But then a life of unease and silent speechless anxiety must somehow erode the spirit when you were under the thumb of somebody who would kick a cat down the stairs. Her captive there, a guardian never speaking but what there is blame and anger out of his mouth.

He felt he was approaching San Antonio as if it were an enemy city to be taken by stealth, at its heart a young woman who had been promised to him by some unknown means. He meant to have her. He had land now and real men owned land. So it had always been. Then a dangerous feeling that he might come to think of himself as bigger than he really was, invincible, that he could in some way go back to all the mistakes his parents had fallen into, that he could make it all right.

But why should he not? He and Doris would be married as his parents never had been, they would be parents to their own children. They would not allow their house and barn to be burnt down by marauding armies. You could work like a mule and all you had could be destroyed, wrecked in a night of flames and burning horses. He shut his eyes against the memory. But this would not happen to them, not while he lived and had the Dance revolver to hand. Let me live.

The old man had been there for him when his mother took the cholera and when she died he had rocked Simon in a rocking chair for hours. The floors of their rooms behind the main barn were badly planked and the rockers made a strange rhythm of repetitive knocks. He was five or maybe six years old. He cried himself to sleep and woke up and began crying again and still the old man rocked him back and forth, back and forth, all night long and into a motherless dawn.

They called the old man Walking David to distinguish him from the many other David Alexanders in that part of the country and because in his youth he had walked all the way down from Pittsburgh to Kentucky along the Shawnee Trace and had emerged from the forest primeval somewhere east of Paducah. He was nearly without clothes, his trousers worn off to the knees and only one shirt on his back, but he carried a good Pennsylvania rifle and never spoke of the savage encounters with the Shawnee or the murderers of Cave-In-Rock or the hunger that had happened to him between here and there and said not one word about that journey and probably would not until the day he died.

In Paducah he found other Alexanders preceding him, successful in the horse business, and there he took charge of the big Paducah livery stable when his niece, Simon’s mother, Mary Beaton Alexander, was found to be with child by a traveling fiddler. It was her barn by inheritance. It had shedrows with stalls for fifty horses, twenty-five to a side, and a center roofbeam forty foot overhead. The floor and fairway were planked with squared oak logs and the haylofts could store hay for an entire winter for every horse in the barn. The harness room was a wonder to behold.

Why Henri Boudlin did not remain and marry her and become a horse lord of western Kentucky no one knew. Maybe it was the call of steam whistles on the broad Ohio, or the thought of New Orleans, or perhaps his family in Baton Rouge. Maybe he went and meant to come back. Perhaps he went down to that city and died. Simon always knew in his heart his father meant to come back with presents for his mother, for their marriage: laces and perfumed powders, yards of taffeta in the color called Alice blue.

Simon often told people his mother and father were married by a Justice of the Peace because his father was Catholic and they differed and so compromised. But this was a lie and he tired of it and soon he stopped repeating it. When people came to know that Henri Boudlin had not married his mother at all they cried in false voices, “Oh, that don’t matter!” They said, “Character matters!” But Simon in his cool withdrawn way knew it did matter. It mattered terribly.

When, at age seven or eight, he understood that his mother and father had not married his despair was bottomless and without remedy because now she was dead they could never marry and make it right. Why did he not marry her? What was wrong with her? He had fleeting, disconnected memories of his mother: pretty, charming, singing, clean hands that smelled of hard soap and her thick reddish brown hair and her earrings, black and silver drops; himself standing on a chair to help with the bread dough; her laughter. What was wrong with her? This thought tore at him and would all his life. Why was she not good enough to marry?

So in his mind, in the manner of the extravagant theatrical presentations of the day (The Bandit Lord of the Dolomites, Innocence Betrayed) his father became the rich inheritor of a great fortune, son of a Louisiana sugar baron, with a thousand slaves and five thousand acres of land, Copperbottom horses, plantation houses, and his mother the beautiful girl of the western Ohio, a wilderness child, torn from Henri Boudlin’s arms by the aristocratic fiends of Louisiana who said she was not good enough.

The old man was the only parent Simon had ever known since the age of five or six, when the rocking chair and the arms of Walking David held him relentlessly, indefatigably, faithfully, and without cease, singing If you had seen what I have seen, ye would not be so cantie-o . . . So Simon had grown up in a world of men who, however kind and patient, were not women after all, and the thought of having a woman of his own to marry and love forever made him pause in wonder. Especially one like Doris Dillon, with her blue eyes and that glimmering black hair, slender as a ramrod. His own. He felt almost avaricious, heavy with desire.

He would make everything right. This time it would be right. As the wagons lumbered on he fell to imagining that Henri Boudlin would stray into some elegant garden party where Simon was playing “La Savane” and his father would be struck speechless by his grown redhaired son, by his touch with the Queen of Instruments, and Simon would take Doris Dillon Boudlin by the elbow and say,

“Allow me to introduce my wife. I hear you never had one. I recommend it.”

Walking David had made sure Simon’s last name was duly registered in his father’s name and spelled correctly. He had put him down on the 1850 census in that name, on the county corvee muster list in that name, and finally as part owner of Alexander’s Livery in that name, but then came the war and Forrest burnt it all down and stole the horses to deny them to the Union Army. Walking David retired to MacLean’s old cabin and Simon left for Texas to escape impressment.

And now he was approaching San Antonio as one might a fortress with the intent of taking it and carrying away the princess. One had to assess the strength of the walls, the occupational habits of the princess, one had to understand the cunning or the stupidity of her captors.

The wagons crawled up the San Antonio River trail toward the hill country, slowly, slowly, going inland where the earth rose with every mile and the rain came at them in segmented clouds like a building surf. Simon helped pull out the wagon covers into awnings and on his face was a look of provisional happiness, quick jokes flying back and forth between him and Damon, and they heard overhead the chirring clatter of the sandhill cranes as they made their way south to some unknown place along the Gulf Coast with the late sun glittering on the undersides of their wings. One night he at last heard the haunting melody of “Red River Valley.” One of the freighters stood to sing it before the fire. He had a good voice and was clearly much in demand. Someone played a mandolin to accompany him and Damon tried out both his whistles and finally found the key. The freighter had, by ear, opted for the key of C, which suited his low voice.

“I know it,” said Damon. “It’s called ‘The Bright Mohawk Valley,’ the one that I know.”

Simon turned back to the wagon and got out his fiddle, and he and Damon nodded to each other and Simon launched into the tune. The freighter stopped singing, waiting for them to find the notes.

“Go on, go on,” said Simon. So the man started up again and in a short time they had all found their way into the melody and the man’s strong voice blended well with the fiddle. Come and sit by my side if you love me . . . It was a cavalry song, a freighter’s song, drifting low and sad like the wind in the branches overhead. It had many verses and it was late before they quit playing.

Chapter Nineteen

The river had made its way down the elevations from San Antonio in a series of easy falls. The teamsters said that town sat at the foot of the hill country and you could see the sawtooth rim of the hills behind it. All the rivers came down from there. The Medina, the Guadalupe, the Colorado, the Brazos, the Nueces, and the Trinity, sliding down southeastward to the Gulf. In the summertime it was cool up there in the hill country, they said, but dangerous because of the Red Indians, who ruled the earth and all that walked up and down upon it.