John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

Minnie Scott always brings a rake and her collecting basket. The rake is for the acorns, which can pile up inches deep on the graves in the late fall, rotting underneath, getting musky and black if you don’t keep on top of them. There aren’t so many headstones here in Oak Grove, sometimes just a rock with a name scratched on it or a rusted child’s toy or something about the departed. One man who was a plumber before he gambled it all away is under a cross made of pipe, and another beneath a dented, discolored trumpet. Leaper, gone to Glory these many years, has a proper stone now, that she was able to buy and have scribed. But that’s only for the sake of the living. The Lord don’t care what you lay on top, He’s only after souls.

Minnie rakes his site clear, acorns making a neat little rectangle around it when she is done. He was a good man, Leaper, never raised a hand to her or the children, did his best to find work. But the weakness for spirits was there from the beginning, it dogged him his whole poor life and left them nothing to send him off with when he turned yellow and died. Most of her family was in Pine Forest behind the white folks, but they were all so cross at Leaper, even her brother Wick and Reverend Christmas at the Central Baptist, that they let the town bury him here.

“No sense pourin money into a hole,” Wicklow said when she came to him. “Just like when he was with us, you give him money, you knowed what it was going for.”

Leaper had said it himself, coming home sweet and unsteady, sitting hard at the table and looking around like he could barely recognize his own house. Then smiling that beautiful smile when he’d see her, smile that could break your heart. “There’s my girl,” he would say. “There’s my Minnie.” And then later, after she’d helped him out of his clothes and maybe bathed him, he’d say in that far-off voice he got when he was tired, “When I go, just lay me out in the Oaks.”

She blames it on the yankees. The first story he told anyone about himself was him and Jimmy Shines tippin off one night from the indigo plantation, ten years old, stealing a boat and rowing out to the blockade ships. How they shouted and banged their oars on the hull of one till the yankees hauled them up, how Jimmy fell out of the ropes and drowned a few days after but Leaper, they give him a little sailor suit and made him mascot and filled him up with rum most every day, setting him up on a box to sing dirty songs and curse the Rebels. And him thinking it was all right since he was already bound for Hell, having robbed Mr. Ralston of himself and Jimmy.

“I caught a taste for rum,” he like to say, “that I never lost.”

Minnie bends carefully to wipe the headstone clean. She’s got the water on the knee now, too many years cleaning floors and pulling up roots, not so easy to get back off the ground. Taking liquor isn’t a sin, not the way some would have it, it’s how you act once the liquor is in you. Leaper called it “his medicine” and without it he would brood, he would lay up in the house without moving for a whole day, or if he thought she couldn’t hear he’d weep like a child. The only people he had were sold away before he came to know them, and when the boys was born he would look but never touch, smile at her admiringly like a baby was something she’d done on her own. The Royal Scot was the name of the blockade ship, and he had taken Scott for his name when a yankee census man came through to count heads and explain the voting. Leaper had been one of Mr. Ralston’s favorite hounds that he said was the same shade of brown as the little nigger boy and as many times as Minnie begged him to be born again as someone with a Christian name, Luther maybe, he wouldn’t have it.

“If a man’s name not even the truth,” he’d say, “than what about him is ?”

Minnie stops to pick some goldenseal that grows just beyond the oak trees, pulling the plants up, shaking the root clean and stuffing them in her basket. Wilma Reaves’s daughter has the pinkeye again.

She takes the long way home, stopping in a stand of pines on the way to gather some deertongue.

She believes that the Lord listens to prayer, but is mighty picky about which ones He answers. “Please, Lord,” she would beg every night, sacrificing her knees one last time before sleep, “deliver my man from that devil’s brew.” And maybe He tried, as He is a merciful Lord, but Leaper had as tight a hold on rum as it had on him. Neither Jubal nor Royal never took up with it, praise Jesus, and she lies in bed worrying about her younger son been off to this Cuba, which Reverend Christmas says is one of the islands where they make it.

It is a long and halting two-horse trolley ride back toward the river and then having to pay again to transfer onto the new electric line. No wonder the acorns build up, she thinks, moving to the front since there’s no old horse’s behind to smell on this one — poor folks can’t afford to get out there. The car is crowded enough by the time they pass Queen Street that the white man who has avoided sitting beside her for three blocks finally surrenders and stiffly takes the seat, body angled so his feet are in the aisle. The Jim Crow has come as far up as Charleston, she knows, but here it is still just a rumor. The man hurries off at City Hall and Minnie can relax till the depot and then take up walking again. By the time she turns down Terry’s Alley the sun is low and she is exhausted, bone-weary from cleaning Judge Manigault’s house all day, man can’t keep no permanent help even with his boys gone, weary from raking at the cemetery and picking the herbs and knowing it will start again before sunrise tomorrow. Halfway to her door she smells the yarrow, overpowering the rest of what she’s got hanging and drying inside. It takes her eyes a moment to adjust, someone standing inside, a flicker of fear and then her knees gone to water as she realizes who it is, how skinny he’s gotten. She drops the rake and the basket.

“Royal! My poor baby! What them people done to you now?”

The Love and Charity Hall is full to bursting when they step in, almost all the Lodge membership present plus a smattering of Masons and a few of the city’s unaffiliated colored men of importance. Mr. Lowery the carriage maker is holding forth in one corner and Reverend Moore from St. Luke’s next door and Valentine Howe with a crowd of firemen past and present and at least two of the Manly brothers, who have apparently moved their newspaper operation to the floor above. John Dancy from Customs is already seated, looking up patiently as old Mr. Eagles, elegant as always, jabs his silver-headed cane to make a point.

“I want to know the purpose,” he is saying, “of raising hopes, of assembling a fighting force, of the training, of the marches and the grandiose speeches, when all along they knew we’d be mustered out before the first angry shot was fired!”

Mr. Eagles accepted a commission with the North Carolina Volunteers and feels used. There was much public contention over whether officers would be white or colored for the colored companies, and the regiment’s sudden dismissal in February, with the halfhearted explanation that there were already sufficient forces to defeat the Spaniards, was at least an embarrassment to him, if not an insult.

“The marching and the speeches were the purpose,” says Dr. Lunceford in passing and is treated to a glare. They are on opposite sides of the Russell question, the “Black Eagle” a regular, arguing that the governor should be supported no matter what his printed disparagement of the race, while the Doctor has joined Lowery and Fred Sadgwar and some of the others to form the Independents around the issue of “character.” And him walking in with Junior, a soldier fresh from battle, can only be salt in the old man’s wounds.