Simon had been proofed against these kinds of offers since he was seventeen and of a mind for any sort of adventure that came his way. An elegant woman on board the Cumberland Star; the steamboat was tied up in Paducah for six days because of low water, himself on the outer edge of full grown and a wizard with an ancient fiddle locally made. Her husband far away in Pittsburgh. There were so many opportunities for a young man like him and she would see to it, she had advantageous connections in Pittsburgh, theater, private groups. He made her head spin. Her cabin was far to the rear and very private. He was lost in her for seven days upriver.

Then there were fantasies that fell apart piece by piece into sly, unanswerable mutations and a rising scale of hysteria. By the time they were fifteen miles from Pittsburgh, it was clear she didn’t know anybody in the theater world there or about music at all and was terrified of her husband. But seven nights in bed with her almost made it worth it, almost. At the landing she sent him off to find a hired coach and then she disappeared. What did he know? He was seventeen. By the time he got back to Paducah he knew quite a lot. It took him a month to work his way home.

He said, in a cool, light voice, “You seem to think I have no life of my own that is not worth abandoning on the instant.”

She shrugged her white shoulders. She got up in a slack, untidy shifting of green silk and hoops, ignoring her hem caught on a corner of the piano bench. Simon waited with an increasing sense of danger until she started to turn and then lay down his fiddle and bow, lifted the bottom hoop free, opened his hand, and let the silk fall.

“Oh, that’s just me,” she said. “Always catching on furniture. There’s too much skirt in this skirt. But St. Louis.”

He said, “You have no influence with your brother or father, Miss Pryor.”

“Oh. Now how would you know one way or the other?” She went to the window where it looked out over the street wall, onto the decorative short palms, and onto the Strand. House windows stared back at them with lantern eyes from across the street. “Come stand beside me.”

He did.

“Why are you in Galveston?” She tucked her arm into his, pulled a ribboned decoration from her hair, and tossed it on the windowsill. “Why are you so rude?”

She was as tall as he was and he could feel her bare arm against the coarse wool of his coat, his ribs. “It’s my invincible will. I crush all before me.”

Her heat touched him and drew unwilled sparks and he listened to her slow laughter. She withdrew her arm, stepped away, back again. A dance. She took up the ribbon curled on its pin and tucked it into his lapel. He caught her hand and closed his own on it and then let go.

“But I do have influence with them! Why would you ignore an offer like that? Are you married? You have children?”

“Not married,” Simon said. “No children. Not that I know of.”

He watched her face as that sank in, watching with his hooded gray-green eyes and only the trace of a smile. She seemed taken aback at first and then made a short, derisive noise that was unbecoming to a young woman in a new silk dress. She waved it away. There was about her an innocent confidence in her own attractiveness in that she did not make flirtatious appeals or give him any of those glances many women relied upon. She didn’t bother.

“You don’t want a life like that. Those women. You play on the waterfront? I think the music is repetitive? Simple and repetitive?”

“A kind of howling,” said Simon.

“Would you not want a better life? It must be painful to be so talented and reduced to, well, howling.” She put her hand on the back of her neck and regarded a brilliant blue-white star that had roamed into the frame of the window.

“I just suffer.” He took a deep breath and blew it out as a person would blow out cigarette smoke. “Miss Pryor, you are inventive. You have any number of music masters to teach you any number of songs. There is no offer. Your brother and your father are not going to arrange any teaching position for me.” She frowned, stiffened. “I hate teaching. I love howling. The evening has been beautiful and so are you. Your friends in St. Louis will be captivated by stories of your adventures in Galveston. This will be at least one of them I would imagine.”

She put a hand to her mouth and wheeled away in a revolving motion of hoops.

“I wanted to help,” she cried. She was near tears. “You are capable of so much more!”

“We are playing at intrigues,” he said. “Or you are.”

He took the ribbon and its pin from his lapel. Wondered how many others she had invited to St. Louis, how many times she had had confrontations with her brother and father over situations exactly like this one. He took one step to close the space between them and pinned it on the deep V of her bodice, put his hand along her bare neck, and kissed her small pink mouth. At first gently and then repeatedly and with more urgency, as a thick sweet fire moved through him without hindrance. His lips parted from hers very slowly, slowly. He sighed out a long breath and pressed his cheek to her hair. Then he drew away. Despising himself for a fraud, he said, “I will regret this the rest of my days. What I could have had. But instead given over to an abandoned life. Good night, Miss Pryor.”

He walked down the hall, past whoever might be invisibly listening, back to the bandstand. Saw they stood waiting, Doroteo with an open case and his guitar still in his hands.

“Sorry. Miss Pryor wanted a private lesson.”

Damon said, “Those private lessons.” He blew a high, piercing C and slid it down into a half note.

Doroteo single-noted a sweet and sentimental melody and batted his eyelids. The boy looked both confused and suspicious.

“What then?” said Patrick.

“On your next birthday,” said Doro, “I am to tell you all. All.”

The boy flushed at their quiet laughter. They got out before some officer in blue demanded their passes or their discharge papers simply because he was drunk and he could. The moon was nearly full and stood over the mineral glitter of the sea, sending out a path across the water, and Venus glowed with white fire. All the palms and live oaks of Galveston ran the sea wind through their fingers and it dried the sweat on their faces. As they packed up, the majordomo came over with their pay. Not only the agreed-upon price of twenty-five dollars but a pale blue handkerchief in which was wrapped a fifty-cent piece.

Chapter Ten

What a wealth of animals.

Doris Dillon is traveling across a new world that seems to have no end and every lift of the land delights her. It keeps on rolling beneath their wheels hour after hour and day after day and there are new, strange things every mile, some that dart away and others standing crowded together, holding up flat hands like dark green banditti in a play. They are called cactus and she has been told not to touch them.

There are remnant spirits in this country from another time. She watches for them in the trembling heat waves of the noontime and she listens carefully during the hot nights with the fernlike leaves of the mesquite overhead and the cook fire dying down. She might as well be on the moon. She is prepared to be astonished; she is eighteen and not long out of County Kerry. A fine thrill runs through her heart when large white birds sailing on a Gulf wind follow them out of the Rio Grande Valley. They seem to take turns as escorts and on their heads a crown of star-white feathers. She realizes that they are the feathers that the Denny’s women put on their hats back home in Ireland, the shameless thieves.

“Those are called snowy egrets,” says the driver. “They are great fliers, only bird better for staying in the air is a buzzard.”

The birds sail away in a high-atmosphere blur of white. They are making sure we leave, she thinks. They will tell the others. Trees become fewer and fewer, and far ahead Doris can see black shapes. Large animals, alert, moving away. She thinks this must be what enchantment is like, when a person is taken into the other world. Her spirits are effervescent now they are away from the colonel; joy comes back to her and unwraps itself gift by gift.

She has always loved animals. She has always been mystified by them, pulling carriages, dragging a plow, the heedful dogs guarding the sheep on the hillsides, her striped cat stalking a rat behind the grain bin. They fascinate her for reasons she does not know, but she knows we owe them for their trust, the ones that have come to live with us. Her father had acquired ten acres of land and a cow that had a calf every year and a sow and an ox to pull the plow and the harrow and the stoneboat and their small cart. He had done it by working himself to the bone, and now she is fairly stunned by these thousands of acres that it seems nobody owns and by the wild animals that live on them.