A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  Not so bad, fixable even, only Al Garvin tends to unwind with a couple shots of the hard stuff after a good score, nerve tonic he calls it, and is so tight he don’t remember Yardley Entwhistle Jr.’s card still sitting in his coat pocket.

  “Three years for this?” Shoe complained when Tammany had thrown their hands up and the mouthpieces had said Cop a plea and scarpered with their pay and the judge, Yardley Jr.’s old classmate, settled his hash.

  “One year for this,” said the judge, “and the other two for all the things you’ve done we never caught you at.”

  Which, strange as it might seem, is some consolation.

  Footsteps on the stairway again and the long bar clunking, the litany of cell doors opened till it is his own and Shoe steps out. Dinner is mutton stew today, one of his favorites. Monday is bean soup, ham, and potatoes, Tuesday pork and beans, beef stew on Wednesday, Thursday hash and cornbread, Friday chicken and gravy, Saturday mutton and Sunday just the oatmeal porridge in the morning, chapel, and the long day alone in your cell to think about how hungry you are. Captain Grogan leaves them standing for a long count. Goulash will be getting his two ounces of bread about now, and the gill of water to tease his gullet with. Grogan taps and Shoe half-turns with the others. Double tap and the cons short-step down the gallery.

  The mutton is hard to swallow today, tougher than usual. Shoe has grown to hate the back of the head of the second-tier con who sits at the shelf in front of him. Keepers stroll up and down the rows, making sure you keep your jaws working and your glimmers fixed on nothing. They could march you straight from First Work to dinner if they wanted, and save everybody a lot of routine. But routine is the point, to make you feel like a cog in the world’s slowest gristmill, grinding, always grinding, instead of a person with enough left upstairs to have an idea of your own.

  He scored an apple last week, first of the fall, traded for a word in Grogan’s ear about who should fill Wiley Wilson’s spot on the bottom row. Wiley had been in since two days before Lincoln was shot. “Or else,” he liked to say, “they would of pinned that on me too.” Wiley locked up in the next cell during Shoe’s first jolt here, and he’d been at Auburn through the yoke and the paddles and the shower-bath torture and finally been made gallery boy on the bottom so he wouldn’t have to deal with stairs anymore. On Wednesday he didn’t step out with the rest in the morning and when Captain Lenahan went in to rap him on the shins with the stick he didn’t twitch. Shoe was on the detail, holding a corner of the blanket they carried him out in, the old man dried out and weighing next to nothing. He’d lived past all his kin, so a couple of the mokes from the south-wing coal gang dug him a hole in the little prison patch and they dropped the body into it.

  Pete Driscoll had left the apple in the fold of Shoe’s mattress. Shoe took most of the evening to finish it.

  Second Work he is running for Dudley in clerical, who likes to keep you hopping. Get me some water, get me some chewing gum, pull down the shade, pull it back up, run this note here, run that note there, run down to the kitchen and get me some java.

  “More when I know it,” Shoe whispers as he doles the kites out in the shops, cons hissing questions at him when their supervisor isn’t looking.

  “Shoal-gosh,” says Stan Zabriski in the ironworks. “That’s how you say it.”

  “The Hunkie.”

  “He’s Polish. You say the c-z like a s-h.”

  “You people expect to get ahead in this country,” Shoe tells him, “you better straighten that out.”

  He is less than surprised, proud even, that the scrap of newspaper he left at the broom shop has beat him to the ironworks.

  “Telling jokes, he is,” says Sergeant Kelso when he stops by clerical to check on his pay slip. “Sitting up with his hand firm on the tiller of the ship of state. That’s our Mac.”

  “You’ve heard more?”

  “The wop who drives the breadwagon got it straight from the special edition. They’ve dug out all but one of the bullets and he’s as right as rain.”

  “Thank God,” says Dudley, scribbling in his ledger. “If that damn cowboy gets in we’re all cooked.”

  Kelso sits on the edge of the desk. “Oh, Teddy’s all right. A bit impetuous is all. The boys on Capitol Hill will cure him of that soon enough.”

  Shoe stands by the blackboard memorizing the shift assignments for the next month. Never know what you might earn with that sort of dope to pass out. “So they left a slug in him?”

  “Let sleeping dogs lie, says I. If Mac’s not squawking it’s best to leave it sit there.”

  “Sit where?”

  “If they knew,” says the keeper, giving Shoe an exasperated look, “d’ye think they wouldn’t have yanked it out of him by now?”

  As you come in from Second Work there is a bin full of bread and Shoe grabs two slices to take up to his cell, thinking of Shoal-gosh down there sitting on the rivets, pondering his future with an empty stomach. His future that sits only three steps away, on the other side of the barred oaken door. Shoe pulls his rack down and lays out the mattress and blankets and sits on the edge of it, slowly eating the bread and draining the tin cup of warm coffee left on his shelf. They come through twice a night down in the punishment cells, shining the bullseye lantern in on your face and calling your name and if you don’t repeat it right away they come in and kick you where it hurts. What surprised him was how there could be bedbugs when there was no bed, by the third day a lively nest of crotch crickets in his pants. Scratching their bites and finding and killing them became his only entertainment. The Yiddish singer fell apart a week after they fried Kemmler, screaming how his brains were leaking out through his ears and pressing his shit through the narrow slit in his door till the bulls got arm-weary from slugging him and wrote him a ticket to Matteawan.

  “What have you got to say for yourself?” Grogan asked Shoe when he finally wobbled back out into the yard, pale and squinting, his teeth loose with scurvy.

  “You win.”

  “We always do,” smiled the keeper.

  There are worse things, he muses, than doing a three-spot in Auburn. It could be your home, like old Wiley, in the slammer so long that everybody outside forgets you. Or you could be stuck on the Row like this Shoal-gosh, listening to the dynamo grind.

  A little before lights-out Pete Driscoll gimps down the gallery, pausing by Shoe’s door.

  “Garvin says he’ll give you three-to-two the President lives.”

  They’ve planted Al in the south wing, but he and Shoe manage to keep a few wagers running—Al lost a bundle to him on Bryan in the last election, everything he’d won on the Gans–McGovern scrap. It helps to pass the time.

  “He’s betting on Mac?”

  “Says he’ll serve his full jolt in the White House and waltz on back to Canton.”

  According to the papers every two-bit croaker in Buffalo stuck their fingers in the guy, searching for the missing slug. Shoe’s own father walked out of the hospital with a clean bill of health from the docs, only to be kayoed by an infection a week later.

  “Tell him I’ll take it for fifty.”

  Pete limps away, going down the iron steps one at a time. The bulb hanging overhead flickers, then goes out with the light in the rest of the wing as the seven o’clock from Syracuse rattles past outside. Shoe lies on his back in his prison-issue union suit and listens to the prison telegraph. Tapping from above, tapping from below, tapping from all sides, the bars singing with questions. They all want to know, but Shoe has no answer.

  He dreams of crows.

  LAZARUS

  The men don’t want to leave the caves. It is cool inside during the day and there is water running, cold water, in one of them. The American is fevered, mumbling, and sleeps through the first day inside. Fulanito is strutting, proud of his capture, for even if the American is a negro he might be worth somebody in a trade. There was trading in the early days of the campaign, when they were still an army, a half-dozen insurgentes
descalzos equal to one American captain. Orestes comes back to report the American column has in fact marched on over the mountains toward Subig and there seem to be no more behind them. The woman from Las Ciegas brings the American water twice without being told to.

  The fever of the negro breaks on the afternoon of the second day. Diosdado goes to sit by him.

  “Do you understand your situation?” he asks, speaking slowly.

  “I got to carry or you gone shoot me.”

  Diosdado smiles. “We do not wish to do this. We should be fighting on the same side, you and I.”

  “We’re not.”

  The man is not stupid. Diosdado asks the woman from Las Ciegas, who speaks Zambal and Tagalog, to bring some of the broiled kamote left from the morning meal, then watches him eat.

  “Do you like these?”

  “Like eatin em more than carryin em,” says the American. “You a general?”

  “Teniente. A lieutenant—in name only. As we have disbanded the army, rank is no longer so formal.”

  “Where you learn to talk?”

  “In Hongkong. From the British.”

  He resembles the mountain negritos in the nap of his hair and the shade of his skin, but his features are what Diosdado guesses is a combination of the African and the European. The man cocks his head as he looks back, calculating.

  “How you mix?”

  “In Zambales many of us are partly Chinese. And I have a Spanish grandfather on my mother’s side of the family,” he explains. “You, on the other hand, are a Royal Scot.”

  The man almost smiles. “They call me Roy in the company.”

  “And why do you fight for them?”

  It is what he has been wanting to ask, what truly puzzles him, but suddenly out loud it sounds rude.

  Royal Scott considers, shrugs slightly. “S’what I signed up to do.”

  “But why?”

  “Best job they offerin.”

  “A job killing people you know nothing about.”

  “All I got to know is they shoot at me and I shoot back.” The man softens his voice. “I’m a p’fessional soldier, Regular Army,” he says, face growing blank with belief. “You fight who they say to fight.”

  “A mercenary.”

  “Pay aint bad, when it comes.”

  “Did you ever think,” asks Diosdado, trying to make it sound offhand, “of doing what we have done? Defying your oppressors?”

  “You mean the white folks?”

  “Of course.”

  “Quick way to get yourself hung.”

  “But your comrades here, men of color, are trained soldiers, they have arms—”

  “Back home they got eight, nine white folks for every one of us. Got more guns than anybody can count, got a navy, got cannons. You seen em, seen what they can do—”

  “Somebody is fighting back. They shot your president.”

  The American’s face reveals very little, the information seeming to confuse more than to shock or upset him.

  “Colored man do it?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good, then. Colored man shoot the President, there be hell to pay.”

  “If you join with us,” says Diosdado, “fight with us, you would be a free man.”

  “Free to go home?”

  Diosdado can think of nothing to counter this. No, the man is not stupid.

  He looks at his soldiers, most of them sitting at the mouth of the cave, moving as little as possible, making grim jokes with each other in soft voices. He is not certain that a one of them could articulate a vision of the future they are fighting for, but each, he knows, would risk his life unthinkingly for any of the others.

  “Mule don’t care which side is loadin weight on his back, and a mule don’t kill nobody,” says the American. “Just think bout me like I’m a mule.”

  SCRUBWOMEN

  The townhouse is almost bigger than the Eden Musee, and nothing here is faked in wax. They are working their way down through the stories under the supervision of Mrs. Coldcroft, who becomes distant and red-cheeked by the late afternoon.

  “She’s been rearranging that liquor cabinet again,” Molly will say after the housemistress has made her way, chin elevated but gripping the balustrade tightly, down the grand staircase. “No dust on them bottles.”

  It is Brigid and Molly and the colored girl with a week’s labor in the palace, dusting and scrubbing and scraping and polishing and scrubbing some more. Molly talks as much as she scrubs, maybe more, and the colored girl seems unsure of the work, as if she has never done a great deal of it.

  “It’s criminal, if ye ask me,” says Molly from her knees on the massive parquet floor of the ballroom. “One family with all of this. Ye could shelter half of Kilkenny in here.”

  “Thank Jaysus that’s not who we’re cleaning up after,” says Brigid.

  “Greedy people,” says Molly, looking around disapprovingly at the huge room, dozens of chairs pushed together in one corner, a balcony large enough for a small orchestra over her head.

  “Fortunate,” Brigid corrects, head down, digging into where the baseboard meets the floor with her rag. “They’re fortunate people.”

  “Fortune—yer right, that’s what it is. Fortune has smiled upon them. Fortune has emptied its bloody pockets into their laps, is what it’s done. Railroad money, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  Molly sniffs the air. “To me it smells like railroad money.”

  “And to me,” says Brigid, wringing the cloth into the bucket, “it smells like Sapolio and vinegar.”

  The colored girl works steadily, silently, by the heavy velvet drapes, now and then stealing a glance at Brigid to take note of how she is doing it. Not that there’s any mystery.

  “Hot water, brown soap, and elbow grease,” her Ma used to say. “And plenty of the latter.”

  The family has left “for the season” as Mrs. Coldcroft put it, though what that season might be Brigid has no idea. She wonders if Harry comes from a house like this down in the South, with its gas lighting in every room, its entrance hall and staircases, its beautiful stained-glass windows in the parlor and delicate gilded tea tables in the salon, canopied bed in the lady’s room and wallpaper with huntsmen on it in the gentleman’s, with a dining room that will seat a hundred, four chandeliers required to light them all, its marble floors and skylights and domed ceilings and fireplaces and dark-wood library that smells like the inside of a humidor. Did he grow up with servants, colored girls perhaps more robust than their working partner, to see to his every whim? When Brigid asks about it he tries to divert her to another subject, revealing only that his father is a judge of some sort.

  “Darlin, ye’ve got to put some muscle into it,” Molly calls to the colored girl, who shyly told them her name was Jessie. “Just pushin the soap around won’t get it clean. Have ye never washed a floor before?”

  “Why don’t ye demonstrate it for her?” says Brigid, lightly. “Bein an expert at the trade.”

  Molly gives her a narrow look but does go back to her scrubbing. The only way to deal with it is to concentrate on what is within your arm’s reach and not think about the vast areas yet to come. The best bedroom was more detail work—putting camphor gum in the linen chests, replacing the sachets in the emptied drawers of the vanity, polishing the beautifully carved rosewood posts and headboard of the bed with beeswax, hauling the Oriental rugs out back to be beaten and aired. Mrs. Coldcroft was there all the while, of course, to be sure none of them pocketed a souvenir or curled up for a nap on the plump, inviting mattress, but the light, filtered through damask curtains, was lovely in the morning and the smell of the room was like a spring garden. It is the hallways and the stairs, carpets pulled up for their ministrations, and this football pitch of a ballroom where it took an hour just to wipe the dust off the top of the dado rail all around, that are apt to break your spirit.

  Brigid finds it all so beautiful, and wonders if the la
dy, whoever she is, does not merely move from room to room during the day, looking upon each finely crafted detail with awe and admiration. Or is the society life so engaging that you barely have time to notice your surroundings? She doesn’t worry much about how the family came by their fortune, only that such a place exists, exists on a block of similar houses in the very same city that she herself resides in, a palace that puts the one moldy-stone Irish castle she’s seen to shame. If only it were available for everyone to enjoy, like the Musee—

  “It’s about time to change, wouldn’t ye say?” calls Molly, looking into her bucket.

  Mrs. Coldcroft insists that they get their water in the scullery, which is three floors down.

  Brigid sighs. “So yer hungry.”

  Molly is a strapping Kilkenny girl with an appetite to match her size. “Ye’ve read me mind,” she smiles. “I was just feelin a bit light-headed, I was.”