John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

The women look at each other, then begin to climb in. There are some crates to sit on but by the time Alberta pulls Jessie up these are gone. She sits, awkwardly, on the floor of the wagon bed, holding on to the side. A mismatched pair of horses pull them forward, one bleeding from under its harness. The women bump shoulders and knees as they roll east on 44th Street.

“Will he take us back to the same place at the end of the day?” Jessie asks, and the others laugh. Alberta looks her over.

“You aint brought nothin to eat.”

Jessie shakes her head. Her too-thin coat cannot hide from their eyes that she is several months pregnant. She feels alternately famished and bloated these days and is suddenly prone to headaches. Nobody on the street is even looking at them, a wagon full of women, colored and white, loaded like sacks of grain. Alberta pulls something wrapped in a handkerchief from her waist and unrolls it, breaking off half a corn cake and handing it down to Jessie.

“Eat this here,” she says. “You gone need it.”

“You’re very kind.”

“Yeah,” the dark girl smiles. “I feeds the crumbs to the birdies.”

It is a little stale and there is no butter but it is the best corn cake Jessie has ever eaten.

The building is on 25th between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, six stories high, floor-length windows separated into tiny panes by iron mullions. The drayman ties his horses to a light pole and then lets the back gate of the wagon down, stepping back to stare at their legs as they climb onto the street.

“Follow me.”

There is an elevator and a board beside it with the names of different manufactories and the floors they reside on, but the six from Paddy’s Market and two more they gathered on the way are led down creaking wooden stairs to the basement. It takes Jessie’s eyes a moment to adjust. The ceiling is low, with only a few oil lamps hung from the pipes running overhead. A huge boiler dominates the middle of the room, faced by two long benches with stools placed next to them. It is sweltering and smells like food has been stored here recently, cabbage maybe, and the only exit is by the narrow, unsteady stairs. There is no place to hang their coats, so they hurry to pull them off and lay them in a pile on the floor in the corner. Jessie is perspiring already and has to fight back a panic that there is not enough air for everybody to breathe. Eight or nine women are already seated along one of the benches, painting metal figurines.

“All of you take a stool over here,” says the wagon driver. “It don’t matter which one.” He ducks under a lantern to reach the end of the first bench, frowning at several fully painted figurines lined up on a thin metal tray at the end of it.

“You gals been sleeping here, or what?”

None of the working women, who are all white, look up to answer him, faces set in the dim light.

Jessie sits at the empty bench, Alberta on one side of her and Clarice on the other. There is a glass pot of orangey-pink paint in front of her, a small paintbrush lying on a scrap of cardboard beside it. The wooden bench top is gouged and scarred but not spattered with paint like the other that has been in use.

The drayman steps to the head of their bench and picks up one of the metal figurines to wave at them. “I’m only going through this once, so keep your ears open. Anybody here don’t speak English?”

None of the women at the table respond. It occurs to Jessie that if she didn’t speak English she wouldn’t have understood the question.

“All right, this is your basic piece, and each one of youse is going to paint a different part of it. The paint dries fast but not so fast you can’t smudge it up with your hands, so you never pick it up by where the gal before you just painted.”

The figurines are American soldiers, marching men with a rifle over their shoulders. They are bigger than the lead infantrymen Junior played with when he was a boy, nearly a half-foot high. The top of each figure has been dipped in blue, the bottom in a buff color, meeting unevenly at the belt line.

“The base, all around here, is green. Number One, that’s you.”

The drayman walks down the line to point to the section each woman is to paint.

“Number Two, you do the hands and the face with this — don’t get none on the bottom of the hat — and Number Three, you got black for the belt and the boots. Be careful with that damn black, it’s murder to cover up. Four, you got the little brush, that’s brass color for the buttons. Just one little dot on each of em, don’t go crazy with it. Five, the whites of the eyes. Six, dark brown for the hair and eyebrows and the rifle, Seven, a dab of blue in the center of each eye — don’t fill the whole thing up — and Eight,” he has reached the end of the bench, “you do the hat light brown and line the pieces up on the tray here. I want them facing the same way and none of them touching. Now do we all know our colors?”

Jessie thinks that to make a figurine of the drayman they’d need a pot of red for the berry on his nose. He slaps the top of the bench with his hand.

“You mess it up, stick the wrong color in the wrong place, just put it aside on the table and keep the line going. You’ll have to fix those later. Let’s get cracking.”

He hands Alberta the figurine and goes to the stairs, turning back to glare at them just before he starts up.

“Oh yeah — I come back and catch any one of you flapping your gums — you’re out . No pay, no nothin.” He taps his temple with a finger. “A word to the wise.”

They begin to paint. Alberta has a wider brush and slaps the green onto the base sloppily, so it is dripping when she hands it to Jessie. None of the oil lamps is directly overhead and it is hard to see, but she does her best with her brush. The figurines are hollow cast iron, molded with great detail. Her paint is light but doesn’t look like any skin color she’s ever seen when it goes on. She used to love painting eggs with Mother at Easter and has done watercolors for years, but something about this makes her anxious.

“I’ve got the hardest task by far,” mutters Wee Kate, squinting as she lines a soldier’s eyebrows with brown. “The bastard done it on purpose.”

“Shut up with ye,” says Sorcha. “Ye’ll earn us all the sack.”

Jessie has passed five pieces on to Clarice when a skinny white boy steps out from around the boiler carrying a tray with a dozen of the finished soldiers on it, all the colors, especially the skin, looking better now. He is wearing gloves and a sweat-soaked undershirt, quickly unloading the figurines into a crate painted on the side with a similar-looking soldier standing in front of a giant American flag. He takes a tray of painted men from the end of the first bench and hurries back behind the boiler.

“He’ll have an oven back there,” announces Wee Kate. “To bake the color on.”

The women continue to paint, silently. Jessie already has green stains on her sleeves and wishes she had worn a different waist today. She does the neck and face first, not worrying if it overlaps with the hairline, then takes more time with the hands, careful of the blue uniform cuffs. If it wasn’t for the low ceiling and the smell and the heat from the boiler and the unforgivingly hard seat of the stool it wouldn’t be the worst of occupations.

Another man comes down, this one tall enough to have to bend over to fit under the pipes, and stands behind them, watching.

“Jesus Horatio Christ,” he says finally, kicking the back of Wee Kate’s chair. “You’re sposed to paint the damn things, not play with them!”

He stomps, stooped over, to stand in front of them. He has bloodshot eyes and long, crooked teeth, and his breath smells like his lunch when he starts to shout into their faces.