A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

He sees Junior at the river, hacked apart like a side of bully beef.

  “Kasheeebobobobobobobobobosheegowanda!” Royal cries out, eyes rolling back in his head. “Kwasheeedavasagavasagachooogondadada!”” He sinks to his knees and the Spirit, or whatever it is his fear has called up, rattles through his body like a runaway freight train, his right arm curling up to his chest and his left shooting straight up over his head, fingers splayed out wide. The bolomen back away. Royal jerks forward, his forehead rapping hard against the ground and his stomach begin to heave, spasming his body like when he got the fever in Cuba though nothing but a taste of bile comes up and then for a little while he loses himself to it and doesn’t know what he is doing exactly. Finally he is able to right himself and sees through eyes streaming with water that Nilda is kneeling and rocking and praying and making the Sign, head, heart, shoulder, shoulder and he makes it too, again and again, the Spirit or whatever it was run through him and gone now, so he sings, as holy as he can sound, rocking back and forth—

  Life is like—a mountain railway—

  —being the only song he can think of at the moment—

  With an engineer that’s brave

  We must make the run successful

  From the cradle to the grave

  —rocking and singing, never the voice that poor Little Earl had, but nothing to be ashamed of—

  Watch the curves, the fills and tunnels

  Never falter, never fail

  Keep your hand upon the throttle

  And your eye upon the rail

  The cross man barks something and a woman steps into a hut and then comes out with a piece of pork wrapped in a leaf and some cooking bananas and lays them beside Nilda—

  Blessed Savior, wilt Thou guide us

  Till we reach that blissful shore?

  —Nilda gently guiding him to his feet and the cross man stepping aside and her leading him, still singing, through the sorry little village—

  Where the angels wait to join us

  In God’s grace forevermore!

  —on down the path and away from them, Nilda carrying the food, safe now but singing because it feels good, because it puts him in mind of Mama and Jubal and himself before he ever killed anybody—

  There you’ll meet the Superintendent

  God the Father, God the Son

  With a hearty, joyous greeting

  Weary pilgrim, welcome Home

  When he finishes singing Nilda stops and takes the cloth of the bleeding Jesus hung on his front in her hand and kisses it in thanks. Royal wants to kiss her back.

  They leave Gallego’s band and take only what they came with, food all gone, Legaspi and El Guapo lifting each end of Bayani’s camilla and Kalaw shouldering the extra ammunition and the iron cookpot. “Every time I lift something heavy,” says Kalaw, “I’m going to miss that negro.”

  “Without us he won’t survive,” says Diosdado. Pelaez leads the way down the mountain on the far side, raising his arm in warning when the slope grows treacherous. It is a clear morning, clear enough to see all the way across the misty coastal plain to the distant horizon-line of sea. “If the headhunters don’t get him the cristeros will.”

  “No—if he’s with that woman he’ll be safe. I wouldn’t want to cross her. A real Zambala.” Kalaw shakes his head. “The ones still tied to that tree though—”

  Diosdado shrugs. He had avoided talking to the three tied by their necks. “That is their problem.”

  It is hard going down the pathway, Bayani having to clutch the sides of the litter, cursing, to keep from being pitched off it. Diosdado gives him the last of their medicine, black poppy tar they bought in Pampanga, and he chews on it grimly as they descend. They reach the bottom at noon and stop to replenish their water at the stream that crosses Don Humberto Salazar’s property, crossing fields of petsay till they come to the north road and hear the loud chok chok chok of a karatong ahead of them, someone beating the bamboo gong to announce that strangers have arrived. Diosdado waits for Fulanito to shinny up the telegraph pole and cut the line, then puts his pistol in a sack and sends the boy ahead, telling him to fire a warning shot if he sees any sign of the Americans, then run as fast as he can. Fulanito hurries away, excited as always to have a mission.

  “He’s your best soldier,” says Bayani. The wounded sargento’s eyes are all pupil now as the narcotic takes effect.

  “He doesn’t even know what he’s fighting for.”

  “The war is his home. He fights to keep it alive.”

  Diosdado looks across the familiar fields. “But one day we’re going to win,” he hears himself say, “and it will end. You’re going to live to see a Fili-pino Republic.”

  Bayani holds a hand over the wound in his side as he laughs silently. “Is this a promise or a threat?”

  The men spread out around them at the side of the road.

  “Let me tell you a story, hermano,” says Bayani.

  “Are there women in the story?” asks Kalaw.

  “Not the kind you like,” the sargento answers. “These are the kind that will cut your pinga off.”

  “Then I’m not listening.”

  “When I left San Epifanio,” says Bayani, turning his head to the side to stare at the countryside, “I fell in with a group of tulisanes, not so different from our glorious Filipino army today—only when we robbed and kidnapped we had no great cause to excuse it.”

  Diosdado’s men are expressionless, exhausted as they listen. They have all heard the rumors, legends almost, about their sargento, but he has never spoken of his past to them before.

  “We told ourselves at first that we would only take from the rich, because we hated them and because they have more to steal. But it is always less dangerous to steal from the poor. One of our band was captured by the guardia civil, and he betrayed me. I would have done the same to him, I suppose, because when I was given the choice of swinging from the hemp or fighting for the Spanish, I made the coward’s decision.

  “They treated the disciplinarios like the scum that we were. I don’t know how they treat their own men, the jóvenes pobres who join or are conscripted back in Spain, but five of our company were shot during the first week. One of them complained too loudly about an order to march when we were tired and the capitán stepped up and put a pistol bullet through his brain, which stayed on all of us, in small pieces, for the rest of the march. Many of us were killers already and by the end of our training we were organized, disciplined killers. They called us their tigres, and somehow I felt proud to be a member of this brigade.

  “We were sent to Mindinao and barracked at Fort Pilar in Zamboanga. There were no women, of course, the moro girls afraid to even meet our eyes in public lest they be beaten or even killed by their men, and the vino we brewed there was very bad.

  “ ‘Muchachos,’ said our alferez, because he always called us his muchachos indios, ‘we are here for one purpose only. To kill moros.’

  “There was an old datu in the interior, Datu Paiburong, who was the devil’s own servant. The tribes along the coast were afraid of him and the ones who spoke chabacano and had come to Christ were terrified of him and it was he and his people we were sent to destroy. You know how once their kris is drawn from their belt in anger it must not be replaced before blood has been spilled? Datu Paiburong drew his when he was a young man and never put it away.

  “For almost a year we raided the stockades his people lived in, but whenever we came the men would be gone. Some of our own were ambushed and some fell into the man-traps the moros dug and were killed or lost a leg, so we began to tear the stockades apart, to burn them to the ground. But they would rebuild almost overnight. The next time we raided and there were no men the alferez looked the other way and some of the women were violated. There were men among us who had done these things before. We knew that this was the same as murdering the women, that even if their lives were spared and they did not kill themselves they would be filth in the eyes of their people until th
e day they died. And after these violations one of our men was captured and tortured and when we found him his intestines had been pulled out of his stomach and tied to a tree and he had been forced to walk around it many times, wrapping his insides around the trunk and then left for the tree ants to eat him. They wrote on his chest in his blood—they wrote Each of you shall die like this.

  “ ‘There you have it, muchachos,’ said our alferez. ‘It is a Holy War that we are fighting.’

  “The order came down then to herd all the people who followed Paiburong—this is the time of General Weyler—into one guarded area where we could keep them under control. But they knew. Sometimes we thought the birds of the forest were in league with them, because whenever a new campaign was ordered they knew almost before we common soldados did, and this time when we came to the stockades they were deserted. Not a hen living, not a mouthful of food left. So we began to track them, farther and farther in from the coast, deep into the jungle, and by the time we started to climb we were exhausted and short on supplies, eating nothing each day but a tiny puñal of rice and beans mashed together and cooked in our own drinking cans and a man was bitten by a víbora and died screaming. The capitán and the teniente and the alferez no longer called us their boys, they called us indios hijos de puta or malditos criminales and kept their weapons ready all the time, afraid we would mutiny.

  “Datu Paiburong’s men laid ambushes for us on the way up the old volcano. They are excellent shots, the moros, even with those ancient muskets they use, and our men who were hit in the first volley almost always died. And then they would be gone, and it was time to climb again. We could not pause to bury our dead, so we wrapped them in ponchos and tied them with mil leguas vines into the branches of trees and hoped to be back before the ants and the jaguares got to them.”

  The men all sit close to Bayani now, listening. When he breathes in there is a wheezing sound, but his voice is calm, steady.

  “The colonel broke us into three parties, each climbing from a different direction. We were to meet at the top in the evening.

  “When we reached the part of the mountain where there were no more trees our buglers signaled and the moros fired at us from the rim and we had to charge up over the bare ground. We had started with a half-dozen field pieces but they’d been left behind so we could keep up with the chase. So we had only our rifles and they killed many of us as we charged up the slope, hating them, hating them for murdering our friends and for the jungle and the heat and for the oficiales cursing at our backs and because they were moros, though we were not, in fact, the truest of Christians.

  “By the time we reached the top they had retreated down into the old crater. The crater was deep and so old that a ways down inside it there started to be trees again, and soil, a little round valley within the mountain.

  “We had suffered many bajas, but it was the whole battalion and we had them outnumbered and had better rifles and knew they must be nearly out of ammunition. We had no fires that night, but they did, two huge fires where they cooked and sang and chanted and then, very late, the women began to shriek. It drilled into your soul, the noise they made. One of our guides said the singing was to their god, telling him they would soon be at his side, but he had never heard the women shriek like that. You could see their shadows, moving around the fires, but the colonel said to save our bullets for the morning.

  “ ‘They’re halfway to Hell down there,’ said our alferez. ‘Tomorrow we send them the rest of the way.’

  “The women came in the front. The sun rose and we heard them all making that noise with their tongues, high, like when the cicadas in the trees are singing their last notes because the day is dying, and then they came running up the side of the crater toward our positions, their faces painted and a dagger or a sword or some only with a sharp rock in hand and the men right behind, some with muskets and the rest with their kris drawn for the last time. They are beautiful people, the moros, their long hair, the colors they wear—beautiful. Beautiful targets as they ran up the side of the crater to us and we fired in volleys and then at will, hardly needing to aim, the men climbing over the bodies of the women as they fell and we were told to fix bayonets as they kept coming, muskets fired and thrown aside, screaming as they climbed up the steepest part where there was no cover and tumbling backward. Only a few survived for us to run the steel through. One of these was the old datu, who had some bullets in him and eyes like a cat and managed to hack one man in the arm before he was killed. We lifted him up on bayonets and marched around and all the men left in the battalion cheered till the colonel said to lay him down, we were taking the body back to Zamboanga for display.

  “I was among the men who were ordered to go down into the volcano. On the way we finished the ones who were wounded. I finished a girl, a beautiful young girl, who was shot in both legs. She looked into my soul and cursed it and I shot her in the heart. At the bottom we found the children, the ones they thought were too little to fight, with their throats cut like lambs. The women had been shrieking by the fires while the men killed their children. They were laid out on flat stones, stuck to them with blood. I was afraid that the mountain would wake when it understood what had been done in its heart, that God or Satan would melt the rock and drown us in fire.

  “The moros had thrown the last of their food into the fires so we would not get any of it. We pulled the jewelry off all the dead except for the datu and started back for the coast. All the men who had been wounded became infected and died. A man in our company who had worked in a bank in Manila and stole money from it went crazy and said he would walk no more and was left behind without his rifle. We took turns carrying the body of the datu, who was sewn up inside the canvas of a tent, two men at a time. He didn’t weigh much but he smelled like something from Hell. There were mosquitoes everywhere and no water left that was drinkable and nobody spoke except to abuse the Lord’s name or give an order. We knew we had been cursed.

  “ ‘At least,’ said our teniente, ‘we left all that heavy ammunition behind in the moros.’

  “When we came to the field pieces, there were lizards living in the barrels. None of the bodies of the ambushed men were where we had left them, or else we weren’t on the same path. The officers would compare their compasses to be sure we were heading in the right direction, but it took two days longer to come down from the mountain than it took to get up it, and a third of our battalion was gone.

  “They hanged the body of the datu from a crane arm in the port, with his beautiful clothes and jewelry still on him, but the moros there, even the ones who had hated and feared him in life, only came to kneel and touch their foreheads to the ground. Honoring him. After a few days of this the gobernadorcillo had him taken down and stripped and thrown into the harbor for the fishes to eat.”

  Bayani closes his eyes. The men are silent. A flock of birds twists over the cassava field across the road, changing shape, threatening to break apart and then flowing together.

  “If we had that kind of unity,” says Diosdado after a while. “If we believed like the moros—”

  “You miss the point of the story,” says Bayani from his stretcher. “You always miss the point. They believed. They believed so much that they slaughtered their own children. But they were outnumbered and outgunned and so they all died.”

  Diosdado scowls. The valley is very lush now, crops growing as if there is no war. “It doesn’t matter how you die, or when,” he says. “It matters how you live.”

  Bayani sighs and there is a rattle in his chest. “Say that when you are down inside the mountain, hermano. Say that when you are where I am now.”

  They walk through the valley, crossing petsay bean and corn fields, and then come to his father’s vast huerta, mango trees as far as the eye can travel. These first ones are the abuelos, a hundred feet to the crown, the dark green spear-shaped leaves nearly a foot long, the trees full and round-topped and laden with hundreds of carabaos, fat and green and just about to tu
rn. The smell, sweet and resinous, makes Diosdado’s mouth water. His mother would chop the young leaves for salad with tomatoes and onions, would shred the unripe fruits and serve them with bagoong, the salt of the shrimp paste cutting the sour of the green mango, and him out climbing the sturdy branches with the sons of the trabajadores till it was time for his lessons.

  They are halfway through the orchard, in the section where the picos and the tiny señoritas are mixed in with the carabaos, when his father’s workers surround them. Diosdado is suddenly aware that he is dressed in rags like the rest of his men. He recognizes a few of the dozen trabajadores but not their leader, who points a shotgun at his belly.

  “What are you doing here?” asks the man in Zambal.

  “We are soldiers of the nation,” answers Diosdado. His men are ready to fight, even at such a disadvantage, but there should be no need to. “We have a wounded man.”

  “This land belongs to Don Nicasio,” says the foreman. “You are not welcome here.”

  A few of the workers have rifles, the rest bolos. One clutches a rusted cavalry saber. They are better dressed and better fed than Diosdado’s men, and know loyalty only to their patrón.

  “We will walk with you back to where his lands begin,” says the foreman.

  “Put your fucking weapons down,” snaps Bayani, whose fists are clenched against the pain once more, “and go tell Don Nicasio that his son is home.”

  The plantation house is, like his father, solid and implacable, built of stone on both stories and buttressed for an earthquake that has not yet come. Don Nicasio does not embrace Diosdado when he receives him in the despacho. Nothing has changed in the room, the smell of leather and ink, the map from the shipping company displaying its myriad routes still covering the wall behind his father’s desk. The desk was Diosdado’s favorite forbidden playground when he was small, its dozens of cubbyholes and sliding panels and secret drawers revealing their treasures—a magnifying glass, a flask of Scotch whisky, the heavy pistol he was afraid to even touch.