“Tuning fork,” said Simon absently. “Officers have got to have some white shirts, don’t they?” He got out his tuning fork and struck it on the door frame and said, “It’s an A.” As he held it humming in the hot air they all began tuning up, and to help out, Damon blew A on his D whistle. The air vibrated with incipient, unformed musical structures and two kitchen helpers and the cook bent around the edge of the kitchen door to stare curiously. Simon said, “Get out, you,” and they did.
The banjo man said, “I know the dog robbers. I bet they can get some.” He tapped the air with his forefinger, counting. “Six. We need six.”
“Eh?” The Zouave ran his thumbnail over a chord, then another. “Dog robbaire?”
“Valets,” the banjo man said. “We call them dog robbers. All right. You all figure out what we’re playing and tune up. I’ll go see what I can do. I’m tuned.” He paused at the door. To the Zouave he said, “You’re not with them or us either, are you?”
“Mais non.” The Zouave waved his forefinger in the air. “I come from other side the river with that French armee there. I come across very quietly to see the surrender and I stay for the fete.” He struck out a series of chords. “Is it well?”
“Yes. Behave yourself.” The black color sergeant ducked out of the storage room.
“What about coats?” Damon said. “Playing in shirtsleeves, well, might as well be in our drawers.”
“Can’t be helped,” said Simon.
They scrubbed their faces and hair at the well in the kitchen yard with lumps of gray lye soap, scraped their nails with pocketknives. They went back into the storage room, whose palm-leaf thatching was overrun with rats and various sorts of insect life, and shaved, staring into the bottom of a polished tin plate. They beat the sand out of the knees of their pants. The shirts arrived. A corporal strode into the storage room, threw the shirts down on a stack of molasses kegs, looked around in a theatrical manner, and said, “You get them back to me!”
He turned on his heel to disappear into the dust and noise of the soldiers, wagons, and horses of two armies all sorting themselves out. They could hear the shouts of sergeants, a man repeatedly bellowing for tent stakes. They jettisoned their uniforms, threw their forage caps and shell jackets and uniform frock coats into a corner, blue and gray and butternut all in a heap.
Simon grabbed the whitest shirt before anybody else could get to it and buttoned up the high collar until it appeared his neck was stuck in a cast. His head thrust out in a ragged red-brown mop of hair. The shirt had an immense tail to it. Simon jammed what seemed to be yards and yards of white linen into his britches. The others struggled into whatever seemed to fit and the Zouave was left with one that had ties at the neck and fit him like a cotton pick sack. They all looked at one another.
“Bien,” said the Tejano. “Somos elegantes. Adorables. And so I think the fiddler leads us.”
“Yes, take the lead, fiddler,” the color sergeant said this in a voice of indisputable authority.
“All right. Can y’all do anything besides marches?” said Simon.
“Like what?” The boy with the bodhran rattled his tipper across the skin.
“Reels, hornpipes. I say we start hard and fast and then when they’re all drunk and declaring eternal friendship, get into ‘Lorena’ and ‘Home Sweet Home’ and ‘Hard Times.’ I want to see them crying into their rum. Anybody know ‘Nightingale Waltz’?”
“Of course,” said Damon. “For hard and fast, what? ‘The Hog-Eye Man,’ ‘Cumberland Gap,’ ‘Blarney Pilgrim,’ ‘Little Liza Jane.’” He blew down the whistle. “I hope my suggestions are not dismissed out of hand. Also ‘Mississippi Sawyer.’”
Simon said, “‘Whiskey Before Breakfast’?”
Confusion; silence.
“Some people call it ‘The Fiddler’s Dram.’”
They shook their heads.
“‘Rye Whiskey’?” Everybody nodded. “All right, then. And listen, everybody gets a turn. Y’all know ‘Eighth of January’? Let the sergeant take the break.”
Damon said, “Of course. Now, on ‘Rye Whiskey’ let us do a verse a capella. The ‘if a tree don’t fall on me’ verse. I can do the bass on that.”
“Me lead tenor,” said the banjo player.
“Yes, a verse a capella,” said Simon absentmindedly. He rosined his bow with long loving strokes as the sunlight poured through the open door and lit his hair afire. He had drops on his eyelashes and wiped them away on his shoulder. “Me high tenor. I can get above the melody if we’re in G.”
“I do the hum,” said the Zouave. “I do humming effets.”
“Some officer’s wives are coming,” said the bone-and-bodhran boy, the Yankee drummer. He tipped his head from one side to the other as he ran through triple clicks with the bones. “From over on the island. Right at first to join them in prayer and cast a glow of femininity and grace on the gathering. Then the women go. Then you can play the dirty ones.”
Thus they solidified as a group as musicians do, or perhaps their minds and thoughts precipitated out of the military suspension in which they had been held and so they once again became servants of music and not of the state.
Chapter Three
She was a slight person with black hair and dark blue eyes who gazed around herself with a polite and cautious smile. She walked in behind the wife of a Union colonel. She was holding a young girl by the hand. The master of ceremonies was the regimental chaplain who, along with the ladies, would also disappear before they got into the off-color ones like “The Hog-Eye Man” if he knew what was good for his immortal soul.
Simon sat with a solemn, respectful expression while he silently ran over key changes in his mind. But then he saw her.
He instantly abandoned all thoughts of key changes. She filled his entire vision with her pale round face and a little gesture of putting her finger to her lips as she leaned to listen to a major beside her. Simon did not hear the chaplain’s courteous words about reconciliation and returning to homes and hearths now that this terrible and fratricidal war was finally over, how Colonel Webb (a lift of the hand toward the Union colonel) had brought the war to a close single-handedly with this victory amid the sands and bitter storms of the Rio Grande, sonorous statements about the dinner being honored by the appearance of Colonel Webb’s gracious wife and little daughter, a sign of trust, a sign of civilized customs, behold this innocent child, Josephina, who will grow up in a finer and better world where all men can now behave as brothers. The girl with the black hair was not introduced, and so Simon thought she might be a governess or tutor. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
She wore a dress of black and brown vertical stripes with a perfectly white collar and a wide black belt. She looked intently at the chaplain as he spoke, and then into Colonel Webb’s face as he replied. An expression of deep attention, an intelligent face, hair so black it carried blue lights in the late sunlight that poured in through the open windows of the adobe mess hall. Since it was an evening event she wore no hat, and Simon could see the intricate braids and burnished ebony of her hair. He watched as she moved, turned to the child, bent down and spoke to her, smiled at the colonel’s wife, looked up overhead in sudden alarm as a rat thrashed its way through the roof thatching. He watched every move, spellbound. Elegant, contained little body under all that vertical striping.