A Moment in the Sun (99 page)

The volunteers, which is really New Jersey National Guards, are having a time over in the pines, laughing and calling out how maybe they put real bullets in their rifles. The one being Colonel Funston is up on his ride, a big bay Morgan horse that got its ears up for what happen next. The white boys can play the fool cause the camera pointed elsewhere, looking right down the line of all the colored being Filipinos. Jubal has put himself as far away from it as he can get, worried lest he mess up somehow and get Mr. Harry in trouble. There is no snow left on the ground but it is cold, colder than it ever get in Wilmington and he bets the Philippines either. They only got on white pants and white shirts but just now Mr. Charles tell them to take their hats off and leave them out of sight. Royal is headed over there right now, where the real Filipinos stay, and if this is what they look like, just colored men without hats, it’s good they all in white and he’ll be wearing blue.

“Remember it’s two shots and then we scatter,” says Zeke, who has been a Filipino before and act like he’s the sergeant here. The National Guard who is being Colonel Funston has run them through the drill over and over—how to load and shoot, load and shoot, not to point at anybody too close. He show them how it’s only paper inside the cartridges and won’t hurt you at a distance. Jubal has it all in his head and wishes they would start and get it over. Got him so riled up waiting in the ditch for them to charge and it’s only for the camera, you wonder how can Royal abide the real thing. He hears Hooker nickering, tied back by the camera wagon and wondering where Jubal is. She maybe fuss some when the shooting starts, but her making noise don’t matter none.

Mr. Harry come out in front of the ditch and lean on his stick to talk to them.

“The key principle to keep in mind,” he says, “is not to look at the camera. There is the enemy before you—” he points with his stick, “—and there is your route of escape. Remember that you have been instructed by your officers to hold this position at all costs and should not abandon it lightly. And—if you have been selected to die—please do so be
fore
the volunteers enter the trench.”

Zeke raises his arm. Zeke got himself closest to the camera, nothing be-tween him and it.

“Suh?”

“Yes, Zeke.”

“Them of us that got to run, how far we spose to go?”

Mr. Harry points past them with his stick. “You see the chestnut back there? Run behind that and then take up your firing position again.” He smiles. “Consider those trees your second line of defense.”

He tells them to check one more time they got a round in the chamber and one in their back pocket, then limps out of the way. Mr. Harry takes care of the camera but doesn’t turn the handle.

Jubal looks over at the volunteers again, searching out which one he will aim at. If he really do it like he got to kill the man before the man kill him maybe it will take some of the nerves away. The one that carry the flag is the easiest to spot, but that don’t seem right, shooting the flag, so he picks out the man next to him. You dead, Mister Volunteer. Mr. Charles calls are they ready and it gets real quiet, Colonel Funston’s ride side-stepping some like it be nervous too, and then Jubal hears the camera winding and Mr. Charles calls “Charge! Fire!”

The white men come ahead, hooping and hollering as they run and Jubal gets a good one off, dead center on the man but then there is so much smoke from their rifles shooting you can’t see a thing. He digs the second round out, trying to stay calm, and loads it up. He is looking for a body through the smoke when Ernest and Tip fall beside him and he remembers he’s been tapped to die. He fires high into the smoke and tosses the rifle clear before dropping straight down holding his chest like he always done when Royal pretend to shoot him when they were boys playing blues and grays. The volunteers, not so many as there are Filipinos, stumble down the front of the ditch and each fires once at the men running away before they chase after. The smoke hangs over and then there is Colonel Funston on the Morgan prancing along the front of the ditch and then down into it, coming way too close and before he can think Jubal has jumped up and dove away from the hooves.

If he was dead his eyes should have been closed and he just get trompled, but it is too late now, the camera has seen him and remembered it. So now maybe he is a Filipino been wounded a little or faking and when Funston trots back at him with his pistol drawn he hops up and lights out for the trees. He runs a few feet and there is the pistol shot but he is not hit and he keeps running till he comes to where everybody has stopped around the chestnut tree and one of the volunteers points a rifle at him.

“Hands up, boy,” says the volunteer. “You been nabbed by Uncle Sam.”

They all laugh, the volunteers and the Filipinos, and then Mr. James shouts for them to come back. He is smiling and Mr. Harry is pulling the roll out of the camera, so maybe he didn’t mess up too bad.

“Excellent, gentlemen. Just excellent,” says Mr. James. “Stirring. And you,” he points to Jubal, “the terrified insurrectionist—that was in
spired
.”

This must mean good because Mr. Harry is taking the camera off the sticks and the one who does the cranking is writing something on a pad of paper, both of them smiling too.

“Now if our Filipinos will don their hats and reclaim their rifles, we will move on to the
Capture of Trenches at Candaba
.” He points up to the one playing Funston. “Captain Ditmar, be advised that in this film you will be required to fall from your mount. Quickly, gentlemen!”

Jubal climbs into the ditch to find his rifle. His heart is still racing. This time, if he is wounded, maybe he’ll remember to drag a leg.

OBSTETRICS

He hopes it was only the stairs. Jessie breaking her water halfway to the fourth and calling in a panic until he and Yolanda could carry her up, and now writhing on the bed with a blood-tinged mucous plug on the floor.
Placenta previa
is the worst of the catalysts he can think of, the hemorrhaging so likely to carry the mother away during or after the delivery, but there is also
eclampsia
and
endometritis
and
hydramnios—
so many possibilities for preterm induction, and obstetrics never his strongest suit, if only for the lack of opportunity to practice. Only the wealthiest of colored women in Wilmington choose to engage a physician rather than one of the city’s half-dozen midwives, even in emergency situations.

The idea of attending his own daughter’s first parturition has never, until this moment, occurred to him.

Dr. Lunceford forces himself to concentrate on his preparations. Yolanda is trembling, cold as always, her own harrowing experiences no doubt weighing on her thoughts. And Jessie, his little Jessie, lies back on the pillows breathing deeply and studying his face for clues.

“It’s coming, isn’t it? It’s coming now.”

The arithmetic is not difficult. The one incident she confessed to, on the night of Junior’s final visit, then counting forward—it is twenty-eight weeks.

“We shall see,” he says to his daughter. “The vital thing is for you to remain as calm as possible while I see what we have here.”

“What can I do?” Yolanda asks, standing as far back as the room allows, terrified. She has never observed him in practice, Yolanda, has demurred even when close friends have asked her to be present at their own birthings.

“I need you to clean the stove, as thoroughly as possible.”

“The stove?”

“Just the warming compartment, the larger one.” He looks deeply into her eyes. “Please.”

It is an unlikely possibility, but he needs to spare her the sight of what may come next. Yolanda crosses quickly to Jessie, bends to embrace her and kiss her on both cheeks.

“You’re all right now, baby,” she says. “Your father knows what to do.” And then hurries into the kitchen.

It is near freezing in the room, Dr. Lunceford in his overcoat and Jessie with her top half weighed down under all of their blankets, little puffs of condensation from her mouth as she breathes irregularly now, the landlord untraceable whenever the radiators fail in the building. Jessie’s eyes are bulging slightly as she watches him. Blood pressure elevated. In Wilmington, even with the home births, there would be a curtain or a kind of tent structure blocking the woman’s view of his actions and his view of her face. Better to concentrate on the organs involved in the procedure and nothing else. But there is no time for that now, and he seats himself at the bottom of the bed to stare into the vagina of his only daughter, who he has not seen naked since she was four years old.

It helps that there is no footboard. Jessie is frightened, perspiring, the pains having come twice, some five minutes apart. She is barely dilated.

That was the problem for Yolanda the second time, with Jessie and what would have been her sister. Dr. Tinsley reaching for the dilator, eyes apologetic as he glanced to Dr. Lunceford, allowed in the room as a professional courtesy. Many physicians preferred to perform their
accouchements forcés
digitally, but at the Freedman’s Hospital they had the latest of instruments. It was shiny, polished steel, he remembers, four blades with a screw mechanism at the top. He remembers the tearing, remembers his wife’s screams, the chloroform ineffective in the dosage they regarded as safe, remembers the sister, never named, coming out first and then Jessie, identical except for her color, her faintest bloom of life.

“I want to hold them both,” Yolanda said, coming up from the morphine when her condition was stable, when the bleeding had finally been halted. “I must hold them.”

“The one has been buried,” he had to tell her. “Two days ago.”

There are so many things that can go wrong. A girl in her teens, first delivery, preterm—he tries not to imagine any of them. Let it present itself, he thinks, and I will choose whatever remedy is available.

“It hurts, Daddy,” Jessie says, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It hurts so much.”

She hasn’t called him Daddy for years. It is what common girls, white and colored, call their fathers, and Jessie has not been raised to be a common girl.

“I can’t give you anything yet, Jessie. It would interfere with what you’ve got to do.”

There is ether in hospitals, and even without his license he could obtain chloroform tablets and an inhaler, but he is convinced that as commonly employed such anesthetics are unsafe for both mother and fetus. The Twilight Sleep advocates to the contrary, a comatose mother is unlikely to experience normal contractions.

Jessie arches her body, clenching her fists and crying out. Yolanda appears in the doorway.

“Go,” says Dr. Lunceford, and she returns to her scouring.

He shifts the oil lamp closer and pushes the labia apart with his fingers. He has only an ancient Sims speculum in his bag that at the moment seems a device of torture rather than diagnostics. She is beginning to open.

“I want you to breathe somewhat rapidly in between the cramps,” he tells Jessie. “Rapidly but not deeply. If you start to get dizzy, slow your breathing down.”

“It’s coming, isn’t it?”

He doesn’t want to get her hopes up, not at her age, not when it is this early. His first delivery, the one that soured him on obstetrics, was a girl about Jessie’s age. She was long overdue, her mother said, but had had no contractions and now was sick with a fever.

The baby was very large and beginning to decompose. He insisted on the curtain that time, insisted that the mother and the aunt and the girl’s best friend stay on the other side of it to comfort her while he worked. There was enough swelling that neither the blunthook nor the cephalotribe were of any use, no way to insert them without further damaging the vagina. He was forced to use the trephine perforator, asking the women to sing a hymn to distract from the sound of it, and then hook in and yank the tiny body out with a crochet. At least it came out in one piece.

So many possibilities, so many pitfalls.

“You’re going to have to help me,” Dr. Lunceford says to his daughter. “Do you think you can do that? You have to be very brave.”

“I’m only a girl,” says Jessie in a very small voice.

“You have been married, you have been widowed, you have been exiled.” It is the first time he has ever said the word aloud. “You only have to do what all women do.”

“I’m not ready.”

“I’m sorry. It won’t wait.”

They speak very little these days. Yolanda pleads with him to forgive Jessie and he maintains that their acceptance of her, living with her and what they all know to be true of her condition, is forgiveness enough.

This time she cries out louder, and Dr. Lunceford has a momentary twinge of concern for their neighbors on the fifth floor. Their neighbors who engage in screaming matches twice a week.

A tiny knob of skull is pushing through now.

“Aaron?” calls Yolanda from the kitchen.

“Is it clean?”

“As clean as I can make it.”

“Take some of my handwash, the antiseptic,” he calls, “and wipe the inside with it.”

Jessie is huffing now, balling handfuls of the bedsheet in her fists, pushing down hard enough with her feet that her buttocks raise off the bed from time to time.

“It shouldn’t be coming now, should it?” she says to him when she can catch her breath. “I’m not ready.”

“We won’t know anything till it reveals itself,” he says. It is not true. He knows it will be undersized, discolored, the digestive tract not finished, the lungs prone to atelectasis, susceptible to infection—if it is viable at all. “You just have to concentrate on helping it come out. When the next cramp happens I want you to try to breathe in and make your chest and stomach rise up. You’ve been clamping down.”

“It hurts so much.”

“The pain will be there no matter what you do, Jessie. But if you lift up with your stomach it will allow the baby to come out.”

He is careful to call it a baby and not a fetus. Dr. Osler once presented a lecture that concerned nothing but Terminology and the Patient—when the lay terms should be employed, when a bit of scientific Latin was not amiss to either obscure a harsh reality or impress a skeptic. But in his mind this is no baby.