Simon the Fiddler Read online

  “You reckon?”

  “At this point anything is possible.” The dark man lay back in his shirtsleeves and grimy suspenders while smoke drifted from his mouth.

  That evening after the beans and cornbread Simon laid out his possessions carefully, each one in exactly the same place whether he was sleeping in the storage room of J. A. Fenning’s Public House in Victoria or a crowded army tent on the Rio Grande. He placed his good Kentucky hat on top of his rucksack, laid out his razor and comb on the box and covered them with a handkerchief, and stored his tuning fork, rosin, and extra strings in the case along with his expensive and precious Markneukirche fiddle.

  “And so my name is Damon,” the dark man said. “Like a demon.” His skin was bluish pale, colorless. He was tall and narrow in the shoulders, his long feet stuck out into their tent space in two different shoes. “Damon Lessing.”

  Simon shifted on his hardtack box, cocked his head. He regarded Damon with a drawn, spare face, no expression.

  “Simon Walters. And leave my rucksack where it is.”

  “Well now, I thought I’d lay out a hand of cards on it.”

  “I said leave it alone.”

  Damon glanced at him and parted a deck of cards into two halves. “You have a dangerous look on your face, fiddler. The sergeants make sharpshooters out of men like you. ‘Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore . . .’ Very well. I am reduced to the Missouri Shuffle.” Damon made the cards snap together, rolled another cigarette, and handed it to Simon. “Calm down, son.” Simon thanked him and smoked it, and so they were nominally friends, or at least not ready to shoot each other.

  Simon wore the regulation forage cap pulled down over his forehead and left his good hat in the tent. He formed up for drill with the others on the flat sandy stretches while enormous towering clouds built up over the Gulf and sailed inland carrying, it seemed to him, secret messages about blue storms and pirates and tales of giant unknown fish.

  Every evening through the months of April and May the wind came up out of the Gulf at nine o’clock like a transparent armada set loose on the world of deep south Texas. Simon could hear the Rio Grande River just beside camp where the Mexican women came to wash their white laundry in the brown water. He could hear the bells of churches on the other side. The wind bowed the thick stands of carrizo cane and the horses ate slowly. Egrets rose up with long leisurely strokes of their wings.

  They were all badly armed; they were assigned old Springfield smoothbores of Mexican War issue and the dark man with the pennywhistle had only a percussion revolver made by Dance and Brothers that he kept in his rucksack. Simon loaded, knelt, and fired with the others and his cap flew off with the recoil. They drilled there in the bright, cauterized desert, learned the manual of arms, to the rear march, and dress right dress. Simon had trouble with the last and behind him from the ranks came yells of “Other arm! Other arm!” The sergeant tried to get Simon to play his fiddle for marches. At morning drill the sergeant shouted his name.

  “Walters! Front and center!”

  Simon was staring out over the river cane, watching the plumed heads bend to the western wind.

  “Walters!”

  Damon jabbed him in the kidneys with a knuckle. “Simon. That’s you. Apparently.”

  “By God it is me. Yes, sir?” He stepped out to front and center.

  The sergeant asked him to get his fiddle for the drill.

  “No, sir, I will not.”

  The sergeant looked him up and down with a raking glance. A short redheaded fiddler with square shoulders and a trim waist, pale skin burnt a dusty brown, a mutinous expression on his face. The sergeant considered. Discipline was slipping; desertion throughout the entire Confederate Army was growing by the day, so the sergeant did not have him stripped to the waist and tied to a buckboard wheel and beaten. Instead he said in a painfully conciliatory voice, “But I’m ordering you to. Why not?”

  “Why not. Because it’s not a march instrument. Because I can’t march and bow at the same time. Because sand will ruin my fiddle. It’s everywhere.” Simon jammed his tattered Confederate infantry cap down over his nose.

  “Well, you had better do something,” said the sergeant. “Musically.”

  Damon had a D whistle and a C and a big low G, but he had great trouble getting a good sound out of the G. So Simon borrowed the G whistle and learned it in a fairly short time. It had six holes and played in two keys. The trick was to cover the bottom hole securely. The dark man showed him how to pour boiling water down it to keep it clear of spit. The man had trouble with it because his right-hand fingers had been injured and he couldn’t reach all the holes, even in a piper’s grip.

  “Caught it in a sheave block,” he said. “At one time I was conscripted into the ironclad Yankee navy in New Orleans.” But he could be burning hell on the smaller D whistle and once in a while in the evening as the cookfire died down he would sing in a rich bass voice. These fleeting charms of earth, farewell, your springs of joy are dry . . . while Simon sat with his arms around his knees and his shirt open to the evening breeze, his fine reddish hair sticking up like twigs, following the complex phrasing of that old song with his mind in a state of timelessness. He saw thin stars rise out of the unseen ocean, out of the distant east, and a world changed, a world burnt down with themselves held harmless from it all. If they were lucky, if they could continue to be lucky. I’m a long time traveling here below to lay this body down . . .

  At drill they played the usual marches: “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” and “Rose of Alabama.” They guarded the trains of cotton bales that came in one wagon after another, crossing over to Mexico to be sold. Simon heard talk that the officers pocketed a good deal of the cotton money. Men gambled, told stories, walked out into the shallows of the river in their drawers or naked to drench themselves. They squashed their shirts and underwear in the thick water, laughing and throwing water at one another, and traded for chinguirito, a kind of blistering cane rum, with people from the Mexican side. The sergeant told them that the French were on the other side of the river. Why the French were there the sergeant didn’t know. Maybe they were buying the cotton. It was a strange gathering of immobile armies at the end of a world of desert and ocean and a slow brown river.

  Simon worried about his hearing; someday this goddamned war and all its insanity would end and he would have to make a living with his music. He was likely to lose part of his hearing, the high tones at any rate, with this perpetual target practice. Jeff Davis had already been captured and was in jail, so what was the army’s reasoning on this matter? Lee had cashed it in a month ago at Appomattox. Lincoln was dead at the hands of a demented actor. Why were they all still here?

  “Nobody tells us lowlifes,” said the bugler.

  “Of course not,” said Damon. “They have forgotten about us. Let us not remind them.” They sat sweating in the shade of the cane-and-canvas tent. The mindless talk, the endless talk, wore on Simon’s nerve ends. He felt like his brain was being sandpapered.

  “Who has got wax?” Simon got to his feet. “Where can I get an apple?”

  “Oh, oh, an apple!” cried the bugler. “And a chess pie and a diamond stickpin!” He sat and sawed off the legs of his drawers with a penknife so they would be cooler.

  “Do you not know,” said Damon, “that people in hell want ice water?”

  “I wasn’t aware.”

  Simon stood up and stepped out into the blazing white-hot heat. He sauntered off to the cook’s wagon. How he managed to come back with a greasy candle end and a withered apple he never said. He broke off bits of candle for wax balls for his ears, cut up the apple, and shared out all but two slices, which he wrapped in bits of muslin and laid inside his fiddle case, then snapped it carefully shut. The apple slices would give a bit of humidity to the inside of the case and keep the delicate woods of his fiddle from drying out and cracking.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said the bugler. “That
’s clever.”

  “Stop swearing. You’re too young to swear,” said Damon in an exhausted voice.

  “Be damned if I am you son of a bitch,” said the bugler. “I been swearing since I was six months old.”

  Simon had to save the candle wax for firing practice and so from time to time he wondered if he would go insane. He loved solitude; it was as necessary to him as music and water. He walked away from camp in the evenings when he could to spend an hour or two playing, working through the complexities of slip jigs in 9/8 time. If he played there at the regimental band tent, people came around to listen and sometimes applaud, and often they cried out for their favorite tunes. They wanted “Lorena” or some sea shanty, as if his entire duty in life was to entertain them.

  So he went out alone among the saw palmetto and the carrizo cane in his shirt and vest, next to the river, where he practiced double-stopping and hokum bowing two-to-two and two-to-one, over and over. A mindless drone for anyone who came to listen. He stood straight and poised as a candle flame in a vast windless room of imagined silence. His reddish hair flew in the Gulf wind; on his face was a look of blank intensity. Every song had a secret inside. When he was away from shouting drunks and bartenders and sergeants and armies, he could think his way into the secret, note by note. “The Lost Child,” “Wayfaring Stranger.” He squinted in the low evening light at the few musical scores he possessed. He was teaching himself to read music. He played the scale on the G whistle and then some simple tunes. After an hour or so he replaced the Markneukirche in the plush lining of its case, wiped off the rosin dust, and flicked the hasps, listening for the solid click that told him his fiddle was safe inside its hard-shell case.

  He knew that he did not play music so much as walk into it, as if into a palace of great riches, with rooms opening into other rooms, which opened into still other rooms, and in these rooms were courtyards and fountains with passageways to yet more mysterious spaces of melody, peculiar intervals, unheard notes.

  It was there at the Confederate encampment at the ranch called Los Palmitos that Simon considered his life and how he would survive in the world to come. After the surrender, after the surrender, that time and change arriving any moment. If he were not able to play for a living, he would become restless and fall into contentiousness, ill humor; he would be sharp and impatient and inside a deep nameless distress. He sat alone and ate hoarded jerky meat, so thin it crackled. He had bought it from one of the Mexican women who crossed over holding up her skirts to sell it to him. Pretty wet brown legs. The river was very low.

  His first problem was to find a girl who would fall in love with him despite his diminutive stature and his present homelessness. The right girl. He had not been a celibate; nobody growing up in the river-port town of Paducah, Kentucky, on the Ohio or playing saloons in Texas could lay claim to a life of sinless perfection, so perhaps he had no right to make demands, but the girls he had met and courted, briefly, had no comprehension of 9/8 time. They regarded him as a poor choice given his occupation as a traveling musician—always disreputable—and his stubborn, relentless dedication to his fiddle.

  Never mind. After he found her, then there had to be land for sale somewhere and this would be his base and his bastion. It would be in a valley with running water and pecan groves and a surrounding of green hills. He would build her a fireplace with a waist-high hearth so she did not have to be bending over all the time at the cooking. And so he constructed an imaginary place of private loyalties and slow impeccable evenings into which he would send reels and hornpipes, furiously played. They would be for each other as much as the world was not. When life was very calm and ordered, only then could he get on with his music. Some of those invisible rooms were ones of anarchy and confusion and a person needed a quiet life to approach them.

  This was not an idle fantasy. Whatever Simon determined on, he would not quit until he had it or was dead or incapacitated. Like the fiddle, for instance. It was a very good fiddle and it had cost him years of meticulous saving. People often badly misjudged him. He was, after all, only five foot five and 120 pounds and although he was twenty-three, he looked as if he had barely gotten past his fifteenth birthday. He tried to keep a firm grip on his temper by answering people quietly, to pause before replying. All those sorts of sayings that girls sewed into samplers. Lessons of life.

  So the hot days of the beginning of May dragged on. The dark man, Damon, was given to quoting Edgar Allan Poe in a deep terrible voice—Resignedly beneath the sky the melancholy waters lie—and the bugler talked endlessly about his relatives in Louisiana, who all apparently did little of interest except lose their tools, get struck by lightning, and develop chronic and inscrutable diseases whose symptoms the bugler described in appalling detail.

  Simon sat on his blankets in the choking dead shade of the tent and put his head in his hands, thinking, Shut up, shut up, shut up. He waited in steadfast silence for the platoon cook to start hammering at a suspended tire rim to call them to their supper, their mess plates held out like beggars for their increasingly meager fare.

  Chapter Two

  On the morning of May 12, 1865, when a storm arrived in banks of hard blue clouds straight out of the Gulf, Federal troops decided to row across from Brazos Island and attack them. Nobody knew why. It didn’t matter why. Simon was awakened by ear-splitting thunder and lightning, a crashing rattle of rain on the canvas. He sat up in his blankets and called out, “Who moved my hat? Who?”

  Somebody had moved his good felt Kentucky hat from his rucksack to his boots. Rain pelted the cane walls of the tent, drummed on the roof. The bugler was playing “Alarm” for troops to fall out under arms, when a ball came through the canvas with a ripping whine. After several frozen seconds, they grabbed their ammunition boxes and their smoothbores and bolted out of the tent.

  Two hundred and fifty Federal troops attacked across the sloppy open ground running, splashing, firing. They had come up in the night. Wind and rain tore through the encampment. The pickets had been driven in and one of them yelled, “My God they’re all niggers!” The man next to Simon was hit and went down. Somebody else grabbed him and hauled him to his feet and tried to get him to run, but then the rescuing man was hit and went down as well. The drummer hammered out “Retreat” as best he could on a wet skin.

  Simon turned back at a run to get his fiddle. It was all he had against a chaotic world and the mindlessness of a losing war, against corruption, thievery, cowardice, incompetence, cactus, gunsmoke, and hominy.

  An officer in Confederate butternut rode up and aimed his revolver at Simon. Rain gushed in streams from his hat brim as he stared down from his dancing, nervous horse.

  “Where the hell are you going, Private?”

  “My fiddle!” Simon shouted. He gripped his wet musket barrel and clenched his eyes against the rain. There was gunfire coming from everywhere. A group of men had taken shelter behind a crate of rifle balls.

  “Get back to your unit or I will shoot you!”

  Simon turned back and ran with the others; a scattered, shameful retreat past their own stores and wagons and horses, into the flat wastes of the Rio Grande plain in which they were all slashed by palmettos and ocotillo. He turned once with two other men and knelt in the drenched sand, loaded, rammed, and fired, then got up and ran again. He was knocked down by a loose horse, which caused him to lose the Springfield. Damon pulled him up and thrust his revolver grip-first at Simon as if it had become a liability, as if he had stolen it and wanted to be rid of it, as if it were red-hot.

  “Take it.” He was hunched up against the rain. “I’m a terrible shot. You look like you’re prepared to kill people.”

  “No.” Simon shoved it away. “You kill people.”

  “I mean it, take the damn thing!”

  So he took it.

  That night they lay up in a draw. The storm rumbled on like a celestial caravan loaded with rain, to the west, upriver, and then on to parts unknown. Stars came out intermitten
tly between the low, separating clouds. Simon heard a corporal crawling past them, whispering, Dawn attack, dawn attack and saw the watchful, anxious faces around him and men feeling in their pockets for pieces of cornbread or chew or lead balls, groping with wet hands. There were three shots left in the revolver and Simon didn’t know where he was supposed to get more ammunition. He turned it over in his hand; it was a big heavy object. He rolled up an empty chamber under the hammer and lay down in the wet dirt, with the revolver clutched under his coat. It stopped raining. Simon lay curled up with his head on his arm, waiting for sleep, and suffered through a peculiar feeling, a kind of interior weeping, because he knew his fiddle was gone—broken or stolen.

  At dawn Simon woke up confused, in the orient light of a desert newly washed with rain in which hid men who wanted to kill him. He was dirty and wet. His hands were black with gunpowder residue. Men stirred, made small noises. Damon crawled toward him and tossed him a leather satchel. It had the powder measure and patches and balls in it. Shortly afterward they followed shouted orders to charge and retake their camp, and as he ran he heard the tearing crackle of musket fire. Within seconds black-powder smoke hung over their heads in sliding layers. Simon sprinted straight for the regimental band tent. The cane walls and canvas roof had collapsed and all around it their blankets were scattered like tattered corpses, bundles of nubby wool all sodden. The attacking Federals had stolen whatever was to hand.

  Simon cocked the hammer repeatedly until he had a load up, thumbed on a cap, got a running Federal in his sights. With a vast, furious, vengeful joy he pulled the trigger and saw the man go down and hit and roll like a rag doll. And damn you stay down, he thought. He found that they were once again in possession of their camp. Confederates ran bent over, ducking rifle fire, looking for their possessions. Simon and his tent mates pulled at the wet canvas of their shelter and there he found his rucksack with his savings inside in a pool of water, and others cried out in joy at finding some few of their possessions.