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.