A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone

the carousel. Around her were womenwhose children rode and women who stood with their children around them, watching the others.
    He sees me as a fool, Justin thought fearfully. He sees my foolishness.
    Under the lights, her face fixed on the whirl before her, she contemplated her inward place. It was a foolish place, of course, but orderly. Like a corridor in some worthwhile institution, the walls and floors all spotless, the suffering and the flesh behind white screens. A virgin’s place, a bit of a whited sepulcher.
    It was dim and Lenten, its saints were shrouded and if it held any tabernacles they were open and empty. It was very far away.
    The notion frightened her. Far, she thought—far from where?
    It was fearful and a prison and so was the world. She looked at the crowd across the lights from where she stood; she and they were separated by miles.
    But she had been in prison before and she had been afraid. Marched through the cicada din of a Mississippi night, to a place where the cotton fields were ringed with hooded watch lights and barbed wire under a million stars, to a blockhouse smelling of drains and urine. And then they turned out the lights in the block and the matron came out to tell ghost stories in the dark. It was the torment reserved for outside agitators that night, the treatment the guards had smirked about all the way to Parchman. No prods, no bucket across the skull, not that night—but darkness and ghost stories.
    Somebody said boy, if Folkways Records was here. They were in a black block because the white girls would kill them. In the dorm outside their jammed segregation cell, the black girls laughed or moaned and cried; some of them were sisterly, some insane and armed with razors.
    The matron’s dusty little voice demanded “Who Got Mah Golden Ahm?”
    The jughead innocence had its own horror. And nuns were bad luck there.
    Goddamn it, Justin said to herself, I’m not a fool. He must know that.
    She had seen the guns and the dogs; she knew well enough the difference between real wounds and painted martyrdoms. She had courage—her parents had it and she had it from them. All her life shehad worked and soldiered with the best; wherever work and soldiering were required she could pay her way. We are not afraid today, she thought. What am I getting myself into? She shivered.
    Then she looked up and saw that Father Godoy had taken a place opposite her along the carousel rail and, with the lights behind her, she felt that she could look at him unembarrassed. The two older boys whom he had sought stood, looking annoyed and drunk, behind him. Godoy was watching the children on the carousel.
    The machine was playing a march from an old operetta; the children, with their eyes full of lights, were reaching out to snatch the brass ring that was suspended by a strap from a stanchion beside where Godoy stood. They circled past his gaze, undersized, rickety, plenty of them dwarfed or scabrous, the sixty-five percent, the survivors of birth and infancy in Tecan—on their painted horses. He looked at them as no father she had ever seen looked at his own children. His gray eyes shone like theirs, with such fierce love that she trembled to see him.
    She felt then that all the companionship, all the moral recognition she had ever required from the universe reposed in the eyes of this priest. Between them the children went round and round, children of the campesinos, rojos, jíbaros —the wretched, the pobrecitos. She could not take her eyes from his face as he watched them.
    At 0401 Pablo Tabor signed himself off the circuit and put out the last cigarette of his watch. On his way through Search and Rescue to the Coke machine, he saw the sky through the Operations Room window, it was alight and clear, pale yellow.
    “Ah me,” he said softly.
    Breedlove, the Operations yeoman, was watching him.
    “Ol’ Pablo must have smoked about a thousand cigarettes tonight,” Breedlove told his yeoman striker. “I