenders higher on his shoulders. “Listen. We’ve got to get paid for this. We’ve surrendered, well, the Confederates have, so the war’s over and we’re civilians now and they’ve got to damn well pay us.”

  The others stared at him. They were thinking. Simon dried his face on his dirty checkered shirt sleeve, lifted the open fiddle case and blew out all the sand from the plush lining. He turned the screw on the bow to tighten the horsehair. He waited. From outside came the noise of somebody cranking a windlass to bring up another bucket of taupe-colored water from the Fort Brown well.

  The musicians were both Yankee and Confederate. They were all filthy. They had recently been trying to kill one another. They smelled of gu
npowder and were sweating like animals in the ninety-seven-degree May heat, while outside palm trees made their endless whistling rustle in a Gulf wind. They sat and ate of the food brought to them. Simon took out his knife to spear up as much bread and bacon as he could from the metal platter. They wiped their hands on the hemp sacks of beans. A guitar player with a double-aught guitar from Benavides’s Tejanos was there, and a black Federal color sergeant with a five-string banjo, a man in a Zouave uniform who appeared suspiciously French and also had a guitar, the little Yankee drummer who had brought his bones and a bodhran, Damon with his Irish whistles. Damon wore a striped shirt and his top hat. You could tell he and Simon and the Tejano were Confederates; few of them had intact uniforms anymore. But even in his torn trousers Damon sat slim and tall with an air of undefeatable gentility, twirling the C whistle in one hand.

  “How do you figure on doing that?” he said.

  “We got to clean up,” said Simon. “Stands to reason.” He threw out both hands, palms up, in an appeal to that rare jewel-like thing called reason. “We got to get out of these uniforms or at least into some white shirts. We got to look like civilians.”

  Another long considering silence.

  “Might,” said the banjo man. He was still wearing his blue sergeant’s uniform coat, buttoned up even in the heat. He began to turn the pegs on the head of the banjo. “You got a tuning fork? Pitch pipe?”

  “Tuning fork,” said Simon absently. “Officers have got to have some white shirts, don’t they?” He got out his tuning fork and struck it on the door frame and said, “It’s an A.” As he held it humming in the hot air they all began tuning up, and to help out, Damon blew A on his D whistle. The air vibrated with incipient, unformed musical structures and two kitchen helpers and the cook bent around the edge of the kitchen door to stare curiously. Simon said, “Get out, you,” and they did.

  The banjo man said, “I know the dog robbers. I bet they can get some.” He tapped the air with his forefinger, counting. “Six. We need six.”

  “Eh?” The Zouave ran his thumbnail over a chord, then another. “Dog robbaire?”

  “Valets,” the banjo man said. “We call them dog robbers. All right. You all figure out what we’re playing and tune up. I’ll go see what I can do. I’m tuned.” He paused at the door. To the Zouave he said, “You’re not with them or us either, are you?”

  “Mais non.” The Zouave waved his forefinger in the air. “I come from other side the river with that French armee there. I come across very quietly to see the surrender and I stay for the fete.” He struck out a series of chords. “Is it well?”

  “Yes. Behave yourself.” The black color sergeant ducked out of the storage room.

  “What about coats?” Damon said. “Playing in shirtsleeves, well, might as well be in our drawers.”

  “Can’t be helped,” said Simon.

  They scrubbed their faces and hair at the well in the kitchen yard with lumps of gray lye soap, scraped their nails with pocketknives. They went back into the storage room, whose palm-leaf thatching was overrun with rats and various sorts of insect life, and shaved, staring into the bottom of a polished tin plate. They beat the sand out of the knees of their pants. The shirts arrived. A corporal strode into the storage room, threw the shirts down on a stack of molasses kegs, looked around in a theatrical manner, and said, “You get them back to me!”

  He turned on his heel to disappear into the dust and noise of the soldiers, wagons, and horses of two armies all sorting themselves out. They could hear the shouts of sergeants, a man repeatedly bellowing for tent stakes. They jettisoned their uniforms, threw their forage caps and shell jackets and uniform frock coats into a corner, blue and gray and butternut all in a heap.

  Simon grabbed the whitest shirt before anybody else could get to it and buttoned up the high collar until it appeared his neck was stuck in a cast. His head thrust out in a ragged red-brown mop of hair. The shirt had an immense tail to it. Simon jammed what seemed to be yards and yards of white linen into his britches. The others struggled into whatever seemed to fit and the Zouave was left with one that had ties at the neck and fit him like a cotton pick sack. They all looked at one another.

  “Bien,” said the Tejano. “Somos elegantes. Adorables. And so I think the fiddler leads us.”

  “Yes, take the lead, fiddler,” the color sergeant said this in a voice of indisputable authority.

  “All right. Can y’all do anything besides marches?” said Simon.

  “Like what?” The boy with the bodhran rattled his tipper across the skin.

  “Reels, hornpipes. I say we start hard and fast and then when they’re all drunk and declaring eternal friendship, get into ‘Lorena’ and ‘Home Sweet Home’ and ‘Hard Times.’ I want to see them crying into their rum. Anybody know ‘Nightingale Waltz’?”

  “Of course,” said Damon. “For hard and fast, what? ‘The Hog-Eye Man,’ ‘Cumberland Gap,’ ‘Blarney Pilgrim,’ ‘Little Liza Jane.’” He blew down the whistle. “I hope my suggestions are not dismissed out of hand. Also ‘Mississippi Sawyer.’”

  Simon said, “‘Whiskey Before Breakfast’?”

  Confusion; silence.

  “Some people call it ‘The Fiddler’s Dram.’”

  They shook their heads.

  “‘Rye Whiskey’?” Everybody nodded. “All right, then. And listen, everybody gets a turn. Y’all know ‘Eighth of January’? Let the sergeant take the break.”

  Damon said, “Of course. Now, on ‘Rye Whiskey’ let us do a verse a capella. The ‘if a tree don’t fall on me’ verse. I can do the bass on that.”

  “Me lead tenor,” said the banjo player.

  “Yes, a verse a capella,” said Simon absentmindedly. He rosined his bow with long loving strokes as the sunlight poured through the open door and lit his hair afire. He had drops on his eyelashes and wiped them away on his shoulder. “Me high tenor. I can get above the melody if we’re in G.”

  “I do the hum,” said the Zouave. “I do humming effets.”

  “Some officer’s wives are coming,” said the bone-and-bodhran boy, the Yankee drummer. He tipped his head from one side to the other as he ran through triple clicks with the bones. “From over on the island. Right at first to join them in prayer and cast a glow of femininity and grace on the gathering. Then the women go. Then you can play the dirty ones.”

  Thus they solidified as a group as musicians do, or perhaps their minds and thoughts precipitated out of the military suspension in which they had been held and so they once again became servants of music and not of the state.

  Chapter Three

  She was a slight person with black hair and dark blue eyes who gazed around herself with a polite and cautious smile. She walked in behind the wife of a Union colonel. She was holding a young girl by the hand. The master of ceremonies was the regimental chaplain who, along with the ladies, would also disappear before they got into the off-color ones like “The Hog-Eye Man” if he knew what was good for his immortal soul.

  Simon sat with a solemn, respectful expression while he silently ran over key changes in his mind. But then he saw her.

  He instantly abandoned all thoughts of key changes. She filled his entire vision with her pale round face and a little gesture of putting her finger to her lips as she leaned to listen to a major beside her. Simon did not hear the chaplain’s courteous words about reconciliation and returning to homes and hearths now that this terrible and fratricidal war was finally over, how Colonel Webb (a lift of the hand toward the Union colonel) had brought the war to a close single-handedly with this victory amid the sands and bitter storms of the Rio Grande, sonorous statements about the dinner being honored by the appearance of Colonel Webb’s gracious wife and little daughter, a sign of trust, a sign of civilized customs, behold this innocent child, Josephina, who will grow up in a finer and better world where all men can now behave as brothers. The girl with the black hair was not introduced, and so Simon thought she might be a governess or
tutor. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  She wore a dress of black and brown vertical stripes with a perfectly white collar and a wide black belt. She looked intently at the chaplain as he spoke, and then into Colonel Webb’s face as he replied. An expression of deep attention, an intelligent face, hair so black it carried blue lights in the late sunlight that poured in through the open windows of the adobe mess hall. Since it was an evening event she wore no hat, and Simon could see the intricate braids and burnished ebony of her hair. He watched as she moved, turned to the child, bent down and spoke to her, smiled at the colonel’s wife, looked up overhead in sudden alarm as a rat thrashed its way through the roof thatching. He watched every move, spellbound. Elegant, contained little body under all that vertical striping.

  “Fiddler.”

  Simon jerked his head around. It was the sergeant with the banjo beckoning to him.

  “I seen your face,” said the sergeant. “Do you want to speak to her?”

  “Yes!”

  “Go down there and tell the chaplain that you’d like to ask what the ladies wish to hear for the toast. This is what the army calls a dining-in, ladies are introduced. Then the music starts, toast, everybody bows, the ladies leave.”

  The black color sergeant carefully turned the peg on his fifth string. He spoke in a low voice like the voice of a spirit of temptation or aid in a time of need. Simon put his hand on the sergeant’s shoulder and leaned in to listen.

  “So slide down there and keep your head low and speak real quiet to the chaplain and say that you’d like to know what the ladies want to hear.”

  “Thank you,” Simon said. “What’s his whole name? The colonel?”

  “Franklin Webb. You just call him Colonel sir.”

  “Do I salute?”

  “Not if you want to look like a civilian.”

  Simon tucked his fiddle against his left side in the crook of his wrist and the bow in the fingers of his left hand and he slid like a haint from the makeshift stage. He continued silently along the wall and moved past standing officers in both blue and gray with their drinks in their hands. He reached the back of the mess hall in a quick, ghostly, reptilian slide.