Johnny One-Eye

by Jerome Charyn

  “I beg your pardon, Lord Howe. I’ve had the dysentery. And it’s sucked the life out of me.”

  “I’m told General Washington has the flux night and day, and he commands an army, Serle.”

  “Not an army, sir, a mob. The rebels have their own irregular nation. Why, it’s naught but an ochlocracy—rule by mob and mob alone. They shall never win against us, these noisome fellows, cowards one and all.”

  I was boiling hot, but I had to hold my hands in my britches to keep from pummeling him.

  “Shut up, Serle,” said Black Dick. “The boy has lost an eye fighting against our Canadians on the walls of Quebec.”

  Who had told him that? Was it Clara who’d given up my secrets while she labored over Aristotle?

  “I am sorry,” Serle said. “I’m homesick, you see. I miss my wife and it makes my bile run…where are we going, milord?”

  “To Montresor Island. It’s been reoccupied. The rebels have planted a flag on their own former works. And their young major has taunted me and my brother, says if Black Dick can have Manhattan, he’ll have Montresor.”

  ’T was a worthless little island off Manhattan’s east coast, just south of Harlem.

  “Milord,” I asked, “what is the name of this officer?”

  “Malcolm Treat.”

  I felt sorry for the Brits. That one-eyed major was still in charge of Washington’s secret service, and he wasn’t wintering in Morristown with the commander in chief. Malcolm Treat had found the means to get back onto Manhattan Island. He would make his stand on Montresor and have a poor lovesick admiral capture him.

  Equipped with long coats, we went up to the quarterdeck, stared at the cozy little fortress on Montresor that looked like crooked teeth on a wall.

  “Milord,” Serle asked in his long coat, “are we not pulling too close? They could lob a shell into our hull and ground the Eagle.”

  “With their paltry guns? I could catch their cannonballs with my fists. Do shut up.”

  Black Dick signaled to an officer I could not see, and the Eagle delivered a ferocious broadside that tore up the island and roiled the water to such a degree that I thought the ship would sink. We’d come to Hell Gate, a maelstrom, a vortex that we locals liked to call the Pot, because at high or half tide it could capture anything—soldiers, horses on a barge, sailors in their ships. There was a mountain right below the Pot, rocky crags that had already caused a pair of frigates carrying paymaster’s silver and gold to sink without a sign. And here was Black Dick with his Eagle, willing to risk us all in a whirlpool, on account of Aristotle. If Clara had not crawled under his skin, would a sane man have entered this ungodly channel when he could have rowed across from Manhattan to Montresor?

  A second broadside seemed to level most of the island’s works and leave Montresor a patch of smoldering ruins. And while the Eagle rocked to and fro, we got into a little landing boat—ten marines, the admiral, Serle, and myself—and we rode the currents until we found somewhere to make purchase on the island. The rebels could have shot us to pieces had there been five of them behind a wall, five with flintlocks. The admiral wore his ceremonial hat, but the hat was wet, and his cape was furled around him, so that he resembled some lunatic washed ashore by the tide.

  He handed me the white flag that he’d kept all the time under his cape.

  “Johnny One-Eye, tell your compatriots that we mean them no harm. Should they surrender without a shot, we shan’t harm a hair on their heads. But His Majesty will not countenance rebels in control of Montresor.”

  “Yes, yes,” Serle said, “tell these unhappy men what you must.”

  The admiral glared at him under the enormous prow of his hat.

  “Serle, you are confusing the boy.”

  I wasn’t confused. I was the receptacle of a mad mission.

  I thought to find broken bodies everywhere, men wounded or killed by the Eagle’s shattering force and firepower. But I heard not a single human sound, not a groan, not a hiss, not a battle cry. I walked on top of the works, the crumbling walls that the Brits had cannonaded so well. No party of men could have survived it, large or small.

  Then a face leapt out at me like a sinister lantern from what might have been a man-made crevice in the wall. The face belonged to Malcolm Treat. He wore mud and grease as camouflage.

  His complaint broke the silence.

  “If it isn’t the king’s little reptile. Do you know how many your cannon have killed?”

  “None,” I said. “You overran the island with twenty ruffians like yourself, took no prisoners, slaughtered whoever was here, buried them under the works, got your lads off the island, and waited for the fools to come.”

  “Divil,” he said, “assassin, you’re one of Black Dick’s agents now.”

  I did what I always wanted to do ever since Treat had held me prisoner in a potato bin. I thrashed him, first with my fist, and then with the flagpole. Why should the likes of him have ever ruled over me? He was nothing but a puny one-eyed parasite who’d attached himself to Washington’s waistcoat. I’d have finished him there, on Montresor, among the ruins and those missiles off the Eagle that sat like pocked pumpkin heads on the rough soil.

  But my pleasure was short. Little Serle came upon me, in advance of the admiral and the marines. And I had to put down the flagpole. But I was a shiver from almost murdering a man. And then I caught Black Dick’s man-o’-war through the mist. It was a seabird, by God, with its own enormous tilted beak and wings of cloth, its gun decks like row upon row of hollowed eyes hung with feathers of smoke, feathers that didn’t seem to fade. I could understand now why the admiral was so vulnerable away from the sea, prone to folly. He had no need of Aristotle aboard the Eagle.

  He tilted his head and looked upon Treat, who lay within the crumbling works, a spent cannonball inches from his ear. “Major, I am moved by your heroic stand. To hold your little island against a battleship. You are my prisoner, and you’ll dine with me on board the Eagle.”

  He put his cape around the major, got him to his feet, and had his marines carry him to our landing boat. Treat had triumphed, not I. He would be put on parole with the admiral’s approval. And Black Dick would recommend him to the players of John Street, who called themselves Howe’s Thespians, in honor of Sir William. Little Treat could assume the women’s roles, like the Empress of China or the Old Maid.

  I furled up my white flag and walked through the mist, watching the Eagle’s many eyes. I dreaded returning to dry land. I liked it here. There were no ambiguities, viz., my curious relationship with Clara, which had started as a honeymoon, albeit chaste, and was now but a battlefield.

  Twenty-Four

  THERE WAS MUCH BRUIT IN MY OWN FRONT YARD. A gang of British sappers arrived in mid-March and reduced our rampart to the tiniest of hills. Next they built a guardhouse, a little hut, and we had redcoats stationed right on Robinson Street. Had Sir William stumbled upon George Washington’s own secret history with Gert? Redcoats on our lawn wouldn’t have been the way to lure him into the Queen’s Yard—yet it troubled the soul. Sir William meant to trap George Washington within Gertrude’s garden.

  And what if I were wrong? Perhaps Sir William worried that some rebel sharpshooter might take a potshot at his brother, who wandered about the nunnery unless he was on board the Eagle—or was politicking for Malcolm Treat’s parole in front of the king’s tribunal.

  Black Dick had given his word that the little major would not flee the confines of Manhattan and shouldn’t be locked up in a barn, a church, a sugarhouse, or one of the prison ships moored in Wallabout Bay, across the East River. “Wallabout is for common criminals, for dubious rebel soldiers and seamen,” said Black Dick, “not for men of Malcolm Treat’s heroic mold.”

  The admiral was a lonely man in love with Clara. He must have longed to welcome Malcolm One-Eye as his own lost prodigal son, a son he’d never had, and display him like some tamed brute, viz., a model American. He offered to let him live on board the Eagl
e, but a man-o’-war was not considered part of Manhattan, and might expose a rebel major to certain military secrets. Black Dick was willing to defy the Barrack Board, steal housing from a British colonel to make room for Treat, but Treat was twice as clever as his captors and asked to live at Gert’s.

  “Agreed,” said the admiral. “We’ll have grog together.”

  Black Dick could not see the perfidy of that little man. Treat meant to diddle with Clara while Black Dick was on board the Eagle, or was busy with some maritime matter. And it seemed unheroic of him to hurt his very sponsor—’tis a lie. I wasn’t thinking of Black Dick. I was jealous of that little major, jealous beyond words or reason, jealous of yet another shit-in-the-pants who cut off my own path to Clara.

  So I trapped him at Madame’s table, eating mutton pie. He could recall the thrashing he got on Montresor. He flinched, held the mutton pie over his jowls.

  “Keep away from Clara if you value your life. She’s with the admiral now.”

  “She is not. And how dare you intrude. I’m an adjutant in the Continental Army.”

  “On parole. And if I tell the admiral of your interest in Clara, he’ll kick you as far as Wallabout.”

  Treat shivered. His Majesty warehoused American prisoners at this notorious Brooklyn bay, with its stinking, rotten ships.

  “You gadfly,” he said, “you unconscionable pest. I’m innocent. It’s Clara who’s interested in me.”

  I counted the gunports on some imagined man-o’-war to keep from strangling him. But I stole his mutton pie, devoured it in front of his eyes, and kicked him like a dog. He vanished into a closet. I sat with my heels on the table, whistled a song, and waited. I didn’t have to budge.

  Clara appeared, her eyes ablaze, as bountiful as a hundred men-o’-war, real or imagined, in brocaded boots with buckles and pointed toes, her bodice shimmering with gold filigree. I would have surrendered without a fight on any other day.

  “Are you the procurer of Robinson Street, Johnny One-Eye? No one tells me what man I will or will not see. And have the grace to stop writing letters for Admiral Dick. He’s not a child.”

  “Yet you treat him like one.”

  “Perhaps this is what he wants, to become a child in Clara’s arms.”

  “So you can read him Aristotle and unman him.”

  “Are you not an expert on that subject? Perhaps you might teach him a few tricks. On how to live amongst whores and be woefully ignorant of their ways.”

  She knew how to bathe a boy in her own venom.

  “Clara,” I said, “do you remember how it was when we lived together?”

  Her green eyes covered me like a pair of suspicious patrol boats. “We never did.”

  “You were bald as an egg.”

  “I wasn’t,” she said, caressing her own mountain of hair.

  “Clara, how can you forget but five years ago, five little years?”

  “Child,” she said, “I don’t keep such a strict calendar. But I do recall a kind little boy who delivered drinks to Gert’s customers. And then he put on airs. He traveled across the road to King’s College, took to wearin’ a black gown. And I prefer a soldier any day to an educated crow.”

  Had to tell her for the hundredth time how I went to war and served under Benedict Arnold.

  “Why ain’t you with Arnold right now? Ah, but you’re still a boy. And if I ever lived in your bed, as you love to boast, why didn’t you keep me there?” “I couldn’t.”

  Only Clara could make me cry—not Gert, not that horseman, General Washington, not the Howes, and not the king himself. When Clara saw the first tears settle on my nose, she seemed satisfied, as if a duel had been won. She wiped my tears with one of her long fingers. I could not stop marveling at the natural grace of that digit—like a serpent that had decided not to sting.

  “Johnny, did you tell me stories in that cradle of ours?”

  “Every night.”

  “About snowmen and orphans and African kings—”

  “And birds with impossible mouths that could swallow a live pig.”

  She laughed, and I was struck with a pernicious pain. I would never arrive at that far territory—my own Ohio—where I might possess the magic of other men and make Clara love me.

  “And toads in feathered hats,” she said, rubbing my hair with a rhythmic concentration that was close to a caress.

  “Then you do remember?”

  I clutched her hand and Clara pulled away.

  “Child, I’m only singin’ whatever it is you want to hear.”

  And I could not hold back my hate.

  “I can have you banished from this island,” I said.

  “The little provost of all the colored people. Banish me, then.”

  And she left me with the remains of my mutton pie.

  I SOON HAD other worries. Sir William was plotting in the parlor, and I could learn nothing. Mortimer, his brute, kept me out of reach. William and his brother had their ships and their men. Washington had to maneuver without a navy. He never had the guns of the Isis or the Eagle. He had to maraud and run. But he did not lack fiery young officers, one of them being my classmate, Hamilton, a West Indian orphan who was older than I when he entered King’s. He’d been a pamphleteer at my college—a writer of revolutionary tracts—and a captain at nineteen.

  We all knew that Washington had delivered a lightning raid last Christmas, crossing the Delaware on a wet and windy night, falling upon Trenton and its hundred houses, capturing or killing a whole garrison of Hessians. And Hamilton—a veritable runt, two inches shorter than I—distinguished himself chasing Hessians from house to house. Their colonel, Johann Rall, had called the Continentals “country clowns.” Yet Rall was the clown, a drunken sod who would not build any works. “We want no trenches,” he said. “We will go at them with the bayonet.” But his men could barely get him onto his horse. Their muskets were wet and would not hold flint. Washington’s lads fired at them like flies. Johann fell from his horse and died the next day. Harvey Hill, the Crier, sang Johann’s story across our little island. The Hessian colonel who wandered through Trenton’s hundred houses and died in his own excrement.

  Loyalist merchants and British soldiers in Manhattan could afford to laugh. The Hessians were hirelings, after all, and didn’t really belong to the Crown. The entire garrison had fallen into a drunken stupor and had fought the rebels in winter underwear. And Sir William met with his aides in secret, clearing all of Gertrude’s guests out of the Queen’s Yard. He was in a foul mood. Poems began to appear on the walls of army barracks, inside coffeehouses and clubs, and on the cannons at Fort George.

  Awake, arouse, Sir Billy

  There’s forage in the plain.

  Leave your little filly

  And open the campaign.

  I wondered if the Crier himself had penned that piffle. Harvey Hill should not have attacked Mrs. Loring. And while Sir William brooded with his aides, he sent Mortimer out to me.

  “General would like you to visit with Mrs. L.,” said Mortimer.

  “She’s having a crisis, John.”

  The brute himself drove me to Mrs. Loring’s little yellow birdcage on Dock Street. “She’s expecting you. Needn’t bother to knock.”

  I went to milady, who was lounging upstairs in bed. “Do you hear what the rebels are saying about me and Will? I shall leave this wretched country.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “That’s the problem. I’m a pariah everywhere. They can think of nothing better than to write folderol about Mrs. Loring. I have become the great amusement of this war. Whatever William does, they will blame me. Would they have been so savage to a good little wife?”

  “But you are his wife, milady, his war wife. And it’s the war that maddens them, makes them cruel. They laugh at your expense because they have so little else to laugh about.”

  “You are the kindest sort of philosopher. Sit beside me.”

  I was reluctant, lads. I thought of Clara, o
f my next battle with her, wherever and whenever that would be. But Mrs. Loring was persistent.

  “Sit beside me.”

  I did not venture to ask why Cunny was naked under her quilt; I simply shucked off my clothes. I have to admit—the beauty of her skin astonished me. Her silken body moved against mine with its own tender truth. And she did not have to sit on my thighs the way she had done in her carriage. Clara fled from my mind for a moment as I pinned milady’s arms to the wall; her lapdogs watched us with much curiosity and then devoured my stockings.

  Mortimer came for me in the middle of the night, while Mrs. Loring slept against my shoulder. He bade me to get dressed, and I had to leave the yellow house.

  “You may visit Mrs. L. so long as it pleases her, but you must not wake up with her. The last lad who insisted upon it is no longer alive.”

  “Did Sir Billy run him through with his hanger?”

  “Hardly, boy. I broke his neck. But I wasn’t as fond of him as I am of you. General can imagine many things, but he’d rather not ’magine her waking up with another man. That’s his privilege, and his alone.”

  It had started to snow, and the flakes fell on Dock Street like some sudden enchantment—pieces of powder, crystalline and pure, and I was the only witness. Mortimer had wrapped his head in a scarf.

  Twenty-Five

  SIR WILLIAM’S ENTIRE ARMY FELL ASLEEP AND would continue to snore until May, when the summer campaign was scheduled to begin. But the general had another campaign. You could not find him conferring with his family. He was playing vingt-et-un. It had become the rage of wartime Manhattan, at least on Holy Ground. The nuns played among themselves, or with guests, always scalping them. But no one scalped Sir William. He acted as the bank, always as the bank, and dealt cards from a little ivory holder smooth as glass. He had a paymaster’s box that he called the Bank of England, and it was filled with the currencies you might find in a pirate’s chest. I committed them all to memory: the London pound (safe as the Lord), the New York pound (worth half as much as a Londoner), the Portuguese johannes, called “joe” (worth sixteen pounds), and the much more popular “half-joe,” the Spanish silver dollar, or piece of eight (as valuable as a London pound), the Spanish gold dollar, or doubloon (worth sixteen pieces of eight), the thaler, or German dollar (worth a little less than a Londoner), the French Guinea, or louis d’or ( the value of which went up and down), the gold ducat, first coined in Sicily, the caroline of Württemberg, etc., etc. It was a mystification of money. But the Bank of England never failed. It was Mortimer who was in charge of the box—the brute could count as fast as ten government clerks. He had a wooden claw that scooped up cash and cards. The general was like an invalid without him. He’d been dealing and handling the claw until Mortimer returned to the table.