Simon said nothing about his thirty dollars; it was to buy land with and he was going to hang on to every coin until Felipe Quinto screamed for mercy.

They stopped a passerby for information and stood uneasily as the man paused and put his hands in his pockets and looked them over one by one. He noted the way they slung their gear and the remains of butternut uniforms. He was used to returning soldiers, it seemed. Ragged men set loose from a defeated army, trying to find their way back into human life, its fabric, its customs, the long-forgotten uses of civilization.

“Looks like y’all carrying musical instruments there,” he said.

“Looks to me like it too,” said Damon. “Does it look like it to you fellows?”

The rest of them murmured agreement. Simon said, “We were wondering about places to rent. Where we could set down our musical instruments, sort of.”

“Why hell, boys, just go out there toward the Gulf side, they’s all kinds of abandoned go-downs and shacks and shanties and all that.” The man gestured toward the east. “People tearing them down for firewood. Tore up about half the wood buildings in Galveston for firewood. Deserted out there. Shantytown, about deserted. Magruder came in, chased the Yankees out, and then half the city was told to leave. Blockade. Union came back again and blew us all to hell. No blockade now! Get yourself a house, boys.”

They walked off in the direction he indicated. The better part of Galveston was inside the island, facing the harbor, where the wharves and warehouses were and a long elegant street called the Strand. They passed a big building called the Hendley Hotel, whose facade was missing cannon ball–sized chunks of masonry. They could see some of the grand houses, mansions built on cotton money and shipping money before the war and still elegant. But they were not going there. They trudged out toward the seaside. Soon they were slogging through sand in a kind of shacktown.

They came upon an empty house that seemed suitably abandoned. It stood somewhat slanted among other single-story cottages and shacks, the unpaved streets floury with white sand. They slung their baggage onto a splintered floor. Simon could hear the roar of the surf in the distance, could see the blue glint of the Gulf of Mexico. The house had lost many of its cypress shingles, the chimney was about to collapse, there was only one window that still had its shutters, and the front door never quite closed.

In the next few days Simon shored up the chimney with stones robbed from other chimneys nearby, Patrick carved at the door with his knife until it would shut, Damon hung hemp sacks from the waterfront over the windows, and Doroteo made an excursion to the wharf and brought in two sacks of cotton from a busted cotton bale sitting unsold in Bailey’s Exports warehouse. They made themselves beds by stuffing the cotton into yet more hemp sacks. They set up a kitchen table with shaky legs by bracing it into a corner, found a pail and a dipper, located the nearest pump, and they were in business.

Chapter Six

Damon said they were all going to starve if they did not eat more than hardtack and so they made their way to the northern pass, where the fishing boats came in. There Doroteo bought five redfish from a black man with a Jamaican accent for five cents apiece. He called them huachinangos and regretted his lack of achiote. Nonetheless, he built a fire in the fireplace and said, “Leave this to me. Get away.” He placed several pieces of iron strapping over it, and he soon had them crisp as winter leaves on the outside and snowy white within.

Simon picked up large pieces with his knife and told them it would all get better as they went along, they would find jobs in the saloons if they worked at their music, he was sure of it.

“All right with me,” said Damon. “‘They had gone unto the wars, trusting to the mild-eyed stars’ . . .” He stretched out his legs; his shoes were coming apart. One was a brogan with two-hole laces and the other was an ankle boot that laced up his shin.

“Whoa,” said Patrick. “Not more dead cities and stuff.” He was trying to throw pieces of fish in the air and catch them in his mouth.

Doroteo said, “I am finish with the dead cities, Damon.”

“That’s not ‘The City of Sin.’” Damon lifted his chin in an offended gesture. “It’s another one. Patrick stop that, Jesus Christ.”

“There’s no end to them.” Patrick wiped his mouth with his blue shirt cuff. “Dead cities, talking ravens, spirits in the outhouse just waiting to bite your butt. We got any lard?”

Doroteo handed him a small packet and the boy began to lightly smear the lard over the skin of the bodhran. They had each taken one corner of the shack as their own. Simon had settled on the corner to one side of the fireplace, where he laid out all his possessions as neatly as he always had, as he had been taught to do by the old man. He reassembled the revolver, carefully, after cleaning it with a stick and a rag, loaded five charges, rolled up the empty chamber under the hammer. He leaned back against the wall, listening to the fluting noise of the wind in all the cracks of the abandoned house. He was very tired. He was still hungry. But Sail away ladies kept running through his head and he fell into the song and the sleep it brought with it. Images of ladies sailing away in their big hoop skirts, moving toward a sea horizon like hot-air balloons of many colors, Doris Dillon among them. His mother young and pretty and dead. Revolving great rays of sunset and beyond that sunset a presence so vast it struck terror in his heart and he jerked awake.

Evening. He was still thirsty. He got to his feet and thought, I need water, that’s why I am dreaming so much. So strangely. He took up the dipper from the bucket, swallowed one dipperful, two. The water was cloudy and tasted of bog pools and salty rain. He poured a third dipper over his head. There was a great deal to do, much facing him in this new peacetime. If it was a peace, if military occupation was a peace, then it was all right with Simon as long as he could make music happen, as long as his girl did not float away into some windy unattainable sky, as long as he could make a living. He wiped his face with both hands.

Long dark shadows came up out of the continent to the west of them, crawled over the harbor, and block by block the lamplighters set fire to the streetlights. In Shacktown there were no streetlights. Simon built up the fire in the fireplace for some illumination. The other three smoked, rested, were talkative, but Simon sat on his pallet and leaned against the wall and returned slowly to the present world.

He had to get them all into a passable band and make enough money for clothes; his were in tatters. Only the old checkered homespun shirt had not broken its seams. Eventually he would need a horse. Then he could get to San Antonio and find some way to present himself to Doris Dillon. To see if she was the same as the person in his imagination and if she was, then to tell her he would wait for her, for three long years if he had to. Maybe he didn’t have to, but that would take more information than he had or knew how to get.

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.

They woke up sticky with heat and the salt air. Then they went out to the local pump to pour water over their heads and then to the beach to gather driftwood for the fire.

“Well now,” said Damon. He stood shirtless and barefoot with water running down his narrow chest. “Let’s figure out what we all know in common and start practicing.”

“There you go,” said Simon.

“Take the lead, fiddler.”

“All right.”

They returned to the derelict house to clean up as best they could. Simon stood in front of a piece of mirror to shave, carefully stropping his straight razor on his boot sole. Since they had no scissors to trim beards, Damon did the same, waiting for his turn in front of the broken mirror. His beard was heavy and blue. The boy Patrick regarded him with a critical squint and then held out a wad of gray soap.

“Here, Mr. Damon,” he said. “I been a-saving of it. If you got lice it’ll kill them dead and if you got sunburn it’ll take your skin off.”

“Well, bless your little Irish heart,” said Damon and grabbed it before Doroteo could get his hands on it. “Simon is afflicted with pale peach fuzz and you Mexicans don’t have face hair to speak of.”