John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“This here just come.”

The telegraph office won’t send their white boys to the colored houses, but their colored messengers are allowed to deliver to whites and get in the habit of coming to the back. He looks cute in his little hat, wears uniform pants too long and shoes too big. Hattie can’t shut her mouth bragging about the boy, maybe because her older one is the worst hophead in the whole Brooklyn section.

“It need a reply?”

“No M’am.”

She gives Clerow a penny from the dish she keeps by the door and steps back in, worried. Before the Spanish War she would have just put it by Doctor’s plate at breakfast, but now, with Junior still in uniform and so many sick up north on Long Island, she hurries through the kitchen to pull the skillet off the heat. A telegram is not a letter. A letter, with Junior’s handwriting on the front, means he is well enough to write it, no matter how long ago it was sent. The news inside might be bad but not the worst. A telegram is short, maybe just one hard fact in it, and Alma keeps it in her apron pocket, unread, till she is upstairs.

Doctor is doing his men’s business behind a locked door so she brings it to Mrs. Lunceford, sitting in her bedroom in her dressing gown, looking pretty by the window that takes the morning light.

“This just came.”

Mrs. Lunceford looks at the paper like it might be a snake in her hand.

“Leave it on the dressing table, Alma.”

Except for Jessie, the Luncefords don’t want her witness to their private life. The Hightowers, the white folks she kept house for just before, would scream and holler and curse and then make up with tears and little private names as if Alma wasn’t standing there an arm’s-length away from them. And then that mess working for the Judge and his boys — well. But she has never been seated in a room with either Doctor or Mrs. Lunceford, has never been taken into their confidence.

And still knows everything she needs to about them.

Alma waits halfway down the stairs to listen, hand gripping the banister to keep from shaking, until she hears Mrs. Lunceford cry out “Oh, wonderful!” and then she is called and rushes back up to find Mrs. L and Jessie and then Doctor, all excited and smiling cause Junior is visiting them on leave this very day.

“It’s sent from Washington,” says Doctor, scrutinizing the little note. “He must have just wired it from Union Station on his way.”

“You’re certain it’s today? There’s only the one sentence.”

“With telegrams you pay by the word,” Doctor explains. “It’s a virtue to be con cise .”

“We need to have something special—”

Jessie takes the telegram and reads it. “ Coming today on leave arrive 4:20 Love Jr. It doesn’t say how long he’ll be here.” She shoots a look to Alma.

“Alma,” Mrs. L says again, “we’ll have to have something special.”

“No trouble, M’am,” she smiles, and hurries back down the stairs. It will be trouble, with the wash and breakfast not even started and the extra cleaning that will be expected, but she feels lightheaded as she steps back into the kitchen. Junior can’t be the only soldier on the train.

Jessie nibbles toast. Mother is going on about what needs to be done, what needs to be cleaned, and Father has already gotten his Lodge brothers busy setting up a reception for Junior tonight.

Their eyes meet first — his are wounded, smoldering with unexpressed longing, hers misting with the sudden release from her lonely vigil. He crosses the room with long strides, ignoring all the others, no object in his mind but her, the image he had carried through the hell of battle now real, made flesh before him, and taking her, who he has barely touched before, taking her full in his arms—

It does not seem possible, after all her thinking, all the scenarios, each different in at least one detail, that she really will see him, Royal, again, that he is a person who walks the earth and not a character from books.

“I’m just so relieved he’s out of that horrible quarantine,” says Mother. “The conditions he described—”

“Scandalous neglect,” says Father, getting up to go on his rounds. “If the stories you read about how badly they’ve served the white soldiers are true, you can imagine what our colored boys have been through.”

The last she’d heard of Royal was in one of Junior’s letters. Failing had been mentioned, and We can only pray . Nothing from Royal himself, though Alma said she asked the carrier each day when he came by if there was anything for her. Alma never got mail at home, she said — her street, just an alley really, was not on the official route. But surely if something terrible had happened since Junior’s letter he would have found a way to let her know.

There were stories told about the young woman, about her silent, almost mute demeanor, the sadness that always seemed to fall upon a room she had entered, the black gowns, always black, that she wore. The stories were only conjecture, of course, attempts to fathom why one so young, one so seemingly full of life should have come to be this mysterious, selfless Sister of Help in such a remote corner of the world—

No. It couldn’t be. She would have felt something, would have sensed it somehow. Her mother is right — there is so much to be done. If Royal is in Wilmington and Junior does not bring him home, how will they see each other? The one time Jessie mentioned him, in passing, at the dinner table there was a long, strained silence until Father began complaining again about the black layabouts in Brooklyn who made his vaccination work so difficult. What if Royal is already sent away, off to another post in another forsaken country? Or still in the death-camp in Hempstead?

“I suppose he’ll be different,” says Mother. “A man on his own.”

Jessie lays her toast down and hurries upstairs to study her wardrobe.

Alma throws the last of the linens into the boiling water, poking them under with the paddle, adds a double handful of soap flakes, then stirs the mass of it around till soap foam comes to the surface. She has the shirtwaists, petticoats, and collars in a pile by the starch tub, has Doctor’s clothes all separated the way he asked her to after the smallpox hit in January. She has to lean over the kettle for leverage, working the paddle with both hands, and the rising steam wets her face and forces her eyes shut. It’s a relief when she hears Honniker’s man down the street and can leave it for a moment.

Alma pulls her wet shirt away from her body, smooths it down, and walks around the house. Honniker’s man, Simon, tall, gap-toothed, cinnamon colored, has a bell on his wagon so he doesn’t need to call out. There are always a half-dozen dogs, strays mostly, following him around town, though he swears he never throws them a scrap.

“Alma Moultrie, needs some poultry,” he smiles when she steps out to the curb and he pulls the reins in.

“Today you right,” she says to his usual greeting. “Two big fryers.”

“Company coming.” Simon leans back to uncover the birds and Alma picks out a pair. Honniker mostly sells to white folks, but you can buy what he calls the “colored cuts,” the head and trotters and innards, out the back door or off Simon’s wagon. Doctor draws the line at anything below bacon or cured ham, though. “If these low-class negroes attended to their diet,” he says, “they wouldn’t fall ill all the time.”

“We got Mr. Lunceford Junior coming back from the war. Usually I’d make him a stew, but that’s more time than I got today.”

Simon wraps the birds in butcher paper, hands them down. “So after you got your family all squared away here, nine, ten o’clock, think you like to step out with me?”