John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“Because those are your orders. When someone comes out they can relieve you and you can come in.”

Coop is up and unhitching his ammunition belt. “I’m getting in that water before you niggers start takin them boots off.”

“River look cold.”

“Cold sound fine to me.”

Every other day the woman, Nilda, walks a mile from Las Ciegas with their clothes and scours them with pumice rock and lye soap in what is more a puddle than a spring, white cattle egrets stepping into the wet grass to search for snails and crayfish as she works. Royal sat to watch her there once, and helped her carry the water-heavy clothes basket back until just before the first outpost. She washes their clothes, but the men themselves stay dirty, dust and dried sweat staying on their skin for weeks. You don’t miss a chance to wash yourself.

The water is cold but the current isn’t much on this side of the bend, weak enough so you can even swim out a few strokes without worrying. The men shout and splash and duck each other under, most of them fully naked. Junior has his yellow soap and works his way upstream for a little privacy, his desperation to be clean an open joke within the company.

“Junior think if he scrub it hard enough,” Too Tall will say, “it might just come off.”

“He right too. That boy was born black as me, an lookit him now .”

The bottom is silted and easy to walk on. Royal steps out up to his armpits and can feel it change there, the backwater eddy giving way to the full current. He reaches over the surface and dips his fingers into the water as it rushes by. It will just take you.

He stands there, at the edge, for a long time and then turns back to see who’s got the soap.

There is still coffee hot when he comes out, skin tingling, and he drinks some from his cup and takes his time dressing, being sure to brush all the sand from between his toes before he pulls his socks on, to stretch the wrinkles out of his pants before he puts them on. The others dress beside him, calling out insults as Hardaway comes back and decides to go in alone.

“See why the man afraid of snakes. Think one is gonna catch a look at what he got hangin there and fall in love.”

“Don’t let them big ole catfish in there catch holt of it, now!”

Hardaway pays them no mind, bending to duck his head under the water and blowing loud bubbles.

“Where I come up,” says Willie Mills, “the catfish gets long as a tall man’s leg, and they hole up in the roots under the river bank. We used to go down there, reach in—”

He mimes the action, closing his eyes and probing with an arm—

“—and when you feel one you just stick your hand down his gullet, halfway up the elbow, and yank him out of there.”

“Big cat like that will bite on you.”

“Oh, you see some blood, but them big ones fry up nice, feed the whole family.”

“ Dans le bayou ,” says Achille, “we hunt the snapper turtle with our bare foot. Walk in the mud of the bank till you feel a shell, then reach in and pull him up.”

“Good way to lose some fingers.”

“On the snapper shell he has a ridge ,” he explains. “You feel those ridge with your toe, you know which end is beak and which end is tail.”

“Feel em with what toes you got left .”

You had to go a ways up the river from Wilmington before the turpentine and creosote smell was gone, and Royal and Jubal would fish for bass using crickets they had caught, Jubal making up wild stories about what the Cape Fears and the Waccamaws were up to when they owned the river. Jubal never told the same story twice.

Hardaway screams and they turn to make jokes about snakes in the water but he is naked, scrambling out of the water and behind him there is another thing, light-skinned, floating slowly face-down in a rosy cloud.

It is a lazy kind of floating, peaceful, and it takes a moment to know what has happened.

The others are up with their rifles then and shouting, staying low as they spread and move up the bank, none of them fully dressed. Royal watches it float, turning a half-circle as it drifts away, then hurries out in all his clothes to grab an ankle before the current can take it. He turns and hauls it back through the running water, drags it onto the sand without looking. It is Junior, he knows. Junior is the only one of them that light. Royal is wet and shaking with the cold, still squatting by the body without looking at it when the others come back around, having found nothing upriver but the chunk of yellow soap placed carefully on a rock.

“Must have only been a few of them or we’d all be cooked.”

“Aw, damn, lookit what they done—”

“We got to carry him back. Here, spread his clothes out—”

“Got to wrap him careful or his arm’s gonna come off.”

“They be waiting out there to ambush.”

“We don’t go back the same way we come, stay in the open. Hell, let em show their damn faces—”

“That bolo cut right through a man, don’t it?”

There is a buzzing in Royal’s ears now, and the river louder than it should be, and the fact of Junior that can’t be real, can’t be real. Ponder, the corporal and in charge now, kneels beside Royal, hand on his shoulder.

“This aint no different than Cuba, Roy. Pick up your dead and keep moving.”

Royal nods.

“So you best get them boots on.”

They cover Junior as well as they can with his own clothes and work up a kind of stretcher from driftwood poles and men’s shirts tied to it that Gamble and Willie Mills carry, Junior’s hat, boots, and canteen sitting on top of the body. Royal insists on carrying the butchered man’s Krag and ammo belt as well as his own, able to bear the weight but only dimly aware of the ground they cover as he follows after Pickney and Coop in the lead.

Junior is why he is here, and now he is gone.

Royal sees himself, sees them all, from very high and very far, a tiny procession of nine dark men carrying a dead soldier across the sun-beaten flatlands of somebody else’s country.

Junior is why he is here. Junior is why he is anywhere besides breathing cotton chaff at Sprunt’s in Wilmington, Junior the doctor’s son who watched him in the stable and in the yard and one day invited him inside when Mrs. Lunceford was not home, who said he was smart and ought to stay in school some more and become one of the Talented Tenth. And here he is instead in the Colored 25th, somewhere between Bacolor and Las Ciegas without an idea why.

“They don’t know it, but it’s a war,” Junior used to say, even back when they were still throwing pinecones at trees pretending to be base-ball pitchers. “Only not a war where one side beats the other, but where one side figures out we should be right there marching next to them, that that’s where we should have always been.”

“I steer clear of white folks,” Royal would always remind him, “and hope they does likewise for me.”

“You mean you hide.”

“I’m right here.”

“You hide your talent.”

“I got no talent. Less it’s throwing a in-shoot. Watch this—”

Pinecones will do all kind of tricks and so will a baseball if you hold it right and throw it fast enough. Junior couldn’t throw much but was light-footed and could bunt the ball just where he wanted and beat it to first.

“It’s not an oppor tun ity to do something for the race,” he would say, dead serious, “it is our duty.”

Junior got most of this from Dr. Lunceford probably, who was in tight with all the big colored men in town, who got a new-model carriage every couple years and spoke even better than a white man, even if it was only to Uncle Wicklow. Junior was going to be a man just like him, though not a doctor, and his sister Jessie was the most beautiful girl in Wilmington.