A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  “They got surgeons,” he says. “Surgeons that know all about bullet wounds. They got drugs for the pain and on one of the ships they got the X-ray machine, look right into your bones.”

  If Little Earl is reassured he doesn’t say so, keeping his hand pressed hard to his neck. There is blood but it isn’t throbbing out, just keeping his fingers wet, and he stares at a spot level with his eyes as if he can’t look down or at Royal for fear of losing his balance. They move in silence, past more troopers climbing and broken bodies left on the slope and bodies left in the pineapple rows, bodies left in the scrub and suspended awkwardly on the trocha of barbed wire. Royal leads Little Earl back as quickly as he can without dragging him, certain that now that he’s been to the top the ones still shooting from the village will discover he’s no longer dead and will murder him.

  Hardaway is back guarding their bedrolls and haversacks behind the treeline.

  “We done it!” he says with a gap-toothed smile. “Can’t deny the 25th.”

  “Where’s the field hospital?”

  “Sposed to be at El Pozo.”

  “Where’s that?”

  Hardaway just points back into the trees. “Think we was near there two, three days ago. You keep walkin, somebody bound to know.”

  Royal finds his gear and pulls the first-aid roll out from it. He folds the arm sling a few times, making a compress.

  “Look pretty hot up there,” says Hardaway, watching Royal’s hands. Hardaway is another rookie and feeling sheepish he wasn’t on the hill.

  “Hot enough.”

  Royal gives the folded cloth to Little Earl to hold against his neck.

  The sun is slanting low and the firing from behind more sporadic by the time they find the dressing station. It is only one young doctor’s assistant and a pair of litter bearers with a small supply of bandages. The doctor’s assistant looks at the hole in Little Earl’s neck, blood starting to ooze out again, then scribbles on a red-white-and-blue tag and loops it with copper wire through a buttonhole on his shirt.

  “There many more behind you?” he asks.

  “Hard to tell. Half of who was on the hill run over to the village. Don’t think we be much help for San Juan.”

  “Oh, we took that near two hours ago,” says the taller of the litter bearers. “They shot the hell out of us getting there, but the boys run up and took her.”

  The shorter of the litter bearers walks a ways with them to be sure they are headed right. He reads Little Earl’s tag, gives Royal a dark look.

  “Don’t give him no water till they say so,” he says. Little Earl seems not to be listening, seems barely to be there at all anymore but keeps following, putting one foot in front of the other. “And don’t be stopping to rest.”

  Coop stands in the plaza in front of the church in Caney, looking down on a dead Spanish general. There are only scattered shots popping now, back in the village. The general is a goat-bearded, white-haired man spread out on a stretcher on the ground, shot through the legs and in the head. Some of his hair is stained with blood and stuck to the canvas of the stretcher. Coop nudges the body with his foot.

  The village is mostly just palm huts but in the stone and stucco houses there were holdouts, most of them civilians, who had to be burned out and shot. Achille and Too Tall have a group of maybe forty prisoners, fever-looking Spanish soldiers, standing by the church doorway with their hands up on their heads.

  “Get over here,” calls Too Tall. “We gone need you.”

  “Need me for what?”

  “We spose to march these boys back and hand em to the Cubans.”

  “If they know where they headed,” Achille adds, cocking an eye, “they try to bolt for sure.”

  “You mean if they know where they beheaded,” says Too Tall and they both laugh.

  In their light blue pinstripes the captured men and boys look like hospital patients in pajamas.

  “Why I want to hook up with your detail?” Coop asks.

  “Cause come nightfall everbody else gone be digging trenches for the white boys over on San Juan.”

  Coop laughs and crosses to join them. “At your service, gennemen.”

  It is nearly dark when Royal finds the Santiago–Siboney road. They follow it to the field-hospital tents, sitting in high wild grass between the road and a little brook, three big ones for operations and dispensary, one slightly smaller for wounded officers, then six bivouac tents for enlisted men. These are all full, a hundred men crowded inside each where only sixty should be, and a dozen long rows of wounded lie on the ground outside.

  Royal has to grab the shoulders of the orderly trotting by to get his attention.

  “I got a wounded man here.”

  “You aint the only one.”

  “It’s real bad, I think.”

  The orderly glances at Little Earl’s tag without looking at his wound, then points to a line of men lying at the base of a cluster of piñon bushes. “Set him down at the end there,” says the orderly. “He’ll get his turn.”

  “They any blankets?”

  “Not less you brought one.”

  Royal pulls Little Earl to the end of the line of waiting wounded. Some of them are moaning and rocking, or weeping quietly, and more sit or lie staring blankly. A few are dead. Little Earl tries to rest on his side but starts to choke and Royal helps him sit up.

  “Won’t be long now,” he says to his friend. There are nearly thirty men ahead of them. Some of them have had their shirts or trousers stripped off to uncover their wounds, and as the light goes the temperature is dropping. There seems to be no system to bring water to the waiting wounded or to the hundreds more who have already been through the tents. Royal squats on the guinea grass and realizes he is dizzy himself.

  “I’m going for water,” he says, squeezing Little Earl’s arm. “I be right back.”

  He passes the open flap of one of the big tents on his way to the brook. A white soldier makes choking noises, writhing on a table as a pair of orderlies work a rubber hose down his throat, blood frothing out the sides of his mouth while a blood-spattered surgeon stands waiting, his eyes closed as if sleeping on his feet.

  “Easy does it,” coos the orderly who is pinning the wounded man down on the table. “Easy does it.”

  The brook water is cool and Royal drinks from his cupped hands till his stomach starts to hurt. Litter squads are still arriving, adding their damaged men to the line of the waiting, then staggering back toward the front. The night frogs begin to chirp. He fills his canteen and a pair of orderlies come carrying something heavy rolled in a blood-soaked sheet between them, leaving the whole load just up the bank from him and stepping away quickly.

  Royal has an idea what it is but looks anyway.

  When he lifts the sheet up he is not sure at first why it seems so wrong. Then he realizes it is because they are all together, white arms and black, white legs and black, stripped naked, obscenely intertwined. One of the legs, cut off below the knee, still has a boot on it and that seems wrong too. Royal covers the limbs and hurries back to find Little Earl.

  “Take some water in your mouth,” he says, offering the canteen, “but don’t swallow.”

  Little Earl tries but begins to choke again. He spits bloody hunks of phlegm and tissue onto the ground, looks to Royal with fear in his eyes.

  “Won’t be long now,” Royal tells him. “They moving along.”

  A table has been set up in front of the nearest tent, a doctor just back from the front working on a soldier’s chest, an attendant holding a lit candle close to the wound to help him see. The moon is almost full, peeking over the treetops across the road. Sergeant Jacks said to hurry back, but they’ll be plenty more chances to kill him tomorrow and he’s not going to leave his friend lying alone here.

  Little Earl takes his wrist, pulls him near, then whispers a request into his ear.

  “I’m not much of a singer,” says Royal.

  His friend only looks at him, waiting, b
lood soaked through the folded cloth he presses to his neck. Royal sees that Little Earl’s arm is shaking now, that even in the moonlight you can tell he isn’t the right color.

  “I can’t think of anything from church.”

  Little Earl gives a slight shrug. The only song that comes, the one they sing marching sometimes, doesn’t seem right and the lyrics he knows are mostly dirty. Little Earl squeezes his wrist, hard, and Royal is as scared as he’s been all day.

  The old gray mare

  She come from Jerusalem

  Come from Jerusalem

  Come from Jerusalem—

  —he sings, softly—

  The stud had balls but

  He lost the use of em

  Many long years ago

  RALLY

  The Judge sits in the last car with seven maidens in white. The soot and cinders from the engine can’t reach them here, and there is no excuse for the rough element on board to come passing through. Sally has set her heart on riding the Float of Purity since she heard of it and the Judge has had to explain more than once that Cumberland County is hosting the event and has its own supply of maidens. She has insisted on wearing white from head to foot, though, stating that every other woman attending in Fayetteville will be similarly attired.

  “I have heard no such thing.”

  “Neither have I, Father, but trust me, they will.”

  So she jabbers with her school friends and fellow debutantes while the Judge chaperones the whole clutch of them, unable to so much as light a cigar. Clawson from the Messenger and one of the Meares brothers and George Rountree and Sol Fishblate who used to be mayor and some of his cronies from the ousted board are in the dining car, passing the Scotch, no doubt, and the Judge would join them but for the way those White Government Union layabouts were running their eyes over Sally on the platform this morning.

  He looks out at the overcast landscape. It is still drizzling a bit, puddles lying gray in the fields from last night’s downpour, and he wonders if the weather will keep people away. There is a burst of raucous laughter, men’s laughter, from the car ahead. It is the age-old dilemma of revolution—for that, after all, is what they have embarked upon. The rabble, the sans culottes, are needed to storm the barricades, but then must be held in check before they run rampant, mistaking the power to destroy with the sense to rule. Most of the contingent, already four railroad cars full when they pulled out of Wilmington, seems responsible enough, many in the uniform of the Cape Fear Militia. But the White Government clubs, ranks swelled by brother organizations at each whistle-stop, have changed the tone of the excursion. The call themselves a Union, but the only thing uniting them is their mutual unemployment and a hatred of negroes, seeming more like the dregs of Coxey’s Army than the solid base of a political-reform movement. White Emancipation, the purpose of this rally, is too important, too vital a cause to allow it to be sullied by vulgarians.

  The train slows to a stop and up in the second car the Fifth Ward Cornet Band blasts into Onward, Christian Soldiers to greet the new passengers, giving it a bit more Sousa than you’d likely hear at a revival meeting. It is the station in Tar Heel, a buggy ride away from the rally site, and only a handful of pilgrims step aboard. A red-cap porter backs away from the train as it begins to roll again, looking a little stunned as the men in the car ahead begin to shout at him from their open windows. The Judge closes his own, hoping to spare the young ladies, but they are too involved in their own excited chatter to have heard anything.

  The epithets linger in the air like train smoke.

  He was asked to join the hooded riders when they were at their peak back in ’68, when, many would still insist, they were most needed. They performed important services, vital to the day, but the society included too many men of the wrong caliber. The Judge sensed how easily they might sink from moral vigilantism to mere revenge and thievery, and regretfully declined. Roaring Jack Butler was in his heyday then, enrolling blacks in the Union League, ringleader of the Republican militia formed to stamp out the Klan, promoting his version of the “new South.” He made certain allegations against the Judge, merely a lawyer then, in the carpetbagger press, which in his father’s day would have resulted in a duel. But his father’s day had ended with the Capitulation.

  “The only thing a man can truly carry to his grave,” the old man would say, “is his honor.”

  The Judge realizes now that this was his only lesson, repeated in many forms over the years. Even the nightly treat of Sir Walter Scott, read or recited from memory, was an affirmation of that basic principle. His father said they were descendent from Jacobite Scots who had fled to France after the ’45 uprising, that the blood of kings flowed through their veins. The blood of kings flowed, quite literally, through most of his stories, often to the point of death defending an untenable cause. It was his father who taught him the original meaning of the burning cross, the beacon calling the clan, men of the same blood, together to defend their families, their land, their honor. It was such a potent image—fire, religion, family, the premonition of torture and death—blazing its message through the dark night of oppression.

  “Symbols matter,” his father had told him. “They stir men to action. They must never be degraded.”

  “Father?”

  It is Sally, turned to look over the back of her seat to him.

  “When we get there, I’ll need a moment to arrange myself. We all will.”

  “I’m sure there will be time.”

  The rallying of the clan.

  If they had done their work in the daylight he might have joined. But in the uncertainty of darkness, men with masks and firearms—there was too much opportunity for blunder and mismanagement. The only act he ever regretted committing had been at night, in the company of other men. It was at Chancellorsville, though the battle had no name then, just another endless day of slaughter, mostly in a tangle of woods that allowed little opportunity to know if you were in the van or outflanked, no chance to reform ranks on the flag. His only brother, Robert, had been killed that day, as had many other good friends in the 18th. There was murder in his heart and when they assumed the picket they were told that yankee cavalry was operating in the area.

  You only had time for one shot if horsemen overran you, the object being to fire quickly and hope to dodge the saber. They heard hoofbeats, a small party approaching at a canter and he joined in the volley toward the looming silhouettes, muzzle flashes on both sides of him, then the cries and the terrible discovery that it was their own officers they had fired upon, with General Jackson unhorsed and sure to lose his arm. He looked into the great man’s eyes when they carried him to a tent—they were glossy with shock and he was moving his lips very slightly, whispering a prayer. There was no knowing if his own bullet had found its mark on any of the wounded, but no comfort in that ignorance. Jackson was stricken with the pneumonia just after his surgery, and died a week after. A few days before Gettysburg the Judge saw a photograph of the coffin, covered by the new Stainless Banner that he thought, with its massive white field, too much resembled the flag of surrender.

  They arrive in Fayetteville shortly before noon, a fine mist of rain still in the air, and hurry without organization the few blocks to the Lafayette.

  “Oh my,” says Sally, thrilled, “just look at all of us!”

  Thousands choke the street. Every sunburned farmer in the county, with wife and tow-headed brood, has come for the festivities, a logjam of buggies and haywagons that needs breaking up before the procession can get under way. Sally and her friends duck into the hotel to freshen themselves, and the Judge finds himself waiting, watching the frantic last-moment pushing and prodding of the rally organizers who shout and wave over the throng, trying to shape the energy and good will present into concerted action.

  A half-dozen bands tune their instruments at once, grunting and blatting, snare drums rattling, while wearers of uniforms struggle through the crush of bodies to find each other. The rain stops,
which is a blessing, and the Judge manages to get his back up against the hotel and avoid being jostled by the crowd.

  The battle flag has reappeared.

  During the Occupation it was outlawed by statute, and even after the yankee troops marched out it was rare to see one. But today, from his own limited viewpoint, the Judge can count nearly a dozen. It is the old square cloth of the Southern Cross with thirteen white stars upon it, the flag that came from the St. Andrew’s Cross of Scotland that came from the crux saltire, the X-shaped cross the Romans had used to crucify the apostle. His father, years before the War, told him how St. Andrew had appeared in a dream to King Angus MacFergus the night before battle, how his Picts and Scots had looked above the battlefield to see a great white cross in the sky and were inspired to drive back the Northumbrians. There was no mistaking that banner, held high above the artillery smoke, no mistaking it for the enemy’s flag as with the Stars and Bars. It thrills him to see it again, rippling in the little breeze that has come up, and makes him anxious as well.

  They must never be degraded.

  He tried to call Jack Butler out. They were boyhood friends, fished and hunted together, their fathers partners in law and business. But the war of ink, each letter to the editor surpassing the last in vitriol, degenerated from my esteemed colleague to notorious scalawag and Secessionist assassin. Action was called for. His father was wounded in a duel as a young man, precipitated by a point of honor so complex he was never able to fully explain it to his sons. He described the confrontation, the deadly honor and solemnity of it, as the event that finally made him a man.

  The Judge met his adversary by chance on the courthouse steps, Butler descending with a gang of the officeholders from that benighted time, himself with only poor tubercular Granville Pratt as a witness.

  “Sir,” he said, blocking the other man’s way, regretting that the terrain put him at a disadvantage in stature, “I demand satisfaction.”