A Moment in the Sun (63 page)

Jubal climbs up and kneels and puts his shoulder to the crate to get it sliding, while Mr. Kenan and the white boy take the weight of the back end. He hops down to take a corner but Colonel Moore shoulders him away.

“We got it from here,” he says.

So Jubal holds the back door open for them and when they’re through Colonel Moore calls, “You shut that, boy.”

He’s got to wait to be paid then. It’s always better if you help them carry it in cause then you just stand there in the way till somebody notices and pays and usually give you a tip on top of it. When they leave you outside there’s no telling, you just wait and even if they have forgotten about you they act like you done something wrong if you knock to remind them.

But Mr. Kenan hurries out and gives him an extra twenty-five cents even though he didn’t help them bring it in, and winks.

“Don’t be careless how you spend that, now,” he says. “Don’t let the devil get it all.”

Dan is pulling his lip up and farting more as they roll empty back to the stable, but keeps on pulling strong and steady, and every time they pass a white man Jubal sneaks a look at their face to see if he can guess what they up to. Mance is right, he thinks. Acting strange and skittish.

Not knowing what their problem is, Milsap has to lug both boxes of tools, but it’s just a short walk to the Armory. It used to belong to the Taylor brothers’ family and is more a clubhouse for the Light Infantry and their friends than a real fortress like in Raleigh or Charleston. There’s a long wait after he knocks and then it’s Mr. Kenan who answers the door and pulls him in.

“He didn’t tell you to come to the back?”

“No sir.”

“Least you’re here. Come on.”

Kenan leads Milsap to a room in the rear and there it is, laid out in pieces on a tarp on the floor, beautiful. Colonel Moore is there and a young fellow, maybe one of the Shiner clan from over in Dry Pond, who they don’t introduce to him.

“It’s got an instruction sheet for assembly,” says Colonel Moore. “But we didn’t want any slip-ups.”

The cylinder is already put together, ten blued-steel barrels, smelling of oil and metal shavings.

“Look like it come straight from Hartford.”

“We thought it was heavy,” says the boy, “but they just thrown all the ammo in the same crate with it.”

Colonel Moore holds out the assembly sheet for Milsap but he steps past without glancing at it.

“They done most of it for you,” he says. “Just kept a few things apart to pack easier.”

He sits and opens one of his toolboxes as the men look on, excited. He saw one pulled behind a wagon once when he was a boy, but it was a yankee parade and his father wouldn’t let him go closer. It is one of those inventions that once you see it makes perfect sense, that plenty of people had thought of only the machining wasn’t up to it then or the cartridges weren’t uniform or any of the dozens of little things that have to fall in place at the right time.

“The beauty of this,” he says, cradling the cylinder and beginning to attach it to the frame, “is each barrel got its own breech and firing-pin system. And by the time you crank her around again, your spent cartridge has fell out of the ejection port and a fresh one has slid in from the hopper. What’s this take?”

“Krag rounds,” says Mr. Kenan. “You work it right she’ll put out six hundred a minute.”

“That’s some monkey-buster,” grins the boy, who surely resembles a Shiner.

Milsap sets the brass crank in the socket, gives it a turn to check the action, then begins to secure it.

“It’s a Peace-keeper,” says Mr. Kenan. “Best way to keep the peace, you let the other side know what you capable of, militarily speaking. Deters any ideas they might get about disruption.”

“Or voting,” says the Shiner boy.

“You gone roll it into place?” asks Milsap.

“Haven’t decided yet,” says Colonel Moore.

“Well, it’s best you mount this plate on first—shipboard, wagon bed, wherever you want, get it rock solid, and then bolt the apparatus on top of that. It’ll tolerate some cant, but the more level the better. And if you expect to be firing a good deal,” and here Milsap looks up to Mr. Kenan, “you best put some plugs in your ears. Don’t want to end up deaf like me. Imonna put these on now so you can move it easier.”

Colonel Moore and the Shiner boy lift the assembly up while Milsap wrestles the carriage wheels onto the axle, tightens the nuts on the hubs. When he is done they all step back to behold what he’s put together, silent for a long moment. There is nothing in the magazine yet, the boxes of cartridges stacked against the wall, but there is no mistaking the purpose of this machine. There is God in this design as well, thinks Milsap, the God of swift and terrible retribution. He realizes he is in a sweat, though it’s the others who done all the lifting.

“You think it’s likely to come to this?” he asks.

“It might and it might not,” says Mr. Kenan. “But we’ll sleep better just knowing it’s here.”

“You have ruined us.”

Yolanda has seen him angrier than this, furious over some defiance on Junior’s part, some pointed slight at a Council meeting, but never so cold.

“You understand that, don’t you? You understand what you’ve done?”

Her daughter stands before him, chest heaving with sobs, near hysteria since he began his relentless questioning of her symptoms. He has not touched her, and Yolanda can tell that she is not yet allowed to.

“I was going to tell you earlier,” Jessie manages to say between sobs for breath, “but I wasn’t sure.”

“Sure of what? There is no question about your relations with that boy—”

“But that doesn’t mean—”

“So you think your behavior would be acceptable if there hadn’t been this consequence?”

Yolanda wishes he would stop. Her daughter’s girlhood is shattered, that is all that matters now.

“I see this sort of behavior every day across the tracks,” he says. “I expect it from those people. But in my own family—” He is shaking his head now, eyes fixed with censure on Jessie. He is not a man to hurl objects, not a man to kick and curse. She knows he is gentle with the other ones, the fallen girls he treats north of Red Cross Street, she knows from the way they smile and proudly show off their fatherless infants when encountered on the street. But this is their daughter, their jewel, their gift to the world.

“How could you do such a thing?”

It isn’t shame she hears in her husband’s voice, though public shame is certainly on his mind. It isn’t shock or disappointment or even the fear of how this will be used against him, against them all, that she senses in his tone.

He is jealous.

“I’ll write to him,” Jessie sobs. “Or if you let me, I’ll go to him—”

His smile, his pride, walking arm in arm with her, showing her off to the world—

“The next time I see that boy,” he says, “will be his last day on earth.”

He walked that way with her once, Yolanda, when she was his young wife, but time passes and daughters love their fathers and fathers return that love—

Jessie runs and throws herself on the divan, covering her head with her arms, wailing. Yolanda takes a step but he stops her with his eyes.

“It’s that white woman,” he fumes. “Filling her head with scandal.”

“She’s a piano teacher.”

“And a Suffragist.”

“You’ve never had a problem with—”

“It isn’t the voting, it’s everything else that goes along with it!” He is pacing now, pointedly looking away from Jessie, pacing the way he does when he returns from the city meetings and condemns the latest outrages. “The father is practically an anarchist.”

“You know that isn’t true.”

“And that boy—”

“His name is Royal.”

“His name,” says her husband, raising his voice so Jessie can hear over her sobs, “will never be spoken in this house again!”

It is easier, it must be, for the rest of them, the people north of the tracks. Nobody is watching them, nobody hoping for them to fall. And there are women there, midwives and roots women, who can erase an indiscretion if engaged in time. More than once he has spoken of having them arrested, but never made a formal complaint. And some just have the child, acknowledging the father whether he reciprocates or not. Easier, yes, but no option for a decent Christian girl.

“I’ll write to his commanding officer,” he says, “and have him discharged.”

“And what purpose will that serve?” says Yolanda. She is amazed to feel so calm. It is the same calm that came over her when Junior went under at Lake Waccamaw and she was the one to pull him out, the one to flip him on his stomach and work his arms and squeeze his little ribs till the water was forced out and he took his first gasping breath. Jessie is making those sounds now on the divan, drowning in her misery, but Yolanda is calm and already thinking ahead to what can be done. What must be done. The worry will come later, as it did with Junior, trembling every time he came near the water after that, her first thought when he announced his enlistment the anxious relief that, thank the Lord, he had not signed on to be a sailor.

“We need to be strong now,” she says. “We need to think very clearly.”

Jessie is weeping more quietly, having made her last effort and eager to hear what fate will be decided for her. Dr. Lunceford stops pacing, turns to face his wife. We have been so fortunate, she thinks. I will not allow this to destroy us. Jessie has been foolish and weak but not wicked, never that, and what they’ve planned for her is gone. But there will be no tragedy. We have endured worse than this in our lives, she thinks. And then, with the tiniest guilty twinge of excitement—there will be a new baby.

Her husband begins to pace again, but now his eyes are inward, calculating, his step the measured stride that always follows his diatribes.

“We find a husband,” he says. “Immediately.” He shoots a look to Yolanda before she can raise the possibility. “Someone respectable.”

Alma sits on the stairs, waiting for the storm to pass. Her own father had taken his belt to her the first time and for a while she blamed him. The next she lost before she was showing much and by the third he was out of their lives. That was the story with railroad men, her mama said, they went off down the tracks and one day didn’t come back.

Dr. Lunceford uses suspenders to keep his pants up and she’s never known him to raise a hand to any of his family. Not like the Judge, thrash his arm stiff whipping his younger boy’s behind, and him, Niles, only waiting for it to end and taking no lesson from the punishment. The last fight was the worst, with blows exchanged and blood on the rug and her in the middle of it.

And now little Jessie down there sobbing like she’s got it hard.

Alma hurries back up to their bedroom when the girl’s begging loses steam, when Doctor’s plans are fixed and Mrs. Lunceford stays quiet. Alma finishes making their bed, sheets smelling the tiniest bit of smoke from the fire over on Castle Street the day she hung them out, and she hears Jessie running up and slamming the door to her room.

She waits till it is clear Mrs. Lunceford won’t be following, still reasoning with Doctor down the stairs. She steps in without knocking. The girl is sprawled on her belly, exhausted from crying. Alma sits on the edge of the bed. It is a long moment before Jessie pulls her face out of the pillow and stares, red-eyed, toward the window.

“Did you hear?”

“I heard.”

“They won’t let me have him.”

“You didn’t tell him before this? Write to him?”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“I
told
you, girl—”

“You’re not a doctor.”

“I aint a farm girl, neither,” says Alma, “but I know when a melon is set to bust.” She puts a hand on Jessie’s shoulder, tries to remember being this young. By the time she got shoes, ten, maybe eleven, she knew enough not to hope for things. You try to get what you can out of life, but only white folks and the few there is like the Luncefords, the educated colored, bother to make big plans and expect them to work out.

“
Can’t spen’ what you ain’ got
,” her mama always said, “
and can’t lose what you ain’ never had
.”

“What you gone do now?”

“What can I do?”

“That boy want you. That’s all you been tellin me—”

“He’s in the Army.”

“So? Texas somewhere—”

“Arizona.”

“It aint the moon. If it’s on the map, there’s a train will get you there.”

Jessie throws her arm across her forehead. “I’m just a girl,” she says in a very small voice.

If there was one like Royal Scott wanting her, she’d
walk
to the damn Territories if that’s what it took. But she is not this girl and never was.

“You gone marry who they say?”

Jessie covers her face with her other arm.

If I’d been able to keep one alive, keep maybe a couple of them, Alma thinks, I’d of schooled them better than this. Not the way her mama did, no time to do more than warn and worry and pray every night to the Lord for His divine protection, but really telling what was what and keeping the men off them long enough to have some little-girl time, making mudpies without a worry in the world. But after the fourth one came out looking like a tadpole the white doctor told her it was never going to happen for her, and the only mothering she’ll ever do is letting this fool girl know she isn’t licked less she lets herself be. She just got to deal with it, one way or the other.

“You aint so far gone,” says Alma, softly, stroking the girl’s arm. “There’s things that can be done.”

Jessie uncovers her face, looks scared at her.

“I thought them teas and baths was gonna fix you, but it’s caught hold now and there’s—”

“I can’t do that.”

Alma shrugs. “Then you can’t.”

The girl keeps staring at her. “Did you? Ever?”

“Never had to, never wanted to,” says Alma. “Nature done it for me.”

“Oh.”

First time out and this girl end up with a baby, everything goes regular, and she don’t even want it. Alma offers the other possibility.

“You need a train ticket, whatever, I got some money put by. You welcome to it, darlin.”