A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  “What they got us down here doin nigger work for,” grumbles Cooper, “when they Spanish left to kill?”

  Royal’s hands are bleeding, his bowels starting to twist. The Captain has them pile the breastworks on the rear side, as if they might be attacked from behind.

  “You don’t eat nothin,” says Willie as they finally lay out their gear to sleep in the open again, “you starts to shit your body out. Keep this up and we won’t be nothin left but eyes and assholes.”

  In the morning, refugees from Santiago appear on the road that cuts through their trench line. Hundreds of them, hungry-looking and scared, old men, women and children, even a few dogs skulking along nervously at the edges of the sorry stream, casting a suspicious eye on the watching soldiers.

  “Dog look like stewmeat to me,” says Willie.

  “If you kill it, I’ll eat it,” adds Cooper, but nobody shoots the dogs, preferring not to scare the wretched Cubans any worse. Some of them are dressed well enough, one lady wearing cotton gloves and walking stiffly under a parasol, but most are barefoot in rags with a numb, unfocused look on their faces. Where they can all be going is unclear.

  “Counterattack comin today,” says Corporal Barnes. “Rats always climb off the ship when it’s set to go down.” Barnes, whose experience of ships is like their own, puking over the rail when he could get to it and in the hold when he couldn’t.

  A mule train comes, teamsters haggard and mud-spattered, with sacks of raw beans and cans of embalmed beef and the news that the Spanish fleet attempted to run the blockade the day before and was smashed by the American gunships. There is a cheer, echoed along the lines as the word spreads.

  “It’s the 4th,” says Junior, stabbing a can of the slimy meat open with his knife. “We ought to celebrate.”

  “Celebrate what?” asks Cooper, who has sworn off the beef since it made him sick in Tampa.

  “Celebrate our naval victory,” says Junior. “Freedom from tyranny.”

  Cooper and some of the others laugh. “Why’nt you step up on that ridge and make us a speech?” he says, pointing to their former perch, occupied now by a white regiment. “I guarantee we see some fireworks.”

  They stay just beneath the ridge the next day, and the next, when the rain starts in the evening and the men push rags into the barrels of their Krags and the water runs down the slope and into the backside of the trenches and Royal just barely makes it to the tiny ditch of a latrine before the beef runs through him. He has been thinking about Jessie but decides to give it up, something dirty about even the memory of her while he’s in this obscene place, this place where dead men and dead animals lie still unburied. There are a dozen other men squatting in the rain beside him, pants at their ankles, including one being held in position by his bunkie.

  “He got the shakes,” says the standing bunkie apologetically, holding his moaning friend by the wrists, head turned sideways to provide the illusion of privacy. “We aint gonna fight no more why don’t they pull us the fuck out of here?”

  It rains through the night, wet coming up through their groundcloths and soaking the little half-shelter tents, water over their ankles when they climb back in the trenches, rubber peeling off the flimsy ponchos of the men who bother to wear them. Royal is shivering too, now, though the rain feels warm on his face.

  “Guess I’m not one of them Immunes,” he says to Junior, who looks away without comment, mouth tight. Royal’s hands shake as he tries to shovel muck on one of the pointless details the officers are inventing to keep them busy during the endless back and forth of negotiations with the Spanish.

  “I can imagine they’re eager to surrender,” Junior says. “Even if they do have us outnumbered. They’ve spent a fever season here before.”

  “Don’t let your guard down,” warns Sergeant Jacks, glaring at the make-work he’s been ordered to supervise. “It aint over till the Fat Man says so.”

  The Fat Man is Shafter, who they have seen only once, being loaded into a carriage after a visit to the front, the huge, gouty pile of general in charge of the whole circus.

  “Spanish just got to wait,” says Pres Stiles, who has been coughing up black, tobacco-looking hunks of phlegm. “Nother week in this shithole gone do us in.”

  Heads have been counted. In their company Cousins and Strother are dead and Little Earl is lying under a tent back at Siboney waiting to be shipped home. When Royal left him he couldn’t talk but was still breathing. Lieutenant McCorkle from G was killed right at the beginning with Leftwich, and three men from D were lost on the barbed wire. A few more of the wounded might not make it, but considering the volleys that were poured into their firing line, the impossible open slope they had to cross, it is a wonder to have so few casualties.

  “Aint been the bullet made can bring me down,” brags Cooper, who was a good ten yards ahead of the rest of them during the charge to overrun the trenches.

  “Yeah, but they makin new ones every day,” says Sergeant Jacks. Royal remembers Jacks walking backward up the hill, heedless of the Spanish volleys, checking to be sure the men didn’t bunch up and blowing his whistle when it was time to flop or rush ahead.

  “There’s a lot of stupid things you can do to get yourself killed,” Jacks likes to say, “but there aint much smart you can do to stay alive, except quit the damn Army.”

  On the 11th they are marched back to the front lines in the pouring rain. Royal has a fire in his throat and something pressing behind his left eye, has to step out from the column twice to drop his pants and let go. By now it is one man out of four with the aches and chills and they are down to hardtack only, which they break apart to fry in the little bit of rancid sowbelly left to them. Royal threw away his last bit of that days ago but the smell clings to the cloth of his haversack, grease spots attracting swarms of tiny ants if he lays it on the ground during the few hours it isn’t raining. Pete Robey sings at dinnertime when they are making their desperate little fires, smashing charred coffee beans with the butts of their bayonets—

  There’s a poor starving soldier

  Who wears his life away

  Clothes are torn and his better days are oer

  He is sighing now for whiskey

  With throat as dry as hay

  Singing “Hardtack, come again no more!”

  Pete has a deeper voice than Littler Earl’s, a voice that rumbles out of his barrel chest, and the others are too beaten to join him for the chorus—

  It’s the song, the sigh of the weary

  “Hardtack, hardtack

  Come again no more

  Many days you have lingered

  While worms crawl at your core

  O-oh hardtack, come again no more!”

  When they reach the trenches overlooking Santiago again the white unit who has been holding them staggers away, scrawny and unshaven, filthy uniforms hanging from their bodies.

  “You boys are welcome to it,” says a sunburned, runny-eyed sergeant. “Skeeters’ll get you if you don’t drownd first.”

  It rains all through the night and for most of the rest of the week. The officers, some of them just as sick as the men, give up on everything but keeping the pickets out and every day another dozen can’t hold themselves upright in the morning.

  The day the Spanish leave Santiago, Royal is shitting blood.

  Not mixed with anything, just a hot slick stream of blood out where it shouldn’t be coming from and he is on his way to tell Sergeant Jacks something might be wrong when he sees the Spanish marching out, hears the bitter grandeur of their drums and horns as the side of the hill tilts up and smacks him hard in the cheek. He lies in the mud a while, dry-heaving, before Junior comes to find him.

  “You o.k.?”

  Royal manages to roll himself on his back.

  The sick tent is just back down the hill, too many men down in all the regiments to transport the private soldiers all the way back to the coast. There is no medicine but for a spoonful of bismuth once a day and th
e treatment amounts to checking for dead every few hours and hauling them out.

  “You got it easy now,” says Junior, trying to seem cheerful. “Just lay back and wait to ship out.”

  After Junior leaves, a delirious man, a corporal from D Company, starts to thrash in his cot and rave about missing buckwheat cakes.

  “I catches the one who took em,” he repeats, over and over, “I cut him to the bone.”

  There is a different kind of time inside the sick tent, fever-time, each man in his separate sticky hell. It keeps raining, rivulets, then streams running under the tent edges and cutting away the ground beneath their cots. Royal finds himself tilting, feet higher than his head, and no one comes to set him level again. The delirious man is shouted at, told to shut up, threatened, but none of them lying there has the strength to get up and strangle him.

  When he is conscious enough to sustain a thought, Royal realizes that all of it—the drumthumping of recruitment, the long training, the weapons and uniforms, the soul-wearying marches, the waiting in vomit-sloshing ship holds for the bilious, ocean-tossed transport of their blue horde to this steaming island, the flags and the stirring horns and the frank judgment in his comrades’ eyes pushing him forward, willingly if not eagerly, one foot in front of the other, obeying the order of the moment—are just parts of an intricate, implacable process meant to bring a sharp-nosed, shrieking bit of metal and his own forehead to the same spot at the same instant.

  But the machine has failed somehow, too many moving parts, too much room for error, and so he lies here with rotting bowels waiting to feed the sweet-smelling, poisonous green jungle that grows and decays around him.

  Royal is swept by waves of fever. The heat generates inside him then flashes through his body, a shimmering liquid heat beneath his skin cooking out in fever-sweat, his clothes sodden with it, heat concentrating as it rises to a place behind his eyes, brain boiling, images flashing, images first of battle, of the angry whine of bullets sizzling by, of metal ripping through flesh, but then as the days pass (if they are days and not only waves of clarity and unconsciousness) the images soften and swoon and there are times that Jessie comes to him, Jessie in a way he’s never dared to imagine her, loose and naked and steaming amid the hot green jungle plants, Jessie smiling, her tongue impossibly red, her breasts oozing sticky white pulp that drops, spat, on the broad green blades of the foliage below, her skin slick and oozing like the fleshy succulent plants and hot and wet and her sex a purple orchid red at the pistils yielding hot and wet and fleshy to embrace him, tightening in a sweet hot grip around him, squeezing, constricting, pulsing hot until he bursts and she is gone, his uniform cold and wet and heavy as a shroud on his trembling body.

  The chills start then, shimmering through bone-aching limbs, pulsating Northern Lights of sensation that flutter, icy and electric, clear through him and he understands that he is dying despite Junior talking somewhere close You’re o.k. you’ll be fine don’t worry and piling on blankets—where did he find blankets?—that press on Royal but bring no relief from the icy wind that blows in his blood. And sometimes, suddenly, a patch of smooth water after the chilling rapids, Royal vaguely conscious and aware of sounds, a snatch of voices from the living outside the tent, the ones who can still prop themselves up at their posts and shiver under the searing noon sky, aware of where he is and who he is, aware of bright light strained through dirty white canvas overhead and mosquitoes whining by his ears and dying men groaning and Junior there again, giving him a drink from his cool metal cup and Royal hasn’t the strength left to lift his own head, then, slipping back down, flushing hot with fever as he is swept under another wave, lost to another steaming nightmare.

  Days pass in waves of heat and chill.

  Rain drills the tent canvas at night, stormwater cutting a deeper furrow below the cot, somebody weeping, weeping.

  And Royal is a sidelong bulge of panic in a horse’s eye.

  The horse is churning without direction in a hot, acid sea, snorting saltwater after each new wave slaps its upstretched head, nostrils barely above the surface, legs pedaling desperately, hooves seeking solid ground and finding none, not lathered despite the effort but huffing and pedaling in a lather of ocean, slapping waves incessant and blocking sight on every side, the powerful forelegs beginning to tire, saltwater rushing into the nose and down the long gorge and still it struggles, frantic, without the sense to surrender to liquid, a machine of slamming heart and burning muscle torn from its mooring but powering forward nonetheless, no thought, no plan in the beast’s mind only a shrill unwavering note of fear—

  !

  !

  !

  Royal is a sidelong bulge of panic in a horse’s eye.

  If it was me, thinks something just a little removed from what used to be his conscious mind (not a thought, really, or a voice, just a knowledge that is separate from his body), if it was me and not this thrashing animal I would give up, give in, let the water fold over but they can’t see ahead, horses, eyes set off on each side of the great head, they can’t see what’s straight in front of them, can’t understand that there is no safe harbor to swim to, that the kicking and huffing and bulging out of eyes is a waste. When the dying man, Royal, saw something like this there were dozens of them, horses and mules churning the sea into a lather with their fear and their pedaling legs and a few of the last ones saved, that’s right, saved when a bugler already on shore played Boots and Saddles and they obeyed the order of the moment, unthinking like good soldiers and swam to the shore that led to the pathway that led through the poisonous jungle to the steep murderous slope where the angry waspwhine bullets waited to burn through them and carry their parts away. But that’s over now, and he’s not needed anymore, different fevered men crouch atop the hill, and he is free to give in, to accept the warm caressing water if he was Royal still and not the sidelong bulge in a horse’s eye, was not thoughtless panic and thrashing and here it comes, a big one, more than a wave a mighty lathering swell rising up and over, blotting out the sky, and the nostrils swept under and the powerful forelegs spasm, barrel chest pressed in a vice, lungs flushed with acid saltwater, no air, no air, no air, till the machine jolts, wrenching his throat open with a crying gasp and wheezing, dragging the hothouse sick-tent air into his lungs, sopping wet and cold now lying on solid ground with the taste of brine in his mouth.

  “What happened?”

  Junior is standing over him. “Fever broke.” Junior is hollow-eyed, un-shaven. He holds himself upright leaning on his rifle.

  “You look like hell, Junior.”

  “You want to see hell,” says Junior, smiling a gaunt, death’s-head smile, “I’ll get you a mirror.”

  “No calls,” says Royal. Something that has been gnawing at the edge of his consciousness, a lack, something missing in the air. “No reveille.”

  “Kid Mabley’s in the other tent, almost as bad as you. And none of the others got the wind left to blow.”

  Royal shifts his weight slightly and feels the pool of sweat beneath his back and buttocks. He is lying on a cot, beneath a tent, and knows now that he’s not going to drown. But the rest of it is distant, unformed.

  If there’s no bugle, he wonders, how do we know which way is the shore?

  Father—

  Junior off on water detail, writing hidden behind a tree so the others won’t know he has paper. His hand trembling, paper propped on an empty canteen on his thigh. Something dead is nearby, buzzards wheeling overhead.

  You have no doubt read reports by now of the gallant show made by our force at El Caney and the San Juan Heights. It was, from a military point of view, an inelegant and possibly ill-advised assault, though the results appear to be much more auspicious than expected. The Spaniards put up a desperate fight, and any doubts about their valor on the battlefield have been put to rest. Santiago, and possibly the war, have been won at the cost of much precious American blood, and certain notables with political aspirations are already elbowi
ng their way into position to take full credit. We have not received any papers since our arrival, and thus I have no way to know if the role played by our colored troops has received adequate attention. The 24th Infantry and the 9th and 10th Cavalry were instrumental in the capture of the San Juan Heights, while my own 25th led the last desperate dash to take the fortifications at El Caney. The sons of Ham have made quite a military record for themselves here, and I can only hope that this will be justly recognized and celebrated throughout our homeland.

  He hears the shouts and splashing of the others on the detail, naked in the river scouring themselves with the little yellow cubes of soap they’ve been issued, black men with ribs showing through their skin, a few just sitting at the edge of the flowing water, too weak to risk the current. Junior, with everything he’s just experienced, still can’t fathom bathing in front of others.

  What the citizens at home should also know is that our great victory is in danger of betrayal by the incompetence and self-serving of powerful men far from the clamor and deadly consequence of the battleground. If we are not brought home from this place immediately we shall all be lost to fever and starvation. The rains are upon us—dysentery, malaria, and the dreaded yellow jack have leveled over a third of the regiment, with more taking ill each day. My own company lost Private Charles Taliaferro this morning—a good soldier and a good friend—and the brass have forbidden the firing of a last salute and playing of Taps for fear the constant burials will undermine morale. But there is no morale, only the desperate realization that we have been abandoned here to die by an unprepared and uncaring government. There is insufficient food, medicine, shelter, no provision for dealing with the fever season and seemingly no plan for what follows the “liberation” of this island and these people. On the 12th we took high ground and encamped with our backs to the enemy city, told to defend the Spaniards from any incursions by our insurrecto allies wishing to wreak vengeance. These Cuban patriots now mutter among themselves, wondering, no doubt, if we have designs on their sovereignty.