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 intermittently 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.
“Stop mucking around in that, you sons of bitches!” a sergeant yelled at them. Simon dodged a galloping team of artillery horses and sought shelter from further conflict at an abandoned provisions wagon. He sat under the tail of it and considered the revolver—how much it was worth, where he could sell it, and how he could start in again on the long road to contriving and saving for another fiddle. Then a deep discouragement came over him and it was a heavy feeling like he had rarely experienced in his life.
The next day, Colonel Santos Benavides and his Tejano Confederate troops arrived as reinforcements. At ten o’clock Simon heard ear-splitting thunder very close by and threw himself flat on the ground. It was Colonel Rip Ford with French artillery from across the river. Colonel Ford had gone over and borrowed the Frenchmen’s cannon. In a screaming tide of men and a thick screening of powder smoke they drove the Federals back to their island. Colonel Ford rode into the surf and sabered a Yankee struggling for a boat so that his head half came off and the next wave rose up marbled with his heart’s blood. Then Giddings’s regiment stood on the shore of Texas and danced and waved their regimental flag, making rude gestures at the Yankees fleeing across the water.
And then they surrendered.
The day they surrendered was perfectly clear and it had turned hot. Simon and the other men of Giddings’s regiment were mustered to march to Fort Brown several miles farther west up the river. This had been the Confederate fort, this was where they would formally surrender. Damon handed Simon his big G whistle, bent over, and blew the spit from his D. The musicians were put behind the colors, dressed right, and started out in a rolling step. With the two pennywhistles and the drummer and bugler doing their best, they played “The Braes of Killiecrankie,” that terrible lament of an old Scots battle where the clans had fought against one another and left bodies strewn in pieces all over a rocky battlefield. He and Damon had to fake the low notes but Simon heard many of the men behind him singing the words; they knew it, they had always known it would come to this.