Simon the Fiddler

by Paulette Jiles

Writhing and bending when playing fiddle was distracting, it was undignified. With his hat low over his eyes and his bow flashing in lantern light he brought up melodies clean and clear from some inexhaustible source.

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?

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.

“Listen, you all.” He hitched his suspenders higher on his shoulders. “Listen. We’ve got to get paid for this. We’ve surrendered, well, the Confederates have, so the war’s over and we’re civilians now and they’ve got to damn well pay us.”

Thus they solidified as a group as musicians do, or perhaps their minds and thoughts precipitated out of the military suspension in which they had been held and so they once again became servants of music and not of the state.

The contract, as I understand it, means no courting, no visits, no sighing over secret letters or flashing those blue eyes of hers at anybody. Any. Body. All her letters are read first by the Webbs. She is the governess and personal servant to an officer’s wife, and when young men try to present themselves for her attention we hang them.

Simon, Damon, the Tejano, and the boy started out for the Gulf of Mexico one foot after another in the searing heat.

Simon gazed around at the other men sitting slumped back in their chairs to listen and knew they all shared memories of the chaos of the Civil War, of death and destruction, poverty, dislocation.

Music is clean, clear, its rules are forever, another country for the mind to go to,

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.

Their improved appearance made their music better in the eyes of the saloon owners. They now had tone. They were hired by the Slippery Jack and by the beginning of March they had permanent employment

They had been on the road now for an eternity it seemed, from Los Palmitos to Galveston to Houston, and then to the dry country here below the Nueces.

Such a long way to come on the strength of having seen her twice, and of eight letters, half of them to a boy now dead. On the strength of his imagined home and an imagined wife.

Simon was having heroic thoughts. Rescuer’s thoughts. Savage thoughts.