“No, no, sorry boys, this sailor group is better. Patrons like them better. If your fiddler won’t play with them then your boy there with the bones and that drum, he’s good, they could use him.”
“No, sir,” said Patrick. “I am faithful to my friends and you can go to hell and shovel ashes.”
“He didn’t mean that.” Simon stepped up behind Patrick and gave him a quick, secretive punch in the kidneys. “He was raised in an engine room by a coal slinger. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
They hustled out, quickly.
As soon as they were on the street Simon cried out, “Did you have to? Did you just have to?”
“What?” said Patrick. His jug ears were bright red. He seemed on the verge of tears. In the gaslight they sparkled on his lashes, a look of distress on his young face.
“Insult the owner. That was a great idea. Insult the owner. Yes, that’s it. That’s how we get work.”
“I never was in a band before, I never learned.” Patrick clutched his bodhran in front of himself, a shield held out against Simon’s anger.
“Learn now or get the hell out.”
“Simon,” said Damon.
Simon marched on half a block in silence and finally got hold of himself. Then he said in a taut voice that they had to practice five songs and get them down perfect. Note perfect. If they had those faultless, then they could fake the rest until they learned them. As it was, they were sloppy and uncoordinated and the more he thought about it the madder he got. They tore at pieces of old bread as they walked along, biting it as if it were some stubborn foe. It tasted terrible.
In their shack with half a candle to light their slovenly existence Simon jerked the suspenders from his shoulders and unbuttoned his shirt in the deadly oceanic heat, put both hands on his hips, and said, “Goddammit, we have got to start all at the same time and stop all at the same time.” He turned on Patrick. “And if I hear you start that damn drum one beat ahead of us one more time I am going to jerk a knot in your tail, do you hear me?”
The boy sank back on the tar keg he was using for a seat, lowered his head, flushed red.
“Simon, Simon,” said Doroteo. “Es joven.”
“Yes, well, so was I at one time too and nobody cut me any slack.”
Which was not true and Simon knew it. The old man had cut him all kinds of slack. He looked out the window in search of a distraction. He had resolved to keep his temper in hand, because as his old man had told him over and over again, great trials and tribulations awaited him if he did not. Across the sand-filled street in the moonlight, a cat crept out of a dislocated house wall and trotted down the street with a kitten in her mouth. “Very well. I have not lost my temper. I have myself firmly in hand. Patrick. Here. It’s not when I bring the bow up, it’s when I bring it down. Got it? When I bring it up it’s ‘get ready’ and when I bring it down to the strings and nod to you it’s ‘haul away.’”
“We’re a scratch band,” said the Tejano. “We just got together. The fault is not with us.”
“Yes, you’re right. Now let’s get at it.”
They needed a week of practice and how would they eat in the meantime? They had no choice. This was when the boy took up Damon’s G whistle and every morning he silently marched out to the lonesome seaside and there amid the sea grape and vermilion morning glory taught himself to play it, trying over and over again with a desperate resolution. He came to Damon, confused about a certain phrase, holding it with his fingers over the holes.
“Here, you half-hole it,” said Damon. “Then you can get that sharp. Listen.”
When he had learned where the music lay in it, where the songs and the hidden melodies were, he played “The Minstrel Boy” in a way that left Simon silent and listening in silence and regretful that he had been hard on the boy.
“That’s wonderful,” Simon said. He gripped Patrick’s shoulder and gave him a friendly shake. “That’s very good.” The boy twirled the big G whistle between his fingers and smiled, did a little skip. Outside the shack the fans of the sabal palms thrashed and made harsh sounds in the hot wind, the Gulf waves ran up in polished sheets and drew back again as they sweated and played. They went over five fast songs—“Glendy Burke,” “Blarney Pilgrim,” “Cotton-Eye Joe,” “Leather Britches,” and “Mississippi Sawyer”—until they had them precise and sharp and all together. Then they fooled around with six slower ones, starting with “St. Anne’s Reel,” and on to “The Nightingale Waltz,” “Rye Whiskey,” “Hard Times,” and finally “Lorena,” which they could all have played upside down and underwater.
Damon said, “Let’s try ‘We’re Bound for the Rio Grande.’ It’s a capstan shanty. Sad, slow. We could do one chorus a capella. Here, I’ll write down the words for you. Try it in G.”
Damon swiftly wrote out the verses on the back of a handbill. They tried it. It needed work. They worked. Then they went over each one of the fast ones in turn, over and over. On the fast ones especially they had to start out precisely together and with volume.
And that’s when the other people in Galveston’s shantytown paused in what they were doing and listened to four voices harmonizing on Waaaay Rio! We’re bound for the Rio Grande. And those people often thought, I wish I could sing . . . They heard the satiny low notes of the G whistle and the ripping, blistering pace of the D, the crisp rhythm of the bones, the immeasurably ardent phrases from the fiddle on “MacPherson’s Lament” and thought, I wish I could play an instrument . . . and the great Gulf poured out its long waters upon the white beaches and took them away and came back again. Sometimes small boys gathered at the open windows to watch them as if they were onstage in a play.
With the last of their pennies and nickels they bought salt junk and old bread, bait shrimp from the fishermen, condemned ship’s biscuit, and sometimes turnips from a farmer’s cart. Doroteo took charge of all the food that came to hand; he diced the turnips, boiled the salt junk to tenderness, toasted the tiny shrimp on palm-leaf spines.
They got work, finally. First at the Jamaica and then at the Windjammer. They played the lively tunes at the beginnings of the evenings and then slid into nostalgia as the lanterns in front of them burned up their oil and the late hours wore on. It always worked, it worked like a charm, the sailors and harbor-front workers and off-duty soldiers sang along and banged their glasses on the tables in time to the fast tunes when the four flung themselves into the splendid crackling excitement of “Mississippi Sawyer” like a steam engine in sawdust hell. Damon, with his unlikely air of refinement, poured out cascades of notes and often the boy would dance a reel step or a flatfoot and made the bones rattle in his hand as he rolled through triple clicks.
Then as the men at the tables got drunker they were lulled to sleep or unconsciousness by the slow tunes. Simon and his group gathered up the audience and took them out of the bitter air of a harbor-front dive. Even in their ragged clothes and broken shoes they bore the drunk and the lonely along far sea currents, drifting up unknown forelands, into lost battles, defeats, unto the missing, the loved ones gone astray or unfaithful. Deep in the night they sang “I’m Bound for the Rio Grande” with the boy on the G whistle.
“One more,” said the boy. He looked up at them from where he sat on the edge of the stage. “‘Death and the Sinner.’” And Simon gave a slight one-sided smile; then the complex haunting tune of that Irish slow air threaded out into the dark streets. Finally, they would pack up their instruments, wake up the owner, collect their money, and walk through the dark streets home. Soon they were starting to make good money, both from the owners and from tips. They were able to buy meat to put on the fire and soap for a good foaming scrub at the pump. Simon slit the plush in the fiddle case and slipped all his coins inside.
There were the occasional fights. Once at the Sailor’s Rest, a drunk called out Damon, said he could not play a single melody without flubbing a note, a man with a crippled hand shouldn’t be playing an Irish tin whistle anyway, get of
f the stage and let the boy do it. The drunk stood up and made shooing motions with his arms.
Patrick paused in the middle of a flatfoot dance that was so limber it looked as if he were walking backward over glass. He held up the bones.
“Shut up,” said the boy, “you fart-faced old wreck, you useless piece of shit, get your butt hole out of this saloon.”
“Patrick!” Doroteo shouted. “¡Por Dios!”
The drunk charged up onstage in search of an exciting evening.
Simon threw open his fiddle case. They were living in a world of returned soldiers who had fought, had seen death and destruction, suffered hunger and want, and were not afraid of Satan himself. Fights could start up with amazing speed. Simon shoved the fiddle in its case and threw in the bow. Damon was dancing around like a bare-knuckle fighter, windmilling his fists, one of which would not quite close because of the old injury.
Then Damon turned and came face-to-face with the drunk. He drew back in pretended maidenly alarm with his Irish whistle clutched close to his chest. The drunk reached toward him and Damon’s hand shot out fast as a striking snake and he rammed the end of his whistle into the man’s eye, hard and fast. The man screamed and clutched his bloody eye, Patrick and Damon grabbed him, turned him around, and Simon planted a boot in his rear end and kicked him offstage. The drunk sank down like an emptied poke sack. He was going to have somebody reading the evening news to him for quite some time. Doroteo stood and watched it all. He stood the guitar on its tail pin, placed his hand on top of the pegboard, and spun it, smoothing down his mustache.
It was suddenly quiet. The locus of the trouble lay flat on the floor, moaning with a hand over his eye.
“Anybody else?” Simon shrugged his suspenders higher on his shoulders and turned to look all the men in the eye.
“Yeah,” said the boy. He danced like a spring toy on his busted shoes and made an invitational gesture with the two bones. “Come at me, you sluts.”
Overhead the beams of the saloon’s low ceiling threw long shadows and the Galveston rats stared down from the rafters with their eyes like stars in the lamplight. Damon regarded the men gathered around the stunned and groaning drunk and stepped to the front of the stage. His face was flushed. He stood with his two feet planted firm and with a defiant glare at the audience launched into a beautiful rendition of “Neil Gow’s Lament,” a Scottish slow air.
Simon took his fiddle and bow out of the case and joined in. Doroteo struck out light chords, the boy started in on the bodhran and outdid himself, running the tone of it from high to low, slowly, from the rim to the center, a march for the funeral cortege carrying poor Neil Gow’s second wife to the graveyard. At the end there was a moment of complete silence and then the applause began and went on for a long time.
Chapter Seven
The long battle cries of the war had faded and now life settled down the way a bombed building settles down, extinguishing all the lamps as the walls fold in and it was every man for himself, a kind of societal darkness or twilight that would take a long time to lift. A different world was coming after the surrender, along with the news that ran down the telegraph wire and the journals and newspapers that arrived on the train from Houston, its steam whistle sounding out over Galveston Bay.
Simon calculated that the military convoy should have reached San Antonio long since. The colonel with Mrs. Webb, the daughter, and the lovely Doris Dillon in his ponderous wake, should have found a house. He asked around about the mail and the bar manager at the Hendley Hotel said it was moving now, between Houston and San Antonio, sometimes by freight convoys and sometimes by private courier. Might take a couple of weeks or so.
For a two-cent copper he bought some clean paper from Englehardt’s Print Shop on C Street, which was just gearing up to get back in business. For an additional twenty cents he bought a bottle of ink and a steel pen with two extra nibs. He noted that the owner also had pages of sheet music. He flipped through them and although he would not allow himself the luxury of buying any of them, he saw scores for the latest Stephen Foster, piano scores for bits and pieces of symphonies by long-dead composers. Some other time, he thought and laid the scores down again.
He sat at the rickety table with one clean sheet of paper and the pen. He had to get a letter to her somehow. To let her know he was alive, that he was thinking of her. He had no idea how to go about it. It was around five in the afternoon; a short while before they had heard the bells of St. Mary’s and Patrick and Doroteo had just come back from Mass. The window with the shutters faced west and the sun sent bars of light through them and onto the paper. He wiped off his sweaty hand on his pants.
“Don’t say you admire her from afar or any of that estuff,” said Doroteo. “What about you say if she wants news about Ireland? That you met somebody from Ireland.” Doroteo lifted a shinbone onto the table, sharpened his knife on a stone, and then set to work expertly peeling off flesh.
“Yes, but that’s a lie. She would find out after a while.” He pondered the empty sheet of paper in a long painful stare. He had lost a suspender button and so had taken them off, parted them at the cross behind and used one as a belt, tying it in a knot in front. He thought and hitched up his pants, moved both feet, thought again.
Doro said, “Well, think of something not a lie but not a love letter. Do not say ‘I love you passionately. I love you when I see you, al instante.’ Everybody says that.”
Simon tried to think of some neutral, ordinary reason for her to receive a letter. He was curious about Ireland and did she know any Alexanders there . . . no, that was no good. Alexanders were Scots. He thought, It can’t be from me. It has to be from somebody else with news of me. He peeled off his shirt and threw it in a corner. It was rank, really rank.
He swiveled around on the tar-bucket seat and said, “Now listen, Patrick, you’re Irish. You will write to Miss Dillon.”
“I can’t hardly read nor write.” The boy raised one hand in alarm. He had been marking out a checkers board on the floor and Damon was shaping the checker men with his penknife.
“You can now. I’ll write it for you.”
“No, me,” said Damon. “I can do the punctuation correctly and add some phrases.” He laid down his work. The rolling boom and wash of the incoming tide in the distance sounded very good. Doro sat before the fire and flipped the strips of meat from one side to the other.
Simon lifted both hands. “God, you’ll say stuff about falling towers and Death riding in on the tide or who knows what?”
“I will not,” said Damon. “Trust me.”
“I never was going to write her,” said Patrick.
“Sure you are. And it will have news of me. Think about it. The Webbs will let her have the letter if it’s just from a fellow Irisher and got news of the old country.”
Patrick thought about it. “Maybe. I guess. My people there in Pennsylvania, there’s a Dillon aunt. One of my mother’s sisters married a Dillon. He came over in ’48. Well, hell’s bells then, go ahead then, say it’s from me. Colonel Webb knows me, he knows I am too young to pay court to her. Just go ahead and lie.”
“Good!” cried Simon. “Tell me about your uncle, the man she married.”
“Well,” said the boy. “I’m thinking.” He thought. “You been to Pennsylvania?”
“Pittsburgh,” Simon said.
“Well, I hope you enjoyed our fair state.”
“I did. Now, your uncle.”
They all bent over the letter. Patrick supplied the details, Damon contributed the modestly elegant language and correct punctuation, and Simon wrote it out in his best hand. He sat in his sawed-off drawers in the midday heat with the Gulf wind peppering their shack with sand grains. He wiped his hand on his trousers again and poised the pen.
September 15, 1865
General Delivery, Galveston, Texas
Dear Miss Dillon; I entertain hopes that you might remember me, I am the snare drummer that was with Colonel Webb’s unit in the
regimental band. I shall always recall your kindness to me at Brazos de Santiago.
“That’s S-A-N-T-I-A-G-O,” said Doroteo.
“How would the boy know how to spell it?” said Damon. “He don’t know it from a hole in the ground. Misspell it.”
“Damon?” said Simon.
“All right, all right.”
I take the liberty of sending you this missive as one immigrant to another as a means of conveying to you news of our country there across the sea.
“I never came across the sea,” said the boy. “My mother and father did, that’s a bald-faced lie.”
“Who’s to know?” Simon blew dust and sand from the paper and dipped the pen in the inkwell again with great care. “So just hush up.”
It is said you came from Ireland directly and because my family also is from Ireland then I thought I would send you what News I have of that unfortunate Country as you might be homesick for News of it, as we Irish must help one another as best we can. I am doing well with the help of the very kind fiddler named Simon Boudlin, who played at the dinner at Fort Brown, and also have the friendship of Doroteo Navarro, guitarist, and Damon Lessing, flautist, so I am not alone in this world.
Now, my mother’s sister married a Dillon and he came over some (“be vague,” said Damon) years ago from Kerry and settled in Pennsylvania in Allentown, where I am from, and he is doing very well working on the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad. His name is Brandon Casey Dillon. He came over on the Jeannie Johnston. He might be a relative of yours. Also that the family of Peter O’Dougal Dillon in the village of Ballyroe has gone over to Scotland to work in the Shipyards there, I don’t know which ones, but all say this is Excellent. I know that the priest of Ballyroe sends Letters directly to all of us in that part of Pennsylvania and he kindly includes news of the people of Tralee and all of County Kerry as best he can to be read aloud and indeed his Letters are sent from place to place and all delight in them.
Simon the Fiddler Page 8