A Moment in the Sun (41 page)

Dewey steps away. Though Coop has made some kind of shallow bowl the back-sliding sand is halfway up to his knees now. Keep this up long enough, he thinks, and I bury my own self.

They don’t whip you in the Army, or chain you up at night. They give you real folding money, thirteen dollars a month, instead of cardboard scrip you got to use in their own store and they give you a rifle and teach you how to use it. Just show up telling them you’re Henry Cooper, jump over a stick, cough while the Doc puts his fingers on you, and you can wear the blue. He was skinny, bleary-eyed, a week hiding in the piney woods and two more tramping north and west, with nothing in his pockets and clothes that didn’t fit he had to steal on the way. The recruiter in Kansas City barely looked at him. “Cavalry is full up,” he said, “but if you don’t mind walking we got a place for you.”

Even in war there’s got to be nigger jobs, he figured. Not just the digging and hauling and minding prisoners, but bloody work, something they don’t want to put their white boys in front of. The Indians had been settled in for some time and there wasn’t much talk of this Cuba war yet, they hadn’t blown that ship up, so killing wasn’t even on his mind.

Beats slaving in a damn turp camp with iron on your legs.

One of the white outfits, volunteers, double-times past him in formation, a blue rectangle moving against the bleached sand. Coop recognizes the look on their faces, trying hard not to think beyond the moment, not to wonder when is this particular hell going to end. There been nothing regular about their life since they pulled out of Fort Missoula, the brass just guessing their way along, and you got to grab your chances when they come. Get a chance to get drunk, or for a woman, or for a decent bite to eat and you damn well better jump on it. “
We not paying you boys to think
,” Sergeant Cade likes to tell them, “
just pick em up and lay em down
.” The sun is lower now and Coop tosses his sweat-heavy campaign hat to the side of the pit. He hasn’t been to stockade once since he joined, they can’t break him and they can’t shake him and he knows it bothers old Cade, on his tail from first bugle to
Taps
, but Cade don’t rile him none. Just keep smiling and shoveling and tonight they owe him a pass, strap on the pistol and step out with the boys. Coop can’t read, as such, but he knows his letters, knows when there is a big
W
on a brand-new sign it likely means “Whites Only” and was stuck up there just for him. There was more of that back home when he visited too, making a point of what a man already know on his own, rubbing you raw in a public way. We will see. The Cubans in Ybor just want your money—hell, they all shades themselves, ebony to ivory, and got all manner of Italians and Chinamen running around in the bargain. But Tampa City it’s your standard-issue crackers, sun-baked and nasty, and a nigger won’t get too many chances in this life to run it down their throats, to carry a sidearm and dare them, just dare the sorry sons of bitches to make something out of it.

Coop pulls his feet free of the sand. Without the uniform, of course, he be a dead man. Dead swinging on a rope or tied to a tree and burned or just shot and left lying for the dogs. Or dead soon enough from the way they work you. It come clear to him in the turp camp before he run off. So whatever the Army or old Geronimo or the Spanish or the Chinamen, if that’s where they end up, got to throw at him is nothing. Better a bullet on a battlefield than be scraped by the week and bled by the season.

And when Sergeant Cade step by to see how the latrine is coming, here is Coop pouring sweat, ankle deep in a long, shallow ditch in the sand, smiling. Shoveling and smiling.

As the sun falls Tampa is a dream. The yearning of a war-hungry nation.

Father—

Junior in the shade of the tent, sides pulled up hoping to catch an afternoon Gulf breeze, Merriam pack across his knees to support the paper, voices shouting cadence drifting from every direction. Junior writes with dashing penmanship—

We have encamped at Tampa pending orders for embarkation. It is a hodgepodge of a town, given over to cigar-making and tourism, the former mostly in foreign hands and the latter in the minds of certain as yet unrewarded entrepreneurs. The arrival of our force, some eighteen thousand men in uniform, has no doubt been a huge economic boon, though one finds nothing but complaint in the local (white-owned) newspapers. Nearly one out of four of the fighting men gathered here is colored, and your pride would certainly swell to observe the account we are making for ourselves. My own 25th is in the thick of the training, and our surrounding volunteer units can only gape in wonder at the precision and brio we bring to field maneuvers and review.

Junior has his boots off, risking a sudden call back into action, his feet throbbing—

There are flying columns of “Cuban freedom fighters” clamoring about town in white linen uniforms, brandishing their long
machete
knives and waving the one-starred flag. A notably underfed and overheated group, I’m afraid, and if their compatriots on the island are no more impressive it explains a great deal about the lack of success they’ve met over their decades of struggle. These aggregations are notable, however, for their inclusive nature, the white
insurrectos
marching shoulder to shoulder with the sable sons of Maceo. Emancipation came to the island a mere twelve years ago, and it stirs the blood to see these dark warriors accepted as brothers in arms by their erstwhile masters. We hope the performance of our own colored regiments in the coming battle will weigh heavily against the efforts of segregationists to discredit us, and that the call for Negro officers will be met. Whatever honors we win here will be an advantage for our entire race.

The volunteers are a mixed lot, their comportment and training varying, as one would suppose, with their state of origin. The 71st New York share the Heights with us and seem a steady bunch, while the contingent from Georgia have proved less congenial neighbors. They are all “spoiling for a fight” while my fellow regular soldiers seem content to await orders. The “Rough Riders” have arrived with much fanfare, though we have little contact with mounted units. There are of course more horses and mules in their area than troopers, with the attendant sounds and odors, and I see no hope of transporting them all to Cuba in the “mosquito fleet” so far assembled.

Junior hoping no one will see him writing again, already the butt of jokes, the bearer of nicknames. If Royal hadn’t been there, Chickamauga would have been the end of him—the heat, the veterans’ insults, the grueling days of mindless drilling. It was a mistake to have come in as a private. A man with his background and education, with his standards of conduct—but there are no colored lieutenants and the war would not wait. Junior writing, holding pen hand aside to keep his sweat from dripping on the letter, as Little Earl naps sprawled beside him and the others steel themselves to face another meal—

The food has been an adventure. Hardtack is universally reviled and taken, if necessary, broken in pieces mixed with stew or canned tomatoes. It resembles nothing I have seen before, certainly nothing edible. A good deal of humor is spent imagining its proper employment (our Navy is said to be caulking the more ancient wooden vessels with their version of it, known as sea biscuit). “Bacon” is seen at nearly every meal and is another source of bitterness and objurgation, large blocks of sowbelly meant to serve as fresh meat for our diet. Of the tinned variety the less said the better, and though foraging is officially condemned the practice here is rampant. Yesterday I saw a man pay 5 cents for a single egg.

Junior paid the nickel and was later shamed to learn Private Cooper sold the rest of his clutch for two cents each. The poundcake Jessie mentioned in her letter was purloined somewhere in transit, not a crumb of it left, and the prices in Ybor shoot up between every visit. Junior, who was nauseated the first time he managed to finish a plate of sowbelly and half-cooked beans, who suffers the same dysentery his tentmates do but in silence and disgust, who has never been so filthy in his life and imagines all manner of crawly things breeding beneath the sour-smelling wool of his uniform—

I have had little time to reflect on what Fate may hold in store for me. My comrades do not speak of it, and from all appearances give little heed to the gravity of our situation. I am confident, though, that when the time for action arises, the men of the 25th will comport themselves as champions of liberty and fulfill without hesitation whatever duties shall fall upon their shoulders.

Junior thinks of little else. They are not slated to leave with the first wave, no, but he is confident the call will come, Company L into the breach, and then—

A wound, grave enough to be carried from the field but that will slowly heal, leaving a scar visible but not disfiguring—acceptable. A bullet to the head, neither seen nor heard—if the highest price is to be payed, that would be the best. The veterans have their stories, skirmishes in Indian territory or on the border, men with parts of themselves shot away, maimed, suffering agonies before they die, the veterans tell it with little emotion and some of it must be true. Or worse, to go home untried, untested, never to face an angry shot, left on the beach as others sail to glory. The privations, the insult, are only bearable if they lead to a moment in arms, under the flag, caught in a desperate fight. If we risk that for them, Junior thinks, Junior believes with all his soul, how can they deny us the rest?

Our bugler is warning of the evening mess and I must close. Please send my love to Mother and Jessie. I shall write them separately as time permits. I ask that you share the general observations enclosed with Manly at the
Record
, whom I have promised a correspondence. There are other Wilmington men here besides myself and Royal Scott, but none of a literary bent. I will make you proud.

Your son,

Aaron

Junior considers his boots for a long moment, then grimaces and struggles to pull the first one on. Little Earl sits up, sand stuck on his face, looking bewildered.

“Chow?”

“That’s right.”

The private frowns, trying to dredge something from his memory. “When was it they give us biscuits and butter?”

“Chickamauga,” says Junior, starting on the other boot, “the first week.”

Little Earl shakes his head. “Shouldn’t ought to play with a man like that.”

Tampa is a fever dream. Tampa is for sale.

Coop and the boys wait at the trolley stop, resisting temptation. Gasoline torches light the area and vendors at the various wood-and-cardboard stands shout out their attractions. Oranges are sold at one, imported from California since this year’s killing frost, while others have soap and cocoanuts and local souvenirs and lemons and writing paper and sandwiches and there is a forty-foot-long ice-cream-and-soda-fountain counter at which prohibited items may also be purchased if the Provost Guard is either absent or willing to settle for a share. A crap game proceeds at one end of the counter.

“We leave that one alone,” says Coop, “unless we way behind by the time we get back here.”

“That be sometime tomorrow,” grins Willie Mills.

“Don’t you worry none. Ice cream might be run out, but them craps still be rollin day or night.”

There is a new building, a two-story barnlike structure slapped together with raw pine, that sits just across from the trolley tracks.

“Pompton Stiles from B Company won hisself a pile in there playing chuck-aluck,” says Willie.

“Yeah, and then he lost the whole thing on the roulette.” Coop lets his hand rest on his pistol grip, a dozen white volunteers arriving and standing in a group to wait. “I stick with them bones. Bones always treat me right.”

A barefoot little black boy comes by, selling polished conch shells. Nobody wants to buy but he lingers, staring at the men. Coop pulls the Colt out of its holster, offers it.

“You want to hold this here?”

The little boy stares, awestruck, at the heavy weapon. “Naw suh.” He shoots a glance toward the white soldiers, who are studiously looking in another direction. “They lets you ca’y that?”

“They insist on it,” says Too Tall, who claims to have been a preacher once in Alabama. “Soldier aint a soldier less he’s armed and ready for action. What if a boatload of them limejuicers land here in Tampa tonight, commence to attack the population? We might not have time to run back and get our rifles.”

The boy nods, wide-eyed.

“Someday, if these crackers don’t run you down first, maybe you be a soldier too,” says Coop.

“Yeah?”

“Hell,” says Willie Mills, “they take Coop here, they take about any old body.”

They are laughing when the electric trolley arrives. Only a few passengers get off, mostly more vendors arriving for the nightly festivities, but there is a crowd of soldiers squeezing onto the two cars. The conductor scowls and stares hard out at the carnival booths, and Coop finds himself pressed tight against a short, nervous corporal from the Ohio Vols.

“Anybody seen that Jim Crow on board?” Coop calls out, grinning, just before the bell and the first lurch of motion.

“Naw,” answers Too Tall from the other end of the car. “He aint been invited.”

Tampa is a fever dream. Tampa is a dream of Hell.

The song ends and Little Earl feels the Spirit move within him. Earlier it was the stew and one of the sweats he’s been having, the ones that come even when they’re not running you over the sand, but this is different, tingling out through his whole body and urging him to stand and shout no matter what the white folks think.

Moody, the famous Moody of Chicago, steps to the podium on the plank stage at the front. He is a stocky man, with a patriarch’s beard and a deep, booming voice that fills the great tent without strain—it impresses Little Earl that the evangelist is only
talk
ing with them, man to man, though there are women scattered in the rows. There are at least five hundred souls gathered under the canvas, with many uniformed soldiers among them, whites taking up some three-quarters of the space and the blacks crowded behind a rope to the left.