Forever

by Pete Hamill

  “O’Donovan,” Cormac said. “Martin O’Donovan. From Galway.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’m Sarah Hughson. I run this place, with my husband, John.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Cormac said.

  “Mary, take Mr. O’Donovan to room three, would you, dearie?” the woman said in a flat voice.

  “Yes’m.”

  He lifted his shoes and socks in one hand and his bag in the other. At the sight of him, Mary Burton laughed out loud.

  “Don’t you be laughin’ at a guest, y’ young flit!” Sarah said sharply.

  “I don’t mind,” Cormac said. “I must look a right idiot.”

  “It’s not for you to excuse her, young man,” Sarah said. “We live with rules here. The first rule is the three shillings is paid in advance.”

  He dug the shillings from his pocket and handed them to her.

  “Try to get some sleep,” she said. “You look fit for bein’ buried.”

  “Aye,” he said, and followed Mary Burton up the stairs, eyes fixed on her bare calves. She led him to a small room under the eaves, furnished with a narrow cot and a battered bureau. A small window faced south to Fort George. He dropped the bag on the floor. There was a piss pot against the wall.

  “Well, you’re certainly not from Galway,” she said. “Not with that accent. I’m from Galway, and I know. So I assume your name’s not Martin O’Donovan.”

  “Are you a policeman in disguise?”

  “Not in this bloody house,” she said, chuckling in a private, knowing way.

  “Call me Martin anyway,” Cormac said.

  “All right,” she said. “In this bloody town, nobody is who they say they are anyway.”

  She stared out the rain-dripping window toward the harbor.

  “Is there a way to get a bit of breakfast?”

  “First take off your clothes,” she said.

  He laughed. “Is this the way you welcome people to America?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s just that I can’t stand the feckin’ sight of that lovely feckin’ suit turning into a feckin’ coal bag.”

  She stared at him. “And besides,” she said, “I want to know what it is you’ve got strapped to your back.”

  He removed his jacket and hung it on the bedpost.

  “It’s a sword,” Cormac said, unbuckling the straps across his chest and then holding the sword’s handle in its scabbard and showing her. There was a glitter of fascination in her eyes.

  “A fecking sword it is,” she said. “I thought so.”

  “Actually, it’s my father’s sword.”

  “Was he thinkin’ of New York when he gave it to you?”

  “No,” he said, and paused, as an image of his father’s corded arms scribbled through him, hammering the sword in his forge. “No, he was dead when it passed to my hands. He left it to me.”

  She looked at him with another kind of disbelief. He sensed that there were few stories that Mary Burton truly believed.

  “I see,” she said.

  She lifted his jacket off the bedpost. A sour odor filled the room. Cormac was sure it was from him: sweat and rain and the stench of the ship.

  “The trousers too.”

  “Uh, I don’t know you that well, miss. I don’t—”

  “I told you: The name’s Mary Burton. I owe the feckin’ Hughsons six more feckin’ years on me feckin’ indenture. Let me have the feckin’ trousers.”

  “Why don’t you fetch me some breakfast and I’ll take them off while you’re gone.”

  “Jaysus, another tightnutter from Ireland.”

  She hustled out with the jacket, closing the door behind her. A key was slotted in the keyhole and Cormac turned it, locking the door. He was not really shy of Mary Burton seeing him naked, but he didn’t want her seeing the money belt. He stripped off the trousers, unbuckled the money belt, and shoved it under the mattress. He pulled off his long, soaked underwear and hung it with the trousers on the bedpost. Then he unlocked the door and eased under the coverlet, his hunger fighting with his exhaustion, and both in combat with images of Mary Burton’s body. Little squalls of rain spattered the windowpane. He smelled bacon frying. His body drowsed, but he remained awake, the sword on the floor, his hand on its hilt. Then Mary Burton returned with a tray. She laid it across his covered thighs: three fried eggs, slabs of greasy bacon, brown buttered bread, and a pot of tea.

  “Sit up,” she said.

  He did, leaning closer to her.

  “Do you think I could have me a bath?” he said.

  She snickered. “The rule is one bath a week. There’s seven feckin’ rooms in this hole, and your room doesn’t get its bath for two more feckin’ days. Don’t feckin’ complain to me. I don’t make the rules.”

  He laughed. “How many times a day do you say ‘feck’?”

  “As many as I feckin’ can.”

  She paused at the door.

  “I suppose you’d like me to join you?” she said.

  ”Well, I—”

  She humphed in a dismissive way.

  “Just leave the feckin’ tray outside the feckin’ door,” she said, picking up the rest of his clothes and closing the door hard.

  He ate desperately, jamming the bread into his mouth, taking bacon in his fingers. Thinking: Mary Burton. Thinking: Who are you, girl? Thinking: Why do you talk worse than a sailor? Mary Morrigan moved in his mind, smelling of the forest, whispering the old tales. He saw the perfumed breast of Bridget Riley in the Earl of Warren’s bed. Then Tomora, gazing with her liquid black eyes from the blackness of her jail. Then the door opened again and Mary Burton came in, holding a steaming bowl of water. She placed it on the bureau.

  “If you wait two days to feckin’ wash,” she said, “we’ll be dead of the stink.” She put a piece of gray muslin and a sliver of soap beside the bowl. “And don’t tell that bitch Sarah I took you some soap. She’ll add thruppence to the feckin’ account.”

  With that, she was gone again. Cormac finished eating and then stood up naked, using the soap and the muslin cloth to wash his face and neck, armpits and balls and feet. He felt at once filled and purged, his stomach full, his flesh scoured. He then put the dirty dishes on the tray and laid them outside the door. The corridor was empty. He heard smothered female voices from below. Then male growls. He locked the door. He shoved his bag between bed and wall, with the small leather pouch inside containing his mother’s spiral earrings. He laid the sword under the thin mattress and strapped the money belt to the small of his back. Thirteen pounds. His mother’s spiral earrings. His father’s sword. They were all that he truly possessed, which was a lot more than most. All of them with him now in this room in America. The rain whipped the windowpanes, and he fell asleep.

  42.

  In the dark, Cormac heard the muffled sound of a fiddle and thought he was still on the ship. But nothing rocked or creaked, no seaborne timber cleaved water. He was in a room. On land. With dim light leaking through crooked shutters. He rubbed his eyes, and the room emerged dimly, in dark gray tones. He stretched, felt the sword through the mattress and the straps of the money belt digging into his flesh. He unbuckled the money belt and rubbed his skin. Then he sat up naked. And stepped into the chill, and felt for the candle and wooden matches on top of the bureau. He snapped a sulphur head with a thumbnail, lit the wick. Almost reluctantly, yellow light revealed the room. From beyond the door, the unseen fiddler played a melancholy tune.

  His suit was not in the room. He cracked open the door and peered into the darkened hallway. The sound of the fiddle was louder now, but no less melancholy. And there was the suit, neatly hanging on a rough hanger hooked upon a wall peg opposite the door. He took it in behind him. Again, he washed his face and armpits with the chilly water and dried himself with the coarse, damp cloth, dressed quickly, buckling the money belt under his trousers, and went out, locking the door behind him and pocketing the key.

  He followed the sound of the fiddle down two fligh
ts of stairs to the blue door in the back of the entrance hall. The melancholy tune ended, and the music shifted into an up-tempo reel, which was greeted by a loud, growling, masculine roar of approval.

  He opened the door and stepped into another world: a lowceilinged, smoky room crowded with white men and Africans, some of them up and jigging madly to the music, the floor shaking, laughter pealing, some of the black men doing wild parodies of the white men’s dances. One white woman was dancing with two black men, laughing and taunting them. And from the side came Mary Burton, all rosy in the light of lanterns. She grabbed Cormac’s forearm.

  “The feckin’ suit looks better now,” she said.

  “It does. Thanks very much.” He smiled. “And thanks for the water and soap.”

  “You must smell a lot better,” she said. “Can you jig?”

  “No.”

  “Well, try anyway.”

  She jerked him into the center of the dancing men, her back straight, her arms rigidly hanging at her side, her breasts bouncing to the music and the movements. The room roared. Dance it, Marymouth. Do it, do it… She glowered at Cormac until he stepped in and tried to match her moves, feeling clumsy and oafish, his legs like lumber. Until one of the Africans shouted at him.

  “Don’t think, boy. Move.”

  And so he did, surrendering to the music, and the packed heat, and the smoke, and the open mouth of Mary Burton, her lips shifting as he stared, and the music pulsing, and her breasts pushing against the cotton blouse, and she was Mary Morrigan and she was Bridget Riley, and his head started seething and he felt himself hardening and her hand brushed his hardness while other dancers bumped against him, closing the tight space around Mary Burton, and she ran a tongue over her mouth in a teasing way. And then it was over. Everyone cheered. And then Mary Burton embraced him, pressing into him, pushing her small breasts hard against his chest.

  “Ah, that was feckin’ grand,” she growled, suddenly turning and shoving her way through the crowd to the bar. He followed her. From the jumble of excited talk he kept hearing Marymouth, Mary-mouth, at once affectionate and charged with lust. She pushed an African aside and reached for a plate. The bar was covered with jugs and glasses and mugs, and platters of ham and venison and bleeding beef, potatoes, turnips, and cabbage, bread loaves and a butter tub, and a kind of porridge called sappaan. She heaped food on a plate. Behind the bar stood a tall, unsmiling, fleshy man with skin cratered by smallpox. His body was still, but his hands moved quickly: uncorking bottles, pouring drinks, gathering coins, and dropping them into the pockets of his greasy apron. His eyes were as soft in their own way as his body. But to be sure, Cormac thought, I’ve spent so many weeks with men made lean and hard by hunger that almost everybody else in the room looks soft.

  “John,” Mary Burton said, “this is your new boarder, Mister O’Donovan, he says his name is.” Then to Cormac: “John Hughson. He owns this feckin’ dive.”

  Hughson’s mouth smiled, but his eyes remained soft and disappointed.

  “Welcome,” he said. “Have a drink, lad.”

  He glanced at Mary Burton.

  “Maybe you’ll be the one to land Miss Mouth,” he said, opening a bottle of porter.

  “Oh, shush, John. Let the man eat.”

  “That’s sixpence,” Hughson said, as Cormac fumbled for change. “You must be just in from the sea. You’ve got that ship hunger on you. Ah, well, you’re not alone. Some of ’em come in here ready to eat the bloody furniture.”

  “The feckin’ furniture might taste better than some of your food, John,” Mary Burton said.

  “Don’t give the lad a bad impression, wench.”

  He turned to a foot-wide opening in the wall behind him, beyond which was the kitchen, and shouted something Cormac couldn’t hear under the sound of another kind of music. The fiddler bowed a few bars, and then the Africans joined him, using rattles and gourds and polished wooden bars that made a klawkklawk-klawk sound. Some chanted together and were answered by others. The voices were taunting, bragging, laughing, sharing the close, dense, happy air of the place to which they’d been taken at gunpoint. Cormac understood only one large thing: He was hearing Africa.

  “Come on,” Mary Burton said, grabbing Cormac’s plate and pushing him along through the chanting crowd to a table near the far wall. Three black men were seated on a bench, drinking rum. In the corner, the white fiddler played in solitude, overwhelmed by the African rhythms but trying to play into and through them.

  “Move over, you lot,” Mary Burton said to the three Africans, and they did, smiling and polite. “We’ve got us a new feckin’ inmate.”

  Cormac had already seen one of them: Quaco, the tall man who had behaved well at the Wall Street quay that morning. He said nothing, but gave Cormac a look of recognition, perhaps remembering that he had tried to protect Kongo from the hard men. The others were named Sandy and Diamond. Sandy was Cormac’s age, the other two older. They were all dressed in clean shirts and rough trousers. Mary Burton turned her back to them and picked at some of the food on Cormac’s plate.

  “Why do they call you Marymouth?”

  “Because of my dirty feckin’ mouth. Or—no, that’s it.” She smiled in an almost proud way. “John Hughson says I’ve got the dirtiest feckin’ mouth in America.”

  Cormac squeezed her hand.

  “Well, there’s a lot worse things, I suppose.”

  “Aye, like being a feckin’ slave,” she said. “They call us indentured servants, but that’s the fancy way to say it. The true feckin’ word is slave. Just like all these black fellas from Africa. There’s no bloody difference. I did two years up in Poughkeepsie with a fat feckin’ Dutchman that bought me from some feckin’ English poof. The Dutchman tried to get up into me, but I fought him off, and then his fat feckin’ wife was sure he was gettin’ me anyway, and she it was that had me sold again. John Hughson’s brother bought me for John, and I told John, You might own me, but you won’t have me body and don’t expect me to act like a feckin’ lady while I do the slave work.” She smiled. “Drives him feckin’ wicked, it does.”

  She got up and went to the bar, and carried plates to another table, and sat down again with Cormac, talking and moving to the music, and then was up again. She was always in movement, cracking wise with customers, dancing variations on the jig with Africans, clearing plates, then sitting with Cormac again. Across the night she explained in bits and pieces this small part of the world into which he had arrived, turning for confirmation to Quaco, Sandy, and Diamond. “Isn’t that right, Quaco?” “Yes ma’am.” “Tell the man I’m not feckin’ lying, Sandy.” “Oh, you don’t lie, Miz Mary.” Among other things, Cormac learned that Hughson’s was one of only four taverns where blacks and whites mixed freely.

  “There’s two hundred taverns and only four of them is like this. Isn’t that right, Diamond?”

  “Right, Mary.”

  The British authorities didn’t like it, Sandy said, but they took Hughson’s little bribes and left him alone. Mary laughed. “John says the English captain is really his partner.” Sunday was the slaves’ day off, and because there were so many of them, the white people tried hard to avoid direct confrontations. Yes, it was against the law to serve strong drink to a slave, but this was New York. Yes, it was against the law for slaves to assemble in groups larger than three, but this was New York. After dark, no slave could move through the city without a lantern and a pass from his master; the law meant little because this was New York.

  “They’re not a bad lot, the Africans,” Mary Burton said. “I pity them, kidnapped by those English feckheads and brought to this feckin’ sewer.”

  There were some free Africans, she said, most of them too old to work anymore, cast into the streets by their masters, who were then spared the task of feeding them. “They’re up in the Out Ward, just above the Common,” Mary Burton said. “They’ve got their own burial ground there. They won’t let them be buried with the feckin’ whites. That’s t
he bloody English for you. The Jews are in their own wee bit of turf too, along the Chatham Road. The bloody English, always on their own, even when they’re feckin’ dead.”

  Cormac heard that first night from Mary, from Quaco (with nods and mutterings from Diamond and sad remarks from Sandy) what he would hear for many weeks to come. For the Africans, New York was getting worse, not better.

  “They see too many of us now,” Quaco said quietly. “They needs us. But they don’t want us too.” A flash of something dangerous washed through his composed, intelligent face. “They fears us too,” he said, and started to say something else, and then cut himself off.

  Quaco told Cormac that he was twenty-two and had been in New York since he was twelve, working most days in the meat market for Wallace the victualer. Now that he was older and taller and stronger, and showed a gift for African languages as well as English, he was often rented to the dockmaster when ships came in. There were so many languages among the Africans, but the ones he heard most were Ashanti and Yoruba, which was the language of his part of Africa.

  “I try don’t to be mean,” he said. “Try don’t to hurt a man or woman. They be scared, them from the ships. They don’t know if they still in the world. I talks to them in Ibo or Yoruba or Ashanti, calm ’em down, tell ’em they be fed soon, get them clo’s to be warm. I gets milk to some chile his mother’s dead from the ship. Cawse, a man get crazy, want to kill somebody, I have to stop him. Man he runs, I catch him. But I helps more than I harms people.”

  “Ain’t always be such a way,” said Diamond. “Ain’t all times you be down there helpin’, Quaco. Just proves: Africaman got to help his own self.”

  “Don’t talk no foolish words, boy,” Quaco said in warning.

  “They sure to be a day,” Diamond said, staring at his small hands, and his rum. “They sure to be a day. Our day.”

  “Shut down, fool,” Quaco said, and playfully squeezed Diamond’s head and sipped his own porter. But as the night lengthened, and Mary Burton worked other tables, and Quaco’s tongue was loosened by drink, he told Cormac what it was like to be a slave in New York. Slaves couldn’t ever confront a master. If they did, they got the lash. Sometimes they got the lash for no reason. “Master don’t like the way you look at him, here come the lash. Master don’t like the cookin’? Here come the lash. Silverware missin’? The lash. Africaman can’t go to school to learn to read, ’cause they might read newspapers and see stories ’bout slaves who murder they masters. Or slave rebellions in Jamaica or Georgia.” Silence. “Like we don’t know,” Quaco said, shaking his head. “Like we don’t hear.”