Johnny One-Eye

by Jerome Charyn

  IT WAS JUST AFTER APRIL FOOL’S, AND THE APRIL fool himself, some British jester, would scamper across our village in his coat of many colors, with children clinging to his ragged tails. The jester looked like Harvey Hill. Harve did not have a charmed life, what with his family gone. His wife and little daughter had died in a fire set by drunken redcoats but five years before. The redcoats were not even punished. And that’s when Harve began his career as our Crier. He would never talk about his wife and daughter. But I could feel their presence in his fevered eyes. He was like a man on a haunted mission, wearing the tattered clothes of our April fool.

  I cared not a fig or a fart about Sir William and his spies. I had to find Harvey Hill. But he must have realized that the Brits wanted his blood for having scribbled that poem about William’s concubine. He went into hiding, and we had no one to cry out the peculiar weather of war, not with his artistry. We lived in limbo, while Sir William defied all his critics. He went with his filly on long carriage rides, gave balls in her honor, balls where she danced the minuet with merchants and admirals, and presided over mountains of food. But Mrs. Loring was no wild-eyed glutton; she didn’t gorge herself on some dish the general’s own caterers had prepared, didn’t excuse herself and belch at the back of the ball. She saved as much food as she could, hoarded it, and begged me to accompany her in her chariot to Canvas Town, to the charity house, and to the hovels of Little Africa.

  Highwaymen roamed the streets, but we had Mortimer aloft in the coachman’s box, and if they were foolish enough to try and molest us, Mortimer would knock them to the side of the road, leave them lying there for the sheriff and his constables.

  I could not ask Mort to be disloyal to Sir William and help me warn General Washington. But I could enlist milady. She was William’s consort, ’tis true, but I had the right to ask her not to be neutral toward his bloody designs.

  “Your Will means to murder Washington,” I said. “To trick him into a game of vingt-et-un and hack him to pieces.”

  Mrs. Loring looked at me with her blue eyes. “Nothing obliges Washington to play vingt-et-un in the Queen’s Yard.”

  “But Sir William masks his perfidy, talks of a truce.”

  “Then it would be unworthy of me not to help you.” “How can—”

  “Shhh,” says she. “My seamstress is married to a rebel. She sends messages to Morristown once a week.”

  “And you haven’t offered her carcass to Sir William?”

  “Lord, no. I would not ruin the poor girl. She has promised never to read Will’s dispatches that are scattered about my bedroom. We are fair with one another, and the girl trusts me.”

  I near bit my knuckles in disbelief—I’d found a route to General Washington. I scribbled a note to the seamstress. The giant is saved, I sang to myself. But I sang too soon.

  Mortimer came up to me with my note crumpled inside his fist.

  “I would wallop any other lad but you, report him to Master Will. You must not involve Mrs. Loring in your schemes. It might disturb my master, upset the tranquility of his household.”

  “I will never understand you,” I said. “You would be a willing accomplice in a murder?” “Yes.”

  “I will not ride in your carriage.”

  “Then you’d hurt Mrs. Loring and I’d have to break your bones.”

  “You are a brute, Mortimer, and a noxious blackmailer. I love thee not.”

  “Still, you will ride in the carriage.”

  I’d upset Mort. I could tell. I’d become his little brother on our carriage rides, and it cost him dearly to be deprived of my affection. I crept into the carriage, but ’t was not much of a chore. I was moved by milady. She was never frivolous or wanton in her ways. She fed the poor, found them clothing and fuel for winter. She was much like Clara and Gert in this regard. Mrs. Loring might have been a nun in another world. She would not have felt like a pariah on Holy Ground. The German baronesses who had accompanied their highborn captains to America looked down upon her, called her the general’s whore behind her back. I wouldn’t have traded ten baronesses for milady. They were vile, inbred creatures, the daughters of mad, syphilitic men; they had no color in their cheeks. And still, the general had to please them while he presented Mrs. Loring at the concerts and soirées where Hessian orchestras played a sinfonia of Haydn and a certain Mrs. Hyde sang “If ’tis joy to wound a lover” or “The rapture at battle’s end.”

  I did not enjoy the sounds. Perhaps it was because I was as much a miscreant as Mrs. Loring. I preferred our rides in the chariot, with the brute above us, unless he was involved with the general in vingt-et-un.

  MRS. LORING WASN’T utterly free of her husband, tho’ Sir William paid him plenty to leave her alone. Still, he was a mountebank and a toad. Sir William’s commissary of prisoners had his own manor house in Harlem, his own carriage, his own brutes, who must have told him about our travels to Little Africa in milady’s chariot. He could not abide that we were wasting pickled salmon, Russian tongue, and French olives on the poor of Out Ward. He was in the habit of hoarding whatever food he could find or stealing it for one of the five inns he and his partners ran.

  The good Joshua was a greedy, grasping fellow. He dressed in British fashion—high-buckle shoes and silky sleeves. But he had one disadvantage. He couldn’t cross paths with Sir William too often, since his presence would remind Manhattan’s aristocratic ladies of Mrs. Loring’s “baggage,” a husband in Harlem with an expensive peruke. And he could not bear the signs of her new life. The chariot inflamed him. He fell upon us with his own band of robbers but a week after April Fool’s. And even if Mortimer was with us, he had instructions not to interfere with Joshua Loring’s banditry.

  Loring hung from the side of his horse, poked his head into our window, doffed his London hat. He stank of perfume and powder. He was bewigged like some lord of the high court. He wore a dab of lip rouge, which must have been a rage I had yet to hear about. He’d darkened the moles on his face. He looked like an effeminate pirate, mean beyond imagination. He’d become the richest man on the island now that he fed off every rebel prisoner in the sugarhouses and on Wallabout Bay. He couldn’t show his pique to the general, but he could show his distemper to me.

  “Who’s the infant, dear? Is it the same Johnny One-Eye who has a trove of missing parents? Why is a changeling inside your carriage?”

  “Ride on, Joshua. You have no business here.”

  “I have a lot of business, including your cunny, which rents at an exorbitant rate.”

  “You will not insult Mrs. Loring,” I said.

  “I will, particularly when I’m her mister.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  I opened the carriage door, climbed down the single step, and stood near five horsemen, including Mr. L. They all had pistols in their pockets.

  “Look, me lads, the little prince of Robinson Street. I’m told he was born in a brothel, survived on whores’ milk. Mrs. Jennings, the good Gertrude, is his protectress. I wonder what it is she protects.”

  “Sir, I will meet you in Out Ward, behind the black soldiers’ cemetery.”

  “A cemetery for black soldiers! There’s no such place.”

  “There is,” I said. “On the far side of Fresh Water Pond. You may come with seconds, or without. It matters little to me. But you will not bandy Madame Gertrude’s name. Pistols or swords, monsieur?”

  “A bold little rascal. A born duelist. But why should we wait? I’ll crack you right here, on the spot, break every bone in your body.”

  Mrs. Loring peered out of the chariot. “The Howes would love that, Joshua. They’ll mend him on their own, considering that he’s Black Dick’s confidential secretary.”

  “If he’s a scribe, wifey, I’ll spare him his fingers.”

  “Loring, I am not your wife,” she said.

  “Then why is it your name is Mrs. Loring?” “Camouflage. I thought to resemble a snake.”

  “That’s insulting,” said the h
eaviest of the horsemen. “I’d call it a capital crime. She ought to be slapped. Methinks I’ll slap her myself. If you’ll allow me the liberty, Mr. L.”

  Mortimer was still in the box above us, like a silent referee. As the heavy horseman got down from his horse, Mortimer said, “Be so kind as to depart from here.”

  “Mr. L., since when is a rotten, stinking driver allowed to address a landed gentleman like myself?” the horseman asked.

  He reached for his pistols, and the brute, without any warning, tossed a horseshoe at his head. I’d never seen horseshoes in the coachman’s box. The horseman sank, his skull shattered, his brains leaking on the ground. Only one of God’s angels could have pitched a horseshoe like that. I was really taken with the brute, and I had no pity for the horseman with the broken head.

  Mr. Loring rode away with the robbers and their extra horse.

  His wife was shivering. I covered her with my coat and held her hand like a lad who’d just been betrothed.

  “Mortimer,” I said, “ought we not bury the man, or summon the sheriff?”

  “I’d rather he rots where he lies,” Mortimer said, and he drove us out of this wild land where a horseman would soon become carrion.

  Twenty-Eight

  THE RAINS WERE FIERCE IN APRIL AND ’T WAS bitter cold as I ran round and round in circles like a demented cat and wasn’t a hair closer to warning General Washington. Meanwhile, Sir William pumped up his enterprise. His nights at the Yard were famous. All sorts of gamblers would come, and William would give them a moratorium, take their money, and then his brute would escort them to the harbor, where they had to get on the next available ship, whether it was bound for Halifax or the Windward Islands. And pretty soon gamblers stopped coming to the games, but the myth of vingt-et-un grew and grew.

  A pig would be roasted in the parlor, and Gertrude found herself feeding an army; the general paid her for every head of hair that held cards and feasted on the pig, but she wasn’t interested in his thalers and London pounds. She thought only of Washington and how she might signal to him, but she and the nuns had to live under a pernicious form of house arrest. Redcoats were stationed on every floor.

  Sir William now had an enormous establishment to uphold—his headquarters, Mrs. Loring’s yellow house, his tailor in London town, paupers and indigent Loyalists, his various clubs, etc., etc., but he did not gamble to grow rich or bring himself glory. He gambled in order to look into the whites of an opponent’s eye at vingt-et-un. It was a battlefield for Billy, and he tossed cards on the table like a commander in chief. He earned his victories by sheer will, and if an opponent got lucky and called out “vingt-et-un,” his luck rarely remained for long. The bank would win in the end, all across the table.

  And he kept laying down challenges to the farmer in chief. “I’ll wager his army against mine in a toss of cards.”

  I was plagued with a nervous fit. I would hiccough every five minutes as I watched Sir William’s money box fill and could feel Washington’s doom. Sir William would lure him back to the nunnery one way or another. And it made me hurtful to my very own kin, or whatever kin I had. I went through the Queen’s Yard like some heartless angel who wanted to impose his will on the nuns—they were mystified when I bit their necks. I paid them in doubloons, my reward for educating Black Dick to Aristotle and writing his love letters to Clara. It was Mortimer who brought me money on behalf of Dick. The doubloons were as heavy as a pocket pistol and tore right through my purse.

  I DID NOT RELISH IT when I strode into Clara’s closet. She wore a flimsy gown while she smoked her pipe. “Child, what could you possibly want with me?”

  “Your cunny,” I said. “Your tits.”

  I had never talked in so crude a manner. The nuns had raised me. I discovered philosophy at their feet.

  Clara put my hand between her legs.

  I was mortified. I had no engine within myself that could respond to Clara. I longed to bite off my own hand, like some wolf or wild pig or a madman. I was not a wild pig. I cried with shame as she held my hand on her sex. I felt neither flesh nor fire, but a rigor mortis in all my limbs.

  She must have taken pity, because she released my hand, and I was more in love than I had ever been.

  “Clara, could you consider marrying me if I made my fortune?”

  “Child,” she said, “I have as much fortune as I’ll ever need in my own closet.”

  “But I would sing you to sleep every night.”

  She studied my remark. “Then why wait for a wedding march? Sing to me right now.”

  “I cannot,” I said. “The words will not come.”

  “Then what are ye good for, Johnny One-Eye?”

  ’T was my incapacity that pleased her, and the dominion she held over me. She could have had any man on our island—generals, merchants, pirates, and married ministers—but she stayed at Gert’s. My mother must have soothed Clara’s wild streak. She’d run from the Windwards to escape a lewd stepfather. But she’d confessed to me while we were still bedmates, with but a few patches of blond fur on her bald head, confessed that she had inflamed her stepfather to devil him, that men and boys had wanted her since she was nine. “I must have been born tall,” she’d said. And when she came to our island, she must have dreamt that she’d live in a bordello. Gert had never obliged her to rut with a man. She watched the men watching her and wasn’t indifferent to the longing in their eyes. She quickly learned to love leather shoes and jeweled slippers and panniers, but this was the armor she chose to wear—the encasings of Clara that could not cloud her mirror. She saw herself without clothes and shoes in the silver glare that shot back at her. She had her dolls and her marmalade and Madame’s deep affection. And if such things should ever fail, she still had her tobacco.

  I could not compete with that right now. I was readying to disappear from her closet when Clara began to tease me about having touched her sex. “Should I tell the admiral you’ve been wandering in his waters?”

  ’T was like a murderous game of vingt-et-un. I had to give back what I got.

  “He might not mind. At least I could tell him what his waters look like.”

  She cracked me on the head with the bowl of her pipe. And my mother arrived, my mother, wielding a broom.

  “John Stocking, you have brought havoc to this house.”

  I’d abused the nuns in my own fashion. But shame only filled me with spite.

  “Madame, doth havoc weigh as much as a doubloon?”

  She smacked me as she would a bilious boy. I skulked out of the nuns’ quarters and discovered Black Dick in the parlor. The admiral was beside himself.

  “Clara says I am not pretty enough. She can only fall in love with a pretty man, or a learned man, and I am neither. She cares not a pish for my wealth. A castle in Ireland would bore her…John, John, our letters have failed. She saw through the thin veil, recognized your hand, and says the thing she abhors most in this world is a dishonest admiral…I think it best that both of us take to the sea tonight, or a reasonable proximity. We’ll sleep aboard the Eagle. That tub will not betray us. She’s a worthy man-o’-war.”

  We dined together at some little inn for admirals. Beautiful women couldn’t take their eyes off Black Dick. He could have bedded down a whole harem of mothers and daughters. He could have taken a consort like his brother did. But he was a quiet, almost religious man, who didn’t care for concerts and soirées, didn’t indulge in vingt-et-un or other vices, and might have lived a monk’s life aboard his flagship, traveling between Manhattan and Newport, had he not come across Clara. She was outside his vocabulary of ropes and waterlines, outside the hundred little obligations of a peer of the realm. He’d never had a doxy in his cabin, though he wasn’t blind to the fact that his sailors sneaked women on board. A wise commander didn’t count every single soul on his ship—a man-o’-war was filled with devils, doxies, and dogs. He had not been prepared for Clara, who spoke the king’s English better than he did, was never grasping, wouldn�
�t have dared ask him for money, and took her own delight no matter whom she was with. Her sense of exchange was profounder than the admiral’s. She had few worldly goods, yet she was much more elegant than any mistress of a manor house. She wanted nothing from Black Dick, not his influence, not his titles, not his sex, nor his nearness to the king.

  “Johnny,” the admiral said, “I cannot breathe.”

  Neither could I, in love as we were with the very same wench.

  We lasted three nights on board the Eagle, and then we hurried to Holy Ground like a couple of penitents. The flagship had given us freedom and an appalling appetite—I gobbled sausages and eggs, sausages and eggs—but a loneliness had crept between the rigging and the ratlines, the unnaturalness of constant male company, even if tarts were permitted on board. Both of us needed that strange comfort of the nuns, women who asked nothing of us, gave very little, and allowed us to fit within their own empty space.

  But the space wasn’t empty any longer. The general had swollen the Queen’s Yard with all the fixtures and furniture of vingt-et-un. The Yard was more a grog shop, an inn, and a gambling house than a nunnery. People crowded the closets, flocked to the game. The nuns held cards, smoked their pipes, slept with a couple of stragglers who’d never heard of vingt-et-un, and remained Billy’s prisoners of war. But Madame began to wear a smile behind Billy’s back. She’d gotten through to Washington—no, ’t was her green-eyed protégé who’d gotten through. Clara had seduced a merchant while Black Dick was on board the Eagle. This merchant was no spy—he traded with the redcoats and the rebels. Clara bribed him with all the lucre Gert had gotten from Sir William—and bribed him with her own body. She would perform tricks for him that no other suitor had ever seen—but not until he smuggled a note to Washington and got a receipt.

  Washington did send a receipt; nothing scratched with a pen—Hamilton wrote all his notes—but a ribbon from Gert, a frayed, disfigured piece of silk that she’d let him have years and years ago.