John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

Jerrold calls out as a couple of the shitwagon boys roll by, bringing their street manure to the pier.

“You boys had a busy night.”

“Yeah, we gonna lose these road apples and put the nags away,” answers the lead driver. “Then I’m gonna look up that gal you been keepin with.”

The teamsters laugh. Jerrold’s wife is a big, rawboned woman who scares the daylights out of everybody but him.

“Aint no woman got a nose will let you near em,” calls Duckworth after them. The shitwagon boys ride all night between sanitation stations and then ship it out at dawn. White’s Sons sends a dozen wagonloads upstate every day, stable manure bringing a price while the road puckey just gets dumped somewhere. “You boys is ripe .”

Mulraney shows up then, nodding sharp at them all. “Gentlemen,” he says, like always. Mulraney is not so bad for an Irish, he don’t call you nothin or tell you how to do your job if you do it right. Knows his horses, too, and word is he trained racers before the bottle got the best of him. He’s the one who says when it’s time to sell a horse out or send for the Cruelty people and put it away. You need a horse doctor to say it’s an accident and shoot it if you want insurance, but the Cruelty people are free if you say it can’t work no more and will suffer. Hooker was almost out the door to whatever ragpicker would buy her when Jubal came.

“She’s found her man, she has,” the dispatcher says whenever he sees her back in the traces. “It’s a remarkable phenomenon.”

The sun is two fingers over the rooftops when Jubal’s turn comes up, one of the stable boys ducking his head out the doorway.

“Thirty-eight between Nine and Ten,” he calls, and Jubal puts Hooker into motion.

He tries to keep to the streets with paving block, cobbles dealing hell to a white-footed horse, and keeps her to a slow trot. Hooker likes to run, which makes him think she was maybe once on a fire truck, and you got to keep some drag on the reins. Ninth is already crowded with traffic, hacks and delivery wagons and ice carts, a few pony phaetons and fancy carriages and the streetcar sparking up and down the middle. The hacks you have to watch out for, and the two-wheel cabs are even worse, cutting in and out of the flow to pick up or leave their fares, drivers waving their sticks and yelling at each other to stay clear. On the busiest day of the year in Wilmington it was nothing like this. When he first came, on foot, Jubal made his neck sore staring up at the buildings, one taller than the next, but driving you have to watch the cross streets, watch the rig ahead of you, watch for little ones trying to get under your wheels and you don’t dare look up at anything. At the end of the day he can barely open his hands, which never happened back home no matter how long he drove.

White’s Sons has the Board of Health contract and guarantees removal within three hours of notice, which is usually by a police from a callbox. But there is no police at the location, only a handful of little ones, Irishes they look like, daring each other to go up and sit on the dead horse’s rump. Jubal walks Hooker past it, the little ones, mostly boys and one little girl sucking on her fingers, moving away to watch. He stands in the seat to look behind as Hooker backs the wagon up to the horse’s head.

“The Dago left it,” says the oldest of the boys, stepping closer. “The one that sells melons. It wouldn’t go no more and he whips it and hollers at it in Dago and it still won’t go so he jumps off and hits it on the nose and it just kneels down on its front legs and stays that way. So he grabs some crates from the alley here and busts em up with his feet and sets a fire under its back end. Only then it just falls down on its side and don’t move no more.”

“I seen one explode once,” says a boy who keeps putting his thumb up his nose. “Back when we lived by the river. Its belly blowed up like a balloon and then kablooey —all over the street. My old lady wouldn’t let us outside till they come get it.”

If you’re lucky the owner is still there and the harness is on and you can use that to pull it up. But this horse has been stripped clean, a dusty chestnut mare that maybe has the glanders, nose still running snot. Have to wash the wagon bed out good when he’s shed of it.

Jubal sets the brake and hops down to the street. The rest of the boys step up, leaving the little girl staring from the sidewalk. Sometimes the street children will cut the tail off before you get there, twisting horsehair rings for each other.

“Can we help?”

“You stay clear of her,” he says, pointing to Hooker. “Come too close she maybe kick your head in.”

The boys look at Hooker with new respect and a few take a step back. Jubal unwinds the cable and pulls it down to the carcass, then lets the tail ramp of the wagon down. He ties the forelegs together just above the knee, yanks a leather strap tight around the neck and then links the two together with chain, slipping the cable hook through the middle link. The boys squat to watch him work.

“You want to get these off the street before they go stiff,” he explains, “or else they maybe don’t fit on the wagon.”

The tip-wagon is low-sided and extra wide, with a pulley block bolted to the frame behind the seat, and the ramp has skid boards that he greases every morning. Jubal runs the free end of the cable through the pulley and then unhitches Hooker, knotting the traces together and then clipping the cable to them. More little ones come down from the stoops to watch, and women stick their heads out from the tenement windows all around. He leads Hooker away from the wagon, waiting for a furniture van to rattle past before heading her on a diagonal across the street till the cable is taut.

“Hold,” he says to the horse, using the reins like a lead line to keep her grounded, and goes to check that the carcass is lined up right. Even hooked to a load you never know what a horse might get up to — a loud noise or a bee in the blinkers and they can go off trompling people till they run into a wall. He comes back to her, holding the reins a couple inches from the bridle bit.

“Yo!”

He doesn’t have to yank on her or even slap with the reins, Hooker pulling steady and straight and the pulley squeaking and the carcass dragging up the ramp onto the wagon bed. A couple of the boys clap their hands when it is done.

“Where you gonna take im?” asks the second boy.

Jubal grins as he backs Hooker between the wagon shafts. “Straight to the butcher shop. This gone be your supper.”

The other boys laugh and call out Kevin eats horsemeat, Kevin eats horsemeat, pointing and dancing around the boy.

“We eat nuttin but cabbage,” he answers them, face going red. “Cabbage and beans.”

He has almost got Hooker back in the traces when a panel wagon pulled by a hackney horse, half lame and too small for its load, stops alongside him. The panel is new-painted in red and black and gold and says—

EDISON COMPANY PICTURES

HIGHEST-GRADE SPECIALTIES

The white man sitting next to the driver leans out to talk to him.

“There is another one that wants dealing with,” says the man, who wears a straw boater and looks like somebody Jubal knows. “At the corner of 39th.”

Jubal lifts his hat off. “Can’t carry but one at a time, suh,” he says. “But I thank you for the lookout.”

The man frowns at him for a moment, then points. “I know you.”

White folks always think they know colored because they don’t look so close, but then it comes to Jubal and he smiles. “That’s right, suh, you Judge Manigault’s boy.”

He does not add “The one who don’t walk right” which is how most of the colored in Wilmington know them apart, the ones who don’t say “the good one” or “the nasty one.” This is the good one.