A Moment in the Sun (73 page)

“Aint nothin we can do about it.”

Wick snorts in disagreement and comes out of the stall, carrying his hunting rifle with him. “They after you?”

Jubal shrugs. “Some that know who I am got a look at me when it come to gunfire. Right now they just huntin black hides, don’t care who it is, but I expect they been takin names.”

Wick pulls the bridle and steps in with Tobey. “Best thing for you is ride out of here tonight and don’t look back.”

“Leave Wilmington?”

“This city dead for us now. Won’t never be the same.”

Jubal is not so sure it won’t settle down, that tomorrow or the next day he can’t be back hauling coal and ice and whatever else they want, but he gets the saddle and throws it over Tobey’s back.

“I got near one hundred dollars in a tin box under them grain sacks,” Wick says, nodding to the corner. “Take all the paper money—it won’t weigh you down.”

There is shooting only a block away and Strider whinnies and shifts about, then lets loose with his pizzle and the barn starts to reek. Smells like fear, sharp and nasty.

“That horse don’t never foul his own nest like that,” says Wick, shaking his head. “Done step past the line.”

Jubal has never been farther north than Raleigh. “What I’m gonna do?”

“You a strong young man, nearly smart as your little brother. You find something.”

Jubal cinches the saddle tight. Tobey don’t hold a candle to Nubia, but won some races when he was younger, his dam covered by a thoroughbred, and can still cross some ground if you keep him at a canter. And he is jet black, hard to pick out after dark.

“You’ll tell Mama?”

“I get through this day I will.”

Wick has the Remington up in his hands again, watching the door. Jubal remembers the day the postman brung it from the Montgomery Ward catalog, wrapped tight in brown paper, and how proud his uncle was, bragging about the pop it had, how it took the smokeless powder and shot the pointed bullets. It looks puny after what he’s seen on the street today.

“They got soldiers marching in lines,” says Jubal. “They got a whole army out there killing people.”

“They want to start a war with me,” says his Uncle Wicklow, who takes his hat off when he talks to ladies, who he’s never heard mouth an angry word against any man, black or white, “I’ll shoot their damn eyes out.”

The Judge walks with his hands over his ears. The bells and the gunfire and the drunken scoundrels hollering from every trolley that careens up Market and his own heartbeat hammering in his ears—all such a racket he can barely think. At least Sally is safe in the church basement with the other ladies and children, at least for once in her life she’s obeyed his instruction, and the new girl will be cowering in the pantry, no doubt, rolling her crooked eyes with consternation and useless to fix him anything to eat. Not that he’s hungry. A queasiness, a mild nausea has settled in his gorge since he came down the steps of City Hall and had to push through the insolent crowd of rednecks loafing there waiting to be set on whatever victims this Secret Seven or Clandestine Nine who are behind the whole sorry business have chosen next. A dizziness.

The Judge turns onto Eighth to get away at least from the raucous trolleys and suddenly his left arm cramps and he feels like he’s been rammed in the chest with a lodge pole. He grabs on to the picket fence beside him, unusually high, then his legs go to water and he sits hard on the ground. The sky has gotten very bright, too bright, and the alarm bells are like his life-pulse made sound, screaming through his body, and then there is a woman, young but not so young, someone he knows he should recognize, kneeling beside him.

“You just be still, Judge,” she says, laying a hand on his arm. Kindness, he thinks. There has not been a moment of kindness in days. “My daddy’s coming out to help you.”

If there are white men wounded and dying at the main building, he doesn’t know and doesn’t care. Dr. Lunceford supposes he would be even busier if the ambulances were willing to bother with black men and if they could get through the fighting. So far there has been a steady stream of injured, most of whom have walked in on their own two feet, nervous about the neighborhood around City Hospital and still shy of medicine from the whole smallpox disaster at the beginning of the year. There was a riot then, too, a couple of the pest houses on Nixon burned to the ground and both black and white invading the Board Chamber to declare the vaccination law a violation, people pointing at him as if he were a poisoner of children. But gunshot wounds are not the province of root doctors and so they come in, half in shock, to ask will it cost them to get the bleeding stopped. They’ve only needed to use the ether once, as most of the bullets have passed through clean, but all the beds are full and there are wounded sitting on the floor in the hallway, waiting.

Dr. Mask comes in with the next one, laid out on the stretcher and looking like he’s been used for target practice. Tom resigned from the Health Board along with him, surrendering science to superstition and leaving the smallpox rampant, but his practice has not suffered.

“They left this one lying where they shot him,” he says, looking angry. “It’s been some hours and he can’t have much blood left, but there’s still a pulse.”

Dr. Lunceford has the man nearly naked on the table before he realizes it is his son-in-law.

Dorsey has been shot many, many times, his back torn apart, a few of his fingers missing, the side of his head swollen. He is breathing shallowly, not conscious, which is, as the shack people never fail to say, a blessing.

“Where do we start?” Mask says, spreading his hands to indicate the extent of the damage. “That’s bile leaking out there.”

He thinks immediately of Jessie. “Where was he found?”

“Down on Hanover,” says the orderly, Barnes, examining the blood-soaked canvas of his stretcher.

“On the street? And no one with him?”

Barnes only shrugs. “White boys from the ambulance said they keep coming back but them with the guns say leave him out here for an example. Like there aint enough examples still layin out in the dirt.” Barnes pulls out a buck knife and starts to cut the ruined canvas off. “Finally Judge Manigault’s boy, the cripple one, stop and make sure he get picked up.”

There is hollering then, Millicent who runs the nurses booming from out in the hall and then white men with rifles push her in and look around.

“You’re not allowed in here!” shouts Millicent. “This area got to be
clean
.”

The men try to ignore her, though she is bigger than any of them. “Which one of you is Lunceford?”

Dr. Lunceford steps away from Dorsey’s body. “I’m Dr. Lunceford,” he says.

“You got to come downtown with us.”

They are in the uniform of the Light Infantry and the barrels of their rifles are pointed at the floor. Not one of them glances at Dorsey lying raw under their noses. Dr. Lunceford suddenly finds it difficult to breathe and knows to take this slowly so the contempt will not show. It was his first and most important lesson in politics.

“If the board has determined to take action,” he says evenly, “they will have to proceed without my vote. We have patients to tend to.”

“There’s a new board been put in,” says the one who seems to be the leader, “and you aint on it. Just come with us and there won’t be any ruckus.”

Barnes has the buck knife held low in his hand and Tom Mask is seething, and he has seen Millicent lift an intoxicated watchman up and slam him against the wall, but these men have weapons and there is murder in the air. Dr. Lunceford takes hold of Dorsey’s bicep on the arm that is not shot away and gives it a squeeze. There is no way to know how much a dying man is aware of.

“If he wakes up,” he says to Dr. Mask, “just be sure he’s not in pain.” And then he lets the white men lead him away.

The Judge lies propped on the sofa, looking up at Roaring Jack Butler.

“You had yourself a heart attack,” says his old enemy, his old law partner. “Smack in front of my house.”

“I’m sorry,” says the Judge, still working to catch his breath.

“It’s catching up to us all,” says Jack. “The best and the worst.”

They are quiet for a moment, and as if to honor that the last of the alarm bells stops ringing. There is still gunfire, distant and sporadic, and the Judge has a sudden crushing feeling of shame to be lying here.

“I am sorry,” he says again, “for the inconvenience.”

“If you’d been Alfred Waddell I’d have had the girl leave you out there.”

“You know what he’s been up to, then.”

“A great deal of wind,” Jack says, “of the overheated variety, has been rushing past my ears of late.”

“He’s our new mayor.”

Jack laughs then, and if he could the Judge would join him and then both men are in tears.

“Look what we’ve come to, Cornelius,” says Jack, shaking his head. “Look what we’ve come to.”

When the newly minted Special Constables knock and the daughter, Loretta, who never married, lets them in, the Judge is beginning to get some feeling back in his fingers and toes.

“I am Judge Cornelius Manigault,” he tells them, the fist behind his lung tightening again. “You leave this man be.”

“Manigault not on our list,” says the cretin in charge of the arrest, and they haul Jack away before he can find his hat.

He didn’t think there would be so many people on the tracks. It is raining now, and cold, raining since the sun went down. Jubal keeps Tobey at a trot, leaning forward in the saddle to try to make out where the flat ground along the track bed is. You got to know what’s ahead or there can be trouble. There are folks walking up on the rails or resting along the way, some empty-handed and some carrying canvas tarps or mattresses rolled up, set to spend the night outside. They startle when they hear Tobey’s hooves coming up behind and Jubal keeps calling out, softly, “It’s all right, it’s all right.”

It is not all right, and the people, mostly women and children, are fleeing out of Wilmington in the rain and the cold and none of them sure when it will be safe to come back. Even Tobey knows something is wrong, skittish and sharp-eared, a horse that’s never been rode at night without a carriage hung with a lantern hitched behind him.

There are lanterns on the bridge up ahead, sentries. The Hilton drawbridge has been raised up all day to keep people on the poor side of the Creek, and this way, the tracks over the railroad bridge, is the only stretch they haven’t been patrolling. Jubal has his friend Denson up in Mount Olive and if he can follow the rail far enough out of town and then cut north—unless the whole state gone crazy. Used to be a black man got worried, white folks in his town mad at him or just looking at him funny or there’s no work, he pull up and come to Wilmington. This
our
town, people used to say, don’t nothing move unless it’s us that moves it. It’s the only place he’s ever lived.

“Who’s that?” calls a voice from up on the bridge and he feels Tobey twitch with fright under him and he kicks hard with his heels and they are galloping, rain hard in his face and shots coming after and cursing and dark shapes of people leaping out of the way and it is dark, dark, so dark that for all he knows there might be nothing up ahead—

The cemetery is filled with living souls, wandering in the rain. Jessie lights her kerosene when she comes upon the first miserable group of them, but is shouted at to kill the flame.

“Them men still about,” says a woman with a half-dozen sniffling children clinging at her. “They see a light in here they shoot at it.”

Jessie lays the lantern on top of a stubby tombstone and keeps searching, pushing her face close to whoever she meets to see if it might be him. There are dozens, maybe hundreds among the headstones, all with a different story.

“They decided to kill us all. It come down from the governor.”

“Naw, it’s the North and South War that’s started up again. There’s Federal soldiers with bayonets coming on a train to take our side.”

“It just got out of hand, is all. Fed them redboys too much liquor.”

A very old woman tells her there are even more people run all the way to the swamp back of the Smith Creek Bridge.

“Nobody can survive out there,” Jessie protests. “Not on a night like this.”

“You be surprise what folks can get through,” says the very old woman, who sits on the wet ground with her back up against a stone angel. “Even your own little self.”

Jessie is wet to the bone and cold, her hair plastered down on her head and streaming with rain and there is no shelter, no shelter, only the wet, cold stones and the frightened people haunting this ground waiting for the sun to come up or to be chased farther into the woods and it feels like this rain, this dark, will last forever, a sodden limbo of fear and not knowing.

She hadn’t started out to be here. When the shooting had settled down to a distant pop she’d taken the lantern and set out to find him. She’d headed first for his colored shop and there was a dead man spread out in the middle of Brunswick Street in the rain, but too tall, not his clothes, and another man curled in a ball at Hanover and Third and she’d had to put the lantern down by his face to be sure. The man’s lips had curled back so he looked like a dog about to snap and she hurried on, sand turning to mud in the streets and at Campbell the sentries began, white men and sometimes just boys challenging and a few just letting her pass when they saw she was a woman, while others had to step close and throw their lights over her and tell her to go home, there was nothing she could do now for her man. Dorsey’s colored shop was closed up but none of the glass broken, no fight there, and she thought of going back to Dorsey’s house, going home, but with the inside torn up and the piano smashed apart out front it didn’t seem safe anymore, didn’t seem like where she should be.

She was trying to get to the Orton Hotel, maybe they’d kept the bunch of them there from leaving, there were so many guns around town, when the boys stopped her. Boys almost men. They had rifles and mocking eyes and had draped their jackets over their heads against the rain so they looked like neckless creatures, surrounding her.