A Moment in the Sun (23 page)

“As a private in the infantry.”

“You used to call it Mr. Lincoln’s Army.”

They are all still standing, all but Mrs. Lunceford, who sits in her chair by the silk-covered whatever it is called, a pleasant smile on her face.

“I think he looks splendid, Aaron,” she says. “We should be proud.”

“Mr. Lincoln,” the Doctor continues, seeming to ignore her, “gone these many years, turned to colored troops only as a desperate measure.”

Alma Moultrie steps in with a tray bearing wine and glasses, lays them on a small table that probably has a special name too.

“They both look splendid.”

Royal turns to smile at Mrs. Lunceford and sees that Jessie is looking at him, an unwavering gaze much like her father’s, but there is no challenge in it. Only what—? Admiration? He feels her in the room even when he can’t see her.

“We’re regulars, sir,” he says. “Professional soldiers. If war is declared, the volunteers, whoever they are, will have to wait their turn.”

“So you’re spoiling for a fight?” Again the gaze, challenging, unblinking.
And what have you to do with my son’s reckless decision, young man?

“If a fight presents itself, we’ve been trained to handle it.”

The others, the veterans, give the rookies no end of razzing about how green they are, about their lack of experience, their lack of the true stuff, how they will turn tail and run at the first angry shot. Junior, immune to every hint that he should hide his breeding or at least not wave it around in public, is their special target. Royal hopes for a fight, if only to break up the boredom of drill and detail that makes up their days in the regiment.

“Put a little water in Jessie’s glass before you pour, Alma,” says Dr. Lun-ceford. “I suppose we have to drink a toast to these young fools.”

Junior is beaming. Royal can tell, no matter how stiff and strange these people are, that something has happened between his friend and Dr. Lunceford, an acceptance of some kind. There must be a word for it, a word that means only that thing that has happened and nothing else, but he doesn’t know what it is.

Niles remains tight and distant as the minstrels reappear and trade a few more jokes and then exit gaudily, cakewalking out to
There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.
He holds the pose, never once laughing or commenting during the olios, not when the soubrette reappears in front of the curtain to sing
On the Banks of the Wabash
or the equilibrist and his lovely assistant Rose who tosses Indian clubs for him to juggle while rolling precariously along the edge of the orchestra pit atop a huge medicine ball or the tenor back with a beautiful rendition of
Silver Hairs Among the Gold
that has Harry teary-eyed again or even Gerta Wetzel the Human Pretzel and her grotesque bar act that has the audience wincing and turning their heads away at the most extreme of the contortions or the little fellow in leather breeches and campaign hat who is introduced as the Great Teethadore who Harry supposes is meant to be Roosevelt of New York. The little man’s routine, high-stepping in place and singing
If Uncle Sam Goes Marching into Cuba
, is the only one that doesn’t draw even polite applause, the local folks not sure if it is meant to be funny or patriotic. Niles is still stewing when Perfessor Scipio Africanus steps out for his lecture.

It is Brother Bones again, only now he is wearing the Interlocutor’s frock coat, gripping on to the lapels and striking an orator’s pose. “Ladies and gennlemens, extinguished guests,” he begins, “the tropic of my discoursation tonight is entitled ‘The Enfranchisement of the Lower Orders,’ or ‘How come we gots to let them Irish vote?’ ”

Niles snorts a little laugh through his nose.

“It has come to my retention,” the Perfessor continues, “that this fair city—” and here he pauses to look up at the sports in the balcony, “—aint near as
fair
as it might be.”

The colored sports thinks this is funny, slapping hands on the railing and on each other’s backs. “
Doesn’t nobody but trash go to those shows
,” Alma used to say when she was still with the family, before the incident with Niles. But maybe she only meant among her own people, for nobody in Wilmington would think of Judge Manigault’s boys or the Lassiters or the Bellamys or the de Rossets, all well represented here tonight by their younger generations, as trash. Harry misses Alma—the new one Judge has hired can’t cook much and is painful to look at, with some sort of goiter sticking out on her neck.

“Leastways it don’t look so fair if you is hangin roun City Hall waitin fo a handout or one a them gummint jobs what used to go to members of the Caucasian Persuasion.”

It is maybe too uncomfortably true to get much of a laugh, thinks Harry, but somebody has clearly done their advance work.

“But what I caint unnerstan is how this great big ole city, the largest metropopulist in the Old North State, has got itself one hunnid an sixty-nine saloons and houses of ill dispute—an I been to em
all
, fokes—but only
five
mayors.”

This breaks the house up. There are, in fact, at least five distinct slates of mayor and aldermen claiming the reins of the city, including the one the Judge is backing that just suffered defeat in a Raleigh courtroom. The Judge has no use for the bunch declared winners by the governor, and can rant for hours about the hell there will be to pay if they are allowed to serve out the full two years left in their term.

“This yere is a sorrowful state of affairs,” says the Perfessor, “an I intends to correctify it by thowin my
own
hat into the ring—as soon as I pawns it back fum Mist’ Miller.”

Niles starts to giggle. He owes money to Miller, quite a bit, and has made Harry swear never to reveal to the Judge that his son is in debt to a colored man.

“As the sixth or seventh mayor of this fine city, I promises to do my nutmost to put a chicken in every pot—and for them what aint got no pot, we’s passin em out down to Repubikin Hindquarters tomorrow mo’nin.”

“Ten dollars, then,” says Niles, affably, and holds his hand out without taking his eyes off the stage, as if ten dollars is nothing, as if the hundreds before, yes, it must be hundreds now, have been a passing trifle. Harry feels strange, exchanging money in a public place like a carnival tout, but digs out the bill and lays it in his brother’s hand.

“An since the Consternation of the United States says how it’s the perjority of the people what gets to call the shots, I promises to insinuate Negro Abomination here in Wimminton!”

Boos and hisses now, not all of them good-natured. The Perfessor holds his ground.

“The white fokes has abominated the political spear here in Wimminton long enough, and all they done so far has been to run the jint down to its present state of putrification, their gummint caricatured by pecuniary misfeasances and gross incontinence. Now it’s
our
toin!”

More boos, though a few shout
Amen
from the balcony. Fun is fun, but it is possible to cut too close to the bone.

“I spose they’s a good number of you fokes out there considers youself Confederates.”

Cheers and rebel yells answer this. Niles looks around with shining eyes as the boys downstairs, most of them his old friends, hoot and stomp their feet. Their daddy, the Judge, fought for the Great Lost Cause, as did any man of his generation with two legs and ballocks hanging between them. The comedian has touched a nerve.

“An I is a former advocate of the Fusionist Party.”

Booing again. The Fusionists are the alliance of carpetbagger, nigger-cosseting Republicans and poor white Populists who dominated local politics in the last election.

“So I suggests we jine together an forms a co-lition betwixt the Confed-erates and the Fusionists—we call it the Confusionist Party.”

It is good enough to get most of them back on his side. If people get this het up over a pretend colored politician, Harry thinks, what will they do if a real one appears?

“Cause politics in Wimminton is the con
fu
sinist thing I ever try to wrap my nappy head around!”

Applause now, people conceding the truth of his point.

“If any of you fine peoples,” the Perfessor finishes, “care to hear the rest of my perambulation, I can be foun at the Abysinnian Embassy—Fo’th Street, co’ner of Bladen.”

The Darktown address gets the Perfessor a nice laugh to part with, the curtain beginning to rise before he is fully into the wings.

There is a battleship upon the stage.

Coop has done it in a carriage before, but never with springs like this. Usually they creak and groan, bringing out a lot of shushing from the gal, as if anybody from the house could hear. White people’s carriages. It always give him a little thrill, to think of the Mister and maybe even the white Missus parking their bottoms where his bare black ass been only hours before, busy at what they never want to imagine. Sweet Alma is on him, big warm breasts nestling his cheeks, rolling on him slow and tight and the leather against his ass so soft and warm. And these springs. A quiet ride, that’s what it is—if he ever runs into old Wicklow again he’ll have to compliment the man. Alma grips the back of the seat and presses close to him, smelling like cinnamon, calling him Clarence, Clarence baby, but that’s okay because there’s no one else to hear, not even the coach horse like a few times in white folks’ barns, grinding their oats without interest only a stall panel away. Maybe that’s how he’ll do it, he thinks, be Coop with the Indian gals by the Fort or whatever ones you can buy in Cuba if they go, be Coop for the stripes and the brass and the white men and the whole damn world you got to bow down to, and save Clarence, save the real man, for a sweet pretty woman like Alma Moultrie.

“Darlin,” he says to her, her big eyes drinking him in, the carriage rocking ever so slightly but with no complaint from the springs, “I been needing this for so long.”

The battleship rocks on plasterboard seas, and there is an intake of breath followed by a hum of comment as people recognize it as the
Maine.
It is only scrim, of course, unpainted but with the details somehow projected from behind it. Harry smiles at the relatively crude wave effect at its base, two long cutouts of blue swells that rise and fall rhythmically against each other to create a peaceful, safe-harbor illusion.

The operetta begins with the tenor up on deck in his uniform and Dolly St. Claire below, isolated in a spotlight extreme stage left, trading verses as the light turns golden sunset yellow—

Just a song at twilight, when the lights are low

And the flickering shadows—softly come and go

—the soubrette back home thinking of her loved one as he does the same on board in Havana’s harbor.

The
Maine
. Harry has studied the pictures, has read the accounts of witnesses and experts, and entertains the possibility that it was nothing but a boiler bursting to disastrous result, an unsurprising phenomenon given the enormous pressure brought upon rivet and seam in the massive steam-powered vessels. They are floating bombs, as every engineer will agree—but a torpedo in the night and an underhanded foe make for better newspaper circulation.

The soubrette and the tenor, called Aura Lee and Ensign Tom in the program, join in harmony for the last chorus—

Though the heart be weary, sad the day and long

Still to us at twilight comes love’s old song

Comes love’s old sweet song

“Excuse me, old boy,” says Niles, rising. “Got to put out a fire.”

It is a joke between them, recalling the first time the Judge took them on a hunt, and to entertain themselves after the day’s killing was through and the men had begun drinking they wandered back into the thick pines and Niles started a fire in the underbrush using the magnifying glass he’d got for his birthday and they tried to put it out with their own water. Each had consumed a full canteen of lemonade during the day and felt bloated enough to irrigate a cotton field in July, but the fire had outrun their ability to pee on it and the men had to be called to avoid disaster.

“Boys do what boys do,” the Judge had said, leading them deeper into the woods away from the smoke and the mocking hunters, “and men do what men do.” They had supposed he was going to cut a switch and have at them with it, choosing an isolated spot either to spare them public humiliation or preclude intervention if he was truly furious, but he only stopped and took his own out and proceeded to relieve himself for what seemed like the better part of an hour. No words were spoken, just the splatter of almost clear liquid onto dry leaves, the Judge staring into the distance with a placid look on his face.

“I would hope you boys have learned something about fire today,” he said when he’d led them almost all the way back to camp, “and something about bourbon.”

Old Uncle Zip, who had belonged to the Judge’s family before the Invasion and still served as guide for the hunting trips, came to them later with some praline candies he’d smuggled along. He sat on a log with them, sharing the candies, chuckling and shaking his head. “Don’t you boys worry none,” he told them. “The Judge boint down the backhouse at his daddy farm in Delco tryin the same speriment. An he uz years older than either of you.”

Harry watches Niles apologize to the last patron in the row and head back up the aisle. It is unlikely he will return, concocting some story about an old friend met in the lobby the next time they see each other, an old friend in some sort of a scrape that called for immediate assistance. The invitation to join him at the show has been a pretense, of course, a maneuver to put Harry in a genial mood and in a spot where raised voices and recriminations would draw the wrong sort of attention. Niles is devious, but so consistent in his ways as to be transparent.

Captain Sigsbee, played by the runt who looks like Roosevelt wearing a white beard and moustache, orders the young officer to undertake a vital and perilous mission—transporting a message from the President of Our Great Nation past the vicious minions of the Butcher Weyler, through the steaming Cuban jungles, and into the hand of the wily insurgent general, brave Calixto García. Captain and Ensign hold their hats over their hearts to sing
The Army of the Free
—