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Wisdom comes to us at odd times and this was one of them. They let him collect his money, his coat,
He put his heart into it; many knew the melody but few knew the words. It was long, slow, and full of yearning, it lifted all the faces to him and tilted them over into the stream of magic, some long-ago time when the wars had not yet begun, before the first shot and before the first lie and the first burning. When all was summer again and the cattle were safe in a green field.
He was used to returning soldiers, it seemed. Ragged men set loose from a defeated army, trying to find their way back into human life, its fabric, its customs, the long-forgotten uses of civilization.
“You will do well here if you aspire to more refined music. I tell you, Texas will never be developed except on the coasts. Houston, Galveston, Indianola. It will never be anything inland. There’s no semblance of civilization there. No place to play your music. Lacking in refinement and rainfall, therefore neither crops nor symphonies, no, not ever. Perhaps crude approximations; Indian corn and back-country fiddling but no more, no, not ever.”
The barber cut hair like he was harvesting hay;
She knew that in the horse’s big muscular soul there were inharmonious clashing notes of broken music.
Colonel Webb has gone on ahead to San Antonio, to rent a house. May a cat eat him and may the devil eat the cat.
It was different then. The air was different and the long remote crying of the steamboat whistles as they came down from the Monongahela and Pittsburgh seemed to tell a story of a great nation and a great people with adventure and the look of distance in their eyes, and now it was somehow soiled with the stench of the dead. MacFarland was dead. Lincoln was dead. Neighbors had shot one another dead. It was not the same country.
The night of the city fell in liquid sequential curtains, shadow after shadow, from the slow drowsy army horses in their paddocks on Government Hill who stood in silence under the alders there, and then over the ruins of the Alamo and then the river itself cast in deep shadow where a few canoas with a lamp at the prow made their way home. St. Mary’s answered San Fernando as the old bells sang out over the plazas.
