They spent a few hours dozing in the lee of a barracks wall, huddled together with their clothes draining salt water. When the tide was sliding out lower with every wave Damon got them to their feet and they crept to the docks. They found a twenty-foot dinghy or catboat, which the Federals were using as a tender. They loaded their gear with great delicacy to avoid making any noise; Simon came aboard last, easing over the gunnel like a wary cat with Damon hissing hush hush at them all.

Then Damon sat on the one thwart and took up the oars. He rowed them out into the Gulf for some distance; at last the few sparks of light from the island dwindled and disappeared.

Stepping the mast took some effort even with Damon’s instructions, which soon turned to exasperated shouts. Then the sail; it was gaff-rigged and they fell afoul of what seemed to be hundreds of square yards of canvas and limitless amounts of rope. The boy drummer was struck on the head by the boom but his Union Army cap softened the blow even as he shouted in pain and started cursing. The wind stayed steady and Damon put the cutter on a beam reach as they sailed north on the east wind. The height of the waves increased. By dawn they were out of sight of land, plunging up and down on a rolling sea.

“We don’t want to be out of sight of land,” said Simon. “Turn this thing west.”

“Where’s that?” said Patrick. “Oh God.” His hand went to his mouth and he bent over, turned to the gunnel, and vomited into a wave.

Damon shook his head. “Just don’t throw up in the boat, young’un.”

“West is opposite the side the sun is coming up,” said the Tejano. He sounded discouraged. “?Y saben que? We don’t have any water.”

“Or a bottle to put it in.” The boy had turned a greasy color, like pork fat, and he dipped up water with his forage cap to pour on his head and then lost it into the sea. “Ah shit,” he said. “Well, just shit.”

“Look around,” said Simon. He lay in a heap with his shirt and pants soaked and his rucksack and blanket roll at his back. “May be supplies under the cuddy.”

They found two wooden canteens, one full, the other half-empty. The Tejano took over the tiller and turned the catboat to catch the wind on their tail so that they sailed more or less to the west. This made the catboats’ motion even worse, bucketing straight up the waves and plunging down again. The sun rose into the sky and became smaller and the waves shot intense heat reflections into their faces. The motion sent the boy doubling over the side again, retching. A gull hung in the air over them, its head bent down to see who they were, what they were doing, and in its still, stiff airborne stasis it turned its head from one side to the other as if searching their faces each in turn.

At least there was a wind. Simon pulled his Kentucky hat over his face and rolled his sleeves down. Having been on the Ohio River a good many times, he knew what water reflections could do, especially to skin like his. He threw his Confederate cap to Patrick and told the boy to tie his kerchief over his head and let it hang down behind and shade the back of his neck.

“Well hell’s bells, what about this?” said the boy. He put on Simon’s cap and then over that the bodhran. He clutched it by the crossbar and held it over his head. “This here is like a big Texas hat, idn’t it?”

The hours grew hotter and brighter. Simon hung on to the gunnel and watched the strange unstable world of Gulf water rushing past them, a place that was without footing or rest, all the same color and swept by salt wind. He bent over the side, watching shafts of weird light sent into the deep by the white-hot noontime sun.

Sometime in the afternoon his mind turned back to the girl and so he called to Patrick to ask if he knew aught of her. Where Colonel Webb and his family were going. He had heard it from the sergeant but he wanted a second opinion.

“San Antonio, they say,” said the boy. They were all speaking loudly against wind and water. “To go into garrison there.” He held the bodhran against the sun and squinted. He was trying not to throw up again.

“That’s right,” said the Tejano. “Everybody was asking because of the girl. And me too, one of these days. Going to San Antonio.” He shut his eyes against the glare. “It’s Spanish anyway. So far.”

Doroteo wore a wide-brimmed hat of palm straw and he was down to his blue-striped shirt. His coat and pants were regulation Confederate gray, but he had cut all the insignia off his jacket. He held the tiller in one hand and his guitar case in the other. He rocked to the motion of the waves, trying to save the case from falling into the water in the bottom of their boat. Damon tipped his hat to the back of his head to protect his neck and stared down at his two different shoes, exhausted.

Young Patrick breathed through his nose and paused to see whether he would vomit. He didn’t. “I talked to her once. She is fair kind and I took off my hat to her. I was wanting to pull the head on my drum, you know, loosen the hoop and she said, ‘Oh, sit in the shade then and here’s a dipper of cold water.’ It was going on for two hundred degrees in the shade, on my mother’s grave.”

Simon listened with drops of sweat draining from under his hatband. “And so she is from Ireland directly, herself.” Simon held his rucksack with the fiddle case jammed down in it in both arms. Maybe he was making a fool of himself out here on the hot ocean, in love like it was a taking, going someplace unknown and in what had to be admitted were mere rags.

“Yes. I told her my parents back in Pennsylvania, they had come over too. From near Waterford. She said she was from Tralee, which is where a lot of Dillons come from, the ones that ain’t dead or come here.”

“Dead of what?”

“Of no food to keep them alive, since the potatoes all went to slush in the Black ’47.”

“But she’s just come over, ain’t she?”

“She has. Said she was very happy to find employment in America, even though she did end up in Texas and a battle besides. And I said as God is my witness, I never thought I’d have ended up in Texas either and look at me now.”

“But where will she be in San Antonio?”

“They said they were going into garrison at that old Spanish mission where the Mexicans killed everybody.” The shade of the sail rolled over him and back again, over and back.

Doroteo nodded. “The Alamo,” he said. He smoothed down his mustache with his thumb and forefinger. “Didn’t do any good.”

“That’s it. Alamo.” The boy swallowed and then sank back once more against the gunnel. His great ears were bright red on the tips and his large boots were nearly sole to sole as his knees flopped open.

“What do they say about Colonel Webb?”

“Say?” The boy opened his eyes.

“He’s her employer isn’t he?”

“He didn’t have nothing to do with no drummer boy.” Then in a cheerful voice, “But he was fair and easy with the men. The men liked him. He made them laugh.”

Simon said, “Well, there you go.” He doubted, somehow, what he had seen. It was just the vague thrashing about of a man in a state of nerves after a battle. An unquiet mind.

And so the day went on. They talked in a slow desultory way, releasing words as reluctantly as they sipped at the precious water. Patrick roused himself in the heat and glitter of salt water to say that he knew three dances. “I can do the flatfoot, a jig step, and a reel step.”

“We are a regular traveling circus.” Simon lay back with his hat over his face. “Can you swallow swords?”

“I never tried it,” the boy said, “and I ain’t about to.” The thought made him vomit over the side again. “Ah shit,” he said and wiped his mouth on his Union blouse sleeve.

Far away to the west the Gulf coast came into view, so they turned north again. This caused more sail adjustments. The backstays and halyards sagged. The Tejano said that he had once been a fisherman on the Gulf in his former life, and sagging backstays and halyards—these ropes here—were not good. Damon agreed. It was a scandal the way they sagged. Patrick and Simon were told to tighten them and after they figured out how, they did. This put them on a beam reach again, going north. The plunging and bucketing smoothed out somewhat. Then Damon said that Galveston was on a long sand island that lay across the mouth of a deep harbor and the main place was on the inside, the harbor side. That’s where the saloons were. That’s where the money was.

Chapter Five

They sailed all day without seeing another vessel. The sky overhead was clear blue, as if they had left all rain behind and all hope of rain. Damon called up quote after quote from Edgar Allan Poe: No swellings hint that there may be a far-off happier sea, Nothing save the airs that brood over the magic solitude . . . And the boy called out for him to leave off, would he? He’d heard enough poetry. And Damon suggested that he go over the side and swim if he didn’t like it, ignorant spotted-faced little fiend and could he just stop puking? Simon and Doroteo shouted for them both to shut up.