by John Sayles
“Company H stack rifles here!” shouts Sergeant Jacks, standing on a small rise in a swarm of mosquitoes he chooses to ignore. “Then get on those crates. Move!”
“I don’t see any of the white soldiers unloading cargo,” says Junior. He and Royal butt their rifles into the sand, bringing the muzzles together, and Little Earl adds his to make the pyramid stand.
“Somebody got to do it.”
Junior follows back to the boats. “But it’s always us.”
Royal shrugs as he wades out, then staggers backward into the surf as a crate of ammunition is pushed into his arms. “Didn’t send us down here to sit on the beach and eat cocoanuts.”
In the drawing a barefoot insurrecto stands behind Uncle’s massive calf, sticking his tongue out. Just in front of Uncle’s knee is Teddy in his campaign outfit, gloved hands on hips, glaring. The object of scorn is a Spanish don, greasy moustache ends dragging the ground, peeking up timorously at the towering American Icon whose top-hatted shadow covers him.
A NEW “BULLY” ON THE BLOCK
But he’ll have to start again. It’s impossible not to sweat on the paper here, to smear, and the Cuban isn’t right yet. He’s drawn a Mexican before, but the sombrero is different here and what cactus there is grows only a few inches from the ground. And the Chief is not fond of Mexicans. There are Cubans in Tampa of course, cigar kings and soapbox politicians, but they look nothing like this motley rabble grinning at the edges of the American throng, looking for something loose and preferably not terribly heavy to steal.
And then every few moments one of the damned illustrators drifts by from the operations at the shoreline to peer over his shoulder, maybe chuckle, and say how wonderful it would be to just be a lampoon man and not have to render the realities of life.
It is not meant kindly.
Remington is here, glued to the Rough Riders, the younger illustrators all kowtowing each time he passes, and Glackens from McClure’s, and Howard Christy from Collier’s and Macpherson drawing for the London papers, and a claque of photographers hung with leather-covered boxes and even a fellow from the Vitagraph company who thinks he’ll make a motion picture of the fighting.
The quandary is which type of insurrecto to draw. All the ones here to greet them are barefoot and starving and wear tattered white linen pajamas and slouch hats, the wide brims rolled back in the front so as not to hamper their aim. They carry their machetes, but for the few who sport captured Spanish Mauser rifles or ancient Winchesters, and have a beaten, hangdog look to them. Something less than your ideal plucky freedom fighter. A handful look like his Mexican or have the long El Greco faces of dignified European gentlemen, sans monocle and trapped in beggar’s rags. But more vexing, two out of three are clearly negro, and many of the others some mongrel mix. The Chief has not been promoting a slave rebellion, or an endorsement of miscegenation. He is sailing down on his yacht, due any day now, and Crane and a few of the other wags insist no real fighting will be allowed till he comes ashore. Perhaps when presented with the facts, when he sees the actual ebony-skinned, barefooted article—but no. Higher ideals are at stake here.
This place, Bacquiri, Daiquiri, something like that, is pleasant enough but for the heat and the mosquitoes. They were expecting a hot reception, and the Navy guns plied the coastal hills for a good while, a fireworks exhibition that perhaps induced the Dons to scurry inland. The only real excitement was the unloading of the beasts, which, in the absence of a landing dock, had to be improvised. A mule or horse would be led to the cargo port and given a glance at the beach, some four hundred yards distant, then shocked on the hindquarters with a blacksnake whip, the animal bolting forward into an awkward plunge. Quite a bit of braying and screaming when they first went in, but then each got down to the grim business of survival, many considering the floating transports to be their only safe haven and circling back to try to climb on board. There had been a particularly persistent mule just below him, somehow managing to lift its forelegs clear of the swells and thump the hull for a solid hour before going under. Teamsters and sailors were out among them in rowboats, talking softly, trying to herd them, occasionally managing to rope and guide a few to shore. Fitzpatrick was beside him at the rail, sketching furiously, doing an especially nice job on their eyes, huge with terror, and with the already drowned rolling about on the surface. And glancing over at the Cartoonist’s own empty hands as if to say, You’re not getting this?
Oh, he can draw a mule, all right. His Democratic donkey is second only to old Nast’s, and the Chief loved his Bryan riding backward on a Populist nag. But he likes to think he is more an interpreter of events, an editorialist, colleague to Davis in his pith helmet and Crane and Creelman, to Stephen Bonsal and Poultney Bigelow and the other correspondents who stand querulous in the seething mass of blue uniforms, pumping the regulars for information and priming the volunteers for quotables, colleague to men of ideas, rather than a mere draftsman.
“Look there,” he said at one point, and Fitz was obliged to reckon with the despatch boat chugging past with a half-dozen Kodak fiends and the Vitagraph man cranking his bulky apparatus, all capturing the bedlam on celluloid. “There’s your future, old man,” he added, in what was meant to be a kidding tone. “You’ll go the way of the buffalo.”
So no bloated equines, but he has done a sketch of one of the scurrying land crabs, terrible little brutes with their eyes, in perpetual astonishment, suspended above their bodies on little stalks. Very promising—perhaps a Spanish diplomat, or one of their key generals, or even Spain itself as a crab, side-stepping in terror beneath Uncle’s giant impending footstep. It is a shame they’ve recalled General Weyler, the “Butcher” sobriquet license for wonderfully gory analogies, cleaver in hand, dripping innocent Cuban blood, clasping horrified black-eyed maidens to his offal-smeared apron.
Keep Your Claws Off! Uncle will say, or some play on scuttling.
It needs work.
Wooden crates of ammunition are being hauled ashore, negro soldiers staggering wet to their armpits, while sergeants everywhere bark regiment numbers and company letters and order their milling warriors to fall in. The men are casual, light-hearted even, no doubt relieved to be making the landing without Spanish interference and exuberant to be free of the stifling, overcrowded transports. Like a football rally, American boys all in blue, or an especially crowded 4th of July picnic, and if not for the steaming heat you could imagine it was the Jersey shore.
He ran into Rudy Dirks in Tampa, Dirks who draws the Katzenjammers, wearing the uniform of one of the volunteer regiments, and Post who’d sketched at the Journal is here with the 71st New York, a private in arms. Taking things a bit far, he feels, though maybe for the German it is a declaration of his patriotism. Personally, he needs to take the Olympian view, to distill the essence of a situation, to perch on a general’s shoulder, if need be, and view the larger canvas. He has done several drawings of Shafter, his favorite the one where the commander’s bulk is sinking the flagship of the invasion fleet. But the Old Man has so nurtured this war, is so thoroughly in the jingo camp, that in everything he’s submitted Shafter is merely “substantial” rather than the gout-ridden colossus he’s made to appear in the Havana papers.
In the drawing, now, the insurrecto is scrawnier, clinging onto Uncle’s massive thigh, not even a machete to protect himself. And his face—
The Chief’s favorite, Davenport, is not here, nor is Fred Opper or any of the other big-money cartoonists. He is the only one who has made the voyage, not in uniform but here nonetheless, with beasts of burden still washing ashore, some of the colored Ninth detailed to drag them out of the surf. The native militia are offering doughboys huge green bananas from their flour-sack carryalls, offering short stalks of sugarcane and exotic fruit, hoping to trade for tinned beef, and the strip of beach is just as crowded and disorganized as the dock at Tampa the day they left. This, this whole thing, could be a disaster, a folly. A great mulatto approaches him, smiling, hol
ding out one of the oblong yellow-green fruits.
“Mango?” says the giant insurrecto.
He waves his pen in the air to decline. “No, thank you very much.” He tilts his head back and closes his eyes then, feels the relief of a slight breeze off the ocean, and tries to imagine the Cuban face.
FORAY
It is unseasonably cool, chilly even, a stiff breeze coming in off the Cape Fear as the cab rolls along Water Street to the train station. It will be colder up there, Harry knows, snow eventually, and his coat will be inadequate. Perhaps his first purchase in the great city. He has only the new-bought wall trunk and his old leather satchel, amazed at how few possessions seemed vital enough to warrant inclusion. The wheel shop is only padlocked, no sign indicating his absence or likely return.
The familiar sights roll by—Harry knows the owners of most of the commercial properties, the residents of at least half of the private dwellings—and he muses that away from the noise and smell of riverside industry Wilmington is a lovely town. But compared to the northern metropolis he has read and imagined so much about, only that. A town.
He wonders if there will be trees.
The cabman is one of the sullen rather than cheerful types, a tubercular old negro who sighed and staggered dramatically as he lifted the snugly packed trunk into his vehicle. His horse needs washing. The Judge will be at his Front Street club now, trading stories with his contemporaries, and then on to his nap in the leather chair by the south window. Harry’s note, rewritten several times and left at home in the Judge’s box by the door, presents an orderly rationale for his departure. Harry is not, in fact, getting any younger. Opportunities do exist, up there, which may never be available in Wilmington. And it is his own money, after all, that is being ventured, his own life to lead.
And yet he feels furtive as they pass the busy Sprunt works, cotton press slamming bales together, and roll into the yard before the Atlantic Coast Line depot.
“Wait here a moment, please,” he says to the moping cabman as he carefully lowers himself to the ground. Train schedules have been known to change.
He does not recognize the station agent, which is a blessing. Tuck Sim-mons, who mans the booth until noon, is a familiar of the Judge, having procured the position through the old man’s kind agency after his cigar emporium was destroyed, uninsured, in a suspicious blaze. Wilmington is full of such gentlemen, beholden to his father for this or that act of generosity, and as a boy it seemed a wonderful thing. Only lately has it become oppressive, Harry unable to miss, behind the effusive greetings and inquiries as to the Judge’s health, the silent evaluation.
He must be such a disappointment to the old gentleman.
The agent sits behind his window, contemplating the front page of the Messenger and shaking his head.
“Hell in a hand basket,” he mutters before looking up. “Somebody got to make a stand.”
It is suddenly very close, though it is only Harry and the station agent and the empty benches inside. He removes his hat.
“May I inquire,” he begins, though he has three printed schedules folded in his pocket, though he has all but memorized the timetable, “how one would proceed from here to New York City?”
The agent cocks his head to one side, looking Harry over. “My, my, my,” he says, then glances up at something that must be posted on the wall above the window.
“Monday, Wednesday, and Friday there’s a Florida Special coming through, northbound—it leave here at one-ten, stops in Wilson and Rocky Mount before you reach Richmond. At Richmond you change from the ACL to the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac, take you to Washington. From there you switch to the Pennsylvania Railroad, trains to New York nearly every hour.”
Harry nods at each point of the itinerary. “And the fare?” He has it counted out, folded in an envelope, in another pocket.
“To Richmond, or all the way through?”
“The entire journey.”
“Private compartment?”
“I can share.”
The agent smiles at him. He knows the Judge, knows who Harry is. He must. Harry feels the perspiration on his lip, feels his color coming up. Nobody of his immediate acquaintance, other than Niles, has ever ventured beyond Charlottesville, Virginia, and certainly none has entertained the idea of actually living in what the Judge still refers to as “enemy territory.” The few yankees Harry has met—mostly snowbirds on their way to one of Mr. Flagler’s sunshine resorts—have been less intimidating than he expected, though of course not in their native element. All have commented on the charm of an accent he was not aware he possessed, and assured him that he would be regarded in the North as a creature of refreshing novelty. Rara avis.
“If you were to travel on a single ticket,” says the station agent, “it would cost you sixteen dollars and seventy-five cents. Meals not included.”
It will cost me a great deal more than that, thinks Harry. His legs, both the healthy and the malformed one, do not feel as if they can support his weight. Perhaps he is coming down with something.
“I thank you very much,” he says to the agent as if his idle curiosity has been satisfied, then turns to go. His footsteps, uneven as always, sound very loud on the depot floorboards as he makes his retreat. The Judge will be at cigars and brandy by now, and there is ample time to return home and cover his tracks.
The balers at the Sprunt works seem to be operating inside his head as he steps into the yard, pounding, throbbing. He is short of breath. It is the farthest he has gotten, the last attempt only a long sight-seeing ride past the depot and then up to visit his mother’s grave at Pine Forest. He is ashamed of himself, but not enough to turn and march back inside to make the purchase.
“Not today,” Harry smiles sheepishly to the cabman, who does not seem to care.
EL CANEY
They are up and moving before sunrise. No breakfast, not even coffee. The order is silence, though Royal and the others are too tired to have much to say. It has been days of marching since the landing, marching in the heat and the bone-soaking rain and at night only rolling the wet poncho and blanket and tent-half canvas out on the ground to try to stay dry on at least one side and feeding the mosquitoes or out on sentry. At night there are shots, shouting, crabs rustling in the underbrush. And then that whole day spent hurrying in circles in the jungle, trying to relieve the ambushed Rough Riders at Las Guasimas but never finding them, lost, a dozen men falling from the heat and Royal nearly one of them. It is a wet heat that sits heavy on you, like being a steamed oyster says Junior, only oysters don’t carry forty pounds of supplies and a horse-collar blanket roll over their necks.
Parrots and tocororos begin their squawking in the canopy above as the men form twos and start down the pathway that is being called a road. Light filters in through the branches, giving shape to the trees, and by the time they come out into the first canefield the morning mists are rising, then thinning to reveal the distant Sierra Maestras. Royal had never seen mountains, never left the Carolina coast before the Army and Fort Missoula, and these don’t look real to him, their slope too sudden, too steep. He is already sweating under his sodden uniform, haversack strap digging in, already feeling tired when a squad of Cuban fighters lopes past their line. The men and boys are dressed in thin, light cloth, a few with sandals, most not, and every shade under the sun. A few look like white men, a few like the Chinese he’s seen in picture books, and a few are blacker than any man in North Carolina. Achille Dieudonné from G Company who speaks Creole French and border Mex says these dark black ones are Haitians, floated over on rafts from that island where the going is even rougher.
These Cubans are smaller, mostly, than the Americans, and very thin, though that is exaggerated by how little they carry—a sugar sack and a machete, maybe a rifle, their cartridge belts rigged from stiff cloth or no belt at all, just a leather pouch worn round the neck holding the few bullets they have. Thin, but nothing like the ones back at Firmeza, the reconcentrados th
ey found behind barbed wire who looked even more miserable than the drawings in the newspapers. Royal has never seen people so poor, so starving, white, black, and brown thrown in together, hollow-eyed with their bones poking up under their skin.
“I wouldn’t treat a dog that way,” said Too Tall Coleman as they passed. The people only watched them, mute, too wasted to muster an expression.
There is a sound ahead, a deep, coughing, compressing of air like truncated thunder. Four of them, one just after the other. Sergeant Jacks turns to call softly over his shoulder.
“The dance has begun, gentlemen,” he says. “Let’s keep moving here.”
They continue marching, in and out of the thick trees, and Royal can tell by the mood of the sergeants that today it will be real. Last night they were given extra rounds to carry, two hundred more he has twisted into the spare socks in his pack, and the chaplain was busy and the officers were huddling together with maps. The mosquitoes are up now and at their business but Royal knows to crush them not swat them and to strap his load tight so it doesn’t rattle and to not ask questions. He and Junior and Little Earl are rookies but not so green as they once were, real soldiers now except for the one thing and after today that will be done.
They have been marching almost three hours when volunteers begin to appear, coming in the opposite direction in twos and threes, men from the 2nd Massachusetts who have been pulled off the firing line. Many are wounded, pale and a little stunned, a few shot through the body and walking as if it is a conscious effort to hold themselves together, their gaze gone inward.