John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

Oh, he can draw a mule, all right. His Democratic donkey is second only to old Nast’s, and the Chief loved his Bryan riding backward on a Populist nag. But he likes to think he is more an interpreter of events, an editorialist, colleague to Davis in his pith helmet and Crane and Creelman, to Stephen Bonsal and Poultney Bigelow and the other correspondents who stand querulous in the seething mass of blue uniforms, pumping the regulars for information and priming the volunteers for quotables, colleague to men of ideas, rather than a mere draftsman.

“Look there,” he said at one point, and Fitz was obliged to reckon with the despatch boat chugging past with a half-dozen Kodak fiends and the Vitagraph man cranking his bulky apparatus, all capturing the bedlam on celluloid. “There’s your future, old man,” he added, in what was meant to be a kidding tone. “You’ll go the way of the buffalo.”

So no bloated equines, but he has done a sketch of one of the scurrying land crabs, terrible little brutes with their eyes, in perpetual astonishment, suspended above their bodies on little stalks. Very promising — perhaps a Spanish diplomat, or one of their key generals, or even Spain itself as a crab, side-stepping in terror beneath Uncle’s giant impending footstep. It is a shame they’ve recalled General Weyler, the “Butcher” sobriquet license for wonderfully gory analogies, cleaver in hand, dripping innocent Cuban blood, clasping horrified black-eyed maidens to his offal-smeared apron.

Keep Your Claws Off! Uncle will say, or some play on scuttling .

It needs work.

Wooden crates of ammunition are being hauled ashore, negro soldiers staggering wet to their armpits, while sergeants everywhere bark regiment numbers and company letters and order their milling warriors to fall in. The men are casual, light-hearted even, no doubt relieved to be making the landing without Spanish interference and exuberant to be free of the stifling, overcrowded transports. Like a football rally, American boys all in blue, or an especially crowded 4th of July picnic, and if not for the steaming heat you could imagine it was the Jersey shore.

He ran into Rudy Dirks in Tampa, Dirks who draws the Katzenjammers, wearing the uniform of one of the volunteer regiments, and Post who’d sketched at the Journal is here with the 71st New York, a private in arms. Taking things a bit far, he feels, though maybe for the German it is a declaration of his patriotism. Personally, he needs to take the Olympian view, to distill the essence of a situation, to perch on a general’s shoulder, if need be, and view the larger canvas. He has done several drawings of Shafter, his favorite the one where the commander’s bulk is sinking the flagship of the invasion fleet. But the Old Man has so nurtured this war, is so thoroughly in the jingo camp, that in everything he’s submitted Shafter is merely “substantial” rather than the gout-ridden colossus he’s made to appear in the Havana papers.

In the drawing, now, the insurrecto is scrawnier, clinging onto Uncle’s massive thigh, not even a machete to protect himself. And his face—

The Chief’s favorite, Davenport, is not here, nor is Fred Opper or any of the other big-money cartoonists. He is the only one who has made the voyage, not in uniform but here nonetheless, with beasts of burden still washing ashore, some of the colored Ninth detailed to drag them out of the surf. The native militia are offering doughboys huge green bananas from their flour-sack carryalls, offering short stalks of sugarcane and exotic fruit, hoping to trade for tinned beef, and the strip of beach is just as crowded and disorganized as the dock at Tampa the day they left. This, this whole thing, could be a disaster, a folly. A great mulatto approaches him, smiling, holding out one of the oblong yellow-green fruits.

“ Mango ?” says the giant insurrecto .

He waves his pen in the air to decline. “No, thank you very much.” He tilts his head back and closes his eyes then, feels the relief of a slight breeze off the ocean, and tries to imagine the Cuban face.

It is unseasonably cool, chilly even, a stiff breeze coming in off the Cape Fear as the cab rolls along Water Street to the train station. It will be colder up there, Harry knows, snow eventually, and his coat will be inadequate. Perhaps his first purchase in the great city. He has only the new-bought wall trunk and his old leather satchel, amazed at how few possessions seemed vital enough to warrant inclusion. The wheel shop is only padlocked, no sign indicating his absence or likely return.

The familiar sights roll by — Harry knows the owners of most of the commercial properties, the residents of at least half of the private dwellings — and he muses that away from the noise and smell of riverside industry Wilmington is a lovely town. But compared to the northern metropolis he has read and imagined so much about, only that. A town.

He wonders if there will be trees.

The cabman is one of the sullen rather than cheerful types, a tubercular old negro who sighed and staggered dramatically as he lifted the snugly packed trunk into his vehicle. His horse needs washing. The Judge will be at his Front Street club now, trading stories with his contemporaries, and then on to his nap in the leather chair by the south window. Harry’s note, rewritten several times and left at home in the Judge’s box by the door, presents an orderly rationale for his departure. Harry is not, in fact, getting any younger. Opportunities do exist, up there, which may never be available in Wilmington. And it is his own money, after all, that is being ventured, his own life to lead.

And yet he feels furtive as they pass the busy Sprunt works, cotton press slamming bales together, and roll into the yard before the Atlantic Coast Line depot.

“Wait here a moment, please,” he says to the moping cabman as he carefully lowers himself to the ground. Train schedules have been known to change.

He does not recognize the station agent, which is a blessing. Tuck Sim-mons, who mans the booth until noon, is a familiar of the Judge, having procured the position through the old man’s kind agency after his cigar emporium was destroyed, uninsured, in a suspicious blaze. Wilmington is full of such gentlemen, beholden to his father for this or that act of generosity, and as a boy it seemed a wonderful thing. Only lately has it become oppressive, Harry unable to miss, behind the effusive greetings and inquiries as to the Judge’s health, the silent evaluation.

He must be such a disappointment to the old gentleman.

The agent sits behind his window, contemplating the front page of the Messenger and shaking his head.

“Hell in a hand basket,” he mutters before looking up. “Somebody got to make a stand .”

It is suddenly very close, though it is only Harry and the station agent and the empty benches inside. He removes his hat.

“May I inquire,” he begins, though he has three printed schedules folded in his pocket, though he has all but memorized the timetable, “how one would proceed from here to New York City?”

The agent cocks his head to one side, looking Harry over. “My, my, my,” he says, then glances up at something that must be posted on the wall above the window.

“Monday, Wednesday, and Friday there’s a Florida Special coming through, northbound — it leave here at one-ten, stops in Wilson and Rocky Mount before you reach Richmond. At Richmond you change from the ACL to the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac, take you to Washington. From there you switch to the Pennsylvania Railroad, trains to New York nearly every hour.”