Damon kicked a chair between them but Simon didn’t move except to blink. His face had gone pale and his lips were white.

Then Webb turned and stalked out of the empty ballroom; in one corner was a ribboned flower from somebody’s hair, a forgotten handkerchief lay on a chair, a teacup had fallen and broken in a white scatter of porcelain. “Goddamn you,” Webb shouted, and as he went he suddenly picked up one of the silver sugar bowls and threw it across the room and sugar cubes skittered all over the dance floor. The silver sugar bowl struck a windowpane and broke it. Then it rolled with a ringing sound to the wall.

Chapter Twenty-four

Simon knew he had to get her out of there as soon as possible. The mark of the blow stood out red on his cheek. He walked with wild thoughts streaming like a rapids through his mind on this night of broken teacups and shouting, this night of waltzes. When they were on the street he told Pruitt that he was no longer needed, to find employment where he could. Some hard words flew back and forth, but in the end Pruitt slouched away toward the little bridge over the San Antonio River, thumping the bodhran in one hand, and disappeared into the confusion of the Irish Flats behind the Alamo. After that, Simon was too angry to speak.

They went on toward the bridge on Fourth Street, toward Losoya. Damon walked beside Simon, running through melodies on his D whistle; waltzes. He poured them out into the dark city. He kept a prudent silence.

Beside a shoe repair shop on Commerce he said, “Simon, don’t come back to the hotel. Find some other place to sleep. Stay out of sight until you two leave in . . .”

“Two nights.”

“He’s going to go for you one way or the other. I mean worse than beating on you with money. What you want to do is abscond.”

Simon kept walking. “All right. I’ll sleep in the buggy at Cassiano’s. I owe about twenty-four dollars and fifty cents on the harness. I’ll earn it in the next two nights at the Plaza House.”

“No, don’t.”

“I have to. I have to pay what I owe. I will not run out of San Antonio owing money. And, of course, tonight we apparently worked for free.”

Damon blew out a long breath. “Cheap son of a bitch. Very well, nothing is going to change your mind, I see.”

They walked on in silence and finally they came into Main Plaza on the narrow little street called Dolorosa. The walls of the cathedral loomed on the other side. Damon said,

“And so, Simon, I will be on my way to Nacogdoches.”

Simon’s face changed. Sadness, maybe a kind of hurt at what was inevitable. They walked out of the narrow way toward the cathedral. The lights of the Plaza House shone out onto the wooden sidewalk and the dirt, the wheel tracks. Scattered bits of hay told of the hay market held there earlier in the afternoon, all gone now.

Simon stopped. “All right,” he said. “Let’s sit on the wall for a bit.”

Around the cathedral there was a low wall enclosing the camposanto where San Antonio’s proud old Spanish founders were buried: the Leales, the Bethancourts, Curbelos, Arochas. Their lacy cast-iron crosses surrounded the walk leading to the doors. Simon and Damon sat on the wall, both of them a little shaken by the near fight at the Webb house. Simon had come close to breaking his promise, breaking it into a thousand pieces. He laid his fiddle case on top of the wall beside him.

Simon said, “Well then.” He stared at his boots while Damon rolled two cigarillos in newspaper and handed him one, lit both of them with a lucifer. They stared out at Main Plaza’s dirt and litter, and low clouds raced over the campanile, the roofs of the town. Shouting and laughter from the saloons. Doors and windows here and there shone in squares of faint yellow candlelight.

“So tell me,” said Simon.

“Yes,” said Damon. “I have unfinished business there.” He smoked. “I figured you were not going to wait it out for her contract to expire. I was thinking about it coming up on the freight wagons. And I thought, Well, time to go back and straighten things out. Back to the tall pine country.” They watched a man stagger out of the Plaza front doors. He was silently drunken and deeply concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. He managed to disappear up Soledad, past the Veramendi House and on into darkness in total silence. “I saw what Webb did. He was crowding her close, grabbing her arm. I saw she was afraid of him. I saw the old lady’s face. Mrs. Colonel has been through this before. This ain’t her first dog fight.”

Simon flicked sparks and ashes onto a grave. After a moment he said, “Tell me about Nacogdoches.”

“I need to go there and get my children back.”

Simon lifted his eyebrows in surprise but remained silent, listening.

“I was a teacher there at that little university in Nacogdoches. I came down from Little Rock. Raised in Little Rock. Taught poetry, of course. Met a young widow—twenty years old with two children. Babies. Her husband was cutting down pine and had a tree kick back on him. He was a Hollis. That was their name, family name Hollis. Fairly well off people there in Nacogdoches. Got married. So then after two years she up and left me.”

Damon sucked on the cigarillo and fought through his difficulty in speaking.

“Strange woman. Said she wanted to be a fortune teller. She drank quite a lot. Laudanum too. Left with a group of people who wore various peculiar combinations of colors. Left me with the two small children. I loved them.” At this his voice broke and he vigorously cleared his throat. “They were my own. Since babies.” Once again he had to clear his throat. “Well. We made a little household, the three of us. Sammy and Rachel and me. Rachel was five and so serious about being the little mother of the house. I had a ring made for her keys and tied a ribbon to it and she went around locking and unlocking everything that had a lock on it. So proud. Played whistle for them evenings. Fireplace, sleepy children, ‘The Lonesome Boatman.’” He paused. “Then they took the university building for a hospital. Confederate. I was out of work. Old man Hollis came and said he was taking the children. Said I was no relation and no job into the bargain. Said I was going to be conscripted anyway. That they were his blood kin, the grandparents. He had got a lawyer, had a ruling in their favor. We never did get along. He never did want her to remarry. The whole family was strange.”

Simon waited and after a long silence he said, “And so he took them.”

“Yes. A scene—crying, screaming, Rachel leaning out of the carriage calling to me, the sheriff riding alongside on a horse with four white legs.” Damon looked up at the star-filled sky as if for some relief from the scene running through his head. “Bats,” he said. “Belfries.” They heard not only the whisper of bat wings but the long throaty groan of a nightjar. Damon said, “And so the next day I went to the sheriff’s office. Tried to reason with him. He says, ‘Hollis is my brother-in-law, he knows what’s best for those children.’ I said, ‘I am legally their father.’ Didn’t matter, the judge had ruled in his favor. He says, ‘You can go before the judge if you like and plead your case.’ I said all right, by God, I will. He kicks back in his chair and hollers up the stairs, ‘Verna! Bring me my robes!’”

Simon snorted out smoke, trying to contain his laughter. A bitter laughter. Then he took a deep breath through his nose and said, “So much for that.”

“So much for that. At any rate, I went looking for money for a lawyer. Had some investments in New Orleans and there, amid the hustle and bustle of an occupying army, I got conscripted into the damnable Yankee ironclad navy. They needed hands. I was walking down the waterfront. ‘Deep in the heart whose hope has died . . .’ Shoveling coal is in some way an antidote to hearts crushed by onrushing events. However. The captain was a lunatic, wanted speed, speed—he had us push that boiler to a hundred percent overload and then they hung a weight on the safety valve. Got away from them in Indianola—often referred to as desertion—jumped overboard—and then was snatched up by Colonel Rip Ford of the dauntless Confederate Army of the West, horsed and unhorsed. Shoved into the regimental band. Then you appeared with your fiddle in that stinking hot tent. And so. They are my children. Their names are Lessing, legally. Children need fathers. I am their father. I will go back and somehow get them back.”

After a moment Simon said, “Well. Damon. I never knew.”

“I never said anything.”

“You don’t have a discharge then, from either one.”

“I do not. Probably on a list somewhere as a deserter. Yankees, I mean.”

“Will you go back to teaching?”

“Not unless I can prove I was never with the Confederate Army, and in the course of attempting that, it’s possible they could find out I deserted from the Yankees. Former Confederates are now not allowed to teach anyway. Or do much else, really.”

“What about your investments?”