Simon the Fiddler Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Endpaper

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Paulette Jiles

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Simon the fiddler had managed to evade the Confederate conscription men because he looked much younger than he was and he did everything he could to further that impression. His hair was reddish brown and curly; he was short and spare. He always shaved close so that he had no beard shadow. He could pass for fifteen years of age if not in direct sunlight. And often people protected him because they liked his music and did not care to see him dragged off for a soldier.

  In an unseasonably hot October he had been engaged to play at a barbecue near Marshall in East Texas, in plantation country. Horses were tied at random in the shade of the tall loblolly pines, among the fires and the drifting layers of smoke. Black servants moved with pitchers of iced drinks and men and women sat with plates in their hands to listen to Simon play “Jock of Hazeldean”; light and poignant strains so different from the war news, the tattered letters arriving from the ruins of Atlanta with accounts of its burning and its dead.

  Simon stood on a flatbed wagon and poured the notes out into the overheated air, unmoving, straight-backed, his hat cocked forward over his face. He had a high-boned face, bright hair, and light eyes and his music was enchanting.

  A banjo player sat at the edge of the wagon. He was an old man who tipped his head carefully as if there were water in it and it might spill over. He was trying to hear where it was that Simon was going with the melody and to follow if he could. Simon drew out the last note with a strong vibrato and bowed to the applause, and when he raised his head he searched out the edges of the crowd like a hunted man.

  After a moment he laid his bow tip on the old man’s shoulder to get his attention and smiled. “How are you doing?” he said in a loud voice. “Could be you want a cold drink. They have ice, I saw it in a pitcher.”

  “All right.” The old man nodded. “Yessir, doing fine, but I think they done come.” The old man kept on nodding. He was cotton-headed and partially blind.

  “Who done come?”

  “The conscription people.”

  Simon was still and silent for a heartbeat, two heartbeats. Then he said, “Well Goddamn them.”

  He said this in a low voice because there were ladies present. He would have liked to fall backward into a water tank and sink, clothes and all, but it looked like he was going to be on the run again, abandoning this well-paid job and the lovely girl wearing a blue bonnet sitting in the front row with a rapt, appreciative face. He shoved his fiddle into the case, quickly snapped the bow into its groove, and slammed the case shut. He laid his hand on the old banjo player’s shoulder.

  “I’m gone,” he said. “Take the money.”

  “No, sir, that ain’t fair.” The old man’s banjo was crudely made and had no resonator, but he had done his best with it. He turned his head in Simon’s general direction. “That ain’t fair to you.”

  “Yes, it is.” Simon grabbed his fiddle case by the handle and jumped off the flatbed. “I’m about done with those people. If I had a weapon I’d be loading it.”

  “Son, listen, you don’t want to do that.”

  Now the plantation owner came hurrying through the crowd, past elderly men, past women sitting carefully with their hoop skirts arranged over armless chairs. He took Simon by the arm.

  “Come now,” he said. “Come with me right now.”

  Several of the ladies half-stood. They wanted to know what was the matter. These laments so rudely interrupted and the child had not even eaten yet. Simon pressed through the crowd saying excuse me, excuse me and took off at a running walk behind the man.

  “Conscription men. I didn’t invite them.” The man was dressed as the planters always dressed at these barbecues, in a cutaway and trousers with foot straps and a beaver hat big as a church bell. “They were not given an invitation. They are ruffians, these people.” Simon marched at his heels in a jerky, furious pace.

  “Yes, but I’m not of age for a soldier,” Simon said.

  It was a bald-faced lie. They were going at long strides away from the plantation grounds and toward a sawmill operation back in the pines. Past stumps, past Virginia creeper blazing green in the sun.

  “The hell you are not,” the man said. He strode on down a red-dirt path and far above rain crows bent down to watch all they did and then spoke to one another with noises like clocks. “You’re lying like a dog trottin’.” And then, “I can tell by the backs of yo hains.”

  Simon stormed along behind the planter, vines slapping at his face. “You know what, I’m about done running. Next they’re going to take that old man with the banjo. Jesus!”

  “Hush,” the planter said. “We are losing this war hand over fist. It’s about done. Just keep your britches on.”

  Simon didn’t hear him, partly because he was behind and partly because he was tangled in his own outrage. “If you had a weapon, I would borrow it from you.”

  “Here we are.”

  It was an icehouse, dug into the red East Texas dirt and roofed by a plank shed. Down in the pit were blocks of ice under deep layers of sawdust. “Find yoseff a spot down in there and cover up with that sawdust.” He held out an invitational hand.

  Simon’s face had taken on a flat, smooth expression, his mouth in a stubborn straight line. “Wait. I’d just as soon get into a fight with them as run.” He looked back down the path among the pines with a determined glare. “If you have a pistol then give me the loan of it.”

  “I will not.” The man picked up a bucket. He spoke like people spoke in Savannah or Mobile, coastal Southerners, dropping r’s like loose buttons. “We’ve got many a soldier but we are short on fiddlers. I don’t want shooting at random here at my wife’s musical event. Can you shoot anyhow?”

  “No,” Simon admitted. “Not very well.”

  “There you go. They’d take you one way or the other. They’d put you in the front rank and you’d take a ball in the head first off. Get down there. Your time is running short, here.”

  Simon held on to the door frame, leaned his trim and limber body over the pit and looked down into the dark gaps between ice blocks. “Wait, wait, God, there’s a corpse down in there!”

  “I heard you had a quick temper but you just hold on to it for now.” The planter stepped forward into the gloom of the low-ceilinged shack to see into the pit. “Pugnacious, hotheaded, and what? That wad of clothes? That’s Miss Lucy’s, she’s freezing out the lice.”

  “There’s hair!”

  “She’s freezing the lice out of her wig too. She was out administering to the poor. Now cover up. I’m going to get the hatchet and take some ice back for an excuse to come here.”

  Simon stared at
the wadded clothes half-buried in sawdust. It seemed rather intimate to get down among a woman’s unmentionables and her skirt and her wig. He said, “Ah, I don’t believe I am acquainted with Miss Lucy.”

  “No normal man would want to be acquainted with Miss Lucy. Now get your behind down there.”

  It was a drop of five feet or so. Simon jammed his hat down tight, held the fiddle case under one arm, and jumped. He landed in an explosion of sawdust, got to his feet, and kicked himself a hole in it. He spent a good hour in a gap between the ice blocks, covered over with sawdust and frozen lingerie. He listened intently to the noises from outside: mockingbirds, a mule clearing its long nose in a hoarse snort, a rattling noise in the brush. He held the fiddle case to his chest. That was in October of 1864 and the atmosphere outside was so hot it seemed the air was afire.

  In his patched homespun checkered shirt Simon was perishing with cold when they finally came to tell him it was safe to come out. Several young women stood in the doorway and called to him, offered their hands to help him up. They fluttered around him, laughing, dusting off the sawdust with their handkerchiefs. Simon smiled and stood with his arms held straight out to the side, redheaded and engaging and at liberty for the time being. His tension and indignation were all knocked away by the girls and their flying handkerchiefs. The one with the very jaunty blue bonnet took it off and used it to beat the sawdust from his back and he almost said, Sweetheart, you have permission to beat me half to death with that bonnet, but he did not and only turned and took their hands one after another to say goodbye. They said it would be a tale to tell your grandchildren, near freezing to death on a hot day in October, in the middle of the war.

  He played throughout Central and East Texas in saloons and pleasure palaces, for weddings and funerals. Simon had a hair-trigger temper and he knew it, and all his life it had been impressed upon him to contain himself because he could end up in jail with his fiddle confiscated or stolen. The last thing he ought to do was get into a brawl with the conscription men. So he lived in the bright strains of mountain music and the reflective, running pools of the Irish light airs that brought peace to his mind and to his audiences; peace soon forgotten, always returned to.

  He played for a wedding of twins at a church near Long Point and a funeral in Nacogdoches, he played “Song of the Spirits” in a very low dive in Saint Augustine, where the piercing wind of a Southern winter storm tore through a broken pane and furloughed men who carried grave, ineradicable wounds listened with still faces. This was all in the East Texas country, near the Louisiana border, where people still had money; money from cotton smuggled through the coastal blockades. Wherever he lifted his fiddle to his shoulder he commanded a good price and he saved every coin carefully, because when the war was over, he was going to buy a piece of land, live on it with a beautiful and accomplished wife, and play increasingly complex pieces of music. Hard cash and children would, somehow, come of their own accord.

  It was not so much that he was a good player, because most of the people who crowded the saloons and dance halls couldn’t tell a good fiddle player from Adam’s off ox, but because his repertoire seemed to be without end. He had a bottomless supply of waltzes, jigs, reels, hornpipes, and slow airs. Some of the slow airs could bring men and women to a standstill, their eyes brimming with tears for a remembered love or a certain long-lost valley at twilight or another country without war, taken by emotions of loss and exile for which they had no words. He stood straight and still as he had been taught by the fiddlers on the Ohio. Writhing and bending when playing fiddle was distracting, it was undignified. With his hat low over his eyes and his bow flashing in lantern light he brought up melodies clean and clear from some inexhaustible source. He tried to stay out of fights, smiled and accepted compliments, collected his pay in silver pesos, and slipped through the hands of the conscription men with music trailing behind him, harmless and elven and utterly unmilitary.

  But they finally got him in March of 1865 in the town of Victoria at J. A. Fenning’s Public House on Brazos Street. Victoria was near the Gulf of Mexico, a body of water that Simon had always longed to see; the horizonless ocean itself. A drunk in a pair of striped pants kept insisting he be allowed to play Simon’s fiddle. He was drunk enough to come up on the stage crying out that he could play as well as anybody and Simon held both bow and fiddle behind himself and said, Back off, back off, listen to me, back off, and his eyes were intent on the man, in the darkness beneath his hat brim. But the drunk would not back off even with the customers shouting at him.

  At last Simon laid his bow and fiddle on top of the piano, turned back to the man, and shoved him, hard. “I told you twice, Goddammit, no.” By this time several of the drunk’s friends were grappling with him to get him off the tiny stage and then they began to argue among themselves as to the best method of removing him. The arguing men then started fighting with one another. The bar owner pulled out a shotgun and laid it on the bar. More shouting. The drunk, with reaching clawlike hands, surged with slow menace toward the fiddle.

  Simon elbowed a man out of his way, snatched up a spindly chair that was meant for the pianist, who had not showed up, and, his patience gone, braced his feet wide and smashed it down on the man’s head with all his strength.

  The noise and the shouting caused two conscription men to come running in off the street to see what was up. Simon had a look of sheer wrath on his face and a broken piece of the chair in his hand. Many of the men in the saloon were of conscription age and they cleared out of the bar from every exit, but Simon was delayed by shutting his fiddle up in the case and they got him. So that was the end of his freedom for the next while.

  The two conscription men lifted him right off the stage. He was wise enough not to fight with them. Wisdom comes to us at odd times and this was one of them. They let him collect his money, his coat, his fiddle case with the rosin and tuning fork and the paper package of extra strings, and his clothes in his carpetbag with razor, soap, his other pair of socks. He grabbed his hat, which was a good fur-felt hat with a three-inch brim that had lasted him since he left Paducah, Kentucky. They said they wanted him for a regimental band, they didn’t care how old he was. He could have been a titty-sucking baby in his mother’s arms but if he could play music then they had just the right place for him.

  At the encampment outside of town on the Guadalupe River he gave a false name, Simon Walters. This was so that he would be at the end of any list or muster roll and would therefore have time to think of what to do if some group he was in was called up for some task, such as fighting or kitchen duty. He gave his place of birth as Paducah, Kentucky, lied about his age, had no pass to present, and then put on the worn, patched, second-hand Confederate uniform they handed to him. The coat was a homespun butternut shell jacket with lighter patches where some insignia had been cut off and the buttons were from a Union uniform. They were brass and had the Federal eagle and the shield on them. The sort of thing that gives one pause. He wore his checkered shirt under the jacket and vest as standards had fallen amazingly here at the end of the war. He managed to trade his carpetbag for a rucksack. They gave him a blanket. He found a pair of suspenders to keep the pants up. The pants sagged around his legs like stiff woolen pipe, but the pockets were enormous and he could carry all sorts of stuff in them.

  He ended up with Giddings’s regiment under Captain Robinson down on the Rio Grande. They were bivouacked inland, so Simon still had yet to see the Gulf of Mexico. They were given very little to eat. He marched into camp along with fifteen other conscripts and a wagon of supplies, their mules so thin that the caracara eagles had followed them all the way down.

  The Yankees held the port at the mouth of the Rio Grande. Where the great river flowed into the Gulf of Mexico a sandy island had formed called Brazos de Santiago, and the Yankees languished there on that island among the docks and warehouses, along with two actual houses occupied by officers and their wives. All buildings leaned downwind in the blown sand,
the unending roar of the surf. The Confederates under Giddings were encamped five miles west, up the river, Simon among them. Nobody was moving. Nobody wanted to fight. The war was ending. There was no reason to get killed.

  He was assigned to a shelter made of canvas and carrizo cane along with others in the regimental band: the bugler and the drummer and a man of about forty or so who played the Irish tin whistle. He had a dark beard and hair like coal, a top hat tipped over his nose. Something had happened to his right hand. He gave Simon a nod and went back to rolling a cigarette in a piece of the Galveston newspaper.

  “Well,” said Simon. He pulled off his rucksack and stood unsmiling, holding the straps.

  “Well, here’s another one,” said the bugler.

  The drummer said, “Is that a fiddle case?”

  “No,” said Simon. “It’s a dead baby.” His gaze swept over them with a cool look from his light eyes, the way he would assess an audience for its volatility, its mood, its ability to pay.

  The bugler shoved a wooden box aside, pushed a heap of blankets into a corner, and held out an invitational hand. “Here you go. You’re wondering when we’re going to eat.” He glanced at Simon’s lean body under the shell jacket and his thin face.

  “More like what.” Simon commandeered the box by putting his rucksack on it and sat down on the dirt floor. He was weak with hunger and the heat and was determined not to show it. He cocked up his knees and laid his hands in his lap.

  “Beans and cornbread. Sometimes hominy.”

  “It’s food.” Simon watched as the bugler went back to sewing a patch on a trouser knee. He turned up the canteen they had issued him and drank the last few drops. Then in a cautious tone, like a man telling of a dream he had once had, he said, “They told me the Gulf of Mexico isn’t too far from here.” He wiped his mouth on his cuff. “I’d very much like to see it.”

  “The sergeants,” said the dark man, “are not yet allowing the men to go on sightseeing tours.” He lit up. “After the surrender you could take a stroll down there and indulge yourself in sportive play upon the gleaming sands.”