by John Sayles
“That come after. They really made Joe a police?”
“We got six or seven that’s police. We movin up here, Clarence.”
“Coop.”
Alma smiles. “You done flew the coop, I expect.”
“Didn’t stop to look behind me till I cross that state line. And then the Army, they don’t expect no papers from a black man. They likely a good number of men I barracks with who don’t go by the name their mama call em.”
“You look real nice.”
Alma was sweet when she wasn’t worried about her people watching over her, had those dimples at the sides of her mouth when she smiled and never scolded too much if a man needed a loan to tide him over. They’d been tight as twine before Wilmington got too hot for him to stay in.
“How bout you step into the carriage house with me, we get back where we left off?”
“Wicklow be out there.”
“They aint put him to pasture yet?”
“Besides, they gonna need me, with company and all—”
“We only here till they service the transport, Alma. Aint nobody staying over.”
Alma looks back into the house, calculating. “I was spose to be home by now.”
“Tell them your sister took sick.”
“Reesha moved on to Charlotte, got married.”
Alma’s sister has a wall-eye and sour disposition. Coop holds his tongue.
“I might could just ask if they need anything else—”
“We spose to get back to the station by ten o’clock,” says Coop, catching her eye and holding it. “I been thinking about you all the way from Montana.”
“That’s where you been?”
“Fort Missoula. Girl, they got some winter there—snow come right up under my arms.”
Coop is a medium-tall man, dark skinned, his arms thick from years of wrestling barrels up a gangway.
“I lay up in that cot with the wind screaming past,” he keeps on, “and who you think I’m missing? Who you think I wants to have there under that blanket?”
Some of them you can’t be too nice with, they get spoiled by the sugar and start acting wifey, but Alma is a regular gal. He has thought of her, it is true enough, thought of her nights in the stink of the turp camp, thought of her in the long tramp up north, thought of her in the barracks when the others are snoring and only him and the coyotes are still twitching. Thought bout Alma and Lavinia and Inez Brown and Maude Bledsoe who is married to that railroad man and the little one with the spaces between her teeth he took up with in Greensboro before they caught him coaxing somebody else’s mule out of somebody else’s barn. He’s always had a way with animals, which was why Tillis took him on in the first place. But that one knock-kneed, yellow-eye son of a bitch had the devil in him. Hind legs squatting down, dug in and staring at him, a look in his eye that say “Your time is up, nigger.”
After the little trial the owner say that mule so ornery he wish somebody would steal it. Then they give him more years than he ever expect to live and send him into the pines with an iron ball tween his legs.
“Train pull up in that station,” says Coop, leaning in tight, “I head straight for my Alma.”
She looks over his shoulder to the carriage house. “Light’s out now. Maybe Wicklow gone home.”
“I wait for you there, sweet girl.”
Alma touches his face with her hand. None of the ones who live outside the fort would ever do that, maybe not even if you paid them.
“I’ll look in on my people,” says Alma, “and get out there when I can.”
Miss Dolly St. Claire appears stage right in a spot, the light dimming on the minstrels behind her. Harry helped put the overhead lighting in here, devising a control box that can be operated from the back of the theater, and is gratified to see it put to use.
The soubrette strolls beneath a parasol in a ruffled lavender dress, a bowler-sporting dandy on her arm, singing in a coy, lilting voice—
Take it back, take it back, take it back, Jack
For gold can never buy me
“Maybe she’s a Silverite,” quips Niles, cocking his head to appraise her the way he does with new women. Niles is two years younger and has always been the brash one, the one who says what’s on his mind and leaps before he looks. A large sum of money went missing from the Judge’s safe the day he disappeared without a word, and it was two months before the letter arrived from San Francisco explaining how he was on the treasure quest and meant only to save the Judge the bother of sending him his monthly stipend for the next two years, taking it in advance.
Take it back, take it back, take it back
Promise you’ll be true
“I’d promise her anything to get to Heaven.” Niles fingers his moustache, cocks his head the other way. Harry thinks the prospecting trip was less a bid for fortune than the consequence of Niles’s sudden breaking of engagement with Mae Dupree and her father’s vow to “horsewhip the scoundrel.” Mae is married now, to a Lassiter, and all that has settled down.
Many of the audience join in on the chorus—
So take it back, take it back, take it back, Jack
Take back your gold!
It is the dandy’s turn then, a round-shouldered tenor in a light blue suit, wearing a red carnation in his lapel, neither young nor old. The voice that comes from him, though, is like a separate thing, like a beautiful soaring bird—
A little maiden climbed an old man’s knees
Begged for a story: “Do, Uncle, please.
Why are you single, why live alone?
Have you no babies, have you no home?”
Mae had been Harry’s first, at least in his heart. He had spent many a night extolling her virtues to his younger brother, asking his advice in matters of strategy, planning how to begin his campaign to win her heart. “It just happened,” Niles told him after the first time he’d seen them walking together at Lake Waccamaw. “Of course if you want me to back away, old boy, and give you a clear field—”
It was exactly what he wanted, but then he was cross with Mae for preferring Niles and pretended not to care and then miserably resigned himself to their engagement. And when he went to her house after his brother’s abandonment, hoping perhaps to make his own desires known, she had refused to see him.
That’s why I’m lonely, no home at all—
I broke her heart, pet—after the ball
He resolved to cold-shoulder his brother on his less than triumphant return, but Niles was deathly pale, coughing like a consumptive, his plucky grin so innocent of malice, his exaggerations so childlike, that they were immediately fast friends again. If Harry envies anything it is not his brother’s looks or that he was born with normal legs or even his dalliance with Mae Dupree, but the sheer adventure Niles has experienced at so young an age, traveling up north and out west and to the frozen Yukon while Harry has barely been out of the state. That, he hopes, is about to change.
Harry joins in the chorus with half the audience—
After the ball is over, after the break of morn
After the dancers’ leaving, after the stars are gone
Many a heart is aching, if you could read them all
Many the hopes that have vanished—after the ball!
A pair of Hibernians in green checked suits enter now, the orchestra playing The Irish Washerwoman as Pat hauls Mike out in a wheelbarrow, both wearing baldpates and flaming red muttonchops. Pat stumbles and dumps Mike in a heap at center stage.
“Ye clumsy Oirish fool, ye’ve broken me neck!”
“And how can ye tell, Mike?”
“Just lookit it!” Mike stands, his head canted sharply off to the left. “I can’t put it sthraight atall.”
WHOMP! Pat gives him a wallop with his fist that snaps Mike’s head all the way around to the right.
“Now it’s stuck on the ither side—”
WHOMP! The cymbalist joins the pit drummer as Pat throws another haymaker, this one knocking Mike’s hea
d straight. He wiggles his jaw, checks his nose.
“Ye sh’d be a physician, Pat—ye’ve got a mother’s touch.”
“Did she bate ye, the auld woman?”
“Only when she could catch me, Pat. Ah, but she was a lovely woman—she passed into a better world just the other night.”
“Me condolences, Mike. Did she say anything before she died?”
“Say anything? She nivver shut her trap fer sixty years!”
The drummer cracks the rim of his snare.
“I hate to tap you again, old man,” says Niles without turning his head to Harry, “but I’m afraid that once more I’ve been caught short.”
Harry has managed to save most of his monthly stipend, left from their mother’s estate, while Niles was squandering his own “advance” in the Frozen North.
“You’re not gambling again?”
Niles flashes his dazzling smile, spreads his hands. “Life. Expenses. I am not the paragon of thrift that my dear brother is—what can I say?”
“I had to send me brother Frank a tellygram to give him the hard tidins. Did ye know they charge ye a nickel a word now? A long-winded feller could cost himself a great deal of the auld spondoolacs.”
“And what did ye say?”
“Ma’s dead.”
“That’s it? Yer only livin mother who worked her poor fingers to the nub to provide fer ye, gone to her reward, may the good Lord bless her soul, and all ye can say is ‘Ma’s dead’?”
“The very thing the tellygraph feller sez. ‘See here,’ he sez, ‘a mother’s got a right to a proper hewlogy. I’ll give ye three more words, gratis.’ ”
“Gratis, is it?”
“That’s Latin fer ye don’t have to pay.”
“I know what it manes, ye great flamin eejit. What did ye add to yer tellygram?”
“Ma’s dead. Bed fer sale.”
A big thunk on the bass drum as Pat gives Mike a roundhouse smack, Mike rolling backward and springing up on his feet to join Pat, singing and jigging as the orchestra backs them with the tune—
Mrs. Murphy had a party
Just about a week ago
Everything was plentiful
The Murphys they’re not slow
“What do you say, Brother?” Niles continues hopefully, turning to Harry and looking especially repentant. “You know what a hopeless case I am with finances.”
Harry decides to make him work for it a little. “How much?”
“Whatever you can spare.”
“Have you talked to the Judge?”
Niles shakes his head, grinning. “No blood coming out of that stone.”
The bicycle shop has been doing well for him the last few years, word that he’s a wizard with a wheel spreading beyond the city, and he’s put quite a pile aside. But Niles—he’s seen Niles throw away a twenty-dollar double eagle on a single roll of the dice, throw away more in one sitting than the wheel shop takes in for a month.
“I could part with ten,” says Harry.
Niles makes a pained face.
Harry knows that there is no way to gauge what his own expenses will be if he really makes the break and goes up north, how long it might take to get himself situated. He tries to hold firm.
“Ten dollars,” he says, “if you promise to pay me back on the first.”
Mc Ginty he got roaring drunk
His eyes were bulging out
He jumped on the pianer
And loudly he did shout—
Niles has never paid him back a dime, not on any of the loans over the years, so it is as good as gone. The sky, he knows, is not the limit for Niles. His brother crosses his arms and stares darkly at the stage, sulking.
“Who put the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder?”
Nobody answered, so he shouted all the louder
“It’s an Oirish trick it’s true
And I’ll lick the Mick that threw
The overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder!”
“Like our Board of Aldermen,” grumbles Niles, “but with more dignity.” Before he broke off with Mae, Niles had considered a career in politics.
“Most men step into public life from another profession,” the Judge observed when this design was revealed, “with allegiances and rivalries already forged in the world at large. Since you are as yet—innocent of employment,” and here he raised his eyebrows the way he does when lecturing a convicted man from the bench, “you will be free to defraud the citizenry without encumbrance.”
The lights rise again on the minstrels.
“Brother Tambo!” calls the Interlocutor. “Explain to me why you were tardy for tonight’s presentation.”
“Well, suh,” explains the tambourine man, “I’s on my way here when I’s accosted by a whole mess a young boys.”
“Ruffians.”
“Little bitty ones. They was wearin sho’t pants.”
“You mean knickers?”
“Nawsuh, they was white boys.”
This one earns the biggest laugh of the night. Harry looks back up to the left rear balcony and they are laughing too, mostly sports out on the town for the night, a few with their hats still on their heads. He has been to tent shows where the numbers have been reversed, five colored to every white man, but those were with real colored on the stage. It was Niles who dragged him to his first nigger show at the Thalian, sneaking in late and staying in the back in hopes they would not be spotted and reported to the Judge. In the afterpiece one of the actors descended from the ceiling wearing angel wings and Harry had been more fascinated with that, with the mechanics of how it was done, than with any of the jokes or songs or travesties played out on the boards.
“Brother Tambo, how would you like to earn a dollar?”
The end man’s eyes bug out even more. “Is it ’lection day awready?”
Righteous applause from the fair-skinned patrons. The sports in Nigger Heaven are not amused.
There is furniture in the room Royal doesn’t have a name for. He has never been in a white man’s house, rich or poor, but his mother is in them now and then to take the laundry and he has read books. Is that a divan or a credenza? Or maybe a credenza is a kind of piano, like the one Jessie is resting her hand upon, smiling slightly, standing in her white dress like somebody is painting her portrait.
“We’ve been the first called, I believe,” says Junior, “because they think we’re immune.”
“Immune to what?”
Dr. Lunceford is the most intimidating man Royal has ever met, black or white, despite his soft tone and his manners. Sergeant Jacks with his forehead resting on your own, screaming instruction and insult, breath hot on your face, has got nothing compared to this man’s gaze. Why, exactly, are you in my house? it asks when he smiles and grips your hand. You don’t really belong here, do you? it suggests as he inquires about your training and destination.
“To tropical diseases,” says Junior.
“That’s nonsense.”
“A prejudice perhaps, but one that works in our favor. This is a grand opportunity. Fighting for the flag, shoulder to shoulder with our white brothers in arms, freeing the oppressed Cuban from his bondage—”
“You really think it will happen?”
“A foregone conclusion. The explosion in the harbor—”
Dr. Lunceford turns to Royal. “And what do you think?”
Royal is surprised by the sudden question. He glances to Junior, who smiles and nods to him to get on with it.
“I enlisted to follow the flag, sir.” He can’t quite see Jessie out of the corner of his eye. “If hostilities commence—China, Cuba, the red men straying from their agencies—we will do our duty.”
“People look up to the man in uniform,” says Junior. Junior has told him of the Doctor’s disapproval of his enlistment, shown him the letters full of underlined words. “If we are to take our rightful position in this nation, we must be ready to defend it.”
“As a private in the infantry.”
“You used to call it Mr. Lincoln’s Army.”
They are all still standing, all but Mrs. Lunceford, who sits in her chair by the silk-covered whatever it is called, a pleasant smile on her face.
“I think he looks splendid, Aaron,” she says. “We should be proud.”
“Mr. Lincoln,” the Doctor continues, seeming to ignore her, “gone these many years, turned to colored troops only as a desperate measure.”
Alma Moultrie steps in with a tray bearing wine and glasses, lays them on a small table that probably has a special name too.
“They both look splendid.”
Royal turns to smile at Mrs. Lunceford and sees that Jessie is looking at him, an unwavering gaze much like her father’s, but there is no challenge in it. Only what—? Admiration? He feels her in the room even when he can’t see her.
“We’re regulars, sir,” he says. “Professional soldiers. If war is declared, the volunteers, whoever they are, will have to wait their turn.”
“So you’re spoiling for a fight?” Again the gaze, challenging, unblinking. And what have you to do with my son’s reckless decision, young man?
“If a fight presents itself, we’ve been trained to handle it.”
The others, the veterans, give the rookies no end of razzing about how green they are, about their lack of experience, their lack of the true stuff, how they will turn tail and run at the first angry shot. Junior, immune to every hint that he should hide his breeding or at least not wave it around in public, is their special target. Royal hopes for a fight, if only to break up the boredom of drill and detail that makes up their days in the regiment.
“Put a little water in Jessie’s glass before you pour, Alma,” says Dr. Lun-ceford. “I suppose we have to drink a toast to these young fools.”
Junior is beaming. Royal can tell, no matter how stiff and strange these people are, that something has happened between his friend and Dr. Lunceford, an acceptance of some kind. There must be a word for it, a word that means only that thing that has happened and nothing else, but he doesn’t know what it is.