John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

It takes all five of them to get the slab centered over the crate and drop it, the dinge having to jump down on one corner to get it level in the hole. All the bulls but Sergeant Kelso and Stuttering Steinway go back then, the Warden watching the walls as he walks like he’s still expecting company, leaving the detail with a pile of dirt turning to mud and five shovels.

“Fill her in quick, lads,” says Kelso, lighting up a coffin nail when the Warden is out of sight. “I don’t like the look of this sky.”

The heart tries to compensate. At first she just said her chest was sore, but they’d only just received the news about Junior and she was weeping so much, waking him with it, and he’d hold her then but she seemed to take no comfort in him. Then the headaches, and finally she couldn’t lie on her left side.

You can only tell so much listening to it. There was a clink just to the right of the apex beat, a metallic clink, then a murmur. The heart tries to compensate. There is a lesion, or a valve collapses, some insult to the system, and one of the ventricles, usually the left, has to do twice the work and it starts to grow, like any muscle. It is trying to keep you breathing, to keep you alive. But it thickens and becomes too strong, too strong—

It was clear she shouldn’t be climbing the stairs anymore, but she didn’t want to be a prisoner.

“Minnie and I can’t stay inside all day,” Yolanda said. “She needs fresh air to grow.”

So they moved again, to a place even worse, which he had not thought possible, but the apartment was on the ground floor in the back. There was a bulge then, just below her sternum on the left. He tried bleeding. He tried ammonia and digitalis. Yolanda stopped eating. She slept badly, jolted awake by nightmares that white men had come to kill them with a Gatling gun, that Minnie was burning in the oven. He resorted to spirits of chloroform with a little camphor, dissolved in hot whiskey, just before bedtime. She slept so soundly that he worried she would not wake, and spent the whole night laying his ear against her chest.

Dr. Lunceford had planned their redemption. They would build a new fortune in the North, would ascend to their former heights and someday return, preferably with a federal marshal and several armed officials, to reclaim what was theirs.

At the end, when her blood pressure was so high and her spirits so low, he could only try a pill that combined digitalis, squill, and black oxide of mercury.

“No more medicine,” Yolanda said. “I am in the Lord’s hands now.”

It is hard, still, for him to accept. Dr. Osler thought that severe fright or grief could induce a failure of compensation, and he himself has seen patients, older people mostly, seem to will themselves to die. But the look on her face, even after the letter sometimes, when she would walk with Minnie, alive, loving, joyful—

“You wouldn’t catch me dead in Brooklyn,” she used to say, but that was the neighborhood in Wilmington, where the idlers and the fallen women congregated, where the colored people seemed happy to live for the moment. This Brooklyn is a tentative green, the very first stirring of spring showing on the hillsides, and there is ground not profaned by tenements or commercial buildings and here she will lie forever.

It is all the money he has saved to bury her, the carriage fare across the Bridge alone more than he can scrape together in a week. There will be no redemption for the Luncefords, even if his license to practice is finally awarded. Without her—

“You have to take care of them, Aaron,” she said on the last day. “They have no one else in this terrible place.”

The baby, against all his expectations, is thriving. The human organism, that can be so fragile, that contains an organ capable of exploding itself, can also prove indestructible under the most inauspicious conditions. And Jessie, who has become a mystery to him, barely speaking these days, is now a toiler, the sort of woman they used to employ to keep the house clean. After this is ended, the phrases uttered, the earth piled over, it will only be him and Jessie and the baby in the miserable rooms across the river, across the island, in a building that looks like a tomb.

His wife is dead of a heavy heart and he cannot bear to live so far away from her.

Jubal stays at the edge. The turnout is not so bad when you think about how far it is from home, Reverend Endicott come up from where he’s staying in Philadelphia to say the words and Felix Birdsong there, and Dr. Mask and Mrs. Knights and Ned Motherwell who used to work at Sprunt’s and Dr. Lunceford up front with Jessie and what folks are sposed to think is Dorsey Love’s baby. It is nice to see some faces he knows here in the City, but Jubal stays at the edge because he didn’t know Mrs. Lunceford so well, just Yes M’am, thank you M’am delivering goods to their big house and because of how it went with Jessie and Royal.

It is a middling-sized cemetery, not nearly so pretty as the Oak Grove in Wilmington, but there are some old dates on the stones in the colored section. People been resting here for a long time. It brings Mama to mind, and Royal, who nobody has heard from for so long.

“ As I pass through the Valley of the Shadow of Death ,” says Reverend Endicott, “ I shall fear no evil— ”

Jubal wonders how he would do, passing through the Valley of Death like his brother done in Cuba, where you don’t know is it you they gone to kill or the man next to you and it’s not for the moving pictures. The closest he ever come was the riot and there it was just busting out all around you with no sense to it and nobody expecting you to act brave. If we had guns , all the men said afterward, but the ones who did have guns ended up shot dead and sunk to the bottom of the Cape Fear River.

The Reverend finishes his words and then Miss Alma who used to work for the Luncefords steps out to sing.

Even though he stands back at the edge Jubal can see tears shining on her cheeks, all dressed in black and singing like to pull your heart out—

Just a closer walk with Thee

Grant it Jesus is my plea

Daily walking close to Thee

Let it be, dear Lord, let it be—

He has always admired Miss Alma, love the way she smile, how she carry herself, but never known she had a voice like this—

When my worldly life is oer

Time will be for me no more

Something melts in Jubal and he wants to cry for all of them — Mrs. Lunceford and the Doctor and Jessie and poor Junior buried so far across the ocean and Royal lost in the Valley of the Shadow and all of them wandering here in what the Jamaica man who hollers on the corner call Babylon, all of them run out from their homes and their lives and lost in this City—

Guide me safely, safely oer

To Thy shore, Thy kingdom

To Thy shore

What kind of woman carry a voice like that in her? She is tall and handsome and wide-shouldered and Jubal didn’t even know she come up here like the rest till now. Miss Alma ends the song and it is quiet but for the rolling of the carriage wheels over on Bushwick Avenue, never gets all the way quiet in the City, even out here. Dr. Lunceford drops a handful of dirt in the hole and then Jessie, who is older now but still look like an angel cut in butter, does the same and the people start away. If this was home it would be a hundred or more to pay their respects, but up here Jubal only counts nine and then him who maybe doesn’t even belong there.

Dr. Lunceford carries himself heavy when he step by. He set Jubal’s arm back when he break it falling off Jingles and was as polite with Mama as if she was a white lady.