Simon the Fiddler

by Paulette Jiles

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.

Music is clean, clear, its rules are forever, another country for the mind to go to, and so this search for employment among the drinking places of Galveston did not bother him. To Simon, the world of musical structures was far more real than the shoddy saloons in which he had to play. Nothing could match it, nothing in this day-to-day world could ever come up to it. It existed outside him. It was better than he was. He was always on foot in that world, an explorer in busted shoes.

They were living in a world of returned soldiers who had fought, had seen death and destruction, suffered hunger and want, and were not afraid of Satan himself. Fights could start up with amazing speed.

She must take great care. Trust in God, her mother said, but never dance in a small boat.

The yellow fever was an invisible being restlessly searching up and down the coast. It wanted to live on its own but everybody it inhabited died, and so it kept on searching.

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.

The alligator had no neck and its front feet were star-shaped and scaled. It looked like an afterthought God had come up with on the eighth day when all He had to hand was black rock and pure evil.

Become wise, young man, and cynical, and life will be far more understandable.”