A Moment in the Sun (127 page)

The colored girl says thank you, quietly, when she takes her pay and puts her coat on, a worn-looking item not nearly up to the weather outside, and leaves with a small nod of goodbye.

“I’ll expect you to have reached the reception room by tomorrow,” says Mrs. Coldcroft, a mite bleary-eyed, face creased on one side from where she’s slept. “Which means the fireplace will have to be dealt with. And how is the—” she nods, frowning, toward the deliveries door that Jessie has just left through. “How is
she
making out?”

“Oh, she’s a crackerjack, she is,” says Molly, beating Brigid to it. “Not much for conversation, but she’s a terror on the floors.”

Jessie’s legs are aching by the time she reaches the third-story landing, and she can hear little Minnie crying inside. The heat is on again, but unbearable now, either none at all or an inferno, and Minnie is wrapped tight in a blanket lying in the cradle Father made from a dresser drawer he found on the street, wailing her strange little cry that sounds as if it comes from a tiny spirit inside of her. Jessie wrestles the kitchen window open and props it with a can of beans, then unwraps her daughter and lifts her into her arms. She is overheated, which Father says is just as dangerous as her being too cold. Jessie is about to call angrily for her mother when she sees the opened envelope on the little kitchen table. It is stamped just the same as the letters that come from the Philippines, but it is not her brother’s writing on the front, the words squarish and thick and filling her with dread. Minnie has stopped crying.

Mother is sitting on the bed, staring out into the air shaft, the letter lying folded beside her.

“They’ve killed him,” she says wearily, not turning to look at Jessie. “They’ve killed my son.”

UNDERSTUDY

“He’s gone,” says the messenger. “We need you now.”

Alexander must have had a similar moment, ungirded in his tent at the news of his father’s murder, or Marcus Antonius on the stabbing of Caesar, even poor hapless Andrew Johnson when word sped back from Ford’s Theatre.
Some are born Great, but others—

But there is no time for reflection when a nation has been orphaned. The coach awaits below, the steeds restless in their traces as if they sense the urgency of their mission. The jehu flicks his persuader and they are off, careening pellmell through the labyrinthine passages of Greenwich Village, citizens clustered on each corner reacting to the announcement with shock and mourning. The tidings had been so propitious at first, medical experts present at the calamity, speedy intervention, clear sailing expected for the President. Then the first grudging qualifications—the bullet left imbedded, the rise in temperature, the threat of dreaded infection. But this—this was not to be imagined, it was unthinkable that he, of all men, should be hoisted so precipitously to the summit, that his hand should rest upon the tiller of the Ship of State—

“What will you say?” asks the messenger. The boy is pale, goose-necked, sweating, no doubt unnerved to play even a supporting role in history’s great drama.

“Words are of minor importance in times like these,” he replies. “What is paramount now is a display of strength and continuity, a reassurance that though their beloved captain has passed, we are not without rudder in the storm.”

The messenger looks out the window of the coach. “There’s going to be a storm?”

They considered him a joke at first, no better than fifth business. A buck-toothed little runt, an asthmatic four-eyes with a grating voice, the sort who came on after the sword-swallower or the skating chimpanzee. A meddler and a blue-nose, an overgrown boy playing with his toy boats in the bathtub. And then Cuba and his crowded hour and the public reassessed him. There was laughter still, yes, but with a tinge of respect. What will the little man do next?

On to the White House—but as an appendage. Second billing, a court jester employed to fill out the bill for the veterans and the crowd in the cheap seats, or worse, a “chaser,” meant to aid the ushers in clearing the auditorium. But he bore it with fortitude, as a man must, taking the national stage with the same brio that had made him a byword in New York. The campaign hat was somewhat battered, true, the uniform no longer
à la mode
, but they still cheered him in the hinterlands, some wag inevitably shouting “Take that blockhouse!” from the throng and the merriment that ensued was fond enough. That alone would have been career enough for some men, but to scale the heights yet never stand at the pinnacle—

The coach jolts to a stop and the doors are thrown open. Attendants are waiting, hustling him into the building, husky bodies shielding him from solace-seeking eyes.

There is a full house out front, he can sense it. Keith himself is waiting in the wings.

“The uniform!” the theater magnate exclaims, panic tightening his voice. “You’re not wearing the uniform!”

“The moment demands a statesman,” he demurs, “not a warrior.”

“One minute!” hisses the wizened caliph of the curtain. “Get him out there!”

As he steps out to his platform in the dark, as he has done so many times before, Goldoni is onstage massaging his tonsils. But tonight is different. Tonight is Destiny—

God of our fathers, known of old—

—sings Goldoni—

Lord of our far-flung battle line—

—singing with his hand over his heart, facing a bier with a coffin draped in the Flag upon it, a diapositive of the martyred McKinley’s profile shining on the flat behind him—

Beneath whose awful hand we hold

Dominion over palm and pine—

Behind, in the dark, he pulls the spectacles, clear glass, out from his vest pocket and adjusts them on his nose. The moustache, affixed with spirit gum in the early years, has grown with the man. And now for the role of a lifetime—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

—Goldoni finishes and there is muted applause, sniffling from the stricken multitude.

“And so,” the tenor intones to the fervent throng, their yearning almost palpable, “we bid adieu to our trusted steward, our stalwart in peace and in war. O where, where shall we find a man to replace him?”

And then the spotlight rises on a stoic five feet and two inches of muscular Christianity, eyes fixed on glory—

Teethadore Resplendent.

And some
, he thinks as the applause spreads like his lock-jawed grin, first one, then a dozen, then the entire house rising to their feet in thunderous ovation,
some have Greatness thrust upon them
.

HOSTAGE

They don’t have a shovel. Royal hacks and jabs at the rocky soil with a rusted bayonet, then tosses what comes loose out with his hands. The fever has passed but he is running with sweat and finally Bayani, the one who does most of the bossing, gets disgusted and jumps down with him, digging with his own knife. One of the rebels, who had been falling a lot as they climbed, didn’t wake up this morning. A couple of the other men are laid out and moaning, Royal surprised that they get just as sick as imported troops do.

When the hole is deep enough, about the size of a small bathtub, Bayani taps him and Royal crawls out, his hands bleeding. At first he just sits out of the way as they lay the body down, but then when the leader of the rebels, who speaks English and says to call him Teniente, starts to say what sounds like religion over it he stands to be respectful. One of them, the one with the beak of a nose, is crying as he holds his hat over his heart and looks down at his dead friend. There is some praying of the men together and then most of them help Royal cover the body with dirt and rocks. Somebody has made a cross from bolo-cut branches bound with a piece of harness and it takes a while to get it to stand straight. When they buried Junior in Las Ciegas, Kid Mabley played his bugle after, but these people are afraid to make noise.

“These mountains are full of danger,” says the Teniente, sitting beside Royal as he washes his hands clean. They’ve made a camp in a little bowl on the side of the mountain, a place where rainwater pools up and there are some trees high enough for shade. The Teniente won’t leave off him with the “
colored American soldier
” business, how he should be on their side against the white folks. But there’s nobody else he can understand, and the more they know you the harder you are to shoot.

“There are the Igorot who will cut off your head and maybe eat you after, and the
Negrito
, who are of your color but very small and will kill you with a dart that they blow from a tube, and a group of very religious people, the Guardians of the Virgin,
santones
, who you cannot predict what they will do. That is if you are not stung by a viper or die of hunger before they find you.”

Royal has no thoughts of trying to escape. The fever has passed and the rebels have very little to carry and he has no idea where he is. Nilda is still with them, helping to gather firewood and to cook when that is possible.

“It is dangerous even for us.”

“So why you want to be here?”

The Teniente waves a hand at his dozen sorry-looking
insurrectos
. “Most of my men were born in these mountains. And I lived here, on the other side near the sea, when I was very young.”

“You think you can beat them?”

He isn’t dressed any different but the way they treat him he must really be a lieutenant or maybe just rich before the war or what they have instead of white people. It is hard to tell the differences just by eye, specially with all them looking so raggedy and underfed and no coolies to truck their goods but him. They don’t joke with Teniente like they do with each other and a couple even take their hats off when they talk to him. Bayani, who they call
sargento
, looks at Royal the way you look at a brood hen that might be ready for the pot. If the time comes for killing the dark-skin American, he will be the one to do it.

“Are they willing to follow us all the way up here?” asks the lieutenant. “To send men to every island, to fight the
moros
whose god tells them it is beautiful to die in battle and who were never broken by the Spanish army?”

Up here, hungry, cold now, and if the Teniente is telling the truth, surrounded by all these wild people, it seems crazy to think you could ever bring it all under control. But the people who make the decisions, who send the Army to do their business, are not up here and never will be.

“They run the flag up,” he tells the Filipino. “And once they done that they won’t leave off, no matter what. I been to where they chased old Geronimo, there aint enough in that country to keep a snake alive, and still they went and chased him down and thrown the irons on him and drug him back to the reservation. Once they run that flag up, the story is over.”

He can tell it is not what the Teniente wants to hear. He seems to ponder something for a moment. “What do you know of Roosevelt?”

“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.”