John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

Niles looks around at the gathering. The engineer has stepped out to watch, his locomotive wheezing hot water up the track, waiting for the ceremony to end before he pulls out of the station.

“It has been my honor,” says Niles finally, “to represent you good people, to represent our fine city and the great state of North Carolina, in this desperate and glorious conflict.”

Cheers and exhortations. Whatever the Judge’s apprehensions about his son serving in a Colorado unit with a troop of illiterate miners, the experience may well have made a man of him.

“As Colonel Waddell has so eloquently stated, our mission in Asia is not one of conquest, but no less than the struggle of Christianity and enlightenment against the forces of darkness and ignorance. I believe that in my absence you folks have triumphed in a similar crusade.”

Laughter and applause at this. There has been some grumbling, concern that the best of the niggers were driven out with the worst of them, Sprunt even sending recruiters up North to bring some back and fill out his shifts. But on the whole, white Wilmington is pretty pleased to have recaptured the city.

“I believe that our success on both of these fronts is evidence that our cause is just and that Almighty God is with us. I have returned not only to reunite with those dear to my heart—” turning to nod fondly at Sally and the Judge, “—but to offer my support, in whatever form proves most useful, to the revitalization of our city and the ascent of our section to its rightful prominence in national affairs.”

More cheering. The Judge gives a nod to Clawson, who steps forward to stand beside Niles.

“We’d all like to know,” grins the editor, quieting the crowd, “if that support might include a run for public office?”

Niles puts his hand over his heart and smiles modestly. The saber scars on his face temper his good looks — even with the gap cut into his moustache he seems more trustworthy than before. War has carved him into something finer.

“I believe Colonel Waddell would concur,” he says, “that if the times demand it, a man must step forward to meet his responsibilities.”

A cheer then and the Judge nods to the band leader, who drops his baton and it is Dixie with the Stars and Bars unfurled from the roof of the station and confetti tossed into the air and stomps and yells and the Judge is not the only man with his heart in his throat. The whistle blows then and all move away from the blasts of steam as the train starts to roll and Niles steps down for what seems like an hour of handshaking and backslapping, the yankee flag wedged under the stump of his left arm and the band shifting into The Volunteer to serenade the folks heading home.

“I thought that went rather well,” says Niles when they are just family and on the way to the carriage.

“The state ought to have a regiment in this fight. With you as commander.”

Niles smiles faintly. “I believe I’ve seen enough of that hellhole for the present, thank you.”

The Judge is glad to see Niles swing himself up into the barouche on his own and then reach back to help Sally. Coleman, the third driver the Judge has hired since the city was liberated, does not think to come down from his seat. Decent government is restored, but the impudence lingers.

“Clawson and I have spoken with Josephus Daniels,” says the Judge, hauling himself on board and facing backward. “There’s a position in the state senate about to open up, and he says he’ll run a campaign in the News and Observer to draft you. With your approval, of course.”

Niles leans his head back against the seat as Coleman sets the team in motion. The journey has tired his son, or else he is just looking older.

“Until I learn to deal poker with one hand,” he says with his new, saber-slashed grin, “I might as well give politics a go.”

They won’t step ashore in Nagasaki. Just a coaling stop before the long leg to Honolulu and then to the States. Royal wonders if the white troops going home get to go in and stretch their legs. Except for the crew it is only colored on the A.T. Crook , sitting out in the long protected anchorage with low mountains on both sides, the harbor ending with the little man-made island of stone warehouses where the chaplain says they kept the Dutch traders operating after they crucified all the Catholics, a short bridge connecting it to the small city that spreads by the river’s mouth. The Japs have their navy training here, thick fortress walls near the water’s edge and warships maneuvering all around them for what looks like practice.

Royal sits up on the forecastle deck and watches the first of the barges come alongside. The loaders squat on the mounded coal till the lines have been secured, then clamber up the webbing, one man and more than three dozen women forming their line from the port gangway across to the coal bunker, four men left on the barge to shovel. The sun is straight down on them, harbor surface dead flat and most of the soldiers lolling on deck wasted from the heat. The women chatter with each other as they get into position, gabbling like a flock of wild turkey hens, and then go silent the moment they are in place and the coal starts moving, big bamboo baskets loaded with forty, maybe fifty pounds hoisted hand-to-hand up the side of the ship and then passed down the line by the women, the hems of their short robes tucked up into waistbands, baskets never slowing for a moment till the man at the end dumps the coal into the bunker opening and flings the basket toward the rail, where a woman catches it in two hands and drops it over the side to another woman feeding baskets to the shovelers below.

Ants, thinks Royal, ants like he’s seen in the jungle, filing into their anthill with their loads and filing back out to carry more, blind to everything but the task. Some of the other men come out to the edge to watch with him, mute with the heat, five more gangs feeding the bunkers now and then more as the other barges and lighters swarm both sides of the ship and it is all women doing the passing, the webbing and decks overrun with them, hundreds of women passing baskets of coal toward the bunkers. No shouting, no talking, only the crunch of the shovels in the coal and the hollow crashing as it tumbles into the bunker and the occasional thunk of a barge against the big ship’s hull.

They are short, sturdy women, from fifteen to fifty, many of them wearing straw hats with very long bills against the noonday sun, keeping their legs slightly bent as they turn their hips to take a load, turn to pass it on and then turn back to take the next, their faces and arms glistening with sweat, clothes sticking wet to their bodies, long black hair, where it hangs loose, dripping with sweat. A few of them are as brown as Nilda. He was starting to have more of her words just before the Army came to bring him back, words for things you could point to, for water and fire and wood and the names of things to eat. The other ones, words between a man and a woman that aren’t things you can point to, those he can barely remember in American. They don’t look like people right now, these coal-passing women, only like part of a machine that is feeding the ship. He can’t imagine Jessie here, can barely even bring back her face. She is a little girl he used to look at through window glass, wearing a velvet dress and gloves that she only pull off to play white people’s music on the piano.

But she is not there behind the glass anymore, and Junior cut to pieces and Coop laying in the dirt up in Zambales and Jubal run north, all of them dead or scattered and Royal is cooking under the sun in the middle of a harbor on a hot metal ship crawling with ant-women.