“Are you joking? They were in Confederate bonds.”

Simon’s chin drooped to his chest and he closed his eyes. He was for a moment discouraged with all of humanity’s history of dismal marital confusions—the failures, the weirdnesses, and the tangled webs. He thought of stories in the Old Testament that recalled the hot jealousies and rages of men and women from ancient times when they used bows and arrows and swords, and no one had ever heard of a railroad or a telegraph and yet somehow the stories were just like modern times today in 1867.

But Damon was going to put it right for the boy and the girl, he was going to make it right somehow. Never underestimate the obstinacy and pure stubborn mulishness of an Irish tin whistler. What other kind of person would keep trying to wring melodies from those unresonant little instruments, would make up for their shallow tones with crans, cuts, rolls, and fills? He would not quit those children. Simon glanced over at the man with his beard-shadow and his Hardee hat tilted on his head, his white cravat and unbuttoned black coat with the C and D whistles sticking out of the pocket. Damon was staring at the dirt stretching away into Main Plaza.

He said, “Good luck, Simon.”

“How soon are you going?”

“I’ll stay until I see you’re on your way. You are going to need a hand here and there. This is not going to be easy.”

Simon stood down from the wall and took up his fiddle case and held out his hand to Damon. “Thank you,” he said. They shook hands solemnly and then walked back to the Plaza House and into the kitchen for what they could find to eat while San Fernando rang out the hour of one in the morning.

Doris unhooked the tapes and stepped out of her hoops. Mercedes sat before a vanity table with a long strand of her hair between her fingers, bent over a candle. “The animal!” she said. She whisked the strand of hair through the flame. Little sparks and the smell of burning hair filled the room.

“Merci, what are you doing?” Doris calmed herself from the laughter and from thrumming nerves. She took in a long breath; her heart had been put crossways and it had not slowed down yet. She twisted the hoops into a figure eight, bent one loop into the other, and shoved them under the bed.

“This is a new thing, you burn off the split ends,” said Mercedes. She blew away the tiny bits of ashes. “Now Dori, you know you can’t stay here. We have to have a plan.”

Doris realized she was gasping but in a slow contained way. She closed her eyes, opened them again, took the gardenia from her braids, and slowly began to undo the fifteen buttons down the front of her dark green dress.

“I know,” Doris said. “I have told Simon I will be out of this house in two nights.” She put her hands to her cheeks and smiled.

Mercedes laughed with conspiratorial delight as she brushed out her hair. Now all the split ends were gone and it was glossy as velvet. She looked around Doris’s tidy small room. “Dios te bendiga, girl, at last we are going to be gone! Pack up,” she said. “We will go out the window and over the roof. You are smart to say two nights. If you left now they would be waiting. Suspicious. Let two nights go, they are lulling, peaceful. Ha ha.”

“It was Simon’s idea. We were dancing and I said yes,” Doris said. After a pause: “Simon has gone to the recorder there at city hall and has taken out our marriage license.” She gave a small grateful laugh as Mercedes’s eyes lit up. “He has a surrey and a pony.” A small hesitation and then: “The pony’s name is Tupelo.”

“You see! From the first I told you! I love to be right. I am almost always right in these things.” Mercedes got up and shook out her embroidered skirt, knocked more burnt split ends from her white blouse, and began to carefully and silently take all the clothes from Doris’s trunk. “You must repack, here. Now your jewelry goes on the bottom.”

“I don’t have any but what I’m wearing.”

“Never mind. All your music, then your underwear. You have too much underwear. Leave some with me, and I will give it a good home. Then soaps, then the white cloths.”

Doris got up and then hesitated. “We can’t get out with a trunk, Merci. I need a carpetbag.”

“Yes.” Mercedes put a forefinger to her lips. “You are right.”

“I mean, if we went out over the roof it would be like dragging a dead body.”

“Yes. And we would knock off the shingles. Shingles falling right in front of their windows, fijate. I will find one, my aunt has an old one. So let us now just lay it all out as to how it is to go in.”

And so they practiced opening the window without noise, stepped out onto the slanting roof to judge the footing, whispering, trying not to fall into nervous laughter, crying Shhh shhh! to each other. And then two hours later, when Mercedes had gone to sleep, Doris sat at a slant on an armless chair with her legs out straight under the skirt, her dress unbuttoned and the front laces of her corset dangling. Her feet rested on the heels of her shoes. A grand feeling of freedom and exhilaration like a fast run on foot down an open meadow. She would soon be gone, gone.

The house sighed with luxurious silence now that the reception and the domestic collisions were dead for the night. She must find shoes with sturdy soles, not these Balmorals with their stacked heels. She would leave the hoops, she had two days to finish sewing a linen organizer with pockets, to knit the ribs on the last pair of stockings. Her sewing was in a cloth packet called a housewife, with razor, crochet hooks, sailor’s palm, curved needles, straight needles, waxed thread, and silk embroidery thread. She remembered with a feeling of discouragement all the tools and utensils her mother had, for the fireplace and the butter and the cooking, the sewing frames. She and Simon did not even have dishes. Mary, Mother of God, you will help us with all this, I know you will.

It was going to be all right.

She would be gone into a land of roaming aboriginal creatures, with Simon, who was handsome and imperative in his desires and had the bearing of a working man, who knew music and could build a house. She wanted her life to be among working men. Her father was one and she had preferred his company above all others until she saw the fiddler standing alone in that landscape of spiny undergrowth, proud as Satan, pouring out a melody about death, about sinners. Better than the lieutenant and his account books in a stack, a good man but stuffed full of numbers like an arithmetical sausage and nary a note of music in his head. He wanted to go into law in the army, chasing down corruption by the numbers. Good. May he prosper. She would be gone at last from the Webbs and their crushed manners and the drink and their social terrors. God between herself and them. She felt as if she had shrugged off a heavy coat. In two days. Just two more days.

Simon slept in the buggy with a blanket and left his rucksack at the Plaza House for Damon to care for; his few pesos and the revolver and the ring were in it. He awoke with confused thoughts or dreams of all the human and animal figures that stood in his way, figures of immeasurable antiquity that turned to face him with a stupid, powerful menace. He got a coffee and two crisp, fresh orejas at a stall, watching for the sheriff, a sheriff’s man, Union soldiers. After tomorrow night they would go.

Up in the Plaza House’s attic, as he was dashing hot water in his face, Damon stood at the door, observing him.

“Simon, let me give you a loan of the money.”

“It’s nearly a week’s wages.” Simon wiped shaving foam from his face. “I can’t let you.”

“Let me give it to you now,” Damon persisted. He was dressed slim and black-coated and formal. “I’ll collect from Pressley.”

“Thank you, Damon, it will be all right.”

That evening at the Plaza House Simon played with speed and verve, his hat pulled down over his face. There were great trials ahead. He must now become head of a family, responsible for his well-being and hers and the thought of it made him larger, as if he had gained several inches. He could make money anywhere with his fiddle and he intended to. He stood with his feet braced and the music sailed out of him and out of his fiddle. It ran in invisible currents through the cigar smoke; he and Damon bore down on “Mississippi Sawyer” as if to destroy it measure by measure and then lifted up “La Savane” as a peacemaker. Halfway through the night they saw Pruitt lurch through the front doors.

“Hey, hey!” He stared at Simon with a fixed grin. “I can come in here if I want.”

Damon regarded him with a suspicious, alert expression but Simon was in the middle of “The Flowers of Edinburgh,” and paid him no mind. Pruitt stumbled in to sit at a table near the front. Then at the door of the saloon Simon saw Doris; her slim figure and the heart-shaped bonnet.

She waved hesitantly at him. He paused with his bow lifted.

“Doris! What?”