A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  “Sit down here,” Diosdado says to the American, who he can see is surprised to be addressed in his own language. The man, who is big but not so big as some of them, has to support himself with one arm to stay upright, even sitting.

  “You are of the 25th Infantry.”

  The man nods.

  “And you have burned Las Ciegas.”

  When Colonel San Miguel ordered the attack on the garrison, Diosdado told Bayani to stall enough getting there that they were not part of it. Since Aguinaldo’s capture the Republic has ceased to exist as such, only groups of independent raiders left, striking when they have the advantage. Why attack the enemy where he is dug in with an ample supply of ammunition?

  “The people are all gone there,” says the American.

  “Yes. Some have come to us.” He points to the dozen they have met on the way, sitting anxiously with the things they have carried piled around them. “And where is your column going?”

  The man hesitates. “They don’t tell us the names till after we took it over.”

  Subig will be next. The column must have crossed some distance upriver. Nothing to be done, and he needs to get his people to San Marcelino before the yanquis arrive.

  “What is your name?”

  “Royal Scott,” says the americano negro. “Private.”

  Diosdado looks the man in the eye and sees only someone waiting, resigned, for what happens next. This close, their faces are only human, not like the stories from Manila or the cartoons in the newspapers. But he finds himself speaking very slowly, as if to a child.

  “I must tell you, Private Scott, that you have only two courses open. Either you will come with us in silence as a prisoner and a cargador—a carrier of things—or we must shoot you now.”

  Fulanito stands with his rifle aimed, unwavering, waiting for the Amer-ican’s response.

  The rebels hang their heaviest supplies on a pole they lift onto the American’s shoulders. Most of the Pampanganos want to return to the burned village and rebuild, but Nilda lifts her own burden and begins to walk. The American, Roy, gives her only a quick glance and does not smile at her. The rebels are going north to Zambales, they say, and that is where she wants to be. He looks like he is wounded or sick, Roy, staggering under the load, struggling to keep up with the swiftly moving band. She walks behind, and once when he seems about to topple she puts a hand to his back and gently pushes forward. She asks the Virgin, in the familiar but respectful way that Padre Praxides taught her in Candelaria, to intercede.

  Mother of God, she prays, do not let them shoot this man.

  TEMPLE OF MUSIC

  The Temple of Music belongs on the head of a Byzantine despot. Its sides, anchored by statues of bards and Bacchae, are a deep Chinese red with trimmings in gold and yellow, the panels of its massive dome an aquatic blue-green, facing its slightly less gaudy sister, the Ethnology Building, across the Esplanade. Today it is even hotter inside the Temple than out, many of the patient citizens dabbing the sweat from their faces with handkerchiefs as they wait to greet the President. The line begins outside, where a pretty girl strolls along it selling samples of cool Lithia Water from a tray, then hooks into the southeast entrance. Inside there are soldiers and Exposition police forming a chute between their human chain and the curving row of seats, to guide the well-wishers in single file toward their destination. A soloist is playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on the immense organ that takes up much of the eastern wall of the structure. There is a slight blue-green cast to everything touched by the afternoon sun slanting through the dome panels. The President is flanked by his secretary, Cortelyou, and the Exposition director, who introduces any prominent Buffalonians as the line comes from the left. A pair of Secret Service men stand across from them, watching the crowd.

  The Assassin has his handkerchief wrapped around his right hand, as if it has been injured, the pistol wet and hot in his palm beneath it. There is a very large colored man behind him. He realizes he should have eaten, but the stabbing he witnessed the night before has driven all thoughts of food from his mind. “Keep moving,” says a policeman, though it is clear everybody in the line is eager to get to the President.

  He is a bland pudge of a man, thinks the Assassin on seeing him so closely, a willing tool of the Monopolists and money-riggers, a smug prattler of Christian bromides. The President smiles and shakes hands in the line ahead. “A pleasure to meet you,” the Assassin hears him say. A bland pudge of a man with a massive, self-satisfied belly who scratches a pen on paper and men lose their farms or are thrown out of work or sent to foreign jungles to kill and die. I will do this thing, thinks the Assassin—there is no turning back. Easy as standing in front of a train. Two more people.

  “I spent a long, sleepless night,” he hears the President explain to the man who lingers in front of him, “but in the morning I found that the Lord had spoken. We could not abandon the Philippines to paganism and anarchy.”

  The Assassin is the pebble under the iron heel of the Rulers. He is the Voice drowned out by their machinery. He is invisible. He sees the eyes of the bodyguard shift from him, uninterested, to the negro giant next in line. The Assassin is No Man. In ’93 when they cut wages at the rolling mill he went out with the others, walked the picket line, was fired and put on their blacklist. Nieman, he said after the strike had failed and they were rehiring and the new foreman asked his name, Fred Nieman. No Man. The foreman did not speak German, did not see the smirks of the other workers as banished Leon Czolgosz strolled back onto the factory floor. He had been cool-headed on that day, had waited in line for his interview, had done what was necessary. He steps past the Exposition man. The President holds his hand out. The Assassin pushes it away.

  The soloist pauses then, or perhaps the piece is over, the last great organ note echoing in the Temple.

  The Assassin stares into the great, self-satisfied belly of the man and squeezes the trigger.

  Harry is helping to set up for the Parade when the shots and the shouting begin. The Temple is behind them. He helps Paley reposition the apparatus, helps him up onto the apple boxes they have nailed together to make a shooting platform. They asked to be inside but the Exposition organizers said no, even the still photographer would have to step out before the greeting process began. The word of the deed crackles around them like static electricity, the line of well-wishers dissolving into an ever-growing mob. The President has been shot, that much is for certain, and the assailant has been made captive. Exposition police have rushed out of the Temple and from other parts of the fair to guard the four entrances, enraged citizens pushing at them, men who have come to stroll the grounds with their loved ones now red-faced and hysterical.

  “Lynch him! Lynch him!” they shout.

  “Bring the son of a bitch out here and burn him!”

  Harry takes his hat off and mops his brow with his handkerchief.

  “That’s just talk, kid,” Daddy Paley calls down to him. “We don’t usually go for the rope up here.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Shoot,” says the cameraman, trying to crank steadily despite his excitement. “Shoot till we run out of film.”

  “It’s just a crowd. The backs of people’s heads.”

  “The backs of people’s heads trying to get into the building where their President has just been shot. And we’re the only camera outfit on the grounds.” With that he begins to slowly pan the apparatus left to right on the swivel-joint Harry has been trying to perfect.

  Harry turns as an electric ambulance pushes its way through the mass of people, siren wailing. Beyond it he sees the denizens of the Midway approaching, cautious, looking stunned and awkward outside of their native habitats. Arabs, Turks, and Armenians, Egyptian dancing girls, Mexican vaqueros, Filipinos of various shades and sizes, Esquimaux, Hawaiians, feathered Indians from the Congress, Japanese in their colorful robes, the Baker’s Chocolate Dutch girl in her wooden shoes, tiny Selenite Moon-Men, tribal chieftan
s from Darkest Africa and cotton pickers from the Old Plantation. They hang back a ways from the throng of Americans angrily surrounding the Temple of Music, not sure of their place here but knowing something important has occurred.

  If there was a way, thinks Harry, to begin with the whole motley gathering of them, wide enough to hold the camel’s head in the frame, then slowly lose all the others so only one face fills the shot, the buckskinned beauty from the Five Nations gift shop perhaps, twisting her braids and crying. And then, turning back as the police raise their clubs to quell a murderous rush on the main entrance, he prays that the assassin is at the least a white man.

  TELEGRAPH

  They all want to be put wise and expect Shoe to come up with the dope. The rumpus out front has barely settled down when the six o’clock from Syracuse pulls through, factory whistles screaming and the bell gonging at the tractor works. Shoe rolls off his rack, feeling the cold concrete through his socks, steps to the basin and splashes his face with the tiny bit of water left standing, no light yet but everything in the cell within the arm’s reach of an amputee. He wrestles into his pants, shirt, vest and jacket, then jams his feet into the prison-issue gunboats and laces them up. By the time the lights are switched on in the tier, his own bare bulb flickering overhead, he is dressed and combed, ready to peel another day off his sentence. Shoe hooks the rack up flush to the wall, rolls the thin mattress, folds the blanket and lays the sorry excuse for a pillow on top. He does his morning set-up routine, facing the door and pressing hard against the concrete on either side with his arms, straining as if to push the walls apart, then reaching up to touch the ceiling, followed by a dozen squats, knees popping each time he bends them.

  “Give him to us!” they shouted. “Hand the filthy bastard over!” That size crowd in the dead of night, police whistles shrilling and every one of the night bulls clomping out to the front gate, it must be some holy terror they’ve brought in, some spitting, unrepentant menace to society hustled past the warden’s desk and flung directly into a punishment cell. Wife-killer maybe, local enough to draw a mob, or maybe a chickenhawk caught with his beak where it shouldn’t be. Whatever the beef, it’s the first flash of novelty at Warden Mead’s hotel for months, and the boys will want to know the particulars.

  Time for bolts and bars now, as Grogan, with his heavy tread, clangs up the stairs with Pete Driscoll gimping behind him. The long bar is sprung and Shoe stands with his hands on the grated iron, the levers clunking as the Captain and the trustee approach from the right— chunk! chank! and when his door is free Shoe pushes hard to swing it open, then grabs his shitbucket by the handle and steps out onto the wooden gallery walk. He stands at attention, face forward, shooting his eyes to Pete. But the trustee only raises his eyebrows, in the know but unable to pass it on, and follows Grogan unlatching the cells. The faintest light sneaks through the barred windows of the outside wall across from him now as the company forms up con by con, each with bucket in left hand and wearing their joint faces, indifferent to the day, waiting for permission to breathe. Grogan reaches the end of the tier, every man accounted for, and raps his metal-tipped stick once on the floor. The men half-turn left. Grogan raps twice and they begin to still-march in rhythm with each other, till he raps a third time and they short-step forward, single file along the gallery walk, right hand laid flat on the guardrail where it can be seen, and down the narrow iron stairs to the bottom, crossing the stone floor till the lead man reaches the wing door where they stop and wait in silence till all the tiers are in formation and then Grogan double-raps again and they head out past Captain Flynn counting at the door and into the damp, cold shock of the yard.

  The line short-steps out from the north wing building then bends sharp to the right at the center walk, forming up double file now and waiting for Grogan, who lets them cool a moment, the breath of two hundred men visible in the yard, leaves just beginning to turn on the birches along the walk, a yellow-tinted canopy for the line of gray men with black stripes. They stand with eyes front, swindlers and pete-men, gashouse pugs and forgers, sneaks and stalls, smash-and-grab artists, pennyweights, till-tappers, boardinghouse thieves and moll-buzzers, each one willing himself invisible, hoping to be passed over by Grogan’s bloodshot eyes. The Captain, satisfied for the moment, raps twice against the stone of the walk and the double line moves, full-stepping the length of the great rectangle back to the brick shithouse.

  It is still the Rule of Silence in line and at meals, though they nixed the Lockstep just last year. No more chugging along with your right on the shoulder and your left on the hip of the con in front, no more tripping on the new fish, no more easy slipping of kites into your front man’s waistband. It took Shoe three weeks to remember how to swing his arms.

  It is cold in the yard as they march down the center walk, crows flapping down into the birches, the first frost of the season sitting pale on the grass, and cold in the shithouse as each line enters a door, Shoe flipping the bucket lid up, dumping last night’s business into a large stone hopper, scooping water into it at the next basin, shaking it to rinse before dumping it into the final basin and the Owasco River beyond on the way out, then adding it to the pile at the disinfecting station before forming up again. This will be the only exercise most of the cons get all day. Captain Grogan raps and they full-step back, past the punishment cells and the new brick shock shop on the south wing to the mess. Sergeant Kelso, looking more exhausted than usual, stands at the door counting as they enter in single file, shooting a look to Shoe as he passes. Shoe slaps his right hand to his left breast in salute as he marches by the Principal Keeper, the PK peeping each con with equal disinterest till they have filed down into their rows and stand, row after row after row after row, all facing the same direction, waiting at the long chow shelves. The PK turns, ganders that all is in order, raps his skull-cracker on the floor and a thousand men pull their stools from under the shelf, then step back to attention. He raps again and they sit as one, food already laid out in front of them, oatmeal sludge, two slabs of punk and a cup of lukewarm bullpiss which Shoe puts away mechanically, shying one of the bread slices back into the basket when the mess con passes, no food wasted at Auburn, no, anything you leave on the table you finish in the cooler. They are given only minutes to stoke up, though how many is not clear as there are no clocks or watches in the joint, at least none that a con can get a rubber at. The screws own not only your time, good and bad, easy and hard, but Time itself. The PK raps twice and they stand and exit by rows, spoon held out in the left hand and dropped into the washbin as they short-step out, Sergeant Kelso counting and giving Shoe another look, widening his eyes to indicate it is big news.

  Daylight then, slanting through the bars of the high windows as Grogan’s company enters the north wing again, and the crows, more crows than cons in the yard some mornings, ganging in the trees outside mocking the Rule of Silence. The men stand in formation till the Captain raps and they climb the iron stairs to their tiers, Shoe facing the cell at attention till the double rap and then stepping into his stone coffin, turning and pulling the grated door just short of closed. He waits till the footsteps come near and then gives the door a shake to prove the hinges are still good, and steps back. Chank! Chunk! the levers go down and he is double locked, standing with a checkerboard of light coming through the iron lattice and onto his body, waiting till whump! the long-bar falls into its brackets and seals the whole row before turning to check the mail. There is a kite, folded smaller than a dime and left between his pillow and blanket, written in haste with the char of a used matchhead, scrawled by Pete Driscoll and left by the other gallery boy, the Jew kid with the harelip. It is one short, shaky word and only that.

  MACK, it says.

  There is time for a coffin nail before First Work, and Shoe lights one from his boodle and stands blowing the smoke out through the grated iron. They say how Sitting Bull’s outfit and the rest of the horse Indians can write a telegram with a woodfire and a wet blanket,
and Shoe wishes he could do the same when Grogan’s footsteps have faded and the tapping starts up. Tin cups on iron grating, nothing subtle, and all of them want to know the same thing. He uses his stool against the door to answer, thump, thump, thump, yeah, yeah, yeah to let them know he’ll find out what the rumpus was, what it meant, is there going to be a party in the shock shop, and then the bullpen door screeks open and it is Grogan back below them calling up.

  “If I have to climb those feckin stairs an extra time,” he warns, “one of yez will pay for sure.”

  And then even the crows are quiet.

  There is Mack Crawford on the south wing and Mack something or other who works in the basket shop and any number of Irish and Scots cons, MacThis and MacThat, and there is Sergeant McCurran on the graveyard shift and Captain McManus who supervises the laundry. Pete’s message is like most prison dope, one-third bullshit and two-thirds speculation.

  Shoe stabs out the cig and saves the butt in his boodle, never know when hard times will hit, and then the screws clomp up into the tiers again to make their music on the metal and it is First Work. Shoe jams his cap on this time and short-steps with the others to the iron stairs and down and out into the yard where the details are separated and marched away to their shops. Sergeant Kelso fingers him.

  “Shoemaker.”

  “Sir.”

  “With me. Carpentry.”

  Shoe falls out from his line and begins to full-step, slowly, toward the woodshop. Kelso strolls two steps behind him, waiting till none of the other bulls can see their faces before speaking.

  “Opening day.”

  It is Saturday, Shoe remembers, and the college boys will be knocking heads.