The soldiers sit on a load of track ballast in the gondola, rolling past cane fields where men crouch with curved knives flashing and past rice fields with barefoot women walking up on the dikes carrying parasols to shield them from the brutal sun and tiny clusters of huts where the people wander out to stare at them but nobody shoots. There are mountains ahead in the distance, a long jagged-top wall of them off to the left, the west, and a big one sticking up all alone ahead to the right. There is one passenger car that the officers ride in, and boxcars full of horses and mules and Chinese and supplies for the Pampanga outposts. Royal fingers a heavy, round ballast stone, angry, but the land is so flat there is nothing to throw it at.
“Got us up here on this rockpile,” he mutters to nobody in particular. “Just a load of freight.”
“Wasn’t no rocks, we couldn’t see over the sides.”
“They put on some Pullmans, we could ride in style,” calls Hardaway.
“Aint gonna let you in no Pullman without a red cap on, nigger,” smiles Cooper. “What you think this is?”
They have patrolled along the Dagupan line before but never been this far north. It is almost November but it is still hot. The ballast rocks are hot where there is no soldier to cover them. The smoke from the stack on the little toy-looking engine blows straight back over them and Royal watches the hats of the others turning gray with a layer of ash.
“Treat the damn mules better than us.”
Achille points out to a trio of smallish men hacking at a stand of cane. “You want to trade places with them?”
Royal just squeezes the rock.
“Ever chop cane, Roy?”
“No.”
“That sugar will eat a man up.” Achille frowns out at the field as they pass, their smoke spreading behind them, drifting downward. “Harvest season one year when I was only un ti boug, my maman say go find your père cause it was nearly dark and he not home. I walk out by the field and there I see him, lay out on his face in the red dirt of the road and I know from how he looks he is dead. Not move a thing. But when I come close he is breathing. Just so weary he can’t make it home without he lie down and sleep some, right there in the road.”
Royal turns to watch the cane-cutters disappear behind the rear of the train.
“So I sit by him and maybe one hour, two hour, he wake up and see me, don’t say a word, just stand and start out for home. Let me carry his long knife.”
“Them boys not really cuttin sugar,” says Cooper. “They just practicin. Sneak up on Corporal Junior here some night and whack! whack!” He makes a chopping gesture to Junior’s neck.
“Only if you fall asleep on sentry duty,” says Junior.
They pass a shacky-looking mill, a single water buffalo plodding in a circle to turn spiked, hardwood rollers while one man jams stalks of green cane in between them, snapping and cracking, the juice running down a bamboo trough the carabao carefully steps over into a huge iron pot smoking over a furnace sunk in a pit, another Filipino pulling the crushed cane out to be spread in the field while a third, a sinewy, sweat-pouring man in nothing but a loincloth, feeds the furnace from a stack of dried stalks, all of them looking like they’ve been doing this since the beginning of time. The smoke from the pot, smelling of burned sugar, drifts across the track as the soldiers roll by.
“Them people change place with any of us up on these rocks in a minute,” says Achille, shaking his head. “Workin that sugar eat a man right up.”
San Fernando is a big town or a small city and the train station is the grandest they’ve seen outside of Manila. The church and the casa municipal and some of the nicer houses have been knocked apart by American artillery or burned down by the rebels before they left but life is going on here, market day, women walking with big wide baskets of fruit balanced on their heads, no hands, women plucking chickens to sell while they’re still flapping, a band with an accordion and a fiddle and a boy drumming on some kerosene cans on the platform and the people about their business, putting up with the soldiers from different units walking among them like they put up with the typhoons that sweep through or the daily rain showers or the stifling heat, just another unchangeable thing in the world. The soldiers pass their rifles down and jump off the gondola and are lined up in twos with Company F and marched double time through the streets.
“I gots to wee-wee, Sarge,” calls Hardaway.
“You can do that when we get where we’re going,” says Jacks without turning around.
“Where that is?”
“They’ll tell us when we get there.”
They are marched double time through San Fernando, sweat-sticky and covered with ash, and head away on a wagon road to the northeast. A pack of little boys follow for a while, laughing and pointing excitedly at the smoked yankees, the boldest working up the nerve to dart forward and touch Royal on the back of his hand.
In Cuba after the Dons surrendered, the little boys, skinny and hungry as they were, would lug your rifle for you on a long march, three, four, five miles hoping maybe you’d stop to eat and they get a scrap of hardtack out of it. Raggedy-ass, smiling, every color you could imagine. Here the word has come down that you don’t even let them near, any googoo over ten year old as like to cut your throat as look at you.
“Look like we the first colored been up this far,” says Too Tall. “Folks don’t know what we about.”
“Then it’s up to me to spread the news,” says Coop.
Clouds hang low in the broad sky. Companies H and F in dusty blue march down the red dirt road between deep green rice paddies dotted white with cattle egrets, one hundred twenty men with rifles on their shoulders and two dozen coolies staggering after them under packs and cases. It is rice-harvest time, women in broad hats bending to sickle handfuls of the stalks close to the ground, then binding them into bundles hung on tentlike wooden racks to dry. The Filipinas are careful to keep their faces turned away, but a huge carabao steps forward to get a closer look, chewing, snot running from its nose, a cloud of flies lifting and following, then resettling on its glistening black hide when it stops at the edge of the dirt road.
“Lookit that, Too Tall mama come out to greet us.”
“She that good-lookin, Too Tall, how come you so ugly?”
“And what that big ole thing hanging twixt her legs?”
“Googoos come after you sorry-ass niggers,” says Too Tall, who is dark-skinned and used to this, expects it, even, “don’t count on no help from me.”
“Somethin wrong,” says Corporal Pickney suddenly, looking up into the sky.
“What that?”
“It aint rainin.”
“Got to wait till they not one tree left we can stand under,” says Gamble, “then she gonna dump on us. I see one way over there.”
“My people had come to these islands, see what the weather is like, they would of kept on sailin.”
“Sailin, shit. Didn’t nobody in your family ever get let up on the deck to look at no islands, man.”
“I’m talkin way back. Story is they sailed in boats, knew how to swim—”
“If they was ever in the water it was with a rope around their ankle, some white man trolling for alligators.”
“Couldn’t use you for bait. Scare them gators away.”
“This enemy territory, less you all forgot,” calls Sergeant Jacks. “Might want to keep that noise down.”
“We aint sneaking up on nobody, Sarge,” Cooper calls back. “Hell, they can see for clear twenty miles across these fields.”
“Yeah, right about now they gone to wake General Aggy up from his nap, tell him the 25th is coming to grab his little googoo ass.”
“Can’t catch nobody you can’t find.”
“Hey, if we was to catch him—”
“Aguinaldo, shit,” says Coop. “Aggy aint but just one damn general. These people got more generals runnin around in these boondocks—hell, you own a pair of shoes they gone make you a Captain at least.”
“What’s this?”
Junior steps out of formation and pulls off a square of paper tacked to a telegraph pole.
“Junior mama left him a grocery list.”
There is a drawing of a black man at the top of the paper, hanging dead from a tree, his head cocked at an unnatural angle.
“To the Colored American Soldier—” reads Junior.
“That be us,” says Hardaway.
“Why do you make war on us, freedom-loving men of the same hue, when at home the whites lynch your brothers in Georgia and Alabama—”
“And Mississippi and Florida and Texas—”
“It is without honor that you shed your precious blood. Your masters have thrown you in the most iniquitous fight with double purpose—to make you the instrument of their ambition. Your hard work will make extinction of your race—it’s very well written,” says Junior, scanning down the page.
“—and Kansas and Missouri and Indiana—”
“The googoos think we gonna join up with them?”
“Hell yeah. Lookit all they got to offer—” Gamble sweeps his free arm at the rice fields around them. “Give us forty acres and one of these water buffalos that look like Too Tall mama.”
“Maybe if they throw in one of these little long-hair gals—”
“This not our country,” says Royal.
Too Tall laughs. “That’s what old Geronimo used to say bout that sorry pile of rocks where we built Huachuca. But now it is.”
“That’s what old King Cannibal say when the white mens come to take your grandaddy out from Africa. And they took him just the same.”
“But what they’re saying—”
“What they’re saying don’t mount to muleshit,” says Corporal Pickney. “ ‘Freedom-loving men of the same hue—’ that’s a laugh. Aint none of these people my color.”
“White folks calls em niggers just like they do us,” says Hardaway.
“A wolf and a dog may both be referred to as canines,” says Junior, folding the paper and slipping it inside his shirt. “But there is no confusing the two.”
“Junior—I’m sorry—Corporal Junior—have got that right on the money,” says Coop. “Even if he is a iniquitous sumbitch. But in this story we the wolves.” He jerks his head at a pair of the Filipinas across the field, shaking grains loose from dried bundles of rice straw. “And these people just shit out of luck.”
They come on the village of Las Ciegas in the late afternoon, the usual cluster of nipa huts scattered around the plaza in front of a tiny stucco church, Jacks sending a squad around to the rear of it to catch anyone trying to sneak away and the rest of them rushing in with bayonets fixed and voices barking.
“Front and center!” they shout. “All you googoos come on out! Fuera, fuera!” Two men rushing up each of the little ladders and onto the platforms of the huts and chasing people out, mostly old or women with children but a handful of younger men who scurry out with their hands on top of their heads crying “Amigo, yo soy muy amigo!,” herding them all into a mass in front of the church and telling them “Bajo, bajo!” to sit on the ground and some crying while the search is made, bayonets poked and probed and stashes of supplies dragged out and chickens and turkeys flapping and dogs hysterical at their boots and a bristly black hog tied to a tree with a knotted rope through its ear squealing in panic, squealing and trying to bolt, like to tear that ear right off till Coop puts one between its eyes to shut it up and impress the googoos and Royal biting his cheeks the whole while, hating them for this, pushing a man twice his age who is the size of a middling boy, all bone and gristle, pushing hard enough that the man falls over on his face.
“Get up! Arriba, goddammit, don’t make me be draggin your sorry ass over there! Up!”
One squad surrounding the villagers while the rest stab their bayonets into walls and floors and bedding, Coop and Too Tall digging with theirs under the hut platforms hoping for buried gold.
And then Captain Coughlin singles out one or another of them, jerked up and slapped onto a beautifully carved wooden chair in the middle of the plaza to face him and the turncoat interpreter whose name is Dayrit but the men call Stubby. Royal is the one supposed to pull them out, stepping over the cowering, crying mess to stand over the one he thinks they’re pointing to and saying “This one? You want this one?” and then grabbing hold of skinny arms to yank them up and drag the suspect stumbling over the others, gabbling and crying, to be interrogated.
I am death, he thinks. I am their angel of death.
One musket, useless to fire, is found in Las Ciegas, and a store of rice maybe too big for one family, and, under the mayor’s big hut that sits behind a little staked fence, a stack of Mexican silvers buried in a bamboo safe.
“I knew it!” cries Coop when he pries the lid off the bamboo section and pours the coins out on the dirt. “They just pretendin to be so raggedy-ass. Got their whole deal hid away somewhere.”
And the story from the ones set in the chair is always the same. This is a poor village. Some of the young men were killed by the Spanish, some have been kidnapped by the insurgentes or by gangs of bandits. If you take our food we will starve. We are amigos, friends of the Americans, and know nothing about fighting. And then, when it is clear that the soldados negros are not moving on, that they are going to garrison this town, they point out the mayor who is the only one with shoes on and can explain how the Spanish used to do it.
There is one young woman who does not cry and sits a little apart from the others. When Royal stands over her she gets to her feet before he has to grab her. He can smell cocoanut oil in her hair.
“She say her husband is died,” Stubby tells the captain when she is planted in the chair. “She say the kastilas kill him in Manila.” He puts his hands around his fat neck and makes a choking gesture. “Some time ago.”
“They all say their husbands were killed,” growls Captain Coughlin. “There’s nothing but widows in this country.”
Stubby grins and nods. “Widows, yes. We have many of these.”
“Tell her I don’t believe her. Ask her where he is.”
Royal watches the woman as she answers the shouted questions. She looks like she is maybe his same age. She looks like she is past hurting.
“She say he is en la tumba,” says Stubby. “He was called Fecundo Maga-puna.”
Captain Coughlin bends to put his face very close to hers, but her eyes are unwavering.
“Get her away from me,” he says and Royal moves but she is already on her feet. He follows her back to where she was sitting, cocoanut oil the sweetest thing he’s smelled in weeks, and when she turns to look into his eyes he mutters to her.
“Perdóname,” he says.
He is not sure if that’s right, if it’s only what you say if you bump a lady on a crowded trolley, if it doesn’t count unless you take your hat off first, but she does not glare back at him, only keeps looking, and for the rest of the questioning he can feel her eyes on him.
Nilda, he heard her say when Stubby asked her name. Nilda Magapuna.
They are bigger than the Spanish, much bigger. And dark, some of them, some as dark as the negritos up north and some closer to her color, but the ones in charge are all white men. So it works the same with them. They are men with rifles and do what is always done. At home in Zambales when she was a girl the Spanish did the same, and took everything there was to eat, but these men seem to be staying. If they stay long she will leave, after they relax their vigilance, leave and try to go back to Zambales. There is nobody here in Las Ciegas for her anymore, Fecundo buried and his mother gone to the coast so now they can talk about him openly, how he left owing money to so many, a gambler and a layabout and where did he find that girl?
When she looked into the eyes of the one it surprised her at first. They are just men. Just men with rifles like the Spanish are men or the ones fighting still to the north are men and if she doesn’t leave, soon, that will be trouble.
Hilario, the capitán de barangay, is pointing her out now.
She really is a widow, he says. She lives in the house of her dead husband’s mother who has left for the coast and that house is a good place to put some of your soldiers. If you pay her she can cook and wash your clothes. Hilario’s wife is glaring at Nilda because the wife knows Hilario has been after her since the day she arrived from Mariquina. The dark soldiers are all under the houses now, stabbing the ground with the blades on their rifles, looking for treasure. She hopes if they find any more they don’t start to fight over it. Some of them are looking at her, too, and the other young women. We are treasure, Nilda thinks, but only for a moment.