If you had been where I have been
ye would not be so cantie-o,
if you had seen what I have seen
in the braes of Killiecrankie-o.
Simon was drained when they got to Fort Brown. It took a lot of wind to keep playing that big G and he hadn’t eaten for some time—he couldn’t remember when exactly. Outside the earth walls of the fort, Colonel Giddings and Colonel Benavides turned in their muster rolls and called for the men to unload and stack arms. Somewhere along the way General Kirby Smith had taken the Confederate and Texas colors and crossed over into Mexico and it was said he and his men kept on riding toward Veracruz.
Simon wandered winded and gasping until they were told to form up. He did not have a long gun to stack in the arms pyramids, as did everyone else, but he stood to attention in his shabby trousers and suspenders and butternut forage cap to watch. The Confederates from Giddings’s unit and Benavides’s infantry pulled themselves once again into a military stance as the sergeants screamed out “Prepare SLINGS!” and then “Stack ARMS!” In groups of four the men stacked arms to make pyramids of four long guns each while the Union soldiers stood at attention to watch, somewhat abashed, as they knew they had not won against these surrendering men.
Simon stood unmoving in the rear rank. People noticed movement. He was determined not to be noticed. He had disassembled the big revolver and hidden it in his rucksack. He was thinking that if they caught him with it, what the hell, life could not get much worse than it was at present.
Then Simon saw a Yankee soldier standing around with a fiddle case under his arm and Simon’s hat perched on top of his head because Simon wore a six and three quarters hat size, which was small, and the soldier had a big round head like a pumpkin. Both hope and rage came to him in the same instant. The sun was blinding there on the flat stretch of land before the fort where palm trees lifted their arms restlessly and old smoothed river rocks gleamed. Simon threw off his rucksack and left the ranks at a flat-out run straight for the soldier.
“Get your filthy hands off my fiddle, you son of a bitch!”
The soldier turned to see Simon running at him and threw out a hand. “What? What?”
Simon picked up a fist-sized rock, stood back on his right leg, wound up, and threw. It struck the soldier on the bridge of his nose with the force of solid shot. The hat flew off and the big man sat down in the dirt. Blood burst out of his nose in a spewing gush. Then, since the soldier presented such an easy target, Simon kicked him in the head with the heel of his boot. The man fell flat, making vague movements with one hand. Simon took up his hat and his fiddle case and felt whole again. Then he stood and waited for whatever would happen next.
What happened next was a Federal provost marshal and two privates took him in an armlock. They had him bent over and stumbling toward the garrison punishment cells.
It was a dignified and amiable surrender as far as the officers were concerned. They were all to have a dinner together at the Fort Brown officers’ mess and for a formal dinner, musicians are needed. Simon spent two hours in the punishment cell; a long two hours. He sat with his hands loose between his knees in a dim light and the sweat seemed to jell on his body. He tried to think where it would be, how he could get it back, how long he was going to be left in this hole without food or water. The piss bucket buzzed with flies.
He heard steps and the clank of keys coming down the corridor. He lifted his head but remained expressionless, watching the soldiers’ shadows preceding them.
“Well, fiddler.”
A private turned the key in the lock and its sharp cry pierced the air.
“That’s me.”
“You’re wanted.”
“Good to hear.” Simon stayed where he was. “For what?”
The soldier pulled the cell door open. “Get your ass out of there and you’ll find out.”
He was escorted to the food storage room next to the kitchen, where five others sat with various instruments. They shoved him in the door. After a moment a sergeant arrived and threw down Simon’s fiddle case, his hat, and his rucksack. Simon took up the case without a word and instantly sat down, opened it, and in an interior tidal wave of relief that was beyond his ability to describe saw that the Markneukirche was intact, that his extra strings and his tuning fork were there, his rosin, his scores with his scribbled notes all over the staves, his bow in one piece. There were the slices of shriveled apple. He sat for a moment with his head in his hands. Thank you, God, he thought. Then he looked up.
They were turning up dippers of water, eyeing one another. They sat on barrels of flour, big tins of meat. A little Union drummer poured a dipper over his head and sat with eyes closed in relief as the water ran down inside his blue collar. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old. His thatch of dirty yellow hair stuck up in sweaty points.
They had to get quiet. A quiet inside themselves. They had to make up a band. It was the only reason they had let Simon out of that shithole and had given him his fiddle back. They had to think music. The heat was that of burning suns, lakes of hellfire. Simon knew somebody had to take charge. He figured that person was himself. He took the dipper from the child drummer, poured water over his own head, and said, “Listen, you all.” He hitched his suspenders higher on his shoulders. “Listen. We’ve got to get paid for this. We’ve surrendered, well, the Confederates have, so the war’s over and we’re civilians now and they’ve got to damn well pay us.”
The others stared at him. They were thinking. Simon dried his face on his dirty checkered shirt sleeve, lifted the open fiddle case and blew out all the sand from the plush lining. He turned the screw on the bow to tighten the horsehair. He waited. From outside came the noise of somebody cranking a windlass to bring up another bucket of taupe-colored water from the Fort Brown well.
The musicians were both Yankee and Confederate. They were all filthy. They had recently been trying to kill one another. They smelled of gunpowder and were sweating like animals in the ninety-seven-degree May heat, while outside palm trees made their endless whistling rustle in a Gulf wind. They sat and ate of the food brought to them. Simon took out his knife to spear up as much bread and bacon as he could from the metal platter. They wiped their hands on the hemp sacks of beans. A guitar player with a double-aught guitar from Benavides’s Tejanos was there, and a black Federal color sergeant with a five-string banjo, a man in a Zouave uniform who appeared suspiciously French and also had a guitar, the little Yankee drummer who had brought his bones and a bodhran, Damon with his Irish whistles. Damon wore a striped shirt and his top hat. You could tell he and Simon and the Tejano were Confederates; few of them had intact uniforms anymore. But even in his torn trousers Damon sat slim and tall with an air of undefeatable gentility, twirling the C whistle in one hand.
“How do you figure on doing that?” he said.
“We got to clean up,” said Simon. “Stands to reason.” He threw out both hands, palms up, in an appeal to that rare jewel-like thing called reason. “We got to get out of these uniforms or at least into some white shirts. We got to look like civilians.”
Another long considering silence.
“Might,” said the banjo man. He was still wearing his blue sergeant’s uniform coat, buttoned up even in the heat. He began to turn the pegs on the head of the banjo. “You got a tuning fork? Pitch pipe?”