Simon the Fiddler

by Paulette Jiles

It was a strange gathering of immobile armies at the end of a world of desert and ocean and a slow brown river.

Some of those invisible rooms were ones of anarchy and confusion and a person needed a quiet life to approach them.

and how he could start in again on the long road to contriving and saving for another fiddle. Then a deep discouragement came over him and it was a heavy feeling like he had rarely experienced in his life.

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

in an appeal to that rare jewel-like thing called reason.

so they once again became servants of music and not of the state.

thought-picture of her walking beside him in this air laundered bright with salt wind, new strings in his fiddle case, Colonel Webb’s foul designs foiled, and

And himself yet young and inexperienced in many ways. But that’s why God made people young at first, to get the doing done.

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.

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

On the strength of his imagined home and an imagined wife. Of lying down in bed with her every night and waking up in the morning with her beside him. The