A Moment in the Sun (65 page)

“Some of my fellas hauling timber in seen him,” says the mine foreman, trying not to stare at Guadalupe on the grulla mare beside him. “They stopped and walked all the way over from the wagon road but he said he’d just stay where he was.”

Lupe is half Mex and half Indian, which Jacks didn’t know till they were hitched and nobody come to congratulate her. Relatives on both sides will nod hello if they pass by but that is about all. And then up in Missoula with her it was a whole nother kind of people, white ladies who couldn’t be bothered and the Flathead gals who don’t speak Spanish or Apache. So it is mostly just the two of them, which has been just fine so far. Marriage is a tricky enough deal without the in-laws thrown into the pot.

“
Es un loco?
” she asks about the soldier when they are riding away.

“
No sé cual soldado es
,” he shrugs. “
Quizás es solamente un borrachón
.”

There are men in the company, good men in a pinch, who can’t handle peacetime duty and fall into the bottle. And it is worse out here in the Great Nowhere, easy for a soldier to think the Army has just forgotten about you, that you’ll shrivel up in the sun like a dead rattler. Which is some of why he chased after Lupe so hard on his first tour here, knowing only that she wasn’t white and she wasn’t for sale and that she was one tough trader. They still had a sutler at the Fort then and whenever he would try to swap canned provisions for her wild game or Navaho blankets or other souvenir goods she would pick a can out at random and make him eat the contents, all of it, before she’d close the deal. Wouldn’t talk any English, either, though even back then Jacks could tell she understood it fine.

She points to the sky.

There are nearly a dozen buzzards wheeling lazily in the air, enough to know that what’s below them is bigger than a
javelina
and high enough to guess that it isn’t dead yet. Lupe leads the mule on a rope. It is maybe a three-year-old, bred in the Mex style on a mustang mare, and is way too curious to have been used in the traces. Its big ears start twitching every which way when they cut off the road and into the chaparral.

From a distance he does look dead, though he is sitting up, cross-legged in the middle of a big patch of
ocotillo
and
cholla
cactus. There were maybe twenty each from A and H got the two-day pass, let them blow off some steam and keep the barracks scraps to a minimum. Men are not mules, which would be happy to eat mash and switch flies all day, they get mean and skittish if there’s too little to do, if there’s nobody else to fight but each other. Huachuca isn’t bad duty, laid out just like Fort Missoula only the mountains are scrub instead of evergreen, but riding herd on the cursing, whining, sweat-stinking lot of troopers will wear a man down, so whenever there is a chance to spend a night at the cabin he grabs it. If there was ever a person don’t need taking care of it is Guadalupe. She won’t come on the Fort any more, not even to sell, and he figures it is on his account. The old hands know better than to call him Squaw Man or tamale-eater but still it is nice to keep the two things separate. Army owns enough of you.

It is Royal Scott.

It is Royal Scott and he’s lost his hat and the skin on his face has started to blister. He sits cross-legged, hands resting on his knees with his palms up, eyes closed. Lupe hands Jacks her reins and gets down, stepping carefully over the horse-crippler and around the
cholla
till she can bend down and look at him close. He opens his eyes to see her.

“Here she is,” he smiles. “Come to kill the wounded.”

“You got lost in the desert,” calls Sergeant Jacks, giving the boy an out. Scott looks over and doesn’t seem too surprised that he is there.

“No, Sergeant, this is just where I come to a stop.”

“You were due back in camp sometime yesterday, I expect.”

The boy shakes his head. “I need to go home.”

“You
are
home, son. Till they tell us different.”

He keeps smiling, one of those don’t-give-a-damn-no-more smiles Jacks has learned to be wary of. Guadalupe is still bent over the boy, studying his face.

“Just leave me here, Sarge. I aint worth shit for a soldier.”

He is mostly right. “Army will be the judge of that, son. Get up and we ride in together.”

Private Scott holds his hands out. At some point, probably in the dark, he fell and tried to catch himself and got both hands full of
cholla
spines.

“I can’t hold no reins.”

“You just get up. Lupe can pull you along.”

Lupe helps him stand. He teeters some when he walks, but there is no bottle left on the ground so it is just thirst and hunger and being out in that crazy hail that made such a racket on the cabin roof.

“Thank you, M’am, I think I got it now.” He looks up to Jacks. He isn’t the worst in the company, but he is no warrior, not like some of the old boys or that wild-ass Cooper. “This is her, isn’t it? Mrs. Sergeant.”

“That’s her.”

“I thought it was just a rumor.”

Jacks gets down from his buckskin quarter horse to help her hoist him up onto the mare.

The boy’s hands are useless so it is not easy. The circle of buzzards loosens, disappointed, and one by one they peel off to search for a less active prospect.

The private is still watching Lupe. “She write you letters when you’re away?”

“She don’t write.”

“Good. Don’t teach her.”

When the boy is settled in the saddle Guadalupe rides bareback on the new mule, who is surprised but doesn’t kick, pulling the mare along by the reins.

“
Es que se le parte el corazón
,” she says to Jacks when they are on their way to Huachuca. “
Nada más
.”

The Army will occasionally grant leave on the death of a soldier’s mother, but makes no provision for broken hearts. Every time the damn mail comes there is somebody left in a funk, and he wishes the people at home would have the decency to lie if they don’t have good news to report.

“We’ll stop on the way, deal with them hands of yours. Lupe got something to put on it.”

“She a medicine woman?”

“Horse doctor. If she can fix saddle galls and glanders and poll-evil, I figure she can’t do too much damage to a colored infantryman.”

It is only a glue that she makes that you paint on after the big spines are pulled out and wait for it to dry. When you peel it off all the little cactus hooks and hairs in the wounds come out too. They ride for some time, Scott still smiling his smile though he is facing at least a week in the brig and won’t see another leave for months, though it must be some effort to keep seated being weak and dizzy and riding with his hands crossed in front of his chest.

“You were out there a good five miles from Bisbee,” Jacks says finally. “Mind telling me where you were headed?”

“Not headed anywhere. Just waitin.”

“Waiting for what?”

The private stops smiling and looks off to the right to the Dragoons, where old Cochise holed up with his people. “You sit there long enough,” he says, “and the Dark One is spose to come and offer you the world.”

A CALL TO ARMS

It will take a day or two for the word to drift back from Magnolia, and with the election tomorrow it won’t likely compete as big news. The Reverend and Mrs. Cox seem like they’ve hosted plenty of these—wedding party of four, no announcement in the papers. The
Record
has shut down, of course, Manly supposed to be halfway to Philadelphia, and the
Messenger
doesn’t bother with colored society. Dorsey doesn’t mind a bit, not any of it. Only too bad Mama passed before she could see him married to Miss Jessie Lunceford.

“From the beginning of creation God made them male and female,” says Reverend Cox with his big deep voice, “that they might be one flesh.” Dorsey has seen him preach once or twice, coming back from Raleigh on a Sunday and stopping halfway for church. A joyful messenger for the Lord. Dorsey is joyful now, surely more joyful than Mrs. Lunceford with her handkerchief to her eyes and Dr. Lunceford grim-faced and wishing it was over and Jessie, so beautiful in her yellow dress holding the yellow roses it was so hard to find, a brave little smile on her face like a girl waiting for her smallpox needle. Dorsey doesn’t mind any of it. There is joy in his heart, and in time hers will follow.

“Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves unto his wife,” booms Reverend Cox, voice filling the tiny nave they’ve requested to avoid the empty, accusing pews in the main hall. Reverend Cox knows this is not a judge’s sentence but a joyful sight under Heaven, and thunders out the Scripture while Mrs. Cox keeps an eye on the clock. Dorsey noticed the party waiting in the main hall when they passed through, the girl showing six months if it’s a day. With Jessie you’d hardly guess, maybe just a little butterfat here and there, make her look more womanish.

“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things—”

Dr. Lunceford endures the Reverend’s words with shoulders set and chin thrust upward. Dorsey has cut him once or twice, in the days before he moved to the Orton Hotel for the white trade. A serious man, Dr. Lunceford, a race man. People have nothing but good to say for him as a doctor, but the rest scares them some, showing so proud in the world, making the white folks jumpy. They are Episcopalians, the Luncefords, but have chosen Reverend Cox because it’s Magnolia where nobody of any account knows them and because the Reverend is understanding of what he called the
ex post facto
of the situation. Dorsey expects some heavy ribbing from the boys who cut for him over that, maybe even from some of the white gentlemen at the Orton when they finally hear. But no matter the circumstances, from this day forward Dorsey Love and Miss Jessie Lunceford will be bound in holy matrimony.

“I do,” says Jessie, quiet and sweet and dry-eyed as she speaks.

“I do,” says Dorsey, feeling shivery as the words come out. His life will never be the same.

There is no way to cross the river of white men. Jubal pulls back on old Dan and sits as still as he can, watching them pass, white men in red shirts riding through the colored section of Wilmington, whooping their rebel yells, some already taken with liquor and all of them shiny-eyed with the power of their numbers. Jubal watches and is careful to avoid meeting the gaze of any of them, knowing how easy they can spook. There are the horsemen in the red shirts under the old slavery flag and then a bunch on foot, the first two holding up a banner that says
WHITE CITIZENS
’
UNION
which is the ones he has been losing hauling jobs to, the bossman saying Sorry, Jubal, I got to hire white till this election business blow over, three dozen Paddy-looking characters ambling along in sloppy rows singing—

Onward Christian sojers

Marching as to war—

Making it sound more like a drinking song than a hymn—

With the cross of Je-sus

Going on before

Then there is another mounted group, ten or twelve riders in buff uniforms and campaign hats.
ROUGH RIDERS
is written on the banner the first two support, the third man carrying the American flag on a long pole. This bunch gets the biggest noise from the white folks lining the street, as if they are all veterans of the recent triumph.

Two of them detach from the rank and ride up on either side of Jubal, a big one with a beard and a mean-looking little one.

“Come to gawk at the parade, Rastus?” says the little one.

“Nawsuh. Just waitin to cross.”

“We aint holdin you up, are we?”

“Naw. Yall go ahead first.”

“That’s white of you, Rastus,” says the little one and the big one laughs. The little one tugs at the front of his shirt. “You know what this uniform mean?”

“Mean you been to the Spanish war,” says Jubal. “Like my brother Roy.”

The white men trade a look.

“We was
meant
to go,” says the little one. “North Cahlina Volunteers. Only they pushed them nigger outfits in front of us.”

The big one indicates the parade passing behind him. “Know what this all about?”

“Aint sure I do.”

“This here’s the White Man’s Rally. It’s about how we gonna take this city back.”

Jubal says nothing.

“What you think about that?”

There is always the point where you got to guess which way it’s best to move. “
You don’t never show a mad dog your back
,” his uncle Wick always says, “
and you never look a papa bear in the eye
.”

“Don’t spect I think nothin about it, one way or the other.”

The little one nudges his horse closer. “You playing with me, boy?”

Jubal is a little above him on the wagon seat. Dan won’t bolt no matter what you hit him with, been trained for that, so even if the path ahead was clear there is no way out of this. He just hopes they won’t look into what he’s hauling under the tarp behind—Dorsey Love would surely skin him alive if that got messed with.

“Nawsuh, I aint playin.”

“You gonna vote tomorrow?” asks the big one.

“
And there aint many white folks
,” Uncle Wick always finishes, “
who merits the truth
.”

“I aint never voted,” says Jubal, looking the little one in the eye with as empty a face as he can muster. “And I don’t spect I start up tomorrow.”

The big one grunts. “Sounds like a wise plan of inaction.”

“We gonna be out here tomorrow, supervisin,” says the little one. “We see you anywhere near a polling spot, you be one dead nigger.”

They yank the reins and are gone then, trotting to catch the other Rough Riders. There are gaps in the flow of the white people coming down Bladen now, just the stragglers, black folks starting to pop their heads back out from their houses, but Jubal is in no hurry to push through.

Her father insists on running up the colors when they pass. He has lost several flags to vandals in the past, even after he fenced the yard with pickets, in the annual battle of the dead. When Miss Loretta was a girl and the bluecoats still a presence in town her father would march with them up to the National Cemetery on Decoration Day, though he had never been a soldier, would drag her along by her skinny arm, mortified, to hear the yankees speechify and the negroes sing. Honoring the Nation’s Sacrifice is what they said, but really it was only the graves of the Union men and some of the colored who had served with them they were praying over, and there were many in town who wanted to reroute the New Bern Road so they wouldn’t have to pass by the entrance gate. She was twenty-four when the bluecoats marched to the train station, gone forever, and since then every tenth of May when the rest of white Wilmington flocks to the Oakdale flying the old Dixie flag to mourn the Confederate Dead her father raises his defiant Stars and Stripes to shame them all. And here he is today, Roaring Jack, ramrod straight beside the pole, banner rippling above him, glaring his contempt over the white pickets to the horsemen passing by.