John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“You people got half a day to give me a hundred fifty pieces. Didn’t he tell you that? You don’t make one-fifty, nobody gets paid!”

“Ye’ve given me three things to paint,” says Wee Kate, holding up the soldier she is working on, and then nodding toward Sorcha beside her, “and this one has only got to spot the feckin eyes on it.”

“You don’t like your job,” says the tall man, raising his eyebrows, “you know where the stairs are.”

Wee Kate thunks the soldier down on the bench top and angrily jabs her brush at it.

“And the same goes for you!” he shouts at the women at the other bench before clumping away up the stairs.

“There’s a Jew for ye,” mutters Wee Kate when he’s gone.

Jessie has no idea if the man is a Jew or not, but the threat of not being paid puts a frantic energy into their work, Jessie perspiring, her brush hand beginning to cramp, and a dull pain is forming behind her eyes. A few of the women still have food with them and hurry a few bites in between soldiers. How they can stomach anything with the cabbage smell and the heat—

Jessie is aware that she needs to relieve herself. Nothing has been spoken of this, and she looks around desperately. No sign of a convenience. She paints a few more pieces, resolving to put it out of her mind. But the problem is not in her mind. She is barely keeping up with Alberta, but it can’t wait.

“M’am,” she says, turning to a woman behind her at the other bench, a woman with a touch of gray in her hair, “excuse me, but—”

“Past the boiler, on the left,” says the woman without looking up from her work.

“Now ye’ve sunk us,” snarls Wee Kate, who has three soldiers lined up waiting for her attentions as Jessie hurries past.

It is only a closet, with a toilet of sorts and a single candle for light, the ceiling open around a thick pipe that runs upstairs. She hurries through her business, holding her breath against the smell for as long as she can. There are footsteps above, and then the voices of the wagon driver and the tall man.

“It’s all that was left,” says the drayman.

“I told you before—”

“You want all white, you got to send me out earlier.”

“How am I supposed to know half of em don’t come back?”

“And what’s the difference?”

“Campbell rents the room,” says the tall man, “and he don’t want niggers in the building. That’s the difference.”

Jessie is suffocating in the closet. She arranges her clothing and steps out to see the skinny young man carefully stoop to slide a tray of soldiers into the mouth of an oven standing on stout legs near the back wall, a brazier filled with glowing coals beneath it. He turns and holds her eye for a long moment.

“You don’t want to be here,” he says sadly, and then turns back to his work.

“Here’s our ladyship, come back for a visit,” says Wee Kate, but none of the others even look up. Alberta is finishing the face on a piece for Jessie, and hands back her brush.

“Thank you,” says Jessie, sitting into her spot. There is no clock in the basement, and without a window there is no way to know how much time has passed.

“You do it for me when I gots to go,” says Alberta.

Jessie begins to paint again, head and hands, head and hands. If this were a novel, she thinks, the Dark and Brooding Man would appear at the bottom of those stairs to sweep her into his arms and carry her away. He would have vanquished those who ruined Father, restored their fortune and their home. The women left behind in the basement would be stirred by the scene, and Wee Kate, a tear in her eye, would have an appropriate and sentimental comment to put a cap on the story.

But then she is not the Wronged Heroine, honest and stalwart. She is the Fallen Woman, the lass alluded to as a caution to flighty girls, the one who through her own fecklessness and perfidy has earned her fate.

Jessie has to struggle to keep the soldier she is holding in focus. Her head is swimming. If this is the influenza, how will it affect the life growing within her? How will she not pass it on to her parents living in the cramped quarters of their apartment? She feels flushed, light-headed, she feels — ashamed. That is what she feels most acutely. What would Junior say, or Father, if they saw her here, doing this work for these men? Or Royal, if he ever overcame his rightful anger to look at her again?

Junior’s infantrymen were Union soldiers, and he fought the battle of New Bern over and over with them, using clothespins to represent the Confederates. They were all white men in blue, set in various poses, and he would erect battlements of dirt in the backyard or in the coach house when it was raining, making the noises of rifle and artillery fire and the occasional cry of a wounded man. Jessie remembers how heavy they were for the size of them, barely able to lift the box that Junior kept under his bed for years.

She wonders who is living in their house in Wilmington now. They will be white people, of course, and she wonders if they have a daughter who sits dreamily at her piano, if they have a small boy who plays in the carriage barn with lead soldiers whose blue uniforms he has painted gray—

Jessie stands shakily, takes a few steps and dips her brush into Wee Kate’s paint pot.

“Christ Almighty, what’re ye up to now?”

Jessie steps back to her place and quickly paints a soldier with brown face and hands, then sets it in front of Clarice. Clarice looks at her, giggles and starts to paint the hair and eyebrows black. The figurine moves down the line. Jessie dips her brush back into her own pot, but there is still some brown on it and this one comes out closer to Junior’s shade.

The first was more like Royal Scott.

The next one she paints might be an Italian.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” exclaims Wee Kate when the figurines reach her. “Have ye gone mad?”

“I done the rest for you,” says Clarice. “You just paint that rifle and pass em on.”

When the skinny boy takes them away on the tray he says nothing, nor when he returns and crates them with the color baked on.

Head and hands, head and hands, head and hands. Figurines pass down the line of women who have become one long, many-armed creature that occasionally sighs but does not speak. At some point each of the women excuses herself, even Wee Kate, the slack taken up by the others and the flow of pieces uninterrupted. Once, when she was little, Father let her come with him to treat a man injured at the cotton press, found her a safe place to stand and watch the gang at work. At first it was the sound that terrified her, steam exploding to drive the heavy metal press down onto the loose bales, the big, sweating men shouting at each other over the clank and grind of machine parts. But as she watched, the noise and confusion began to fall into a pattern — men hoisting bales up from the wagons with a pulley, dankeymen pushing them along a slide to the mouth of the press where the snatchers cut the ropes away and shoved them in onto the huge metal teeth and the leverman pulling the arm to trigger the press down and back up and then the tyers pushing metal bands through the teeth and then pulling them over to fasten them snug around the tight-pressed bale and jumping away when the press kicked the bale out with its tongue to slide down the chute onto the back of another wagon. And all through it the caller — singing out instructions, sometimes even riding on top of the press itself to see the entirety of the operation, nearly disappearing into the hole as the press hammered down.

Ready when you hear me call—

— he sang—

Pull that stick and let her fall!

Limbs, bodies, heads moving out of the way just in time not to be destroyed by the monstrous works—