A Moment in the Sun (62 page)

“Have you started having your flow?”

The girl seems to understand. “It began last August,” she says. “But since I’ve been ill—”

Unthinkable.

Miss Loretta feels her own tiny swoon of nausea. She is a music instructor, nothing more. “How long has it been interrupted?”

The girl looks at her with fearful eyes. “It can’t be that.”

“Of course not.” It is very stuffy, here in the wings, the air stale and motionless. “Because you’ve never engaged—” they are familiar, Miss Loretta and this colored girl, more familiar than teacher and student, more familiar than society will normally allow, given what separates them, “—because you’ve never engaged in improprieties with your young man.”

It is not a question.

It is a statement begging confirmation and the girl lets it hang too long, another caesura, the sound of Miss Loretta’s words decaying in the narrow space that is heavy with the mildew of the side curtains bunched around them, and then the realization that they are not alone.

“Pologize for disturbin you ladies,” he says, pulling his cap off and holding it over his chest, “but you finish with that pianner?”

It is the day man, old Samuel, a fixture at Thalian Hall since Miss Loretta was a girl, known as Songbird because of his constant humming while at his tasks. He has appeared without a note, however, and stands frozen in a slight bow awaiting her instruction.

“We are quite finished with it, Samuel. Thank you.”

He turns to the girl. “I seen your Daddy out the hallway, here on city bidness,” he says. “He ax if I know how it’s goin for you in here.”

“I’ll have to tell him when I get home,” she says quietly.

Samuel bows again and puts his cap back on. “Yes M’am, Miss Jessie.” He leaves them to attend to the piano.

“It was only the one time,” she says when he is gone, as if this may provide absolution.

Slaves to our bodies.

“Yes,” nods Miss Loretta, wishing there was a place for her to sit. “You will need to tell your father when you are home.”

“I’ve let you down,” cries the girl, Jessie, her Jessie. “I’ve betrayed you.”

Jessie is weeping now and Miss Loretta finds herself holding her, cradling her head against her chest as she stands and the girl sits on the stool, feeling the tight-coiled black tresses she has always wanted to touch, if only from curiosity, stroking her hair now and this is too much, too much to bear. She has lost her, lost her dear Jessie forever.

“What can I do?”

“Oh my dear,” says Miss Loretta, weeping herself now, “there is so very little you can do.”

“They’ll find out.”

“You will tell them. Today.”

She is amazed to discover that she does not think any less of the girl, that there is, in fact, no betrayal. Only sadness. There are worse fates, of course, but she wanted more for this one. Colored society—what, society in general being what it is—the young man may suffer no consequences. Off in the Army somewhere, at liberty, in the eyes of the world, to shoulder his responsibility or not. What must it be to move with that freedom, to love without care. What reckless joy to saunter through life with only your conscience as restraint, ever the raptor and never the ruined.

“You will tell them today, and you will be married, and you will have your child,” Miss Loretta says to Jessie, as gently as she can muster.

“Is that all?”

It is more than she herself has achieved, it is what women are raised to do. Jessie looks up to her from the stool, holding tightly to both of her hands now, waiting for her response.

“You can pray that it is a boy,” says Miss Loretta.

“First you loosen the set screw—that’s right, now lift that lever pin.”

Milsap wills himself to patience, standing over Davey’s shoulder while the boy tries to pull out the distributor clutch. He can follow instruction, Davey, but every time he puts his hands into the Linotype it’s like the first time they been there. No sense of the machine, of what sets what into motion.

“Now you can take the lever and the spring away—get a good holt on it—you drop these little pieces in there we got to tear the whole thing apart.”

“All right—”

“Now—you’re gonna take the screw from the bracket
there
and loosen the other screw over on the right front so the whole clutch bracket comes off its dowel pins without springing the clutch
shaft
—”

“There’s so many parts.”

It could have been done with an hour ago but part of the job is seeing if he can train anybody else to fix the apparatus. Maybe come a day when he’s not there and there’s important news and the machines go down, both of them, could be one of a thousand things. What happens then if it’s only Davey or Clifton Lee or that half-wit German they just brung in? The people must be informed, that’s how a democracy functions.

“You do as many things as this machine does, you need a lot of parts. And they got to be in
har
mony, which is why we’re changing out this clutch.”

Milsap sees that there is God in the machine, in the active interplay of slides and matrices, of wheels and pulleys and discs and shafts and springs and ejectors, of hot lead and cold steel, just as there is God in the holy, complex cycles of rain and seed and growth and harvest, in the cleverness of the human mind that can, like Mr. Merganthaler’s, discover a system so intricate yet so obvious once invented that it surely must be divine.

The copy boy comes up and stands by them but Milsap isn’t ready to see him.

“Anything in this life,” he says, “got to be in harmony to operate how it’s sposed to. Your church organ—how many moving parts you think that has? One of them, just one, gets out of kilter and you gonna hear
noise
in the house of God, not music. Our society,” he says, picking up a theme that Mr. Clawson has been developing in his editorials this week, “has got some intricate workings of its own. Something, somebody, steps out of their
place
—well, that’s when you get chaos. That’s when you get
an
archy. What you want?”

The copy boy, staring into the guts of the machine, is startled to be addressed.

“Oh. Mr. Clawson need you.”

The boy runs off. Milsap considers leaving instructions with Davey, then decides against it.

“Don’t touch anything till I get back,” he says. “
Any
thing.”

When you put the clutch back on the beam you have to be sure that the timing pin in the distributor screw meshes into the clutch-shaft gear, where the tooth is cut away, so that the screws will be in accurate time with each other. It seems plain enough, like holding a bottle of milk the right way up before you pull the cap off, but some people got no feel for machines and Davey is one of them.

Clawson is in his office in the tilt-back chair, reading, when Milsap ducks his head in.

“I got a telephone call from over at the Armory,” he says without looking up from the copy in his lap. There’s only a handful of telephones in town and the
Messenger
got the first. Milsap can read the subhead, upside-down, of the copy that lies in the editor’s lap—

FEDERAL BAYONETS TO BE USED IN
CARRYING ELECTION IN NORTH CAROLINA

The yankees are threatening to come back and escort their friends to the polling places and the
Messenger
is making the proper stink about it.

“They need you to go over and help them with something. Right now.”

“What is it?”

Mr. Clawson looks up and gives him one of those Do I pay you to ask questions? looks.

“Bring your tools.”

Davey is still staring into the machine when he comes back.

“You touch anything?”

“No sir.”

“You might’s well clean out the magazines while this is down.”

“Yes sir.”

If there is God in the machine, his printer’s devil will be the last man on earth to recognize Him.

You got to take note when old Dan start rubbing his ass on everything in sight. Rubbing his ass and jerking his tail around and pulling his lip up to show his teeth like he got something to say. Jubal leaves him tied out front on Terry’s Alley and goes around behind the shack. Mama is off cleaning for somebody, hardly ever find her home this time of day, but she say come by and get herbs whenever.

The wormwood plant is in an old wood tub half-buried away from the rest of the garden. Jubal pulls the leaves off, few from this side, few from that, and stuffs them in a leather sack. Brew up some tea with them, lace it with plenty of honey. Dan won’t take nothing that bitter less you sugar it up some. Maybe mash some garlic in with his oats, lace some honey in that too. He had the roundworm once before, Dan, had to shit every three blocks and fought when you cinched the traces on him.

Jubal has the four-wheel dray with the headboard and seat hitched to him out front. Got to get four, five more years out of Dan, the way prices are. The horse leaves a pile, sick-smelling, in the sand as they turn south to head out of Brooklyn.

If there was some way to know ahead, like these white folks do who got the telephone, you would never roll empty. Drop one load off and pick up another on the same block, and just keep doing that, making triangles all over town. But how it is, they send some little barefoot boy they give a penny to that finds you or he doesn’t and some other man he sees with a wagon get your job. Jubal pulls back on the reins to slow and ease alongside Mance Crofut, walking along Fourth.

“How they treatin you, Mance?” he calls.

“They’s mischief afoot.”

“How you say?”

Mance is a hunting friend of his uncle Wicklow, do up a stew with squirrel or possum make you slap your brains out. Mance have to roll around in this one spot where the deadfall trees are going back to dirt before he goes stalking, cause he always smell of creosote from his years on the dock. Jubal went out with them once when he was maybe twelve—Mance hit a doe neither him nor Royal nor Uncle Wick could even see it was so far back in the trees, little hole just under the ear.

“You know my ole Trapdoor Springfield I got,” says Mance, leaning on the edge of the front wheel as the dray comes to rest. “I allus gets my bullets at Mr. Yaeger store, maybe some chaw that he hang out back. Only this mornin he won’t sell me no bullets, says he fresh out of em. I can see the boxes right there behind him on the shelf, but you don’t want to call no white man out as a liar, specially if he one of the better ones, sell me on credit now and then when there aint no work. So I goes down to Dothan’s and to Bailey Catlin’s and even all the way up to the Phoenix Genral Store, they say they got none either. You know that’s a .45-70, aint like half the town don’t shoot with them old Army rifles, so’s I
know
somebody tellin stories. I come back to Mr. Yaeger’s, buy a hank of that chaw, an I look right at them boxes behind him an I says ‘You haven’t got noner them .45s in since I come by this mornin, have you?’ Now he look round that storeroom to be sure aint nobody listenin and he lean crost the counter and he lower his voice down, say ‘I be honest with you, Mance, they is an inner
dic
tion on us sellin no weapons nor bullets to the colored folks till we told it’s o.k. again.’ Seems it’s this White Man’s Union, going bout making rules and you break em they gone shut you down or burn you
out
.”

They are quiet for a moment, pondering this.

“Election coming up,” says Jubal.

“Well I wish it was already past,” says the old man, shaking his head. “White people start actin skittish, you got to step lightly.”

Jubal offers him a ride but the old man is almost home and cuts off into Campbell Street, still shaking his head. Dan whickers and farts as they cross over the railroad tracks on the Hilton Bridge. Mostly it’s the foals you got to worry about with roundworm, eat their whole insides up. A mule Dan’s age has had em more than once, and they don’t usually suffer too much with it. That’s just life, is what Uncle Wicklow says, whatever bad happens to you, you don’t ever lose it. Just learn how to carry it inside.

He turns at Princess, and then again on Seventh, crunching on the shell road now, passing little Jessie Lunceford who his brother is so sweet on, walking alone, dressed pretty and wearing a face like she lost her last friend. He calls out to her but she doesn’t seem to hear him. Jubal pulls Dan’s head to get them off the main street, then stops the dray crosswise to the rear of Turpin’s Pharmacy like they asked. Mr. Kenan is there waiting.

“We not going far,” says Mr. Kenan, winking, “but this here’s a load.”

Jubal has never liked a man, specially a white man, to wink at him, and it makes him uneasy when Mr. Turpin and Mr. Kenan commence to joshing while he helps them lift the big crate out.

“Boys at the Armory gone preciate this,” says Mr. Kenan, winking again. “After this party done, they be some young men wish they
had
n’t.”

But the crate is way too big and way too heavy for liquor, dead weight that staggers the three of them getting it out from the back and onto the dray. The springs complain when they thump it down.

“Yes sir,” says Mr. Turpin, “there be some heads hurtin fore this wingding over.”

Jubal just smiles the way they like and shoves the crate farther onto the platform. No need to tie it down with the Armory just about around the corner.

“Whatever you gennemen got in there,” he says, “they’s a good deal
of
it.”

Mr. Turpin throws a tarp over the crate and goes back inside. Mr. Kenan rides beside Jubal on the seat, looking glad there isn’t nearly anybody around, and hops down quick when they pull up behind the Armory. Mr. Kenan was the Customs House man, where they say you make more salary than the governor. When they give it to John Dancy, who is colored, a lot of people thought there would be trouble but so far it’s just noise.

“Get us some more hands,” says Mr. Kenan, and hurries inside.

Jubal pulls the tarp off and tries to peek between the slats of the crate but it’s covered in there too. Sure as hell aint no whiskey bottles. Mr. Kenan comes out with Colonel Moore and another man Jubal doesn’t know, young man with blisters on his nose. Colonel Moore won’t hardly look at him but then he is one of them die-hard Confederates, marches with the Klan and still hasn’t give up the emancipation war for lost.