John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“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.”