And his people? Simon left the bridle alone and came to stand at the low door of the surrey. He told her they had once owned a great livery stable with many horses, with fifty acres of land, but it had been burnt down in the war and the horses taken by a Confederate officer. All gone. That he stood as inheritor to a burned building and fifty acres with the fences destroyed, that he had been raised an orphan, that three generations ago his people had come from a place called Stranraer in Scotland, of which he had never heard any stories.

“Oh, but that is only across a bit of the sea from Ireland!” she said. “We are almost cousins!” She thought a moment and then said, “They are the most shameless smugglers there, and thieves.”

The driver drew his hat down over his face and stared at the ruins of the Alamo.

Simon laughed. “Well, I guess we came to America and took up honest work. And so I suppose I must say goodbye. Until next time.” Simon put on his hat, stood back when the driver lifted the reins. Touched his hat brim. But then he said, stepping forward again, “And so, your father wept when you left.”

The driver rolled his eyes and lowered the reins again. He searched in his pockets for tobacco, stuffed a pipe, and lit it.

Yes he had, he was not a man afraid to cry, and her mother beside him waving. Like the rest she crowded the stern to see her father and mother and Ireland fading away into a faint blue shadow on the sea and then gone. Her employment with the Webbs was arranged beforehand with an agent in Waterford. She had sailed to New York City and then went with the family on a far journey into the enormity of the United States, to Ohio, a city called Columbus, full of astonishing wealth, farmers owning seven, eight cows and a hundred acres, two hundred! Webb was stationed there at Camp Thomas to be the man of administration for the 18th U.S. Infantry. A man of paperwork and account books. A year and a half there and she had only begun to learn her way about and then he was sent to Texas. She herself had had a night of very fearful thoughts, visions of Red Indians and bloody scalping, but in some way it was stirring, like an old epic, and the land open, in a way it was like those large final chords that came at the end of a piece. In this country there seemed to be no grand people, no making always the diminutives at the end of every word.

And then, there Simon was at the military dinner asking what song she would like to hear, and there he was again, playing “Death and the Sinner” as they drove away.

“I remember you,” said Josephina. She stared at Simon with a cold, impersonal look. “They said you went around collecting money afterward. I remember your face.”

Simon didn’t smile but stared back. “That’s right,” he said. “You have a good memory.”

The girl said, “Oh, men find Miss Dillon very attractive, don’t they?”

Simon said nothing. The girl shrugged and sank back into her shawl. Doris and Mercedes glanced at each other because of this sudden dissonance and were unsure how to smooth it over.

The driver lifted his reins and said, “Welp . . .”

Simon quickly wished the ladies good evening, bowed, and hurried inside to collect his money and put his fiddle in the case.

He and Damon were engaged to play at seven at the Horde Hotel. He barely made it in time. Pruitt showed up with a bleeding ear dripping onto his yellow-and-purple-striped shirt. He had again been in some kind of fight in an alleyway, in a dive on San Saba Street with bad whiskey and bad lighting, sinister people. He slumped into a chair just inside the doorway with his face lowered. It chilled Simon, the way he looked upward from his light eyes.

“Get on your feet,” he called to him. “We’ve got work to do.”

Pruitt glanced behind himself at the door, at some imaginary enemy, and got up and rolled the bodhran in front of him, down the floor to the stage with expert kicks. Damon shook his head slowly, shoved out a chair, and said to him,

“Sit down, tighten up. Your drum head’s slack. Jesus.”

Simon lay that night in his attic bed up above the Plaza Hotel and a vision of open grasslands took him by force as he lay naked in the warmth, his eyes closed, drifting into sleep. The sky over these grasslands was streaked with the fire of blue lightning. Rain coming. Beasts with horns and piebald sides strolled over the world of grass with untroubled strides as if at home, as if they had each one been made there by God Himself out of red clay and shining silicate dust and had been given minds that were constructed of unknown songs telling them of every decline and every waterhole. On a planet meant for them and those who loved them. It was here that he and Doris Dillon seemed to have made a house of red stone, far away from the intrigues of cities. Far from dissonances and the chaos human beings could create in their own lives. He would wake up now every morning of the world with her beside him. The wind entered this house through the open windows, where they stood together, and it circled every room to sweep away all misery and all doubt. Her long hair lifted and fell and was resonant with harmonics like an instrument of a million strings.

Chapter Twenty-two

When she gave lessons at the Duerler home at San Pedro Springs, he was asked to come once again. It was a long walk to the north side of the city. It was a house of tall windows and white walls, Swiss landscapes in ornate frames, an old square Bechstein piano of only four octaves. He stood at her left shoulder and watched her small hands stretch to cover six notes, seven, failed on eight.

“Simon?” she said. “Are we ready then?”

“Yes, yes.”

He lifted his bow to the strings for “Beautiful Dreamer” and could barely follow it. Three or four young girls still in pigtails, including Josephina, ran screaming and laughing through the room, calling to one another while the older women sat with coffee cups and tried to follow the syrupy romantic strains of the music. The girls’ voices trailed away outside with more screams concerning the ducks of the lake waddling toward them with glittering duck eyes, intent on violence and muggery.

Simon and Doris looked around for Mrs. Webb, saw she was not within sight, and then they dared to walk off by themselves among the tall pecan trees, telling each other of their likes and dislikes, of their favorite songs, of what they did all day, what they thought of at night when they could not sleep (“You.” “You.”) and of the chaotic household of the Webbs. He held her hand, turned it over in his, saw the several small pricks of a needle in her fingertips, knew she had been sewing, wondered what.

The Duerlers had made gardens and pools alongside the springs. They walked on, down the course of the creek and the miracle of a spring-fed stream in an arid country, among tall pecan trees now leafless. Smoke drifted through the branches from a nearby charcoal-burner’s kiln. They climbed up a shoulder of limestone and down the other side. He watched while she came down sideways. He saw she wore no hoops. Good. She finally stood and beat the leaves and dirt from her hems.

“You are making yourself a traveling dress,” Simon said, and lifted the bits of thread from her sleeve. “And you are wearing patterned stockings. I like them.”

“Oh hush!” She took off her hat and batted at a droning deer fly.

“When we are married you’ll have a riding suit. We’ll have to find you a sidesaddle.”

She smiled at him and tipped her head. “Tell me, what do people do to get married in Texas?”

“What I’ve just done this morning.” He opened his coat and drew a folded paper from his shirt pocket. “They take out a marriage license at the courthouse, also known as the Bat Cave, you see here.” He held it out to her. “And it has our names on it and then we take this and go before a Justice of the Peace at first and then later we’ll figure it out about the priest.”

She took the paper and read it. “Oh my God, Simon!”

“And then we leave for the Red River Valley.”

“Simon, this is . . . well faith, you’ve . . . this is my name here!”

“I know, it’s shocking. Sudden. This was in case you still doubted me.” He bent forward and kissed her on the lips. Kissed her again.

A small hesitation and then she kissed him back, on the lips, a soft, light kiss, and laughed at herself, at her own boldness. In a way the kiss astonished him so that he was blank-faced and suspended for an instant, then placed his hand alongside her cheek, drew her to him.

She said, into his coat lapels, “It would be breaking a contract. I have another half year to go. I signed. What would happen to me?”

“He broke the contract, Doris.” Simon tried to think. The military had its own justice system he knew, but what their rules and laws were he had no idea. “Surely he has broken it, with his behavior, pursuing you, laying his hand on you, it can’t be ethical to hold you to a contract, it can’t be.”

“No, but . . .”

“Once we are married there is nothing he can do.”

He sat down on an outcropping of the sandy-colored limestone and drew her down to sit before him, between his knees. He watched the shimmering surface of the clear round spring, rested his chin on the crown of her head.

“And I will be the best man I can be within my power. You are all I want. I have not been a perfect saint. Someday I will make my confessions to you.”