John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

After the little trial the owner say that mule so ornery he wish somebody would steal it. Then they give him more years than he ever expect to live and send him into the pines with an iron ball tween his legs.

“Train pull up in that station,” says Coop, leaning in tight, “I head straight for my Alma.”

She looks over his shoulder to the carriage house. “Light’s out now. Maybe Wicklow gone home.”

“I wait for you there, sweet girl.”

Alma touches his face with her hand. None of the ones who live outside the fort would ever do that, maybe not even if you paid them.

“I’ll look in on my people,” says Alma, “and get out there when I can.”

Miss Dolly St. Claire appears stage right in a spot, the light dimming on the minstrels behind her. Harry helped put the overhead lighting in here, devising a control box that can be operated from the back of the theater, and is gratified to see it put to use.

The soubrette strolls beneath a parasol in a ruffled lavender dress, a bowler-sporting dandy on her arm, singing in a coy, lilting voice—

Take it back, take it back, take it back, Jack

For gold can never buy me

“Maybe she’s a Silverite,” quips Niles, cocking his head to appraise her the way he does with new women. Niles is two years younger and has always been the brash one, the one who says what’s on his mind and leaps before he looks. A large sum of money went missing from the Judge’s safe the day he disappeared without a word, and it was two months before the letter arrived from San Francisco explaining how he was on the treasure quest and meant only to save the Judge the bother of sending him his monthly stipend for the next two years, taking it in advance.

Take it back, take it back, take it back

Promise you’ll be true

“I’d promise her anything to get to Heaven.” Niles fingers his moustache, cocks his head the other way. Harry thinks the prospecting trip was less a bid for fortune than the consequence of Niles’s sudden breaking of engagement with Mae Dupree and her father’s vow to “horsewhip the scoundrel.” Mae is married now, to a Lassiter, and all that has settled down.

Many of the audience join in on the chorus—

So take it back, take it back, take it back, Jack

Take back your gold!

It is the dandy’s turn then, a round-shouldered tenor in a light blue suit, wearing a red carnation in his lapel, neither young nor old. The voice that comes from him, though, is like a separate thing, like a beautiful soaring bird—

A little maiden climbed an old man’s knees

Begged for a story: “Do, Uncle, please.

Why are you single, why live alone?

Have you no babies, have you no home?”

Mae had been Harry’s first, at least in his heart. He had spent many a night extolling her virtues to his younger brother, asking his advice in matters of strategy, planning how to begin his campaign to win her heart. “It just happened,” Niles told him after the first time he’d seen them walking together at Lake Waccamaw. “Of course if you want me to back away, old boy, and give you a clear field—”

It was exactly what he wanted, but then he was cross with Mae for preferring Niles and pretended not to care and then miserably resigned himself to their engagement. And when he went to her house after his brother’s abandonment, hoping perhaps to make his own desires known, she had refused to see him.

That’s why I’m lonely, no home at all—

I broke her heart, pet — after the ball

He resolved to cold-shoulder his brother on his less than triumphant return, but Niles was deathly pale, coughing like a consumptive, his plucky grin so innocent of malice, his exaggerations so childlike, that they were immediately fast friends again. If Harry envies anything it is not his brother’s looks or that he was born with normal legs or even his dalliance with Mae Dupree, but the sheer adventure Niles has experienced at so young an age, traveling up north and out west and to the frozen Yukon while Harry has barely been out of the state. That, he hopes, is about to change.

Harry joins in the chorus with half the audience—

After the ball is over, after the break of morn

After the dancers’ leaving, after the stars are gone

Many a heart is aching, if you could read them all

Many the hopes that have vanished — after the ball!

A pair of Hibernians in green checked suits enter now, the orchestra playing The Irish Washerwoman as Pat hauls Mike out in a wheelbarrow, both wearing baldpates and flaming red muttonchops. Pat stumbles and dumps Mike in a heap at center stage.

“Ye clumsy Oirish fool, ye’ve broken me neck!”

“And how can ye tell, Mike?”

“Just lookit it!” Mike stands, his head canted sharply off to the left. “I can’t put it sthraight atall.”

WHOMP! Pat gives him a wallop with his fist that snaps Mike’s head all the way around to the right.

“Now it’s stuck on the ither side—”

WHOMP! The cymbalist joins the pit drummer as Pat throws another haymaker, this one knocking Mike’s head straight. He wiggles his jaw, checks his nose.

“Ye sh’d be a physician, Pat — ye’ve got a mother’s touch.”

“Did she bate ye, the auld woman?”

“Only when she could catch me, Pat. Ah, but she was a lovely woman — she passed into a better world just the other night.”

“Me condolences, Mike. Did she say anything before she died?”

“Say anything? She nivver shut her trap fer sixty years!”

The drummer cracks the rim of his snare.

“I hate to tap you again, old man,” says Niles without turning his head to Harry, “but I’m afraid that once more I’ve been caught short.”

Harry has managed to save most of his monthly stipend, left from their mother’s estate, while Niles was squandering his own “advance” in the Frozen North.

“You’re not gambling again?”

Niles flashes his dazzling smile, spreads his hands. “Life. Expenses. I am not the paragon of thrift that my dear brother is — what can I say?”

“I had to send me brother Frank a tellygram to give him the hard tidins. Did ye know they charge ye a nickel a word now? A long-winded feller could cost himself a great deal of the auld spondoolacs.”

“And what did ye say?”

“ Ma’s dead .”

“That’s it? Yer only livin mother who worked her poor fingers to the nub to provide fer ye, gone to her reward, may the good Lord bless her soul, and all ye can say is ‘Ma’s dead’?”

“The very thing the tellygraph feller sez. ‘See here,’ he sez, ‘a mother’s got a right to a proper hewlogy. I’ll give ye three more words, gratis .’ ”

“ Gratis , is it?”

“That’s Latin fer ye don’t have to pay.”

“I know what it manes , ye great flamin eejit. What did ye add to yer tellygram?”

“ Ma’s dead. Bed fer sale .”

A big thunk on the bass drum as Pat gives Mike a roundhouse smack, Mike rolling backward and springing up on his feet to join Pat, singing and jigging as the orchestra backs them with the tune—

Mrs. Murphy had a party

Just about a week ago

Everything was plentiful

The Murphys they’re not slow

“What do you say, Brother?” Niles continues hopefully, turning to Harry and looking especially repentant. “You know what a hopeless case I am with finances.”

Harry decides to make him work for it a little. “How much?”

“Whatever you can spare.”

“Have you talked to the Judge?”