by John Sayles
They have a new hero. And, the Humorist supposes, he is fitting for the age. Not a Washington, stoic, patriarchal, erect upon a towering steed on a hilltop surveying the conflict; not a Lincoln, haunted by carnage, magnanimous, no, positively bereft in victory, understanding that too harsh a palliative may vanquish not only the disease but also its host; not even a Grant, steadfast, straightforward, implacable—it is a Funston.
A banty rooster that crows at the opening of a news scavenger’s notebook, a bully boy on the field of battle whose idea of sport is to take no prisoners, a Kansan Custer who leaves caution (and humility and compassion and, that antiquated notion, honor) to the wind, and whose biography, when inevitably published, can bear no title more apt that Pluck and Luck.
The subterfuge is nothing new. Homer is chock full of it, the wily Odysseus time after time proving to be more a confidence man than a warrior. Intercept the messenger, yes, decipher the code, forge documents—such intrigues are all accepted in the Great Game. Aguinaldo, in his jungle retreat, believes he is to be reinforced, General Lacuna writing to confirm he has sent a company of his men, along with five yankee prisoners. A bold plan, and admirable in that aspect, with an element of risk. Funston himself, with his chosen officers, dressed in rags of uniforms, marched through the hostile wilderness by loyal Macabebes disguised as Filipino insurrectionists. Ninety miles of pain and privation, through enemy territory, lost at times, hunger and thirst a constant, fearing discovery, or, perhaps worse, mutiny. Finally, exhausted and starving, unable to go farther.
“Only eight miles from the enemy stronghold,” he boasts, “and too weak to move.”
This is where the story diverges from the parable of the Trojan Horse.
Emissaries, Macabebe scouts able to pass as Tagalos, are sent ahead to beg for food. Sustenance is delivered to their camp, the ruse maintained. Nourished, their fighting spirit restored, the party marches triumphantly into Aguinaldo’s bailiwick, his much smaller compliment of soldiers turning out in parade dress to welcome them, and then—
The Humorist imagines himself a man at the prow of a lifeboat, peering over a restless sea. Perhaps it is in time of War. He spies a figure tossed on the waves, desperately swimming, survivor of some maritime calamity, each stroke more feeble than the last and about to go under. He bids the oarsman put his back to it, the lifeboat plowing through murderous swells, till he can lean forward and stretch his arm out to that solitary victim, reaching, reaching, and finally the exhausted wretch able to clasp his wrist with one hand—and plunge a dagger into his heart with the other.
Funston is the man with the dagger.
He is the toast of the Nation.
“Villia, shot in the shoulder,” Funston says of Aguinaldo’s chief of staff, “leapt out the window and into the river, but the Macabebes fished him out, and kicked him all the way up the bank, and asked him how he liked it.”
Not only intrepid and fearless, but a wag of the first order. This proud jokester is the new model, his name and deeds on every tongue, the paragon of Patriotism, the unbashful subject of glowing editorials and stentorian orations, the centerpiece of an overnight industry of hagiography and boy-admiration. Here is a man, say the politicians, say the churchmen and the public-school teachers, to be proud of. A man to emulate. He has captured Aguinaldo and thus ended the war (the war that was declared over a full year ago, that somehow continues to claim, despite the surrender of its putative instigator, hundreds of new victims each week).
The Humorist once proposed, as a jest, a statue of Adam, the First Man, only to have one civic booster take the idea literally and mount a campaign to construct the thing. Perhaps, with his wide celebrity, he can now arouse interest in a suitable monument to Funston—the doughty colonel on his knees, in tatters, raising a trembling hand in supplication to the diminutive but haughty Tagalo generalissimo—while craftily concealing the blade, gilt-edged for glory, behind his back.
Enough to stir the pride of the dullest American schoolboy.
But no, this might be misunderstood. He has discarded the grin of the funny man, chided the Times after his first mildly satiric writings on the Philippine disgrace, for the sour visage of the austere moralist. For what place do morals have in the National Business? His merest whisper, not of reproach, but of frank disillusionment with the feisty Funston’s exploit, has brought the Humorist a veritable flood-tide of correspondence from all corners of the Republic, impressive in its profusion, inspiring in the forthrightness of its sentiment, no finer example than the missive that now lies unsheathed on his desk.
Dear Traitor, it begins—
QUANDARY
There is no telling which one they’ll run until the Chief comes in. The Cartoonist pins them to the wall side-by-side. He prefers the first as a drawing, a contrite Aggy in short pants writing I Promise To Stop Fighting on the blackboard as his new teacher, Miss Liberty, confiscated slingshot in hand, looks on benignly. The other sepia-tinted ragamuffins—Hawaii, Guam, Porto Rico—sit obediently in their labeled chairs, hands folded on desktops, a tiny American flag propped in each inkwell. The focus of the drawing, however, is the lad’s mother, a jowly Hoar in a calico dress and straw bonnet, sympathetic tears pouring down his cheeks. The Cartoonist has lettered ANTI-IMPERIALIST LEAGUE on the hem of the frock, unsure if enough readers will recognize the Senator. He’s tried Carnegie, but the Scotsman never looks right unless seated on a pile of money bags or the stooped back of a beleaguered ironworker. By now he can draw Bryan with his eyes closed, but the Chief has kept a candle lit for the old warhorse despite his lackluster account in November, and Twain remains beyond the pale.
HIS FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL
—says the caption, condescending but not vindictive, a nod to the elation felt by most citizens at the daring capture of the little supremo.
The other sketch keeps the heat on McKinley and the jingoes. A runty, demented TR in his outsized Rough Rider togs and an equally diminutive Colonel Funston (whose mug has been plastered all over the dailies in the last week) shoulder a pole from which they’ve slung scrawny, bedraggled Aguinaldo like a slaughtered hind.
WE’VE BROUGHT YOU AN APPETIZER
—proclaim the boys as they rush toward the President and Mark Hannah, bibs tucked into their collars, knife and fork poised in hand, greedily surveying the map of the world laid out on their table. A sobering thought that transcends the moment’s euphoria, muses the Cartoonist, but not one likely to satisfy the man on the street.
The Chief, when he stampedes in from whatever theatrical event or soirée he has escorted his young ladies to this evening, will not ask the Cartoonist’s opinion. He will frown at the drawings, the frown turning to a scowl when he spies the hated Roosevelt, eventually grunt, and, hopefully, jab his finger into the center of one of them. “Print it,” he will say, a newsman’s newsman, charging uphill as heedlessly as the toothy Vice President during his “crowded hour” on San Juan Hill.
Or maybe he’ll ask the Cartoonist if plucky Funston couldn’t appear to be just a few inches taller than TR.
There are ten of them, with Junior, a buck sergeant now, in charge. The days have been getting cooler since the end of the year but they have been off the road for most of the patrol, up and over the rice-field dikes, working their way through prickerbush and scrub, chasing another rumor of a rebel build-up. The two collections of huts they’ve walked through, not big enough to be on the lieutenant’s map, were deserted, but that might only be for one of the endless religious marches, people here with more saints to celebrate than days to do it on, or else they’ve heard the rumor too and don’t want to be around for reprisals from the losers. Royal sees one man the whole morning, standing thigh-deep in the muck of a flooded rice field whipping a switch on the butt of a sweat-lathered carabao, itself mired to the chest, trying to get it to drag a wooden harrow through the mess and neither of them going anywhere. He feels more like the water buff than the man, hard to say if it is really trying to pull itself forw
ard or just satisfied to sink deeper and ignore what’s happening to its hind end.
The men march on, walking in a loose rectangle through a banana plantation, Royal and Willie Mills in the van, carrying their rifles port-arms. The trees are strange, nearly twice as tall as Royal, with each trunk supporting a single massive bunch of fat green fingers, like a man in a bulky overcoat hung by his heels. And the rows of banana fingers all pointing up to the sky—it seems wrong, like a lot of the things that grow here, like something a little boy might draw. Royal keeps an eye out for the spiders he has seen crawling on the bunches. He doesn’t like spiders.
They walk, talk for a while, then lapse into silence. There are men among them who would make better sergeants, older men who deserve it, but Junior is the lightest of them and educated and Royal figures that is what the officers were thinking when they had to move somebody up. Junior has been tight since he got the stripe, knowing there is some resentment, and trying to be firm but not lean on his rank too heavy. It is usually Hardaway who starts the talking.
“You member Fagen?”
“Big ole Tampa boy with the 24th.”
“That’s the one. Word is he run out.”
“Run out to where?”
“Loaded up every sidearm he could carry and walked into the boondocks.”
“Where the googoos kilt him.”
“Naw, man—made him a captain.”
“Captain of the googoos is like King of the Niggers.”
“General is king in the Army.”
“Then captain is what? Duke? His Royalty, Duke Fagen.”
“Story is he been leadin ambushes, and they caught some of them volunteers from Ohio, left em alone with Fagen—”
Too Tall aims a pretend pistol downward.
“Told em to kneel and say their prayers, then pop! pop! pop! pop!”
They are quiet for a while, passing from the bananas into a stubbly cane field, considering Fagen.
“Ohio Vols,” says Coop.
“Yeah. White boys.”
“Well—as long as he don’t teach the googoos to aim.”
They laugh then, even Royal who can go a week without cracking a smile. Junior is heard at the rear.
“Treason is treason. When he’s captured they’ll hang him.”
“Not gonna capture that ole boy. He stepped out that far, he cut his own throat before they take him.”
They ponder this, the dead-end nerve of it. Royal can hear the river ahead, see the tops of the trees that line both banks. The patrol is meant to reach the river, work north along it for a few miles, then loop back to the garrison before dark.
“If all he wanted to do was kill crackers,” says Gamble, “he could have stayed in Tampa.”
The river is not so wide here, but swift-moving from the months of rain. They keep it on their right and march till they come to a sandy beach piled with driftwood in the crook of an elbow bend. There is none of the usual comment when Junior orders them to fall out.
The men have taken to carrying fruit or boiled eggs they’ve bargained for in Las Ciegas as well as their rations, and Sims gets a little driftwood fire going to cook coffee.
“How they do it,” says Coop, “is they just keeps movin. Them little shitholes we run through this morning? Full up with googoos five minutes after we leave, havin them a party.”
“They aint gonna win no war that way.”
“Long as they not where we are, they doin fine. Most alla them U.S. volunteers gone home by now, right? And how many ignant niggers like us you think they can fool into coming here?”
“Speak for yourself,” says Junior.
“I’m doin that. I been vaccinated twice already, bit by every kind of bug that crawls or flies, had googoos shoot at my head and knock a cocoanut off a tree and the sun done cook me to a whole new shade of dark, and yet I aint put nary a one of these little monkeys in the ground. They just playin with us, is all, cause they don’t want to fight no more.”
“They’ve switched to guerilla tactics,” says Junior. “Like the Boers in South Africa.”
“They’ve switched to hidin out and laughin at us poor donkeys runnin around in the heat,” says Coop. “Aint no tactics to it.”
Royal eats to get it over with, staring dully out at the river and the long wall of jagged mountains beyond it. Junior has been drilling him about the importance of a positive state of mind, and every new day he tries to will himself into one, but it never lasts much past Kid Mabley blowing Assembly. Mingo Sanders from B Company and some of the others from the Indian wars say get used to it, this is what regular soldiering is, living out your routines, working your details, keeping yourself razor-sharp so that when the redskins do attack you’re more than a match for them, ambushed or not. The fights, if they come, are flash floods in a life of drought.
“Two of you will post up and down the river,” says Junior suddenly, standing up from the sand, “while the rest of us bathe.”
“I’m staying out of there,” says Hardaway. “Might be snakes.”
“Man got snakes on the brain.”
“All right, Hardaway and Gamble set up as pickets—”
“Why me?”
Junior gives Gamble a long look.
“Because those are your orders. When someone comes out they can relieve you and you can come in.”
Coop is up and unhitching his ammunition belt. “I’m getting in that water before you niggers start takin them boots off.”
“River look cold.”
“Cold sound fine to me.”
Every other day the woman, Nilda, walks a mile from Las Ciegas with their clothes and scours them with pumice rock and lye soap in what is more a puddle than a spring, white cattle egrets stepping into the wet grass to search for snails and crayfish as she works. Royal sat to watch her there once, and helped her carry the water-heavy clothes basket back until just before the first outpost. She washes their clothes, but the men themselves stay dirty, dust and dried sweat staying on their skin for weeks. You don’t miss a chance to wash yourself.
The water is cold but the current isn’t much on this side of the bend, weak enough so you can even swim out a few strokes without worrying. The men shout and splash and duck each other under, most of them fully naked. Junior has his yellow soap and works his way upstream for a little privacy, his desperation to be clean an open joke within the company.
“Junior think if he scrub it hard enough,” Too Tall will say, “it might just come off.”
“He right too. That boy was born black as me, an lookit him now.”
The bottom is silted and easy to walk on. Royal steps out up to his armpits and can feel it change there, the backwater eddy giving way to the full current. He reaches over the surface and dips his fingers into the water as it rushes by. It will just take you.
He stands there, at the edge, for a long time and then turns back to see who’s got the soap.
There is still coffee hot when he comes out, skin tingling, and he drinks some from his cup and takes his time dressing, being sure to brush all the sand from between his toes before he pulls his socks on, to stretch the wrinkles out of his pants before he puts them on. The others dress beside him, calling out insults as Hardaway comes back and decides to go in alone.
“See why the man afraid of snakes. Think one is gonna catch a look at what he got hangin there and fall in love.”
“Don’t let them big ole catfish in there catch holt of it, now!”
Hardaway pays them no mind, bending to duck his head under the water and blowing loud bubbles.
“Where I come up,” says Willie Mills, “the catfish gets long as a tall man’s leg, and they hole up in the roots under the river bank. We used to go down there, reach in—”
He mimes the action, closing his eyes and probing with an arm—
“—and when you feel one you just stick your hand down his gullet, halfway up the elbow, and yank him out of there.”
“Big cat like that will bite on you
.”
“Oh, you see some blood, but them big ones fry up nice, feed the whole family.”
“Dans le bayou,” says Achille, “we hunt the snapper turtle with our bare foot. Walk in the mud of the bank till you feel a shell, then reach in and pull him up.”
“Good way to lose some fingers.”
“On the snapper shell he has a ridge,” he explains. “You feel those ridge with your toe, you know which end is beak and which end is tail.”
“Feel em with what toes you got left.”
You had to go a ways up the river from Wilmington before the turpentine and creosote smell was gone, and Royal and Jubal would fish for bass using crickets they had caught, Jubal making up wild stories about what the Cape Fears and the Waccamaws were up to when they owned the river. Jubal never told the same story twice.
Hardaway screams and they turn to make jokes about snakes in the water but he is naked, scrambling out of the water and behind him there is another thing, light-skinned, floating slowly face-down in a rosy cloud.
It is a lazy kind of floating, peaceful, and it takes a moment to know what has happened.
The others are up with their rifles then and shouting, staying low as they spread and move up the bank, none of them fully dressed. Royal watches it float, turning a half-circle as it drifts away, then hurries out in all his clothes to grab an ankle before the current can take it. He turns and hauls it back through the running water, drags it onto the sand without looking. It is Junior, he knows. Junior is the only one of them that light. Royal is wet and shaking with the cold, still squatting by the body without looking at it when the others come back around, having found nothing upriver but the chunk of yellow soap placed carefully on a rock.
“Must have only been a few of them or we’d all be cooked.”
“Aw, damn, lookit what they done—”
“We got to carry him back. Here, spread his clothes out—”
“Got to wrap him careful or his arm’s gonna come off.”