A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  Royal can come to her in Virginia, they can have the ceremony, and if this is what she dreads the most, everything will be made right. She will be forgiven. She only has to survive this test, to prove herself worthy.

  The white man clears his throat, impatient, out there somewhere in the staring rows of seats with Miss Loretta. Jessie looks at the sheet music, notes drawn on lines, swimming.

  G-Minor, she thinks, and wills her fingers into motion.

  It isn’t wrong, really, just not what is accepted. Miss Loretta sits on the aisle, a few rows behind the Maestro, and can’t help but try to read his reaction from the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head. It has been such a trial to convince him to come up, and she worries she may have overstated Jessie’s abilities. What is outstanding in Wilmington may not impress Atlanta or Charlottesville, though her ear and her intuition have not deceived her before.

  “Another Hottentot prodigy,” the Maestro smiled tightly when she met him at the station. “You’ve become something of a missionary.”

  He is listening, though, eyes closed as always, fingertips of his right hand gently pressed against his temple as if the music is being played inside his head. Jessie has chosen her favorite ballade, and though it is meant to begin in a pensive mode there is something—not tentative, exactly, for the girl’s fingers know where they’re meant to be—something otherworldly about her playing as she begins. The caesuras are much too long, Jessie listening to each phrase, pondering it, before proceeding with the next. The massive hall is cool, as always in the early afternoon, and Miss Loretta realizes she is shivering.

  There will be only this one opportunity with the Maestro. She has made an effort not to frighten the girl, tried not to overstress the importance of the audition. But the fact remains that it is one of those rare moments in which the course of one’s future is determined, the road dividing, only one path leading forward. She is so young, Jessie, innocent yet of the terrible knowledge that certain actions, certain decisions, cannot be undone. Miss Loretta dabs at her neck with her handkerchief, then fans herself, suddenly flushing with one of the vaporous attacks she is prone to lately, worse always when she is tense or upset, and then Jessie stops playing.

  Just stops.

  The ballade is meant to change character here, gaining power and certitude, but Jessie only sits staring at the keys as if this more resolute music is a forest she dare not enter.

  The Maestro turns his head to Miss Loretta, arches an eyebrow.

  “I’m sorry,” says Jessie, her near whisper carrying out to them.

  The girl stands and steps off into the wings, footsteps hammering. Miss Loretta is up and leaning in to placate the Maestro.

  “Perhaps if I speak with her—”

  “She understands,” he says, shaking his head slightly and reaching for his coat as he rises. “Left to their own devices, they prefer to dwell at their own level.” He pats Miss Loretta’s hand as he steps into the aisle, as a father pats the hand of a child who has lost her balloon. “Your efforts for the girl are commendable, and I’m sure you saw the spark of something there,” he says, slipping his coat on, “but the Academy is not a settlement house.”

  “I apologize for—”

  “No need. I’ll be able to catch the three o’clock if I hurry.”

  Miss Loretta sits then, suddenly exhausted, till she hears the door to the lobby thump shut behind him. The chill that so often follows her hot spells shudders down her spine from the sides of her neck. It is very quiet in the great hall. She stares at the piano, mute and reproachful at the center of the stage. She remembers hearing Anton Rubinstein from this very seat on the aisle, enthralled at thirteen years of age, the music filling her soul. Miss Loretta sighs and stands to find the girl.

  Jessie sits on a stool by the bank of pulleys that control the scenery and curtains. Her cheeks are wet with tears as she looks up to see her teacher.

  “I am so very sorry.”

  “Not as sorry as I.” Jessie flushes as if she has been slapped. Miss Loretta regrets the phrase the moment it is uttered, but she has suffered the Maestro’s condescension, has confused her own thwarted hopes with those of this colored girl.

  Softer now, “You’re not feeling well?”

  The girl’s forehead is damp, the neck of her shirtwaist darkened with perspiration.

  “I was afraid I was going to be ill.”

  There was a girl at Conservatory, Antonia, a lovely girl who played like the wind and had great dark eyes that were rumored to be the result of gypsy blood in her family. Miss Loretta and the others would gather outside the rehearsal room and marvel at her facility, her passion. But if more than one of them stepped in to listen Antonia would break off and return to playing scales or pretend to study the score. The morning of her first recitif she began to tremble and by noon was burning with a fever so intense an ambulance was called for. It was said that her symptoms had disappeared by the time she reached the hospital, though none of them ever saw her again. The porters were there to remove her belongings from her room the next morning.

  “The nature of your sex,” said Professor Einhorn without mentioning Antonia by name in his next lecture, “disposes you to a heightened sensitivity. It is both your glory and your undoing.”

  Miss Loretta chooses her words carefully. “You have performed in front of people, important people, before this,” she says. There was the concert in February, the haute monde of Wilmington present, and but for the girl’s parents not a dark face in the audience. She was brilliant.

  “I feel ill all the time,” says Jessie. “Not just today.”

  It is unthinkable.

  The girl has been rounding out lately, her body ripening. Nothing more. These are growing pains, perhaps, the unruly sway of female humors. We women are slaves to our bodies, thinks Miss Loretta, and our emotions rule our health.

  “Have you had—”

  She is not the girl’s mother, after all, not responsible. But at the end of all her pleading to lure the Maestro here for a trial, after all her steady instruction and guidance through the years, her investment in this child, there must be an accounting.

  “Have you started having your flow?”

  The girl seems to understand. “It began last August,” she says. “But since I’ve been ill—”

  Unthinkable.

  Miss Loretta feels her own tiny swoon of nausea. She is a music instructor, nothing more. “How long has it been interrupted?”

  The girl looks at her with fearful eyes. “It can’t be that.”

  “Of course not.” It is very stuffy, here in the wings, the air stale and motionless. “Because you’ve never engaged—” they are familiar, Miss Loretta and this colored girl, more familiar than teacher and student, more familiar than society will normally allow, given what separates them, “—because you’ve never engaged in improprieties with your young man.”

  It is not a question.

  It is a statement begging confirmation and the girl lets it hang too long, another caesura, the sound of Miss Loretta’s words decaying in the narrow space that is heavy with the mildew of the side curtains bunched around them, and then the realization that they are not alone.

  “Pologize for disturbin you ladies,” he says, pulling his cap off and holding it over his chest, “but you finish with that pianner?”

  It is the day man, old Samuel, a fixture at Thalian Hall since Miss Loretta was a girl, known as Songbird because of his constant humming while at his tasks. He has appeared without a note, however, and stands frozen in a slight bow awaiting her instruction.

  “We are quite finished with it, Samuel. Thank you.”

  He turns to the girl. “I seen your Daddy out the hallway, here on city bidness,” he says. “He ax if I know how it’s goin for you in here.”

  “I’ll have to tell him when I get home,” she says quietly.

  Samuel bows again and puts his cap back on. “Yes M’am, Miss Jessie.” He leaves them to attend to th
e piano.

  “It was only the one time,” she says when he is gone, as if this may provide absolution.

  Slaves to our bodies.

  “Yes,” nods Miss Loretta, wishing there was a place for her to sit. “You will need to tell your father when you are home.”

  “I’ve let you down,” cries the girl, Jessie, her Jessie. “I’ve betrayed you.”

  Jessie is weeping now and Miss Loretta finds herself holding her, cradling her head against her chest as she stands and the girl sits on the stool, feeling the tight-coiled black tresses she has always wanted to touch, if only from curiosity, stroking her hair now and this is too much, too much to bear. She has lost her, lost her dear Jessie forever.

  “What can I do?”

  “Oh my dear,” says Miss Loretta, weeping herself now, “there is so very little you can do.”

  “They’ll find out.”

  “You will tell them. Today.”

  She is amazed to discover that she does not think any less of the girl, that there is, in fact, no betrayal. Only sadness. There are worse fates, of course, but she wanted more for this one. Colored society—what, society in general being what it is—the young man may suffer no consequences. Off in the Army somewhere, at liberty, in the eyes of the world, to shoulder his responsibility or not. What must it be to move with that freedom, to love without care. What reckless joy to saunter through life with only your conscience as restraint, ever the raptor and never the ruined.

  “You will tell them today, and you will be married, and you will have your child,” Miss Loretta says to Jessie, as gently as she can muster.

  “Is that all?”

  It is more than she herself has achieved, it is what women are raised to do. Jessie looks up to her from the stool, holding tightly to both of her hands now, waiting for her response.

  “You can pray that it is a boy,” says Miss Loretta.

  “First you loosen the set screw—that’s right, now lift that lever pin.”

  Milsap wills himself to patience, standing over Davey’s shoulder while the boy tries to pull out the distributor clutch. He can follow instruction, Davey, but every time he puts his hands into the Linotype it’s like the first time they been there. No sense of the machine, of what sets what into motion.

  “Now you can take the lever and the spring away—get a good holt on it—you drop these little pieces in there we got to tear the whole thing apart.”

  “All right—”

  “Now—you’re gonna take the screw from the bracket there and loosen the other screw over on the right front so the whole clutch bracket comes off its dowel pins without springing the clutch shaft—”

  “There’s so many parts.”

  It could have been done with an hour ago but part of the job is seeing if he can train anybody else to fix the apparatus. Maybe come a day when he’s not there and there’s important news and the machines go down, both of them, could be one of a thousand things. What happens then if it’s only Davey or Clifton Lee or that half-wit German they just brung in? The people must be informed, that’s how a democracy functions.

  “You do as many things as this machine does, you need a lot of parts. And they got to be in harmony, which is why we’re changing out this clutch.”

  Milsap sees that there is God in the machine, in the active interplay of slides and matrices, of wheels and pulleys and discs and shafts and springs and ejectors, of hot lead and cold steel, just as there is God in the holy, complex cycles of rain and seed and growth and harvest, in the cleverness of the human mind that can, like Mr. Merganthaler’s, discover a system so intricate yet so obvious once invented that it surely must be divine.

  The copy boy comes up and stands by them but Milsap isn’t ready to see him.

  “Anything in this life,” he says, “got to be in harmony to operate how it’s sposed to. Your church organ—how many moving parts you think that has? One of them, just one, gets out of kilter and you gonna hear noise in the house of God, not music. Our society,” he says, picking up a theme that Mr. Clawson has been developing in his editorials this week, “has got some intricate workings of its own. Something, somebody, steps out of their place—well, that’s when you get chaos. That’s when you get anarchy. What you want?”

  The copy boy, staring into the guts of the machine, is startled to be addressed.

  “Oh. Mr. Clawson need you.”

  The boy runs off. Milsap considers leaving instructions with Davey, then decides against it.

  “Don’t touch anything till I get back,” he says. “Anything.”

  When you put the clutch back on the beam you have to be sure that the timing pin in the distributor screw meshes into the clutch-shaft gear, where the tooth is cut away, so that the screws will be in accurate time with each other. It seems plain enough, like holding a bottle of milk the right way up before you pull the cap off, but some people got no feel for machines and Davey is one of them.

  Clawson is in his office in the tilt-back chair, reading, when Milsap ducks his head in.

  “I got a telephone call from over at the Armory,” he says without looking up from the copy in his lap. There’s only a handful of telephones in town and the Messenger got the first. Milsap can read the subhead, upside-down, of the copy that lies in the editor’s lap—

  FEDERAL BAYONETS TO BE USED IN

  CARRYING ELECTION IN NORTH CAROLINA

  The yankees are threatening to come back and escort their friends to the polling places and the Messenger is making the proper stink about it.

  “They need you to go over and help them with something. Right now.”

  “What is it?”

  Mr. Clawson looks up and gives him one of those Do I pay you to ask questions? looks.

  “Bring your tools.”

  Davey is still staring into the machine when he comes back.

  “You touch anything?”

  “No sir.”

  “You might’s well clean out the magazines while this is down.”

  “Yes sir.”

  If there is God in the machine, his printer’s devil will be the last man on earth to recognize Him.

  You got to take note when old Dan start rubbing his ass on everything in sight. Rubbing his ass and jerking his tail around and pulling his lip up to show his teeth like he got something to say. Jubal leaves him tied out front on Terry’s Alley and goes around behind the shack. Mama is off cleaning for somebody, hardly ever find her home this time of day, but she say come by and get herbs whenever.

  The wormwood plant is in an old wood tub half-buried away from the rest of the garden. Jubal pulls the leaves off, few from this side, few from that, and stuffs them in a leather sack. Brew up some tea with them, lace it with plenty of honey. Dan won’t take nothing that bitter less you sugar it up some. Maybe mash some garlic in with his oats, lace some honey in that too. He had the roundworm once before, Dan, had to shit every three blocks and fought when you cinched the traces on him.

  Jubal has the four-wheel dray with the headboard and seat hitched to him out front. Got to get four, five more years out of Dan, the way prices are. The horse leaves a pile, sick-smelling, in the sand as they turn south to head out of Brooklyn.

  If there was some way to know ahead, like these white folks do who got the telephone, you would never roll empty. Drop one load off and pick up another on the same block, and just keep doing that, making triangles all over town. But how it is, they send some little barefoot boy they give a penny to that finds you or he doesn’t and some other man he sees with a wagon get your job. Jubal pulls back on the reins to slow and ease alongside Mance Crofut, walking along Fourth.

  “How they treatin you, Mance?” he calls.

  “They’s mischief afoot.”

  “How you say?”

  Mance is a hunting friend of his uncle Wicklow, do up a stew with squirrel or possum make you slap your brains out. Mance have to roll around in this one spot where the deadfall trees are going back to dirt before he goes stalki
ng, cause he always smell of creosote from his years on the dock. Jubal went out with them once when he was maybe twelve—Mance hit a doe neither him nor Royal nor Uncle Wick could even see it was so far back in the trees, little hole just under the ear.

  “You know my ole Trapdoor Springfield I got,” says Mance, leaning on the edge of the front wheel as the dray comes to rest. “I allus gets my bullets at Mr. Yaeger store, maybe some chaw that he hang out back. Only this mornin he won’t sell me no bullets, says he fresh out of em. I can see the boxes right there behind him on the shelf, but you don’t want to call no white man out as a liar, specially if he one of the better ones, sell me on credit now and then when there aint no work. So I goes down to Dothan’s and to Bailey Catlin’s and even all the way up to the Phoenix Genral Store, they say they got none either. You know that’s a .45-70, aint like half the town don’t shoot with them old Army rifles, so’s I know somebody tellin stories. I come back to Mr. Yaeger’s, buy a hank of that chaw, an I look right at them boxes behind him an I says ‘You haven’t got noner them .45s in since I come by this mornin, have you?’ Now he look round that storeroom to be sure aint nobody listenin and he lean crost the counter and he lower his voice down, say ‘I be honest with you, Mance, they is an innerdiction on us sellin no weapons nor bullets to the colored folks till we told it’s o.k. again.’ Seems it’s this White Man’s Union, going bout making rules and you break em they gone shut you down or burn you out.”

  They are quiet for a moment, pondering this.

  “Election coming up,” says Jubal.

  “Well I wish it was already past,” says the old man, shaking his head. “White people start actin skittish, you got to step lightly.”

  Jubal offers him a ride but the old man is almost home and cuts off into Campbell Street, still shaking his head. Dan whickers and farts as they cross over the railroad tracks on the Hilton Bridge. Mostly it’s the foals you got to worry about with roundworm, eat their whole insides up. A mule Dan’s age has had em more than once, and they don’t usually suffer too much with it. That’s just life, is what Uncle Wicklow says, whatever bad happens to you, you don’t ever lose it. Just learn how to carry it inside.