Johnny One-Eye

by Jerome Charyn

  At dawn a guard would show himself and cry, “Deliver your dead!” And we had to search the hold for dead men, who belonged to us, however much they stank and rotted in our nostrils. But if the guards caught us harboring a dead man, they would open the hatches above us and piss down on our heads, deprive us of the wormy bread and dish water that served as our meal, and wouldn’t allow us into the light.

  And so we had to surrender the dead, which they didn’t bother to drape, and then dumped overboard into the mud flats. It was a burial for dogs, but on the Jersey ’t was the dogs that had become men. Each little sailor had a poodle, and their masters, the guards and minor commandants, had bulldogs that they reared on deck. The dogs ate liver and drank milk. And when we rose like Lazarus out of the dark, two at a time, and breathed the wondrous air on the quarterdeck, the dogs would gaze at us in deep disgust. These bulls were trained to battle and enjoy bloody meat, not endure the stench of prisoners.

  My heart broke during one of our little walks. A woman was rowed aboard from another ship. I recognized her under her shawl, with her rich blond hair and maidenly smile under a pound of paint—’t was Mrs. Anne Harding, that young farmer’s wife I’d saved from Jaggers, a demented fool of a man, when I marched with the Manhattan Irregulars. She’d wanted to march with me, become my camp wife, and coward that I was, I’d refused. She’d have been better off with Jaggers.

  I knew the heft of things, lads. Loring must have bought her from her husband like a cow. I wondered if there had been a bill of sale. Or perhaps she just ran away and had become another Johnny’s camp wife, or the “mum” of an entire regiment. I could speculate like some sage in a skullcap, but the pith of it was that Mrs. Harding had become the whore of Loring’s little fleet.

  She dared not look at me. She was much too ashamed, ashamed that I should see her as she was, with all the powder and paint of a doxy. I would have groveled at her feet, begged forgiveness for abandoning her, but I’d have frightened the girl, and the dogs would have grown suspicious, seen my groveling as a sign of alarm, all that agitation from a heap of filth, and might have hurt Anne Harding. And so I kept away, didn’t even acknowledge that I knew her, as she traipsed to the little canvas poophouse. I could not bare to think what she had to perform for Fat Tobias and his madmen. I felt murderous enough to swallow my own lice.

  I was shunted below in my chains. That walk on the deck did me small good. Drinking air couldn’t refresh a yob who had to watch Anne Harding’s pitiful gait as she prepared herself for her own doom. I moaned in the dark. The other stinking yobs tried to comfort me.

  “There, there, soldier, you’ll pull through…weren’t you with Arnold in the Maine woods?”

  He was the one general they ever spoke about. We prisoners called ourselves the Jerseys, not out of respect for this vile, pediculous hulk, but because it was our commonality, the glue that held us in its glorious stink. These yobs had been with Arnold in Quebec, at Saratoga, at Ticonderoga, where he captured the cannons that Washington would need to drive the British out of Boston, and at Valcour Island, where Arnold was the commodore of the one little navy America ever had. He did not possess a real gunner aboard his flagship, the Congress, and Arnold had to “point” the cannons like the conductor of a sinfonie. It was Arnold who had his own small flotilla of galleys—ships with sails and oars—and paid a bunch of pirates to build such galleys, and when he couldn’t pay them in coin, he paid them in cows. At the end of the battle, Arnold beached his broken ships, set them afire, so the British couldn’t have them. He’d held his own against the Royal Navy, their admirals, their gunnery officers, their heavier cannonballs. And he flew his colors in defiance as the galleys burned.

  It was not a rebel fairy tale. The pirates in the hold had sailed with Arnold, had watched him maneuver against the British. Ye gods, the man loved to fight. But the stories these yobs traded began to sicken me. The commodore sat in Philadelphia with his castle on Market Street and an army of coachmen.

  IT WAS DIFFICULT TO SLEEP in this dungeon. And twice fat Tobias had come with his cronies, handkerchiefs under their eyes, not to hide their identity, but to safeguard them from the noisome fumes. And they’d deliver their bastinadoes in some mandarin passageway, each one thwacking me with a cane that was so thin, ’t seemed invisible.

  I could not have survived a third such thrashing, but fate intervened in a most curious fashion. I was called up to the poophouse in my chains. This time André sat in the pilot’s chair, covering his nose with his neckcloth.

  “Heavens, man, you stink!”

  “These are your accommodations. I did not ask for this particular inn—what will happen to Gert and Clara? Did you close the nunnery, arrest the nuns?”

  “Not at all. Good fellow, your imagination grows in much too fertile soil. The nuns will sit in place while I want them to sit. As for Clara? Well, I will punish her when it moves me, and not a moment before.”

  I knew the Fiend. He would find the nuns a prison ship of their own. But I had to play along with him—Clara’s life could depend on it.

  “I’ve found you a spot of work,” he said. “You admit that you were Arnold’s secretary. Well, the lads on the Jersey are as illiterate as mice. You will write their correspondence. Prisoners can’t be paid. But I can promise you better food.”

  “I’d like to eat with the bulldogs. They have the best food of all.”

  “Stocking, do shut up! You will have an hour a day on deck. You may dine with the bulls if you like. What on earth are those marks on your neck?”

  “Loring’s lads have been caning me.”

  He removed the neckcloth from his nose. Was it anger or only playacting that got him to twitch? Who could read into his theatrical soul? André might have you bayoneted or spill your brains, but he also had the maddening British sense of fair play. I’d seen it on those Manhattan lawns the Brits liked to dress up as cricket fields. Warfare was but another game.

  “Stocking, you have my word. Those lads will not beat you again.”

  “I need a grander favor. There’s a woman that these reptiles have turned into a harlot. I knew her once upon a time. Mrs. Anne Harding, a farmer’s wife she was.”

  “And an American spy.”

  “Spy? I can barely believe it. The woman is familiar to you?”

  “I banished her to Wallabout Bay,” André said. “She whored in George Washington’s behalf. ’T was the hangman’s knot, or—”

  “Becoming the consort to an entire fleet of jailers. I admire your British justice. ’T has a delightful ring.”

  “You have no say in this matter. I did offer her a choice. She could either become a slop girl or a whore. Like it or not, I think she was already involved in that second trade.”

  “André, if I had a sword, I…”

  He smiled and put the neckcloth to his nose again.

  “You may have fifteen minutes of time with her every fortnight. And if I have uttered a single untruth, I will release her. Would you care to sleep in another compartment? I can arrange it.”

  “Wouldn’t separate myself from these men. They’re my brothers.”

  “But you will have to wash, or the greatest penmanship in the world won’t get you topside long enough to scratch a single letter…ah, almost forgot, old son.”

  André reached into a secret pocket where a spymaster might have kept his most precious maps, pulled out a piece of parchment paper that held a silhouette, and presented it to me. I recognized André’s subject within the dark border—that willful profile, that pyramid of hair. He’d captured my Clara.

  “Not to worry, John. Didn’t force her to pose. I accomplished it from memory.”

  And he was gone, this fiendish savior of mine. Why had he come here? To torment me with the one memento I would value most? A portrait of Clara! Did he miss our conversations? Or was he setting a trap for me that included Clara and Anne Harding? And how long would it be before I too turned as yellow as the men around me and disappeared into t
he mire?

  Forty-Four

  I DID NOT DISAPPEAR—QUITE THE CONTRARY. I bathed in a barrel. The guards gave me a swabbie’s clothes to wear. I wrote love letters for the keepers of the pit dogs. And when the dogs saw how attentive their masters were to me, their own complection changed. The bulls would come prancing and lick my hand. I’d never have thought that these killers would be so sentimental. They’d wag their knobby little tails that had to be bandaged before a fight, because the tail was a bulldog’s weakest point. They’d slobber over me. I’d become their mascot. We’d have our daily repast of liver and milk.

  I would get to know their names. How could I not? Hunter, like the Hunter, our hospital ship, where surgeons practiced the art of the scalpel on prisoners, if a surgeon could ever be found. Eagle, like Lord Howe’s flagship. Black Dick, like the admiral himself. Sir Billy. Osiris, god of the underworld and also a ship of the line.

  I became devoted to these savage creatures. Once a week a gondola would carry them into some hellhole close to the shore, where they would battle the bulls bred by some ferocious farmer in a pit inside a barn. The guards cared more about the money they might lose than about the dogs themselves. If one dog died, these yobs would train another. Perhaps I am wrong, and they’d hardened themselves against the loss of a favorite bulldog. But I moped for a week when Osiris, my favorite, didn’t return on the gondola—kept me from thinking of Clara.

  The guards would cackle while I wrote love letters to a particular housemaid they hoped to capture with my words.

  “Look at him. A regular weeper.”

  And then they’d cry into the black silk handkerchiefs they wore around their heads like gunners or pirates.

  “Cunts and cocks. I miss that lad. No one could bite into a dog’s gullet like my Osiris.”

  They had little interest in the war. But they did talk about that curious sleepwalk of Clinton and Washington—1779 looked to be a war year without much war. Clinton had no time for rebels. Manhattan had become the new capital and command post of the Crown’s Caribbean colonies. Clinton had to send his best matériel and men to protect sugar plantations from the French.

  I could not consider these guards as my mates. But they would give me extra rations for the Jerseys down below. And they’d let me have a little respite with Anne Harding. She couldn’t have been but twenty, yet she was as worn and stooped as a grandmother. Or was it that the paint had hardened into a grim mask?

  She would muster the hint of a smile the moment she saw me, could not wait to clutch my hand as if I were the very last delight in the world. We’d stand on deck with little noises coming from the marsh and swampland. Giant frogs, I’d imagine, and their croaks lent a certain music to life on board the Jersey. And Anne would enlighten me. Little André hadn’t lied. She was a spy, and ’t was that spymaster, Major Malcolm Treat, who sent her into a British officers’ brothel while he himself was on parole. There was no goodness in the gods of war.

  “Johnny, you shouldn’t frown,” she said. “The officers were perfect gentlemen. And a vice admiral fell in love with me and asked if he might keep me—tiaras, capes, a maisonette of my own. That was my undoing. He caught me copying some of his papers. But I’m glad. How else would I ever have met you again?”

  “Jesus, you could have knocked on my door at the Queen’s Yard.”

  “And ask for a ghost? You came into my life for half a minute five years ago.”

  “Did you leave you husband?”

  “Yes, I came to Manhattan with a highwayman.”

  That highwayman was Jaggers. He’d kidnapped her, she said, but she did not mind. He’d introduced her to a village that was beyond her ability to calculate and dream. She had never seen such a flurry of people as lived on our island—redcoats and traders and colored men who carried their own chains, beggars and river rats and women in headdresses that could reach a roof. She, a simple country soul, was astounded at the wealth of merchants in their tumbling merchants’ streets and at the desolation behind Broadway, where buildings had not been repaired since the Great Fire of ’76, their gutted frames poking out like raw, malevolent teeth.

  She might have stayed with Jaggers, who drank himself into delirium, but the minute he was sober, Jaggers grew as jealous and overbearing as a husband. She had no wish for another Mr. Harding.

  I asked her what she wished for.

  “You,” she said.

  “You play with me, Anne, like the worst coquette.”

  “I am a coquette.”

  “Jaggers hit you, I ’magine. And that’s when you met Major Treat.”

  “Yes. And Jaggers couldn’t fetch me once I moved inside a brothel.”

  The logic was as merciless as the laws of gravity. Might have propelled her in another direction had I made her my camp wife when I’d marched to Boston with the Irregulars, and had I allowed her to follow me and Arnold’s men to Maine and Quebec. But suppose she had perished in the wilderness, or fought beside her “husband,” as some of the camp wives did, and ended up with a bayonet in her eye. Lads, not even an Aristotle could play with such certainties and uncertainties and not go mad. I could do nothing but follow history’s humble lines and let the future unfold. But I flourished on activity and not on fate.

  “Anne, I could lead a rebellion and save you the trip from poophouse to poophouse.”

  “You dasn’t. I’m gathering information.”

  She was still a spy. And I promised myself that should I ever escape these lads, I would bastinado Major Treat worse, much worse, than Loring’s lads had bastinadoed me.

  WOULDN’T HAVE KNOWN it was St. Valentine’s had Anne not brought me sweets. She fed me caramels from a little bag.

  “You’re my Valentine, John. I fancy you. I always did. I think of your face when I’m with those other men.”

  “You mustn’t.”

  I wished to die from the pain. It was like a hundred bastinadoes.

  “But we could hide behind the dogs’ kennel. There’s a space into which we can crawl. You could go under my skirts and have my bum…if you want.”

  I could not even consider such copulations. ’T would have been no ravishment at all. Yet I did have a hunger to hold her.

  “I don’t have the pox,” she said. “I bathe in mercury balls and I…don’t you fancy me just a little?”

  “Not here, Anne, not now, in this infernal place where I have to watch you walk your own terrible station.”

  “Johnny, ain’t I your Valentine?” she asked. And how could I mention Clara, or Clara’s silhouette?

  “I have no other,” I said, as the yobs in the poophouse called her name.

  Forty-Five

  I HAD THE DIVIL OF A TIME HOLDING ON TO Clara’s silhouette and keeping it out of the guards’ hands. I tucked it deep inside this blouse of mine that resembled a scabrous cave with many fissures and parenthetical pockets. I’d look at Clara’s silhouette and see the outline of Anne Harding. ’Tis not that I coveted Anne more than Clara—the prison ship had unhinged me. I’d die if I didn’t escape. I’d have to lead a rebellion on board the Jersey, seize Anne from Loring’s men, even if I had but the narrowest chance. I was as much a gambler as George Washington or General Howe. I’d have to play vingt-et-un with my own life.

  There had been rebellions on other boats. Prisoners had burnt half the Scorpion, jumped into the water, but redcoats found them in the swamps of Wallabout Bay, returned them to their wounded ship, where they starved to death or were poisoned by Loring, who put arsenic into their bread. So the pirates say.

  “Lad, he wants us to rebel. The money he saves on grub goes into Loring’s own pocket.”

  “What grub?” I growled like my poor dead Osiris.

  “The British pay aplenty. We ought to have decent soup and decent bread. But we get the slops from the men-o’-war in the harbor. And Loring divides the profits with whatever admiral or muckamuck is around.”

  “But we could repair this ship and…”

  The yobs
laughed at me. “Some sailor you are. She’s beyond repair, mate. Worms are eatin’ her arse. Soon she won’t have a bottom, and we’ll be sleepin’ in mud.”

  The pirates began to call me Adm’ral America since I was something of a hero—I’d made a mockery of Clinton’s court-martial and had thumbed my nose at the hanging tree, according to the pirates, who boasted that if I ever wore a black silk handkerchief about my head, they might mistake me for their leader. How precocious they were. I meant to become a pirate in a black silk handkerchief. But first I had to attend the dogs. I’d convince the guards to let me go into their gondola, but what would I have done with Hunter and Eagle, who only lived to fight?

  ’T was an idle dream. I had to bring my chains when I climbed out of the hold.

  And the guards would have shot me in the face with their muskets had I tried to get near the gondola. And if I jumped ship? I would have drowned with my shackles, even at low water.

  But I had my Valentine, even if the sight of her tore into my guts. Anne had become my Town Crier. She arrived with news from abroad, news she’d gathered from different sailors on different poop decks.

  Seems Arnold had married Peggy Shippen in April and was fighting Philadelphia. The radicals said he was a thief who enriched himself with profiteering. Congress was baying at his back. And the blond serpent must have whispered in his ear. He could not read his own ruin.

  Arnold thought the job of military governor meant he was some kind of king—he had a gilded coach, twenty horses, stewards, cooks, maids and washerwomen, and rode about Philadelphia with a bodyguard of twenty men. Had the war itself not been in such limbo, he might have volunteered to take his coach into battle (he could not climb onto a horse with his crippled leg). And then we would have seen my Arnold, coach and horses creating havoc within enemy lines. He was the one American general that the British feared, tho’ they loved to disparage Arnold, call him “that wild apothecary,” because he was not a gentleman soldier like themselves. But he had nothing and no one to fight, except Philadelphia and his own self. Or perhaps I misread him and he’d always dreamt of gilded coaches and a gaggle of cooks, with Peggy but another portion of this dream. No matter. She sealed his doom. I am certain of that.