Simon the Fiddler

by Paulette Jiles

  The four sat silently amid unseen garbage and refuse as the patrol went past. The two soldiers murmured between themselves and went on, their footfalls stark and heavy on the stones. Without speaking the same thought occurred to all of them: They have good boots. They heard church bells ring out; one. And stop.

  After listening for a long time Simon stood up and said, “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know that either. Someplace.”

  They turned away from the waterfront and into the city. They walked together in a defensive group, Simon leading and Damon bringing up the rear. Doroteo kept the center with his guitar case on his back and the boy Patrick beside him, bareheaded, holding the round drum in front of him by its inner bar like Saint Brendan’s shield held out against the devils of the night.

  They finally came upon a sort of saloon. A light gleamed out the front window and music could be heard from inside. Simon stood in the street listening to the rich, full sound of a German flute playing a lighthearted shanty.

  He stepped forward and pushed the door open a crack. He turned up his head to see what had once been a two-story building; the upper floor had been taken out and now it was a cavernous tall space with broken beams overhead.

  A thin man sat on a packing box. A single lantern burned at his feet. The flute was silver, the kind you blew across the mouthpiece, with stops on velvet pads. At several tables men were asleep with their faces on their arms and one on the floor curled up around a seaman’s bag, snoring. The man lowered the flute and sang, Sail away ladies, sail away . . . Then he noticed the newcomers.

  “Well, well,” said the thin man. “Come in.”

  “We’re looking for a place to sleep,” said Simon. “Where we won’t bother the patrols.”

  “This is the place,” said the man. He held out his bony long fingers in a gesture of invitation. “Join the merry crowd. They’ve drank themselves insensible. From the Liverpool ship called the Lisa Rose.”

  They sat down on the chairs; Damon plucked at one knee of his trousers to straighten a nonexistent pleat and regarded the filthy litter of the floor.

  Then the flute player said, “Did you all just come from Brazos de Santiago? There was a big battle down there.”

  Simon cried out, “No! Was there? What happened?”

  The flute player tipped his head to the side and shut one eye. “Sorry I asked. It was the remains of your Confederate uniforms.”

  “No problem,” said Damon.

  Simon lifted a hand and then placed his rucksack against the wall, sat on the floor with his legs out straight in front of him, and immediately fell asleep. Sail away ladies, sail away, live with the angels by and by.

  When daylight came the flute player was gone. The English sailors still snored. Simon, Damon, Doro, and Patrick stepped out into the street again. They gazed around themselves at a ruined city. Thin horses languished in their harnesses and most windows were broken, but still people bustled down the cavernous streets, ship’s boys ran hither and yon clutching bills of lading, men in homburgs walked along reading the latest newspapers from New Orleans, sailors loitered in slanky unobtrusive loiter stances in whatever shade they could find. They bought a sack of broken ship’s biscuit from a marine supply store and walked along biting at it, drinking from the canteens.

  “We must find a place for renting,” said Doroteo. “A room.” And then in a discouraged voice, “The verandah, the roof, the gutter. Someplace, anyplace.”

  “That takes money.” Damon had the sack of biscuit by the neck. “We ain’t got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, as they say in the vernacular.”

  “We got our dinner money from the officers,” said Patrick. “Ain’t we? I do.” He wiped crumbs from his mouth. “Whyn’t we ask somebody?”

  Simon said nothing about his thirty dollars; it was to buy land with and he was going to hang on to every coin until Felipe Quinto screamed for mercy.

  They stopped a passerby for information and stood uneasily as the man paused and put his hands in his pockets and looked them over one by one. He noted the way they slung their gear and the remains of butternut uniforms. He was used to returning soldiers, it seemed. Ragged men set loose from a defeated army, trying to find their way back into human life, its fabric, its customs, the long-forgotten uses of civilization.

  “Looks like y’all carrying musical instruments there,” he said.

  “Looks to me like it too,” said Damon. “Does it look like it to you fellows?”

  The rest of them murmured agreement. Simon said, “We were wondering about places to rent. Where we could set down our musical instruments, sort of.”

  “Why hell, boys, just go out there toward the Gulf side, they’s all kinds of abandoned go-downs and shacks and shanties and all that.” The man gestured toward the east. “People tearing them down for firewood. Tore up about half the wood buildings in Galveston for firewood. Deserted out there. Shantytown, about deserted. Magruder came in, chased the Yankees out, and then half the city was told to leave. Blockade. Union came back again and blew us all to hell. No blockade now! Get yourself a house, boys.”

  They walked off in the direction he indicated. The better part of Galveston was inside the island, facing the harbor, where the wharves and warehouses were and a long elegant street called the Strand. They passed a big building called the Hendley Hotel, whose facade was missing cannon ball–sized chunks of masonry. They could see some of the grand houses, mansions built on cotton money and shipping money before the war and still elegant. But they were not going there. They trudged out toward the seaside. Soon they were slogging through sand in a kind of shacktown.

  They came upon an empty house that seemed suitably abandoned. It stood somewhat slanted among other single-story cottages and shacks, the unpaved streets floury with white sand. They slung their baggage onto a splintered floor. Simon could hear the roar of the surf in the distance, could see the blue glint of the Gulf of Mexico. The house had lost many of its cypress shingles, the chimney was about to collapse, there was only one window that still had its shutters, and the front door never quite closed.

  In the next few days Simon shored up the chimney with stones robbed from other chimneys nearby, Patrick carved at the door with his knife until it would shut, Damon hung hemp sacks from the waterfront over the windows, and Doroteo made an excursion to the wharf and brought in two sacks of cotton from a busted cotton bale sitting unsold in Bailey’s Exports warehouse. They made themselves beds by stuffing the cotton into yet more hemp sacks. They set up a kitchen table with shaky legs by bracing it into a corner, found a pail and a dipper, located the nearest pump, and they were in business.

  Chapter Six

  Damon said they were all going to starve if they did not eat more than hardtack and so they made their way to the northern pass, where the fishing boats came in. There Doroteo bought five redfish from a black man with a Jamaican accent for five cents apiece. He called them huachinangos and regretted his lack of achiote. Nonetheless, he built a fire in the fireplace and said, “Leave this to me. Get away.” He placed several pieces of iron strapping over it, and he soon had them crisp as winter leaves on the outside and snowy white within.

  Simon picked up large pieces with his knife and told them it would all get better as they went along, they would find jobs in the saloons if they worked at their music, he was sure of it.

  “All right with me,” said Damon. “‘They had gone unto the wars, trusting to the mild-eyed stars’ . . .” He stretched out his legs; his shoes were coming apart. One was a brogan with two-hole laces and the other was an ankle boot that laced up his shin.

  “Whoa,” said Patrick. “Not more dead cities and stuff.” He was trying to throw pieces of fish in the air and catch them in his mouth.

  Doroteo said, “I am finish with the dead cities, Damon.”

  “That’s not ‘The City of Sin.’” Damon lifted his chin in an offended gesture. “It’s another one. Pat
rick stop that, Jesus Christ.”

  “There’s no end to them.” Patrick wiped his mouth with his blue shirt cuff. “Dead cities, talking ravens, spirits in the outhouse just waiting to bite your butt. We got any lard?”

  Doroteo handed him a small packet and the boy began to lightly smear the lard over the skin of the bodhran. They had each taken one corner of the shack as their own. Simon had settled on the corner to one side of the fireplace, where he laid out all his possessions as neatly as he always had, as he had been taught to do by the old man. He reassembled the revolver, carefully, after cleaning it with a stick and a rag, loaded five charges, rolled up the empty chamber under the hammer. He leaned back against the wall, listening to the fluting noise of the wind in all the cracks of the abandoned house. He was very tired. He was still hungry. But Sail away ladies kept running through his head and he fell into the song and the sleep it brought with it. Images of ladies sailing away in their big hoop skirts, moving toward a sea horizon like hot-air balloons of many colors, Doris Dillon among them. His mother young and pretty and dead. Revolving great rays of sunset and beyond that sunset a presence so vast it struck terror in his heart and he jerked awake.

  Evening. He was still thirsty. He got to his feet and thought, I need water, that’s why I am dreaming so much. So strangely. He took up the dipper from the bucket, swallowed one dipperful, two. The water was cloudy and tasted of bog pools and salty rain. He poured a third dipper over his head. There was a great deal to do, much facing him in this new peacetime. If it was a peace, if military occupation was a peace, then it was all right with Simon as long as he could make music happen, as long as his girl did not float away into some windy unattainable sky, as long as he could make a living. He wiped his face with both hands.

  Long dark shadows came up out of the continent to the west of them, crawled over the harbor, and block by block the lamplighters set fire to the streetlights. In Shacktown there were no streetlights. Simon built up the fire in the fireplace for some illumination. The other three smoked, rested, were talkative, but Simon sat on his pallet and leaned against the wall and returned slowly to the present world.

  He had to get them all into a passable band and make enough money for clothes; his were in tatters. Only the old checkered homespun shirt had not broken its seams. Eventually he would need a horse. Then he could get to San Antonio and find some way to present himself to Doris Dillon. To see if she was the same as the person in his imagination and if she was, then to tell her he would wait for her, for three long years if he had to. Maybe he didn’t have to, but that would take more information than he had or knew how to get.

  His future was all there like a three-draw spyglass shut up and compact and he would draw it out cylinder by cylinder. Behind him were the flames of a burning barn in Kentucky and a childhood of bastardy. The worst was knowing all the time he was a good fiddler, even a superb fiddler, but long before this time and surely now many a good man had gone down to ruin or death unrecognized and probably drunk into the bargain. Simon sank into sleep and once again into dreams, but these he could not recall the next morning.

  They woke up sticky with heat and the salt air. Then they went out to the local pump to pour water over their heads and then to the beach to gather driftwood for the fire.

  “Well now,” said Damon. He stood shirtless and barefoot with water running down his narrow chest. “Let’s figure out what we all know in common and start practicing.”

  “There you go,” said Simon.

  “Take the lead, fiddler.”

  “All right.”

  They returned to the derelict house to clean up as best they could. Simon stood in front of a piece of mirror to shave, carefully stropping his straight razor on his boot sole. Since they had no scissors to trim beards, Damon did the same, waiting for his turn in front of the broken mirror. His beard was heavy and blue. The boy Patrick regarded him with a critical squint and then held out a wad of gray soap.

  “Here, Mr. Damon,” he said. “I been a-saving of it. If you got lice it’ll kill them dead and if you got sunburn it’ll take your skin off.”

  “Well, bless your little Irish heart,” said Damon and grabbed it before Doroteo could get his hands on it. “Simon is afflicted with pale peach fuzz and you Mexicans don’t have face hair to speak of.”

  “Yes,” said Doroteo. “I thank God every day He did not give me that hog hair you got on your face, man.”

  They went over a list of tunes and ran through them until late afternoon. First tune was “Ailen Aroon,” because it was simplest, and then several of the tunes they had played at the officer’s dinner. They all looked up at the same time when they heard some church bells ring out five o’clock. Then they walked out with their clothes too loose on their thin bodies, lugging their instruments. The fine sand poured into Simon’s broken boots. He ran his thumbs under his suspenders and hoisted them higher on his shoulders. The lowering sun glowed red hot and hostile, but they struck out with determined step, music cases in hand.

  The center of Galveston on the harbor side was composed of brick buildings two and three stories tall. They gave only a glance down the broad street called the Strand to take in its houses of several stories with turrets and cupolas, shaded by palms, those houses far away and guarded by money, by their air of a coastal nobility. Their task on this first evening was to find the places where they might be hired. They found at least five saloons, four dining establishments, three hotel bars, and several places that could only be called low dives on the harbor front.

  At each place they stopped to listen to the competition. At the first they paid for plates of bread and butter with coins from the officer’s dinner and devoured every crumb. The boy licked his fingers until Doroteo elbowed him.

  Simon gazed around at the other men sitting slumped back in their chairs to listen and knew they all shared memories of the chaos of the Civil War, of death and destruction, poverty, dislocation. But he had his music. He could lift them out of all that for a few moments. Music is clean, clear, its rules are forever, another country for the mind to go to, and so this search for employment among the drinking places of Galveston did not bother him. To Simon, the world of musical structures was far more real than the shoddy saloons in which he had to play. Nothing could match it, nothing in this day-to-day world could ever come up to it. It existed outside him. It was better than he was. He was always on foot in that world, an explorer in busted shoes.

  They listened to a badly tuned banjo and a concertina, not great but the duo had volume. They walked on.

  One dining room had a piano, a cheap one; they stood quietly back against the wall and left as soon as they saw a waiter coming toward them with a determined expression on his face. One of the saloons had a group of three players on guitar, fiddle, and banjo, churning out jigs and shanties. They came upon the thin flute player in a place called the Windjammer. He nodded to them and then finished his piece and came to sit with them.

  His name was Peter Hendrick and he was hired here and there to provide music for the pleasure and enjoyment of not only the patrons of saloons but dancing parties, garden parties, and the various thrills and delights of the small theater on C Street. But he was moving on to Houston, where there were more places, more money. Unlike Galveston, that town had not been fought over twice, blockaded and shot up, and half the population evacuated.

  Damon was relieved of care and worry by this information. He sat back in his chair and pushed his hat off his brow. There was no way he could compete with that German flute, not with a six-hole pennywhistle. The silver flute had sixteen holes and could cover three octaves.

  “Well, bon voyage,” said Damon and smiled like a villain.

  Hendrick told them two other facts about Galveston that they should know; that often great storms would come, storms called hurricanes with winds that could pick up a grown man and deposit him five miles inland without a stitch of clothes on his body, on my mother’s grave. And then there was the yellow
fever, which turned a person the color of a pumpkin while at the same time he vomited black stuff. So if one of the storms came, they needed to dig in low somewhere.

  “What about the yellow fever?” Simon asked. With water, good sleep on solid land, and some food, Simon had regained his strength and his living, tight verve, his low-spoken intensity. He had lived through a battle, had been shot at and shot back, survived the Gulf of Mexico in a small boat, and knew what lay ahead: work, music, land, a girl. Surely he could survive the fever and a hurricane. He wiped his reddish hair from his face and in front of his taut and famished body he held the Markneukirche in its case.

  Hendrick paused and then lifted a hand palm up in a helpless gesture. “Well, just kiss your behind goodbye, boys, and leave some money for your funeral.”

  They shook hands all around and wished him luck.

  And so they began their rounds, giving saloon owners and proprietors of low dives what they had for a repertoire. They played while the owner sat in judgment, men with dirty aprons, men listening with their heads bowed and their hands between their knees. They were raw and uncoordinated and had to keep glancing at one another to stay together. One after another the owners said no. They said, I could use that fiddle but not the rest of you and merely shrugged when Simon shook his head. They said, Well, we already got somebody this week. They said, I was looking for a group that had brass—trombone, cornet. We need somebody that can play piano.

  They kept on trying. Galveston seemed a city of darkness and the sea since they only walked out after dark and slept most of the day. They became creatures of gaslight and shadows. Soon they were out of ready money and very hungry.

  They finally got their first employment in a saloon alongside the Hendley Hotel but within two nights were ousted by another group with a much sharper sound. This other group was composed mostly of sailors without a ship, a scratch band like themselves, but they had all been on the same crew and had sung sailor’s shanties together, so they were coordinated like gears in a machine.