Simon the Fiddler

by Paulette Jiles

  “I see,” Simon said. He put a finger on the top paper and turned it toward him, but he could not read the legal language and so turned it back.

  “And what are you doing in Galveston, young man?”

  “I play fiddle,” he said, hesitantly. “And we have a group. Currently playing at the Jamaica.”

  “Ah.” A knowing silence and then the land-sales man recovered himself. “And here . . .” He drew out a deed from under a stack of badly printed maps. “This is an interesting one. The attempt to get a clear title should take you the rest of your life. It’s a section of the old Peters Colony land grant, far away in the interior of our great state, where an English consortium attempted to set up a colonizing scheme and tried to run it like a lord’s estate back in old England. The settlers came after his manager with loaded pistols. Then the settlers ran off with all the deeds and records to the Dallas County Courthouse. The Texas Republic and then the State of Texas passed some laws regarding this situation as to titles and deeds, to what end I do not know. But here you have four hundred acres, unimproved, unfenced, no structures, situated just south of the Red River. Indian country. Five dollars an acre. All yours for two thousand, in what currency is a question. I assume you know how to load and shoot a weapon? Because you would have need of one, if not several.”

  “Yes,” said Simon, and took the paper. He was silent for a measure, two measures. He looked at the other papers pertinent to the deed. It was all very legal and confusing: deeds, grants, maps with great white spaces, reports by the Texas Rangers. He leaned back in his chair and drummed his fingers on his thigh. “Do you have some kind of land for sale that is . . . simple?”

  “Land titles are never simple. Never. Not here. Maybe back in . . . where are you from?” The man gave him a narrow glance as if the better to understand Simon’s provenance, his background, his finances.

  “Paducah, Kentucky.”

  “Ah. Who are your people?”

  “Alexanders. Boudlins.”

  “I’m from Little Egypt. I knew some Alexanders in Paducah. They owned the big livery stable, the one Forrest raided.”

  “Right,” said Simon. “That’s my mother’s people.”

  The man raised a grizzled eyebrow and seemed to perk up; maybe this fiddler had money after all. “Well. Your mother’s people. But I’m afraid I don’t know any Boudlins.”

  “They’re from around Baton Rouge,” Simon answered. He hoped the man would not continue to ask impertinent questions. This was about money, about finding a piece of land and somehow making a deal on it, and not an inquiry as to his antecedents. Simon was not quite sure how these deals happened but he would find out. “So what does that mean, a clear title?”

  The man considered; a mosquito circled relentlessly and the smell of the office was of damp leather-bound volumes earthy with unclaimed acres. “It means that nobody else has a claim on it, that claim being hidden away in some obscure land office or government office having to do with legislation passed by either the Republic of Texas or the State of Texas or the Confederacy or all three. Some claim you don’t even know about. You pay your money down on a mortgage and then at some time somebody else comes along and says, ‘Wait a minute, that’s mine!’ And they got a paper says they paid down on it. “

  “All right,” said Simon.

  “And Texas land titles are a dog’s breakfast. Because first it was under Spain. To register a land title you had to travel all the way to Mexico City. So hardly anybody did. Then it was under Mexico. Same deal. Nobody had a secure title to land or buildings. Then it was the Republic of Texas, and their files are moldering yet in the dankest corners of the capitol in Austin. The State of Texas added a whole new pile. Then the Confederacy, which is now in its death throes and didn’t do squat about land titles anyway, and soon we will be under some other government, who knows what, and so there you are.”

  And Simon thought, I don’t care. I’ll buy land somewhere, somehow. There has to be a way.

  He said, “But lots of people own land. Here in Galveston. They own town lots and businesses and so on.”

  “Yes, well, we just cripple along.”

  “What about this place on the Red River? The old land grant place?”

  The man shuffled out the papers. He read from the title description. “Four hundred acres approximately fifteen miles south of the Red River, straight south of Preston’s Bend—survey marks here indicated—unfenced and unimproved, no structures.” He ran his finger down the pages. “Here’s the latitude and longitude. Latitude thirty-three degrees and four minutes north, longitude ninety-six degrees fifty minutes west. Here, I’ll write it down for you. Also the various survey markings, blazed trees, bluffs and so on and the fact that there is a spring of water flowing into Big Mineral Creek, hardwood trees meaning live oaks and Spanish oaks, so on and so on, about two hundred acres of open meadow, or so they say. Plus a noxious sink of rock oil where your milk cow can sink in up to her hocks and die. Price is five dollars an acre, that’s two thousand dollars in case you don’t want to be seen counting on your fingers. Owner, Solomon G. Bradford.”

  “I want it,” said Simon, and suddenly smiled. “That’s it. I want it.” It seemed that the papers had been waiting for him in this untidy little office, waiting for his appearance with fiddle strings in his pocket. It came to him sure as guns.

  “Subject to Indian raids. Also I warn you, white people up there are lunatics. They hung a lot of people up there because they weren’t loyal to the Confederacy. It was a hanging spree of unparalleled dimensions.”

  “I want it. Who do I pay?”

  The man raised his head to look into Simon’s face. He took off his low-crowned black hat and wiped his bald skull and put the hat back on.

  “Well,” he said. “I swan.”

  Simon waited.

  “Son, you need a down payment of about two hundred dollars as ten percent of the price, but I am going to make that two hundred fifty as times are so unsure. Then you need a lawyer to draw up a deed of sale, and you have to pay him because he has to go look up stuff in whatever records are available. Let’s say you just give the down payment to me. Makes it all simpler. Then you have to also pay me for title research and to record the deed. Then you have to go there and survive. Now, what else?”

  Simon lowered his head as he counted up the costs. He had to find the man who owned it. If he were dead or alive. He needed a hundred dollars down payment because he was sure he could get the person to come down. Then more for title research and recording the deed. This was his land and he knew it.

  “So where is this Solomon Bradford?”

  “No idea. Don’t know anything about him; old, young, killed in the war, died of yellow fever, living a life of luxury in Austin as a clerk to some politician, who knows?”

  Simon got up out of the chair. He was not about to hand a penny over to this man. He had been born into a world of horse traders and was well acquainted with deception and the need for caution at every step when it came to buying and selling. He casually pressed aside the top paper, read the second, the longitude and the latitude of this land up in the Red River Valley, then bent his head down to regard his hands with all the music in them and a brief thought of how rare it was to have your heart stirred like this out of an ordinary day in the ordinary sunshine. He needed to find Solomon Bradford. That was the first job.

  “Well, thank you, much appreciated.” His land and his girl almost within reach. It was going to take some doing. And himself yet young and inexperienced in many ways. But that’s why God made people young at first, to get the doing done. He smiled politely, pulled the sticky door open, and said, “Looks like I’ll just have to wait a few years to go looking.”

  “That would be wise.”

  Another polite letter from Patrick to Miss Dillon, full of inventive half-truths, gossip about Ireland that Patrick dredged up from hearing his parents talk, incidents that had occurred more than twenty years ago, assurances of his
desire to join the army again before long (this zinger was directed straight at the Webbs, who would no doubt read and approve of the letter before handing it to Miss Dillon), a careful mention of the very kind violinist Simon Boudlin, who was teaching him to read music. Sealed and stamped, handed over to the man behind the post office counter at the Customs House and the long wait began again. Letters seemed to walk of their own accord down the road from San Antonio, to get lost, wander, camp out for a while beside some pleasant river, finally to amble unconcernedly into Galveston.

  Then her reply came back. She wrote about the demands that army life made on a person and chances of promotion in case Patrick wished to make the military a career, news of Indian depredations in the north, a wagon accidentally driven off the Losoya Bridge. She wrote of things that were often funny, lively, and completely impersonal. A letter went back up the road from Patrick, full of bland, boring news of Galveston and the interminable gossip about imaginary Dillons. Simon wanted to tell her about the garden party (some of it), and the shack they had fixed up (no details about the latrine), about the pennywhistle fight (omit blood and hollering), and about the land he wanted near the Red River. About himself, his thoughts, the voices he heard singing in slow perfect harmony on the ships tied up in the harbor. How much he wanted to meet her. To put out his hand and touch her. He began to despair of ever writing to her directly, of learning the ways of her heart through these censored pages, or revealing his own, such as it was.

  In the next letter he decided he would say Patrick was coming to San Antonio, but then he thought, Wait, wait. He wanted to be able to say he was a landowner, a horse owner, a man with two suits and a watch. He wondered if this would matter to her. He very much hoped it would not.

  So the letter was about four men making do with household chores, the songs they played and in what key, the names of ships coming from all over the world to dock in Galveston, and speculations as to who might emigrate from Ballyroe this year. Safe enough. Painfully safe. It came to the month of November and still the yellow fever persisted. There had not been a hard freeze and mosquitoes hummed and bred in the rain pools.

  They played at a wedding one early afternoon. It was a gathering of people who had returned to the island from inland after having been run out in Magruder’s forced evacuation in ’63. They came by boat and over the railroad bridge with their possessions much diminished and their tools in disrepair. Two of these people decided to get married despite the unsettled conditions of the times, in spite of their poverty. At the two-story wooden house on Twenty-seventh Street near St. Mary’s the dancing went on until late. The celebrants were regaled with whiskey and fish. It was a cold evening. The gulls flew over crying to one another like the lonesome thieves of the air that they were and the evening train from Houston came over the bridge under a thin moon with steam billowing from between its great driver wheels.

  Simon laughed at a little girl trying to dance in front of their improvised bandstand as he bowed out the final notes of “Angelina Baker” and gave the one-two hard and sharp to signify the ending. At the edge of the stand the boy Patrick sat down suddenly. He carefully slid his two polished bones into his coat pocket and sat the bodhran in his lap. His head dropped forward until his forehead rested on the rim of the drum.

  “I’ve taken a fever,” he said.

  They got him home by half-carrying him. He kept saying he didn’t feel well but that he would be better in the morning. Simon was up and down with him the rest of the night, helping him to the outdoor latrine, then back again. Toward dawn Damon took over as clouds were building out on the Gulf.

  He did not feel better in the morning. Doroteo quickly made up the fire with driftwood and heated water, held a cup to the boy’s mouth. The morning dragged on and they sat with the boy as the chills and then the fever struck him. It seemed some invisible devil had taken hold of the boy and would not let go.

  “We should to take him to the Ursuline nuns,” said Doroteo. “They have the hospital there.”

  “No,” said Patrick. “I’m good. I’ll get over it. It’s just the malaria that we had there from the fish.” He rolled back and forth on his cotton-sack bed. He was restless and in pain. “You go to the hospital to die. I am not going to die because of everything I already said.”

  Doroteo leaned on the doorframe. He said, “He is not making right sense. It is not good.”

  They pooled their money and Simon and Damon went to find a doctor. An Ursuline at the wooden house that served as their convent gave them the address of one of the city’s three doctors. It was a substantial house with verandas on both stories and sago palms in front. The doctor was not at home. Yellow fever was pacing up and down the streets and the back bayous of Galveston in long unseen steps, touching a child here and a strong man there and a sailor panting in his hammock belowdecks on a tied-up ship that was soon flying the yellow flag. Damon and Simon sat on the curb and spoke in short sentences. There was little to say. Finally, at sunset, the man arrived in an open carriage pulled by a thin horse.

  He leaned out over the door. “Where?” he asked.

  Simon stood up and pulled off his hat. “Back near Lost Bayou.”

  The doctor was shrunken and weary inside his black suit. After a moment he said, “Who is it? You’re the band that come up after Los Palmitos, aren’t you? You’re the fiddler.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Simon. He put his hat back on. Damon stood with his face stricken with anxiety and he did not seem to be able to change his expression. He turned the pennywhistle over and over in his hand. Simon gestured toward the Gulf. “We live back there. It’s our bodhran boy. The one with the bones.”

  “Get in,” said the doctor.

  Chapter Twelve

  They crowded in and felt between themselves fleeting moments of hope that came and went as if they were passing them back and forth. They clattered along Broadway and then turned into Shacktown, into the leaning wooden single-story houses where women looked out over yard railings as they passed, saw it was the doctor, and shook their heads.

  The doctor pulled up his tired horse in front of their shack when Simon said, “Here we are.”

  “Yes, here we are in Mosquito Flats,” said the doctor. He got down and Doroteo ran out to take the hitching rein and lay it gently and carefully over the yard railing, and then Damon went inside for the bucket and hurried to the pump. He soon came back with water and stood outside holding the bucket for the horse to drink as if he could not bear to come inside and hear the words.

  “Yellow fever,” said the doctor. “That’s what I think. He may get through this first phase and live. If it comes back a second time he may not. If it comes back a second time it is almost always fatal. Is he throwing up?” He kneeled down beside the boy.

  The boy lay on the bed they had made for him on the floor. They had piled up their own beds one on top of the other for him. He was in the fever stage and so he had thrown off the blankets. The blankets were threadbare brown wool stamped CSA. His eyes were glittering.

  “I throw up all the time,” said the boy. “On the sea, on land, in the street, at the governor’s ball in Harrisburg.”

  “Open your mouth,” the doctor said, and Patrick opened his wide mouth and stuck out his tongue. Then he shut it. His yellow hair lay flat and wet.

  “Take a look at that,” he said, “I bet you never seen anything like it.”

  The doctor smiled and held the boy’s wrist to note the pulse rate, listened to his chest with a stethoscope, and then reached into his bag.

  “What I have might do very little,” he said. “But this is laudanum, this is willow bark.” He set out a paper packet and a large bottle of liquid. “The willow bark is for fever, make a tea of it. The other is for pain. Give three spoonfuls of the laudanum. He may get a restful sleep.”

  “Mama, it’s good you’re here,” the boy said, and then his hands grew restless together as if he had suddenly begun to count on his fingers.

  They s
tood around with deep attention. Then they gathered their coins and Simon held them out.

  “That will be a dollar.” The doctor got to his feet. He selected two half-dollar pieces from Simon’s hand, said God be with the lad, and went out to his carriage.

  As soon as the doctor was gone Damon heated water to infuse the willow bark. Simon poured some water into a canteen, then three tablespoons of the laudanum, shook it, and held it to the boy’s mouth. He watched him drink it until he had taken every drop. After that the boy slept heavily. A cold wind came rushing up from the water and it played mindlessly with the sand all around the house while Doroteo carefully arranged the boy’s blankets, his hand resting for a moment on the sweaty hair of his head.

  The next night, Doroteo and Simon went out to play at the bars and earn money for medicines while Damon stayed with the boy and then they switched off. For twenty-four hours he seemed improved and sat up and drank the beef broth Doroteo made for him and thanked each of them by name, holding out his hand to clasp theirs one by one, but then the fever and chills came back worse than before. He could not eat. In five days he had become skeletal, his teeth bared as he struggled for breath.

  “Listen,” he said. His voice was thin.

  Simon sat cross-legged beside him and said, “I’m listening, Patrick.”

  The boy fell silent for a moment and turned his head as if he were trying to hear some distant sound. His eyes stood out in his head, his cheeks had sunk into his face. He seemed attentive to the sound of gulls sailing in over Shacktown, searching out scraps and garbage, and from far to the east over the water came the sound of rumbling thunder. Finally he said, “Simon, it was beautiful. All of us in ranks. An army is so beautiful. The cannon was beautiful. Angels of fire out of the mouths of them. I remember it in my mind. Us drummers did ‘Hell on the Wabash’ and everything and now everything I remember will be gone.”