A Moment in the Sun (54 page)

“Royal,” she said, excited, “there’s going to be a boat race!”

Junior is sleeping in the seat by the window as the passenger car clicks over the rail joints and the dark countryside rolls by. They are in uniform, but there have been no parades. The station in Washington was full of soldiers, the hearty, sunburned ones just mustered out from volunteer units that were never shipped to Cuba, and a few of the hollow-eyed men, too, regulars discharged or chasing their regiments, who had made it back. Men, black and white, like Royal, who’d had to punch another hole in their belts and cinch tight to keep their pants up, men who looked dazed as they passed through the crowded waiting room, shades among the living throng.

The porter who works the dining car, still awake, comes back to sit across from him, grinning.

“Allus likes to see another man in uniform.”

It is a joke, the porter running his finger down his long row of buttons.

“Yours fits better.”

“You boys was down there?”

Royal nods.

“You in the Nigger Ninth?”

Royal shakes his head. “25th Infantry.”

The porter smiles and lifts his cap. “Yall was in the middle of it then. Regulars.”

“That’s right.”

“You done us
proud
. Ever time you or the Cavalry boys or the 24th make a move down there it’s all up and down the line.” The porter waves a finger back and forth to indicate the rail they are riding. “This here the colored man’s telephone.”

Royal forces himself to smile. Since he’s been back in the world the white people just look through them like always, even with uniforms on, but everywhere the colored folks stop and gladhand and want to know where they served.

“How far you headed, son?”

“Just to Wilmington,” Royal tells him. “Then we’ll get on something headed west, catch up with our regiment in Arizona.”

“Out to the Territories.”

“Fort Huachuca. Near where Chief Geronimo gave up the warpath.”

“Wa-chew-ka,” the porter sounds it out. “But you too young to be in on them Indian wars.”

Royal nods. “I suppose now we’ll just sit back and watch the jackrabbits run by. Unless the Chinamen get up in arms.”

The porter chuckles. “Young man your age, you seen nearly as much of the world as me. And I
been
some places. You got people in Wilmington?”

“Yes sir. Born and raised.”

“Got a gal there, I suppose.”

Royal is surprised to feel his heart race at the question. He still gets dizzy if he stands up too quickly, still feels like his insides have been bruised. “I suppose I do,” he answers, glancing over to Junior, snoring softly now by the window.

“She aint around, young war hero won’t have no trouble findin another. If we could change uniforms for one night,” the porter winks, “I be a happy man.”

Alma opens the cellar door to a racket and a swirl of black dust. She shuts it quickly, grabs the house bucket and steps out back to find Wicklow shoveling the morning delivery into the chute.

“Got some of that for me?” she calls, loud enough to be heard over the rattling coal.

Wicklow turns, leans on the wide-bladed shovel and cricks his neck to the side, wincing. The Crosbys’ rooster over on Queen Street is announcing himself, and the backyard is still in shadow.

“Miss Alma,” he says, smiling. “My first ray of sunshine.” He has a sweet tongue, Wicklow, but is never free with his hands like Calvin Hines who brings the ice. Alma always keeps her broom in hand when Calvin comes by.

“How you be this morning, Wick?”

“Sore all over, truth be known.”

“You getting old.”

Wick laughs. “That’s true enough, young lady, but also I been helpin my boy Jubal, got the dray bidness, move Mr. Manly’s press.”

“He leavin town?”

“No, M’am, he only been ast to vacate his office by the white man owns the
build
ing.”

“What I heard,” she says as Wicklow scoops smallish chunks with his hands to fill the house bucket, “he lucky he still got his head on his shoulders. Though Lord knows what he use it for, talking like that.”

“He didn’t say nothin, Miss Alma, he
wrote
it. Wrote it out in his newspaper.”

“That’s even worst. You speak out wrong and they come after you for it, you can always tell em folks just misheard what you really said, or even that you was
drunk
when you said it, act the fool and save your neck. But to print it out in black and white—” Alma shakes her head, lifting an armful of kindling from the pile against the back wall and crossing to add it to the fire already crackling beneath the huge galvanized kettle.

“Wash day again,” Wicklow remarks, watching her hips as she moves.

“Blue Monday.” Boiling the clothes and linens, wringing them out and hanging them up, the endless ironing—on top of all of what she usually does for the Luncefords. “Ever damn time I turn around it come up on me.”

“You got to admit,” the old man continues, “wasn’t nothin he wrote in his article that’s un
true
.”

Alma doesn’t read the newspaper. She barely has time for a chapter of her love stories at the end of the day, measuring them out so a book will last a month, all through work wondering at what will befall the poor girl next and then finding out by candlelight and falling hard into sleep. But she’s heard about what was written, heard that it had to do with colored men and white women, and if Manly is so smart and educated he ought to know better.

“
True
don’t have one little thing to do with it,” she says. She licks her finger and touches it to the kettle—getting there. She tosses a handful of the powdered bluing in. If she’s lucky Miss Jessie won’t lay up in bed too long and she can strip the sheets off. “You know Mrs. Beauchamp, got that big red whatever-it-is growing on the side of her neck?”

“Sits two pews ahead of me in church.”

“Well then, you meet up with her on the steps, no place to look her but right in the face, and
she
know it’s there and
you
know it’s there—but do you say ‘Lord, Mrs. B, if that aint growed twice its size since I see you last!’? You do not.”

“That’s just po
lite
,” says Wicklow, turning back to the pile of coal. “This here with Mr. Manly not about manners, it’s about
prin
ciples.”

Alma snorts. “Who tole you that?”

“Mr. Manly. Last night whilst we were hauling all his machinery upstairs over the Love and Charity Hall.”

“Where Doctor have his Lodge meetins.”

Wicklow nods. “That’s the new headquarters of the
Wilmington Daily Record
. Would you believe ever damn one of them letters they use to print the paper is made of
lead
? I’d knowed all that mess was going to the top floor I’d of told Jubal to go chase hisself.”

“Manly help you carry?”

“Him and his brothers. Course Mr. Alexander that’s the editor is the one that look most like a white man. Talk like one too. He wanted to, he could move off somewhere and
pass
, easy as pie.”

Alma has seen the Manlys out in their carriages, has heard the story of how their grandfather was governor of the state, how the great man set their father, his son, free, even before the War.

“Don’t matter how white he
look
,” she says. “People read that paper they see a colored man speakin through it, and a colored man got to have more sense than just shout out whatever little idea fall into his head.”

Wicklow draws himself up to his full height. “A man can’t live thout principles.”

“Well
I
can live without em,” says Alma, picking up the coal bucket and heading inside. “Specially ones that’s bound to get me lynched.”

Wicklow shovels in silence for a moment after the screen door bangs, frowning and flinging the coal hard into the chute.

“Man laid out the
truth
,” he mutters finally. “In black and white.”

Alma feeds coal into the maw of the cooking range, flicks water on the stovetop to see if it’s ready. She has the bacon sliced and the eggs ready to fry for Doctor, who will be out early on his rounds. Jessie and Mrs. Lunceford only take toast and tea before climbing back upstairs to face their corsets, but Doctor is an old farm boy no matter how he works to cover it over, and wants some fuel for the day.

The bacon is sizzling, starting to curl in its fat when someone, probably Wicklow asking about the carriage, knocks at the back door. Alma flips the slices and hurries out. It is Clerow, Hattie Pettigrew’s boy, with a telegram.

“This here just come.”

The telegraph office won’t send their white boys to the colored houses, but their colored messengers are allowed to deliver to whites and get in the habit of coming to the back. He looks cute in his little hat, wears uniform pants too long and shoes too big. Hattie can’t shut her mouth bragging about the boy, maybe because her older one is the worst hophead in the whole Brooklyn section.

“It need a reply?”

“No M’am.”

She gives Clerow a penny from the dish she keeps by the door and steps back in, worried. Before the Spanish War she would have just put it by Doctor’s plate at breakfast, but now, with Junior still in uniform and so many sick up north on Long Island, she hurries through the kitchen to pull the skillet off the heat. A telegram is not a letter. A letter, with Junior’s handwriting on the front, means he is well enough to write it, no matter how long ago it was sent. The news inside might be bad but not the worst. A telegram is short, maybe just one hard fact in it, and Alma keeps it in her apron pocket, unread, till she is upstairs.

Doctor is doing his men’s business behind a locked door so she brings it to Mrs. Lunceford, sitting in her bedroom in her dressing gown, looking pretty by the window that takes the morning light.

“This just came.”

Mrs. Lunceford looks at the paper like it might be a snake in her hand.

“Leave it on the dressing table, Alma.”

Except for Jessie, the Luncefords don’t want her witness to their private life. The Hightowers, the white folks she kept house for just before, would scream and holler and curse and then make up with tears and little private names as if Alma wasn’t standing there an arm’s-length away from them. And then that mess working for the Judge and his boys—well. But she has never been seated in a room with either Doctor or Mrs. Lunceford, has never been taken into their confidence.

And still knows everything she needs to about them.

Alma waits halfway down the stairs to listen, hand gripping the banister to keep from shaking, until she hears Mrs. Lunceford cry out “Oh, wonderful!” and then she is called and rushes back up to find Mrs. L and Jessie and then Doctor, all excited and smiling cause Junior is visiting them on leave this very day.

“It’s sent from Washington,” says Doctor, scrutinizing the little note. “He must have just wired it from Union Station on his way.”

“You’re certain it’s today? There’s only the one sentence.”

“With telegrams you pay by the word,” Doctor explains. “It’s a virtue to be con
cise
.”

“We need to have something special—”

Jessie takes the telegram and reads it. “
Coming today on leave arrive 4:20 Love Jr.
It doesn’t say how long he’ll be here.” She shoots a look to Alma.

“Alma,” Mrs. L says again, “we’ll have to have something special.”

“No trouble, M’am,” she smiles, and hurries back down the stairs. It
will
be trouble, with the wash and breakfast not even started and the extra cleaning that will be expected, but she feels lightheaded as she steps back into the kitchen. Junior can’t be the only soldier on the train.

Jessie nibbles toast. Mother is going on about what needs to be done, what needs to be cleaned, and Father has already gotten his Lodge brothers busy setting up a reception for Junior tonight.

Their eyes meet first—his are wounded, smoldering with unexpressed longing, hers misting with the sudden release from her lonely vigil. He crosses the room with long strides, ignoring all the others, no object in his mind but her, the image he had carried through the hell of battle now real, made flesh before him, and taking her, who he has barely touched before, taking her full in his arms—

It does not seem possible, after all her thinking, all the scenarios, each different in at least one detail, that she really will see him, Royal, again, that he is a person who walks the earth and not a character from books.

“I’m just so relieved he’s out of that horrible quarantine,” says Mother. “The conditions he described—”

“Scandalous neglect,” says Father, getting up to go on his rounds. “If the stories you read about how badly they’ve served the white soldiers are true, you can imagine what our colored boys have been through.”

The last she’d heard of Royal was in one of Junior’s letters.
Failing
had been mentioned, and
We can only pray
. Nothing from Royal himself, though Alma said she asked the carrier each day when he came by if there was anything for her. Alma never got mail at home, she said—her street, just an alley really, was not on the official route. But surely if something terrible had happened since Junior’s letter he would have found a way to let her know.

There were stories told about the young woman, about her silent, almost mute demeanor, the sadness that always seemed to fall upon a room she had entered, the black gowns, always black, that she wore. The stories were only conjecture, of course, attempts to fathom why one so young, one so seemingly full of life should have come to be this mysterious, selfless Sister of Help in such a remote corner of the world—

No. It couldn’t be. She would have felt something, would have sensed it somehow. Her mother is right—there is so much to be done. If Royal is in Wilmington and Junior does not bring him home, how will they see each other? The one time Jessie mentioned him, in passing, at the dinner table there was a long, strained silence until Father began complaining again about the black layabouts in Brooklyn who made his vaccination work so difficult. What if Royal is already sent away, off to another post in another forsaken country? Or still in the death-camp in Hempstead?