Simon had to save the candle wax for firing practice and so from time to time he wondered if he would go insane. He loved solitude; it was as necessary to him as music and water. He walked away from camp in the evenings when he could to spend an hour or two playing, working through the complexities of slip jigs in 9/8 time. If he played there at the regimental band tent, people came around to listen and sometimes applaud, and often they cried out for their favorite tunes. They wanted “Lorena” or some sea shanty, as if his entire duty in life was to entertain them.

So he went out alone among the saw palmetto and the carrizo cane in his shirt and vest, next to the river, where he practiced double-stopping and hokum bowing two-to-two and two-to-one, over and over. A mindless drone for anyone who came to listen. He stood straight and poised as a candle flame in a vast windless room of imagined silence. His reddish hair flew in the Gulf wind; on his face was a look of blank intensity. Every song had a secret inside. When he was away from shouting drunks and bartenders and sergeants and armies, he could think his way into the secret, note by note. “The Lost Child,” “Wayfaring Stranger.” He squinted in the low evening light at the few musical scores he possessed. He was teaching himself to read music. He played the scale on the G whistle and then some simple tunes. After an hour or so he replaced the Markneukirche in the plush lining of its case, wiped off the rosin dust, and flicked the hasps, listening for the solid click that told him his fiddle was safe inside its hard-shell case.

He knew that he did not play music so much as walk into it, as if into a palace of great riches, with rooms opening into other rooms, which opened into still other rooms, and in these rooms were courtyards and fountains with passageways to yet more mysterious spaces of melody, peculiar intervals, unheard notes.

It was there at the Confederate encampment at the ranch called Los Palmitos that Simon considered his life and how he would survive in the world to come. After the surrender, after the surrender, that time and change arriving any moment. If he were not able to play for a living, he would become restless and fall into contentiousness, ill humor; he would be sharp and impatient and inside a deep nameless distress. He sat alone and ate hoarded jerky meat, so thin it crackled. He had bought it from one of the Mexican women who crossed over holding up her skirts to sell it to him. Pretty wet brown legs. The river was very low.

His first problem was to find a girl who would fall in love with him despite his diminutive stature and his present homelessness. The right girl. He had not been a celibate; nobody growing up in the river-port town of Paducah, Kentucky, on the Ohio or playing saloons in Texas could lay claim to a life of sinless perfection, so perhaps he had no right to make demands, but the girls he had met and courted, briefly, had no comprehension of 9/8 time. They regarded him as a poor choice given his occupation as a traveling musician—always disreputable—and his stubborn, relentless dedication to his fiddle.

Never mind. After he found her, then there had to be land for sale somewhere and this would be his base and his bastion. It would be in a valley with running water and pecan groves and a surrounding of green hills. He would build her a fireplace with a waist-high hearth so she did not have to be bending over all the time at the cooking. And so he constructed an imaginary place of private loyalties and slow impeccable evenings into which he would send reels and hornpipes, furiously played. They would be for each other as much as the world was not. When life was very calm and ordered, only then could he get on with his music. Some of those invisible rooms were ones of anarchy and confusion and a person needed a quiet life to approach them.

This was not an idle fantasy. Whatever Simon determined on, he would not quit until he had it or was dead or incapacitated. Like the fiddle, for instance. It was a very good fiddle and it had cost him years of meticulous saving. People often badly misjudged him. He was, after all, only five foot five and 120 pounds and although he was twenty-three, he looked as if he had barely gotten past his fifteenth birthday. He tried to keep a firm grip on his temper by answering people quietly, to pause before replying. All those sorts of sayings that girls sewed into samplers. Lessons of life.

So the hot days of the beginning of May dragged on. The dark man, Damon, was given to quoting Edgar Allan Poe in a deep terrible voice—Resignedly beneath the sky the melancholy waters lie—and the bugler talked endlessly about his relatives in Louisiana, who all apparently did little of interest except lose their tools, get struck by lightning, and develop chronic and inscrutable diseases whose symptoms the bugler described in appalling detail.

Simon sat on his blankets in the choking dead shade of the tent and put his head in his hands, thinking, Shut up, shut up, shut up. He waited in steadfast silence for the platoon cook to start hammering at a suspended tire rim to call them to their supper, their mess plates held out like beggars for their increasingly meager fare.

Chapter Two

On the morning of May 12, 1865, when a storm arrived in banks of hard blue clouds straight out of the Gulf, Federal troops decided to row across from Brazos Island and attack them. Nobody knew why. It didn’t matter why. Simon was awakened by ear-splitting thunder and lightning, a crashing rattle of rain on the canvas. He sat up in his blankets and called out, “Who moved my hat? Who?”

Somebody had moved his good felt Kentucky hat from his rucksack to his boots. Rain pelted the cane walls of the tent, drummed on the roof. The bugler was playing “Alarm” for troops to fall out under arms, when a ball came through the canvas with a ripping whine. After several frozen seconds, they grabbed their ammunition boxes and their smoothbores and bolted out of the tent.

Two hundred and fifty Federal troops attacked across the sloppy open ground running, splashing, firing. They had come up in the night. Wind and rain tore through the encampment. The pickets had been driven in and one of them yelled, “My God they’re all niggers!” The man next to Simon was hit and went down. Somebody else grabbed him and hauled him to his feet and tried to get him to run, but then the rescuing man was hit and went down as well. The drummer hammered out “Retreat” as best he could on a wet skin.

Simon turned back at a run to get his fiddle. It was all he had against a chaotic world and the mindlessness of a losing war, against corruption, thievery, cowardice, incompetence, cactus, gunsmoke, and hominy.

An officer in Confederate butternut rode up and aimed his revolver at Simon. Rain gushed in streams from his hat brim as he stared down from his dancing, nervous horse.

“Where the hell are you going, Private?”

“My fiddle!” Simon shouted. He gripped his wet musket barrel and clenched his eyes against the rain. There was gunfire coming from everywhere. A group of men had taken shelter behind a crate of rifle balls.

“Get back to your unit or I will shoot you!”

Simon turned back and ran with the others; a scattered, shameful retreat past their own stores and wagons and horses, into the flat wastes of the Rio Grande plain in which they were all slashed by palmettos and ocotillo. He turned once with two other men and knelt in the drenched sand, loaded, rammed, and fired, then got up and ran again. He was knocked down by a loose horse, which caused him to lose the Springfield. Damon pulled him up and thrust his revolver grip-first at Simon as if it had become a liability, as if he had stolen it and wanted to be rid of it, as if it were red-hot.

“Take it.” He was hunched up against the rain. “I’m a terrible shot. You look like you’re prepared to kill people.”

“No.” Simon shoved it away. “You kill people.”

“I mean it, take the damn thing!”

So he took it.