A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  White’s Sons has the Board of Health contract and guarantees removal within three hours of notice, which is usually by a police from a callbox. But there is no police at the location, only a handful of little ones, Irishes they look like, daring each other to go up and sit on the dead horse’s rump. Jubal walks Hooker past it, the little ones, mostly boys and one little girl sucking on her fingers, moving away to watch. He stands in the seat to look behind as Hooker backs the wagon up to the horse’s head.

  “The Dago left it,” says the oldest of the boys, stepping closer. “The one that sells melons. It wouldn’t go no more and he whips it and hollers at it in Dago and it still won’t go so he jumps off and hits it on the nose and it just kneels down on its front legs and stays that way. So he grabs some crates from the alley here and busts em up with his feet and sets a fire under its back end. Only then it just falls down on its side and don’t move no more.”

  “I seen one explode once,” says a boy who keeps putting his thumb up his nose. “Back when we lived by the river. Its belly blowed up like a balloon and then kablooey—all over the street. My old lady wouldn’t let us outside till they come get it.”

  If you’re lucky the owner is still there and the harness is on and you can use that to pull it up. But this horse has been stripped clean, a dusty chestnut mare that maybe has the glanders, nose still running snot. Have to wash the wagon bed out good when he’s shed of it.

  Jubal sets the brake and hops down to the street. The rest of the boys step up, leaving the little girl staring from the sidewalk. Sometimes the street children will cut the tail off before you get there, twisting horsehair rings for each other.

  “Can we help?”

  “You stay clear of her,” he says, pointing to Hooker. “Come too close she maybe kick your head in.”

  The boys look at Hooker with new respect and a few take a step back. Jubal unwinds the cable and pulls it down to the carcass, then lets the tail ramp of the wagon down. He ties the forelegs together just above the knee, yanks a leather strap tight around the neck and then links the two together with chain, slipping the cable hook through the middle link. The boys squat to watch him work.

  “You want to get these off the street before they go stiff,” he explains, “or else they maybe don’t fit on the wagon.”

  The tip-wagon is low-sided and extra wide, with a pulley block bolted to the frame behind the seat, and the ramp has skid boards that he greases every morning. Jubal runs the free end of the cable through the pulley and then unhitches Hooker, knotting the traces together and then clipping the cable to them. More little ones come down from the stoops to watch, and women stick their heads out from the tenement windows all around. He leads Hooker away from the wagon, waiting for a furniture van to rattle past before heading her on a diagonal across the street till the cable is taut.

  “Hold,” he says to the horse, using the reins like a lead line to keep her grounded, and goes to check that the carcass is lined up right. Even hooked to a load you never know what a horse might get up to—a loud noise or a bee in the blinkers and they can go off trompling people till they run into a wall. He comes back to her, holding the reins a couple inches from the bridle bit.

  “Yo!”

  He doesn’t have to yank on her or even slap with the reins, Hooker pulling steady and straight and the pulley squeaking and the carcass dragging up the ramp onto the wagon bed. A couple of the boys clap their hands when it is done.

  “Where you gonna take im?” asks the second boy.

  Jubal grins as he backs Hooker between the wagon shafts. “Straight to the butcher shop. This gone be your supper.”

  The other boys laugh and call out Kevin eats horsemeat, Kevin eats horsemeat, pointing and dancing around the boy.

  “We eat nuttin but cabbage,” he answers them, face going red. “Cabbage and beans.”

  He has almost got Hooker back in the traces when a panel wagon pulled by a hackney horse, half lame and too small for its load, stops alongside him. The panel is new-painted in red and black and gold and says—

  EDISON COMPANY PICTURES

  HIGHEST-GRADE SPECIALTIES

  The white man sitting next to the driver leans out to talk to him.

  “There is another one that wants dealing with,” says the man, who wears a straw boater and looks like somebody Jubal knows. “At the corner of 39th.”

  Jubal lifts his hat off. “Can’t carry but one at a time, suh,” he says. “But I thank you for the lookout.”

  The man frowns at him for a moment, then points. “I know you.”

  White folks always think they know colored because they don’t look so close, but then it comes to Jubal and he smiles. “That’s right, suh, you Judge Manigault’s boy.”

  He does not add “The one who don’t walk right” which is how most of the colored in Wilmington know them apart, the ones who don’t say “the good one” or “the nasty one.” This is the good one.

  The white man narrows his eyes, starting to smile. “And you are—?”

  “Jubal, suh. Jubal Scott.”

  “Of course.” The white man almost reaches down to shake hands, then catches himself. “What brings you up here, Jubal?”

  Jubal keeps smiling. “How things come out, there’s a whole lot of us come north.”

  It sits between them for a moment. As he remembers it this Manigault didn’t have no part in it, always being left out from what the big white folks was up to.

  “Of course,” Harry says, smile fading. He points at Hooker. “I remember you now—you were a drayman.”

  “It got four legs and a tail, I can make it move.”

  The white man smiles again. “You own this horse?”

  “Nawsuh, this belong to Mr. Tom and Mr. Andrew—that’s P. White’s Sons what keeps the street clear. They got three, four hundred horses.”

  The good Manigault nods his head, figuring something. The colored man beside him squirms in his seat, eager to get going.

  “Do they have horses for rental?”

  “Don’t know but they might. Horses to do what?”

  He waves a hand at the wagon panel. “To be in a motion picture. They should look like cavalry horses.”

  Jubal shakes his head. “Don’t have none of that kind. Maybe you try the police, they always got some for auction.”

  The man nods, pulls a small card from his vest pocket and hands it down to Jubal. “If you ever tire of this service, I might have some employment for you. Feel free to call on me.”

  Jubal takes the card, squints at it. “Thank you, suh.”

  “Harry Manigault.”

  The name would have come to him sooner or later. “Like it say on your card.”

  The man smiles again, just about the first real smile Jubal has seen since he’s been in the City. “Good day, Jubal. It is nice to see a familiar face.”

  The driver smacks the hackney with his stick and the panel wagon jerks away. Jubal sticks his hat back on.

  “We get that horse off the street, Mr. Harry,” he calls. “Three-hour guarantee!”

  Dr. Bonkers’ does no harm. It would take a detailed chemical analysis to discover the specific ingredients, but the taste indicates that it is mostly vegetable oil with a dose of cayenne and some camphor to impart a suitably medicinal smell. The recommended dosage is small enough—a teaspoon before retiring—and the taste sufficiently off-putting that subscribers are unlikely to make themselves ill ingesting the Brain Food. Until the licensing imbroglio can be resolved it affords him access to people’s homes, and perhaps more importantly, a shiny black-leather physician’s bag with which to impress and intimidate them.

  Dr. Lunceford is not a gifted traveler, his “spiel” limited to inquiries surrounding the prospective purchaser’s ailments and those of their loved ones, and has thus far moved only enough of the product to avoid being discharged and losing the totemic satchel.

  “Do you suffer from epilepsy, spasms, convulsions, insomnia, hysteria, dyspepsia, pa
ralysis, alcoholism, St. Vitus’ dance or other nervous disorders?”

  The woman looks at him blankly, her door open only enough to see him with one eye. “Aint got none of those.”

  “And how is the general health of your family?”

  The woman looks behind her into the dim-lit room, then back to him. “Got a boy bust his arm.”

  “Ah. Perhaps I can be of some assistance.”

  Her eyes flick down to the leather bag. “You a doctor?”

  Technically, at this time and in this state, he is not. “Madam,” he assures her, “I have set countless broken limbs. Countless.”

  She looks at him suspiciously. “How much it gone cost?”

  He is pushing, gently, against the door. It has been the most difficult lesson for him in this great city, that aggressiveness is valued, required, in fact, instead of being considered poor manners. “You should think about what you can afford. Is the young man in pain?”

  He is by her then, surrendering to the now-instinctual New York habit of evaluating the apartment in relation to his own. There is light only from the street, coming in through a pair of dirty windows, revealing walls with patches of lath showing through and the remains of two layers of wallpaper in patterns that disagree with each other, wrinkled with moisture. They have pinned up a few color pictures torn from magazines, drawings of white people doing pretty things. No, thinks Dr. Lunceford, ours is not as bad as this.

  The boy is small and dark-skinned, a permanent dent, most probably the work of forceps, in one side of his head. The injured arm lays slack in his lap as he sits on the only chair with upholstery in the two rooms, his legs sticking out straight from the seat. He looks up and Dr. Lunceford can read his thoughts—What is this man going to do to me?

  He sits cautiously on the arm of the chair. “What’s your name?”

  “Cuttis.”

  “Curtis?”

  “Cuttis.”

  “How did you injure your arm?”

  “Gettin co’.”

  “In the basement?”

  “On the train. When the co’ train come by slow enough I climbs up an thow some down to Montrose and James.”

  “And you fell off the coal car?”

  “Naw, I ain that stupit. After all I thown down Montrose and James wouldn’t gimme my share an we commence to fightin.” The little boy touches his arm, as if to bring back the memory. “James thow me down on the rail.”

  The mother looks on, standing, waiting to see what he will do next. He has had women, back in Wilmington, repel him at gunpoint to keep him from vaccinating their children.

  “Never forget,” Dr. Osler used to say when he took his students on city rounds, “that when you are in a person’s home, you are a guest.”

  “I’m going to touch your arm, Cuttis. This one first.”

  The boy reluctantly offers up his good arm, and Dr. Lunceford pushes his fingers to the bone, getting a feel for what should be. There is no way to be precise without a Roentgen, of course, but a few generations of cotton loaders who can still bend their arms will vouch for him.

  “Now I’m going to straighten out the arm that you’ve hurt and have you try a few things.”

  The boy looks at his face as he supports the broken arm under the elbow and slowly, gently straightens it.

  “Can I see you make an o.k. sign with your fingers? That’s good—now push your fingers against mine—”

  “It hurt.”

  “But you can do it, can’t you? Now I’m going to hold around your fingers and you have to try to spread them—that’s good, this is all very good.”

  He runs his fingers lightly up from the elbow to the wrist several times. “You were in this fight, what, two or three days ago?”

  “Three days,” says the mother. “But we aint got nothin to pay a hospital.”

  Dr. Lunceford ignores the statement, looking into the eyes of the boy. “Now I want you to pretend that your pain is a voice. When I touch a certain part, you tell me if the voice is humming, talking, talking loud, shouting, or screaming.”

  “It hummin all the time.”

  “I’m sure it is. You’ve been very brave about it.”

  He begins to pinch around the bone, very slowly, moving toward the hand.

  “She talkin now.”

  “Uh-huh—”

  “Louder.”

  “How about here?”

  Tears come to the boy’s eyes and he can’t speak. Dr. Lunceford eases the pressure, turns to the mother.

  “I’ll need one of your stockings—it can be old but it must be clean. And if you’d boil a panful of water, please.”

  She looks at him for a moment, as if the words take time to penetrate, then steps into the other room. He knows he should have phrased it differently—“something you’ve just washed” instead of implying that most objects in here are filthy. Which they are. There is a thin blanket hung over the back of the chair and he imagines the little boy stretches out on it and the threadbare ottoman to sleep, perhaps sharing the chair with a sibling. He waits till he hears pots banging in the kitchen.

  “Your arm is broken up near the wrist, Cuttis, and if I don’t set it it’s going to heal but in the wrong position—”

  “It be crookit.”

  “That’s right. Now you’re going to have to help me—”

  If it was a Monteggia fracture he’d insist they see a licensed doctor, somebody with a fluoroscope, but this is relatively standard—a distal fracture of both bones, the radial fracture complete and displaced, the ulnar of the greenstick variety, no obvious neural or vascular damage.

  He gets a grip above and below the radial fracture. “I want you to take a deep breath now—”

  The reduction is simple, rapid traction and torque, the boy crying out sharply and the mother rushing back in with a black cotton stocking in her hand.

  “He ain counted to three,” complains the boy, tears running down his cheeks.

  But Dr. Lunceford has the bag open, fishing in it for the can of rolled bandages. Most of the space is taken up with bottles of Dr. Bonkers’, but he manages to crowd a few useful articles between them, most of them purchased from a notorious thief on Tenth Avenue, a young Irishman who had never seen or heard of a colored physician.

  “Barbers, I knew you had them,” he said, laying out his wares on a tabletop. “And the ginks who soak you to plant you under the ground. But a colored croaker, who’d a thought that?”

  The bandages, already permeated with plaster of Paris, must have been prepared in a hospital, and Dr. Lunceford assumes the crime was perpetrated during a sojourn in one of the city wards, the thief making his rounds while still convalescing. “The quicker the patient can return to preferred activities,” Dr. Osler used to say, “the speedier the recovery.”

  “I could use that water now,” he says to the mother.

  She hands him the stocking and backs out of the room. He has the boy slowly supinate and pronate the wrist, feels the bones to make sure the reduction is holding, then helps the boy off with his shirt and slips the stocking over his arm, attempting to smooth out the wrinkles. A long-arm cast is not specifically called for, but with young boys the more immobilized the limb the better, discouraging their more rambunctious instincts.

  The mother returns with a pan of hot water and he asks her to set it on the floor.

  “The break will hurt quite a bit for the rest of the day,” he tells the boy as he wets the bandage and begins to wind it around his crooked arm, “but tomorrow most of the pain should be gone.”

  He has seen no facility in the apartment, perhaps everybody sharing an outhouse in the alley, or common toilets, tiny closets, placed on every other floor. He has seen every possible unsanitary solution as he has moved Yolanda and Jessie from building to building, structures thrown up to maximize profit per square foot, not to house human beings.

  “Do you have any sort of medicine you use for the children? For toothaches or that sort of thing?”


  The woman frowns, then walks to a rickety cupboard and pulls out a box of baking soda and a bottle of Mrs. Pinkham’s panacea.

  “I got this for bad stomach,” she says raising the baking soda, “and the other for my lady problems.”

  He nods to the Vegetable Compound. “Give him two tablespoons of that before he sleeps tonight.”

  The potion is largely alcohol and will certainly have a soporific impact on a small boy. Kopp’s Baby Friend, basically morphine in sugar water, would be more effective, but Dr. Lunceford has refused to represent it.

  “I got to buy your bottle too?”

  He smiles. “Dr. Bonkers’ Brain Food is a tonic for a remarkable panoply of afflictions. A broken arm, however, is not one of them. I shall visit, if you don’t mind, in a week to be sure this cast is not causing problems. If you can’t spare anything now, perhaps at that time—”

  The return visit is both responsible and good commerce, as only the most indigent or unembarrassable will allow you to walk away empty-handed more than once.

  “I get you something.”

  She steps out and Dr. Lunceford turns to the boy, who is watching his arm as the bandages begin to harden around it.

  “Which arm do you throw with?”