John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

His sovereign power, without our aid

Made us of clay, and formed us men

And when, like wandering sheep we strayed

He brought us to the fold again!

A phalanx of no-hopers slump behind the ranks, only a few of them clapping in time with the bass drum. A big olive-skinned man in a long coat and bowler hat brings up the rear, walking with his hands in his pockets. He sees Hod watching.

“Soup, soap, and salvation,” he says, nodding forward to the marching Army.

“Don’t know about soap or salvation,” says Hod, “but I haven’t eaten all day.”

“They got their barracks just up here, with a kitchen attached. Yesterday it was beef stew.”

Hod falls in with the man, an Indian from Wisconsin who says he’s called Big Ten.

“I got an Indin name too,” he says, and then makes a sound with lots of parts to it.

“What’s that mean?”

“Walks Far—” he deadpans, “—But Would Sooner Ride.”

Major Tannenbaum, in charge of divine inspiration while they wolf down their day-old bread and Scotch broth, is the scourge of demon rum.

“It is the weakness, the craving for libation that has dragged you to this depth,” he booms, striding back and forth in front of the benches in the damp basement commissary. “The hop and the grape are seeds of the Devil, and their essence his liquid fire. Satan is a deceiver who goes by many a name. Gin is his name, whis key is his name, beer is his name—”

“Poor bastard wants a drink so bad he can taste it,” mutters Big Ten to Hod as they empty their tins. “Lot of these gospel sharks used to swim in the stuff.”

“— rum is his name, schnapps is his name—”

“He’s getting soused just saying the kinds.”

“—and wine— wine is his name, present even at the Papist Holy Com-munion—”

“You trying to get to the goldfields?” asks Hod.

“Hell no. Just trying to keep my head above water. But the only thing I got going in this town is I’m not a Chinaman.”

“The Devil floats in on a sea of alcohol,” says Major Tannenbaum, “captures your soul, and sails away.”

“How bout you?”

Hod can feel the Indian studying the cuts around his eyes, the bruises on his cheeks. The rest of the men enduring the sermon are a beat-looking lot, red-nosed and palsy-handed, the walking wounded slurping barley soup under a smoke-darkened banner that reads JOIN THE RANKS OF THE SAVED. Hard to say just when the older fellas’ lives went off the tracks, thinks Hod, but the younger ones don’t look much different than him.

Tannenbaum shakes his fist in the air. “He who renounces drink renounces Satan!”

“I’m not a Chinaman either,” says Hod, and wipes the bowl clean with the last of his bread.

If the coolies are curious about Diosdado they don’t show it. There are four of them who have bribed their way on board, squatting around the light of an oil lamp in a tiny clearing in the hanging forest of bananas in the hold, rolling dice on a jute sack and sing-songing in a Cantonese dialect it is nearly impossible for him to make out. Something about what they’ll do when back in their villages, what big men they’ll be. Diosdado is relieved to note the amounts they are gaming for are small, none of them likely to lose too much of their hard-earned contract pay on the quick voyage home.

The freighter rolls heavily, and Diosdado feels, for the hundredth time on this trip, as if he will be violently ill.

The hold smells of coal dust, ripening bananas, and, he imagines, his own foul stench. Somehow the photographs of the execution appeared in Manila sooner than Scipio had promised and Diosdado was forced to spend a night and a day on the river hiding beneath a pile of zacate on a stinking lancha till he was finally transferred, stuffed into a packing crate, to the hold of the banana boat. It was dark, of course, and surprisingly cold, and though his muscles cramped and his imagination grew morbid and he wet himself more than once, he obeyed his instructions not to try to break his way out of the crate. Hours in the close air of the wooden tomb before the jolt of the engine as they got under way and then, seemingly, more long hours of sickening pitch and roll.

“Just in time,” said the captain, holding his nose when the lid was pried off. “This one’s already ripe.”

Diosdado sits on his damp, half-filled sack of belongings on the floor of the hold, swallowing constantly to try to control his stomach, which seems to be climbing up into his gorge. The huge stems of pale-green bananas tied to the overhead rails swing in unison with each roll of the freighter. He shuts his eyes tightly and tries to imagine something else, something not pitching or rolling, something planted in the unmoving earth.

It is mango time in Zambales.

By now the first of the crop will be ripe, half the tree bearing each season, or trees bearing on both sides and then “sleeping” for a year. His mother used to put him in shirts that were already stained with the juice to go out and play, the fruit surrendering, stem snapping easily when they were truly ripe and they’d grab some of the drops that had been bruised and compromised by insects and hurl them up into the mass above, trying to catch whatever pristine ones fell before they hit the ground. Insects in the air, sugar bees that hadn’t been seen since the clusters of little yellow-brown flowers had clothed the trees, and the harvesters working their sunkits from morning to late noon, the sweetest time to pick, probing the long bamboo poles till another plump fruit dropped into the sack fastened at the end. If they were feeling lazy they’d only swipe some from the huge baskets covered with jute cloth where the fruit to be sold locally was left to finish, waving away the bees and grabbing and running, the boys, bellies tight with fruit, always happy to be with Diosdado because his father was king here and they couldn’t be punished until later. They’d use their knives to peel the skin back then suck the flesh off all around, down to the hueso , fingers sticking together till they were wet with the juice of the next one.

“You see how they grow,” Don Nicasio would always point out when they passed a tree where the carabao were allowed to ripen on the stem. “See how they are red on the side that faces the sun and yellow on the side that faces the tree?”

“Yes, Father,” Diosdado would say, mango-colored at the fingertips and with a mancha the shape of Luzon on the front of his shirt. “I see it.”

“This is how we must be in life. We must adjust ourselves to what we are facing.”

And that is Don Nicasio. A drinker of imported Madeira , a backslapper to governors and priests, deferential to anyone with ties to what he reverently toasts as “ nuestra gran Madre al otro lado de las mares ,” though when he crossed those seas to visit the Great Mother they thought he was a chino and refused to seat him in fine restaurants unless he was the guest of a peninsular distinguido . He has many such patrons, though, Spaniards who he has helped make wealthy in the islands and is helping still, a scientist with crops, a genius at trade — maybe this is the chino in him — and an able hand at cards or billiards.

By the time of the Katipunero uprising they were having their arguments — actually only one long argument, interrupted when Diosdado went off to the Ateneo, and resumed whenever he returned on a visit.

“I’m sending you to school to study the Spanish,” Don Nicasio would growl, “not to play around with filibusteros. If you want to get yourself killed you can do it without wasting my money.”