A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  “You are an unlucky man,” said the sheng-yuan. “We will have to discover who has done this to you and see that they are punished.”

  “I have nothing,” said Baba, looking at the ground.

  “Nobody starves in my village,” said Zhou. “I will have Feng bring you some seed, and you will plant again. They say a fire is good for the soil.”

  “You are very kind.”

  The sheng-yuan looked at Mei then with his wolf’s eyes and gestured for her to come forward. When she put her leg over the stone wall he began to laugh.

  “What clown feet!” he said. “Your daughter is very beautiful—above the knees. You are truly an unlucky man.”

  When the sedan chair and its passenger had passed Baba slapped Mei in the face.

  Mr. Chan was arrested then and charged with setting the fire, worse, accused of lighting it with a match he had been given for that purpose by the yang gweizi. The village was told to gather by the gate in front of the sheng-yuan’s house, gathering obediently to watch Mr. Chan beaten one hundred strokes with the bamboo cane before he was taken away with a yoke around his neck. The sheng-yuan came out to warn all of them to be wary of the foreign devils, who were all spies for the Dwarf Bandits who were making war on the Empire. He offered free baijiu for the men then, and when Baba finally danced home he was with a half-dozen others, all of them ready to go to war. Ma was having her bleeding and he held her down and yanked away the rag and went out to the others saying they were going to Weifang to wipe the dirty blood on the house of the yellow-hair yang gweizi and break their spells.

  It took Mei a week to rake the ash in the field till it was even. Then after a little rain Feng came with the seed and watched her plant the first handfuls.

  “Not so deep as the millet,” he said. “Put it in rows with space to walk in between. This is gold you are planting.”

  Ma’s left foot had begun to smell, and soon she could only walk on one leg using a crutch that Second Brother made for her.

  “I was as pretty as you,” she said to Mei one night before either of the men had come. “Would you believe that? And then I was married. Mei, your feet have saved you again.”

  “If I don’t marry,” Mei asked, “what will I be?”

  Ma thought a long time about it. She was in less pain than usual but weaker, her eyes growing cloudy, and she smelled too sweet, like fruit fallen to rot.

  “When this kalpa ends,” she said finally, “and it will be very soon, there will be a way for you. It will be a difficult way, terrifying, but you must stay on the path and never despair.”

  “Like when I ran from the wolf.”

  Ma squeezed Mei’s arm then. As Mei’s arms had grown stronger Ma’s had turned to sticks.

  “Running may not be possible.”

  Baba was very worried about the new crop, never having grown flowers before. Every day he scolded Mei, telling her not to crush the new plants under her big feet as she searched for weeds to pull. In only two weeks the sprouts came out, and after a month and a half it looked like they were growing tiny cabbages. And then the plants began to rise. Baba would brag to Second Brother, who had been taken on again in the sheng-yuan’s fields as an act of charity, that he was going to have the finest poppy-flower crop in the village, and Ma would cover her ears so she wouldn’t hear. Most years she put a smear of honey on the lips of their kitchen-god statue so in the New Year it would say sweet things about them when it flew to report to the Jade Emperor. Now she covered his whole head with clay so he could not see or hear what had become of her family.

  “The four walls that we must escape in this life,” said Ma, who was more of a White Lotus than ever now that she could barely walk, “are liquor, lust, anger, and wealth.”

  Baba and Second Brother laughed.

  “We have escaped from wealth thus far,” said Baba. “Maybe this year we will let it catch us.”

  Three months after the sowing, Mei’s plants began to blossom. The petals were crimson red, the color of happiness, and more beautiful than anything she had ever seen. But in only a few days they began to fall off the plants, carpeting the ground in red and leaving a little green ball on top of the stem.

  The balls were growing fatter each day by the time Eldest Brother returned from fighting the Japanese. Everybody in the village knew that the Imperial Army had failed, had somehow been defeated by the Dwarf Bandits and their yang gweizi weapons, and so the family could not have a public celebration. Baba and Ma were excited though, even if Eldest Brother looked like a different person and was not at home in his body anymore, as if the Imperial officers or the Dwarf Bandits had stolen his spirit. He was going to be an escort, he said, a guard for the caravans passing from the mountains to the sea, but most days he only sat around drinking and gambling with the pu hao at Yip’s and people in the market said he was a salt smuggler. Then he joined a group called the Obedient Swords and on market days would appear with them to demonstrate how they could whip their swords at each other but always duck or leap over the blade and never be cut. Eldest Brother was the one who had to pass through the crowd with a rice bowl, asking for the audience to contribute money for their further training. He never came home to visit.

  “The foreign devils have put a spell on Ma,” he told Second Brother when he saw him at the market. “They are making her rot while she is still breathing and it is unlucky to look at her.”

  The plants were as high as Mei’s breasts and the green balls the size of hens’ eggs when it was time to harvest. Feng came to show them how to do this, bringing Mei a special slicer, a wooden handle with three slivers of glass stuck in it.

  “Choose only the pods that are standing at attention, like this one,” he said, demonstrating. “Then make a cut, up and down, on three sides. Wait until the sun is three hands from the ground before you do this, or the nectar will dry too quickly and not flow out. In the morning you take this other blade and scrape off the gum, but be careful not to hurt the pod, because it can be milked many times.”

  There was so much work to be done that even Baba had to help every morning, scraping the pods that had been scored and then slicing the newly ripe ones in the late afternoon. Ma refused to help drying the gum they collected, so he had to tend to that as well, even boiling some down to a brown paste in the cooking pot and then drying it more. Ma only watched him with her cloudy eyes, sitting on the k’ang all day, unwilling to help him keep the fire going for his business and unable to cook because he always had opium boiling in the pot. Mei came in late from the field, sticky with poppy gum, and had to help Ma outside to relieve herself on the dungpile. Second Brother came to say he was moving to the barracks the sheng-yuan kept for his workers. At night it was only the three of them, Mei trying to rub the gum off her fingers and Ma sitting on the k’ang looking into the next world and Baba sitting on the floor under the window smoking opium in his pipe, his eyes as cloudy as Ma’s.

  The pods were milked out in two weeks and then Mei had to cut them off and leave them in the sun to dry. The day she cut them open to take the seeds out was the day that Ma died.

  The hut was ripe with the sweet smell of her. Mei came home just as the sun hid behind the earth and Baba was already on the floor with his cheeks wet with tears, smoking opium, Ma laying flat on the k’ang with a white cloth laid over her face.

  Eldest Brother took charge then because Baba could barely breathe without weeping. He came home from the swordsmen and burned spirit money in front of the hut and poured a ring of sorghum wine around it. Feng sent word that the sheng-yuan would offer credit on the opium paste that was still drying, and a coffin was ordered and a new set of white clothing for Baba and Mei and her brothers and even for Ma. Mei was allowed to help prepare the body with Mrs. Hong, taking Ma’s old clothes off to burn and cleaning her and dressing her in the new white clothes and the beautiful beaded slippers from the day she was married. Mei had never seen her mother’s feet naked before, and they were not beautiful. Mrs. Hong held
a cloth dipped in jasmine water over her nose because the smell was too powerful, and put the powder on Ma’s face and put her brass earrings on and covered her face with a yellow cloth and her little wasted body with a sky-blue one.

  Eldest Brother lifted Ma into the coffin and put up an altar at the foot of it. Because Ma had a bad ending very few people came. Mei remembered only a paid monk chanting prayers and Ma’s older sister crawling into the hut on her knees. Eldest Brother broke Ma’s comb in two pieces, putting one half into the coffin and giving the other to Mei, and then Ma was gone from the earth.

  Feng did not wait the forty-nine days of mourning, incense still burning at the altar, before he came to sit with Baba.

  “A death in the family is a very hard thing,” he said, sitting cross-legged on the k’ang and drinking the tea Mei had served him. “Very expensive. The coffin, paying the monk, clothing—with all that the sheng-yuan has advanced to you, I can only pay twelve tiao for what you have harvested and what you have cooked.”

  Baba only nodded. Twelve tiao was more than he had had in his palm for many years. The foreman sighed.

  “But now you have no real woman to tend to this house,” he said, as if Mei was not squatting on the floor only a few feet away from him, “and no son to work in your field. It will be difficult. You will have to hire someone to do these things, and that costs money.”

  “I have seed drying,” said Baba, picturing the twelve tiao disappearing into the hands of strangers. “And my Second Son will come back.”

  Feng shook his head sadly. “He is contracted to the sheng-yuan, and owes him money for food and shelter. A contract is a sacred obligation. However, I know people in the South,” and here he glanced at Mei, “who are looking for girls to work for them. People willing to pay a good price.”

  She wanted Baba to say he would not sell her, that she was too good a worker, wanted at least to hear him say her name out loud, but he only nodded and said, “This flower-growing is not so easy as it looks.”

  Later he filled his pipe with opium and sat on the k’ang and smoked, silent as always, staring at Ma’s altar while Mei tended the fire. It was beginning to be winter, wind moaning outside their hut, and Mei thought she heard barking and wondered, as she never had before, if dogs might have spirits and if Ling-Ling might come back to haunt her.

  One day all the opium paste was gone and Baba came home drunk like he used to, singing to himself and jingling coins in a sack. Mei did not speak to him, did not even look at him. When he fell asleep he lay on top of the sack and Mei had to stay awake watching him, her breath showing in the cold hut as she waited. It was almost light when he stirred and rolled over and she eased the sack away and emptied it on the floor and counted the coins. She was worth less than thirty tiao.

  My feet will save me again, Mei thought as she pulled all her clothes on, layer after layer, and started out into the village. Nobody was on the road. Nobody was awake in Yip’s hut, but the door was unbarred, and she stepped over the bodies of the sleeping pu hao until she found Eldest Brother in the arms of a wicked woman. He was not pleased to see her.

  “Why would you want to stay with Baba when he treats you like a dog?” he said without sitting up. The wicked girl lying with him was named Ai and was only a year older than Mei, a third daughter who had been sold to Yip when no husband could be found for her. “Go with Feng—the people in the South aren’t so bad.”

  As she left, Yip woke up and cursed her for leaving the door open.

  Mei began to run as she passed their hut again, worried that Baba might wake and find his coins melting in the fire. The workers were just coming into Zhou’s fields as she passed, cutting the last of the giaoliang, which was twice as tall as Mei. She asked for Second Brother, who she had not seen since the burial, and when she found him he was on his knees chopping the stalks with his knife. He turned and smiled when she called his name and she saw that his teeth were blackened like the other workers’, blackened from chewing opium paste.

  “Is something wrong with Baba?” he asked.

  “I have only come to say goodbye.”

  She ran down the road then, away from the village, away from the sheng-yuan’s fields, vowing that she would not stop until she was in a place she had never seen before, running even faster as she passed through the market. It was not market day but there was a caravan, the porters pulling down the tents where they had spent the night. Feng was with them.

  “Ah,” he smiled when he saw Mei and caught hold of her arm, squeezing tight. “We were just coming for you.”

  Niles says he is there to visit Private Burns and is waved through.

  “He’s in isolation,” says the orderly, lowering his voice meaningfully. “Doesn’t look like he’ll see tomorrow.”

  Burns and a half-dozen others from the company are in with the typhoid, no surprise in this pesthole, and the flux is ubiquitous within the volunteers, not to mention the growing number sidelined by the wages of sin. The life of a soldier. Niles checks to be sure the orderly is not watching after him and then cuts left toward the dispensary. The air is laced with ammonia and carbolic acid, stinging his eyes and the back of his throat. No telling in what manner the Spaniards, never the most hygienic of races, operated the hospital, but the Medical Corps have obviously given it a thorough scouring. Niles pauses at the doorway of one of the ambulatory wards, men chatting in groups or with playing cards laid out on the beds between them, the legs of the beds standing in small pans of liquid, kerosene most likely, to keep the marauding squadrons of biting ants from climbing up onto the patients as they sleep. Plain water had been used for this purpose in Cuba until it was found to breed mosquitoes, which proceeded to torment and re-infect the quarantined unfortunates. One of the ambulatories looks his way.

  It is the hard-rock miner, late of Skaguay, dressed in Army-issue pajamas and slippers.

  “Enjoying yourself, Private?”

  The miner, who was Brackenridge and then McGinty and now something else, is not happy to see him.

  “The chuck’s no better in here,” he says with an insolent tone, “but I prefer the company.”

  He is a chronic kicker, this one, not so much in words as with his attitude—the way he looks at you and moves his body a challenge to every order. Harboring some grudge, perhaps, or just incorrigible. Niles looks beyond him into the wardroom. “So this is where they house the slackers.”

  “Venereals,” says the private, turning to walk away from him. “Watch out you don’t catch something.”

  Supply Sergeant Slocum is in the solarium, talking with a mopey-looking artilleryman who slumps in a rattan-backed rocker. Slocum sees Niles, nods almost imperceptibly. The sergeant is something of a wizard with figures, and like many similarly afflicted, believes this increases his ability to fill an inside straight. A fantasist, doomed to be mulcted even without Niles’s dexterous mastery of pasteboard royals.

  “In the morgue,” the man mutters as he brushes past. “Give me five minutes.”

  Slocum’s camera, an old Turner Bull’s-Eye forfeited in the same poker game, hangs from a strap around Niles’s shoulder. There is a handsome slant of sun coming into the high-ceilinged room from the east windows—he pulls the device out and kodaks the long row of convalescents in their rockers, hoping the light will be sufficient. A Chinaman he’s found in Binondo makes prints most reasonably, and the Judge has written that he is eager for views of “the Pearl of the Orient” and the American boys who have liberated it. Harry was always the photo bug, even learning to develop his own snaps, but never goes anywhere interesting enough to record.

  Corporal Grissom, who shilled for Niles in the game, was rewarded with Slocum’s pocket watch.

  The morgue is at the rear of the building, cool and windowless, with its own peculiar smell. There is a body on a draining table, rigid beneath a rubber sheet.

  “Passed this morning,” says Sergeant Slocum when Niles arrives, his voice echoing under the vaulted ceiling. “Inf
ection. He was shot through the lungs the day we took the city.”

  “War is hell,” Niles intones. To be killed in a mock battle engineered to salvage the honor of some peacock Dago general—a dismal hand to be dealt. Slocum lays a heavy wooden box on the table next to the dead soldier, snaps open the brass fastenings and lifts the lid.

  “They accidentally shipped a double order,” he says, fixing Niles with a look. “Which I have not made record of.”

  The box is segmented into dozens of compartments, each containing a vial cushioned with cotton wadding. Niles pulls several bottles out to examine them. Mostly quinine, with some tincture of chloroform, laudanum, ipecac syrup, and a quantity of strychnine.

  “No medical supplies besides ours have entered the city since the Filipinos began their siege months ago,” says Slocum. “This might as well be gold.”

  He is eyeing the camera. If he had been a gracious loser, a gentleman, Niles might entertain the idea of returning it as part of the present transaction. But no, the man is a boor. An egotist, a yankee, and a boor.

  “You should be able to sell these for far more than the amount I owe you,” he continues. “The anti-malarial alone—”

  “But I shall be the one incurring the risk,” says Niles, and closes the case.

  Slocum hands Niles a form in three pages, white copy duplicated in yellow and pink.

  “In that case you are transporting these to Brigade in Cavite,” he says. “In the event anybody inquires.”

  The supply sergeant opens a somewhat battered leather satchel, carefully places the wooden box into it.

  “The luggage belonged to a missionary gentleman from Nebraska, a Presbyterian, I believe. Sampled a bit too much of the local water.” He closes and fastens the satchel, placing it at Niles’s feet. “Gentle with this,” he says. “And give me the whole five minutes this time.”