John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“Somethin for the kiddies?”

It is a small man, maybe forty, white, with a crate strapped around his neck. WORLD OF FUN say the red letters painted on the front and sides. The man steps up and drops one knee onto the grass so Royal can see into the box.

“Got a little bit of everything here, dirt cheap.”

There are tops and jacks and small wooden horses and rubber balls and throwing rings and a paddle-whacker and five metal soldiers, regular infantry. One of them, only one, is a tan color, something like Junior’s shading. Royal points to it.

“Aint that the nuts?” says the man. “A one-of-a-kind item.”

Royal lifts it out of the crate to study the face. It is surprisingly heavy for a toy. The eyes are not bugged, the lips not bloated like the golliwogs sold on almost every street corner here. Just a colored soldier.

“How much?”

“Fitty cents,” says the older man. Royal gives him a look.

“Hey, like I said, it’s one-of-a-kind.”

Royal pays the man and sets the soldier on the bench. He sits. The other people in the park, who know why they are here, go about their business.

Royal sits and watches the carefree people on the green. The sun feels good against his skin as it dips lower and lower in the sky. They are all different colors up here, sometimes all jammed together in the same trolley car, and there must be rules about it but not so clear as back home. What was home. The shadow of the prisoners’ crypt is very long when he stands to go back to the elevated train. It was never in the cards and time passing doesn’t change anything. Spend the night with Jubal, tell him they’ve moved on, gone who knows where, say goodbye the next morning and then — what?

Royal realizes he’s left the iron soldier on the bench. He goes back and when he picks it up he is suddenly ashamed. He can’t leave it here, and riding back over the river with it sitting beside him—

A bullet in the head will only kill you, Sergeant Jacks used to say, but cowardice in the field will hound you into the grave and beyond.

It is a street of three-story brownstone buildings with front stoops leading down to the sidewalk. There are children everywhere, mostly colored, running and playing and talking in groups, ignoring Royal as he searches for the number Jubal told him.

There is a middling-sized girl at the top of the steps, minding a very tiny girl with her hair twisted into braids and red ribbons tied at the ends.

“The Luncefords live here?”

The girl looks at him sideways, suspicious.

“They aint in.”

“But they do live here?” The tiny girl is staring at the iron figure in his hand.

“Doctor out with his bag. An Miz Jessie workin.”

It would be easier, better probably, if they had moved on.

“You mind if I sit?”

“S’a free country.”

Royal sits a couple steps below them. The tiny one is pointing at the soldier now, making sounds, so he sets it in front of her. She smiles and grabs around its body, maybe not strong enough to lift it, and begins to talk to it. Not words, really, but with the music of a conversation.

“Miss Jessie has a job?”

“Right now she learnin to be a typewriter girl.”

Royal looks into the tiny one’s face and counts the time. She seems too little to be three, but her eyes are old.

“If you sick,” says the big girl, “Doctor don’t usually get back till dinner.”

She is halfway down the street before he knows it’s her. She is wearing spectacles and no gloves and doesn’t look like a girl anymore. Jessie slows as she sees him, then comes forward. She looks up to the top of the stoop.

“Thank you, Berenice.”

“Night, Miz Jessie.”

The girl goes inside. Jessie steps up past him and lifts the tiny one into her arms.

“Hope you don’t mind,” says Royal. “I was visiting my brother—”

“This is Minnie,” Jessie tells him, holding his eye and placing the tiny girl in his lap. “We have been waiting so long for you.”

They are putting her feet in the shoes while Harry sets up the camera. The crowd in Luna Park is growing, held back at what the policemen think is a safe distance. Harry helps lift the instrument onto the tripod and levels it. A trainer with a wooden crook taps the huge beast on her rear leg. She shifts it and a pair of nervous-looking roustabouts quickly strap on the copper-lined shoe. She seems impassive, obeying each new tap from the trainer until all the shoes are secured, a thick hawser rope around her neck running taut to a donkey engine on one side and a telegraph pole on the other. If the cyanide carrots have affected her at all she doesn’t show it.

They petted her, Topsy, only last summer, Brigid commenting on the bristles on the top of her trunk, on the incredible heat coming up through her skin. Technicians step in warily to attach cables to each of the shoes, cables leading back to the electrical plant that powers the million lights of Coney every evening. Harry was there in the stadium on the last day of the Pan when they tried to shock Jumbo II, another man-killer. There for the smoke and the sparks and the horrible trumpeting of the beast and then the laughter of the crowd when the giant animal remained standing, angrier than ever. The price of admission was refunded.

“I hope they do a better job of it on Czolgosz,” quipped the wag in the next seat.

Jubal is ready at the wagon with another roll of film in case the first jolt fails and they choose to try again. Harry feels his stomach flutter, nervous, unsure if it is because of the fiasco in Buffalo last year or because this is his first time as operator. Ed Porter is supervising, having him roll a few feet as the mammoth was led up to the shoes. Porter is watching for the signal from the technicians.

The owners of Luna Park wanted to hang Topsy, but there were protests that hanging is barbaric, a relic of a bygone age, so Mr. Edison has stepped in to volunteer his expertise.

The eyes are so tiny for the bulk of it, as if a smaller and very intelligent creature is trapped within the monstrous body. The eyes of the people in the crowd, wide with anticipation, seem enormous by comparison. If there was a second camera Harry would love to do a panoramic of them — begin on Topsy’s tiny, disinterested eye, then use the pan-head to circle slowly, registering the face of every human witness in the front ranks of the throng, holding on this woman in the purple velvet hat, or perhaps that worried little boy clutching his father’s massive hand, holding on a human face as it contemplates the world’s largest land mammal felled by George Westinghouse’s alternating current.

Or pan a little farther to show Jubal at the wagon, back turned to the event, holding his horse by the bridle and covering its eyes with his hat.

“Get ready,” says Porter. The technician by the cable-join relays a signal from the dynamo, windmilling his arm. Harry begins to turn the crank, steady, the rhythm of it like breathing now, trying not to let his nerves push him faster. The camera operator is the God of Time, Porter always says, the power to speed or slow events resting in the palm of his hand. Topsy begins to tap the ground with her trunk, as if searching for something, and Harry remembers the song—

You absent-minded beggar—

The young men on the ferry were singing it and he was worried it would offend his Brigid, but she sang along. They have been back here just once, Brigid attracted to novelty but even more delighted to witness the joy of others. On their trip to the Falls she was constantly looking out for other honeymooning couples.

“Do ye think,” she’d shout to him, over the roar of the great waters, each time she spotted a likely pair, “they could possibly be as happy as we are?”