A Moment in the Sun (19 page)

“If there were boxcars available,” called Bill Hogan just before they pulled out in the early afternoon, “I believe this whole town of Billings would throw in and ride to Washington with us!”

The people cheered and little boys ran alongside the train as long as they could, then flung handfuls of ballast gravel at the deputy train when it skulked after a few minutes later.

They’d lifted some rubber hose from one of the shops in the yard and twice stopped for the men to run out and siphon water, once from the Bighorn River and once from Sarpy Creek, their pursuers stopping back just within sight, going so slow now and carrying such a light load compared to the Liberty Train that their engine was barely thirsty.

“Either they’ve been ordered to escort us out of the state or they’ve got somebody waiting ahead,” said General Hogan. “You boys be ready for anything.”

The engine hauling them now had been waiting to be serviced, its metal parts screaming as they ground together ungreased, and they limped into Forsyth to find another. But the only engine waiting there had the throttle taken out of it and the couple mechanics in their ranks had to work in lantern light to pull the one out of their present ride and switch it over. There was no cheering crowd in the yard.

“Word come through they’s government troops on their way from Miles City,” said the station agent, watching the mechanics with his hands stuck in his back pockets. “If I was you fellas, I’d make scarce.”

But they had stuck together this far and weren’t about to be scattered. So when the Federal soldiers shown up and surrounded them, not one man among them tried to run.

“We commandeered this equipment in the name of the American working man,” Curly Armstrong announced to the major who stepped forward to demand their surrender. “And we’d appreciate it if you’d peel that mess of scabs and reprobates that’s lurking behind off our backs.”

But the major only put them under arrest and crowded them back into the boxcars to wait for the engine to be ready to haul them to Fort Keough. Coxey would have to do without them in the nation’s capital. Hod sat in the crush of silent, sullen men on the board floor and imagined his name being scribed on a blacklist by every mine super from Butte to Bisbee, and figured to be among those picked to draw a month or two in the Helena slammer. He didn’t figure on the three more years of jacking rock and half-dozen borrowed names it took him to put a decent prospector’s stake together.

Bill Hogan, feeling betrayed by the flag that hung from the bulkhead wall, attempted to reason with the sergeant guarding the boxcar he’d been locked in with Hod and eighty fellow Commonwealers. “You are aware,” he said, “that you are bound to serve the United States government and its citizens, not the Railroad Trust.”

“That’s an interesting theory,” the sergeant replied, picking his nose. “You ought to write a book about it.”

Hod waits until all the gold and the body of Fritz Stammerjohn has been unloaded before leaving the steamer. Nobody is waiting for him on the Alaska Dock. He hurries up the steep hill and away from the
Utopia
in the light rain, carrying nothing, trying to mix in with the crowd on the streets. Everything south of the Deadline has been rebuilt in brick since the ’89 fire, the box-houses moved into basements, with barkers and brass bands trying to lure stampeders in for one last blowout before they can escape Seattle. Yesler Way, the old skid road, has had cobblestones laid in since he left, but there are still tramps loitering outside the Occidental Hotel, hanging a story on whoever passes by. Hod has a ten-dollar bill in his pocket, his parting gift from Jeff Smith, and both sides of his face are still discolored from the fight.

They are advertising for porters at the Occidental and for an experienced mixologist at Morrison’s Saloon and for deck apes on the steamship line, but he is white and doesn’t drink liquor and all the steamers are heading for Skaguay where he is wanted for murder. The skid-road palaces have the same music coming out of them and the passing stampeders the same look of bewildered hopefulness as when he left, but there are no dogs running free in Seattle, every stray with four legs under it having been snatched up and sold as a champion sled-puller, and there is a streetcar rolling down Yesler full of women not for rent. Hod is about to turn onto Second Avenue when he runs into a Songster Brigade blasting in the other direction.

Before Jehovah’s awful throne

Ye nations bow with sacred joy

Know that the Lord is God alone

He can create, He can destroy

—sing the uniformed marchers, the horns behind them flat and loud, swinging four abreast onto the big street—

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.

PERISHABLE

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.”

“But our country—”

“Country? What is it called on the map?
Las Filipinas
—a group of islands named after a Spanish king. There was no country before they came and there is not one now, only bands of wild men fighting other wild men for the right to remain ignorant.”

He had been Diosdado’s hero once, the man who knew things, who moved in the world, the man the poor of San Epifanio and its environs came to for help, meekly, hat brims twisted in their hands as they muttered their requests, barely able to meet his eyes. A generous man, a man who advanced pay to those who needed it, who paid for the most elaborate mass on holy days. The Concepcións had their own pew reserved at the front left of the church, his mother God-struck after her second son, Diosdado’s brother, died in infancy, rocking slightly and murmuring the Rosary throughout, the carved ebony beads draped over her fingers, Don Nicasio erect and motionless, watched and admired but seemingly oblivious to the others standing crowded behind him. Diosdado imagined his father’s talks with God as hearty affairs over cigars and brandy, ending with Don Nicasio’s habitual firm handshake and meeting of the eye.

“
So—we understand each other?
”

There are boat horns now, distinguishable over the engine thrum and the constant drumming of the pump pistons, and Diosdado hopes it means they are entering the harbor. The coolies roll up their possessions and tie them into bundles, still talking excitedly. Even if they have hundreds of miles yet to travel, they are going home. Diosdado is going only to a certain spot in the foreign city, to wait for someone to come and give him a clue about what the rest of his life will be. The word must have reached Zambales by now, his mother on her knees praying for his safety and his soul, while Don Nicasio paces and curses, asking the heavens to explain how he could have fathered an idiot and a criminal.