John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“Arizona.”

“It aint the moon. If it’s on the map, there’s a train will get you there.”

Jessie throws her arm across her forehead. “I’m just a girl,” she says in a very small voice.

If there was one like Royal Scott wanting her, she’d walk to the damn Territories if that’s what it took. But she is not this girl and never was.

“You gone marry who they say?”

Jessie covers her face with her other arm.

If I’d been able to keep one alive, keep maybe a couple of them, Alma thinks, I’d of schooled them better than this. Not the way her mama did, no time to do more than warn and worry and pray every night to the Lord for His divine protection, but really telling what was what and keeping the men off them long enough to have some little-girl time, making mudpies without a worry in the world. But after the fourth one came out looking like a tadpole the white doctor told her it was never going to happen for her, and the only mothering she’ll ever do is letting this fool girl know she isn’t licked less she lets herself be. She just got to deal with it, one way or the other.

“You aint so far gone,” says Alma, softly, stroking the girl’s arm. “There’s things that can be done.”

Jessie uncovers her face, looks scared at her.

“I thought them teas and baths was gonna fix you, but it’s caught hold now and there’s—”

“I can’t do that.”

Alma shrugs. “Then you can’t.”

The girl keeps staring at her. “Did you? Ever?”

“Never had to, never wanted to,” says Alma. “Nature done it for me.”

“Oh.”

First time out and this girl end up with a baby, everything goes regular, and she don’t even want it. Alma offers the other possibility.

“You need a train ticket, whatever, I got some money put by. You welcome to it, darlin.”

It will be the end of her job here, for sure, though it probably won’t be long before some of the blame for this spills her way and she’ll be fired anyhow. “Junior will take your side on it if you get there,” she adds. “I just bet he will.”

Jessie takes too long to answer. Alma remembers sitting with her just two years back, maybe three, playing dolls and talking nonsense, the girl laying her head against her when she laughed, little braids back then — how she worked every morning doing up those little braids for Jessie. Girl could melt your heart. Jessie takes too long to answer, but when she does she tells the truth.

“I’m just a girl,” she says.

It never happens in the books. Ruined girls are mentioned, pitied, but there is never one you get to know as a character, as a friend.

Jessie studies herself in the mirror above her vanity. Maybe they’re all wrong. Her father never took her temperature, never listened to her heart or even put his hand on her forehead the way he did when she was little and had a fever. And if they’re wrong about it there is still time to win them over, to make them see who Royal is. If he knew he would come, Army or no Army, he would come and make everything right.

It was his tongue that surprised her more than the rest. Alma told her about the rest, told her not to expect so much the first few times, but that part was nice, was sweet and thrilling, building up after the first strange invasion of his tongue into her mouth, touching her own, breathing into one another for a moment. Intimate. They were intimate. And that is all they will ever have.

Jessie studies herself, studies the swollen wreck this day has made of her face, feeling like a powerful hand is squeezing her throat shut, like each breath is a hill she has to climb. She turns the corners of her mouth down and wonders what it will be like to never smile again.

Tombstone is closer but the boys say there’s more cooking every night in the Gulch so that’s where they are. It is most of a day’s ride and none of them are cavalry.

They ditch the mounts at a stable and come into the Calumet Saloon all together, nine of them, uniforms but no sidearms, and the miners are too drunk to care. Royal’s sitter is sore as hell so he stands at the bar drinking from the stone jug they fill from a barrel, what they say is Old Crow but tastes like creosote and it doesn’t matter.

My dearest Royal—

Mail call was early, with Corporal Puckett handing out the letters.

“Royal Scott got him three,” he shouted out, holding the envelopes under his nose. “Smell good, too.”

Oohing and aahing and catcalling from the boys then, like they would with anybody.

“What you want to do is read the last one first,” said Hardaway. “Get to the grit.”

But Royal started with the first one and wasn’t one line in before he couldn’t swallow.

My dearest Royal—

It hurts me so much to have to write this to you.

The thing with a jug is you can’t see how much whiskey is left. He hopes there is enough. The miners are singing one song and the boys from Companies A and H something else, but happy, it is early Saturday night and the holes around Bisbee are puking out copper like there is no tomorrow and the Papagos and the Apaches are quiet and the boys will have half of Sunday to sober up in the saddle and Royal is slugging his way through a gallon jug.

My dearest Royal—

Her handwriting is beautiful, like you’d expect, and at first it was hard to understand that something so wrong could be hiding in such gracefully crafted shapes. If she is as upset as she says she is, he thinks, why can’t you see it in the writing? If the handwriting in the letters was a voice it would be soft, reasonable, calm—

My dearest Royal—

It hurts me so much to have to write this to you. Nature itself has betrayed us, and I am with child.

Something he heard from the Bible once. With child. Too Tall is down the bar telling a story about Coop, who is back digging slit trenches at Huachuca cause they caught him smoking hemp on guard duty. Whatever is in the jug feels better when it gets down now, though swallowing is still a chore. His throat started closing right while he was reading, his insides trying to push up out of him, and by the end of the first section he could hardly breathe.

My dearest Royal—

It hurts me so much to have to write this to you. Nature itself has betrayed us, and I am with child. But our love cannot be.

Fort Huachuca is nothing but heat and dust. They drill, they march into the mountains with full packs on, they listen to the officers tell them they may be needed in the Philippines or in China, but finally it is only Army makework and not nearly enough of it.

“Stick the niggers where they can’t make too much trouble,” Coop grumbles whenever they are out on maneuvers. “Any further an we be in Mexico.”

“All I know,” says Too Tall, who got the trench foot so bad in Cuba they almost had to amputate, “is it aint rainin.”

It is crowded in the saloon, crowded in all of the dozens of saloons in Brewery Gulch, and the boys will tie one on and then climb uphill to buy women but Royal is looking straight ahead, past the two busy bartenders who run back and forth, looking to the even busier picture behind them of the 7th being slaughtered by Indians on the hills he has ridden over on a bicycle. At the lower right there are men already stripped of their clothes, others having their scalps lifted or being trampled by horses or shot or stabbed or tomahawked, and only a few able to fight back. More Indians on horseback are on their way, galloping from the mountains at the top of the picture. The General himself is just up and over from the middle, dressed in buckskins, hatless, empty pistol held as a club in his left hand and saber raised high in his right. Above the frame it says that the beer company presented the original of the painting to the regiment, though why you’d want a picture of your friends being murdered and mutilated is not explained. On the bottom it identifies RAIN-IN-THE-FACEand HALF BREEDand GENERAL CUSTERand some others and at the far right SQUAW KILLING WOUNDED. Sure enough above it there is a woman in a red dress grabbing a downed soldier at his collar and raising a club overhead to brain him. No prisoners.