A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  Rumors of beheadings, a good deal of theft. The Cuban fighters have kept themselves apart since the rains and sickness began, cutting the strange local fruits open with their machetes and offering them in trade for whatever they don’t have, which is everything. The refugees are beyond pitiful. Apparently the custom here is to be buried by your peers—how many times has a cortège of little boys or little girls passed shouldering the tiny box that bears their stricken playmate? And those are only the ones with enough spark left to care about their sacraments.

  Royal Scott, who you will remember from Wilmington, has been through a terrible bout, touch and go for a while but if we receive transport soon he may stand a chance of pulling through. He asks me to send his regards. Desperation is a great leveler, and the observation of “Jim Crow” rules has all but disappeared among the men here, trapped in the same dire circumstances. Sad that it requires such an extreme of suffering to break down the habits of color prejudice. I am eager to see, once privation and the threat of annihilation are lifted, whether our white comrades will return to their former ways.

  Junior can smell whatever it is that has died. When the jungle is wet there are many odors of decay, but none so sweet as rotting flesh. The evening of the charge he was on burial detail, pulling Spanish boys out from the trenches where they had been shot and clubbed and bayoneted and smashed apart by artillery. The bodies were surprisingly light, though they had swelled in the heat, and after the first few he was careful to turn them face-down so he wouldn’t have to see dirt thrown into their mouths and eyes. That had bothered him more than the smell. And then yesterday, when they found the mule mired with a broken leg and Coop shot it and the cooks tried to dress it and make a meal it had not been the smell but the color of the meat, deep purple, that made his gorge rise and sent him stumbling toward the blood-splattered latrine.

  The dignity of brave men who have faced death in battle is now dragged through the filth, the best men of our generation to be lost in this pestilent wasteland. We are soldiers, and deserve the support of a grateful nation. Please spread the word to any with the ear of those in power.

  Junior has a wound, infected now, a long trough cut in his arm going through barbed wire during the ascent, a wound he didn’t notice till they were marching away from the hill that first night. He flexes his hand, feels the ache. The doctors have nothing left to treat it and he worries it will swell and have to come off, like what happened to Briscoe of A Company.

  “Bad enough a man go home, take his uniform off and the white fokes don’t want to know about him,” Cooper said when they got the news of the amputation. “But you take a whole arm off, you might’s well throw way the rest of the nigger.”

  As for my own performance in the tumult of mortal conflict, you have nothing to be ashamed of. I acquitted myself as an American patriot, no more or less, and though I know now I will never love the military life, I am confident I can at least uphold the honor of my family and my race. My love to Mother and Jessie—

  Your son,

  Aaron

  SURRENDER

  They put the white flag out an hour after the merienda.

  The chino camp followers came up from Manila, and the men paid them to prepare some pancit canton and baboy, and Bayani, the new sargento who reported to him this morning, had the idea of throwing a few of the pork ears on the fire once the breeze shifted to send the odor over the thornbush breastworks to the Spanish garrison crouching without food in Guagua. He is insolent, this Bayani, addressing Diosdado with the tú when he speaks Spanish, which he does ironically and with an atrocious accent, moving among them with a kind of assurance, as if already the platoon belongs to him. It was a good idea, though, a very good idea, and Diosdado shrugged in what he hoped was a manner becoming an officer and said he supposed they could give it a try. The siege has been on for over a week, the Spaniards never even stirring to snipe at their positions until nightfall, Diosdado’s men dug in all around the town and kept busy shuttling from one trench to the next to try to appear like a much larger force and gambling away their meager three-and-a-half-peso monthly pay. Almost all the people from Guagua managed to sneak out with their livestock the night his platoon arrived, and are camped in the fields behind them complaining constantly about how long it is taking to drive the Spanish away.

  “If you would like to lead the charge,” said Kalaw, the private with the big nose, to one delegation, “we will be two steps behind you.”

  But an hour after they are finished with all the pancit and the baboy and the fried bananas the chinos have brought up, the white flag appears from the belltower of the tiny church in the plaza of Guagua, the high spot from which a Spanish sniper hit Anacleto Darang in the knee, their only casualty so far.

  “Come and talk to them with me,” Disodado says to Sargento Bayani, who claims he was a cuadrillero for the Spanish in the Moro islands and understands the thinking of their officers.

  “Con placer, hermano,” says Bayani with his strange, insolent smile. “Let me get a flag together.”

  It takes nearly a half an hour for one of the privates to run back to the hacienda they liberated a week ago and borrow a sheet. Sargento Bayani holds this banner of truce, tied to a long bamboo pole, high over his head as they step out and approach the Spanish breastworks.

  “Our boys need practice,” says the sargento as they walk. “They’ll never get it this way.”

  “The point is to regain our country, not to test ourselves in battle.”

  “And when we have to fight the yanquis?” He has that smile on his face.

  “The yanquis are our allies,” says Diosdado. It is ridiculous, this cynicism. If not for the Americans the Spanish would still control the harbor in Manila, would still be able to resupply themselves, be able to send fresh troops to relieve any besieged garrison. Education will be the key, as Scipio always says. Of all the ills that plague the people, this overriding cynicism, this ignorance, is the worst.

  “We’re sending you into the field,” Scipio told him in Cavite. “Very soon, when we are in power, the people will want their leaders to be men who bore arms against the Spaniards, men of action.” Scipio, never a weapon in his hand, has moved up in the hierarchy, though he will never tell Diosdado his official title.

  Diosdado had expected to rejoin the Supremo’s staff, Pepito Leyba at one side of their diminutive leader and himself at the other, translating, rewriting proclamations in a more confident Spanish, offering his opinion when asked. He had a detailed scenario worked out in which Ninfa Benavides, looking up at him contritely in the rags of one of her fabulous gowns, begged for his intercession to save her collaborationist father from the wrath of the Philippine Republic. She was so very grateful—

  “This is because of my accent,” he said to Scipio at the time, hurt. “Because I’m not a Tagalo, much less a Caviteño.”

  His friend did not deny it. “This will be good for you,” he shrugged. “Believe me. Just avoid being shot.”

  Diosdado has no training, of course, but there doesn’t seem to be much to it. Setting a good example, being a model of character for the men, explaining the importance of doing one’s duty and not leaving in the middle of an engagement to deal with problems at home. The uniform—he had the foresight to have a pair made in Hongkong before he left—does half the job. When he caught the men looting the hacienda, Diosdado made them replace everything that was not of immediate use in the military campaign, and put Sargento Ramos in charge of making certain the goods taken were shared equally.

  “We are soldiers of the Filipino Republic,” he reminds them constantly, “not a gang of tulisanes.”

  There is only an alferez under a smaller, improvised white flag on the other side of the breastworks.

  “My comandante wishes to hear your terms,” he tells them.

  “You will leave your arms and ammunition stacked, neatly, in the church,” says Diosdado. “You will form ranks and march out fifty yards on the road to San Fern
ando and halt. There I will accept your surrender.”

  “Stacked neatly,” echoes Bayani, mocking, and Diosdado shoots him a look.

  “And there will be no reprisals?”

  “You will be treated with the consideration due to fellow soldiers.”

  The alferez looks uneasily to Bayani, then back to Diosdado.

  “We are starving.”

  Diosdado nods. He wanted to ask the men to save some of the merienda, but realized it would never be enough to feed the garrison.

  “There is food in Malolos,” he says. “You will be taken there to join your defeated comrades.”

  He has no idea if there is sufficient food for them in Malolos, only that that is where prisoners are to be sent. The alferez nods and offers him a salute. “I will inform my comandante.”

  “There is no reason to make them feel ashamed,” he says to the sargento on their way back to the men.

  “Of course not. We may shoot them, cut their throats, hack them to bits, but we wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings.”

  The ideal is to keep the best of the Spanish—learning, culture, a certain code of honorable behavior—and jettison all that is base and hypocritical. The friars will have to go, of course, though the Jesuits might be allowed to remain if their political inclinations can be discouraged. The native clergy will do well in the villages, but for the ilustrado class a more elevated approach to Heaven will be required. Sadly, there are aspects of the Filipino temperament, shortcomings, brought into sharp relief by a character like this Bayani—

  The Spanish begin to come out of the plaza. They are trying to stay in ranks, but the men sent ahead to make a gap in the breastworks are weak and struggle with the spiky mass of aroma bush and a few men collapse while they are waiting. It is thirst, really, Diosdado knows, no well dug within the garrison’s fortifications and his own people tearing down the bamboo acueducto that fed the town from the hillside stream, and finally the alferez appears beside a tall, emaciated comandante, leading the men who can walk, maybe sixty of them, out onto the San Fernando road. Before they left for this outpost, no doubt, these soldiers knelt in their ranks before the Arzobispo in Manila, receiving his blessing and swearing before God that they would never surrender the sacred banner of their nation. Bayani sends two squads of the men who have rifles to quickly flank them, worried about their reaction when they discover how few of their tormentors are present. Diosdado steps up to the tall officer, who salutes him.

  “I am Comandante Ramón Asturias y Famy,” he says. “We are at your mercy.”

  “We will take you first to the stream,” Diosdado tells him. “And then on to Malolos. Are there wounded left behind?”

  “Perhaps a dozen. Sick, not wounded.” The officer looks Diosdado over. He is glad that the uniform fits him well, that he has managed to keep it nearly spotless during the siege. “May I inquire about your training?” asks the comandante.

  It seems a strange, if not presumptuous question for a prisoner of war to put forth. Diosdado wonders if he should reveal his inexperience, even to a man unlikely to resume arms against the Cause. Filipino forces will be at the outskirts of Manila soon, circling the final gem of the crown, and the troops inside the Walled City must be made to believe they are outmanned, outgunned, outgeneraled—

  “I believe he is very well trained in philosophy,” Bayani interjects, an innocent look on his face, “with an interest in the Classics.”

  It is cruel, yes, and Diosdado wonders how he knows. He has not spoken to anyone in the platoon of his education. Asturias y Famy is weeping.

  “A university boy,” he says, tears making channels in the grime on his cheeks. The Spaniards have not bathed for a week. “I am surrendering to a fucking university boy.”

  REPRIEVE

  After the swim they stop at the Iolani Palace for a picnic. President Dole came aboard looking like Father Christmas with his long white beard and invited the whole sorry bunch of them from the China—Colorado Volunteers and the 8th Infantry and the Utah Battery and the engineers and the hospital people, everybody but the damn mascot goat—and now they’re breathing air heavy with the smell of flowers and spread out at long, long tables set on the grass under the trees with plates and utensils and cloth napkins for what they call a loo-wow. Hod still has water trapped in his ears from the surf, the bottoms of his feet scraped by coral. There were Kanakas riding the waves in on their wooden boards, men and women wearing almost nothing at all, but they disappeared quick once the beach was mobbed by the sickly-skinned, boat-dopey soldiers, peeling their uniforms off to give themselves up to the sea water. Only Big Ten chose not to go in, sitting on the shore with all his uniform still on, even his boots.

  “My people will row on top of the water all day and all night,” he says, “but swimming is for fishes.”

  Hod thinks it’s so the others won’t see how dark he is all over.

  The food is hard to believe and just keeps coming. The local Americans, celebrating the Annexation Bill just passed in Congress, have roasted a whole herd of pigs down in holes in the ground, serving up steaming chunks from them wrapped in palm leaves, and then there are crabs and fish and chickens and yams and huge sweet potatoes and pineapples that never been in a can and bread and cocoanut milk and the best coffee Hod has ever tasted and dates and cocoanut pudding and something called alligator pears that Big Ten at first tries to eat without peeling the hide off. Inside they are light green and creamy and nutty tasting and you eat them with Worcestershire sauce. Everybody eats twice as much as they can hold, the food on the trip so far just pitiful, salthorse and sea biscuit, and no reason to think it will improve for the rest of the way. Three days into the voyage they let some carrier pigeons loose up top, supposed to fly with their messages back to San Francisco.

  “I was gonna eat them birds,” said Big Ten, watching them fly. “Now we stuck with fishee ricee.”

  The Chinamen and Japs who serve as the crew of the transport always have something you can buy to eat, a nickel here, a nickel there, even doughnuts if you catch them at the right time, but they won’t take Army grub in trade. The yellow men were left on board, helping the stevedores load coal into the ship, when the regiment marched away.

  “Yo, Chief!” calls Corporal Grissom down the table. “Introduce me to your sister.”

  There have been a lot of them telling Big Ten he looks just like the Kanakas and he takes it like a sport. He turns to the long-haired girl who is serving and speaks some of his lingo at her, but she just covers her face and giggles. There are dozens of the Kanaka girls serving in their bright shifts with flowers in their hair, and white women too, white women in clean white dresses with high collars and little straw hats moving around the long tables under the banyan trees with platters of food and urns of coffee.

  “I think she’s a Princess,” says Big Ten. “They aint spose to talk with commoners.”

  Corporal Grissom points to the Palace, just visible through the trees. “They say they got the Queen shut up in there. Once the Americans bumped her off the throne she hooked up with some bunch that wanted to put her back on it, so they stuck her under house arrest.”

  “Tough duty. Lookit that place.”

  “She should of behaved herself.”

  “If this was my island,” says Big Ten, looking around, “I’d sure as hell want to get it back. In fact, I think I better volunteer to be on her guard detail, make sure she don’t bust out and cause any more ruckus.”

  They all agree that duty here would be paradise, even without women serving you a feast every day. There is a kind of orchestra playing for them while they eat, natives wearing bright-colored shirts and ropes of flowers around their necks and some of the instruments Hod has never heard before. Suddenly it is their table’s turn to give back the compliment and they stand to sing On the Banks of the Wabash Far Away only with the words changed for their section of the country—

  Oer my Colorado Rockies flies the eagle

  Down th
e slopes flow rushing rivers clear and cool

  Oftentimes my thoughts revert to scenes of childhood

  Where I single-jacked for silver, Nature’s school

  But one thing there is missing in the picture

  Without her face it seems so incomplete

  On the ship it is a whore they sing of, each verse nastier than the next, but this is polite company, with officers hovering and white ladies present—

  I long to see my mother in the doorway

  Of our cabin years ago, her boy to greet

  Big Ten has a strong bass voice and can harmonize with anybody. Hod sings along, letting the other voices carry his, wishing he could feel a part of this like he did on the run with the Butte contingent of the Commonweal Army. But all he feels is that he’s hiding from something, that his life is not real, and being here in this dreamland, pleasant as it is, doesn’t help any. When the China was towed up to the wharf there were little Kanaka boys and girls swimming all around the hull who smiled and shouted and dove down under to grab for pennies the soldiers threw overboard. That’s me, Hod thought as he and Big Ten, throwing nothing, watched them splash and shout. That’s my whole damn life. Scrambling for pennies to entertain the folks up high—

  Oh, the moonlight’s fair tonight in Colorado

  From saloons there comes the sound of men at play

  Oer the glory holes the caution lights are gleaming

  In my sweet Colorado, far away!

  “So the Philippines is just like this, right?” says Private Neely when they have received their applause and are allowed to sit down and gorge themselves again.