Musial group lately come from the mainland offers songs and dance tunes of the most refined character! Airs, waltzes, and quick-steps for your evening or afternoon festivity at a reasonable price! Band consists of violin, flute, guitar, and rhythm instruments. Contact S. Boudlin in care of the post office.

He carefully wrote five copies in his best hand. He put them up in the better parts of town and also on a Hendley building colonnade post on the Strand.

He took to trudging up the steps of the Customs House every day at two in the afternoon, interrupting his hot, sweating sleep to do so. He came all the way from their collapsing shack out on the seaward side, past other shanties in which all sorts of people had squatted, had strung out their laundry, had built sheds for their pigs and chickens if they had them. They said, Hello fiddler, where you been so long? Hello fiddler, play me ‘Wayfaring Stranger.’ He lifted a hand and went on.

On the street in front of the post office he looked up; it had been four years since Simon had seen the United States flag on a government building. It flew from the roof of the Customs House against the pure white clouds that sailed up out of the Gulf, against the blue air, with its thirty-five stars and the extravagant stripes. Then he walked gratefully between the shady columns, into the cool building, on to the post office on the first floor, hoping to find some notice that they were wanted.

This is how they ended up in the garden of one of the great houses on the Strand. It was the Pryor House, an edifice of wealth and pure white walls and the wonders of mowed grass. A note had arrived in General Delivery that they might be needed for an afternoon gathering. Simon raced back to the shack and shouted them all awake and read it aloud.

Chapter Eight

He said, “Get up boys, we got to go meet one of them, they want to look us over and be sure we don’t have lice. Get to the pump, would you? Comb your hair.”

They met with a stern old man named Heidemann who was a majordomo of sorts for the family. They met him at the fortifications and played several pieces for him, pieces that they judged to be elegant and refined. They sang “Bound for the Rio Grande”; Patrick was so nervous he flubbed it repeatedly on the G whistle, but the majordomo couldn’t tell because they were oversinging the boy as loudly as they could, they were in the outdoors near the slapping dirty waves of the harbor, and most people didn’t have a good ear anyway. Heidemann listened with his hands clasped behind his back and asked, “Have you left the Confederate forces? Do you have your discharges and your passes?”

The boy spun the G whistle between his fingers, sitting in the sand. He said in a nervous, unsteady voice, “Yes, sir, I mean no, sir, we didn’t need any, I was a drummer with Webb, sir, we were with Webb, regimental band, they just released us and said go home.”

Simon and Damon and Doroteo murmured, With Webb, yes.

“Trying to make money for our passage home,” said Simon. He knew the man could hear his accent, which was Ohio Valley, but Doroteo sounded Hispanic and Damon’s speech was Southern but as to place indefinable. The boy spoke like Irish immigrants one generation removed speak; a hard r and a lilt.

“Webb,” said the old man. “Yes, he was down at Brazos de Santiago.”

“Yes, he was. We were.”

“But he was in command of colored troops. The Sixty-second. You don’t look colored.”

“Well. No, they have white officers.”

“You don’t look like officers either.”

“Regimental band,” said Simon, and then he became resolutely silent.

Despite Heidemann’s suspicions they came to an agreement for twenty-five dollars for the evening. He nodded smartly and then he told them,

“You will do well here if you aspire to more refined music. I tell you, Texas will never be developed except on the coasts. Houston, Galveston, Indianola. It will never be anything inland. There’s no semblance of civilization there. No place to play your music. Lacking in refinement and rainfall, therefore neither crops nor symphonies, no, not ever. Perhaps crude approximations; Indian corn and back-country fiddling but no more, no, not ever.”

“Thank you for your advice,” said Simon, and then they turned to walk back to their wretched shack on the sea, dodging the wagon traffic, a loose donkey galloping down the street with a man running after it.

“Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph,” cried the boy. “I’m sorry, I can get it better, I can! I mean ‘Rio Grande.’” He was terrified of another outburst from Simon.

That sense called Better Judgment came to Simon in a rush and he said, “Sure you can. Don’t worry.” He beat the boy on the shoulder in a comradely way. “You’re good, you can do it.”

Then a scramble to cut hair, shave, and press down the white shirts. Doroteo borrowed a skillet from the house half a block down, heated it on the fire, and then threw a thin rag over the damp shirts and ironed them down; he fried the rag but the shirts were pressed and unscorched.

They managed to borrow cravats and jackets from the waiters at the Hendley Hotel dining room with extravagant promises to bring them back, and a dime apiece to the barber of the ship Orion recently in from Jamaica and docked at the Kuhn wharf, therefore wanting for coins to spend onshore. The barber cut hair like he was harvesting hay; Damon sat on a coil of rope and the barber made his dark hair fall in hanks. Simon wrote down the titles of songs on the back of a handbill he had torn off a wall. The handbill advertised passenger train fares for Buffalo Bayou and Houston. He scribbled the titles down with a carpenter’s pencil.

“‘Robin Adair’!” cried Damon. “That’s it! I had forgot the title. It’s English, it will sound reasonably elegant.”

Patrick whizzed up and down the scale of the G whistle. “Sing it,” he said.

Damon said, “The first four measures are the same as ‘Ailen Aroon.’ He cleared his throat and sang, “What’s this dull town to me? Robin’s not near; He whom I wished to see, Wished for to hear?”

“Goddamn, sounds like somebody went and drowned,” said the barber. “Ain’t that a downer.” Barefoot sailors stopped their work with ropes and mops and tools and paused to listen to them. In the intense heat tar dripped in black bullets from the rigging overhead. All up and down the wharf were the ringing sounds of metal ships’ tackle banging against other metal parts and voices from the engine rooms far below. Cries of men loading and unloading from lighters and at the ships’ side the little salt-water waves said wash wash wash.

“Well, we’re not singing your dirty sailor songs for this job,” said the boy Patrick. The sailors turned to him, surprised at what seemed like a wild outburst from a mere child. Simon started laughing.

“Oh God,” he said. “He’s turning into a critic!”

“Well, bugger me,” said one of the sailors. “Your soul to the devil.”

“He’s gone mad,” said Damon. “He has a religious mania. And you, barber, just cut my hair, would you? Here’s the bridge: Where’s all the joy and mirth, made this town heaven on earth, O they’ve all fled with thee, Robin Adair. Yeah, so, it’s weepy and woeful and they’ll all fall to bawling over their dead relatives killed in the recent unpleasantness. Moldering in the grave.”

“After they weltered in their gore,” said Simon. “Give it a go in G, Patrick, and the rest of us will sing it.” He lifted his chin to Damon. “Take the melody.”

“Why should I?” Damon said. “You have a good voice.”

Simon got a grip on himself. After a pause he said in a reasonable voice, “No. I’ll do high harmony.”

After six tries they got it right; crisp and sharp. By that time, they had their hair cut and the sailors were asking where they would be performing.

“Nowheres they’re going to let you lot in,” said Patrick, and they quickly climbed down the ship’s boarding ladder to the wharf, ragging on Patrick all the way back to the shack.

Simon tore off his patched checkered shirt, now with clips of red hair scattered all over it, and fanned himself with the handbill that had the words to “Robin Adair” written on its backside.

He said, “Listen, Damon, next time I tell you to try a song, do it. Do you hear me?”

“No,” said Damon and threw his hat across their cluttered room. “No, I am fucking deaf, Simon.”

“Stop!” Doroteo shouted. He who so rarely spoke, the quiet one, cut the tension with a hard, precise shout. Then he began to polish his boots with a combination of axle grease and stove blacking. He said, “We must play the varsoviana. I will eshow you.” He finished with his boots, wiped his hands, and then plucked at his guitar strings carefully. Chord after chord, striking out the tune with his thumb.