Forever

by Pete Hamill

  Now he was staring at Cormac.

  “Are they all slaves?”

  “They were, sir. They’re soldiers now. American soldiers.” “Have they been fed?”

  “Yes, sir. They’re looking for ammunition now. They used all they had.”

  “And they’re good soldiers?”

  “You saw them. They didn’t run.”

  He sat down again in his camp chair and offered the empty chair to Cormac.

  “Why did they fight while so many ran?”

  “They want to be free, General. That’s why they’re with us. That’s why they listened to me when I recruited them. That’s why they won’t disappear when times get hard. They want to be free, sir. Free.”

  Washington looked at him for a long moment and there was something moving in his eyes that Cormac couldn’t identify.

  “Would you like a glass of wine?” Washington said.

  The cannon screamed through the night, exploding around them, scattering soldiers, collapsing tents. Cormac knew what was happening: The English and their hired Hessian soldiers wanted to smash the Americans here in Harlem Heights, splinter and ruin their five thousand troops, capture or kill Washington. If they could do that, the revolution would be over. They could all sing songs, get drunk, sleep with whores, and get ready to go home.

  Washington that night would not let them do any of that. He was everywhere, sword in hand, his face filled with furies, shouting, commanding, calling on pride. “Your children will remember you for this night! Don’t fail them!” And, “Die on your knees, you crazy American bastards!” And, “Send them all to Hell, boys!”

  And they held. They held the lines, Cormac and Bantu, Aaron and Silver and Carlito among them, pouring fire into the moving lines in the dense wooded hollow below the heights. Still the cannon roared, the balls tore through young bodies. An old man rose in fury, his white hair spiky against the dark sky, and cried: “Come and fight, you feckers! Come and die!” And then was smashed by a cannonball, knocked over into death like a bowling pin.

  Cormac looked up and there was Washington on his horse, right above them.

  “Their cannon are killing us!” he shouted. “Get your niggers and destroy the cannon.”

  Cormac thought: They are not niggers, they’re Americans.

  But Washington was gone, and there was no time for debate. Cormac and the black patrol slipped down the western side of the ridge, seeing the distant shimmer of the river, trying to estimate the location of the cannon from the arc of the balls. Then they saw the first scouts of an English flank, coming up the west side of the forest on a dirt road. Bantu gestured at a stone Dutch barn, its doors open, its animals gone. From its weed-sprouting walls, the path was a pale line under the moon. They hurried to the barn, spread themselves from the loft to the doors, waited, and then started killing soldiers. They shot the first two men who came up the rise, then the next three, then two more, all of them falling upon one another, forming a mound. All were redcoats. All kept coming as if they were toys, and the Americans kept firing and reloading and firing again, hands moving in a blur, fingers squeezing triggers. Redcoats fell to the forest floor.

  Then the first cannonball tore through the roof of the barn, caroming wildly off the flagstone floor, and then another, and Cormac and the others slipped out the back and into the woods between the road and the river. Cormac thought: I killed the earl somewhere up here. Long ago. In another life.

  They made a wide arc, moving the way wolves would move, drawn to the sound of the cannon. The moon did not penetrate the forest. Cormac strapped his rifle to his shoulder and drew the sword. So did the others. They did not need to explain to one another that here in the darkness they would fight silently. They came upon two Hessians, who turned in fear at the sight of four black faces. Too late. Bantu and Silver cut their throats.

  Then they saw the clearing. Five cannon on wheels, a dozen redcoats loading balls, pouring powder. Cormac and the others hunkered low in the shrubs. They spread out, each charged with attacking the crew of one piece. Bantu was to shoot as many as possible while the others pounced with sword and knife. They watched as all five cannon were fired at once, the crews jamming fingers in their ears, some of them grinning. Then the Americans charged. Bantu had two rifles now, one lifted from a dead soldier, and he fired one, then the other, rolled on the ground to reload, and fired twice more. Three redcoats went down. Others turned in horror, reaching for rifles as their throats were slit. Cormac beheaded two men, then chopped another man’s arm at the shoulder.

  They became a single creature made for killing. There was nothing else now. Just the killing. No fear, no choice, no thought. They stabbed and slashed and ripped. They chopped at necks. They drove swords through hearts. Few words were spoken as men grunted, or gagged on blood, or groaned, and then died.

  Then it was over.

  Cormac sat down hard on the thick leafy floor of the clearing. His hands were slippery with blood. It coated his sword and his clothes and his boots. He looked at the others. Silver leaned on a cannon, Bantu lay back against a tree. Aaron seemed dazed and drained, standing with short sword in hand, while Carlito draped a hand on his shoulders. All glistened with blood. They didn’t even look at the men they had slaughtered.

  “We should take the heads,” Bantu said.

  “Yah,” said Aaron.

  Take the heads, Cormac told himself. The way the Irish always took the heads, the way the Fianna took the heads. Sever them. Hang them on poles. No. Don’t take the heads. Please don’t take the heads.

  “They weigh too foogin’ much,” Silver said.

  They laughed, and then went silent.

  Now they could hear the trees riffling and sighing in the wind, and away off the crackle of rifle fire. A lot of rifle fire. But they still didn’t move. The air was thick with the odor of powder, of burning trees and smoldering leaves, of ripped-out guts, of leaking shit.

  Finally Bantu stirred. Suddenly alert. He gripped his short sword, and turned to peer behind him into the darkness. The others tensed. He went on hands and knees, and then moved into some shrubbery. He came out grinning, holding a wolf cub.

  “Yah!” he said. “Look.”

  The cub was small and gray with a white face and yellow eyes. Bantu held it close, cradling it, and the animal began licking blood from his neck and face. Bantu smiled.

  “American!” he said. “American!”

  Each of them came to touch the cub, playing knobby fists against its small sharp teeth, stroking its fine new hair. Cormac felt a surge of emotion, as if he were again the boy on the fields of Ireland, with Bran barking beside him. They kept saying in the city that all the wolves were dead, and here was one of them, alive, separated, like every member of the black patrol, from the pack.

  And then, as time stretched and compressed, an hour later or three minutes later, they heard another sound: a distant roar. They stood still, listening, hands clenching weapons. The roar was louder, coming to them through the trees and across boulders and above the bodies of the dead. Louder and louder. Louder than any sound he’d ever heard, punctuated by rifle shots.

  It was the Americans.

  A dozen of them, dressed in the uniforms of the Continental Army, bursting among them, seeing the dead redcoats and the four men with black faces. One shouted: “We’ve broken their lines! They’re running!”

  And rushed past them, raising weapons, leaping into forest, crashing forward, shooting. Cormac realized that they were in the midst of the first victory of the Revolution.

  But still the black patrol did not move. The wolf cub made a crying sound. Somewhere in the woods were other cubs, a mother, perhaps all of them dead, killed by fearful men.

  “We go now,” Aaron said. “We fetch Big Michael.”

  They moved toward Kip’s Bay through the morning. Along the way, they saw scattered corpses in Hessian blue or English scarlet, providing a harvest for flies and worms. At a small river, they entered the cold waters an
d scrubbed at the blood on their bodies and clothes, Bantu holding the cub over his head, its jaws now shut by gold braid torn from an English corpse.

  A hard gray rain began falling. When they came to an abandoned farmhouse, they entered and bolted the doors behind them. The farmers must have been gone for only a few days, fleeing the war. Carlito started a fire in the hearth and they boiled potatoes and carrots and fried strips of bacon and slathered butter on hard bread. “Better it does not spoil,” Silver said, and smiled, his mouth full of wobbly wooden teeth. “Better we eat.” There were apples too, and grapes, and they ate quietly, peering out at the falling rain and the rolling forests. Bantu fed bread and bacon to the cub and put water in a dish for him to drink. With his back to a wall, staring at the fire, Cormac remembered his hunger in the arctic winter in Ireland, devouring cheese in a dairy, more hungry than he’d ever been before or since. He told the others to sleep while he stood the first watch. They would go for Big Michael in the dark.

  They slept, the wolf cub curled into Bantu’s armpit, and Cormac surveyed the house. It was more than a house, he thought: It was a home. He and the others were sleeping within its walls, but it was not their home. Men like us, he thought, have no homes.

  He entered the next room, where there were two hard, narrow beds covered with quilts. The closets held women’s clothes. Shifts and dresses for a large woman, broad-beamed, large-bosomed. The others were for a smaller, thinner woman. Mother and daughter, perhaps. Or sisters. Mother and cub.

  The clothes and bodies and faces of women flooded through him as he moved on bare feet around the room and then back into the place where the men were sleeping. It was thirty-five years since he’d seen Bridget Riley sail out of New York, thirty-five years since he’d last looked upon the hard, confused face of Mary Burton. There had been many women since then. Which was to say, he’d had no women.

  He knew enough about himself now to understand his habits of holding back, of refusing. He had read much poetry and a few novels, and had listened to many women, to their questions, to their tears. He knew that the combination of Bridget Riley and Mary Burton had put fear in his heart in the place where love demanded fearlessness. He knew that not all women were like those women of 1741, that no woman was exactly like any other woman. But their presence remained alive, full of the potential for betrayal, for illusion, for inexplicable loyalties. Bridget was loyal to the earl; Mary had been, in her way, loyal to Cormac. How could he think all women were alike?

  And more important, there was this other thing, this gift granted to him in a cave in Inwood. There was no way, at first, to know if this was a dream, a wish born in his own brain. He could only know its truth by living. Now he knew it was true. He had continued to live while others died, he had remained young, in all obvious ways, while others withered and turned gray and walked Broadway in feeble, palsied steps. That affected him with women. How could he remain with one woman who would gaze at him and then gaze in the mirror? She would know he was different. She would know that he was beyond the normal cycles of a life.

  Better to let each woman know that he was a passing fancy, that they could enjoy the pleasures of each other’s body, but that each could be alone in the morning. Many women welcomed such an understanding. Widows, the wives of seagoing men, women locked in loveless unions, older women whose children had gone off. They welcomed the excitement of aroused flesh. They welcomed whispered words. They welcomed the gift of a rose or a locket. As years passed, more of them thought he was a handsome young man, when he was actually older than any of them. All were excellent teachers, and he thought of some of them as if they were books he had taken down from shelves.

  “There’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” they would say, and then do what he had done many times with women in his rented rooms. The town was filling up with strangers, with women who did not know one another, and were thus free of the intimacies of gossip. The village he’d come to as a boy was becoming a town and was certain to become a city. And in the anonymous crowds, all was possible.

  Bantu stirred, without benefit of a clock. He would now take the watch. Cormac nodded and went into the bedroom, to lie down and inhale the odor of a woman’s body.

  At some hour before midnight, they found Big Michael where he had fallen, facedown in the earth. Animals had gnawed the flesh on his neck and arms. Aaron started digging with a spade stolen from the farmhouse, and the others gazed toward Kip’s Bay, visible under the moon, with lanterns blazing on the English frigates and men still crossing to the shore in longboats. They must be quick. Silver took the spade, followed by Bantu and Cormac and Carlito. Grunting and digging, until the trench was deep enough to keep Big Michael from the paws of foraging animals. They lifted Big Michael’s body together, the wolf cub yipping and excited, and then lowered him gently. His bones would be part of this island, Cormac thought, for as long as there was an island.

  Bantu spoke in Yoruba, consigning Big Michael to the care of the gods.

  “We will see you in the Otherworld, O brother,” he said.

  And then they started the long journey to the north, to meet with Washington’s triumphant army. They passed small groups of redcoats sullenly guarding campfires. They forded streams. They saw bodies of Americans and Englishmen and Hessians. They paused to rest, then began again. At last they saw the escarpment of Harlem Heights, outlined against the dawn.

  It was empty. Washington’s army was gone.

  “They’ve marched to White Plains,” an American scout told them. “The whole lot of them.”

  “And will fight in White Plains?” Cormac said.

  “I suppose. They don’t tell the likes of me such things. But I guess they’ll fight a bit, then cross the river. The English are now between us and White Plains, they came in the morning, so the only place for Washington to go is New Jersey….”

  The black patrol was silent, staring at one another’s stunned faces. They’d been left behind. Abandoned. God damn it. Silver asked if there were any other boats that could take them across the river.

  “Not that I know,” the scout said. “My orders are to go home in another day.”

  “Where is home?” Carlito asked.

  “Westport.”

  “So Washington is handing New York to the Crown?” Cormac said.

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know. I know I go home tomorrow.”

  Cormac looked south. The sun was seeping into the sky above Brooklyn.

  “Let’s go,” he said to the others.

  “Where?”

  “New York,” he said.

  Bantu took the braid from the muzzle of the wolf cub and walked him into the woods and set him free.

  67.

  They fought their own war now. They sawed through the beams of bridges at midnight, spilling carriages and caissons into streams. They broke into warehouses and killed guards and stole rifles and sent them on boats across the river to New Jersey. They spread posters on the walls of buildings, advising English soldiers to save their lives by going home. Most of all, they burned houses.

  “They keep taking houses for their soldiers and their officers,” Cormac said. “We have to force them to sleep in the rain.”

  He explained what had been done in 1741, and how the conspirators had waited a day for the wind. They must set up everything carefully, straw, paper, oil, kindling. So they did, with Bantu and Silver posing as water carriers, lamp oils suspended at each end of poles. Aaron was a carpenter, with papers stating that he was a freeman, manumitted by a dying owner (printed at night by Cormac in the shop of one of the Sons of Liberty). He went from door to door, offering his services, peering around storerooms and workshops. Carlito met with the Spanish slaves, learning the vulnerabilities of the homes and workplaces of their masters. Cormac marked maps. In the afternoons, one at a time, they wandered past the places where the fire pumps were stored and punctured the bottoms of water buckets and sliced holes in the hoses. At night, Cormac dreamed of fire and
destruction.

  The rest of life seemed almost normal. As the English officers arrived in New York, the Tories welcomed them, throwing elegant parties, hosting nights of song and loyalty at the John Street Theater. They called down God’s blessings on the Sovereign while clavichord music tinkled from the mansions near the Bowling Green. Tory mothers presented their daughters like offerings. Whores began ringing the fort. One or two at a time, and then in larger numbers, the Americans had been slipping away, some carrying their valuables to country places, others boarding ships for the South. Some were loyal to Washington. Others wanted to avoid what was certain to come to the streets of New York. The English did not interfere with their flight. They wanted the abandoned American homes.

  Cormac, dressed as a mechanic, was watching part of this sad American exodus one evening on Broadway when a large redhaired man came up beside him. He was wearing a cape, his hands hidden.

  “They’ll be back,” the red-haired man said. The accent Irish.

  “Aye,” Cormac said.

  “Don’t ye think?” the man said.

  Cormac shrugged. It was impossible to know the sides that each man had chosen in this town; this Irishman could be just another English spy. “Where do you come from?” Cormac asked in Irish. The man seemed startled, and answered, “Armagh.” Another voyager from Ulster. They stood together, and as the last carriage passed on its way north, Cormac heard the sound of uilleann pipes. He was surprised. The sound was mournful, sad, angry, all at once, and seemed to come from the chest of the red-haired man from Armagh. Cormac stepped back and realized the man was playing his pipes under the cape, using his right elbow for power.

  “Good day, sir,” Cormac said, and walked quickly away as the man gave voice through his pipes to the ghosts mixed with the higher-pitched howl of the banshee.

  Then one night, as a hard wind blew toward the west, the fire began. Cormac set it off in the empty upstairs rooms of a tavern called the Fighting Cocks, down by the waterfront off Whitehall. The barroom was full of Hessians, singing in German, and Cormac left through a window. He moved languidly through the streets toward the East River, then cut north and back west toward the Common. When he turned, the sky was red. Bells replaced the tinkling of clavichords. Soldiers ran in a dozen directions and then backed away from the roaring flames. Water once more dribbled from hoses as small geysers arose from punctures. The buckets were like sieves. Horses whinnied and bucked and pounded at stable doors. There were screams and lamentations.