Simon the Fiddler

by Paulette Jiles

That was in October of 1864 and the atmosphere outside was so hot it seemed the air was afire.

But they finally got him in March of 1865

The civil war ended 9 April 1865.

He knew that he did not play music so much as walk into it, as if into a palace of great riches, with rooms opening into other rooms, which opened into still other rooms, and in these rooms were courtyards and fountains with passageways to yet more mysterious spaces of melody, peculiar intervals, unheard notes.

When life was very calm and ordered, only then could he get on with his music. Some of those invisible rooms were ones of anarchy and confusion and a person needed a quiet life to approach them.

Good luck with that

Then Indianola fell astern and was extinguished by the night.

He had resolved to keep his temper in hand, because as his old man had told him over and over again, great trials and tribulations awaited him if he did not.

WITH THE ONSET OF night, the moon rose out of the Gulf as if spying covertly on the world of ocean.

House windows stared back at them with lantern eyes from across the street.

Her spirits are effervescent now they are away from the colonel; joy comes back to her and unwraps itself gift by gift.

She hears the girl behind, complaining as usual, and it makes her nerves light up like hot wires. Patience, the child is only fourteen and this is an unhappy family. Patience. “Josephina, my dear, give me your bonnet and I will fix it,” says Doris Dillon. I am to pray for a quiet heart at times like this, but I never remember to remember.

her mouth dry as a threshing floor

This simile is perfection

Trust in God, her mother said, but never dance in a small boat.

his good Pennsylvania rifle, fourteen pounds and forty-four inches in the barrel.

seemed to tell a story of a great nation and a great people with adventure and the look of distance in their eyes,

Maybe laughter would come back, but it was a dark sun that had come over the country and a plague of crows. But here in his hands was a lifting of the heart when he came upon this delicate handwriting and the hope of making her love him despite his poverty and an unmarried mother and a father disappeared into Louisiana, despite it all.

how beautifully Simon's hope is displayed with such intensity the reader feels it as well

“And Texas land titles are a dog’s breakfast. Because first it was under Spain. To register a land title you had to travel all the way to Mexico City. So hardly anybody did. Then it was under Mexico. Same deal. Nobody had a secure title to land or buildings. Then it was the Republic of Texas, and their files are moldering yet in the dankest corners of the capitol in Austin. The State of Texas added a whole new pile. Then the Confederacy, which is now in its death throes and didn’t do squat about land titles anyway, and soon we will be under some other government, who knows what, and so there you are.”

He was not about to hand a penny over to this man. He had been born into a world of horse traders and was well acquainted with deception and the need for caution at every step when it came to buying and selling.

The gulls flew over crying to one another like the lonesome thieves of the air that they were

and the evening train from Houston came over the bridge under a thin moon with steam billowing from between its great driver wheels.

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

The country was in chaos, there were no rules, law was a matter of speculation, nobody knew how to buy land or put savings in a bank since there were so few banks, how to get a loan, register a title to land, or legalize a marriage, everybody was dubious about the new federal paper money, there was little mail service, and nobody seemed to know where the roads led.

1866 rolled in like a freight train full of bad luck and poverty.

watched a boat come down the bayou with a pair of oars clawing at its surface.

It was like a gift dropped into his hand by a stranger. He followed the eccentric journey of the melody, its difficult changes, the flats and sharps, how the singer returned to the beginning note, and Simon knew he would have never found his way back there.

I am sending this by a soldier through Mercedes, who works for the Webbs and is a friend to me. Mercedes Bethancourt took it to a freighter who delivered your last, and the freighter will give it to a soldier so there is no chance of the colonel finding out.

Read over your contract, Miss Dillon, if you would, and you might even take it to somebody with knowledge of the law although for now with Texas under occupation and the old state constitution suspended, I have heard, we don’t know what contracts can be honored, it is all confusion.

Benito Juárez’s people,

the water of the bayou moving past, its surface hammered with firelit rain.

as slate-colored clouds with spilling blue fronts rolled toward them out of the Gulf.

You could work like a mule and all you had could be destroyed, wrecked in a night of flames and burning horses.

He cried himself to sleep and woke up and began crying again and still the old man rocked him back and forth, back and forth, all night long and into a motherless dawn.

wide sky with cirrus like horses’ manes.