“You did, did you? And you a surrendered rebel of no rank. A musician. Asking questions about the colonel’s personal household.” The sergeant gazed up at Simon as if he had just been offered some very interesting fact.

“That’s about the size of it.” Simon stood with both hands at his sides as if at attention because he thought that might help. He said, “I don’t know any way of sneaking up on the question.”

The sergeant carefully lined up his report papers. “You are not the first to ask.”

“Well,” said Simon. “No, I expect not.” He wondered what form of address was proper to a sergeant of the opposing forces, but since he didn’t know he just kept on. “Then, I’d just like to ask, sir, are you going to tell me or not?”

“Yes. I will.” The thin blond sergeant considered the question. He said, “She is eighteen, Irish, and she’s signed a labor contract with the colonel that legally obligates her to three years of service. It’s better than starving in Ireland. What do you think?” He leaned back in his chair with a deceptively agreeable expression.

“Yes, sir, much better, of course, an immigrant, Ireland, fortunate to get a good position . . .” Simon was trying to think and could only come up with fragments of sentences. So she was in the colonel’s power, somehow. The power of a contract, she an immigrant, away from friends or family to help. “You mean three years before she is allowed to, well, make acquaintances . . .” Simon gestured at random, finally put his hands in his pants pockets.

“Exactly. The contract, as I understand it, means no courting, no visits, no sighing over secret letters or flashing those blue eyes of hers at anybody. Any. Body. All her letters are read first by the Webbs. She is the governess and personal servant to an officer’s wife, and when young men try to present themselves for her attention we hang them. Hang. Them.” The sergeant smiled.

A brief silence. Then Simon asked, “And how many years have expired?”

“Why is this your business? You’re lucky you aren’t in manacles. Big iron ones.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s a crushing disappointment, isn’t it? Colonel Webb will take up garrison life in San Antonio as part of the occupation army. We are occupying you. May you enjoy it. Her name is Miss Doris Dillon. Great playing, by the way. Beautiful. Do you know anything by Handel, by any chance?”

Simon ran the name over and over in his mind and then said, “Not yet.”

“That’s what I like to hear. Positive thinking. You could possibly have a future in the U.S. Army. Regimental bands. Think about it. Good night.”

Simon hesitated. He wanted very much to know how much time had passed since Doris Dillon had signed this contract. He wanted to know if others had seen that dismissive shove, how to approach the subject, if in fact he had misinterpreted a random gesture. He took a breath and held up one finger. The sergeant put on his eyeglasses again and carefully hooked the earpieces around his ears.

“Get. Out.”

He picked up his quill pen and turned back to his reports.

Chapter Four

The next morning at sunrise Simon bent over a basin of water, wiping sand and dirt from his eyes. When he lifted his dripping, unshaven face he saw a little excursion wagon coming from the gate of Fort Brown, the kind that was well sprung and had side curtains, the kind that rode more comfortably than the heavier freight wagons or buckboards. In it were Webb’s wife, little Josephina, several other women, and Doris Dillon.

They were all talking and wrestling with the side curtains in a flurry of skirts and petticoats. The Irish girl sat up front beside the driver and had bent back to help with the curtains, her skirts gripped in one hand against the Gulf morning breeze. The big horse in the shafts trotted out smartly. Behind them came the freight wagons bristling with soldiery. It was a long way to San Antonio and attacks from the Lipan Apache or Comanche were not out of the question.

Simon wiped his face with his shirttail and then quickly took his fiddle from his case. Water and soapsuds ran down his neck. They were coming toward him from out of the fortress, crossing the dry resaca. He must send her a message somehow, that the song had been for her and her alone, that he wished her to remember him. He stepped forward to the side of the road, tightened his bowstring, and began to play “Death and the Sinner” without even tuning up. It was a haunting Irish slow air and he sent it out to Doris Dillon note after note, phrase after phrase, out over the river and the deafening silence of a new-made peace.

She turned, squinting out from under a heart-shaped bonnet to see the slight fiddler with his curling mop of reddish hair playing alone under the palm trees, facing her. As they passed close, she leaned out of the driver’s seat to listen, with a delighted expression on her face. She lifted her hand to him in a small, shy gesture. Somebody reached out from behind her and pulled her arm down. She turned front again and all her body told of her exasperation, but then she glanced over her shoulder at him, with a very small wave, a fugitive smile. And then they went on to San Antonio. Simon bowed his formal bow and when he lifted his head all he saw were dust and glinting trace chains and men moving slowly past to the equipment stacks.

Simon felt elated, suspended somehow. She had looked at him, waved to him; she had smiled. He sat down under the palms where he had made his small camp, and with a feeling of unmerited joy he began to put together his possessions. He considered them, and what he was to do and where he was to go on his journey to getting his land and acquiring the good regard of Miss Dillon. He had saved exactly thirty dollars in Spanish pesos over the last few years. He kept them in twists of muslin in his rucksack so they would not chink and then the twists rolled in a sock. Mexican pesos were the currency of much of the southwest and Felipe Quinto’s haughty Spanish face seemed to give them even more value. Simon was under no illusions that he would receive back pay from the Confederate Army and did not even want to ask in case he had to write his name down somewhere.

He had left Kentucky determined to buy a piece of land in Texas and somehow he would find it. Somebody would mention it, somebody would be lamenting they couldn’t sell it, but somewhere he would hear about it and it would be meant for him and the black-haired girl who was from Ireland and indentured to an uncharitable beast of a colonel for three years.

He thought, That’s just fine. She’s not promised to somebody else and that gives me time to make money and find someplace, and she can’t marry anybody else in the meanwhile. If she can avoid worse from the man.

He stood for a moment to see the crowd of surrendered Confederates packing their gear, tents coming down, the tent ropes coiled. The war was finally over. A great otherworldly hand had swept across the South and destroyed so much and what now was to happen to others he did not know, but as for himself he flew a private ensign with several imperatives written upon it, one of which concerned music.

He jammed the fiddle case in his rucksack along with the disassembled revolver, his odds and his ends. He rolled his blankets into a long tube and slung it over one shoulder, tied the ends together on the other side. It seemed strange to see the American flag floating over the walls of Fort Brown, over the end of the greatest conflict America or any country had yet endured, all her flags folded now into one. He pulled on the Kentucky hat, no longer a soldier for the Confederacy. He started to walk out of the muster area in front of Fort Brown and was quickly stopped by a Union provost marshal’s man.

“Where are you going, son?”

“Galveston,” said Simon.

“Yes, but you have to be written down for discharge and you have to have a pass.”

“Yes, sir,” said Simon. “Where do I go?”

The officer said, in a careful, patient voice, “See that line of men in Confederate uniforms? They are all waiting in front of that tent to have their names checked against the muster rolls. Then they are given a discharge paper and a pass. Go there.”

“Yes, sir.”

Simon started off for the row of slouching, patient men. As soon as the officer had his attention taken away by a nearby argument Simon ducked out behind several commissary wagons, threaded among the Yankee tents, and found the road going east toward the mouth of the Rio Grande.

Half a mile down the road he heard a noise behind him and turned quickly.

It was the Yankee drummer boy, Damon, the black sergeant, the Zouave, and the guitar player from Colonel Benavides’s regiment, who lugged his guitar in a case.

“Well, good morning you-all,” said Simon. His strongly planed face, now furred with a day’s growth of beard, lit up with a pleased expression.

“Hey hey, wait up!” the drummer boy shouted. “Where you off to?”

Simon gestured up the road. He said, “They are going to come and make you all stand in line in the hot sun here before long. As for myself, I am on my way to Galveston.”