The lamps in the saloons burned coal oil or whale oil, the beams overhead creaked in the wind off the Gulf, the streets were incandescent under the gas lamps. Sometimes bats streaked through the white light, moths danced in a city of seagulls and scarred buildings.

Once as they walked home a midsummer storm broke over them, and for the next few days it rained and blew through the cracks of their small house in torrents. Simon and Doroteo moved their instrument cases here and there until they found leakless places. Simon took his hat in hand and said they had a job at the Jamaica and he was going, they could stay if they wanted. They wearily clapped on their hats, put their instruments under their coats. They followed him out the door, toward the city center once again, where the Jamaica’s patrons were so deeply grateful that anybody had showed up to play on a stormy evening that they made twenty dollars. Simon put yet another five-dollar gold piece and two Federal bills for ten dollars each in his fiddle case.

When Simon lay down at night he slept as if he were in a coma. People tired him; always had, always would. He wished there were a roof he could go and sleep on but since he got his sleep during the day, he would have been roasted by the summertime Galveston sun or rained on. He was tired of the talking and disheartened by the thought that he was the odd one and the fault did not lie with his companions but himself. When he could, he took his fiddle and went off alone in the early evenings to Fort Point and its sandbagged fortifications now so dusty and unwarlike where the one solitary Union sentry stood on the tower, behind him that extraterrestrial landscape of sky and cloud being assembled in places unknown and sailing eastward. 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. Thinking. When he found the note, it would be perfect. He stood outlined against a falling sun at the edge of what was once again the United States and the sentry stopped his pacing to listen, transfixed.

At one or two in the morning when they had come home and Damon had perhaps bought half a bottle of cheap liquor to pass around, Simon sometimes talked about his land, and what he would grow on it and the house he would build. Simon did not remember ever living in a house but only himself and the old man in the three rooms in back of the livery barn and so the one he imagined was odd and impractical, but none of the others had the heart to point this out.

Patrick listened with a deep interest. His mother had been born in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, he said, on an immigrant ship from Ireland, and his father came over not long after with his own parents and they had all gone to work for the Susquehanna railroad. They had hopes of being able to buy an entire ten acres to themselves and they were in a state of perpetual astonishment that around them the native Americans owned twenty, fifty, a hundred acres. They had come to live among the northern Yankees in Pennsylvania, he said, and all those people hated people in the South like burning hell, they despised them, you should hear them talk. Said you all were animals.

“We are,” said the dark man. “We are beasts of prey, we are slave masters every one, we gorge ourselves on jelled blood and the meat of corpses.” He held the bottle by the neck and turned it up. “Lo, death hath reared himself a throne in a strange city all alone, far down within the dim west . . .”

Their food had improved as well as their music; Doro spread lard on the hard bread and toasted it, then added a sprinkle of sugar. He often came up with a fruit called guava and more huachinango, oxtails, and shin meat. They cried out their appreciation; he had assigned himself cook’s duties and they wanted to encourage him in this. Then they wiped their mouths on their cuffs and went out into the nighttime city.

They walked past women in patched frocks whose faces were drawn with hunger creases and cheeks artificially red, calling to them in hopeless voices, past heaps of lumber and glass where repairs were going on. They came to the Bayside Saloon or the Sailor’s Rest or the Jamaica or the What Cheer; they searched out the patrons and the appearance of the place to see what might be awaiting them—a fight or the possibility of good tips. They borrowed bar rags from the bartenders to stick in the bands of their trousers to wipe their hands so they could grasp their instruments. Simon used one as a chin rest. The sweat ran from their faces in a lantern-lit sheen.

There was also the possibility of yellow fever in the dank miasmas of the gin houses and the funeral processions that trundled down the waterfront toward the island cemetery. Like everyone else on the street, they removed their hats as a hearse went by.

Now that they were making money Simon’s concern settled on the matter of white shirts. They looked as ragged and filthy as if they had been lost in the woods for some time. If they wanted to garner what money there was to be had here in this city they had to look good, then they would be paid for playing at weddings and receptions and garden parties (if there were any gardens left after the bombardments, if there were heart enough left in the wealthier citizens of Galveston for parties of any kind).

Simon walked through the waves of heat to the warehouses and shebangs down on the waterfront, searching for a washerwoman. He carried all the clothes they had except what they had on their backs.

There in a little plank shack that had not yet been torn down for firewood a woman dumped loads of laundry into wooden tubs. Water simmered in two great fifty-gallon washpots on outdoor fireplaces. She was thin and young and wore shoes made of leather nailed onto wooden soles. She shoved back a frayed rag she wore over her hair; it promptly fell forward again.

“Ma’am,” he said. “Yo, ma’am.”

“Shirts two cents apiece,” she said. “Bleach and ironing extra, and we can talk about how much for repair if you got shirts all torn up.” She pressed two small slivers of soap together, trying to make one lump of them. “And if you’re looking for good-time girls, they ain’t here.” She squinted at him, probably thinking he looked too thin and hungry to be disporting himself amongst the ladies.

Simon paused in that almost imperceptible hesitation that always fronted his words as if he were waiting, wanting to be sure he would speak into a listening silence.

“No,” he said. “Not at all.” Then he explained that he had a bundle of clothes for her and also, Did she have any shirts for sale? That people might have left behind?

“I got shirts from the nun’s hospital that were left behind, after the battle when the Union came back. Their owners gone forever into the dark beyond. You mind bullet holes? Take a look,” she said and threw a tumbled wad of fabric on her plank counter. Simon took up one in his hand; it looked like linen and cotton in a heavy weave. They would do.

“Confederates, Yankees, who knows?” she said. And then a quote she had most likely heard at the little theater on C Street: “All probably weltering in their gore.”

He paid out fifty cents in Federal silver and came away with four shirts of a dim whitish color in various stages of repair. Back at the shack he spread the shirts out on the table. No need to tell them they would be wearing dead men’s clothes. “Now here, see what I did for you. No no, don’t thank me, don’t thank me. See here, they’ve all been repaired.”

They eyed the shirts with suspicion. Patrick muttered about bullet holes.

“No, they’re just, sort of, random tears and piercings there. Now, we need to put up a notice.” Simon sat on the tar bucket and leaned forward on his elbows. “There are better places than the saloons. We could try, ‘Music provided for weddings, funerals, and garden parties.’”

“Nah,” said Damon. He held out his shirt and regarded it with a critical expression. “Churches do wedding and funeral music. They, like all of humanity, prefer their own people.”

“All right, all right.” Simon never had a quick answer for Damon’s depressing observations. “But garden parties.”

“In this day and time? Ha. Galveston wallows in its self-imposed poverty. What garden parties?”

Simon’s face grew smooth and cool. After a pause he said, “You wait. You’ll see.”

MUSIC FOR CONVIVIAL GATHERINGS!