After an hour of making their way down a street called Preston they cleared the main town. Now they trudged through an area where houses were scattered out among the pines and after another half mile they came upon a lumber yard. They stood regarding the heaps of sawdust, two-wheeled plank carts parked with both shafts down, mules in a large corral, canvas spread over the sawpit and between trees to make a shelter where workmen had settled down for the night. The smell of fresh-cut pine and meat frying.

A group of men were playing cards on a box. Damon bent to look; they were playing seven-up for a dollar a corner and five on the rubber. A fellow with sawdust all over him laid down his cards, stood up, and regarded them with a questioning look.

“We’d like to stay here the night,” said Simon. “Just bunk down somewhere.”

“Y’all got a fiddle and a guitar, I see,” said the man. “You’re good, throw your stuff under that canvas there, where the saws are. Some fiddling is always welcome.” He made an expansive welcoming gesture.

Simon shrugged out of his rucksack. “We get paid to do that,” he said. The look on his fine-drawn face was that of a kind of casual arrogance or perhaps just weariness. He pulled off his blanket roll. The man said, “Well excuse me,” and turned away. It started to rain.

Simon lay on his blankets under the tarpaulin alongside the great toothy pit saws. He listened to Damon and Doroteo talking about the merits of flour versus cornmeal—aid to digestion, salutary effects of one or the other—listened to the sound of rain battering on the canvas over their heads. Mules steadily ground corn kernels between their square heavy teeth and somebody tried to make sense of a concertina. That person started a tune and then stopped, started again, trying to find a way into the melody, off-notes, flat notes, then back again into the only phrases the player knew for sure, over and over.

Simon pressed both hands over his ears. Here they were in the wet lowlands and piney woods of mainland East Texas, the smoke of Houston, and all he wanted was to get married to that Irish lass and settle down so that he could play fiddle and live in the world of music. Why is that so hard? His worrying kept him awake. The country was in chaos, there were no rules, law was a matter of speculation, nobody knew how to buy land or put savings in a bank since there were so few banks, how to get a loan, register a title to land, or legalize a marriage, everybody was dubious about the new federal paper money, there was little mail service, and nobody seemed to know where the roads led.

Sometime in the night he fell asleep.

The next morning they went on down Preston Street and after a while it became merely a sandy dirt road cut through the pines. The road was being churned up by two-wheeled freight carts as well as buckboards and freight wagons. Buffalo Bayou wandered on to the west as well and the street or road called Preston brought them once again to its banks. There Simon found what looked like an abandoned flatboat, tied up under a dock. Simon regarded it from under his hat. He thought it would do if they could get possession of it.

They asked around. A freighter told them that the flatboat had been abandoned because the man who owned it had been arrested by the Union for selling stolen rum.

Doro stepped on board and bounced up and down on the decking; it was solid. Damon stood with his hand on his chin looking at it. “They usually bust up those flatboats for lumber,” he said.

“Yep, abandoned.” The man leaned his forearms on the wagon gunnel and said it was quite a story if you have time to listen. The coonasses had been using it to carry ammunition to Terry’s Rangers in salt hogsheads until a deckhand was shot out of the stern, sweep in hand. So the owner quit that business. He sold it to a steamboat man and that steamboat had towed the flatboat all the way from the Atchafalaya to Galveston. Then after the surrender, one of the hands bought it from the steamboat owner and stole a load of rum and come up the bayou. And there’s more.

But Simon declined to sit and listen to the story. It was starting to rain again and he thought it was possible he would never be dry and that the man would never shut up. He worried about his fiddle, he worried about the man to whom he had handed the letter to Doris getting bogged down on the roads in the fall rains.

The man had apparently not run out of story yet. The steamboat hand who owned the flatboat was arrested and taken somewhere unknown. He could have been sent to prison but there was only one prison in Texas, and that was in Huntsville, but it was a place for hardened criminals and those who had used firearms to deprive others of their goods and savings, who had shot somebody in a political argument, had chopped up other people into tiny bits, that’s the kind of people they send to Huntsville. Likely he had escaped the Yankees and run for the lawless Nueces Strip. Nobody was looking for him.

“We don’t look for him either,” said Doro, and lugged his guitar case and pack onto the deck with a decided air, and then the other two followed. So they took up residence on it. It was forty feet by twelve, it was decked, apparently had no leaks, and it had a good-sized deckhouse in the middle tall enough to stand up in, where they could get in out of the rain, which they did frequently. The deckhouse even had a table in it. They scavenged wood from the bank, had a sandbox for their hearth, dipped up bayou water in their only pot. Buffalo Bayou here was narrow and tangled with brush and thorn thickets, its roving green surface overshadowed by the pines. Every pine needle dripped, every stretch of open water was speckled with raindrops, and even at this time of year mosquitoes danced and bit.

In the deckhouse Simon found his corner and set out his possessions carefully. Damon sat pouring hot water through his whistles and Doroteo cleaned his boot welts with a stick. Simon laid out his small stock of paper, his bottle of ink, his pens, then his musical scores, his soap and razor and his hat. As the day dimmed down to evening, Doroteo set out a line of hooks over the side and Damon got up to heat more water for what remained of their coffee.

The next day they set out into the city center, if it could be called a city, and played for a couple of saloons and waterfront go-downs without getting paid, to show what they could do.

The manager of a gambling house and saloon on Fannin Street told them, “Boys, I hate to say it, but the owner here don’t want no raggedy-assed performers up in front of everybody here in this place, you know, the war’s over, everybody tired of being poor or looking like skillet-lickin’ dogs, people want to see players looking prosperous, cotton’s moving, things are better, you know, no offense. Y’all play good. People are looking for tone, you know. The owner’s looking for tone.”

They walked back to the flatboat.

“Well, kiss my ass,” said Damon.

“There’s work,” said Doro. “I can work. We can earn enough to buy soap, anyhow. Then pretty soon get fixed up and try again.” He walked along slamming one fist into the other palm, lightly, persistently, his face expressionless but his cheeks were red with a bright and angry flush. He carried his guitar case on his back. “Pendejo,” he said.

“Yeah, we need to get squared away, as they say in the maritime professions.” Damon nodded to himself.

“All right,” said Simon.

They looked for work at the loading docks and they fished for whatever they could get out of the bayou. The mosquitoes lifted from water surfaces, buzzing and hungry, and the coastal fevers kept the church bells ringing for funerals.

Simon got a job shoveling coal on a steam vessel, banging up his hands deep in a greasy engine room. He and the other coal heavers hung their shirts over the boat’s rail and went shirtless down into the hole. The others called him Moonshine, on account of his coloring and his pale skin marked by streaks of coal grime. He was not as muscled as the others—they were big men with bulky arms—but he could hold his own. He had the dense, wiry musculature of those who had worked hard from an early age; carrying buckets of feed down the fairway, helping the old man cut and stack wood, riding out the crazier horses, hefting the thick harnesses at age seven, nine, ten. He fell into the rhythm of shoveling the shattered lignite coal alongside the others for hours without a break, throwing it from the roaring chute and into the bins.