A Moment in the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page A

stay clear of the swamp and how to travel by the stars and it is still clear in the sky above the treetops, clear with a little bit of a breeze carrying the piney wood smell that they say is so good for your lungs. Clarence hears himself laughing.
    “You do me one thing if you make it,” Brumby say. “Don’t you waste your life, son. We only get one to live out. Find yourself a trade, somethin that aint stealing.”
    We see, old man, thinks Clarence as he eases Lightning into a fast trot, heading west. See what they got for a runaway nigger.

FORT MISSOULA
    The only part that bothers Royal is when the doctor sits on the stool to stare into the hole in the head of his pizzle. The doctor is a white man, which he didn’t know it would be but is not too surprised since it is their army. The rest—showing his teeth, making a muscle, bending his knees up and down, the mirror bouncing light into his eyes and ears, even the white man’s fingers around his wrist while he counts, silently moving his lips—barely starts him sweating. Six of them at a time, naked, standing with eyes forward and arms hung loose at their sides as the doctor moves down the row and the colored boy in the uniform who seems to be his helper slides the stool along. The floor is cold under Royal’s feet.
    “Peel em back and hold em at attention,” says the little colored boy, who the doctor calls Earl and the boy keeps answering Private Beckwith. A couple of the naked men snigger. Royal knows what this is for, he thinks, and does what they say.
    “ This is our only chance ,” Junior has told him, “ so you got to act right .”
    It’s not like a dare, exactly, not like when him and his brother Jubal were little and would get up high in the branches over the creek, way too high and the water not near deep enough, sick in the stomach like how he feels now, and if one stepped off the other honor-bound to follow. Wild-ass stupid. But Junior has made it clear enough that nothing short of this will cause people to pay heed to Royal Scott, lift him up in their eyes.
    In her eyes.
    The doctor bends and squints at it. The sweat comes now, rolling down his sides and Royal can’t help but give up a shiver. Junior’s father, Dr. Lunceford, got an eye that can make you sweat like that, even with all your clothes on.
    “Any problem making water?”
    “No sir,” he says. “Aint never had that.”
    His own Mama did for Towson Miles with her roots a while back, but she didn’t need him to take it out and show it in her face.
    “Less you want to be a dribblin idiot by-an-by,” she told him, “you got to stew these roots twice a day and drink it all down.”
    “It taste bad?” Towson wasn’t ever up to much good, wore him a path between Sprunt’s cotton press and the Manhattan Club, dogging anything in a skirt he met on the way.
    “What you got,” Royal’s Mama told him, “it taste as bad as it ought to.”
    The doctor stands and steps to the side, cocking his head to look at Royal the way the old men in Wilmington do when they’re set to swap mules.
    “Cough.”
    Royal doesn’t know if they’re watching for a strong cough or a weak one, so he pushes one out somewhere in the middle, careful not to blow air on the white man.
    “That’s enough with these, Earl,” says the doctor, crossing to write on some papers at his desk.
    “Private Beckwith,” corrects the colored boy in the uniform, softly. “Put your clothes on and wait outside,” he says to the naked men and they hurry to it, rolling eyes at each other and grinning. Royal doesn’t dare smile even though the doctor has his back turned. This little Earl might see and tell the doctor something after.
    Junior sits on one of the benches along the wall in the hallway with the other dozen who went before. He shoots Royal an asking look, but there is nothing to tell him. It is up to the white doctor and whatever he wrote down.
    “You got to fit the uniform, is what,” says one of the men