John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“We adjust to circumstances,” says Niles, smiling politely. There is a portrait of the order’s namesake in his rough garb hung on the wall, a sparrow perched on one shoulder, a wolf curled peacefully at his feet, a lamb, unafraid of the predator, tranquil under his open hand. “Where exactly—?”

“Pampanga. North of here, not far from the rail.” Brother León crosses to a rolltop desk and extracts a folio of papers. “Your troops have yet to occupy this area, but given your superior force and the volatility of the situation, it is inevitable.” He lays the folio on the billiard table in front of Niles.

“And if Mr. McKinley loses heart and chooses to leave these fair isles to their natives?”

The friar smiles now, hawklike. “We adjust to circumstances.” He hands Niles a pair of deeds. “Much of the land still belongs to the order, of course, but the properties described here are in my brother’s name.”

“Your brother—”

“Who does not exist.” León wiggles his fingers. “His signature is amazingly similar to my own.”

Niles has already considered using Harry’s name for some of his acquisitions. “Pampanga is mountains, if I’m not mistaken.”

“With a broad plain at their base. Hemp, sugar cane, rice, mangoes—”

“My people were in tobacco before the War,” says Niles. The first deed is for 150 acres situated near the city of San Fernando. “We understand how to operate a plantation.”

An underdeveloped land, a soon-to-be advantageous labor situation — a man could do quite well for himself.

“I’ll need to have these gone over,” he informs the friar.

“Naturally.”

The art of commerce, he muses, lies in recognizing desires and seizing opportunities. There are countless citizens who need medicine and have been denied their usual access. There are the suddenly deposed, such as Brother León, who wish to recover some value from what they will be forced to leave behind. There are those like An Chao and Niles, who assure that the flow of goods and services continues despite the uncertainties of the present situation.

And suddenly, there is a Filipino in the room.

Well-dressed, nose in the air, nervously tapping his walking stick against the floor as he glares at Brother León. A mestizo , the term they apply to their half-breeds, from the look of him.

“Ah, Ramiro—”

The young man says something in Spanish to the friar. Niles closes the satchel and lifts it off the table. If he hurries his lawyer friend at the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank will be able to verify the deeds during his tiffin and set the affair into motion.

“This is Ramiro, my sacristán ,” says Brother León. “I have known him since I arrived from Gibraltar, since the day of his First Communion.”

Niles recognizes the young man, who is glaring at him now with undisguised resentment, as one of the sepia dandies he forced off the sidewalk on the Escolta.

“He is also, when we come to that moment, our notary.”

Niles offers the sullen googoo an ironic bow. “How very convenient.”

When Mei comes down from the wards at night Bo is waiting, squirming to be out of Paz’s arms and into hers, and if the sky is clear she takes him out away from the walls and she points to the stars and tells him stories about them. At first she wondered if they should be Chinese stories about the Three Enclosures or the yang gweizi stories about hunters and flying horses that Roderick Hardacre told her, but decided that nobody knows what takes place in the heavens, or how the world works, that even the most powerful are only guessing at how one thing is connected to another, pointing at dots in the distant sky and making up stories about them.

“Do you see those over there?” says Mei, pointing, talking the talk of the North China people to her little boy who starts to shake with happiness whenever he sees her, who calls her Ma and hugs his arms around her neck so tight it almost chokes her. “See those ones that make the head, and then those three, that are the tail? That is called Ling-Ling, the Brave Dog, who once saved a little girl from a wolf, and tried to save another from drowning—”

All yesterday they were at it with shovels, the boys digging and Jubal hauling it off in a wagon. He ask why don’t they just pile it up in front like the real soldiers do but Mr. Charles who is Mr. Harry’s boss says it would get in the way of the volunteers and spoil the shot. So they dig it deeper and carry the dirt away, and Jubal can just see over the top when he stands tall.

The volunteers, which is really New Jersey National Guards, are having a time over in the pines, laughing and calling out how maybe they put real bullets in their rifles. The one being Colonel Funston is up on his ride, a big bay Morgan horse that got its ears up for what happen next. The white boys can play the fool cause the camera pointed elsewhere, looking right down the line of all the colored being Filipinos. Jubal has put himself as far away from it as he can get, worried lest he mess up somehow and get Mr. Harry in trouble. There is no snow left on the ground but it is cold, colder than it ever get in Wilmington and he bets the Philippines either. They only got on white pants and white shirts but just now Mr. Charles tell them to take their hats off and leave them out of sight. Royal is headed over there right now, where the real Filipinos stay, and if this is what they look like, just colored men without hats, it’s good they all in white and he’ll be wearing blue.

“Remember it’s two shots and then we scatter,” says Zeke, who has been a Filipino before and act like he’s the sergeant here. The National Guard who is being Colonel Funston has run them through the drill over and over — how to load and shoot, load and shoot, not to point at anybody too close. He show them how it’s only paper inside the cartridges and won’t hurt you at a distance. Jubal has it all in his head and wishes they would start and get it over. Got him so riled up waiting in the ditch for them to charge and it’s only for the camera, you wonder how can Royal abide the real thing. He hears Hooker nickering, tied back by the camera wagon and wondering where Jubal is. She maybe fuss some when the shooting starts, but her making noise don’t matter none.

Mr. Harry come out in front of the ditch and lean on his stick to talk to them.

“The key principle to keep in mind,” he says, “is not to look at the camera. There is the enemy before you—” he points with his stick, “—and there is your route of escape. Remember that you have been instructed by your officers to hold this position at all costs and should not abandon it lightly. And — if you have been selected to die — please do so be fore the volunteers enter the trench.”

Zeke raises his arm. Zeke got himself closest to the camera, nothing be-tween him and it.

“Suh?”

“Yes, Zeke.”

“Them of us that got to run, how far we spose to go?”

Mr. Harry points past them with his stick. “You see the chestnut back there? Run behind that and then take up your firing position again.” He smiles. “Consider those trees your second line of defense.”

He tells them to check one more time they got a round in the chamber and one in their back pocket, then limps out of the way. Mr. Harry takes care of the camera but doesn’t turn the handle.

Jubal looks over at the volunteers again, searching out which one he will aim at. If he really do it like he got to kill the man before the man kill him maybe it will take some of the nerves away. The one that carry the flag is the easiest to spot, but that don’t seem right, shooting the flag, so he picks out the man next to him. You dead, Mister Volunteer. Mr. Charles calls are they ready and it gets real quiet, Colonel Funston’s ride side-stepping some like it be nervous too, and then Jubal hears the camera winding and Mr. Charles calls “Charge! Fire!”