He wrote on and on in his mind, words he might never use. Are you safe from that man? Are any of us safe from the yellow fever and its terrors? Is it possible that you might look favorably on an invitation from myself to an event (any event) in which I might hold your hand, a dance might occur, I might put my arm around your waist and we move down the center in the steps of the Virginia reel and leave death far behind us? May I sit at the door to your bedroom and speak with you? Tell me the story of Tralee and the tales of the Dillon ancestors, here is a carriage, I lift the reins, we step smartly into the future on the Red River away from coastal fevers and the impending horrors of those fevers. It was terrible. I have seen death now several times, I fear it.

Miss Dillon, I regret his passing extremely. He was loved by all. He wished you to have a medallion of Our Lady that he treasured. You may reply to this letter at General Delivery Houston, as I and the others in my musical ensemble have been invited to that city to perform musical offerings at several private homes. It is possible your letter may be delivered there at the Houston General Post Office although there is no guarantee. With sorrow in having to convey this news, I remain in deepest respect yours truly, Simon A. Boudlin.

And so he wrote in his own name and voice to Doris Dillon to tell her that Patrick was dead, a burden too serious and heavy for subterfuge. Now they must pack up what they had left and get away from this fever coast. Somewhere they would have to play happy jigs and reels to purchase their food and shelter whether they personally felt happy or not. He placed the letter in the hand of a freighter going to San Antonio who said he would deliver it for ten cents, admired Simon’s hat, tried to buy it, and then gave up when Simon showed him the size, lifted his reins, and was off into the distant interior.

And so they left behind almost all of what they had garnered in their time in Galveston as the nun had told them to; their bedding and their cooking gear and the furniture they had knocked together, the white shirts that had proved after all unlucky. Who knew what contaminations resided in the weave of the cloth or the grain of the wood? They were all too young to die and always would be.

They journeyed on, the three of them together. Simon wore the old Confederate shell jacket and his Kentucky hat. He took out the Dance revolver, put the cylinder and frame together, loaded and capped five loads, and left the empty chamber under the hammer as always. They walked down to the train station of the Houston and Texas Central Railway on the waterfront.

They could not afford seats in the passenger cars, but in the loading yards there was a thin young man with only one hand and a dancing, elusive manner who told them they could sneak aboard some of the freight cars. He showed them how to lie hidden in the brush and weeds just outside the main part of the city. The trains ran south down the island and then they slowed to take a right turn to get onto the bridge going over the bay to the mainland. When the train slowed, you ran alongside and pulled yourself up. Be careful be careful, cinders from the smoke stack can set you afire, you can fall under the wheels and they will chop you up like stew meat, hook your fingers in the ladder and fall and you’ll be dragged, it will tear your fingers off. The young man’s eyes darted and shone.

They carried their soldier’s rucksacks and their instruments down the railway as it snaked along the island. Just before the tracks made a hard right turn they sank into the palmetto and cranky stiff cordgrass.

“Laudanum,” said Damon, looking back. “That youngin’s become an opium slave. Probably when he lost his hand.”

They waited through the evening and finally in the dark they saw, far back on the loading docks at the harbor front, a sudden leaping of red light that meant an engine was being fired up. It came toward them with its bull’s-eye headlight, steam roared out from between the drivers in clouds, and the tall inverted cone of the chimney chugged out woodsmoke. The bell never stopped ringing. They rose out of the weeds and ran alongside and Simon was first up. He turned to help Damon and Doroteo and soon they were all crowded into a tiny space among stacked barrels.

“What happens if they find us?” Simon had to shout over the noise.

“I don’t know,” said Damon. “Dear God, look at how fast we’re going!” He was shouting as well. He peered out the door. “They say it can do ten, fifteen miles an hour!”

Doroteo stood by the open freight-car door and held on to its edge to lean out. “We’re going over the water!”

The miracle of speed and effortless movement stunned them into silence. Simon had no words for it other than it was somewhat like the steamboats on the Ohio, but now they had gained the land and were trundling along to Houston, fifty miles away, in a kind of land-boat. The steam drifted back and at last they sat down in the midst of their rucksacks and instruments and fell asleep.

Chapter Thirteen

Simon woke up with Damon shaking his shoulder.

“We’ve got to get off before they find us,” Damon said.

When the train slowed down they saw, here and there, a few men from other cars jump off into the thick tangle of vegetation at the edge of Buffalo Bayou. The Texas Central was only a mere fifty miles of track, and already it was carrying freeloaders, discharged soldiers who would never get their pay.

Houston was strung out along a muddy bank of wharves and warehouses much like Galveston except here there was no clear seawater, only the heavy green bayou. Landing stages and steam vessels nosed into the bank, men loaded cotton and hemp, unloaded salted fish in barrels, train oil, shoes, and crates of patent medicines. Along the waterfront were warehouses and leaning shacks where men ran in and out like figures in a cuckoo clock. They went up the slope toward the city itself. They passed a brick-making factory and the unspeakable stink of a tannery, which discharged its waste into the bayou in a foaming dark rapid. Two-and three-story brick buildings loomed at the top of the slope, all close together like a wall. beer, they said. cotton broker. boots and used clothing plows sharpened wagons repaired cotton wagons for sale see j. farthingham for the best in harness.

Once again they were in a new town and this time there were more Union troops than before. The soldiers walked in twos and threes along the streets. Now that the war was over, cotton was moving again; four-hundred-pound bales were trundling toward the waterfront, one to a wagon. Not only cotton, but lumber and hides and salt and corn. They hoisted their rucksacks and instrument cases and started out in search of a place to stay. Simon hoped they had outrun the yellow fever.

“We got to get further away from the downtown,” said Damon. “Down, down this town shall settle hence, and all Hades from a thousand thrones shall do it reverence.”

A city of eighty thousand on the unstable flooding ground of coastal Texas, threaded with bayous and their tangled drainages, sidewalks of cypress blocks, and the landslide of horses’ hooves pouring down every street. Union soldiers passed one another in groups. Simon carried his fiddle case in his hand, where he could see it in this kaleidoscope of people and wagons. A man in a bowler darted across the street and nearly ran into him. Simon gave the man a flat stare.

“Get the hell out of my way,” he said.

Damon watched amazed as the man touched his hat and stood aside, but then this was the way of it when somebody carried a musical instrument, who knows why but they treat you like a woman carrying a baby. That plus a threatening glare would clear the way. Soldiers and others watched them pass with interested looks because they carried instruments and there is not a human being on earth who does not have a favorite song, lacking only somebody to play it.

Then they heard shouting and murmuring ahead, the sound of a crowd. They came around a corner and there saw a large gathering of black people in front of a building. A sign on the building said freedman’s bureau.

“What is that?” Simon stopped.

He smelled danger. He was looking at chaos. A great crowd filled the street and the sound it made was comprised of longing and bitterness and confusion. A white man shoved his way among the crowd handing out tickets of some kind. A black woman suddenly jumped up into a wagon bed and began calling out for everyone to hand the tickets to her, and when they did she read from them, called to one person and then another, and handed the tickets out a second time. She was taking charge. She shouted for silence.

“We should go,” said Doroteo. “Who knows what is happening here?”

“I say get to the edge of town,” said Damon. “Find a place to stay and then come back in and look for work.”

They started walking west, away from the center of town, away from the crowd. They walked through an unsettled city swarming with wanderers and soldiers and the soiled doves of the streets who called to them, the smell of flooded privies, and the tall thin pines that stood over their heads like falling threads from heaven.