John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

The white man narrows his eyes, starting to smile. “And you are—?”

“Jubal, suh. Jubal Scott.”

“Of course.” The white man almost reaches down to shake hands, then catches himself. “What brings you up here, Jubal?”

Jubal keeps smiling. “How things come out, there’s a whole lot of us come north.”

It sits between them for a moment. As he remembers it this Manigault didn’t have no part in it, always being left out from what the big white folks was up to.

“Of course,” Harry says, smile fading. He points at Hooker. “I remember you now — you were a drayman.”

“It got four legs and a tail, I can make it move.”

The white man smiles again. “You own this horse?”

“Nawsuh, this belong to Mr. Tom and Mr. Andrew — that’s P. White’s Sons what keeps the street clear. They got three, four hundred horses.”

The good Manigault nods his head, figuring something. The colored man beside him squirms in his seat, eager to get going.

“Do they have horses for rental?”

“Don’t know but they might. Horses to do what?”

He waves a hand at the wagon panel. “To be in a motion picture. They should look like cavalry horses.”

Jubal shakes his head. “Don’t have none of that kind. Maybe you try the police, they always got some for auction.”

The man nods, pulls a small card from his vest pocket and hands it down to Jubal. “If you ever tire of this service, I might have some employment for you. Feel free to call on me.”

Jubal takes the card, squints at it. “Thank you, suh.”

“Harry Manigault.”

The name would have come to him sooner or later. “Like it say on your card.”

The man smiles again, just about the first real smile Jubal has seen since he’s been in the City. “Good day, Jubal. It is nice to see a familiar face.”

The driver smacks the hackney with his stick and the panel wagon jerks away. Jubal sticks his hat back on.

“We get that horse off the street, Mr. Harry,” he calls. “Three-hour guarantee!”

Dr. Bonkers’ does no harm. It would take a detailed chemical analysis to discover the specific ingredients, but the taste indicates that it is mostly vegetable oil with a dose of cayenne and some camphor to impart a suitably medicinal smell. The recommended dosage is small enough — a teaspoon before retiring — and the taste sufficiently off-putting that subscribers are unlikely to make themselves ill ingesting the Brain Food. Until the licensing imbroglio can be resolved it affords him access to people’s homes, and perhaps more importantly, a shiny black-leather physician’s bag with which to impress and intimidate them.

Dr. Lunceford is not a gifted traveler, his “spiel” limited to inquiries surrounding the prospective purchaser’s ailments and those of their loved ones, and has thus far moved only enough of the product to avoid being discharged and losing the totemic satchel.

“Do you suffer from epilepsy, spasms, convulsions, insomnia, hysteria, dyspepsia, paralysis, alcoholism, St. Vitus’ dance or other nervous disorders?”

The woman looks at him blankly, her door open only enough to see him with one eye. “Aint got none of those.”

“And how is the general health of your family?”

The woman looks behind her into the dim-lit room, then back to him. “Got a boy bust his arm.”

“Ah. Perhaps I can be of some assistance.”

Her eyes flick down to the leather bag. “You a doctor?”

Technically, at this time and in this state, he is not. “Madam,” he assures her, “I have set countless broken limbs. Countless.”

She looks at him suspiciously. “How much it gone cost?”

He is pushing, gently, against the door. It has been the most difficult lesson for him in this great city, that aggressiveness is valued, required, in fact, instead of being considered poor manners. “You should think about what you can afford. Is the young man in pain?”

He is by her then, surrendering to the now-instinctual New York habit of evaluating the apartment in relation to his own. There is light only from the street, coming in through a pair of dirty windows, revealing walls with patches of lath showing through and the remains of two layers of wallpaper in patterns that disagree with each other, wrinkled with moisture. They have pinned up a few color pictures torn from magazines, drawings of white people doing pretty things. No, thinks Dr. Lunceford, ours is not as bad as this.

The boy is small and dark-skinned, a permanent dent, most probably the work of forceps, in one side of his head. The injured arm lays slack in his lap as he sits on the only chair with upholstery in the two rooms, his legs sticking out straight from the seat. He looks up and Dr. Lunceford can read his thoughts— What is this man going to do to me?

He sits cautiously on the arm of the chair. “What’s your name?”

“Cuttis.”

“Curtis?”

“Cuttis.”

“How did you injure your arm?”

“Gettin co’.”

“In the basement?”

“On the train. When the co’ train come by slow enough I climbs up an thow some down to Montrose and James.”

“And you fell off the coal car?”

“Naw, I ain that stupit. After all I thown down Montrose and James wouldn’t gimme my share an we commence to fightin.” The little boy touches his arm, as if to bring back the memory. “James thow me down on the rail.”

The mother looks on, standing, waiting to see what he will do next. He has had women, back in Wilmington, repel him at gunpoint to keep him from vaccinating their children.

“Never forget,” Dr. Osler used to say when he took his students on city rounds, “that when you are in a person’s home, you are a guest .”

“I’m going to touch your arm, Cuttis. This one first.”

The boy reluctantly offers up his good arm, and Dr. Lunceford pushes his fingers to the bone, getting a feel for what should be. There is no way to be precise without a Roentgen, of course, but a few generations of cotton loaders who can still bend their arms will vouch for him.

“Now I’m going to straighten out the arm that you’ve hurt and have you try a few things.”

The boy looks at his face as he supports the broken arm under the elbow and slowly, gently straightens it.

“Can I see you make an o.k. sign with your fingers? That’s good — now push your fingers against mine—”

“It hurt.”

“But you can do it, can’t you? Now I’m going to hold around your fingers and you have to try to spread them — that’s good, this is all very good.”

He runs his fingers lightly up from the elbow to the wrist several times. “You were in this fight, what, two or three days ago?”

“Three days,” says the mother. “But we aint got nothin to pay a hospital.”

Dr. Lunceford ignores the statement, looking into the eyes of the boy. “Now I want you to pretend that your pain is a voice. When I touch a certain part, you tell me if the voice is humming, talking, talking loud, shouting, or screaming.”

“It hummin all the time.”

“I’m sure it is. You’ve been very brave about it.”

He begins to pinch around the bone, very slowly, moving toward the hand.

“She talkin now.”

“Uh-huh—”

“Louder.”

“How about here?”

Tears come to the boy’s eyes and he can’t speak. Dr. Lunceford eases the pressure, turns to the mother.

“I’ll need one of your stockings — it can be old but it must be clean. And if you’d boil a panful of water, please.”

She looks at him for a moment, as if the words take time to penetrate, then steps into the other room. He knows he should have phrased it differently—“something you’ve just washed” instead of implying that most objects in here are filthy. Which they are. There is a thin blanket hung over the back of the chair and he imagines the little boy stretches out on it and the threadbare ottoman to sleep, perhaps sharing the chair with a sibling. He waits till he hears pots banging in the kitchen.