A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  “I know, Daddy, it’s terrible.”

  The sixteenth notes scurry after each other, Jessie seemingly unaware of the old man’s estimable presence in the room. Miss Loretta has heard this piece plagiarized in a particularly vulgar melodrama, underscoring the action as hero and villain chased each other around the stage and heroine wriggled helplessly tied across a railroad track.

  “Imbeciles!” he cries, God’s angry man. “A pack of yellow dogs! Jingo-istic, profiteering, mealy-mouthed—”

  The veins are standing out in his neck in the manner that worries her so, Daddy thwacking the rolled newspaper against his thigh to emphasize each new deprecation, and Jessie plays through it all, now politely twisting her head to acknowledge his presence, accustomed to his reports from the editorial page. Roaring Jack Butler, his few living friends call him, and his enemies too, though with an implication that he is not of right mind. That the Union prevailed in the great conflict did nothing to mitigate their opinion of him as a scalawag and heretic, and there are few of Wilmington’s great men who will meet his eye in passing.

  “—self-serving, sanctimonious—”

  “Daddy, I have a student—”

  “They want an empire!” He crushes the paper in his upraised fist, as if it is the neck of a despised fowl. “ Altruism, they say, democratic principles, they say, a helping hand to the Cuban patriot—”

  “Hypocrisy is the worst sin, Daddy, as you’ve told me a thousand—”

  “Lies! All lies! They’ll be gobbling up territories like darkies at a fish fry!” With a final, indignant thwack he stomps back into his study.

  Miss Loretta is not certain whether she is amused by his outbursts after these many years, or only relieved that she is no longer their object. His political views and his insistence on not being “run off his patch” no doubt limited her prospects for marriage when she was of a desirable age, her fate sealed by her own—acquiescence? Cowardice? A widow with an inheritance might hope for suitors at forty, but a woman never married at that same age is past consideration.

  “My apologies,” she says to Jessie, but the girl has only turned back to face the piano and execute the tumbling descent that ends the piece. It is very sweet of her, really, to choose the old-maid daughter of the city’s most eccentric landowner not only as a music instructor but as a confidant.

  “I believe I’d give anything to be your age again,” Miss Loretta muses out loud. “With a young soldier to pine for. Heartsick, yet eternally hopeful—”

  “Did you ever—?” Jessie begins, and then falters on the very last note, as if realizing she may have overstepped her position.

  “Ever what?” Miss Loretta asks her, gently. “Have I ever pined for somebody?”

  The girl lowers her eyes, does not turn to look at her. She plays simple, thoughtful chords for a moment. “Did you?”

  “Yes,” Miss Loretta says to the colored girl.

  “And—?”

  “It went a good deal beyond the pining stage, I’m afraid, but he was—unsuitable.”

  Jessie nods sympathetically, as if she understands, as if she can know anything about it. “He was poor?”

  Miss Loretta gives her a tight smile. “He was married.”

  It is evident that the girl is shocked, looking at the keys now as if they may have been suddenly rearranged.

  “Daddy attempted to shoot him on two occasions.”

  She wonders what they think of her around town, what they say about her. After little Carrie’s success at Fisk her services have been in demand, by colored and by white alike, and many of those same men who will not speak to her father are willing to pay to send their daughters into his home for lessons. A strange old bird, she imagines. A spinster eccentric whose constant and public efforts to gain suffrage are regarded as yet another deleterious effect of remaining without husband or child.

  But Jessie Lunceford is too sweet-natured to mock or condemn her, and Miss Loretta is surprised to find herself not in the least embarrassed to have shared an intimation of her deepest regret with a student. A colored girl.

  “Shall we try the Twenty-Three?”

  It is the ballade they have been working on, the one she has suggested for Jessie’s Academy audition and thus the locus of some anxiety, but today Miss Loretta only turns the pages when needed and allows her thoughts to drift on the music. The girl wears her hair in short braids that reveal the beautiful back of her neck, wears no ring on her long brown fingers, wears no disappointment, no sense of things that will never be. When she talks of her crush on the soldier and the impediment of her father’s propriety the tiniest of vertical lines appears between Jessie’s wide-set brows, her mouth turned down in the tiniest of frowns, like a seamstress concentrating to pass thread through a needle. How can anyone so untroubled understand the emotion of the music? Leland had a theory that the masters were only vessels, that the spirits of the great composers, or perhaps God Himself, was speaking through them. He would stroke her fingers, dreamily, as he spoke to her of his spiritual ideas, after they had been making love. She understands about the silences, this Jessie, understands that when there is a return the same notes will have a different feeling, a different meaning because of the thunder that has happened in between. Last week Miss Loretta heard her from the stairway, already seated and playing a strange music, slow and rambling and syncopated to the edge of sounding like a mistake. Jessie said she thought it was a rag, something she had heard from the window of a house she was forbidden to enter. “I know it’s suppose to be wicked,” she said, “but I think it’s just sweet and sad and it’s a place I like to go sometimes.” Which startled Miss Loretta to hear, precisely the way she herself has always thought of the music, not as a thing or a performance but a place, a refuge she can visit but never live in. She still plays every day—badly, but with great feeling.

  “I pride myself now on not being tragic,” says Miss Loretta out loud as the final chord sustains, then fades. “Disappointed, perhaps—but never tragic.”

  Jessie is looking at her now, unsettled. Miss Loretta gives her a rueful smile.

  “That was excellent, dear, very powerful. Let us proceed to Mr. Liszt.”

  COMMERCE

  “Here’s Soapy’s other nigger,” says Tommy Kearns as Hod walks into the Palace of Delight.

  He is used to it by now. “You got some tables?”

  “In the back.”

  A few customers are sleeping off the night’s celebration beneath the elaborate painting on the rear wall, Seven Muses in transparent wisps of gauze dancing in a sylvan glade with a thick-muscled man. Smokey has been shy of stepping in here since the night he was accused of staring at it by a cabin-crazy sourdough and nearly lynched.

  “What Jeff need tables for?”

  “He doesn’t,” says Hod, crossing toward the back room. “Ham-Grease Jimmie needs tables and he’s got a side of beef going over to the Old Vienna who are sending some empty liquor bottles to the Pantheon where they put whatever it is they mix up there into them.”

  Tommy Kearns laughs. “And somewhere along the line it ends up in Jeff’s pocket.”

  “Right now we just need the tables.”

  Smokey is waiting with the wagon in the alleyway. They are halfway loaded when they hear the whistle echoing on the sides of the channel.

  “City of Portland,” says Smokey, who is never wrong. “Made good time.”

  They quickly empty the wagon and pull it around front and join the rush down to the water. The steamer is pulled up to the Juneau Wharf, just throwing the gangplank down when they arrive. Steering is Hod’s least favorite part of the job, but Niles says he was born for it.

  A steam whistle blows and the greenhorns come down the chute and immediately men are shouting offers to them, pulling their coats and promoting their resorts, handing out cards and handbills, promising to grease the wheels on the way to paydirt and warning to watch out for their fellow touts. Hod picks out the likeliest mark, a man who pulls an e
xpensive watch out on a gold chain to check the time every few seconds and skitters over to eyeball each bit of his truck when it hits the planks.

  “This is mine,” he says to no one in particular, then hurries over to claim the next sack of meal.

  Hod waits till he has his back turned, arguing with a deck ape about being in a hurry, and begins to load the man’s goods.

  “Whoah! Whoah! Whoah! That’s mine!”

  Hod and Smokey have a heavy crate in hand. “This here?”

  “Yes!”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes!”

  They lay the crate on the ground. “Where you going with it?”

  “Over the Pass to the goldfields, goddam it, what do you think?”

  Hod rests a foot on the crate and stares at it, scratching his head.

  “How you gone get it there?”

  The mark gets a shrewd look in his eye. “You men packers?”

  “No, but we work for the Merchant Exchange. That’s who will set you up with packers.”

  “That’s where we goin,” says Smokey, “once we load up some goods offen this boat.”

  The mark narrows his eyes even more. “How much to haul my lot over there?”

  Hod shrugs, grins. “Our horny-handed sons of toil,” Niles Manigault is fond of saying, “possess more guile than is apparent.”

  “We goin there anyhow,” he says. “Don’t spose it’s no bother.”

  They pile the wagon with the mark’s whole outfit and four crates of fresh oysters Jeff Smith has promised somebody for a favor and roll up Runnalls Street to Jeff’s Merchant Exchange building which also holds the Dominion Telegraph Service where greenhorns send their messages home, five dollars for ten words, on wires that end three yards from the back door. Syd Dixon is working the store.

  “You get them oysters to the Golden North?” he says, face buried in a ledger book.

  “This fella here going over the Pass.”

  Dixon jumps to his feet, looking pale but not as shaky as some mornings.

  “You’re a lucky man, sir, to be spared the riffraff at the wharf. We are a young city, growing every day, and it is much too easy for an honest fortune-seeker like yourself to be—well—taken advantage of. You’ve already purchased the necessary equipment, I trust?”

  “I—”

  “We left it on the boardwalk out front.”

  “Capital.” Dixon makes a shooing gesture with his hand. “Now get those oysters to the hotel before they spoil.”

  The mark gives Hod a dollar coin for a tip.

  “You done all the talkin,” says Smokey when Hod offers it to him, riding back to the Palace of Delight for the tables.

  “Mr. Smith pays me to pick things up and put em down,” says Hod, laying the coin in Smokey’s lap. “I don’t want any profit from the other.”

  At least once a week he has to be the Eager Prospector, making a show at the Assay Office in front of some mark who will be inveigled to buy out from under him the worthless claim that he lacks the proper paperwork to file on. Or the Desperate Husband, forced to relinquish promising digs to join his dying wife in Kansas. Or the Assayer, approached to verify that the bar of coated lead Doc is peddling, at a severe financial loss, mind you, is indeed solid gold.

  “Men so greedy,” Jeff Smith likes to say when he has an audience gathered, “men so ignorant, such men cannot withstand the rigors of the frozen wilderness. We do them a service, skinning them down to their birthday suits before they can put their lives in peril.”

  They drop off the oysters and haul a crated player piano from the wharf to the Garden of Joy just as the winter sun drops behind the mountain and the dance halls begin to fill up. Smokey leaves Hod outside the Nugget.

  “You watch out for them womens,” he grins, and turns the nag toward the livery barn.

  The floor is shaking under the weight of heavy-footed men and brightly dressed women dancing to band music, Hod fading into a corner to watch Addie Lee work. She twirls with one clomping sourdough or another as the fiddler saws out shortened versions of Mountain Canary or Turkey in the Straw or The Irish Washerwoman at a dollar a go till the girls are breathless and suggest their partners sit out the ballad, sung by Dingle Rafferty, who during the daylight hours removes horseflops from in front of those establishments willing to pay, and there is Addie Lee drinking teawater and the sourdough a two-dollar whiskey, sitting in one of the little boxes partitioned against the north wall—

  As I trip across the Dead Horse Trail

  With an independent air

  —sings little Rafferty from atop a liquor crate next to the piano, chin lifted to the ceiling, eyes closed—

  You can hear the girls declare

  “He must be a millionaire!”

  —Hod watching from his corner as half the men crowd back to the bar for a quick one, Suds dealing out the house mixture and sloppily weighing dust on the scales and the percentage girls who are left with no partner clustering together to steady themselves on each other’s shoulders as they adjust shoes and straighten stockings and the ones in the boxes allowing just enough to keep their escorts’ pokes open—

  You can see them sigh and wish to die

  You can see them wink the other eye

  At the man who found the mother lode in Dawson!

  —Rafferty adding verses till he gets the high sign from somebody in the bar and finishing with a high, sweet, wavering note, men stomping and clapping as he hops off his box with the fiddle skreeking a lead-up to a schottische, the banjo man and tubthumper waiting till negotiations on the floor are settled before joining in and Addie Lee out being hurled around in yet another man’s paws.

  She is catching her breath near the entrance door during a waltz, Rafferty sentimentally warbling After the Ball, when Hod steps in.

  “Young McGinty.” She likes to tease him with the name, though she knows it isn’t his real one.

  “I was wondering—later—”

  Addie Lee nods. “I got one lined up already, but if you want to wait—”

  He doesn’t want to wait, but she has expenses to keep up and he is a barter client.

  “I’ll be here.”

  “All you men,” she says, giving him something like a smile. “Give a girl a big head.” And then the band swings into American Beauty and she is two-stepped away by a man with a hundred-dollar bill pasted to his sweaty forehead.

  The dancing goes on and on, Hod watching the other girls work their marks, easing away from three different fistfights, his reputation in the camp as a fighter now a liability, Rafferty’s tenor lifting higher after every drink he takes. They are still dancing, fresh prospectors replacing the ones who are too drunk or tapped out, when Addie Lee crosses back toward the bar with Ox Knudsen staggering after her like a drunken bear. The fiddler apparently knows only five songs and no one seems to care as he repeats them again and again till he is spelled by a professor who bangs out Coonville Cakewalk on the ivories, the girls rolling their eyes at each other and giggling as the men, reeking of booze and tobacco and wet wool, gallantly offer their arms to escort them in a wavering parade around the floor.

  There is no mystery where she is going with the Swede and what they’ll be up to. Hod can’t help himself and follows.

  Jeff Smith and Niles and big Arizona Charlie and skinny Billy Mizner and Tex Rickard down from Circle City are at a table playing poker and eyeing the marks. Rickard has been setting up fights for the Ox, who works as a blacksmith when he isn’t bulldogging startled prospectors in the ring.

  “Our young Apollo,” notices Niles Manigault, always paying more mind to the room than to his cards. “Mooning over his soiled dove.”

  Hod finds an empty stool and turns his back to them.

  “Make him an eggnog,” calls Charlie Meadows. It has become a source of great amusement to them all that he doesn’t drink.

  “No liquor, no tobacco,” says Niles, drawing a pair. “If it wasn’t for his fascination with the scarlet s
isterhood he’d be a model for our youth.”

  “Leave the boy alone,” says Jeff Smith. “He’s in training.”

  Rickard laughs. “What, with old Smokey?”

  “One needs to acquire the fundamentals of the science.”

  “One needs to render his opponent immediately unconscious,” says Billy Mizner, “like our Swede in there. See your twenty and call.”

  Every day when there is a break from hauling Jeff Smith’s goods around they put on what Smokey calls the pillow gloves and go at it, the negro coaching him on footwork and head movement. None of it seems natural.

  “That’s why it’s a science,” Smokey tells him, breathing hard after a session in the warehouse on Captain Moore’s wharf. “If it come natural, any one of these overgrowed plowboys be the champeen of the world.”

  He means Knudsen, of course, who has been fighting twice a week at the beer hall, taking all comers for bragging rights and side bets. He is a brawler with cannonballs for fists, known for throwing opponents bodily out of the ring and pounding them to jelly once he has them down.

  Smokey steps back and takes up the attack stance. “When they was still throwin baseballs at my head,” he says, aiming hooks at Hod’s ribs, “I’d take them balls off beforehand and go at em with a mallet, soften em up some. Thas what you do with your body hits, soften a man up.”

  Hod brings up his guard and goes up on his toes the way Smokey showed him. “I use a mallet?”

  “You fight that squarehead it best be a railroad tie. What we do now is I temp to knock you block off, and you gots to keep out the way of it.”

  Smokey comes after him then, wild and hard, and it is all Hod can do to dance and parry away from the negro inside the tiny square he has closed in with packing crates.

  “You stop movin, boy, you damn well better be throwin them fists.”

  There is a trio of busted sourdoughs next to Hod at the bar, veterans of two winters in the interior, doling out their little pouches of dust for whiskey and harmonizing to whoever is within earshot.