John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“I was among the men who were ordered to go down into the volcano. On the way we finished the ones who were wounded. I finished a girl, a beautiful young girl, who was shot in both legs. She looked into my soul and cursed it and I shot her in the heart. At the bottom we found the children, the ones they thought were too little to fight, with their throats cut like lambs. The women had been shrieking by the fires while the men killed their children. They were laid out on flat stones, stuck to them with blood. I was afraid that the mountain would wake when it understood what had been done in its heart, that God or Satan would melt the rock and drown us in fire.

“The moros had thrown the last of their food into the fires so we would not get any of it. We pulled the jewelry off all the dead except for the datu and started back for the coast. All the men who had been wounded became infected and died. A man in our company who had worked in a bank in Manila and stole money from it went crazy and said he would walk no more and was left behind without his rifle. We took turns carrying the body of the datu , who was sewn up inside the canvas of a tent, two men at a time. He didn’t weigh much but he smelled like something from Hell. There were mosquitoes everywhere and no water left that was drinkable and nobody spoke except to abuse the Lord’s name or give an order. We knew we had been cursed.

“ ‘At least,’ said our teniente, ‘we left all that heavy ammunition behind in the moros .’

“When we came to the field pieces, there were lizards living in the barrels. None of the bodies of the ambushed men were where we had left them, or else we weren’t on the same path. The officers would compare their compasses to be sure we were heading in the right direction, but it took two days longer to come down from the mountain than it took to get up it, and a third of our battalion was gone.

“They hanged the body of the datu from a crane arm in the port, with his beautiful clothes and jewelry still on him, but the moros there, even the ones who had hated and feared him in life, only came to kneel and touch their foreheads to the ground. Honoring him. After a few days of this the gobernadorcillo had him taken down and stripped and thrown into the harbor for the fishes to eat.”

Bayani closes his eyes. The men are silent. A flock of birds twists over the cassava field across the road, changing shape, threatening to break apart and then flowing together.

“If we had that kind of unity,” says Diosdado after a while. “If we believed like the moros —”

“You miss the point of the story,” says Bayani from his stretcher. “You always miss the point. They believed. They believed so much that they slaughtered their own children. But they were outnumbered and outgunned and so they all died.”

Diosdado scowls. The valley is very lush now, crops growing as if there is no war. “It doesn’t matter how you die, or when,” he says. “It matters how you live.”

Bayani sighs and there is a rattle in his chest. “Say that when you are down inside the mountain, hermano . Say that when you are where I am now.”

They walk through the valley, crossing petsay bean and corn fields, and then come to his father’s vast huerta , mango trees as far as the eye can travel. These first ones are the abuelos , a hundred feet to the crown, the dark green spear-shaped leaves nearly a foot long, the trees full and round-topped and laden with hundreds of carabaos , fat and green and just about to turn. The smell, sweet and resinous, makes Diosdado’s mouth water. His mother would chop the young leaves for salad with tomatoes and onions, would shred the unripe fruits and serve them with bagoong , the salt of the shrimp paste cutting the sour of the green mango, and him out climbing the sturdy branches with the sons of the trabajadores till it was time for his lessons.

They are halfway through the orchard, in the section where the picos and the tiny señoritas are mixed in with the carabaos , when his father’s workers surround them. Diosdado is suddenly aware that he is dressed in rags like the rest of his men. He recognizes a few of the dozen trabajadores but not their leader, who points a shotgun at his belly.

“What are you doing here?” asks the man in Zambal.

“We are soldiers of the nation,” answers Diosdado. His men are ready to fight, even at such a disadvantage, but there should be no need to. “We have a wounded man.”

“This land belongs to Don Nicasio,” says the foreman. “You are not welcome here.”

A few of the workers have rifles, the rest bolos. One clutches a rusted cavalry saber. They are better dressed and better fed than Diosdado’s men, and know loyalty only to their patrón .

“We will walk with you back to where his lands begin,” says the foreman.

“Put your fucking weapons down,” snaps Bayani, whose fists are clenched against the pain once more, “and go tell Don Nicasio that his son is home.”

The plantation house is, like his father, solid and implacable, built of stone on both stories and buttressed for an earthquake that has not yet come. Don Nicasio does not embrace Diosdado when he receives him in the despacho . Nothing has changed in the room, the smell of leather and ink, the map from the shipping company displaying its myriad routes still covering the wall behind his father’s desk. The desk was Diosdado’s favorite forbidden playground when he was small, its dozens of cubbyholes and sliding panels and secret drawers revealing their treasures — a magnifying glass, a flask of Scotch whisky, the heavy pistol he was afraid to even touch.

“While you were busy running from the Americans,” his father informs him, still seated, regarding his son’s torn kasama clothing and sun-weathered face with weary condescension, “your mother, Dios le protige , has passed away.”

Diosdado feels unsteady on his feet, but that may only be hunger and the long journey over the mountains. He has guessed the sorry news already, noting the ribbon of black crepe stretched diagonally across her portrait, chrysanthemums abundant throughout the house.

“I am sorry.”

“She was a good woman. Too good for this world.”

Don Nicasio’s face is more lined than he remembers, yellowish, but his eyes burn as they always did.

“I suppose you’re here to demand tribute.”

“One of my men is wounded and needs a doctor,” he says flatly. “And an offering of food would be considered patriotic.”

Don Nicasio snorts, pushes himself up from his chair and steps past Diosdado. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with here.”

The men are in the rear garden, by his mother’s shrine to the Virgin of Antipolo. The statue is of a young, beautiful woman with her head tilted to one side, as if trying to hear something far away.

“She is listening for an infant’s cry,” his mother explained to Diosdado when he was little. “She is the Mother of us all.”

Beyond the stone bench where they have laid Bayani out Diosdado can see the panteón familiar , a tiny alabaster tomb with a cross upon it marking the grave of Adelfonso, his brother who did not thrive in the School of Survival, and his parents’ mausoleum, recently garlanded with wreaths of carnations.

That was her name — Encarnación.

The segundo with the shotgun and several of the other workers stand nearby, watching Don Nicasio’s face for instruction.

It takes the old man a moment to recognize Bayani, studying the wounds first before looking at the man’s face. Don Nicasio’s body stiffens. He turns away to confront Diosdado.