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.

“We got to clean up,” said Simon. “Stands to reason.” He threw out both hands, palms up, in an appeal to that rare jewel-like thing called reason.

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.

Yeah, so, it’s weepy and woeful and they’ll all fall to bawling over their dead relatives killed in the recent unpleasantness.

The recent unpleasantness, otherwise known in the South as the war of northern aggression, the late unpleasantness.

“I have taken up giving news readings,” said Captain Kidd. “Recently lost my wife. I am at loose ends. Thus I will make my living, like you, fiddler, going from place to place.” He smiled and his face creased like old paper, like parchment. “I have just returned from Dallas, Wichita Falls, Spanish Fort, and I’m going back. Maybe in a month. People are hungry for entertainment up there, even if it is just month-old news from the Philadelphia Enquirer.

Capt. Kidd is the main character in Jiles' News of the World, soon to be a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks!