A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  “Teddy? He was in Cuba. Got up the hill without they shot him, so he’s a hero now.”

  “He is your new President.”

  “That dog sink his teeth in,” Royal tells him, “he aint letting go.”

  The Teniente nods, looks over to where the little boy, who the others call Fulanito, sits staring at the pile of rocks and wooden cross.

  “Nicanor, the man who has fallen, was not meant to be a soldier,” he says. “He was a breeder of the male birds.”

  “For rooster fights.”

  “You have this?”

  “Sure. I seen a bunch of em.”

  “It is very popular among my people. Wagering—”

  “Hell, my people bet on whether the sun come up.”

  “And music. You are also great musicians.”

  “Some of us are. I can’t hardly sing.”

  “You won’t try to escape,” says the Teniente, more a statement than a question. “Will you?”

  It is so many years since he has prayed. Diosdado was a firm believer as a child, the star pupil of the cura parroco, wearing the subaltern’s vestments for special masses, thrilling his poor, God-intoxicated mother with his ability to parrot the Latin phrases. He sits alone on a knob of limestone looking eastward down at the valley they’ve run from, straining to muster the faith to tell his men what must be done next. If the Father in Heaven who Diosdado was taught to adore—remote, wise, looking very much like a Spanish don—is a fabrication, a mere projection of men’s fears and desires, then what of this mythical Republic? The men who personified it, Bonifacio and Luna murdered, Aguinaldo captured and tamed, San Miguel and la Vibora Ricarte grown less rational with each doomed engagement, have all failed them. Our Father Who art in—

  He prayed, pretended to pray, over Nicanor, over the other fallen who they’ve had time to bury. The men expect it, need it, sometimes demanding that hostage friars be dragged from their confinement to mutter phrases in languages the men do not understand, to make their holy signs. A breeze climbs up the side of the mountain, carrying the smell of canefields burning over, sugar rising up into the stalks. The Igorots have an older god, one they never speak of to the curas españoles, a god who makes the spears fly true and the arrows find blood, a god of severed heads and fire. It is a terrible god to have to pray to, thinks Diosdado, dreading whatever decision comes next, but the only one left who will listen to him.

  Royal hears banging and sees the little boy, Fulanito, slamming the barrel of his rifle against a rock.

  “What you doing that for?”

  Royal squats next to the boy. Fulanito snags the fixed sight of the rifle on his shirt front and says something. Royal has seen Mausers abandoned in the field or in the arms of dead rebels with the sight filed off. These are the people who hacked Junior to death, not the very ones maybe, but on the same side. Up close, though, they only seem scared and confused, running and hiding and running again the way a rabbit will if you’ve filled up all its holes. He holds a hand out. “Lemme show you what that’s for.”

  The boy has only one 7-mil round, carried in a small pouch hung around his neck. After he brought Royal in he jacked it out of the magazine and stuffed it back in the pouch. He does the same now before letting Royal touch the rifle.

  Royal flips the rear sight ladder up, then pushes the elevation button and slides the marker up and down the calibrated numbers.

  “You got to guess at how far your target is and set the number here, then you line it up with the tip of your front sight there—which is why you don’t want to go knocking it off. And if they close to you—” he indicates Bayani standing forty yards away, looking back down the mountain, “you slap this down and just use that front one. Otherwise you might’s well just grab it by the barrel and try to club em on the head.”

  Fulanito takes the Mauser back and Royal leaves him playing with the sight ladder. The Teniente says the boy, no telling where he came from, walked into their camp carrying the Mauser one day, doing a dumb-show about how he stole it from a Spaniard. Since it is old and crooked-looking and there is only the one round they let him keep it. This bunch seems mostly to want to move as fast and as far from the shooting war as they can, and Fulanito can run with any of them.

  Nilda is shelling corn, piling the dry kernels on a banana leaf, when the American sits to talk at her again. The men don’t seem to care. Fecundo talked at her like this when they were still in Las Ciegas and he wanted to leave, only Fecundo was always nervous and waved his hands and talked loud like making a speech. The American, Roy, has a soft voice and is sad and sometimes helps her with whatever work is simple enough for a man to understand. Fecundo hit her once because he thought she wasn’t listening. There was nowhere to go. She had run away from Candelaria at fifteen to be with Fecundo even though her parents said he was a gambler and a bassi drinker, even though they had chosen Ciriaco Kangleón who was the cabeza de barangay and had two boys nearly her age from his wife who died of the coughing. They sent word that she was no longer their daughter. In Las Ciegas she had to live with Fecundo’s mother who had wanted him to marry a different girl and called her a puta, even when Fecundo was in the room. When Padre Praxides finally came to marry them and end the scandal he said she had offended Our Father. But she decided that Our Father had surely gotten a look at el viejo Kangleón and his two lazy sons and would understand.

  “Nobody who is intelligent can live like this,” Fecundo would say. “The people here are ignorant and jealous and they cheat at cards.”

  She would keep weeding or digging or chopping or cooking or washing or feeding what few chickens the wild dogs hadn’t eaten and usually he didn’t need her to speak. Fecundo was sure that the people in town were all against him, telling lies and spreading rumors, maybe even poisoning the crops though he had given up caring for them already.

  “Any man with sense would be in Manila by now, where there are jobs that pay a real wage, where you don’t have to scratch in the dirt to eat and there are things to do besides listen to our pile of shit neighbor brag about his Hercules.”

  Hercules had killed Fecundo’s last fighting bird, Relámpagos, and Fecundo did not have enough money to cover his bet so all the men were making jokes about what he would have to give up to settle it. They passed the house and if Fecundo’s mother was not outside they made noises at Nilda.

  “All I need is a little something in my pocket to get started,” he would say. “And then we will live a real life.”

  What he turned out to need wasn’t in his pocket but in a sack that Fecundo would not let her touch or look into, leaving in the dead of night and saying if she did something to wake the dogs he’d leave her behind. They made Iba by the next day and he sold what was in the sack for the boat fare.

  “When we get to Manila,” he told Nilda, who hadn’t spoken since they stepped on board, “don’t talk to anybody. You don’t want to give yourself away as a boba.”

  Tondo was full of bobos, and when they opened their mouths they revealed it in Zambal and Pampangano and Ilocano and Pangasinense and Tagalog. Nilda walked to the cuartel every day hoping for uniforms to wash while Fecundo carried bales of hemp at the port with the Chinese. When they met at the end of the long day in the tiny room they were renting he would pace, four steps between walls, and wave his arms and talk loud as if making a speech about how the españoles malditos had fixed it so an honest Filipino couldn’t rise to his proper station. If she had money that day he would take it and look for a pangingi game in which to change their fortune.

  The men who came to search the room for filibustero papers wouldn’t tell her what had happened or where Fecundo was, but the neighbors knew, and spoke of others who had been strapped to the chair and strangled. She went to the cuartel then and asked the soldiers what she should do, and they said forget him, find yourself another man to take care of you. A few volunteered. She took their dirty uniforms, then, and washed them to earn enough to rent the oxcart for the body.

&nbs
p; Nilda does not speak as she shells the corn, does not respond or look at the American when he pauses in what he is saying with his soft voice. He has eyes that are not afraid, a captive here among his enemies, but sad. He says a word again and again, and the way he says it she thinks it must be a woman’s name. She folds the leaf into an envelope to hold the pile of corn and then starts on another. The American, not really paying attention to it, takes up an ear of the corn and starts to worry the kernels off with his thumbs. She steals a look at the skin of his arm, dark and glossy with sweat, and wonders if he feels like a normal man.

  REQUIEM

  It appears that they will have to make their own electric chair. Despite Mr. Edison’s intercession the Warden has not been moved. They may film the prison’s exterior walls from a distance and nothing more, not even the arrival of the state’s witnesses. A dozen illustrators and news photographers wait under umbrellas farther down State Street in front of the institution, hoping that somebody of note will venture outside. A pair of uniformed guards stand before the front gate to keep them at bay.

  It is very early, cold and starting to rain, and Harry has had the device out before sunup to be sure the lens won’t fog, rigging a tarp overhead to keep the wet off it. Rain this sparse won’t register on film, which is a shame given the circumstances. Harry pulls his watch from his pocket. If the authorities have kept to their schedule the Assassin within must already be dead. Ed Porter, come over from the Eden Musee to work in the film department at Edison, steps over blowing on his hands.

  “I don’t think the light will get any better today.”

  Harry holds his watch up high and swings it from the chain. “If we wait ten minutes more we’ll have the 8:19.”

  “And so—?”

  Harry stands in front of the camera and makes an arc from left to right with his hand. “We follow the locomotive coming in to begin the move, not quite matching its speed, so when it passes out of the frame it brings us along the wall to the rows of elms out front. Otherwise we have only stationary boxcars sitting idle in front of a mass of stone.”

  “But the prison is the subject,” says Porter.

  “If we’re going to bother with a panoramic, something should move.”

  As if to support him a whistle sounds in the distance, three times, approaching.

  Porter grins. “You know I love a train.” He steps behind the camera and loosens the pan head. “After this we’ll make a shot of the front from the roof over there, looking down in. Maybe we’ll see a convict moving.”

  The New York Central is rumbling past when Grogan taps Shoe for the detail. Five cons in all, and more shields than you can shake a billy at—prison screws, state bulls, Doc Gern scowling and Warden Mead himself to escort them out with the box, Mead hunching in the light rain and peeping up on the walls like there might be snipers lurking. Most of the cons who croak in the joint go to the state lot at the Fort Hill boneyard, but then there are special cases who end up in the shadow of the back wall. Shoe has planted cons in the Warden’s garden before, and the wrinkle this time is there’s no lid on the crate, only a sheet thrown over the fried remains of the former Mr. Goulash. There’s a con on each corner of the stained-black crate and one of the colored they call Scrap Iron following, pulling a hand trolley with a big slab of concrete on it.

  Father Costello is waiting, his Book open and getting wet. Shoe and the other trustees let it down easy into the hole, then pull the ropes up. There is a funny smell, like eggs left too long in the skillet. They say it cooks your insides, the jolt, that your blood boils and your brains go to hot mush and run out your ears. They say a lot of crazy things, but nobody’s come back from the hot seat with the straight dope.

  They usually shoot the juice before daylight, get it done with and move on with life as usual on the yard. The Warden is very big on routine, only he calls it Discipline.

  “You men are here, principally, because you lack Discipline in your daily lives,” he tells them every time there’s a big Sunday powwow. “This will not be a problem at Auburn, as we will provide it for you.”

  Father Costello mutters a quick one, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, while Shoe and the other cons stand with their eyes down and their hats in their hands. The bulls all keep their lids on. Captain Grogan says to step back and then a pair of the troopers lug up a huge glass carboy like they use at the brewery and the smell hits him big time. The troopers got their riding gloves on, bending and shutting their eyes tight while they tip the carboy into the hole and a steaming liquid dumps out and sizzles loud when it hits Goulash down below, smoke coming up and the smell really godawful, makes your eyes tear up. There is a half-dozen guys on the north wing wouldn’t be inside if they’d been this thorough disposing of their victims. Shoe is wise to the play now—the Warden don’t want nobody pestering him later to dig up the deceased and poke around in his skull for clues as to why a gink would want to pop the President. There was a bird come through during Shoe’s first bit on Blackwell’s Island who they let stick calipers on the noggins of all the cons and old poxy parlor girls and write down the results and he never seen the point of it—what are you going to do, toss some guy into the slam on account of his hat size? The sizzling and smoke keep on for a while, Father Costello turning his back on it, and then it’s over.

  It takes all five of them to get the slab centered over the crate and drop it, the dinge having to jump down on one corner to get it level in the hole. All the bulls but Sergeant Kelso and Stuttering Steinway go back then, the Warden watching the walls as he walks like he’s still expecting company, leaving the detail with a pile of dirt turning to mud and five shovels.

  “Fill her in quick, lads,” says Kelso, lighting up a coffin nail when the Warden is out of sight. “I don’t like the look of this sky.”

  The heart tries to compensate. At first she just said her chest was sore, but they’d only just received the news about Junior and she was weeping so much, waking him with it, and he’d hold her then but she seemed to take no comfort in him. Then the headaches, and finally she couldn’t lie on her left side.

  You can only tell so much listening to it. There was a clink just to the right of the apex beat, a metallic clink, then a murmur. The heart tries to compensate. There is a lesion, or a valve collapses, some insult to the system, and one of the ventricles, usually the left, has to do twice the work and it starts to grow, like any muscle. It is trying to keep you breathing, to keep you alive. But it thickens and becomes too strong, too strong—

  It was clear she shouldn’t be climbing the stairs anymore, but she didn’t want to be a prisoner.

  “Minnie and I can’t stay inside all day,” Yolanda said. “She needs fresh air to grow.”

  So they moved again, to a place even worse, which he had not thought possible, but the apartment was on the ground floor in the back. There was a bulge then, just below her sternum on the left. He tried bleeding. He tried ammonia and digitalis. Yolanda stopped eating. She slept badly, jolted awake by nightmares that white men had come to kill them with a Gatling gun, that Minnie was burning in the oven. He resorted to spirits of chloroform with a little camphor, dissolved in hot whiskey, just before bedtime. She slept so soundly that he worried she would not wake, and spent the whole night laying his ear against her chest.

  Dr. Lunceford had planned their redemption. They would build a new fortune in the North, would ascend to their former heights and someday return, preferably with a federal marshal and several armed officials, to reclaim what was theirs.

  At the end, when her blood pressure was so high and her spirits so low, he could only try a pill that combined digitalis, squill, and black oxide of mercury.

  “No more medicine,” Yolanda said. “I am in the Lord’s hands now.”

  It is hard, still, for him to accept. Dr. Osler thought that severe fright or grief could induce a failure of compensation, and he himself has seen patients, older people mostly, seem to will themselves to die. But the look on her face, e
ven after the letter sometimes, when she would walk with Minnie, alive, loving, joyful—

  “You wouldn’t catch me dead in Brooklyn,” she used to say, but that was the neighborhood in Wilmington, where the idlers and the fallen women congregated, where the colored people seemed happy to live for the moment. This Brooklyn is a tentative green, the very first stirring of spring showing on the hillsides, and there is ground not profaned by tenements or commercial buildings and here she will lie forever.

  It is all the money he has saved to bury her, the carriage fare across the Bridge alone more than he can scrape together in a week. There will be no redemption for the Luncefords, even if his license to practice is finally awarded. Without her—

  “You have to take care of them, Aaron,” she said on the last day. “They have no one else in this terrible place.”

  The baby, against all his expectations, is thriving. The human organism, that can be so fragile, that contains an organ capable of exploding itself, can also prove indestructible under the most inauspicious conditions. And Jessie, who has become a mystery to him, barely speaking these days, is now a toiler, the sort of woman they used to employ to keep the house clean. After this is ended, the phrases uttered, the earth piled over, it will only be him and Jessie and the baby in the miserable rooms across the river, across the island, in a building that looks like a tomb.

  His wife is dead of a heavy heart and he cannot bear to live so far away from her.

  Jubal stays at the edge. The turnout is not so bad when you think about how far it is from home, Reverend Endicott come up from where he’s staying in Philadelphia to say the words and Felix Birdsong there, and Dr. Mask and Mrs. Knights and Ned Motherwell who used to work at Sprunt’s and Dr. Lunceford up front with Jessie and what folks are sposed to think is Dorsey Love’s baby. It is nice to see some faces he knows here in the City, but Jubal stays at the edge because he didn’t know Mrs. Lunceford so well, just Yes M’am, thank you M’am delivering goods to their big house and because of how it went with Jessie and Royal.