John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

Haul the next one when you able

Put the bacon on you table!

And the men singing back now and then, never taking their eyes off the machinery—

Won’t be liquor, won’t be sin

Cotton gone to do me in!

It was thrilling and terrifying and she felt a mixture of awe and pity for the men working there, a sadness to their labor that she thought at the time was due to their fellow worker having his leg crushed that morning, due to the danger and the deafening bursts of steam and the heat and having to breathe the cotton lint kicked up and filling the air till you were coughing, coughing without a hand free to cover your mouth, coughing blood sometimes and spitting it out onto the hot metal beast. But now she understands that it is not the work itself, so much harder and more dangerous than her own, of course, but the repetition, the repetition of the work that is nightmarish. The same process, the same motions over and over, day after day, year after year, knowing the job will not change, that it is waiting for you, impatient, demanding, insatiable, and that this is all that life will ever have to offer you. Jessie tries to become an automaton, to drive complaint from her head and to make her motions as efficient and mechanical as possible. She tries to count the pieces as they pass through her hands, hoping to mark time with the sum, but twice loses track just past thirty.

At the end her eyes are dry and smarting, the headache settled just behind them, and the brush is trembling slightly in her hand. The tall man has been down twice to check on their progress, shaking his head and muttering, and finally there are no more figurines left to paint. The skinny boy climbs the stairs, carrying a crate full of finished pieces, and promises to tell the men that they’re done.

“Are ye here all the time?” Wee Kate asks the women at the next table, who are all standing and trying to straighten their backs.

“A few of us were in yesterday,” answers the woman with the gray in her hair. “I think they set up in different places whenever they get a contract.”

“I made dolls once,” says another. “Stuck the hair in their heads. Pay was the same but at least we had a window.”

“Oh, I done worse,” says the older woman. “I done plenty worse.”

The tall man comes down with a cloth sack and begins to pay the women at the first table their two dollars, most of it in coins. When it is Jessie’s turn he gives her a pair of Columbian half dollars, the ones with the explorer’s ship on top of two globes on one side and his face on the other. Junior has a collection of them. Had.

“Don’t bother coming tomorrow,” the tall man says to her.

Jessie holds the two coins tightly in her hand, rubbing them together, as she pulls her coat back on and follows the other women up the stairs and out through the lobby into the street. It is almost dark now, big flakes of snow falling lazily between the high buildings, and cold.

“Where you live?” Alberta asks her.

“On 47th, just west of Eighth,” she says. It is the third apartment they have lived in, and if she can find steady work they won’t be there long.

Alberta nods at Clarice. “We walk you far as 39th.”

As they are leaving she sees the skinny boy and the drayman loading crates onto the wagon. Her soldiers are in there somewhere, she thinks, no telling where they’re headed.

New York is a machine with too many parts. Harry braces himself on the ice-slick sidewalk, a flood of bodies rushing past on either side of him, attempting to decipher the intermeshing rhythm of its gears, the design, if any, of its incessant motion and counter-motion. He has cranked his way through every clamshell Mutoscope in lower Manhattan, harem girls and saucy parlor maids up to their customary antics, has thrilled to the Roosevelt Rough Riders thundering off the screen at Proctor’s Pleasure Palace, mourned The Burial of the Maine Victims and marveled over Mules Swimming Ashore at Daiquiri at Koster and Bials, suffered through an interminable and decidedly unfunny comic opera at Keith’s Union Square to witness the Cuban Ambush on their celebrated “warscope” and eaten a hamburger sandwich at a counter with fellow lunchers’ elbows digging into him from both sides.

A tiny newsboy with yellowish skin starts across from the other side of 23rd, disappearing behind careening carriages and screeching trolley cars but sauntering yet, unconcerned, when they have passed, till he stands at Harry’s side tugging at the sleeve of his new heavy coat and raising plaintive eyes.

“ REBELS ATTACK MANILA, Mister. Read all about it.”

“No thank you.” The boy is peddling Hearst’s sensational Journal .

“Two cents, fer cryin out loud. How can you go wrong?”

The boy looks unwell, malnourished at the least, possibly contagious. Harry tightens his grip on his cane, takes a sidestep away. “You aren’t allowed to read this scandal sheet, are you?”

The boy makes a disagreeable face. “I look at the pitchers. You got a problem widdat?”

Harry gives him a weak smile, steps off the curb.

“On Sunday they got em in colors.”

He makes his cautious dash then, using the cane to push off on his shortleg side, narrowly evading the wheels of a rattling landau, and finally gaining the broad, recently shoveled front steps of the Eden Musee.

The building is steep-roofed and ornate in the French Renaissance style, statuary perched on decorative stone ledges, stairs leading to three high-arched entryways. Harry pays his dime to the young lady in the kiosk and waits for his heart to stop thumping before venturing on to the exhibits.

“The Passion has already started,” she informs him. “They’re probly up to Palm Sunday.”

The clientele in the Musee are more genteel than in Proctor’s or Keith’s or the Huber Museum, well-dressed ladies perusing the tableaux with their young ones, gentlemen in bowlers and ties, no crush of workmen and street urchins popping in here for a quick and prurient thrill.

“There will be a display of sleight-of-hand in the Egyptian Room at four o’clock,” adds the kiosk girl.

The first grouping of figures depicts President Lincoln at his famous Gettysburg Address. The tall wax figure, bearded and hatless with the suggestion of a stiff wind in his hair, gestures nobly with one hand, the handwritten speech clutched in the other, flanked by a pair of Union soldiers with rifles at port-arms while a half-dozen onlookers stand at the foot of the platform in attitudes of reverent attention. The eyes are dark and deep-set as in the Brady photographs, but there is no light of life in them.

“— that from these honored dead —” drones a hound-eyed older man dressed in a ’60s mourning cloak who stands beside the tableau with hand over heart, “— we take increased devotion to that cause which they here have thus far so nobly carried on —”

Harry moves on, the unalloyed yankeeness of it giving him a guilty twinge. “ A freak of Nature ,” the Judge was wont to say of the North’s martyred saint. “ Malformed and malignant .”

He wonders how many times a day the man must repeat the speech. Perhaps a phonograph recording of it would be more effective, not placed so it seems to be coming from the motionless figure, but amplified from above, like a voice from the Great Beyond. Harry has already worked out a mechanism whereby a spectator’s foot triggers the phonograph and is pondering the nature of sound waves when he wanders into the execution of Marie Antoinette.

“— this moment, when my troubles are about to end, is not when I need courage, Father ,” recites an acne-scarred youth in peasant garb. “And with that the lethal drumroll began—”