“Is it? Is it?”

The sheriff was now red-faced and shouting. And then, at a loss for words, he picked up Simon’s Markneukirche and lifted it over his head and slammed it against the wall. The upper and lower bouts sprang loose, the chin-piece landed on the far side of the corridor, and the strings dangled from the broken neck, still holding to the bridge.

Simon stood up in complete silence. He said nothing. The man seemed ashamed of what he had done and turned away with a thin, false laugh. He threw the neck with its dangling fiddle strings into the heap of grain sacks.

“You ain’t going to be needing no fiddle where you’re going.”

Simon was still silent. He remained silent all that night and also the next morning. The blood dried on his belly. He opened his shirt and saw that the wound was not bad, it was only skin-deep. With an expressionless face he reached through the bars for a thick crockery cup of black coffee and flour biscuits wrapped in a newspaper.

“Visiting hours from eleven to two,” said the deputy.

Simon sat down on the iron straps of the bunk with its thin cotton pad and ate and drank. The day passed in one impossible hour after another. It was cold. He turned up the collar of the black coat and shut it around himself. He heard Doris’s voice; she was arguing with the sheriff. She was going to get a lawyer, she had a right to visit the prisoner, she was going to come back with a paper written by a lawyer, and he would be forced to allow her to visit Mr. Boudlin. He heard the sheriff say that San Antonio was under military law and she could go and ask the adjutant at the Vance House if she dared, give it a try, girl.

Simon sat in a daze, listening. The voices came from the front door of the ready room of the jail, and then he didn’t hear her anymore. He sat back on the iron-strap cot. What could she know about American law, much less military law in an occupied state? Perhaps she even knew little about Irish law. Maybe the Irish had no laws, just whatever the English felt like doing at any given time. For her to come here meant that she was no longer in Colonel Webb’s house. Where had she gone, where had she run to? And himself unable to help.

He squatted down to shove the tin cup back out of the bars, on the floor. The day passed; noises from the plaza outside. A bird darted to the window and flew down into the corridor to peck at biscuit crumbs. Perhaps it had escaped from the bird sellers.

Chapter Twenty-five

That night they brought in a big man who stank of alleyways and whiskey. They shoved him into the cell with Simon. The man stood there in the dark with his back against the bars, staring at Simon in the light of the one lamp that threw long shadows down the corridor. At the far end the madman called out for the fiddler to give us a tune. “He’s the fiddle player,” the madman said. “Sweet, sweet music. I loved his tunes at the Bull’s Head. It is the Queen of Instruments.”

The big man said not one word but advanced on Simon and with a swift punch struck him on the forehead. He would have landed the blow directly on Simon’s nose except at the last second Simon saw it coming and ducked. He rolled off the cot and under it. The man got him by one leg, and dragged him out, and hit him again, in the ribs. Once, twice.

“Oh, he’s killing the fiddler,” said the madman in a small, feminine voice.

Simon got to one knee and rose up, close, inside the man’s guard, with the heels of both hands together, and smashed up on the man’s chin and at the same time took another terrible blow in his ribs. The man’s fists were like stones. He heard a wet noise. The big man was bleeding badly from the mouth. Simon reeled back and got a knee in the hip. He had been aiming for Simon’s testicles but missed, and Simon’s hip bone took the most of it.

Simon realized the man meant to kill him.

That he was here because Colonel Webb had arranged for him to be arrested, brought in. Maybe paid him.

Simon was struck twice in the face in quick succession. He managed to keep his senses and his balance and his feet, got on top of the bunk and backed into the corner. He could feel blood running out of his nose and more trickling into his eye from a knuckle-cut on the forehead. He could feel the wound on his abdomen break open again and bleed down into his pants. When the big man closed in again Simon got in two hits with his fists, then took more blows to the face. The tiny cell was a cage for men to fight to the death with no place to run, nowhere to escape, and it smelled of the man’s soiled clothes and hard whiskey breath, it smelled of the manure on his boots, while outside like a death knell the bells of San Fernando rang midnight.

The big man got hold of Simon’s belt and flung him across the cell with such force that he ripped the belt clean out of its buckle and Simon struck the bars with a noise like a gong. Another punch; Simon dropped, the man struck his fist on the bars and grunted. Then he knocked Simon to the floor. He kicked at Simon’s head but Simon managed, out of a sea of red sparks and swarming blotted blue figures, to turn to one side and took the blow on his ear. He doubled up his fists because he knew the man was going to stamp on his hands and he did, twice. Simon curled into a ball.

He lay still on the floor. Strange high harmonics sang in his head. The big man took a handful of Simon’s black coat, now glossy with blood spots, but his attention was suddenly taken by some noise at the door of the jail. A boy’s voice crying out, “Pa! Pa!”

The big man turned his head, quickly, then back again to Simon.

“Pa, what are you in for? Mama’s coming!” A boy was jumping up and down at the window in the ready room. Bounding up and down outside, his face showing in the lantern light in repeated leaps.

“Shut up, Casey!” the big man yelled. “Go home!”

The man was printing blood on the back of his hand from his bleeding mouth like terrible sickening kisses. Simon lay watching the bars of the cell arrowing up into infinity over his head, disappearing into a bloody haze.

“Nah, she’s coming! Went to yell at the sheriff! She’ll get you out!”

“Go home, you little shit!”

“What’d you do?” the boy yelled.

There was more yelling. The deputy appeared; he came down the corridor and opened the cell, jerking the big man out. The deputy’s boots were beside Simon’s head. The man ignored him. They all went away.

Time passed. The bells rang one and then two. Simon managed to turn over, put his palms against the floor, and raise himself. His belt and buckle were dangling. Then he threw up, violently, all over the floor in a spasm that made his head feel like it was being crushed. He hung there a few moments, then finally got to his feet by going hand over hand up a cell bar. He knew he was damaged, but he couldn’t tell how badly. He fell down onto the bunk. Felt the iron straps beneath the thin padding. He lay without moving.

Daylight. Noises from out in the plaza. Horses, wagons, shouts of vendors. It seemed to him that his parts were not all working. He tried to put one thought together with another in sequence. When they opened the cell door and gestured him out, he had to pause for a second when he sat up and wait until the cell stopped its strange circular perambulations. Then he stood and reached for the bars, held on to them despite the intense pain in his hands. Then he used those hands to carefully draw the broken end of his belt through the buckle. He wiped his mouth on his cuff. Then he stepped out. The sheriff clicked a set of handcuffs around his wrists. There she stood motionless down at the end of the hall, beside the desk. He was ashamed to look into her eyes with his face a mass of bloody red contusions, blood down the front of his pants, his lips swollen, and his wrists in manacles.

She stood resolutely, her face set in a kind of fierce, unmoving rage with her hands clasped in front of her. She wore the dark slate-gray jacket and skirt with a white collar and a little hat tipped like a garrison cap on her forehead. Then, her resolution gone, she suddenly put one hand over her eyes. Tears streaked down her face from under her hand.

“Oh, Simon,” she said. “Oh, Simon.”

Around her the strewn logbooks so carelessly dropped here and there, and on the wall a notice concerning rules of the jail. How prisoners were to conduct themselves. Beside Doris stood the blond spare man he had met so long ago at Fort Brown, at the surrender when he returned the white shirts. He had been a sergeant then.

“I do have precedence,” the lieutenant said. He was talking to the sheriff. Simon tried to remember what his name was. Whittaker. Jacob Whittaker. Lieutenant Jacob Whittaker. He was in uniform, his shoulder boards with one bar on them, a gold stripe down his pants legs. “We are still under military rule. That will end shortly but it has not ended at the moment.”

“Well Goddamn,” said the sheriff.