John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

It has been some time since the Correspondent has acknowledged his complaints or observations, the man going mute this morning after they cut poor Private Moss, dead from his wound and their appalling treatment, loose from the tree and tossed him into the ravine. Niles worries his teeth with his tongue to see how loose they have gotten. He tried once, maybe yesterday, to asphyxiate himself with the rope around his neck but was only able to slump enough to make himself less comfortable. He has witnessed two hangings in his life, one a formal and somewhat legal execution that ended with a hard snap and twitching legs, and the other an amateur affair meant to prolong the agony of the miscreant, a white man vile enough in his predations to merit the attentions of Dr. Lynch. There will be no public obloquy attendant on his own passing, the wretched niggers barely glancing in their direction anymore, moving them from camp to camp like necessary but annoyingly unwieldy baggage.

Niles has been recalling his Bulfinch of late, the Judge’s voice intoning Olympian exploits to him and Harry when they were boys, Niles perking up at the naughty bits and staring longingly, whenever the Judge was not present, at the gauze-caressed bosoms of violated maidens in the wonderful illustrations. Lately it has been the fate of Prometheus weighing on him, bound to a rock for his transgression, the giant golden Eagle of Zeus sent each day to tear his still-beating heart from its cavity. How the screech of the feathered terror, how the breeze from the waft of its enormous wings must have quickened that heart with apprehension! And then, after the wrenching pain — what? Was he made whole immediately or left pouring blood from his violated innards, life ebbing from him, thinking this is the last, the end, till darkness — and then a sharp jolt of consciousness, sun bleeding onto the ocean horizon and the heart pumping life again? He imagines that the groan emitted from Promethean lips is not unlike his own when coming to, still knotted to a tree, and realizing that nothing has changed.

He has begun to envy the Titan. Bound, yes, but with the healthful sea air in his lungs, the magnificent blue waters, joyous with dolphins, stretched below him, and the song of cliff-nesting birds in his ear. Wind in the hair. What of a few sharp moments with a razor-beaked demon, a gory, if inconclusive death? Niles is being consumed by insects while still breathing. Lice cavort in his scalp, ants, beetles, many-legged crawling vermin he cannot imagine inhabit the rags of his clothing and every sweat-sticky fold of his body — biting, nesting, breeding. Flies have burrowed into his face and left their eggs, the lumps on his tortured countenance growing larger and more tender each day, filling him with terrible thoughts of what will come with their spawning, what manner of squirming pupae unleashed to feed on him. There is no place on the surface of him that does not itch or sting or prickle with the traffic of tiny legs and he has taken to cursing the niggers in the crudest and most detailed manner whenever they wander near, hoping one will understand and take enough umbrage to send a quick bullet through his worm-infested skull. He feels not so much Prometheus as Caliban, styed in a crevice and bent with ague, victim to sorcerers without wit or pity.

“The Anglo-Saxon,” he informs the Correspondent, “has the ability to amuse himself without cruelty. However, even among those considered, academically, as members of the white race, there is a great deal of variation in this attribute. Take the Dago and his corrida , for instance, or the slaughter in your typical Italian musicale . And these miserable buggers,” he jerks his head, though the Correspondent cannot see him, toward the rebels, who have stirred from their midday torpor and seem to be breaking camp, “these mongrelized Asiatics practice cruelty as a matter of course, barely taking any pleasure in it.”

There was one for a while who spoke English and would share a few words, but he is gone. The jefe of this pack, a degenerate Spaniard of some sort, has a hateful, impatient disposition and rules his cretinous minions through fear.

There is gunfire lower on the mountain.

“Another of their hapless ambushes. We’ll be moving soon.”

If he refuses to go, feigns unwillingness or inability to move his legs, surely they will kill him. Quickly, dispassionately, but not with a bullet. There’s the rub. He has seen them butcher a captured mule with their bolos, the animal dismembered before someone thought to silence its bellowing with a chop to the neck, eyes still large and sentient after its larynx was cut. They fed Niles bits of the half-charred, purplish meat for a week. No, when they come to make him move he will clench his toes to force some blood into his numbed leg, will try to hold the mewling woman of a Correspondent he is yoked to upright and drag him down the pathway after their captors. If they haven’t been killed yet, burdensome as they are, there may yet be an exchange, something already in the works.

The rifle fire is closer now, closer than he’s ever heard it.

“Buck up, my friend,” he calls to the man tied to the other side of the tree. “Our salvation may be at hand.”

The rebels are running now, this way and that way to gather their paltry belongings, and the jefe , whose name he knows is Gallego, is walking toward them with the brute who has been charged with their security ever since the colored renegade was untied, the brute who yanks the knots so tight that both Niles’s wrists are chafed and infected, so tight that he has lost feeling in the discolored fingers of his left hand.

Gallego barks an order to the brute and stalks away. The others are nearly all gone now, fled in panic. The man has only a bolo, one of the long ones they use for killing, tight in his hand. He scowls down at them for a long moment.

“If you’re not going to kill us,” says the Correspondent flatly, breaking his long silence, “at least cut this cracker bastard’s tongue out.”

The pain is worse than Niles has imagined, the first blow snapping his collarbone close to the neck and twisting as it rends him apart, and he hears something like the bellowing of a mule before the white light—

He wakes anew, still bound, heart pounding, but far from whole. The pain is like a scream tearing at every fiber of him and there is another scream, audible, something like a baby’s constant wail, only from a grown man on the other side of the tree. When his eyes clear, Niles sees the googoo lying several yards away, a huge stain of blood spreading on his back, bolo still clutched in his outstretched hand. He goes away again, pain still there. He is only pain. And then he feels a hand take his chin and lift it up. It is a nigger staring him in the eyes, not one of theirs but one of the back-home variety, in a Regular Army uniform.

“This one still breathin, too, Lieutenant,” the man calls. “But the googoos done hack him up to pieces.”

It is raining again today. Nilda is already cooking when Royal wakes and sits up on the banig . The mosquitoes have been at him again in spite of the netting they sleep under, sneaking up through the cracks in the split-palm flooring. The thatch above makes a raspy sound as the rain hits it, and he can hear the surf, waves breaking steadily. Unless there is a storm he figures that four waves tumble in and sweep away for every minute in the long day. Maybe sometime he will get out there and count them, sunup to sunup, and do the sums and it would be like a clock. Though nobody here needs a clock.

Nilda looks at him when he stands but she doesn’t say anything. He has learned some of the words, like lalo which is “more,” and learned “yes” and “no,” but she is not much of a talker, Nilda. You don’t need so much talking here on the coast to get by, only the men when they sit after the fishing is done and drink palm beeno and tell stories or the women when they play cards and chew all that business that makes their teeth go red. Nilda doesn’t chew and doesn’t seem to be invited for cards. He wonders if that makes her sorry. It is the kind of thing they don’t have the language for. And the love-words, when they’re doing it, which is often on the long rainy days, he would like to know some of her love-words but all she’ll say is lalo sometimes, at least make him feel she wants it. He can say whatever he wants but hearing himself say things she doesn’t understand makes him disbelieve them, so now it is mostly just noises.