by John Sayles
They will leave tonight, he knows, only the dogs who are not afraid of being eaten and the handful of men he’s impressed for the polo left in the morning, and the flag with the glorious many-rayed sun will be respectfully folded and buried under the old widow’s hut. The church here is too low to give the snipers much range, and if the yanquis don’t lose too many men or are in a hurry there is a good chance they won’t burn the village down like they did at Malabon.
In Malabon the yanquis had a fright, not knowing that fireworks were manufactured there. Even his own beaten and wounded soldiers turned from their retreat to watch the display in the night sky, cheering each colorful bomb-burst.
A runner trots in from the west, looking exhausted. He sees Diosdado’s uniform, approaches and salutes.
“Mi teniente,” he gasps, catching his breath. “You have a man who speaks americano?”
“I am that man.”
“They need you right away.” He points back the way he came. “Just down the road, una media liga, at the great tree.”
Diosdado nods. “Stay and eat something before you go back.”
“Gracias, jefe.”
He leaves Sargento Bayani in charge and heads down the road to the west, refugees from Marilao eyeing him uneasily as they pass on their way to Bulacan. Hererra, who is head of intelligence under General del Pilar, stands with a squad of bored-looking fusileros guarding an American prisoner under a huge kupang tree. The soldier is very young and very blond and very sunburned, looking scared and defiant at the same time as he sits with his hands bound behind his back. He doesn’t seem to be wounded.
“Bring him out here.”
Hererra’s men pull the boy to his feet and drag him out into the midday sun to face Diosdado.
“You know what we want?” asks Hererra.
Diosdado nods and walks around the soldier, who tries to keep a steady gaze but has to blink as the sweat rolls into his eyes.
“Your name?”
“Winston Wall.”
“What regiment are you in, Winston Wall?”
The boy squints, frowns. “I don’t have to tell you nothin.”
Diosdado examines Wall’s uniform. They have good boots, all of them, and go into battle with belts spiked full of ammunition.
“You are a private in the Kansas Volunteers,” he says, “under Colonel Funston.”
Wall tries to hawk on the ground but can’t make enough spit.
“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not.”
Diosdado speaks to Hererra in Tagalog. Some of the yanquis understand Spanish. “How was he captured?”
Hererra smiles. “This yanqui cannot swim. We pulled him out downstream from the fight at Marilao.”
Diosdado turns back to the private. The Kansas soldiers have already made a reputation. “It seems your cupadres have abandoned you.”
“I just got separated, is all.” The boy, taller by a head than Diosdado, lifts his chin and tries to look indifferent. “So you people gone shoot me?”
Diosdado shakes his head but doesn’t smile. “Not now. Not here.”
Before they would send this boy on to Malolos for questioning, would hold him for a prisoner exchange, but headquarters is preparing to leave Malolos and haven’t told anyone where they will set up next.
“You gone feed me, then? I haven’t et for two days.”
Diosdado nods at the fusileros, tiny-looking near the American, who follow their words with rapt incomprehension. Most have never seen a yanqui who wasn’t charging them with a Springfield in hand.
“When these men get to eat,” he says to the private, “I’m sure they’ll give you something. Did you fight at Caloocan?”
The boy can’t help but grin. “That was one hell of a scrap. You boys give it to us pretty hot for a spell till they brung the artillery down on you, tore the hell outta that town. Then it was pretty much butt-and-bayonet drill.”
“You executed prisoners.” A few men who submerged themselves in the water of the ditches saw and crawled back after dark to report the slaughter. The boy seems perplexed, frowning again.
“I don’t know as how we held on to anybody long enough for them to be a prisoner,” he says finally. “Int there some kinda rule about that?”
“If a man is unarmed and surrenders, he is a prisoner. Such actions have their consequence.”
“So you are gonna shoot me.”
Diosdado looks up into the boy’s sunburned face. His nose has begun to peel. “That depends on what you can tell us.”
The boy looks as if he will cry. “But I don’t know nothin. I don’t even know where this is.”
“We are on a road between Marilao and Bulacan.”
“I mean where this whole island is, like on a map. I never been out of Kansas till they shipped us out west, and I was sick on the boat the whole damn trip over. We come to that Hongkong they wouldn’t even let me ashore.”
There isn’t much to know. The Americans are driving north and east from Manila and they have better rifles and better training and officers who speak the same language as their men and aren’t threatening to murder each other. There is no great mystery to their tactics, MacArthur’s division moving parallel to the one commanded by Lawton, fighting up the Dagupan line till they can move their troops by rail. The boy knows less than Diosdado’s own ignorant soldados.
“You had better think of something,” he says to Private Wall. “The people where they are taking you are very angry.”
“I can tell you one thing.” The boy is shifting from one foot to the other and sweating heavily now. The yanquis have been in the country long enough to have the sprue and if they stay through the humid months many will die. The Spanish cemetery in Manila is full of boys who wasted away with disease and weren’t worth the trouble to ship their bodies home.
“I can tell you one damn thing,” he continues, “and that’s that you googoos don’t hold a prayer in this deal. Once Uncle sets his cap for something you can’t chase him off from it. We got an Army full of Indin fighters and wildass country boys and there aint a thing we like better than a old-fashioned rabbit hunt.” He jerks his head at Diosdado. “You’re as near to a white man as they got here—you ought to tell em they don’t have a show.”
Hererra, curious at the boy’s outburst, steps closer. “What is he saying?”
Diosdado wonders how he would act if captured by the Americans, what posture of resolute defiance befits an officer of the Philippine Republic. “He tells me that we’re losing the war.”
The capitán smiles grimly. “I’ll pass that on to my superiors.”
Diosdado gives Private Wall a last appraising look, then starts back to Bulacan. “Your prisoner is going to shit his pants,” he calls, “and then you are going to have to smell him all the way to headquarters.”
“Cabrón!” Hererra shouts, grabbing the private and shoving him toward the stream that parallels the road, yelling at his men to pull the boy’s pants down.
The first line of trenches is dug at the south end of the village, women and boys running with water held in joints of bamboo for their own men and for the soldiers who toil beside them. The Pampangano brothers have something resembling a tinola cooking and many of the men are chewing on unripe mangos they have knocked down. It is the time of day when Diosdado feels like he would resign his commission and surrender to the enemy in exchange for a café con leche and a buñuelo at La Campana on the corner of the Escolta and San Jacinto. He did not appreciate the sweetness of his student days, the dreamlike quality of life in the Walled City, and now it is gone forever.
“What was he like?” asks Sargento Bayani, helping the men reinforce the trench walls with lengths of bamboo and palm trunks. “The prisoner?”
“Big,” says Diosdado. “Like all of them. Giants.” He sits on top of the piled earth. His uniform pants can’t get any filthier. “Above all else, the americanos are not the Spanish.”
“You still believe that?”
“The penins
ulares are capable of wickedness. And they’re weary—three hundred years of fighting us here.”
“And the americanos—?”
“The americanos are—innocent. The way a crocodile is innocent.”
He has seen them shoot unarmed men, men begging to live, has seen them set fire to a palm-thatch hut to drive whoever is inside out onto their bayonets. But still they seem guileless, childlike in their murder.
“Innocent and hungry,” he says.
Bayani spits. “I grew up hungry.”
It seems that he is from Zambales like Diosdado, though they have avoided speaking of it.
“I mean hungry for everything. Hungry for our lands, our souls, hungry for the world. These people,” he waves to the south, to where he knows the Americans are marching, steadily moving forward, “they could devour every one of our islands and never be satisfied.”
The capitán municipal shuffles up to Diosdado, bowing twice as he approaches, and holds something out to him. It is a flintlock pistol from the time of the Peninsular War and smells like the cigar box it has been kept in.
“My grandfather owned this,” he says. “He fought against the Spanish.”
“All alone?”
“Whenever they turned their backs. I offer it to the Cause.”
“Do you have bullets for it, hermano?” asks Bayani.
The man scratches his head. “My grandfather kept them hidden in a different place, so we wouldn’t be tempted to shoot each other. But he is dead now.”
“After the battle has passed and you’ve come back,” says Diosdado, gently pushing the pistol back into the capitán’s hands, “send the children out onto the field to pick up the shell casings. We have a factoría in San Fernando where they are filled and become bullets again.”
“Por supuesto, mi tentiente.”
“And when you talk to the yanqui officer, tell him that you were forced to help us dig, that there were hundreds and hundreds of us and you were afraid.”
“If you wish, sir.”
“And when those boys who raised the flag are a bit older—”
“My sons?”
“When your sons are a bit older, send them to join with us.”
The capitán municipal is clearly troubled by the idea that the war may last so long. “But where will you be?”
“With the Igorots,” smiles Bayani, “in the Cordillera. Sharpening our spears with the true Filipinos.”
CONEY ISLAND
“It’s a poor cut of meat that wants special wrapping.”
Brigid tries to pull her stomach up under her ribs as Grania laces from behind. When she bought the corset, the shopgirl called it an investment in her future.
“Ye should wear it more often,” says Grania. “It wouldn’t hurt so much.”
“And trussed up at work as well? On my knees scrubbin the boards with this takin me breath away?”
Maeve holds the pitted mirror she salvaged before the trash man got it. “But look at the shape it gives you.”
“It isn’t natural.”
“All the girls will be lookin the same,” says Grania.
Grania is an authority on what all the girls are wearing, what all the girls are saying and doing. Not a thought in her head but boys and how to get them to pay mind to her, impatient to escape from school and begin what she likes to call her “proper life.”
“None will hold a candle to our Brigid,” says Maeve. Brigid has hope yet for Maeve, who is sweet and clever at books and speaks like an American and still has her hair in braids.
“None will be my age, either.”
“Ye look no older than ye are,” says Grania, pulling the laces taut and tying them off. “Turn sideways—there, d’ye see?”
“Hand me the waist.”
“Yer not wearin the plain one—”
“And why not?”
“Because yer going to see the Elephant, not to a temperance meeting.” Grania pulls her own striped blouse from the peg beneath Father’s fading portrait of Parnell. “This might fit ye.”
“The Elephant burned down, and I’ll not wear that, whether it fits me or not.”
“Ye liked it when ye bought it for me.”
“It’s too flossy for a woman of my—” she is about to say age, but that isn’t it. They bought it from a jewcart because it looked like the one Grania had admired in a store window on Grand Street, the three of them out dream-shopping together one night when Brigid wasn’t too tired. But the material is not the same and up close you can tell that it is only an imitation.
“Ye have to wear somethin.”
“Give me the black.”
“That ye wore for Father’s funeral?”
“It’s the best I own.”
“But—”
“Black will set her hair off,” says Maeve, putting the mirror down and hurrying to the dresser. Trying to spare her feelings, it’s clear, but Brigid appreciates the effort. Maeve jiggles the broken drawer till it opens, then pulls out the blouse, black bombazine with vertical pleats that Mother brought from Donegal.
“And it goes with my skirt—”
“He’ll take one peep,” says Grania, sighing with exasperation, “and offer his condolences.”
“One more word,” says Brigid in the tone that Mother would use when she’d had her limit with them, “and I’ll jerk a knot in ye.” She feels a fool, standing there in corset and gauze stockings, girding herself for an excursion with a man she hardly knows, and her sister’s mockery on top of it—
Maeve has to climb on a chair to deal with her hair, plaiting it first then artfully piling it over the pompadour frame on the crown of her head. She does it with the same nimble care as when she hung the cloth to cover the grimy walls, as she applies to the funeral wreaths assembled by lamplight each evening after school. “A dexthrus hand,” Father used to say. “She’ll earn a handsome wage someday.”
“If ye had a poof,” says Grania, “ye could wear it higher.”
“Any higher and I’ll topple from the weight of it. And I haven’t even got the shoes on yet.”
Rivka who scrubs with her at the Musee has loaned her the shoes, calf-high leather with a heel as long as her middle finger.
“They’ll shape up your legs,” she said, winking. “Just in case he gets a gander at em.”
Brigid can’t bend over with the corset on so Maeve kneels to button them up.
There is much discussion over the hat, ending with Grania allowing her the simple black straw as long as Maeve is allowed to decorate it with ribbon and rosettes. Grania studies Brigid’s face as she buttons her collar tight.
“Ye should do yer lips over.”
“I’m a working woman,” says Brigid, “not a streetwalker.”
“It’s not who ye are, it’s the idea of ye they carry in their heads.”
“And what do you know about men?”
Grania sneaks out with older ones, girls sixteen and seventeen with money from their shops and lunchrooms, and Brigid has warned her and threatened her and pleaded with her not to be so fast, to enjoy what she can of life before giving up to the hard weight of family the way that Mother did, just a girl herself when Brigid was born. Mother who was wore out at thirty when they took the boat, and dead within the year.
“I know enough,” says Grania. “Take a few steps and lookit yerself.”
Grania holds the mirror for her and she totters around a bit, getting used to the shoes.
“You look lovely,” says Maeve, on the chair again to pin the newly adorned hat to Brigid’s hair. “Like a queen.”
Brigid turns to kiss her cheek. “Yer a darlin to say so. But I don’t feel like meself at all.”
“It’s only a different you,” says Grania, taking her hand. “A special you.”
“You’ll have a grand time,” says Maeve. “Ride the wheel, shoot the chutes—”
“I’ll do no such thing.”
Neither of the girls has ever been to Coney, and Brigid only the once with
Mick Cassiday the bricklayer who was so full that halfway through the day he pulled her out on the crowded beach and proceeded to fall asleep right on the sand, herself sitting on his little square of a handkerchief till his snoring attracted a gang of little mischief-makers and she took the steamer back alone.
“It’ll be loads of fun whatever you do.”
Brigid turns her head this way and that, studying the damage in the ancient looking glass. “Fun,” she says, “has nothing to do with this.”
The girls accompany her down the five dark flights and watch from the stoop as she starts down 38th toward the river in her borrowed shoes. Father stood that way, watching them when Maeve went to make her First Communion, chuffed with pride but firm in his promise never to set foot in a priest-house again after the way they’d banjaxed the great Parnell. A trio of cadets lounging at the corner make their kissing noises at her but stay where they are. After the one incident when Grania was little, words mostly, but words a young girl shouldn’t be hearing, Father had asked a few of the lads from the Clan na Gael to come by and remind the gang they weren’t the only Hibernians in the city with some clout behind them. Since then it’s been the occasional dirty-mouthed pleasantry, but never a hand laid on any one of them.
Harry offered to come for her, of course, gentleman that he is, but if the sight of her wreck of a tenement on Battle Row didn’t chase him the Gopher boys surely would. He’d have given her trolley fare too, if she’d asked, but the boldness of it, asking a man for coins in the hand, made her blush at the thought. American girls could manage such things—Grania was full of stories how’d they’d get this one or that one to treat them, how they did the town and never parted with a cent. Brigid turns left on Ninth, weaving through the crowds and pushcarts of Paddy’s Market, trolley cars rushing overhead, each shopkeeper with a barker in the doorway shouting out wares and prices, scullery maids searching for bargains for their mistresses, dray wagons empty and full rattling up and down the Avenue. The shoes aren’t as bad as she thought, only a matter of leaning forward on her toes, but the corset is a mortification. It is a warm day, and even in the shade under the shop awnings or the Elevated tracks Brigid is soon damp all over, sweat running down her forehead, and begins to feel resentful. This is it, she thinks. Our only adventure, our great single drama in life over in a flash, and then motherhood and the labor of home until the grave. Mr. Manigault is stepping into a hack about now, she imagines, comfortable in his clothing and not a worry on his brow. No wonder the men in Bunbeg were known to wait till their first gray whisker before they married, no wonder the silver-haired gents in the offices she cleans are full of laughter and boasting. Even Rivka’s own intended, a Second Avenue sport Brigid has never liked the look of, nipping off to this new war as if it is a weekend excursion. Her collar is choking her.