A Moment in the Sun (4 page)

“Aint none on that wagon.”

“Man needs a dream.”

“Not me.”

“Yeah? You always sayin how you gone walk right out of here.”

“A dream means it aint true,” Clarence calls back, digging grooves into the tree. “And it won’t be
walk
in.”

Only a pair of men have tried to rabbit since Clarence come to the camp, Garvey James who was found after the count tied under the wagon that goes to Socastee every evening and Jimmy Lightfoot who got lost in the swamp till Musselwhite shoot him close with the shotgun and drag what’s left back in behind Lightning.

“Horse aint built to carry two,” he say when they were called out to take a look. “You boys remember that.”

The chipping ax is weighted in the handle and got a reach long enough to knock a man out of the saddle, if that’s what it come to.

Clarence’s hands are sticky on the rungs as he climbs down. The face below where he’s slashed is crusty white with dried gum and come winter them that’s left will scrape it down into boxes. Not him. There is needles and twigs and pieces of branch laying around everywhere and wire grass growing in patches wherever it can get hold between the trees. Once a month they spose to send a gang out to rake and do a underburn but it aint happen for a while.

“Musselwhite comin,” calls Wilbert from his ladder.

“Which way?”

“Virgin pines. Aint in no hurry.”

“Damn.”

If this is the day he got to be quick. Got to be
bold
. Clarence pulls his cap off and works the match out first, then the key. The key is not cast, but made from different pieces of metal hammered together.

“It work fine, you’ll see,” say Brumby. “You just be sure an throw it where God can’t find it when you done. They gone spect me anyhow, but no use handin em the evidence.”

“I could come by for you,” Clarence tell him then, and meant it, too. Old Brumby as near as he ever got to a father. “They won’t think about me headin back to the camp.”

Old Brumby shake his head. “Only way I leave this place is in
that
,” he say, pointing at the coffin he already built, lid all polished and carved in flowers. Anybody else, unless your family claim you in three days, it’s just a trench out back of the tar pit. No box, no nothin. “What I done,” say Brumby, “this where I’m spose to die.”

Clarence sits so that Wilbert is out of sight on the far side of his tree and tries the key. They are big old Lilly irons, ankle-busters, and when the jaws spring open his heart take a jump. Anything you can think of out of metal, that Brumby can make it. Clarence throws the leg irons over his shoulder, grabs a short branch with some needles left on it and presses it up against the wet gum on the tree. He is careful with the match, holding the head close to his fingers and striking it on the heel of his shoe. Once, twice—the third time it takes fire. He puts it to the branch and then that down into the pile of twigs and scrape gum he has kicked together at the base of the pine, which catches right away. Wilbert leans his big head around the tree.

“What you doing down there?”

“What it look like I’m doing?”

“How you get them irons off you feet?”

Clarence hurries from tree to tree, lighting whatever looks like it will take, flames starting to lick up the faces, wire grass smoldering here and there.

“I
dreamed
em off,” he says. “You wait till you can’t see me no more, Wilbert, and then you call out to that peckerwood.”

He runs. Not so steady at first, legs free to stride for the first time in a year. Even got to sleep in the irons, quarters guard watching while you thread the long chain through, handing it from cot to cot till you all tucked in, just you and your crotch crickets and the twenty-nine other men hooked in your row. He runs a half-acre south and slides down into the old creek bottom and then cuts back toward the virgin pine, bending low, throwing the leg irons under some deadfall and carrying the chipping ax in his right hand. He waits then, squatting and smelling pinesmoke.

He doesn’t peek up till he hears Wilbert holler fire. Musselwhite is only just past him. The woods rider slows Lightning to a walk, stands in the stirrups and pulls his shotgun from the scabbard. The sorrel starts to snort and dance as it smells the smoke. Musselwhite gets off quick and ties the horse short to a pine, just like he spose to. Don’t worry bout any man with his ankles chained stealing a horse.

The shotgun walks toward the fire and Clarence counts trees. At twenty trees buckshot can still take you down, forty and you might only need to dig some out of your hide. Clarence waits thirty and then runs for Lightning.

The horse is all lathered and quivery, eyes rolling. He’s only rode a couple horses he stole and they don’t like it much, strange rider, dark outside. There’s no way he can hold this one by hand if he unties it first.

“We wants to get away from that fire, don’t we?” he croons to the stamping animal. “You an me both.”

It tenses but doesn’t buck when Clarence climbs on. The tether knot is pulled too tight to mess with, so he wraps the reins about one hand and chops with the ax—

They are free from the pine. There is no steering the horse at first, Lightning just bolting flat-eared and low away through the virgin trees, Clarence throwing the ax clear and holding tight, thinking how every time he cut a low branch down here he was saving his own life. Somehow the horse don’t kill them both running so fast, smashing into trees, and they are gone at least a mile before he hear Musselwhite whistle for Reese to come back and come loaded. Clarence pull back gentle on the reins, crooning more, and the horse eases into a canter. Run this pace all the way to the Waccamaw, then walk him north along it a piece before you let him drink. Dogs won’t catch them. There is still the river to cross, and himself hungry and in stripes and by noon the word be on the wire and some riders out. But he knows how to stay clear of the swamp and how to travel by the stars and it is still clear in the sky above the treetops, clear with a little bit of a breeze carrying the piney wood smell that they say is so good for your lungs. Clarence hears himself laughing.

“You do me one thing if you make it,” Brumby say. “Don’t you waste your life, son. We only get one to live out. Find yourself a trade, somethin that aint stealing.”

We see, old man, thinks Clarence as he eases Lightning into a fast trot, heading west. See what they got for a runaway nigger.

FORT MISSOULA

The only part that bothers Royal is when the doctor sits on the stool to stare into the hole in the head of his pizzle. The doctor is a white man, which he didn’t know it would be but is not too surprised since it is their army. The rest—showing his teeth, making a muscle, bending his knees up and down, the mirror bouncing light into his eyes and ears, even the white man’s fingers around his wrist while he counts, silently moving his lips—barely starts him sweating. Six of them at a time, naked, standing with eyes forward and arms hung loose at their sides as the doctor moves down the row and the colored boy in the uniform who seems to be his helper slides the stool along. The floor is cold under Royal’s feet.

“Peel em back and hold em at attention,” says the little colored boy, who the doctor calls Earl and the boy keeps answering Private Beckwith. A couple of the naked men snigger. Royal knows what this is for, he thinks, and does what they say.

“
This is our only chance
,” Junior has told him, “
so you got to act right
.”

It’s not like a dare, exactly, not like when him and his brother Jubal were little and would get up high in the branches over the creek, way too high and the water not near deep enough, sick in the stomach like how he feels now, and if one stepped off the other honor-bound to follow. Wild-ass stupid. But Junior has made it clear enough that nothing short of this will cause people to pay heed to Royal Scott, lift him up in their eyes.

In her eyes.

The doctor bends and squints at it. The sweat comes now, rolling down his sides and Royal can’t help but give up a shiver. Junior’s father, Dr. Lunceford, got an eye that can make you sweat like that, even with all your clothes on.

“Any problem making water?”

“No sir,” he says. “Aint never had that.”

His own Mama did for Towson Miles with her roots a while back, but she didn’t need him to take it out and show it in her face.

“Less you want to be a dribblin idiot by-an-by,” she told him, “you got to stew these roots twice a day and drink it all down.”

“It taste bad?” Towson wasn’t ever up to much good, wore him a path between Sprunt’s cotton press and the Manhattan Club, dogging anything in a skirt he met on the way.

“What you got,” Royal’s Mama told him, “it taste as bad as it
ought
to.”

The doctor stands and steps to the side, cocking his head to look at Royal the way the old men in Wilmington do when they’re set to swap mules.

“Cough.”

Royal doesn’t know if they’re watching for a strong cough or a weak one, so he pushes one out somewhere in the middle, careful not to blow air on the white man.

“That’s enough with these, Earl,” says the doctor, crossing to write on some papers at his desk.

“Private Beckwith,” corrects the colored boy in the uniform, softly. “Put your clothes on and wait outside,” he says to the naked men and they hurry to it, rolling eyes at each other and grinning. Royal doesn’t dare smile even though the doctor has his back turned. This little Earl might see and tell the doctor something after.

Junior sits on one of the benches along the wall in the hallway with the other dozen who went before. He shoots Royal an asking look, but there is nothing to tell him. It is up to the white doctor and whatever he wrote down.

“You got to fit the uniform, is what,” says one of the men who was naked with him. “That’s why the man look at you so careful, cause they already got all their suits and they only want them what fits
in
em.”

Royal sits and nobody talks for a while, the sounds drifting in from deep-voiced men calling cadence as they drill. They were a sight all right, just like Junior told him they’d be, colored men of all shades and ages marching in squared-off groups with their blue shirts dazzling in the afternoon sun, tall as pines with their rifles held just so over their shoulders. He thought that there would be a stockade wall, but no, just a huge open rectangle of a parade ground surrounded by wooden buildings, sitting by the river at the base of evergreen-covered mountains.

Fort Missoula.

He pictures himself standing in that blue uniform in the parlor at Junior’s house, Dr. Lunceford’s hard eye digging into him and her, Jessie, standing behind, seeing him like it’s the first time. Not the same Royal.

But only they choose him. If they take Junior and send him away that is all there is to it, go back to Wilmington and press cotton at Sprunt’s, forget about Jessie. If they take him and not Junior—but that won’t happen.

Another colored soldier steps into the hallway, darker and older than Little Earl who shoved the stool along, this one with more yellow stripes on his arm, standing wide-legged and hands on hips, looking down on them like he owns it all.

“On your feet.”

He doesn’t shout, doesn’t talk loud at all but the men jump up. He reads off a list.

“Hazzard, Drinkwater, Lunceford—” he reads and Royal hears a small gasp of relief from Junior, “—Brewster and Scott, stay here. The rest of you go out that door and get back to where you come from.”

It takes a while for the ones they don’t want to mumble out, disappointed. Royal wonders if some have come from as far as him, all the way up here where they still got Indians who wear deer hide on their feet, a half-dozen of them smoking and looking you over when you walk through the post gate.

“Lunceford,” says the older one.

“Yes sir!”

Junior sings it out. He has had Royal practicing his Yes sir and No sir which is how he says you got to answer everybody above you even if they’re not old or a white man.

“Step forward.”

Junior steps forward smart and stands with his eyes locked ahead. Junior is not so filled in as the others they picked, chicken-chested with skinny pins, but his clothes are nice and he’s lighter complected and carries himself high.

“You been to school, Lunceford.” The soldier says it as a fact.

“Yes sir. Hampton Institute and then half this year at Fisk.”

“Anything you learn there, you gone have to forget it.”

There is something in his friend’s eyes Royal has never seen before, hesitating before he speaks.

“Yes sir,” says Junior in a quiet voice. “I’ll try to do that sir.”

“You call me Sergeant.”

“Yes Sergeant.”

“Get back in line.”

Junior steps straight back two steps without looking and ends up square with the other four. Royal wonders if he’s practiced that too.

“I am Sergeant Jacks,” says the dark man evenly, the man with the stripes on his arm. “And you sorry niggers have the good fortune to be selected to join the 25th Infantry.”

Royal jumps off the branch.

IN THE TEMPLE

In the last few years it has been the Italians,
Guglielmo Tell
mostly, or
Un Ballo in Maschera
, or something new by Puccini. Diosdado stands smoking with a group of his classmates outside the Teatro Zorilla, slightly rumpled in their white linen as students are expected to be, positioned to watch the daughters of the wealthy and their
dueñas
alight from their closed carriages, each one opening like a box of
bombones
to reveal the delicacy within, girls in satin and taffeta and silk and the occasional butterfly in a
balintawak
, sleeves like delicate, transparent wings, their hair shining with oil and up in combs, bestowing their glances and smiles like the most precious of gifts. Then the
ilustrados
with their European suits and gold watches endlessly consulted to show them off and the
españoles
with their air of disdain and condescension—yes, they’d rather be in Madrid but duty entails sacrifice and this sort of event, though unavoidably second-rate here in the Colony, is such a good influence on the
indios—
the men all lingering in front of the ornate, circular temple of culture until the orchestra is well into the
overtura.
Diosdado searches over their heads for Scipio, who said to meet him here. But Scipio never makes an entrance—he just
appears.