Johnny One-Eye

by Jerome Charyn

  I HAD ONLY TO WAIT for André’s next visit if ever I wanted to learn more about Peggy Shippen. How did I know he would come again to my stinking tub? Because he was wed to me in some strange fashion—I had become his poodle, his pet case. I suspicion he was tormented by Clara but could not wholly admit this to himself, hence I was the instrument that linked him to her.

  ’T was hard to keep my own calendar on board the Jersey. All days were equally grim and I had only the weather to gauge the season. Still, I’d swear it was June or July, with its stinking hot miasma, when André suffered to call on me. I know this much. Loring’s lads were frightened of him; their chief, Fat Tobias, went out of his way to please Clinton’s young spymaster and offer whatever vittles he had on hand—nuts and peas and a leg of lamb.

  André treated Fat Tobias like a mad dog, hurling the peas and nuts in his face and ordering him off the poop deck. My survival depended on André, so it seems, but I had no wish to be servile with him.

  “How’s the strumpet?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Which one?”

  “Mrs. General Arnold.”

  He laughed again. “You are rather cheeky for a lad in your position. I like that.”

  “But you will like it not when I get word to Washington.”

  “Word about what? That the cripple has taken a new bride, half his age?”

  “A bride you have bamboozled with your tricks,” I said, “trained as your spy. You have infiltrated Arnold’s very bridal bed. Has he already gone over to the Brits?”

  I read his face as a scorpion might read it—John André had little to hide from the lad of Wallabout Bay.

  “Not yet,” he told me. “The negotiations are decidedly slow. He hath much greed, wants a general’s commission and ten thousand pounds—twenty if he himself can capture Farmer George.”

  “Fiend,” I said, “whatever Arnold’s perfidy, he would never give up General Washington. I’d wager my life on that. And I will find a silver bullet with which to shout in Washington’s ear.”

  He laughed for the third time. “A bullet such as Mrs. Anne Harding? I could have her neck snapped before she ever reaches dry land. Didn’t she tell you her own sordid little tale? She worked at the nunnery for a week after you were gone.”

  “You lie,” I said.

  “I swear on Saint George. Gertrude took her in. That pig on parole, Major Malcolm Treat, had groomed Anne. But Treat is a trifler. He cannot harm us. And Gertrude had to feed us something. She is on our payroll, after all. Gertrude gave her up.”

  “Faker,” I said, “’t was a British admiral who unmasked Anne. She told me so.”

  “That is what she believes. But Gertrude had to give us something—your mother gave her up.”

  I did not like it. I had not granted him the privilege of calling Gert my mum. But he knew more about me than I wished him to know.

  “Washington had a vested interest in Gertrude’s house, meseems. You are the farmer’s love child. And that is the only reason you’re still alive. You, John Stocking, will be our bargaining chip should the war not go well. And do not trouble yourself over Arnold. I doubt Clinton will ever agree to his terms.”

  “I’m not Washington’s,” I whispered, more to reassure myself than to refute the Fiend.

  “André,” I said, “do I have Washington’s hair or nose or height?”

  “You are his whelp. He hath no other. And you may deny it ’til your face turns blue. Took me months to comprehend. The little collegian with his bed inside the nunnery. What was such a prodigy doing in there? ’T was only after I had you ensconced in this hellhole that my head cleared. I installed you on the Jersey because it’s Loring’s flagship. I asked him to have you killed. I paid him in advance. And then it struck me like some monstrous bell—Gert wasn’t protecting you. She let you fly in the wind. She was protecting her farmer.”

  I tried to throttle him. I had not the strength.

  “Careful, old son,” he said. “Commissary Loring would love to feed you to the sharks—doth thou enjoy the silhouette I made of Mistress Clara?”

  I had such rage against Gertrude and the nuns for having given Anne to André that I longed to toss that piece of parchment into the sea. I did not.

  André removed his hanger from its leather scabbard with an enormous flourish, and at first I thought he meant to cut my face. But he scratched his chin with the pommel of the sword. “Would Clara sleep with me if I threatened to hang Gert? I wonder.”

  He climbed down the poop deck, sword in hand, and stepped onto the gondola that was awaiting him. I watched him being rowed away, while the very edge of Manhattan broke through the mist like some magic promontory—a veritable green horn that might snare the gondola itself, I prayed, and finish André once and for all. But, alas, I had discovered a false Manhattan, and André’s gondola went right past that little illusion of land.

  Forty-Six

  IT PAINED ME THAT ANNE HAD LIVED ON ROBINSON Street but a little week, and Gert and Clara had fed her to the British like a leg of lamb. I could not toss a message into Wallabout Bay that would bob downriver and arrive at my mother’s door. And who else would enlighten me? I had to wait like some wily beer boy until Anne’s next visit to the Jersey. But Anne did not come, and it was exceeding hard to count the fortnights with my own fickle calendar. ’T began to feel like autumn of a sudden; the swamp had lost much of its bloom. But I could still hear the reptilian music that hovered over the water, strange eructions that might have been a signal from Anne herself.

  And then, quite like magic, unholy or not, Anne stepped out of her gondola wearing a flimsy coat and the same pound of paint. I could not question her like some inquisitor. I had neither the heart nor the stomach for it. But while we chewed on some sweetmeats she had purchased from a sailor on another ship, I could not help myself.

  “Anne, you lived on Holy Ground, did you not?”

  She continued to chew.

  There was no point in hiding my nativity, since I would never get off this tub. “And you met a certain Mrs. Jennings—she is my mother.”

  Anne did not bat an eye or seem to redden under her pound of paint. “Major Treat did tell me so.”

  Malcolm Treat! Was he bandying my biography about, offering it to perfect strangers? Yet Anne was not a stranger.

  “And did you not meet a tall girl, even taller than I, who has a fascination for fancy shoes and fine tobacco?”

  “Mistress Clara,” Anne said between chews. “She was very kind for a colored girl, told me what might please such and such an admiral or commander of Clinton’s light horse.”

  I thought to swoon. I had such a jealous fit I could have swallowed the Jersey. But I would not show it to Anne.

  “Johnny, I dasn’t speak of my sojourn on Holy Ground for fear it might make you homesick and give you a fever. You must listen. I did not come to the Jersey by accident—’t was Divine Will. The Jersey was not supposed to be on my route.”

  Route, her captors called it, this bloody gondola ride from hulk to hulk.

  “They house us near the harbor, on an old fighting ship, and our warden happed to mention the notorious malcontent, Johnny One-Eye, who was close to leading a black revolt and had to be put away in the foulest prison, where blacks could not find him. I was not certain that this was the same Johnny who had rescued me in Massachusetts…and abandoned me just as quick. Still, I volunteered to add the Jersey to my route, and the warden thought me mad.”

  “But, Anne,” I insisted, “surely Gert could have told you all you needed to know about Johnny One-Eye.”

  “She did not…Johnny, I have lived this last year between two majors—André and Malcolm Treat. But I’d never have found you if not for them.”

  I’D LOOK AT CLARA’S SILHOUETTE, cup it in my hand in that false daylight that often fell through the cracks and filtered down into our hold—some strange sky that even the Jersey could not dispel. I had to think like a spy. Mum had given up a girl she must have known wou
ld soon be compromised. Abandoning Anne meant she could safeguard someone else. And how could Gert have known that Anne Harding would end up on Wallabout Bay?

  But whenever I saw Anne, I could no longer reason like a spy. I now had a blinding anger against Mum. I might have diffused it in a moment had I the chance to talk with her and touch her face. But there was no such chance. And I had no furniture—nothing to hold—but that silhouette crafted under André’s own perfidious eye. Perhaps it was the same perfidy that altered the silhouette, so that Clara seemed to have Anne’s face from time to time. Or perhaps it was my longing for Clara that I had to withhold.

  I knew that the fleet Anne serviced would finally kill her, but no immediate harm would come while André was still alive. I would cling to her, tho’ we seldom kissed, and she would render unto me the little gazette she had gathered about Benedict Arnold. He still had not bolted to the British. But meanwhile Arnold borrowed money like a little nation. He bought Peggy a house in the countryside, a house he would never live in. There were odd absences, whole weeks that could not be accounted for, as if Arnold had crossed some invisible line. Anne could not clarify this in her gazette, but I wondered whether Arnold was on a secret hunting trip to discern how he and Clinton might end the war.

  Anne was convinced that Peggy Shippen Arnold had sneaked into Manhattan to confer with her spymaster, John André. I’d call it a tryst. The silver bullet she was carrying was her own warm mouth. Anne had also heard that Peggy was big with child. And out of spite, I hoped she would present Arnold with a changeling—a little bastard brother of mine.

  Anne could not smuggle books to me, since Loring’s brethren looked under her skirts whenever she arrived. But I would compose books for her—rather, recompose them, since I knew several by heart. She preferred the adventures of Lemuel Gulliver in the Land of the Little People. And it mattered not how many times I repeated the tale to her. She would listen enthralled as I parceled out pieces of Gulliver according to the moments she had with me. The tales seemed to soften the trips she would make to the poophouse. I could not bear it when she had to climb. But she would clutch my hand among all the debris and say, “I think in my head that we’re making a child, Johnny, and that you’re married to me.”

  And I’d have to descend into the hold, live in the darkness with corpses at my feet and feel my flesh go to yellow and gray. I’d console myself with the words in my head, smile as much as a desperate lad can smile at the picture of Gulliver wallowing around in Lilliput, where men were less than six inches high, where his testicles hung down as his britches decomposed, and where he had to put out a fire in the Lilliputian queen’s apartment with his own piss. Anne loved the particulars of this fire, and how the queen was ungrateful, because Gulliver’s piss ruined her sense of propriety.

  WE WERE ALL LILLIPUTIANS, surrounded by Gullivers in their British attire, great big men with their hanging testicles and their raw red faces, who could drown every last one of us in their own piss. And yet that wasn’t what drew Anne to the tale: she worshiped Gulliver, the Man-Mountain, and the way he could carry half a country in the strands of his hair. Gulliver was her hero, not mine. Gulliver couldn’t have rescued a single bulldog on the Jersey. These ferocious lads kept dying on me; others came onto the deck. I groomed their ridiculous fighting tails. They did not ask of me more than I could give. That made them excellent companions. I could not save them, but my one task was to keep Anne Harding alive as she went from rotten hulk to rotten hulk, all of them filled with some Fat Tobias, who would beat her brains out one day as part of his afternoon sport. I sang to her whatever stories I knew. She never tired of Lemuel Gulliver. Methinks we had what one might call a marriage.

  Anno Domini 1780

  ARNOLD

  Morristown

  MARCH 1780

  He railed at the Continental Congress from his winter quarters, railed at those “villains”—the civilian commissaries—who were stealing the lifeblood of his army. One such villain, George Olney, appeared at a dinner party given by an aide to the commander in chief.

  Washington’s officers wallowed in Madeira and perused Olney with a certain mischief in their eyes—he hid with the officers’ wives (and his own dear wife), who had withdrawn to another room.

  The drunken officers demanded that these ladies surrender Olney. Washington was also in his cups. And with so little to be light about, he joined the fray. Whilst Olney himself cowered behind a chaise, Mrs. Olney, in a great furor, scuffled with the commander in chief. “Sir,” she said, “if you will not let go of my hand, I will tear out your eyes and the hair from your head.”

  Washington turned ashen. He bowed to Mrs. Olney. The wife of one officer—Mrs. General Green—demanded that Mrs. Olney apologize to the commander in chief. But Mrs. Olney attacked Mrs. General Green. And it took every officer at the soirée to separate the two wives.

  Washington couldn’t stop trembling. He swore never to drink Madeira again in the company of civilian commissaries and their wives. He returned to the log huts where his men were encamped in a hollow three miles west of Morristown, a place soldiers themselves called “log-house city.”

  There was little or no food coming from George Olney and the other civilian commissaries, who pocketed whatever coin Washington had and could provide nothing but barrels of flour with beetles inside. He should have hanged Olney from the nearest hook and let the Divil deal with Mrs. Olney.

  There would be no more dinner parties in Morristown, no more Madeira while his men froze in log huts and had to survive with beetles in their flour.

  And when he arrived at his own log hut, he found a man stirring the fire—his master of intelligence, Malcolm Treat, who was on parole and should not have left Manhattan.

  “Major, I would kiss you under another circumstance, but we are soldiers still, and sworn to our parole. Should we lie and cheat and kill, we do so not without peril.”

  “Lawd,” said the major on parole, “are you a gen’ral or a preacher man?”

  “Malcolm Treat, you have come to me in a drunken stupor.”

  “How else would I come?”

  And Treat pointed to a corner of the hut. There, in the shadows, Washington saw his redhead. His knees buckled under for an instant. Treat had already gone.

  Gertrude ventured out of the dark to greet Washington with her red hair.

  “General, he was a crazy man, said that if I did not accompany him, he would burn all my nuns. I think he was looking for an excuse to flee his parole for a few days. He might have jeopardized all of us, and…”

  The commander in chief was shivering so, Gertrude took him in her arms.

  “My darling,” she said, “please don’t cry. I will have no more weapons I might use to part from thee.”

  He could not rescue his tongue for an entire two minutes—a warrior without the gift of speech. But he knew his own men. ’T was not drunkenness that had brought his master of intelligence here, tho’ drunk he was. Treat had a most ungodly power to anticipate his general’s needs and desires. Treat had realized from afar that his general was in mortal danger of losing his mind, that only the wildest flower could revive him.

  Gertrude was that flower.

  “Child,” he said as soon as the shivering had stopped. “I too am on parole, on parole with thee.”

  But there was a knock on the door.

  “Gen’ral,” Treat roared, “your whole fuckin’ family is coming—Hamilton and the rest of the tribe.”

  Washington groaned, even as he clung to Gertrude. Was there news of some untoward military strike, or another such calamity? He could not enjoy the smallest of paroles. But he had a devilish idea.

  “Child” he said, “I dub thee my aide-de-camp. We shall find you ink and quill. Yet Hamilton will be mortified should another person wield the pen in his place—ah, I have it! You will be my mystery guest.”

  “But I am no mystery to Mr. Hamilton,” she said.

  And her general screamed at the door. “
Treat, bid Mr. Hamilton that he may enter now.”

  Washington laughed so hard he nearly pissed his pants. He was a madman in the middle of a war, a general who had command over everything save his own skin. But they could come howling at him, enemies and all—for this night at least Washington was on parole, and no one, not Hamilton or the British high command, would tear Gertrude away from him.

  Forty-Seven

  THE SHORES OF MANHATTAN WERE BUT A MILE from our little cove at Wallabout, but we happened to face Out Ward and the hovels of Little Africa, which lived without lamps—so darkness reigned on the Jersey. The nabobs of the wealthier wards and their Loyalist wives utterly ignored us; it was only the Africans who cared about prisoners, who acknowledged we were still alive. If they had no lamps, they did have a cache of fireworks—their little rockets and bombs would explode in the sky, much to the annoyance of the Brits, who feared that such illuminations might mask a rebel attack, while we, in the belly of our boat, could not often speak of skies. But the Africans delivered us with music that marked their holidays—fifes, fiddles, and kettledrums broke up a monotony that was meant to kill.

  I liked to imagine that Prince Paul was communing with me the only way he could. If not for the Africans, I might never have learned about the New Year. Perhaps General Clinton had saluted 1780 in some secret fashion, without a salvo from a man-o’-war. Or perhaps the natural insulation of our cove had deadened the sound of his salvo. But Paul must have acquired his own cannon, which sat on Little Africa’s crumbling dock. Paul’s cannon fired several salvos, signaling the end of a most tumultuous decade, before someone silenced it—a British patrol, I suspicion, that confiscated the cannon and might have torn up the dock to prevent future cannonades.