Simon the Fiddler Page 44

“Just this?” Simon tried to imagine 2,000 Mexican soldiers and 187 Texans all fighting in the small chapel.

“Oh hell no, they fought all over the place. There was a big mission compound. Crockett was killed here on this spot where I’m standing. I found his coat button the other day. That’s the truth.”

“No,” said Simon and laughed. “I bet it had ‘Crockett’ written on it.”

“Yes, son, on my mother’s grave, and you can find those old .65 caliber balls everywhere. Stuck in the plaster and the mortar.”

Simon said, “So I guess Colonel Webb lives here. He commanded the 62nd Colored.”

“Hmm.” The quartermaster regarded Simon carefully: his dripping broad-brimmed hat and his boots, his rucksack and the fiddle carried there carefully jammed down and covered against the wet. “And was you with him? Now discharged?”

Simon opened his mouth and gestured with one hand as a kind of split-second delaying tactic while his mind ran with plausible and implausible lies. Saved by Damon.

“Yes,” said Damon. “Actually, to be quite frank, we were at Los Palmitos and we played for him and the officers at a dining-in after the surrender. It was a most joyous occasion. The end of all the conflict. A scratch band. A colored color sergeant played banjo. And we’ve made our way here hoping to find engagements, these unsettled times, et cetera, but music always in demand, not so?” Damon pulled his beribboned C whistle out of an inside pocket and ran through the first few measures of “Blarney Pilgrim.”

“Yes, indeed.” The quartermaster smiled as the lilting flute tune took over his mind. Then he lifted his head to stare out the chapel doors. Another freight wagon had arrived. The driver bellowed Ho! and threw the brake lever and got down. The sergeant turned back to the two musicians. “Why no, Colonel Webb has his family here, got a fine house up near North St. Mary’s, new houses on Richmond, on the river, can’t ask a family to live in that wreck.” He tipped his head toward the Long Barracks. “Me and the staff sergeant who does the accounting, we got to live there.”

“The accounting fellow?” said Simon. He wanted to know if the spare blond orderly sergeant was here. He could identify Simon as a Confederate soldier, he would remember the red-headed fiddler who had asked about the girl. “I remember him. I guess he’s come up as well.”

“Come up from where?”

“The Rio Grande?” Simon gestured toward where he thought south was. “After Los Palmitos?”

“That skinny blond fellow, yes, ain’t no numbers getting past him.”

North St. Mary’s. On the river.

They ducked out of the drizzle and into the chapel to see the remains of the great wooden doors that lay leaning against the wall. They had been the front doors of the mission and were beautifully carved but were missing two panels which had been knocked in by rifle butts. A saint stared with stone eyes from between barrels of salted pork. Where men had struggled and died under cannon fire and bayonet there were cans of beef, wrapped bundles of candles, lamp oil, horseshoes, tack, ranked tools, shelves of blankets, tarpaulins, boxes of grommets and clamps. The unending wealth of the industrial North.

They left before somebody started wondering aloud about their passes or discharge papers.

The streets were narrow and confining, following the old street pattern of the original Spanish town. Small houses of stone with long verandas stood wall to wall with adobe houses flat-roofed with protruding beams. On Commerce Street were new three-story commercial buildings of brick. The streets themselves were now a geography of red clay and mud. There seemed to be saloons and bars on every corner and in every hotel. The inhabitants of the old houses sat on the verandas and gazed in quiet and wordless alarm at all that was new and loud. But in Main Plaza and Military Plaza still the ancient rhythms of market and trading went on. Hay came in stacked high as cumulus clouds, oxen and horses and mules stood in their traces in front of Cassiano’s feed store and the long shaded fronts of the merchants’ establishments looked out on the daily market.

Simon thought he saw the woman named Mercedes; he had seen her face in the spring wagon with Doris when they left Fort Brown. He was sure he saw her at a hardware store, but then she disappeared into the crowded streets with flaunting bright skirts.

They slept for the last time with the wagoners on South Flores Street. The next morning they pulled on their good black coats and played for a Mr. Pressley in the empty Plaza House Hotel saloon. Behind them the doors were thrown wide to the cold air and the crashing, volatile scene of Main Plaza and all its vendors. They went through several jigs, reels, and two slow airs; waiters and cooks moved past them with supplies for the day.

“You need a banjo player,” said Mr. Pressley. “Those fast tunes are all right but you need a banjo.”

“We’re looking for one.”

“And a rhythm man.”

“That too.”

“You need some new songs. What do you have? Everybody’s tired of ‘Lorena’; that’s the war, that’s old. Nobody wants to hear wartime songs anymore. Don’t play ‘Hard Times’ either. Nobody wants to hear no more about hard times. “

Simon tipped his head from side to side. “There’s a new one—‘Red River Valley.’”

“Let’s hear it.”

Simon played it, sweet and slow. Damon came in on the harmony with his D whistle.

“You’re all right. Play for two dollars a night and whatever gratuities are on offer.”

Pressley was a fat, pale man with slow movements and protruding eyes. He had a very deep voice that seemed to issue from him as if it had first been cast into him from somewhere else.

“We’re going to pick up other jobs if we can get them,” said Simon.

“Let me know. You can have a room upstairs. Attic. It’s where the help stay if they ain’t got nowhere else.”

Simon said, “Yes, well then, what will you charge us?”

“Forty cents a day and found. You can eat whatever they have left over in the kitchen. There’s plenty. Cook will save you supper. Be ready to play at seven every evening by the bell.” He tipped his head toward the door and by implication at the cathedral across the square, San Fernando with its one tower and its campanile.

“We’ll be here,” said Damon. He and Simon glanced covertly at each other; hotel cooking would be the best food they had had since Banquete, even if it was what was left over.

“And also,” said Pressley, “I do magic tricks.”

Damon and Simon fell silent. After a moment Simon said,

“When do you do these magic tricks?”

“When you all get a night someplace else. Everybody just loves them, just loves them.”

They ate extravagantly that night, shoveling in the roast beef, boiled potatoes with butter, white bread, pan-fried squash, and an entire melon for dessert. Kitchen cleanup went on noisily all around them. The cook watched them eat, shook his head, and filled their plates again.

The room up in the attic had three beds and each of their legs stood in glass casters filled with some noxious liquid to keep bedbugs and insects at bay. They shoved the extra bed up against a wall and used it as a place to put their gear. Simon laid out his possessions carefully, his clothes neatly folded: coat first, shirt on top of that, then his cut-off drawers and socks, hat to one side. The Plaza House offered baths; Simon sank into hot water and nearly fell asleep. They sent their shirts to be laundered and their black coats and trousers to be cleaned with turpentine and vinegar. Simon had himself shaved and left his razor with the barber to be sharpened. He once again broke down the Dance revolver and hid it away in the rucksack; they were in a town, military everywhere, best to keep it hidden.

Then he stood at the tiny window in his old checkered homespun shirt that had come all the way from Kentucky and was apparently indestructible no matter how much abuse it took. He could see over rooftops, and here and there an occasional light shone out onto muddied streets, and to the north in the dark hills he could see a fire burning. This was the city where all the stories would come true. Fortresses stormed, princesses rescued, innocence defended, a city of bells and bright shawls and the cool Spanish courtyards beside a river.

Simon pressed his forehead against the glass, watching the rain come and go. From somewhere he heard a concertina playing a tune he did not know, and a woman’s laughter.

The next day a black waiter told them that the ladies and their maids came to the market every day for the daily shopping.

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