He instantly sat down with pen and paper. Calm down, he told himself. Tell her the funny happenings, like “we are living on a flatboat surrounded by alligators.” They may end up taking her letters from her. So he skimmed over the alarming news about Webb’s behavior at Palmitos, his forbidding her letters at all. He would find a way to get letters to her. Then he wrote of the tunes and songs they played and where they came from. He wrote of his intention to buy land far from the cities and the coast, where fevers seemed to rise out of the wet ground. He described a particularly fuzzy waggoner’s dog that wore a leather collar with a bell and could sit up and beg, looking very like a person. He told her of his first sight of her and remembered her dark blue eyes. He wished the colonel in the hot place and dancing in everlasting flames.

She would certainly see him. He wrote of his concern for her well-being and his true and faithful friendship, that thoughts of her had made pleasant many long hours of work in various establishments, and that every slow air he played brought her face to him and the graces of her letters had brought a desire to be with her. If she would but give some indication that his presence would be welcome he would journey to San Antonio. How he hoped she would receive this letter in the spirit it was meant, that of friendship, concern, loyalty, and a desire to make her laugh. He had seen her laughing. He wished to do so again. I remain yours in steadfast friendship, Simon Boudlin.

“You need to suborn the maid,” said Damon. “That’s what they do in all the plays.” Damon picked at the keys of a soot-stained upright piano in the dim tobacco fog of the Jolly Tar saloon while the rain roared down outside in the most aggressive way. The melody sounded like that dismal piece called “The Old Oaken Bucket.” They had come early to rehearse and the place was mostly empty. “The theater as a guide to life.”

“Suborn?”

“Of course. That means bribe. The maids run messages for languishing swains. It was done in Lorena and the Brigand of Algiers and Shakespeare and all of them that imitate Shakespeare. Find the maid, cross her palm with silver.”

“And she does what?” Simon hovered anxiously at his elbow.

“She delivers messages, provides comic relief with lighthearted songs in dialect, helps you to get around the dragons that guard the princess—the cruel wife, who spies on her, the angry upstanding senatorial father who roars and threatens.”

So this was a way to answer her, through Mercedes. Her misery and unhappiness were there in every sentence. He felt like tearing his hair. Where could she go, what could she do about it? She was in a strange country she knew little about and was legally bound for some unknown number of years to a man who was a blowhard and a coward and who was reading every one of these letters.

Simon didn’t want any trouble with authorities like Webb, he wanted a clean clear road in front of him and her with him. He addressed the envelope to Se?ora Mercedes Bethancourt and for a return address he drew a stave and on this stave the first ten notes of “The Minstrel Boy.” Then he gave it over to a man going to San Antonio aboard a dark, stout mare, a man whose saddlebags were full of letters and business correspondence so that he might well have called himself a mailman. To him Simon handed the letter and fifty cents and hope and an unanswerable desire.

May 9th . . . Dear Simon, I must tell you that Mercedes slipped the letter into my basket of sewing scraps. Then several quick measures with answering notes from “Slieve Na Mawn,” she wasn’t sure how to spell it. She is indeed a friend. And so, Simon, you see that I am dependent on the novel John Halifax, Gentleman for intelligent conversation although the main character is a stuffed English shirt and I am dependent also on Mercedes for news of you. How grateful I am that you write of a fight in a drinking place, since it has enlivened my entire week, but take care for someday when I see you, no matter what happens to either you or me, I wish to see you with two good eyes and an unbroken nose. Jesus, Mary, and the Wayne! You should have seen me laughing.

The clerk at MacHinney’s now reached up to a certain shelf the moment he saw Simon walk in the door, his appearance much improved since he was often in his performing coat and shirt, still smoky from a night’s playing.

May 16th. Doris, dear friend. If you found that amusing I have many more but will wait until I see you. I will fill your hours with comical tales of how we nearly perished of thirst sailing up the coast after Palmitos, and do you know what a raccoon is? Let me describe the one that ran off with Doroteo’s socks . . .

May 30th. Dear Simon, having received your last I must ask why did this raccoon animal want Doroteo’s socks? . . .

June 10th . . . They are depraved, my dear Doris, and I wish them all in perdition. May I visit? Should I prepare for a trip to San Antonio? . . .

June 22nd . . . I am at sixes and sevens with this family, Simon. Mrs. Webb is slothful so I manage the house myself entirely which is interesting and I have learned to drive the trap and pony, but I am only one and they are three, they seem to make trouble enough for a fully staffed madhouse . . . remember I have signed a legal contract . . .

July 15th . . . Read over your contract, Miss Dillon, if you would, and you might even take it to somebody with knowledge of the law although for now with Texas under occupation and the old state constitution suspended, I have heard, we don’t know what contracts can be honored, it is all confusion. But I am but a mere fiddler and not acquainted with the law. Better I should tell you about the score I bought yesterday of “Beautiful Dreamer” and which now has Doro’s tobacco crumbs all over it and Damon trying to call a crane with his whistle, making crane noises . . .

Early August: a tropical storm had been born in the Gulf and it had traveled to Houston, gaining strength as it came. They stood out in it and soaped up, flinging spray. Then he and Doroteo and Damon lay up in the deckhouse, Doroteo carefully pulling apart his tuning pegs and sanding down the peg ends. Simon dried his hair with his old checkered shirt and then sat down to reread Doris’s last letter. Damon had brought home half a bottle and now, clean and fresh from a rainwater shower, lay asleep in his drawers. They were hungry but they had not yet decided on how to cook the cut of beef Doro had splurged on with his tips from the Bayou Belle. It was a section of loin from the butcher’s on Fannin Street.

“Let’s get out of here,” Doro said. He began to restring the double-aught. It had inlaid designs around the edge made of mother-of-pearl and ebony and the patterns glistened in the candlelight.

“That’s what I’m thinking,” said Simon. He folded the letter carefully and put it in the fiddle case. The case was heavy with nearly seventy-five dollars in banknotes and silver; money for the property up on the Red. He took up the tenderloin in both hands.

“Sear that first. Then you must scatter the fire a little, not so hot, then put it on.”

Simon did so; he seared it and then raked most of the fire to one side and put it on a rack over the glowing coals. Pale smoke rolled up and flowed out from under the awning even as rain poured down from every edge. Simon came back into the shelter and wiped his hands on a rag. “It’s yellow feverish here. I heard of three cases now in just the past four days. And the provost marshal has got our descriptions written down.”

“I’m thinking about this. He can find my name on Colonel Benavides’s muster rolls if he was look.”

“Did you get a discharge?”

“Yes. But that proves more trouble. I threw it away from me. So I can say ‘Hey, I am just Messcan. Donkey, big hat, serape, I don’t espeak English.”

Simon pinched the top of his nose between thumb and middle finger and leaned his head on that hand. “Yes. Let’s get out of here. I am going to San Antonio as soon as I have a hundred and fifty dollars.”

“In the meantime where to?” Doroteo rolled two cigarettes in newspaper and handed one to Simon. They lit up from the candle and filled the deckhouse with tobacco smoke. “As for me I think Brownsville but they are going to want songs more Mexicano, bailes, dancing.”

“Also it’s going to be full of Yankee soldiers,” said Simon. “They’re going to want passes, there ain’t no way around it. They also will have Benavides’s muster rolls.”