A Moment in the Sun (79 page)

It is nearly noon and Jessie feeling lightheaded from hunger when a drayman with a carbuncle that looks like a raspberry on his nose stops and calls them over to his wagon.

“Easy work,” he says. “Making toys. It pays two dollars a day—only half the day is gone already.”

The women look at each other, then begin to climb in. There are some crates to sit on but by the time Alberta pulls Jessie up these are gone. She sits, awkwardly, on the floor of the wagon bed, holding on to the side. A mismatched pair of horses pull them forward, one bleeding from under its harness. The women bump shoulders and knees as they roll east on 44th Street.

“Will he take us back to the same place at the end of the day?” Jessie asks, and the others laugh. Alberta looks her over.

“You aint brought nothin to eat.”

Jessie shakes her head. Her too-thin coat cannot hide from their eyes that she is several months pregnant. She feels alternately famished and bloated these days and is suddenly prone to headaches. Nobody on the street is even looking at them, a wagon full of women, colored and white, loaded like sacks of grain. Alberta pulls something wrapped in a handkerchief from her waist and unrolls it, breaking off half a corn cake and handing it down to Jessie.

“Eat this here,” she says. “You gone need it.”

“You’re very kind.”

“Yeah,” the dark girl smiles. “I feeds the crumbs to the birdies.”

It is a little stale and there is no butter but it is the best corn cake Jessie has ever eaten.

The building is on 25th between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, six stories high, floor-length windows separated into tiny panes by iron mullions. The drayman ties his horses to a light pole and then lets the back gate of the wagon down, stepping back to stare at their legs as they climb onto the street.

“Follow me.”

There is an elevator and a board beside it with the names of different manufactories and the floors they reside on, but the six from Paddy’s Market and two more they gathered on the way are led down creaking wooden stairs to the basement. It takes Jessie’s eyes a moment to adjust. The ceiling is low, with only a few oil lamps hung from the pipes running overhead. A huge boiler dominates the middle of the room, faced by two long benches with stools placed next to them. It is sweltering and smells like food has been stored here recently, cabbage maybe, and the only exit is by the narrow, unsteady stairs. There is no place to hang their coats, so they hurry to pull them off and lay them in a pile on the floor in the corner. Jessie is perspiring already and has to fight back a panic that there is not enough air for everybody to breathe. Eight or nine women are already seated along one of the benches, painting metal figurines.

“All of you take a stool over here,” says the wagon driver. “It don’t matter which one.” He ducks under a lantern to reach the end of the first bench, frowning at several fully painted figurines lined up on a thin metal tray at the end of it.

“You gals been sleeping here, or what?”

None of the working women, who are all white, look up to answer him, faces set in the dim light.

Jessie sits at the empty bench, Alberta on one side of her and Clarice on the other. There is a glass pot of orangey-pink paint in front of her, a small paintbrush lying on a scrap of cardboard beside it. The wooden bench top is gouged and scarred but not spattered with paint like the other that has been in use.

The drayman steps to the head of their bench and picks up one of the metal figurines to wave at them. “I’m only going through this once, so keep your ears open. Anybody here don’t speak English?”

None of the women at the table respond. It occurs to Jessie that if she didn’t speak English she wouldn’t have understood the question.

“All right, this is your basic piece, and each one of youse is going to paint a different part of it. The paint dries fast but not so fast you can’t smudge it up with your hands, so you never pick it up by where the gal before you just painted.”

The figurines are American soldiers, marching men with a rifle over their shoulders. They are bigger than the lead infantrymen Junior played with when he was a boy, nearly a half-foot high. The top of each figure has been dipped in blue, the bottom in a buff color, meeting unevenly at the belt line.

“The base, all around here, is green. Number One, that’s you.”

The drayman walks down the line to point to the section each woman is to paint.

“Number Two, you do the hands and the face with this—don’t get none on the bottom of the hat—and Number Three, you got black for the belt and the boots. Be careful with that damn black, it’s murder to cover up. Four, you got the little brush, that’s brass color for the buttons. Just one little dot on each of em, don’t go crazy with it. Five, the whites of the eyes. Six, dark brown for the hair and eyebrows and the rifle, Seven, a dab of blue in the center of each eye—don’t fill the whole thing up—and Eight,” he has reached the end of the bench, “you do the hat light brown and line the pieces up on the tray here. I want them facing the same way and none of them touching. Now do we all know our colors?”

Jessie thinks that to make a figurine of the drayman they’d need a pot of red for the berry on his nose. He slaps the top of the bench with his hand.

“You mess it up, stick the wrong color in the wrong place, just put it aside on the table and keep the line going. You’ll have to fix those later. Let’s get cracking.”

He hands Alberta the figurine and goes to the stairs, turning back to glare at them just before he starts up.

“Oh yeah—I come back and catch any one of you flapping your gums—you’re
out
. No pay, no nothin.” He taps his temple with a finger. “A word to the wise.”

They begin to paint. Alberta has a wider brush and slaps the green onto the base sloppily, so it is dripping when she hands it to Jessie. None of the oil lamps is directly overhead and it is hard to see, but she does her best with her brush. The figurines are hollow cast iron, molded with great detail. Her paint is light but doesn’t look like any skin color she’s ever seen when it goes on. She used to love painting eggs with Mother at Easter and has done watercolors for years, but something about this makes her anxious.

“I’ve got the hardest task by far,” mutters Wee Kate, squinting as she lines a soldier’s eyebrows with brown. “The bastard done it on purpose.”

“Shut up with ye,” says Sorcha. “Ye’ll earn us all the sack.”

Jessie has passed five pieces on to Clarice when a skinny white boy steps out from around the boiler carrying a tray with a dozen of the finished soldiers on it, all the colors, especially the skin, looking better now. He is wearing gloves and a sweat-soaked undershirt, quickly unloading the figurines into a crate painted on the side with a similar-looking soldier standing in front of a giant American flag. He takes a tray of painted men from the end of the first bench and hurries back behind the boiler.

“He’ll have an oven back there,” announces Wee Kate. “To bake the color on.”

The women continue to paint, silently. Jessie already has green stains on her sleeves and wishes she had worn a different waist today. She does the neck and face first, not worrying if it overlaps with the hairline, then takes more time with the hands, careful of the blue uniform cuffs. If it wasn’t for the low ceiling and the smell and the heat from the boiler and the unforgivingly hard seat of the stool it wouldn’t be the worst of occupations.

Another man comes down, this one tall enough to have to bend over to fit under the pipes, and stands behind them, watching.

“Jesus Horatio Christ,” he says finally, kicking the back of Wee Kate’s chair. “You’re sposed to paint the damn things, not play with them!”

He stomps, stooped over, to stand in front of them. He has bloodshot eyes and long, crooked teeth, and his breath smells like his lunch when he starts to shout into their faces.

“You people got half a day to give me a hundred fifty pieces. Didn’t he tell you that? You don’t make one-fifty, nobody gets paid!”

“Ye’ve given me three things to paint,” says Wee Kate, holding up the soldier she is working on, and then nodding toward Sorcha beside her, “and this one has only got to spot the feckin eyes on it.”

“You don’t like your job,” says the tall man, raising his eyebrows, “you know where the stairs are.”

Wee Kate thunks the soldier down on the bench top and angrily jabs her brush at it.

“And the same goes for you!” he shouts at the women at the other bench before clumping away up the stairs.

“There’s a Jew for ye,” mutters Wee Kate when he’s gone.

Jessie has no idea if the man is a Jew or not, but the threat of not being paid puts a frantic energy into their work, Jessie perspiring, her brush hand beginning to cramp, and a dull pain is forming behind her eyes. A few of the women still have food with them and hurry a few bites in between soldiers. How they can stomach anything with the cabbage smell and the heat—

Jessie is aware that she needs to relieve herself. Nothing has been spoken of this, and she looks around desperately. No sign of a convenience. She paints a few more pieces, resolving to put it out of her mind. But the problem is not in her mind. She is barely keeping up with Alberta, but it can’t wait.

“M’am,” she says, turning to a woman behind her at the other bench, a woman with a touch of gray in her hair, “excuse me, but—”

“Past the boiler, on the left,” says the woman without looking up from her work.

“Now ye’ve sunk us,” snarls Wee Kate, who has three soldiers lined up waiting for her attentions as Jessie hurries past.

It is only a closet, with a toilet of sorts and a single candle for light, the ceiling open around a thick pipe that runs upstairs. She hurries through her business, holding her breath against the smell for as long as she can. There are footsteps above, and then the voices of the wagon driver and the tall man.

“It’s all that was left,” says the drayman.

“I told you before—”

“You want all white, you got to send me out earlier.”

“How am I supposed to know half of em don’t come back?”

“And what’s the difference?”

“Campbell rents the room,” says the tall man, “and he don’t want niggers in the building. That’s the difference.”

Jessie is suffocating in the closet. She arranges her clothing and steps out to see the skinny young man carefully stoop to slide a tray of soldiers into the mouth of an oven standing on stout legs near the back wall, a brazier filled with glowing coals beneath it. He turns and holds her eye for a long moment.

“You don’t want to be here,” he says sadly, and then turns back to his work.

“Here’s our ladyship, come back for a visit,” says Wee Kate, but none of the others even look up. Alberta is finishing the face on a piece for Jessie, and hands back her brush.

“Thank you,” says Jessie, sitting into her spot. There is no clock in the basement, and without a window there is no way to know how much time has passed.

“You do it for me when I gots to go,” says Alberta.

Jessie begins to paint again, head and hands, head and hands. If this were a novel, she thinks, the Dark and Brooding Man would appear at the bottom of those stairs to sweep her into his arms and carry her away. He would have vanquished those who ruined Father, restored their fortune and their home. The women left behind in the basement would be stirred by the scene, and Wee Kate, a tear in her eye, would have an appropriate and sentimental comment to put a cap on the story.

But then she is not the Wronged Heroine, honest and stalwart. She is the Fallen Woman, the lass alluded to as a caution to flighty girls, the one who through her own fecklessness and perfidy has earned her fate.

Jessie has to struggle to keep the soldier she is holding in focus. Her head is swimming. If this is the influenza, how will it affect the life growing within her? How will she not pass it on to her parents living in the cramped quarters of their apartment? She feels flushed, light-headed, she feels—ashamed. That is what she feels most acutely. What would Junior say, or Father, if they saw her here, doing this work for these men? Or Royal, if he ever overcame his rightful anger to look at her again?

Junior’s infantrymen were Union soldiers, and he fought the battle of New Bern over and over with them, using clothespins to represent the Confederates. They were all white men in blue, set in various poses, and he would erect battlements of dirt in the backyard or in the coach house when it was raining, making the noises of rifle and artillery fire and the occasional cry of a wounded man. Jessie remembers how heavy they were for the size of them, barely able to lift the box that Junior kept under his bed for years.

She wonders who is living in their house in Wilmington now. They will be white people, of course, and she wonders if they have a daughter who sits dreamily at her piano, if they have a small boy who plays in the carriage barn with lead soldiers whose blue uniforms he has painted gray—

Jessie stands shakily, takes a few steps and dips her brush into Wee Kate’s paint pot.

“Christ Almighty, what’re ye up to now?”

Jessie steps back to her place and quickly paints a soldier with brown face and hands, then sets it in front of Clarice. Clarice looks at her, giggles and starts to paint the hair and eyebrows black. The figurine moves down the line. Jessie dips her brush back into her own pot, but there is still some brown on it and this one comes out closer to Junior’s shade.

The first was more like Royal Scott.

The next one she paints might be an Italian.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” exclaims Wee Kate when the figurines reach her. “Have ye gone mad?”

“I done the rest for you,” says Clarice. “You just paint that rifle and pass em on.”

When the skinny boy takes them away on the tray he says nothing, nor when he returns and crates them with the color baked on.

Head and hands, head and hands, head and hands. Figurines pass down the line of women who have become one long, many-armed creature that occasionally sighs but does not speak. At some point each of the women excuses herself, even Wee Kate, the slack taken up by the others and the flow of pieces uninterrupted. Once, when she was little, Father let her come with him to treat a man injured at the cotton press, found her a safe place to stand and watch the gang at work. At first it was the sound that terrified her, steam exploding to drive the heavy metal press down onto the loose bales, the big, sweating men shouting at each other over the clank and grind of machine parts. But as she watched, the noise and confusion began to fall into a pattern—men hoisting bales up from the wagons with a pulley, dankeymen pushing them along a slide to the mouth of the press where the snatchers cut the ropes away and shoved them in onto the huge metal teeth and the leverman pulling the arm to trigger the press down and back up and then the tyers pushing metal bands through the teeth and then pulling them over to fasten them snug around the tight-pressed bale and jumping away when the press kicked the bale out with its tongue to slide down the chute onto the back of another wagon. And all through it the caller—singing out instructions, sometimes even riding on top of the press itself to see the entirety of the operation, nearly disappearing into the hole as the press hammered down.