“Yes, you’re right. Now let’s get at it.”

They needed a week of practice and how would they eat in the meantime? They had no choice. This was when the boy took up Damon’s G whistle and every morning he silently marched out to the lonesome seaside and there amid the sea grape and vermilion morning glory taught himself to play it, trying over and over again with a desperate resolution. He came to Damon, confused about a certain phrase, holding it with his fingers over the holes.

“Here, you half-hole it,” said Damon. “Then you can get that sharp. Listen.”

When he had learned where the music lay in it, where the songs and the hidden melodies were, he played “The Minstrel Boy” in a way that left Simon silent and listening in silence and regretful that he had been hard on the boy.

“That’s wonderful,” Simon said. He gripped Patrick’s shoulder and gave him a friendly shake. “That’s very good.” The boy twirled the big G whistle between his fingers and smiled, did a little skip. Outside the shack the fans of the sabal palms thrashed and made harsh sounds in the hot wind, the Gulf waves ran up in polished sheets and drew back again as they sweated and played. They went over five fast songs—“Glendy Burke,” “Blarney Pilgrim,” “Cotton-Eye Joe,” “Leather Britches,” and “Mississippi Sawyer”—until they had them precise and sharp and all together. Then they fooled around with six slower ones, starting with “St. Anne’s Reel,” and on to “The Nightingale Waltz,” “Rye Whiskey,” “Hard Times,” and finally “Lorena,” which they could all have played upside down and underwater.

Damon said, “Let’s try ‘We’re Bound for the Rio Grande.’ It’s a capstan shanty. Sad, slow. We could do one chorus a capella. Here, I’ll write down the words for you. Try it in G.”

Damon swiftly wrote out the verses on the back of a handbill. They tried it. It needed work. They worked. Then they went over each one of the fast ones in turn, over and over. On the fast ones especially they had to start out precisely together and with volume.

And that’s when the other people in Galveston’s shantytown paused in what they were doing and listened to four voices harmonizing on Waaaay Rio! We’re bound for the Rio Grande. And those people often thought, I wish I could sing . . . They heard the satiny low notes of the G whistle and the ripping, blistering pace of the D, the crisp rhythm of the bones, the immeasurably ardent phrases from the fiddle on “MacPherson’s Lament” and thought, I wish I could play an instrument . . . and the great Gulf poured out its long waters upon the white beaches and took them away and came back again. Sometimes small boys gathered at the open windows to watch them as if they were onstage in a play.

With the last of their pennies and nickels they bought salt junk and old bread, bait shrimp from the fishermen, condemned ship’s biscuit, and sometimes turnips from a farmer’s cart. Doroteo took charge of all the food that came to hand; he diced the turnips, boiled the salt junk to tenderness, toasted the tiny shrimp on palm-leaf spines.

They got work, finally. First at the Jamaica and then at the Windjammer. They played the lively tunes at the beginnings of the evenings and then slid into nostalgia as the lanterns in front of them burned up their oil and the late hours wore on. It always worked, it worked like a charm, the sailors and harbor-front workers and off-duty soldiers sang along and banged their glasses on the tables in time to the fast tunes when the four flung themselves into the splendid crackling excitement of “Mississippi Sawyer” like a steam engine in sawdust hell. Damon, with his unlikely air of refinement, poured out cascades of notes and often the boy would dance a reel step or a flatfoot and made the bones rattle in his hand as he rolled through triple clicks.

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.

“One more,” said the boy. He looked up at them from where he sat on the edge of the stage. “‘Death and the Sinner.’” And Simon gave a slight one-sided smile; then the complex haunting tune of that Irish slow air threaded out into the dark streets. Finally, they would pack up their instruments, wake up the owner, collect their money, and walk through the dark streets home. Soon they were starting to make good money, both from the owners and from tips. They were able to buy meat to put on the fire and soap for a good foaming scrub at the pump. Simon slit the plush in the fiddle case and slipped all his coins inside.

There were the occasional fights. Once at the Sailor’s Rest, a drunk called out Damon, said he could not play a single melody without flubbing a note, a man with a crippled hand shouldn’t be playing an Irish tin whistle anyway, get off the stage and let the boy do it. The drunk stood up and made shooing motions with his arms.

Patrick paused in the middle of a flatfoot dance that was so limber it looked as if he were walking backward over glass. He held up the bones.

“Shut up,” said the boy, “you fart-faced old wreck, you useless piece of shit, get your butt hole out of this saloon.”

“Patrick!” Doroteo shouted. “?Por Dios!”

The drunk charged up onstage in search of an exciting evening.

Simon threw open his fiddle case. They were living in a world of returned soldiers who had fought, had seen death and destruction, suffered hunger and want, and were not afraid of Satan himself. Fights could start up with amazing speed. Simon shoved the fiddle in its case and threw in the bow. Damon was dancing around like a bare-knuckle fighter, windmilling his fists, one of which would not quite close because of the old injury.

Then Damon turned and came face-to-face with the drunk. He drew back in pretended maidenly alarm with his Irish whistle clutched close to his chest. The drunk reached toward him and Damon’s hand shot out fast as a striking snake and he rammed the end of his whistle into the man’s eye, hard and fast. The man screamed and clutched his bloody eye, Patrick and Damon grabbed him, turned him around, and Simon planted a boot in his rear end and kicked him offstage. The drunk sank down like an emptied poke sack. He was going to have somebody reading the evening news to him for quite some time. Doroteo stood and watched it all. He stood the guitar on its tail pin, placed his hand on top of the pegboard, and spun it, smoothing down his mustache.

It was suddenly quiet. The locus of the trouble lay flat on the floor, moaning with a hand over his eye.

“Anybody else?” Simon shrugged his suspenders higher on his shoulders and turned to look all the men in the eye.

“Yeah,” said the boy. He danced like a spring toy on his busted shoes and made an invitational gesture with the two bones. “Come at me, you sluts.”

Overhead the beams of the saloon’s low ceiling threw long shadows and the Galveston rats stared down from the rafters with their eyes like stars in the lamplight. Damon regarded the men gathered around the stunned and groaning drunk and stepped to the front of the stage. His face was flushed. He stood with his two feet planted firm and with a defiant glare at the audience launched into a beautiful rendition of “Neil Gow’s Lament,” a Scottish slow air.

Simon took his fiddle and bow out of the case and joined in. Doroteo struck out light chords, the boy started in on the bodhran and outdid himself, running the tone of it from high to low, slowly, from the rim to the center, a march for the funeral cortege carrying poor Neil Gow’s second wife to the graveyard. At the end there was a moment of complete silence and then the applause began and went on for a long time.

Chapter Seven

The long battle cries of the war had faded and now life settled down the way a bombed building settles down, extinguishing all the lamps as the walls fold in and it was every man for himself, a kind of societal darkness or twilight that would take a long time to lift. A different world was coming after the surrender, along with the news that ran down the telegraph wire and the journals and newspapers that arrived on the train from Houston, its steam whistle sounding out over Galveston Bay.