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.”
“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 . . .