John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

He was as small as a boy, hard to determine his age, and wore a gold cross (as many do here) hung around his neck. I insisted this not be taken from his body before it was laid in the common grave and covered over.

Junior takes a moment to allow a half-dozen mosquitoes, one by one, to settle on his body and then swats them dead. They cannot help themselves, he thinks, though their only chance of escaping with your blood is to attack while you sleep, to do their business and fly away. There is speculation now, maybe even solid evidence from what his father writes him, that the mosquitoes play a part in the spreading of both malaria and the yellow fever. He wonders if the natives, insurgent or not, are immunes, or if they, out there crouching in wait to kill him, are just as queasy and feverish as their American tormentors. He watches one of the insects on his arm, carefully spreading its feet to drill, then crushes it with his palm. A common enemy, like the Spanish, that should draw the opposing sides together.

I am understandably distressed to hear of your present situation in the North. There are no New Yorkers in our company, though from your description of conditions there it is a wonder more of our people have not fled it for the military life. There is overcrowding in sections of Manila, and terrible poverty, but nothing of the magnitude that you report. We have been for the most part kept from that municipality, and the suspicion is that the powers that be believe our presence, in numbers, might offend the wealthier, more educated class of Filipino who are in the assimilationist camp. These people, labeled Americanistas in the local press (and no doubt as traitors by their Tagalo brethren still in arms against us), with their innate tendency to ape the manners of their conquerors, have been quickly taught that they should despise the colored man.

I can only hope that you find a way to prosper in your new surroundings, foreign and chaotic as they may be, or that reason prevails and enables you to return to W with your rightful property and position restored.

In the meantime, give my love to Mother and to Jessie (and to her little one — I am an uncle!) and tell them I think of them constantly.

Oh yes — I have been raised to corporal due to my actions in yesterday’s fracas. It is a small enough accomplishment, but evidence that merit, regardless of the obdurate prejudices of the world, may sometimes be rewarded.

I shall send what money I can when you have a more reliable address.

Ever your son,

Aaron Lunceford, Jr.

Junior steps out under the oppressive sky. The Filipina who washed his overshirt got all the blood out but sewed the new chevron on crookedly, so that it does not line up evenly with the one above it.

“You done writin to you Mama and Daddy— Cor pral?” Too Tall calls to him from his knees, mocking.

Junior steps into his pants. “Indeed I am,” he says. “And now perhaps you gentlemen will join me for a little stroll?”

For at least half a day nobody will tell him what to do. Coop wanders the crowded streets, the amigos and the pigtails taking no special note of a colored man by now, feeling like the rum has done his insides no good. He could spend his leave in the sick ward, squirming on a bench, waiting his turn to get probed, or be out here a free man looking for a better cure.

They call at him from their shops and stalls, “You buy! You buy! Yankee soja you buy!” but none are selling anything he is hankering for. There is even one Chinese, wearing smoked glasses, who follows him grinning down the street riffling a paw full of playing cards and hissing his come-on and Coop has to laugh out loud, the idea you would play a man at his own game with his own deck in his own lingo and expect to leave with your pants on. There must be some greenhorns that fall for it, drunk or stupid or both, but Coop isn’t one of them.

“Yankee soja no tonto ,” he says finally to be rid of the little sharper, turning and waving a finger at him. “You go way yankee soja.”

But the hands that were played—

— Big Horace used to recite from his cell after lights-out in Greenville—

By that heathen Chinee

And the points that he made

Were quite frightful to see—

Where a geechie no-count like Horace ever run into Chinese was a question, but all he ever answer was with another verse from one of his stories.

The cowboy slept on the barroom floor—

— went everybody’s favorite—

— having drunk so much he could drink no more

The gambler fades and then there is a pair lugging a pig on a pole, tied by its trotters hanging upside-down squirming and squealing just like Coop’s guts and he has to bend over for a moment, head held low and hands on knees, while his stomach does some tricks. Like a tug of war going on down there. He’s had the quickstep for a couple weeks now like a lot of the boys, but now there is blood in it and there is only one cure he knows for that.

A half-dozen pigtails hustle past, each loaded down with something Coop doesn’t want to think about lifting. Just what they want back home, he thinks, niggers who don’t know how to stretch a job out. Way they hop around and jabber so fast it’s no wonder they got to burn some poppy at the end of the day, just to catch a breath.

He is able to straighten and take a few steps and right ahead there is a pair of provost guards in their white uniforms staring at him, so he flashes a big melon-eater and steps up to where they can hear and salutes, though they are both only privates.

“You gentlemens know where Division Hospital at?”

They give him directions, very polite and proper, and he heads away in that direction till he can cut out of their sight. Always somebody to throw a shadow on you, no matter where you are, and he wishes he had took his chance and run off when he got the notion in San Francisco. Not like they got his proper name or got time to go chase one darky trooper while they got so many dog-eaters to kill and such a big passel of islands to take over. Morning roll-call before they climb up that gangplank—“Where’s Coop?”

“Aint seen him, Sarge.”

“We better off without that trash. Let’s march.”

Only he let the chance slip by and here he is surrounded by amigos that want to slit his throat open and pigtails after his pay and a stomach knotted up like a mule-hitch and hot, Lord, even Shreveport in the dead dog of summer got nothing on this mess.

There is a pair of pigtails shuffling after him and waving, one of them lugging a stool, and hell, poorly as he feel right now he might as well sit down. He settles on the stool and the younger one outs with a pair of scissors.

“Takee hat off.”

Coop laughs and loses his topper. “Brother, you aint never cut this kind of wool.”

The pigtail frowns and grunts and walks in a circle around him, studying the problem, while the other squats on the dirt street and lays out a little wooden case full of all kinds of truck that looks like a doctor’s tools only made from bamboo.

“What’s all that?”

The barber grabs an earlobe and wiggles it.

“Takee out dirt.”

“From my ears?”

“You hear everything better, ha?”

Mostly what there is is people giving him orders and blowing the damn bugle and he hears that just fine, but there was that boy from Company L had a bug crawl up in his ear and get stuck there and he near went crazy with it.

“Guess it can’t hurt,” says Coop, giving the ear-cleaner a hard look. “But you better be damn careful about it.”