A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

Hod slips tins of sardines under his pillow. “What’s the news from the world, Alfie? When are we going home?”

  Runt gives him an exasperated look. “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “What—?”

  “McKinley says we’re holding on to the joint.”

  Hod feels a twinge in his testicles. If you let it go too far, the doc says, your testicles get inflamed. “Manila?”

  “The whole shebang. They posted the Proclamation this morning. The googoos aren’t too thrilled.”

  “How can he do that?”

  Runt grins. “God told him to. ‘Benevolent Assimilation,’ he calls it. He says he got down on his knees and petitioned the Lord for guidance—”

  “It would be easier,” Blount interrupts, “for a camel to pass through my urinary meatus than for a Republican to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  “A Bryan man.”

  “Me too,” says Hod. “As far as voting goes. Free Silver!”

  “Free Silver Nitrate!” echoes Blount. “Venereals of the world unite!”

  “They got the volunteers putting out brushfires all over the islands, chasing after Aguinaldo, challenging every amigo they meet on the road,” says Runyon. “The order is ‘shoot on suspicion.’ ”

  “Suspicion of what?”

  Runt shrugs. “Suspicion of not assimilating benevolently.” He stands to pose with his hand over his heart—

  Ride with an idle whip, ride with an unused heel

  —he recites—

  —But once in a way there will come a day

  When the colt must be made to feel

  The lash that falls and the curb that galls

  And the sting of the rowelled steel!

  An orderly comes around then with the rolling table and Hod and Blount drink their hourly glass of water.

  “Sometimes they put a little sandalwood oil in it,” Hod tells his visitor. “Improve the taste.”

  “Manila water, Christ,” says Runt. “They trying to kill you people?”

  The convento is just a bit farther east along the Pasig, attached to one of the less ostentatious of the Catholic churches Niles has seen here. A barefoot boy leads Niles past the sacristy and up the polished wood stairs to the living quarters. Brother León is playing billiards.

  “A superior pastime for developing the mind,” says the Franciscan, laying his stick on the table. He is tall, with a narrow, hawklike face, only a trace of the Spaniard in his diction. “It requires steadiness, concentration, and the ability to foresee the consequences of one’s actions.”

  “I prefer cards.” Niles lifts the satchel onto a table that has tiny wells to hold gaming chips at each station. The friar steps over to watch as he opens it. On closer inspection, the cloth of his brown robe is not so rough as Niles imagined. Brother León’s face registers disappointment as he sees the medicines in the wooden box.

  “I cannot do anything with these,” he says.

  “Merely to acquaint you with my end of the transaction,” says Niles. “You are familiar with An Chao’s emporium?”

  “Of course.”

  “He has a dragon. Emerald green with red-tipped scales—”

  “I know it.” The Franciscan’s eyes narrow shrewdly. “If I have learned one thing in this dark corner of Our Lord’s domain,” he says, “it is the unwavering value of precious stones.”

  Niles wonders which of the three knots on the friar’s rope belt designates poverty. “And you would accept it as recompense for a sizable parcel of your land?” he inquires.

  Brother León places the lid back on the wooden box. “You have me at a great disadvantage.”

  The religious corporations have petitioned the military authority to return the lands and privileges usurped by the native filibusters, but no promises have been made, and given the average American’s distrust of papists, none are likely to be forthcoming. All over the city Spaniards are offering for a song that which they cannot carry with them, and the holy men are no exception.

  “We adjust to circumstances,” says Niles, smiling politely. There is a portrait of the order’s namesake in his rough garb hung on the wall, a sparrow perched on one shoulder, a wolf curled peacefully at his feet, a lamb, unafraid of the predator, tranquil under his open hand. “Where exactly—?”

  “Pampanga. North of here, not far from the rail.” Brother León crosses to a rolltop desk and extracts a folio of papers. “Your troops have yet to occupy this area, but given your superior force and the volatility of the situation, it is inevitable.” He lays the folio on the billiard table in front of Niles.

  “And if Mr. McKinley loses heart and chooses to leave these fair isles to their natives?”

  The friar smiles now, hawklike. “We adjust to circumstances.” He hands Niles a pair of deeds. “Much of the land still belongs to the order, of course, but the properties described here are in my brother’s name.”

  “Your brother—”

  “Who does not exist.” León wiggles his fingers. “His signature is amazingly similar to my own.”

  Niles has already considered using Harry’s name for some of his acquisitions. “Pampanga is mountains, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “With a broad plain at their base. Hemp, sugar cane, rice, mangoes—”

  “My people were in tobacco before the War,” says Niles. The first deed is for 150 acres situated near the city of San Fernando. “We understand how to operate a plantation.”

  An underdeveloped land, a soon-to-be advantageous labor situation—a man could do quite well for himself.

  “I’ll need to have these gone over,” he informs the friar.

  “Naturally.”

  The art of commerce, he muses, lies in recognizing desires and seizing opportunities. There are countless citizens who need medicine and have been denied their usual access. There are the suddenly deposed, such as Brother León, who wish to recover some value from what they will be forced to leave behind. There are those like An Chao and Niles, who assure that the flow of goods and services continues despite the uncertainties of the present situation.

  And suddenly, there is a Filipino in the room.

  Well-dressed, nose in the air, nervously tapping his walking stick against the floor as he glares at Brother León. A mestizo, the term they apply to their half-breeds, from the look of him.

  “Ah, Ramiro—”

  The young man says something in Spanish to the friar. Niles closes the satchel and lifts it off the table. If he hurries his lawyer friend at the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank will be able to verify the deeds during his tiffin and set the affair into motion.

  “This is Ramiro, my sacristán,” says Brother León. “I have known him since I arrived from Gibraltar, since the day of his First Communion.”

  Niles recognizes the young man, who is glaring at him now with undisguised resentment, as one of the sepia dandies he forced off the sidewalk on the Escolta.

  “He is also, when we come to that moment, our notary.”

  Niles offers the sullen googoo an ironic bow. “How very convenient.”

  When Mei comes down from the wards at night Bo is waiting, squirming to be out of Paz’s arms and into hers, and if the sky is clear she takes him out away from the walls and she points to the stars and tells him stories about them. At first she wondered if they should be Chinese stories about the Three Enclosures or the yang gweizi stories about hunters and flying horses that Roderick Hardacre told her, but decided that nobody knows what takes place in the heavens, or how the world works, that even the most powerful are only guessing at how one thing is connected to another, pointing at dots in the distant sky and making up stories about them.

  “Do you see those over there?” says Mei, pointing, talking the talk of the North China people to her little boy who starts to shake with happiness whenever he sees her, who calls her Ma and hugs his arms around her neck so tight it almost chokes her. “See those ones that make the head, and then those three, that are the tail? That is called Ling-Ling
, the Brave Dog, who once saved a little girl from a wolf, and tried to save another from drowning—”

  ADVANCE OF THE KANSAS VOLUNTEERS

  All yesterday they were at it with shovels, the boys digging and Jubal hauling it off in a wagon. He ask why don’t they just pile it up in front like the real soldiers do but Mr. Charles who is Mr. Harry’s boss says it would get in the way of the volunteers and spoil the shot. So they dig it deeper and carry the dirt away, and Jubal can just see over the top when he stands tall.

  The volunteers, which is really New Jersey National Guards, are having a time over in the pines, laughing and calling out how maybe they put real bullets in their rifles. The one being Colonel Funston is up on his ride, a big bay Morgan horse that got its ears up for what happen next. The white boys can play the fool cause the camera pointed elsewhere, looking right down the line of all the colored being Filipinos. Jubal has put himself as far away from it as he can get, worried lest he mess up somehow and get Mr. Harry in trouble. There is no snow left on the ground but it is cold, colder than it ever get in Wilmington and he bets the Philippines either. They only got on white pants and white shirts but just now Mr. Charles tell them to take their hats off and leave them out of sight. Royal is headed over there right now, where the real Filipinos stay, and if this is what they look like, just colored men without hats, it’s good they all in white and he’ll be wearing blue.

  “Remember it’s two shots and then we scatter,” says Zeke, who has been a Filipino before and act like he’s the sergeant here. The National Guard who is being Colonel Funston has run them through the drill over and over—how to load and shoot, load and shoot, not to point at anybody too close. He show them how it’s only paper inside the cartridges and won’t hurt you at a distance. Jubal has it all in his head and wishes they would start and get it over. Got him so riled up waiting in the ditch for them to charge and it’s only for the camera, you wonder how can Royal abide the real thing. He hears Hooker nickering, tied back by the camera wagon and wondering where Jubal is. She maybe fuss some when the shooting starts, but her making noise don’t matter none.

  Mr. Harry come out in front of the ditch and lean on his stick to talk to them.

  “The key principle to keep in mind,” he says, “is not to look at the camera. There is the enemy before you—” he points with his stick, “—and there is your route of escape. Remember that you have been instructed by your officers to hold this position at all costs and should not abandon it lightly. And—if you have been selected to die—please do so before the volunteers enter the trench.”

  Zeke raises his arm. Zeke got himself closest to the camera, nothing be-tween him and it.

  “Suh?”

  “Yes, Zeke.”

  “Them of us that got to run, how far we spose to go?”

  Mr. Harry points past them with his stick. “You see the chestnut back there? Run behind that and then take up your firing position again.” He smiles. “Consider those trees your second line of defense.”

  He tells them to check one more time they got a round in the chamber and one in their back pocket, then limps out of the way. Mr. Harry takes care of the camera but doesn’t turn the handle.

  Jubal looks over at the volunteers again, searching out which one he will aim at. If he really do it like he got to kill the man before the man kill him maybe it will take some of the nerves away. The one that carry the flag is the easiest to spot, but that don’t seem right, shooting the flag, so he picks out the man next to him. You dead, Mister Volunteer. Mr. Charles calls are they ready and it gets real quiet, Colonel Funston’s ride side-stepping some like it be nervous too, and then Jubal hears the camera winding and Mr. Charles calls “Charge! Fire!”

  The white men come ahead, hooping and hollering as they run and Jubal gets a good one off, dead center on the man but then there is so much smoke from their rifles shooting you can’t see a thing. He digs the second round out, trying to stay calm, and loads it up. He is looking for a body through the smoke when Ernest and Tip fall beside him and he remembers he’s been tapped to die. He fires high into the smoke and tosses the rifle clear before dropping straight down holding his chest like he always done when Royal pretend to shoot him when they were boys playing blues and grays. The volunteers, not so many as there are Filipinos, stumble down the front of the ditch and each fires once at the men running away before they chase after. The smoke hangs over and then there is Colonel Funston on the Morgan prancing along the front of the ditch and then down into it, coming way too close and before he can think Jubal has jumped up and dove away from the hooves.

  If he was dead his eyes should have been closed and he just get trompled, but it is too late now, the camera has seen him and remembered it. So now maybe he is a Filipino been wounded a little or faking and when Funston trots back at him with his pistol drawn he hops up and lights out for the trees. He runs a few feet and there is the pistol shot but he is not hit and he keeps running till he comes to where everybody has stopped around the chestnut tree and one of the volunteers points a rifle at him.

  “Hands up, boy,” says the volunteer. “You been nabbed by Uncle Sam.”

  They all laugh, the volunteers and the Filipinos, and then Mr. James shouts for them to come back. He is smiling and Mr. Harry is pulling the roll out of the camera, so maybe he didn’t mess up too bad.

  “Excellent, gentlemen. Just excellent,” says Mr. James. “Stirring. And you,” he points to Jubal, “the terrified insurrectionist—that was inspired.”

  This must mean good because Mr. Harry is taking the camera off the sticks and the one who does the cranking is writing something on a pad of paper, both of them smiling too.

  “Now if our Filipinos will don their hats and reclaim their rifles, we will move on to the Capture of Trenches at Candaba.” He points up to the one playing Funston. “Captain Ditmar, be advised that in this film you will be required to fall from your mount. Quickly, gentlemen!”

  Jubal climbs into the ditch to find his rifle. His heart is still racing. This time, if he is wounded, maybe he’ll remember to drag a leg.

  OBSTETRICS

  He hopes it was only the stairs. Jessie breaking her water halfway to the fourth and calling in a panic until he and Yolanda could carry her up, and now writhing on the bed with a blood-tinged mucous plug on the floor. Placenta previa is the worst of the catalysts he can think of, the hemorrhaging so likely to carry the mother away during or after the delivery, but there is also eclampsia and endometritis and hydramnios—so many possibilities for preterm induction, and obstetrics never his strongest suit, if only for the lack of opportunity to practice. Only the wealthiest of colored women in Wilmington choose to engage a physician rather than one of the city’s half-dozen midwives, even in emergency situations.

  The idea of attending his own daughter’s first parturition has never, until this moment, occurred to him.

  Dr. Lunceford forces himself to concentrate on his preparations. Yolanda is trembling, cold as always, her own harrowing experiences no doubt weighing on her thoughts. And Jessie, his little Jessie, lies back on the pillows breathing deeply and studying his face for clues.

  “It’s coming, isn’t it? It’s coming now.”

  The arithmetic is not difficult. The one incident she confessed to, on the night of Junior’s final visit, then counting forward—it is twenty-eight weeks.

  “We shall see,” he says to his daughter. “The vital thing is for you to remain as calm as possible while I see what we have here.”

  “What can I do?” Yolanda asks, standing as far back as the room allows, terrified. She has never observed him in practice, Yolanda, has demurred even when close friends have asked her to be present at their own birthings.

  “I need you to clean the stove, as thoroughly as possible.”

  “The stove?”

  “Just the warming compartment, the larger one.” He looks deeply into her eyes. “Please.”

  It is an unlikely possibility, but he needs
to spare her the sight of what may come next. Yolanda crosses quickly to Jessie, bends to embrace her and kiss her on both cheeks.

  “You’re all right now, baby,” she says. “Your father knows what to do.” And then hurries into the kitchen.

  It is near freezing in the room, Dr. Lunceford in his overcoat and Jessie with her top half weighed down under all of their blankets, little puffs of condensation from her mouth as she breathes irregularly now, the landlord untraceable whenever the radiators fail in the building. Jessie’s eyes are bulging slightly as she watches him. Blood pressure elevated. In Wilmington, even with the home births, there would be a curtain or a kind of tent structure blocking the woman’s view of his actions and his view of her face. Better to concentrate on the organs involved in the procedure and nothing else. But there is no time for that now, and he seats himself at the bottom of the bed to stare into the vagina of his only daughter, who he has not seen naked since she was four years old.

  It helps that there is no footboard. Jessie is frightened, perspiring, the pains having come twice, some five minutes apart. She is barely dilated.

  That was the problem for Yolanda the second time, with Jessie and what would have been her sister. Dr. Tinsley reaching for the dilator, eyes apologetic as he glanced to Dr. Lunceford, allowed in the room as a professional courtesy. Many physicians preferred to perform their accouchements forcés digitally, but at the Freedman’s Hospital they had the latest of instruments. It was shiny, polished steel, he remembers, four blades with a screw mechanism at the top. He remembers the tearing, remembers his wife’s screams, the chloroform ineffective in the dosage they regarded as safe, remembers the sister, never named, coming out first and then Jessie, identical except for her color, her faintest bloom of life.

  “I want to hold them both,” Yolanda said, coming up from the morphine when her condition was stable, when the bleeding had finally been halted. “I must hold them.”