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It was a strange gathering of immobile armies at the end of a world of desert and ocean and a slow brown river.
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.
He unbuttoned his shirt and vest to the wind and sat with his eyes closed, feeling the relief of it, the blessed relief. It seemed to blow right through his ribs and into his grateful soul with a power never felt on land. The stars came and went.
His future was all there like a three-draw spyglass shut up and compact and he would draw it out cylinder by cylinder. Behind him were the flames of a burning barn in Kentucky and a childhood of bastardy. The worst was knowing all the time he was a good fiddler, even a superb fiddler, but long before this time and surely now many a good man had gone down to ruin or death unrecognized and probably drunk into the bargain. Simon sank into sleep and once again into dreams, but these he could not recall the next morning.
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.
Then as the men at the tables got drunker they were lulled to sleep or unconsciousness by the slow tunes. Simon and his group gathered up the audience and took them out of the bitter air of a harbor-front dive. Even in their ragged clothes and broken shoes they bore the drunk and the lonely along far sea currents, drifting up unknown forelands, into lost battles, defeats, unto the missing, the loved ones gone astray or unfaithful. Deep in the night
they sang “I’m Bound for the Rio Grande” with the boy on the G whistle.
On the headland there was always a wind to blow away the mosquitoes and so he played for himself in blessed solitude those songs he loved that nobody cared to hear. He explored the strange modal scale of “Down in the Tennessee Valley,” which some called “A Man of Constant Sorrow” or “The Farewell Song.” It could lead you astray. It could abandon you in a thicket of sharps and flats, far from the major scales and utterly lost. He retuned from the standard GDAE to a cross-tuning in GGAD that gave him a drone. He paused, a redheaded fiddler poised with his bow on the strings but taut and still.
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And he sailed out upon that particular sea with his bow leaping like a dolphin in the bow wave of a fast ship, into
Only once before in her life has she seen wild deer, and there just ahead are five of them! All so alike as to be quarter notes on the waving staves of grass.
It occurred to him that he rarely laughed anymore. Maybe laughter would come back, but it was a dark sun that had come over the country and a plague of crows. But
It was a riddle as well as a deep mourning, and Simon was acquainted with both of these things, and so in the chill night, winter on the bayou, it was as if only he and the unknown singer lived in the same universe for the brief time that the song was sent out into the dark.
Then he stood and began to play “Shenandoah.” He made the Markneukirche sing. After the first phrase he double-stopped and the melody seemed to cry out of its own accord in several voices. It was a song that came to people as sadness, as memory, as longing. It was a kind of spirit unto itself, reflections of a mountain river that carried with it the souls of the ancient people who had lived there long before the white man came; the blue Shenandoah River, fifty-five miles long and clear as air. I love your daughter. A remote place of memory and recall now far away from this arid land.
Become wise, young man, and cynical, and life will be far more understandable.”
He lifted her hand on the palm of his right one, saw the tiny gold ring on her little finger. “There are of course all the details. But you don’t want to know all the details. If we all knew one another’s lives in all the details nobody would marry anybody.”
The night of the city fell in liquid sequential curtains, shadow after shadow, from the slow drowsy army horses in their paddocks on Government Hill who stood in silence under the alders there, and then over the ruins of the Alamo and then the river itself cast in deep shadow where a few canoas with a lamp at the prow made their way home. St. Mary’s answered San Fernando as the old bells sang out over the plazas.
