John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

The last basket makes its way down the first of the lines and as each loader unhands it she sits or lies on the deck to recover till the next barge is in place, hands black with coal from the baskets and faces darkened with it now as they wipe the sweat away, a trail of exhausted women laid out with their eyes shut tight against the sun and their tiny ribs moving up and down.

A coal-smudged young woman with no hat but a red band around her forehead looks up to the forecastle before she sits on the frypan of a deck, locking eyes with Royal. There are another two ships, a German and an English, waiting behind them to be serviced. She cocks her head sideways as if considering something she has never seen before, then smiles at him, face glistening black as a minstrel. Royal feels tears running down his cheeks and suddenly aches, aches all over to be somewhere he can call home.

Diosdado searches along the edge till there is nothing but reflection. The pond is filled with weeds, their ragged tops poking through the surface, but he finally finds a smooth patch and sees himself looking down with the open sky behind him. When he empties his eyes of comprehension there is nothing about the unshaven, shabbily dressed man to suggest he is more than an illiterate tao . He hides his alpargatas under the roots of a flowering narra tree, sinks his bare feet into the pond to coat them with muck, then heads down the acacia-lined road to Tautog.

He won’t be the last patriot to surrender his rifle, not even in Zambales. Luciano San Miguel will fight on, and some of Tinio’s people who have crossed over from the Ilocos, and Toque Rosales, who was a tulisan before the war and will become one again. But they will not win. If dying could drive the yanquis back across the sea he would find a way to die.

The sentry calls halt and he stops on the path with the rifle held in both hands high over his head. There is a rumor that the Americans have been shooting men who try to surrender, tired of paying the amnesty fee for rifles, angry and hot and bored and claiming their victims were ambushers or bandits. It is a rumor Diosdado helped to start when the men were weary of fighting, weary of running. Two soldiers step out at him, white men, each with a Krag aimed at his heart.

“Lay that piece down, amigo . Real slow.”

He remains with frightened eyes and the crooked-barreled Remington overhead. He traded his Mauser to Pelaez for it, a piece of his soul left in the fight.

“Lookit here, nigger,” says the other, and broadly mimes laying a rifle in the dirt. Diosdado puts the Remington down and steps back from it.

“There’s a good boy. Now march.”

The other Americans in Taugtod barely look at him as he is led in with his hands behind his neck. Two of them are chasing a flapping rooster around the plaza, cursing it, and another is shaving himself in a tiny mirror hung by a cord from the branch of a barren santol . The villagers seem resigned to the yanquis among them, as they were resigned to the Spanish before. Little boys are throwing a white ball back and forth with one of the soldiers who wears a leather glove on the hand he catches with. A lieutenant steps down from the house of Ignacio Yambao, the alcalde with the beautiful singing voice who was assassinated after the fiesta of the Ina Poon Bato.

The lieutenant has very green eyes and a blond moustache. The interpreter is a Macabebe, dressed in the yanqui uniform but for gray trousers and a red band around his hat. The Macabebe pokes Diosdado with a stick and indicates a stool placed in front of the lieutenant, who sits on a dusty friar chair and glares at him. Diosdado sits stiffly and looks at the ground like any terrified peasant, twisting his battered straw hat in his fingers, answering the questions in a respectful monotone.

“Who were you fighting with?” barks the Macabebe, first in Pampangano and then in heavily accented Tagalog.

“I was taken from my village, jefe . They tore up my cédula and forced me to go away with them,” he answers, in Tagalog. “They called the leader El Porvenir.”

“That is a lie.”

“As you say, jefe . They told me I was fighting for our nation—”

“You are a bandit and you should be hanged from a tree. Where were you born?”

“I was born in Moncada, in Tarlac, but we moved to San Felipe when I was small. I made my First Communion there.”

“You are a liar and a heathen.”

“As you say, jefe .”

Behind them, next to the little chapel, he sees the cemetery. He wonders if the tall marker with the angel on top belongs to the alcalde . He turns to the lieutenant and tries to grin as idiotically as possible.

“ Americano mucho boom-boom,” he says. “ Filipino mucho vamos .”

If things get really ugly he will tell them where the head of Columbus is buried.

“What is this one’s name?” growls the lieutenant, pen poised over a ledger book held in his lap.

“How were you baptized?” asks the Macabebe.

There is a price on his head throughout the province, even a picture of his face, badly drawn, tacked to the telegraph poles.

“My mother named me Bayani,” he says in Tagalog, raising his eyes to meet the unsettling gaze of the American officer. There is no way to trust a man whose eyes are so green. “Bayani Pandoc.”

There are bats gathering in the acacias in the evening as he heads back to reclaim his sandals, screeching, squirming, the branches bending with the weight of them. Diosdado pauses to wrap the thirty pieces of Mexican silver they gave him for the rifle tightly in a handkerchief, making sure the packet doesn’t jingle, and stuffs it down the front of his shirt. The yanquis cannot be everywhere, and there are bandits on the road.

There are too many trains. Royal takes the Ninth Avenue elevated all the way down to Park Row and then transfers to the Myrtle Avenue line that crosses the bridge to Brooklyn. They have moved three times since the last address Junior wrote them at, no trace in those sorry buildings but Jubal able to come up with another possibility through Alma Moultrie. It has been too long. Dragging his feet after mustering out at Fort Reno, sick again, feeling like it was hopeless, something gone forever. The bridge makes him sweat, so high over the water, the train wobbling as it speeds across, passing wagons and carriages and even some people walking beside the tracks. San Francisco was enough of a mare’s nest, but this city, spread across rivers, looming over your head, even tunneling under your feet — the idea of finding anybody in it seems impossible, the kind of lucky accident that never happens to him. People here move all the time, says Jubal, move up, move down, move out, Jubal himself just resettled to the far north of the main island.

That any city can have two hundred streets all in a row, and more without numbers below those, is more than he wants to think about.

One day at a time, the doctor at the military hospital told him. You’re still carrying the worst of the tropics in that body.

Royal gets out at Navy Street, climbs down the stairs, and walks to a large park a block away. He needs more time to think. If they haven’t moved, if she is still there—

He crosses the long, grassy rectangle of a park to a bench that faces a large stone crypt and sits.

TO THE VICTIMS OF THE PRISON SHIPS

— is inscribed on the side of the crypt. Royal wonders who the victims were, whose ships they were on.

There are women pushing babies in perambulators, and there are children running free, some making a hoop roll with a stick, and people sitting on the other benches alongside the path that snakes down the terraced hill to a large circular walk. It is a relief, this green after the brick maze of the island, but he doesn’t feel any more sure of what he is here for.