A Moment in the Sun (77 page)

Something with feathers—

BETRAYAL

The soldier is young, not much more than a boy. Fit-looking in his uniform shirt and trousers, leggings wound tight over the calves, square-chinned under a battered campaign hat, but no Adonis. The rifle slipping from his stiffened fingers was at parade rest, butt on the dusty ground, no bayonet fixed to its barrel. There is a look of confusion on the young American’s face, of innocence betrayed, his lips parted in surprise, his lower back arched in where the
kris
has been thrust from behind. The Cartoonist has actually seen a
kris
, hung behind glass on a wall in a Boston museum, but has added a few extra serpentine curves for effect.

The wily Filipino is a bit of a problem. The feet are bare, the clothes the same peon’s rags he has used for the Mexicans the Chief hates so much and more recently for the noble Cuban
insurrectos
. The straw hat is equally ragged but less round, coming to a point suggestive of a cutting edge at the peak. Even the shade of the skin he has left relatively unaltered, a delicate cross-hatching to give shape to the exposed areas and suggest something between white and negroid. He hopes that if it pleases the Chief enough to be reprinted on Sunday the color-ink boys will render it a yellowish-tan, like a bilious weak tea. He’s done the features over several times before hitting on something that looks right, the cheekbones high and sharp, the eyes narrow, up-slanting razor slits, the mouth twisted in a cruel, treacherous grin as he drives the crooked blade through his victim’s spine. Only a slight exaggeration from the one photo published of their
jefe
Aguinaldo, who—though reputed to be of a Chinese-Malay mix—bears the angular, cunning stamp of the Jap.

Beneath the assassin’s feet, trodden into blood-soaked foreign soil, lies Old Glory.

The Cartoonist roughs in the caption, noting below it that he wants the heavy Gothic font they use for
In Memoriam
buys on the obit page, sober and declamatory at once—

THE THANKS OF A GRATEFUL NATION

HOMECOMING

They are waiting for him on the dock, notepads gaping like the mouths of baby magpies, insatiable. They are waiting for him everywhere these days, in the hallways, in the lobbies, in front of the hotels, on street corners and under lampposts, in gentlemen’s clubs and workingmen’s resorts, starved for quips, for observations, his every vocalization sandwiched between quotation marks and rehashed for the delectation of the reading public. Having sent his wife and daughter ahead, the Humorist nurses a cigar that has burned down to a stub, waiting, as the steward has requested, for the other passengers to absent themselves. No sense obstructing the disembarkation.

He has seen some of the caricatures occasioned by his political musings, forwarded to London by friends and accompanied by suitable proclamations of outrage. His favorite is the senile literary lion, toothless perhaps but still full-maned and regal compared to the bonneted schoolmarms they’ve made of Hoar, Carnegie, and poor, hapless William Jennings Bryan, his once voluminous bag these days nearly bereft of wind. The fellow at
Punch
had some sport with him after an interview sympathetic to the Boers, drawing him as a grimy, wild-haired
Voortrekker
shooting himself in the foot with a blunderbuss. There is a sort of glee in it, the illustrators attempting to outdo each other, attaching his physiognomy to a menagerie of outlandish creatures, both extant and mythical.

“All in good fun,” chortled the editor from
Lloyd’s Weekly
at the Travelers’ Club, though his countrymen slaughtered at Mafeking and Ladysmith might be excused for undervaluing the hilarity involved.

“Thank you very much, sir,” says the steward, appearing beside his deck chair. “I believe it will be all right now.”

The Humorist rises, lifts the tattered carpetbag he carries more as a prop than as a necessity, and descends the gangplank of the
Minnehaha
, flash powder fulminating with each step, to feed the Beast.

The
New York Herald
is there, and the
Sun
and the
World
and the
Times
and the
Mail and Express
and the
Chicago Tribune
and the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and, for all he knows, a representative from the
New Yorker Staats Zeitung
.

“How does it feel to be on American soil?” The
Sun
.

“A good deal superior to being under it,” answers the Humorist, setting fire to a long black article and taking the first puff. “But then I’ve only just arrived.”

Chucklings of appreciation.

“What are your plans?”

“If I am drafted to serve as President, I will not shun the honor. Short of that I will settle for schnitzel and ale at Luchow’s.”

Knowing laughter. Winks. The
World
steps forward, features devoid of mirth.

“In regard to the statements attributed to you during your stay in London—”

“I found the Prince of Wales an admirable drinking companion and all-around good egg,” the Humorist interrupts, “and I shall defend that position with my life.”

More jollity, but the pack is on the scent now and won’t be shaken.

“I meant your reaction to the situation in China,” clarifies the newshound from the
World.

“The Boxer is a patriot,” replies the Humorist, pausing for effect as pencils are jabbed into notebooks. “No less a patriot than you or I—and I am giving
you
the benefit of the doubt.”

The
World
man stiffens, not certain as to whether he has been insulted.

“He defends his land and his culture,” continues the Humorist, “barbaric though it may appear to our eye.”

The gauntlet hurled. The scribe from the
Times
picks it up.

“But the murder of Christians—”

“Should a handful of Celestials descend on the nether regions of your gashouse district and begin to proselytize for Confucius, they would be made equally short work of. The fate of the missionaries is lamentable, but they were well aware of, if not secretly titillated by, the risks involved.”

It is not that there is nothing left to lose. Yes, he can choose exile again, circling the globe with his stories and being well rewarded for it, can find an innovation equal to the damned compositor to squander his earnings on, can decorate the dining halls of Europe till they grow nauseous at the sight of him, but he longs to be home, in familiar surroundings with Olivia near her most trusted physician. These people can turn on him, decide there is no Humor left in the old man and hound him from their fervently patriotic shore. But he has seen too much, lived too long, to temper his opinions for the mollification of jingoes. He lays the carpetbag on the dock.

“And the Boers?” The representative from Mr. Hearst’s publication, goading him on.

“The British are in the wrong in South Africa,” states the Humorist, holding the cigar away from his face so the smoke cannot obscure his seriousness, “just as our own nation is wrong in the Philippines.”

The jasper from the
Herald
grins wolfishly. Pencils dance merrily on notebook paper.

The
Tribune
scoops up the banner. “Don’t you think that while our boys are in peril—”

The Humorist knows where this is heading and will not allow it to arrive. “I am an anti-Imperialist,” he states, raising his voice slightly. “Opposed, on principle, to the eagle sinking its talons into any other land.”

“We have had nothing but victories there.”

He is not yet clear of the dock and is already exhausted. These men have the bright, excited look of those whose experience of battle is the thunder of scareheads on the front pages of their journals, who look at carnage as a starving dog regards a beef shank dripping in a butcher’s window. It was the look on the faces of his young friends when reports of those early victories came down from the North, friends boasting, as they strutted off to enlist, of how fast and how far they would set the yankees running. It has been the young, covetous of their grandfathers’ fading glory, who have campaigned for the present war. His stomach slides up toward his gorge. He was content, happy even, on the leisurely voyage home, safe from the long reach of the telegraph, but now this queasiness, this sudden weight on
terra firma
. Land-sickness. Jingophobia.

“Our situation in those islands,” he says slowly, giving them time to write, “is an utter mess, a quagmire, from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extraction immensely greater—”

“Our flag has been raised,” declares the pedant from the
World
. “To lower it now would signal defeat.”

“Our flag, my young friend, must be wrenched from those shores before it is further sullied.”

Silence then, scratching of heads and pencils. This is not risible, this is not what they have gathered for, the return of the nation’s favorite wag with tales of European fatuity and American common sense. Then the stutterer from the
Mail and Express
, prudently mute up to this juncture, steps into the breach.

“So Mr. T-t-t-twain, w-w-what you are saying is that you are op-p-p-posed to w-w-
war
.”

The Humorist smiles, takes a lung-tickling pull on the cigar. “I could not have said it better myself. You have no doubt read in your own papers that Czar Nicholas of Russia declares he wants the entire world to disarm.” The Humorist gestures across the harbor with his stogie. “The Czar is ready to disarm.” He touches his chest with both hands. “
I
am ready to disarm.” His friend has arrived behind them with the hack, the Humorist recognizing the driver, a foul-breathed Fenian who excoriates his slat-ribbed nag in the Mother Tongue. “Collect the others and it shouldn’t be much of a task.”

The Humorist winks at them, lifts his carpetbag and hurries through another poofing barrage of flash powder to the open door of the cab. Only the opening salvo, he thinks, what the frogeaters would term an
hors d’oeuvre
. They will be back tomorrow, pencils sharpened, hungry for more.

BARREN ISLAND

The City eats horses. Dozens and dozens are floated over from New York in a day, more than a hundred when it is hot, they say. Some shot in the head by a horse doctor or one of the Cruelty people but mostly they just fell over in their traces and are unharnessed and left in the street till one of the wagons picks them up. If the shoes have been left on they get pulled off and tossed into the pile and sold back to the ferriers. Jubal yanks the hooks into the tendons just below the hocks on a big roan’s back legs so it can be winched down the slide, then pops the shoes off as fast as he can. It goes a lot faster when they’re dead.

The scrapers are next, running their quick blades over the body, razoring off manes and tails, separating the hair by color if it’s for brushes or not if it’s for plaster, and then the skinners step in slicing and tugging, tossing the heavy wet hides into a heap for the tanner’s boy to haul off in his wheelbarrow, a cloud of flies bursting apart with each new toss and then settling back on top. A man comes in to fog the whole floor three times a day but the flies always come back. The blood-smeared butchers come last, one on each side of the chute, hacking out the cuts they want and dropping them into steel carts, stripping one side of the skinned animal then digging in their meathooks to flip it over and do the other. What is left gets hauled up the ramp, unhooked, and slid into the enormous rendering vat. His first week on the Island Jubal was up there on the catwalk in the heat and the fumes and the smell, but he come on time every day and didn’t complain and didn’t fall in so they moved him to horseshoes and now they got a new colored man at the vat. It is mostly Polacks and Irish here, lots of them with the whole family working. Some of the Polacks speak American, and other ones, like old Woytak who skins the dogs and the raccoons and the fox that come in sometimes, talk old country or don’t talk at all. Mr. Tom says if Jubal does a good job and stays out of trouble on the Island a few more weeks maybe he will put him on a wagon.

His first day up from Wilmington he went to all the stables in the City, telling what he could do and asking for work. There were stables for four horses and stables for twenty and stables for more than a hundred that had three stories with wagons on the ground floor and the horses brought up a ramp to the second and their feed on the top. One place that was for trolley horses had five hundred stalls but the trolley gone electric now and near half of them were empty. Jubal asked and walked and asked and walked, teamsters on the street happy to tell him where to try, but there was no work till he come to the West Side stable for P. White’s Sons and they said they would start him out on Barren Island.

The horses on the streets of the City are all blinkered, as close to blind as you can do and still get them to work. The people don’t look to the sides much either, staring a tunnel down the street and hurrying through it. Wherever he went that first day he was in the way of something, and both times he tried to sit down a police appeared to eyeball him to his feet again. There is places in Wilmington where you got to state your business if you’re colored, but there is also a dozen white men Jubal could say he hauled for, who would stand for him as a honest worker with a feel for the animals.

The room he stays in now is not so big and belongs to P. White’s Sons, like all the other rooms and houses on Barren Island. They built the school and the firehouse and the little grocery and probly own the two saloons that he’s never seen any colored in. Rent comes out of his pay, double for the first week. A small steamer boat, the
Fannie McKane
, travels over to a place called Canarsie and back two times a day and once for church on Sunday. He hasn’t gone back over yet, his credit good on the Island but nowhere else. They cook garbage here too, at a plant on the other side of the pier, but it pays just the same and there’s no chance to get on a wagon. There is a neighborhood or two in the City where colored live, even some from Carolina, but this is the job for now and if you work here you got to live here.