Simon the Fiddler

by Paulette Jiles

He played throughout Central and East Texas in saloons and pleasure palaces, for weddings and funerals. Simon had a hair-trigger temper and he knew it, and all his life it had been impressed upon him to contain himself because he could end up in jail with his fiddle confiscated or stolen. The last thing he ought to do was get into a brawl with the conscription men. So he lived in the bright strains of mountain music and the reflective, running pools of the Irish light airs that brought peace to his mind and to his audiences; peace soon forgotten, always returned to.

He had a bottomless supply of waltzes, jigs, reels, hornpipes, and slow airs. Some of the slow airs could bring men and women to a standstill, their eyes brimming with tears for a remembered love or a certain long-lost valley at twilight or another country without war, taken by emotions of loss and exile for which they had no words.

A young man full of dreams, and creative ways to enact them. Simon diligently kept dozens upon dozens of tunes in his head. He was prepared to meet the moment of opportunity and truly play to the crowd.

At the encampment outside of town on the Guadalupe River he gave a false name, Simon Walters. This was so that he would be at the end of any list or muster roll and would therefore have time to think of what to do if some group he was in was called up for some task, such as fighting or kitchen duty.

Cunning and resourceful!

At the encampment outside of town on the Guadalupe River he gave a false name, Simon Walters. This was so that he would be at the end of any list or muster roll and would therefore have time to think of what to do if some group he was in was called up for some task, such as fighting or kitchen duty.

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?

James McPherson is a Civil War scholar. Among his best works is FOR CAUSE AND COMRADES: Why Men Fought in the Civil War.

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.

The "interior weeping" of losing not just your livelihood, but your beloved form of entertainment and consolation.

She lifted her head to the musicians, to Simon as his bow flashed and leaped in the long javelins of light that came through the overhead palm-leaf thatching. She watched him play with that same expression of a deep listening. He brought the tune to its end. There was some applause but after all they were supposed to be background music, this was not a concert. Nevertheless, Simon laid his bow alongside his leg, held his fiddle across his body at the correct angle, and bowed to her. To her, her alone, the black-haired girl with the blue sea-cloud eyes down on the Gulf of Mexico at the end of a terrible war.

To find a true soul mate. A true love...

When they came to the end, men began to stand up and shake hands in preparation for leaving. The Confederate and Union officers toasted one another and made edged jokes that could get lethal if carried too far.

Men. 😒

He had found his girl, the war was over, he had not gotten killed, and now he was before the great gulf itself. He felt cautiously happy; he felt that life was going to be all right. It was all going to work out for him. Maybe.

Jiles has invested us into Simon's character, and we feel his suspense. We all felt this suspense for ourselves while young and at the genesis of exploring our potential.

They were all too young to die and always would be.

Profound statement on lives lost, physically or psychologically, through war.

He peered out the door. “They say it can do ten, fifteen miles an hour!” Doroteo stood by the open freight-car door and held on to its edge to lean out. “We’re going over the water!” The miracle of speed and effortless movement stunned them into silence. Simon had no words for it other than it was somewhat like the steamboats on the Ohio, but now they had gained the land and were trundling along to Houston, fifty miles away, in a kind of land-boat.

Doroteo is as amazed at the lightning speed of this railway car as I was in the 90s when the CD replaed the cassette tape!

Damon watched amazed as the man touched his hat and stood aside, but then this was the way of it when somebody carried a musical instrument, who knows why but they treat you like a woman carrying a baby. That plus a threatening glare would clear the way. Soldiers and others watched them pass with interested looks because they carried instruments and there is not a human being on earth who does not have a favorite song, lacking only somebody to play it.

Then they heard shouting and murmuring ahead, the sound of a crowd. They came around a corner and there saw a large gathering of black people in front of a building. A sign on the building said FREEDMAN’S BUREAU. “What is that?” Simon stopped. He smelled danger. He was looking at chaos. A great crowd filled the street and the sound it made was comprised of longing and bitterness and confusion. A white man shoved his way among the crowd handing out tickets of some kind. A black woman suddenly jumped up into a wagon bed and began calling out for everyone to hand the tickets to her, and when they did she read from them, called to one person and then another, and handed the tickets out a second time. She was taking charge. She shouted for silence.

Simon hated cities. He hated towns. As they trudged through the humid cold streets of Houston he thought of the property near the Red River and it gave him comfort. It was as if he already owned it and this incident was only a temporary setback. There would be a spring of clear water and around it great pecan trees, deer would bed down in the post-oak mottes at night. Wild horses would tread the smoking earth in dimly seen caravans, the breath of the great brown buffalo drifting white in the winter air.

Trauma coping mechanism.

After a moment in which they could hear the singing whisper of the night wind at the window he said, “Let down your hair.” By this time the drug had left him vague and nearly wordless. She unpinned her hair and it came down in a beautiful tumble, thick and glossy. It was like rain. His eyes slid shut. At some time she fell asleep tucked in beside him. The lamp oil burned low. He awoke in the small hours before dawn and he lay awake and at first contented with the warmth of her body against him but then all the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe came back to him without any effort on his part, the dark-haired women who died or were spirited off or were themselves spirits. To make this go away he put his left hand on her head, felt the silky mass of hair beneath his splinted fingers. She slept and dreamed. He saw all the hard road before them unrolling like a scroll and their names there, for better or for worse, written in the Book of Life.