John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“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.

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.