A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  “My fellow citizens,” intones the old Colonel, “it is my great honor to welcome home a son of our soil, a young man who has risked his life and sacrificed his health that the light of Freedom might shine on one of the darkest corners of our world. Lieutenant Niles Manigault, our prayers have been with you, you have done us proud, and we offer you our everlasting gratitude and esteem!”

  The boy on the trap is joined by three more drummers now and a color guard from the Wilmington Light Infantry steps forward, the master-at-arms presenting Niles with a yankee flag folded in a triangle. He’s paid a damned arm to protect it, thinks the Judge, they might as well give him one for a souvenir. There is more clapping and folks calling for a speech and the drumroll cuts off sharp.

  Niles looks around at the gathering. The engineer has stepped out to watch, his locomotive wheezing hot water up the track, waiting for the ceremony to end before he pulls out of the station.

  “It has been my honor,” says Niles finally, “to represent you good people, to represent our fine city and the great state of North Carolina, in this desperate and glorious conflict.”

  Cheers and exhortations. Whatever the Judge’s apprehensions about his son serving in a Colorado unit with a troop of illiterate miners, the experience may well have made a man of him.

  “As Colonel Waddell has so eloquently stated, our mission in Asia is not one of conquest, but no less than the struggle of Christianity and enlightenment against the forces of darkness and ignorance. I believe that in my absence you folks have triumphed in a similar crusade.”

  Laughter and applause at this. There has been some grumbling, concern that the best of the niggers were driven out with the worst of them, Sprunt even sending recruiters up North to bring some back and fill out his shifts. But on the whole, white Wilmington is pretty pleased to have recaptured the city.

  “I believe that our success on both of these fronts is evidence that our cause is just and that Almighty God is with us. I have returned not only to reunite with those dear to my heart—” turning to nod fondly at Sally and the Judge, “—but to offer my support, in whatever form proves most useful, to the revitalization of our city and the ascent of our section to its rightful prominence in national affairs.”

  More cheering. The Judge gives a nod to Clawson, who steps forward to stand beside Niles.

  “We’d all like to know,” grins the editor, quieting the crowd, “if that support might include a run for public office?”

  Niles puts his hand over his heart and smiles modestly. The saber scars on his face temper his good looks—even with the gap cut into his moustache he seems more trustworthy than before. War has carved him into something finer.

  “I believe Colonel Waddell would concur,” he says, “that if the times demand it, a man must step forward to meet his responsibilities.”

  A cheer then and the Judge nods to the band leader, who drops his baton and it is Dixie with the Stars and Bars unfurled from the roof of the station and confetti tossed into the air and stomps and yells and the Judge is not the only man with his heart in his throat. The whistle blows then and all move away from the blasts of steam as the train starts to roll and Niles steps down for what seems like an hour of handshaking and backslapping, the yankee flag wedged under the stump of his left arm and the band shifting into The Volunteer to serenade the folks heading home.

  “I thought that went rather well,” says Niles when they are just family and on the way to the carriage.

  “The state ought to have a regiment in this fight. With you as commander.”

  Niles smiles faintly. “I believe I’ve seen enough of that hellhole for the present, thank you.”

  The Judge is glad to see Niles swing himself up into the barouche on his own and then reach back to help Sally. Coleman, the third driver the Judge has hired since the city was liberated, does not think to come down from his seat. Decent government is restored, but the impudence lingers.

  “Clawson and I have spoken with Josephus Daniels,” says the Judge, hauling himself on board and facing backward. “There’s a position in the state senate about to open up, and he says he’ll run a campaign in the News and Observer to draft you. With your approval, of course.”

  Niles leans his head back against the seat as Coleman sets the team in motion. The journey has tired his son, or else he is just looking older.

  “Until I learn to deal poker with one hand,” he says with his new, saber-slashed grin, “I might as well give politics a go.”

  NAGASAKI

  They won’t step ashore in Nagasaki. Just a coaling stop before the long leg to Honolulu and then to the States. Royal wonders if the white troops going home get to go in and stretch their legs. Except for the crew it is only colored on the A.T. Crook, sitting out in the long protected anchorage with low mountains on both sides, the harbor ending with the little man-made island of stone warehouses where the chaplain says they kept the Dutch traders operating after they crucified all the Catholics, a short bridge connecting it to the small city that spreads by the river’s mouth. The Japs have their navy training here, thick fortress walls near the water’s edge and warships maneuvering all around them for what looks like practice.

  Royal sits up on the forecastle deck and watches the first of the barges come alongside. The loaders squat on the mounded coal till the lines have been secured, then clamber up the webbing, one man and more than three dozen women forming their line from the port gangway across to the coal bunker, four men left on the barge to shovel. The sun is straight down on them, harbor surface dead flat and most of the soldiers lolling on deck wasted from the heat. The women chatter with each other as they get into position, gabbling like a flock of wild turkey hens, and then go silent the moment they are in place and the coal starts moving, big bamboo baskets loaded with forty, maybe fifty pounds hoisted hand-to-hand up the side of the ship and then passed down the line by the women, the hems of their short robes tucked up into waistbands, baskets never slowing for a moment till the man at the end dumps the coal into the bunker opening and flings the basket toward the rail, where a woman catches it in two hands and drops it over the side to another woman feeding baskets to the shovelers below.

  Ants, thinks Royal, ants like he’s seen in the jungle, filing into their anthill with their loads and filing back out to carry more, blind to everything but the task. Some of the other men come out to the edge to watch with him, mute with the heat, five more gangs feeding the bunkers now and then more as the other barges and lighters swarm both sides of the ship and it is all women doing the passing, the webbing and decks overrun with them, hundreds of women passing baskets of coal toward the bunkers. No shouting, no talking, only the crunch of the shovels in the coal and the hollow crashing as it tumbles into the bunker and the occasional thunk of a barge against the big ship’s hull.

  They are short, sturdy women, from fifteen to fifty, many of them wearing straw hats with very long bills against the noonday sun, keeping their legs slightly bent as they turn their hips to take a load, turn to pass it on and then turn back to take the next, their faces and arms glistening with sweat, clothes sticking wet to their bodies, long black hair, where it hangs loose, dripping with sweat. A few of them are as brown as Nilda. He was starting to have more of her words just before the Army came to bring him back, words for things you could point to, for water and fire and wood and the names of things to eat. The other ones, words between a man and a woman that aren’t things you can point to, those he can barely remember in American. They don’t look like people right now, these coal-passing women, only like part of a machine that is feeding the ship. He can’t imagine Jessie here, can barely even bring back her face. She is a little girl he used to look at through window glass, wearing a velvet dress and gloves that she only pull off to play white people’s music on the piano.

  But she is not there behind the glass anymore, and Junior cut to pieces and Coop laying in the dirt up in Zambales and Jubal run north, all of them dead or scattered and
Royal is cooking under the sun in the middle of a harbor on a hot metal ship crawling with ant-women.

  The last basket makes its way down the first of the lines and as each loader unhands it she sits or lies on the deck to recover till the next barge is in place, hands black with coal from the baskets and faces darkened with it now as they wipe the sweat away, a trail of exhausted women laid out with their eyes shut tight against the sun and their tiny ribs moving up and down.

  A coal-smudged young woman with no hat but a red band around her forehead looks up to the forecastle before she sits on the frypan of a deck, locking eyes with Royal. There are another two ships, a German and an English, waiting behind them to be serviced. She cocks her head sideways as if considering something she has never seen before, then smiles at him, face glistening black as a minstrel. Royal feels tears running down his cheeks and suddenly aches, aches all over to be somewhere he can call home.

  AMNESTY

  Diosdado searches along the edge till there is nothing but reflection. The pond is filled with weeds, their ragged tops poking through the surface, but he finally finds a smooth patch and sees himself looking down with the open sky behind him. When he empties his eyes of comprehension there is nothing about the unshaven, shabbily dressed man to suggest he is more than an illiterate tao. He hides his alpargatas under the roots of a flowering narra tree, sinks his bare feet into the pond to coat them with muck, then heads down the acacia-lined road to Tautog.

  He won’t be the last patriot to surrender his rifle, not even in Zambales. Luciano San Miguel will fight on, and some of Tinio’s people who have crossed over from the Ilocos, and Toque Rosales, who was a tulisan before the war and will become one again. But they will not win. If dying could drive the yanquis back across the sea he would find a way to die.

  The sentry calls halt and he stops on the path with the rifle held in both hands high over his head. There is a rumor that the Americans have been shooting men who try to surrender, tired of paying the amnesty fee for rifles, angry and hot and bored and claiming their victims were ambushers or bandits. It is a rumor Diosdado helped to start when the men were weary of fighting, weary of running. Two soldiers step out at him, white men, each with a Krag aimed at his heart.

  “Lay that piece down, amigo. Real slow.”

  He remains with frightened eyes and the crooked-barreled Remington overhead. He traded his Mauser to Pelaez for it, a piece of his soul left in the fight.

  “Lookit here, nigger,” says the other, and broadly mimes laying a rifle in the dirt. Diosdado puts the Remington down and steps back from it.

  “There’s a good boy. Now march.”

  The other Americans in Taugtod barely look at him as he is led in with his hands behind his neck. Two of them are chasing a flapping rooster around the plaza, cursing it, and another is shaving himself in a tiny mirror hung by a cord from the branch of a barren santol. The villagers seem resigned to the yanquis among them, as they were resigned to the Spanish before. Little boys are throwing a white ball back and forth with one of the soldiers who wears a leather glove on the hand he catches with. A lieutenant steps down from the house of Ignacio Yambao, the alcalde with the beautiful singing voice who was assassinated after the fiesta of the Ina Poon Bato.

  The lieutenant has very green eyes and a blond moustache. The interpreter is a Macabebe, dressed in the yanqui uniform but for gray trousers and a red band around his hat. The Macabebe pokes Diosdado with a stick and indicates a stool placed in front of the lieutenant, who sits on a dusty friar chair and glares at him. Diosdado sits stiffly and looks at the ground like any terrified peasant, twisting his battered straw hat in his fingers, answering the questions in a respectful monotone.

  “Who were you fighting with?” barks the Macabebe, first in Pampangano and then in heavily accented Tagalog.

  “I was taken from my village, jefe. They tore up my cédula and forced me to go away with them,” he answers, in Tagalog. “They called the leader El Porvenir.”

  “That is a lie.”

  “As you say, jefe. They told me I was fighting for our nation—”

  “You are a bandit and you should be hanged from a tree. Where were you born?”

  “I was born in Moncada, in Tarlac, but we moved to San Felipe when I was small. I made my First Communion there.”

  “You are a liar and a heathen.”

  “As you say, jefe.”

  Behind them, next to the little chapel, he sees the cemetery. He wonders if the tall marker with the angel on top belongs to the alcalde. He turns to the lieutenant and tries to grin as idiotically as possible.

  “Americano mucho boom-boom,” he says. “Filipino mucho vamos.”

  If things get really ugly he will tell them where the head of Columbus is buried.

  “What is this one’s name?” growls the lieutenant, pen poised over a ledger book held in his lap.

  “How were you baptized?” asks the Macabebe.

  There is a price on his head throughout the province, even a picture of his face, badly drawn, tacked to the telegraph poles.

  “My mother named me Bayani,” he says in Tagalog, raising his eyes to meet the unsettling gaze of the American officer. There is no way to trust a man whose eyes are so green. “Bayani Pandoc.”

  There are bats gathering in the acacias in the evening as he heads back to reclaim his sandals, screeching, squirming, the branches bending with the weight of them. Diosdado pauses to wrap the thirty pieces of Mexican silver they gave him for the rifle tightly in a handkerchief, making sure the packet doesn’t jingle, and stuffs it down the front of his shirt. The yanquis cannot be everywhere, and there are bandits on the road.

  FORT GREENE

  There are too many trains. Royal takes the Ninth Avenue elevated all the way down to Park Row and then transfers to the Myrtle Avenue line that crosses the bridge to Brooklyn. They have moved three times since the last address Junior wrote them at, no trace in those sorry buildings but Jubal able to come up with another possibility through Alma Moultrie. It has been too long. Dragging his feet after mustering out at Fort Reno, sick again, feeling like it was hopeless, something gone forever. The bridge makes him sweat, so high over the water, the train wobbling as it speeds across, passing wagons and carriages and even some people walking beside the tracks. San Francisco was enough of a mare’s nest, but this city, spread across rivers, looming over your head, even tunneling under your feet—the idea of finding anybody in it seems impossible, the kind of lucky accident that never happens to him. People here move all the time, says Jubal, move up, move down, move out, Jubal himself just resettled to the far north of the main island.

  That any city can have two hundred streets all in a row, and more without numbers below those, is more than he wants to think about.

  One day at a time, the doctor at the military hospital told him. You’re still carrying the worst of the tropics in that body.

  Royal gets out at Navy Street, climbs down the stairs, and walks to a large park a block away. He needs more time to think. If they haven’t moved, if she is still there—

  He crosses the long, grassy rectangle of a park to a bench that faces a large stone crypt and sits.

  TO THE VICTIMS OF THE PRISON SHIPS

  —is inscribed on the side of the crypt. Royal wonders who the victims were, whose ships they were on.

  There are women pushing babies in perambulators, and there are children running free, some making a hoop roll with a stick, and people sitting on the other benches alongside the path that snakes down the terraced hill to a large circular walk. It is a relief, this green after the brick maze of the island, but he doesn’t feel any more sure of what he is here for.

  “Somethin for the kiddies?”

  It is a small man, maybe forty, white, with a crate strapped around his neck. WORLD OF FUN say the red letters painted on the front and sides. The man steps up and drops one knee onto the grass so Royal can see into the box.

  “Got a little bit of everything
here, dirt cheap.”

  There are tops and jacks and small wooden horses and rubber balls and throwing rings and a paddle-whacker and five metal soldiers, regular infantry. One of them, only one, is a tan color, something like Junior’s shading. Royal points to it.

  “Aint that the nuts?” says the man. “A one-of-a-kind item.”

  Royal lifts it out of the crate to study the face. It is surprisingly heavy for a toy. The eyes are not bugged, the lips not bloated like the golliwogs sold on almost every street corner here. Just a colored soldier.

  “How much?”

  “Fitty cents,” says the older man. Royal gives him a look.

  “Hey, like I said, it’s one-of-a-kind.”

  Royal pays the man and sets the soldier on the bench. He sits. The other people in the park, who know why they are here, go about their business.

  Royal sits and watches the carefree people on the green. The sun feels good against his skin as it dips lower and lower in the sky. They are all different colors up here, sometimes all jammed together in the same trolley car, and there must be rules about it but not so clear as back home. What was home. The shadow of the prisoners’ crypt is very long when he stands to go back to the elevated train. It was never in the cards and time passing doesn’t change anything. Spend the night with Jubal, tell him they’ve moved on, gone who knows where, say goodbye the next morning and then—what?