“That will be a dollar.” The doctor got to his feet. He selected two half-dollar pieces from Simon’s hand, said God be with the lad, and went out to his carriage.

As soon as the doctor was gone Damon heated water to infuse the willow bark. Simon poured some water into a canteen, then three tablespoons of the laudanum, shook it, and held it to the boy’s mouth. He watched him drink it until he had taken every drop. After that the boy slept heavily. A cold wind came rushing up from the water and it played mindlessly with the sand all around the house while Doroteo carefully arranged the boy’s blankets, his hand resting for a moment on the sweaty hair of his head.

The next night, Doroteo and Simon went out to play at the bars and earn money for medicines while Damon stayed with the boy and then they switched off. For twenty-four hours he seemed improved and sat up and drank the beef broth Doroteo made for him and thanked each of them by name, holding out his hand to clasp theirs one by one, but then the fever and chills came back worse than before. He could not eat. In five days he had become skeletal, his teeth bared as he struggled for breath.

“Listen,” he said. His voice was thin.

Simon sat cross-legged beside him and said, “I’m listening, Patrick.”

The boy fell silent for a moment and turned his head as if he were trying to hear some distant sound. His eyes stood out in his head, his cheeks had sunk into his face. He seemed attentive to the sound of gulls sailing in over Shacktown, searching out scraps and garbage, and from far to the east over the water came the sound of rumbling thunder. Finally he said, “Simon, it was beautiful. All of us in ranks. An army is so beautiful. The cannon was beautiful. Angels of fire out of the mouths of them. I remember it in my mind. Us drummers did ‘Hell on the Wabash’ and everything and now everything I remember will be gone.”

“No,” said Simon. He could not think of what more to say. He clasped his hand on the boy’s arm and was surprised to find tears running down his face, into his mouth. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

“Yes. Will all run off to the sea.”

“Don’t go,” whispered Simon. “Don’t go, Patrick.” Then he dropped his chin to his chest and pressed his clenched fists against his eyes to stop his crying.

The boy became quiet, settled his thrashing limbs, and then began to weep. He sobbed in short gasps, and the rush of tears was stained some strange color. “It’s not right,” he wept. “I’m too young. If I could just be home with Mama and Papa. Take me home.”

Simon’s throat felt as tight as a wrung cloth. He stroked the boy’s brow. “You’ll get better, then we’ll see that you get home. People live through this, Patrick. They get well.”

There was a long silence as if the boy had not heard him. He said at last, “Yes, God lives in the Gulf and he is coming for me.”

On the sixth day the storm trundled in and rain hissed at their leaking roof. Doroteo said they should take him to the hospital but in a hot whisper Patrick said no, you could catch the indecent diseases there and he would not die and go meet God with an indecent disease in his body.

All of a sudden he got to his feet with wild, angular movements. He stood up and vomited a great purge of black blood all over the floor. He wandered from wall to wall erupting with the black vomit and crying out between retches. He puked all over Simon. All over Simon’s hands. The boy had sunk into his bones and his skin was yellow as a finch. Finally they got him to lie down on the soiled bedding, and with a feeling of horror Simon saw that the boy was bleeding from the eyes and ears. His gray eyes swam in a puddling of red blood.

“Oh my God,” Simon said in a low hoarse whisper. He wiped the boy’s face with a wrung cloth already stained brown.

“We have to get him to the hospital,” said Damon.

“There’s too many people there already,” said Simon and then, suddenly, put both bloody hands over his face and wept in a tearing harsh noise. “Goddamn!” Jerking sobs overwhelmed him. He sat on the floor, bent into his hands, and it was some long terrible minutes before he got hold of himself.

Doroteo touched the boy’s wolfish face and said, “There will be a priest there. He needs a priest.” Then he too palmed away tears, wiped his cheeks on his shirtsleeve.

They tore the shutter off its hinges, loaded Patrick onto it, and covered him with blankets. They set off on foot through the rain. They came to the convent and hospital. Lights shone from all the windows, one after the other in a luminous row with the rain running in long strings from the roof edges.

Simon sat with him in the noise and hum of the men’s ward, taking his turn, while Doro and Damon caught a brief moment of sleep in the hall. In the middle of the night the boy cried out, “Mother!”

An Ursuline knelt beside him with her skirts out in a broad carpet around her. “Your mother is Holy Mary and she is right here.”

The boy said, in a tiny thin cry, “I’m sinking. I’m sinking.”

“Let go and you will float, dear child,” she said. “You are invincible.”

Simon sat with his hands over the boy’s hands where they clasped a rosary and listened to the nun recite the prayers. He listened to the steps of the priest coming down the hall and into the ward as he arrived to administer the sacrament of extreme unction and bent to the drawn face, the open mouth, and said the words. He crossed the boy’s forehead with oil. Simon sat without speaking until the child had grown cold.

The yellow fever was an invisible being restlessly searching up and down the coast. It wanted to live on its own but everybody it inhabited died, and so it kept on searching. It stared out over the glittering flat water of the Back Bayou, peered into the houses, buzzed above the water pails. And in answer to it what did they have except music? Simon played “Death and the Sinner” at the muddy graveside, where so many others were buried and more were coming even now. Damon laid the G whistle in the boy’s sunken and inhuman hands as he lay there in his coffin, so he could play before the angels. The nuns said they were to fumigate their house and get rid of all their blankets and bedding and clothes. Take only what you wear and boil that. Your cooking utensils are suspect. Abandon what you can. Best of all would be to leave the place altogether.

But first Simon would have to write a letter. It would be in his own name. It would pass the censorious gaze of Colonel Webb because it was news of the boy’s death.

Simon sat with his rucksack at his feet as the wind spattered Gulf spray on the little house. The others waited patiently. He stared at the paper, then wrote,

Dear Miss Dillon.

And stopped. He was not good at this and never had been, but he bore down on it as if approaching a previously unknown melody in a mysterious key. Doroteo and Damon sat against the wall, blank and disconsolate.

I take pen in hand.

He would have to write to the boy’s parents as well. Your son survived the battle of Los Palmitos and fell victim to the yellow fever in his attempts to return home to Allentown. We his companions found him cheerful and ever ready to help his fellows. I am sending his bones.

No, I am sending his rhythmical instruments and his bodhran.

Simon held out the last sheet of paper.

“Damon,” he said, “you do it. Write to the boy’s parents.”

“I will. Just finish your letter to Miss Dillon.”

I take pen in hand to acquaint you with the sad event of Patrick Matthew O’Hehir’s passing this Saturday last, the 27th of November, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, at one o’clock in the morning. It was a fever and he endured it for six days without complaint, but it turned to the worse and neither medicines nor doctors were to any avail. The priest was there with him at the last as was I and one of the Ursuline nuns.

Simon’s hand threatened to string other words together whether he willed it or not. He could write I very much want to meet you again in order to convey to you my feelings.