A Moment in the Sun (61 page)

“I wish old John Jacob would come over here, build us one of his swanky hotels,” says Donovan. “I can’t sleep in these feckin rat-holes no more.”

“And the rats aint too happy about you snoring like a freight train—”

“I don’t snore.”

“And shit don’t smell. Tell him, Neely.”

“I was a googoo sneaking up and heard that racket coming out of your tent,” says Neely, “I’d turn and run for my life.”

“General Otis has ordered all the saloons closed down on Sundays,” says Runt. “But the boys have discovered this
beeno
home-brew stuff—”

“General Otis,” complains the Kansas private, “has parked his fat ass on a supply of Krag rifles and won’t give em out to us vols.”

“What we need with new rifles if we’re going home?”

“Hate to break it to you, pal, but we aint going anywhere.”

“I signed up to slaughter Dagoes,” says Donovan. “And at that I’ve been sorely disappointed.”

“You’ll get home when they squeezed the last drop of blood outta you.”

“So they got you playing nursemaid to the drunks and goldbricks,” Sergeant LaDuke says to Runt, “while we keep the googoos in line.”

LaDuke was a militia back in Colorado, and when Private Thorogood called him out as a scab and a strikebreaker the sergeant put him on report for a week.

“For a while they had me guarding this herd of buffalo calves,” says Runt. “When they’re little they’re kind of pink-colored—”

“And when they grow up they wallow in the mud and taste like shoe leather.”

“These aint for eatin. They grow the pox on em, for vaccine.”

“Evry time ye turn around this place there’s a feckin doctor with a needle in his hand—”

“Now we’re inside the walls, keeping order. Most nights it’s about what you’d see in Pueblo on a Saturday after dark. One of our fellas got cut by a pimp and his patrol partner shot the little bastard, almost had a riot on our hands.” Runt and Grissom’s monkey trade a look. “What’s the stakes here?”

They gamble, dice and cards and side-bets about what time it is going to rain or how many insects will they find in a plate of beans or anything that comes to mind, many of the men owing next month’s pay and the one after that, gamble, Hod included, because so far they have only time to kill and nothing to save for.

“Fifty-centavo minimum,” says Grissom, “and if one of our Mariquina googoos picks you off before you settle your debts we don’t pony up to bring the body back.”

Manigault steps in then, and Sergeant LaDuke nudges the wine bottle behind his body.

“As I assumed,” says the officer, looking over the spread of cards and pesos on the ammo crate. “Uncle Sam’s finest issue, ever vigilant, girding their loins for battle.”

“We’re rarin to go, Lieutenant,” says LaDuke. “Only the coons have decided to take the night off.”

He was not popular in training or on the ship, Manigault, the men going through “that cracker peacock” and “Niles Manlygoat” before settling on “Lieutenant Tarheel” when he was out of earshot. Opinion improved on the day of the so-called invasion, Niles striding out in front of the company with a malacca cane in hand, seeming to grow more cheerful with every flurry of sniper fire.

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” he says, tapping the cane twice on the edge of the crate. “I had the opportunity to visit headquarters today, and from what I was able to glean—” he winks to the men, a hint of conspiracy in his voice, “—I wouldn’t wander too far from your weapons.”

They’ve been sleeping in their boots for a week, but other than insults tossed across the two hundred yards the forces are ordered to maintain between each other, there has been no action. Hod feels it coming again, stomach churning, but holds to his seat.

“Merely a suggestion to the more prudent among you,” says the lieutenant, raising his eyebrows, then sees Runt.

“Runyon, if I recall.”

“Yes sir.”

“I thought I cashiered you in Denver.”

Runt grins. “But I caught on with the Minnesotas. Some real fighting men.”

“With real officers,” adds Hod, “from what I hear.”

Manigault moves to stand behind Hod. “Insubordination is not looked upon kindly, McGinty. Even in the volunteers.”

“He’s Atkins,” corrects Big Ten. “I’m McGinty.”

Manigault narrows his eyes at the Indian. “I am acutely aware of
what
you are, Private.” He turns to the others. “None of that wine had better end up in your canteens, gentlemen. I miss nothing.” He gives Hod a smart tap on the shoulder with his cane and steps out into the darkness.

“What’s with the shavetail?” asks Runt when he is gone. “Is that the real goods?”

“They like to start rumors. So’s we don’t become lax and undisciplined.”

“As if the little monkeys would dare start anything.”

“Who says they’ll be the ones to start it?” says Big Ten.

“Give me something to shoot,” declares former corporal Danny Donovan, “or send me the feck home.”

If respect is not forthcoming from the lower ranks, one must settle for
fear
. Niles strolls toward the entrenchments, the night beginning to cool, startling a private so overcome with the sprue that he has dropped his trousers to do his business at the side of the path.

“Name and company,” Niles barks as he steps around.

“Bollinger,” says the sweating youth. “Company I.”

Niles only nods curtly and continues. He may or may not pursue the matter. Unpredictability is a valuable tool, even the worst dullards forced to attend, to remain vigilant. Jeff Smith was the master of unpredictability, his moods, genuine or feigned, keeping his pack of thugs and grifters on a very short leash, his pistol always prominently displayed and judiciously brandished. Niles reflects that his own sidearm, an Army Colt ransomed from a pawnshop on lower Larimer, is rather plebeian for an officer of his caliber. It is not a gentleman’s weapon.

“Who goes there?” calls a sentry at the Cossack post, whirling around.

“Lieutenant Manigault,” he answers. “Had I been a skulking googoo, you’d have been dead three times over.”

Command suits him, thinks Niles—he seems to have been born to be a leader of men. The Colorado Volunteers are a ragtag outfit, true, with a criminal element personified by Hod Brackenridge and his redskin cohort, but such a group demands a finer, firmer class of officer to be effective. When this Philippine fracas has petered out he will look in on the political situation in Wilmington, and, if it is still impossible, offer his services to the Regular Army.
Colonel
Manigault, at least.

Niles strides past the discomfited sentry and climbs up on the earthwork wall that faces the enemy—no, they are not yet that, officially—the Fili
pi
no lines. Conversation, in their atrocious ning-nong dialect, drifts across the no-man’s-land with the sound of a guitar being strummed. If, when, the reckoning comes, they shall not prove an estimable foe.

There is a man standing on the opposite earthworks.

He is wearing boots and a short-peaked cap, sporting a pistol on his hip. He sees Niles and mimes pulling the sidearm, pointing it at him and pulling the trigger. It is too dark, the distance between them too great, to see if he is smiling or not.

Niles lifts his hat and gives the nigger a stiff bow.

Soon enough for you, my friend.

IMPROMPTU

The keys have changed their pattern. Jessie stares at them, trying to remember, trying to let the music in. She feels like her body is sinking, heavy, into the floor as her head floats dizzily above it. The Conservatory is in Virginia, not far from Hampton where Junior went to school, and if she can be the first colored girl accepted there, living away from her parents—

“Jessie?” calls Miss Loretta, the voice, echoing in the near-empty hall, a shock.

“Yes, M’am,” she says. The white man’s eyes challenged her when he said hello, his steady gaze asking
Just what do you think you’re doing here?
, and at the moment she has no answer for him. Usually she has only to lay her fingers on the keys, all in their proper pattern, and the music is there.

Royal can come to her in Virginia, they can have the ceremony, and if this is what she dreads the most, everything will be made right. She will be forgiven. She only has to survive this test, to prove herself worthy.

The white man clears his throat, impatient, out there somewhere in the staring rows of seats with Miss Loretta. Jessie looks at the sheet music, notes drawn on lines, swimming.

G-Minor, she thinks, and wills her fingers into motion.

It isn’t wrong, really, just not what is accepted. Miss Loretta sits on the aisle, a few rows behind the Maestro, and can’t help but try to read his reaction from the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head. It has been such a trial to convince him to come up, and she worries she may have overstated Jessie’s abilities. What is outstanding in Wilmington may not impress Atlanta or Charlottesville, though her ear and her intuition have not deceived her before.

“Another Hottentot prodigy,” the Maestro smiled tightly when she met him at the station. “You’ve become something of a missionary.”

He is listening, though, eyes closed as always, fingertips of his right hand gently pressed against his temple as if the music is being played inside his head. Jessie has chosen her favorite ballade, and though it is meant to begin in a pensive mode there is something—not tentative, exactly, for the girl’s fingers know where they’re meant to be—something other
world
ly about her playing as she begins. The caesuras are much too long, Jessie listening to each phrase, pondering it, before proceeding with the next. The massive hall is cool, as always in the early afternoon, and Miss Loretta realizes she is shivering.

There will be only this one opportunity with the Maestro. She has made an effort not to frighten the girl, tried not to overstress the importance of the audition. But the fact remains that it is one of those rare moments in which the course of one’s future is determined, the road dividing, only one path leading forward. She is so young, Jessie, innocent yet of the terrible knowledge that certain actions, certain decisions, cannot be undone. Miss Loretta dabs at her neck with her handkerchief, then fans herself, suddenly flushing with one of the vaporous attacks she is prone to lately, worse always when she is tense or upset, and then Jessie stops playing.

Just stops.

The ballade is meant to change character here, gaining power and certitude, but Jessie only sits staring at the keys as if this more resolute music is a forest she dare not enter.

The Maestro turns his head to Miss Loretta, arches an eyebrow.

“I’m sorry,” says Jessie, her near whisper carrying out to them.

The girl stands and steps off into the wings, footsteps hammering. Miss Loretta is up and leaning in to placate the Maestro.

“Perhaps if I speak with her—”

“She understands,” he says, shaking his head slightly and reaching for his coat as he rises. “Left to their own devices, they prefer to dwell at their own level.” He pats Miss Loretta’s hand as he steps into the aisle, as a father pats the hand of a child who has lost her balloon. “Your efforts for the girl are commendable, and I’m sure you saw the spark of something there,” he says, slipping his coat on, “but the Academy is not a settlement house.”

“I apologize for—”

“No need. I’ll be able to catch the three o’clock if I hurry.”

Miss Loretta sits then, suddenly exhausted, till she hears the door to the lobby thump shut behind him. The chill that so often follows her hot spells shudders down her spine from the sides of her neck. It is very quiet in the great hall. She stares at the piano, mute and reproachful at the center of the stage. She remembers hearing Anton Rubinstein from this very seat on the aisle, enthralled at thirteen years of age, the music filling her soul. Miss Loretta sighs and stands to find the girl.

Jessie sits on a stool by the bank of pulleys that control the scenery and curtains. Her cheeks are wet with tears as she looks up to see her teacher.

“I am so very sorry.”

“Not as sorry as I.” Jessie flushes as if she has been slapped. Miss Loretta regrets the phrase the moment it is uttered, but she has suffered the Maestro’s condescension, has confused her own thwarted hopes with those of this colored girl.

Softer now, “You’re not feeling well?”

The girl’s forehead is damp, the neck of her shirtwaist darkened with perspiration.

“I was afraid I was going to be ill.”

There was a girl at Conservatory, Antonia, a lovely girl who played like the wind and had great dark eyes that were rumored to be the result of gypsy blood in her family. Miss Loretta and the others would gather outside the rehearsal room and marvel at her facility, her passion. But if more than one of them stepped in to listen Antonia would break off and return to playing scales or pretend to study the score. The morning of her first
recitif
she began to tremble and by noon was burning with a fever so intense an ambulance was called for. It was said that her symptoms had disappeared by the time she reached the hospital, though none of them ever saw her again. The porters were there to remove her belongings from her room the next morning.

“The nature of your sex,” said Professor Einhorn without mentioning Antonia by name in his next lecture, “disposes you to a heightened sensitivity. It is both your glory and your undoing.”

Miss Loretta chooses her words carefully. “You have performed in front of people, important people, before this,” she says. There was the concert in February, the
haute monde
of Wilmington present, and but for the girl’s parents not a dark face in the audience. She was brilliant.

“I feel ill all the time,” says Jessie. “Not just today.”

It is unthinkable.

The girl has been rounding out lately, her body ripening. Nothing more. These are growing pains, perhaps, the unruly sway of female humors. We women are slaves to our bodies, thinks Miss Loretta, and our emotions rule our health.

“Have you had—”

She is not the girl’s mother, after all, not responsible. But at the end of all her pleading to lure the Maestro here for a trial, after all her steady instruction and guidance through the years, her investment in this child, there must be an accounting.