Johnny One-Eye

by Jerome Charyn

  I wondered if that cannon had woken Clinton out of his long sleep, but the general was not even on York Island. I learned from Mrs. Harding that he’d sailed out of our harbor just before the New Year, after weeks of loading horses, men, and matériel onto his battleships—he had gone to capture Charleston from the rebels. According to Anne, he took his spymaster with him—Major André.

  And, I reckoned, if both Clinton and André might be spending months in and about Charleston, there couldn’t have been much room for Benedict Arnold in their daybooks. I’d reckoned wrong. Alas, my general was never very far from André’s mind, I would soon discover. In April, Arnold flirted with treason while his son was born—Edward Shippen Arnold; a spirited lad with Peggy’s blond hair and Benedict’s big eyes, according to Anne Harding’s gazette.

  Arnold was but looking for the chance to bolt. He was given that chance in early August when Washington named him commandant of West Point.

  “Anne,” I said, while Mrs. Harding was still on deck, “you must give this message to Major Treat. George Washington is to avoid West Point at all cost.”

  I saw a certain terror in her eyes. But she still engaged in pantomime. She threaded a needle and sowed my lips.

  “Johnny, I work for the British now.”

  And she went to the poophouse without another word.

  I THOUGHT EITHER TO KISS Anne Harding or crush her skull. But truth is I could not harm her. Her fate was like the fate that might befall America—into madness and a kind of slavery. She’d been a farmer’s wife, a country lass who got embroiled in war.

  “Did that Divil André threaten to kill me, Anne? Is that why you have become his gatherer?”

  “Johnny, I must not speak. I am like a woman who carries a malady more potent than the pox. I will only harm you if I come near.”

  But she could not give up the habit of bringing me sweets.

  I went back down into the hold. “I’m Adm’ral America, I am,” I said to my mates. “Lads, if we don’t get off this ship right away, the rebels are lost. Washington is coming to West Point, and our Arnold means to betray him.”

  It pained them to hear Arnold presented in so rude a manner.

  “He hath a weakness, our Ben,” said one of the pirates. “He could never resist baubles and ladies with blond hair.”

  They began to weep, and I struck at them with my chains.

  “This is not the time for tears.”

  ’T was a miracle, the progress we made. A couple of lads bit off their own chains, like sea wolves, others gathered whatever weaponry was about—the leg of a rotting bench, the buckle of a misbegotten shoe some guard had left behind, rusty nails that might serve as a superb claw. We meant to attack the guards when they brought our slop. Good brawlers they were, these lads of mine, older than I and without teeth.

  We waited and waited for the servers to bring us our watery soup, but the servers did not come. I should have seen that something was amiss. But I was hot with desire to sound the alarm and awaken Washington. We rose from the Jersey’s bowels, a good dozen of us with sticks and buckles in our hands, some of us dragging our chains. We had our mission—to overwhelm the guards and take command of the tub. We’d cloak ourselves in their miserable uniforms, climb into a landing boat with their muskets and little flags, and row like the Divil until we reached Manhattan. God help any man who got in our way!

  But the gates to our hold were not even manacled. Still, we climbed. We shattered the doors of the weaponry closet and had a rude awakening—it housed no muskets, and we could not find the least lead ball in the ship’s magazine. Still, we climbed. And when we got to the quarterdeck, we were welcomed by a little company of redcoats and royal marines, muskets aimed at our eyes. Joshua Loring was with the marines, a perfumed handkerchief in his fist.

  I was a dolt. Loring had planted a spy among the pirates and given all our secrets away.

  The reptile bowed to me. “Adm’ral America, or do I mispronounce your name? André sends his greetings. A pity he could not come himself. But he is occupied with larger matters than a worm who wears the dress of a pirate. He has granted me the honor of delivering the coup de grâce. Would you care to pen a farewell note to your whore, Mrs. Anne Harding?”

  I grabbed at his perfumed handkerchief out of some mischievous folly. Muskets exploded around me with an horrific din. Strings of flesh slapped my face. My own lads fell at my feet, their brains oozing blood and some pale white fluid.

  Loring would not look at me. I was manacled again and led back down into the bowels. Adm’ral America.

  Forty-Eight

  ANDRÉ MUST HAVE TOLD HIS MAN-KILLERS TO keep me alive. I still had some small value, as Washington’s putative love child. I felt like a leper among my own lads—nay, a sorcerer who had bewitched them. But I was free to roam about the tub.

  We talked of trifles whenever Anne would come. She did not ask about Gulliver, whose hanging testicles could no longer amuse her. And then she stopped coming at all.

  The dogs could sense my gloom. They growled at the lice in my hair, nuzzled my neck, almost as if they’d inherited my gloom. But they did not survive very long. Our greatest champion, Scorpion, was only with us a month. I fell in love with these monsters with bitten ears and scarred eyes, warriors every one. But they couldn’t bring me the news. I had to depend on the guards, who were stingy with their stories. And then they were filled with a sudden blaze, as a particular story flooded their hearts.

  ’T was a tale of early autumn—the farmer in chief had come to West Point on or about September 24, and Arnold meant to trap him, to end the war in one terrifying blow. Clinton must have promised Arnold half the world and half the king’s colonies too.

  My guards mocked Washington’s visit. “He near escaped the noose,” they said.

  And then they grew somber as they sang to me some folderol that had been sung to them by Clinton’s Town Crier. But these guards were not gifted storytellers, and I had to stitch together a narrative from their pieces of chaos, reflect on it all, since I had no Crier of my own.

  ’T was André who botched the grand design. He was coming from a rendezvous with Arnold, in civilian clothes, with Arnold’s own plans for the surrender of West Point hidden inside his stocking, when he was captured by a bunch of patriotic Cowboys.

  Washington’s own secret service soon learned of the mischief in André’s stocking. These men could not have suspicioned Arnold himself—no one could have imagined such evil. They alerted Arnold about a possible plot. And while Washington sat drinking coffee nearby with Hamilton, Arnold bolted to the British.

  “Our George was livid when he heard the news,” the guards said with a guffaw. “His face was of a purple color.” He could not calm himself. I understood—Arnold was the general he had counted on.

  Mrs. Arnold feigned madness. She swore that a certain clique of Continentals was going to kill her and little Edward, but six months old. “There are hot irons on my head, and no one but General Washington can take them off.” So she raved and sat in bed without the bedcovers, her breasts revealed, her lovely breasts. Ah, the nuns could have learned a trick or two from Peggy Shippen Arnold.

  ANDRÉ WAS SENT TO TAPPEN, near Washington’s headquarters, and was tried by a board of generals. These generals were a ghostly gray as they sentenced André to death. Washington’s hands shook when he signed the execution order.

  “He’s the Divil,” sang my jailers. “Big giant George.”

  And in the short while of André’s capture, Hamilton had become André’s friend. He played vingt-et-un with the condemned man, drank Spanish wine, talked of music and modern warfare. Hamilton was enraged that Washington would agree to hang a man of such quality. “He should be shot, like an officer and a gentleman, not sent to the gallows like a common dog.” This my jailers had overheard from a drunken courier.

  Washington agreed to let André’s manservant through the lines. On the morning of his execution the servant began to sob. “Leave,�
�� André said, “leave until you can show yourself manly!” But he apologized. His sharpness had not been out of rancor, but out of a deep malaise. And I liked him for it.

  His servant shaved him, dressed him in the uniform of an adjutant general, and he walked out with the guards to his own death parade like a dancer, with the lightest of steps. When he arrived at the gallows, he took off his hat. Spectators were amazed at his beautiful long black hair, held with a black ribbon.

  The American executioner was a knobby little man covered in grime. He put the rope around André’s head. And André tightened the noose. He covered his eyes with a white handkerchief. The hangman climbed the gallows like a paradise monkey and tied the other end of the rope to the top beam. André was standing in a wagon attached to two horses. The wagon had its own little shelf—a coffin—and André stood astride this coffin without wavering once. The hangman had already bound his arms. But this hangman had no dignity. He appalled everyone except André, who could no longer see. The hangman kicked one of the horses, and Major André started to swing.

  ANNE HARDING HAD LOST her protector, alas. With André gone, the jailers could do with Anne whatever they pleased. But I did meet her one more time, a week after André’s execution. She got off the gondola with enormous welts on her face. Her eyes fluttered.

  “Anne,” I said.

  “Johnny, you must not touch me…wanted to say goodbye.”

  And she slid past me with a demonic grace. Fat Tobias was standing on the poop deck, waiting for her. He doffed his hat to me. I did not like his smile. Anne climbed up to him. I should call it Calvary were I a religious man.

  I heard her scream, but I could not climb with my chains.

  The guards seized me. “Keep out of it, Johnny-O.”

  The dogs had sensed my own wildness. They bumped me with their muscular heads, in sadness and sympathy.

  Anne screamed again.

  “Help her,” I pleaded, “help her.” And then I pleaded no more.

  “I will murder every one of you cockfucks,” I said.

  The dogs howled in a language that must have been terrible even for them.

  The guards socked me about the head. I beat off their blows, while Fat Tobias murdered Anne—I watched her body plummet from the poop deck, watched it rise and fall in the marsh, rise and fall like some miraculous mermaid until it rose for the last time, as the guards knocked me down into the hold.

  Forty-Nine

  I LEARNED TO SURVIVE WITHOUT LIVER AND MILK. And one autumnal afternoon I was pulled from the bowels of the Jersey in my odoriferous rags and carried up to the poophouse.

  A general sat in Loring’s chair, a British general, and I might have wept were I not swollen with anger. To see him in his British buttons. My Benedict Arnold, the most reviled man in America.

  But I’ll say this much for Arnold. He did not put a handkerchief to his nose. He was still a man of war who didn’t feel foreign to any odor or clime.

  “You’ll come with me,” Arnold said.

  “And if I refuse?”

  “Then I’ll drag ye out to the gondola in irons.”

  Now he was talking like the man who almost took Quebec, not the vulture who ran from West Point, his tail tucked between his legs.

  “Ah,” I said with a smartness that was meant to hurt. “Then I’ll have to capitulate.”

  He was silent on the boat. I could not keep from looking at him. He should have clawed out his own heart, held it beating in his hand and died together with it. But he did not. He wasn’t a genuine British general. He was a brigadier in the provincial army, like a bulldog the Brits might use to snap at Washington’s heels. I had the urge to strangle him, right there on the gondola. To end it all, even if the redcoats on the gondola brought me back to Tobias. But there was such softness in his face, sympathy for me, that I could not attack him.

  Why had he come to the Jersey? He must have had other items on his calendar than the rescue of a former scribe. Perhaps I reminded him of a different Arnold, before Philadelphia, before his battles with Congress, before Peggy Shippen, when he did not need coachmen, could ride in a canoe, lead an army, and sacrifice his own fortune—ye gods, he had not worn silver buttons in Quebec.

  I watched the Jersey disappear in the mist. I’d been on that wretched tub twenty months if my calculations were correct, twenty months without a letter from home. Not a scratch from Gertrude or Clara, tho’ André had hidden me away, and Fat Tobias did not permit any traffic with the world outside. A river, one little river, had created its own eternity.

  We did not dock near Out Ward. The gondola continued south, toward the wealthier wards—the lights of York quickened my blood. The lamps had been lit, and I saw men coming out of the coffeehouses. I had forgotten that people on a cobbled walk had their own particular hum, like the sound of bees in the distance.

  Arnold caught me crying. “Forgive me,” I said. “I did not dream much on the Jersey, didn’t think of villages and towns, but I could not have known how much I missed Manhattan.”

  He stood up in the gondola and wrapped his cape around my shoulders.

  “I shall need a secretary.”

  I did not answer him.

  WE LANDED AT HUNTER’S KEY, near Little Dock Street. A carriage was waiting for us, but we did not have a long voyage. We went from the harbor to Hanover Square, from Princess Street to the Bowling Green and Broadway. Arnold had rented a house right next to Clinton’s headquarters. I was a bag of bones, but he would not have his coachman carry me. The general scooped me up into his arms, deposited me first into a closet off the kitchen, where he ripped off my tatterdemalion blouse and chopped at my beard with a scalping knife, then bathed me with his own hand in a pungence of lye, and how could I strangle this traitor, lads, after such kindness?

  Then he carried me upstairs in a huge white sheet, and I had my own room with a proper bed, a canopy, a mirror, a chest of drawers, paintings of wild horses on the wall—a much better establishment than my hotel on Wallabout Bay, with lice and human flesh as my furniture. I closed my eyes and dreamt of horses…and woke up to Prince Paul staring into my face.

  “Should I dress you, master?”

  I hugged Paul, and wanted to float with him right across the room.

  “Lieutenant Stocking,” he said with that half smile of his.

  “You’ll get me whipped.”

  “But where’s our Blues?”

  “In a barn behind the old poorhouse. They’ve been lent out to the British army—stevedores and such.”

  “Who lent them?” I had to ask.

  “Did you gather dust on Wallabout? The Brits lent us to themselves. That’s the beauty of martial law. But I’m bountiful—a Blue that can spell his name and dance the minuet. The gen’ral has put me in charge of your welfare.”

  “Am I mad, or was it you that fired a cannon from Out Ward to welcome in the year?”

  “’T was my greeting to the Jersey and its prisoners.”

  “Ye gods, are you a rebel or one of the king’s men?”

  “A bit of both,” he said. “That’s all an African can ever hope to be on this island—Clara was always with us at the dock.”

  I turned suspicious. “My Clara?”

  “She danced for you every day, hoping that you’d watch.”

  “I was not permitted to have a spyglass.”

  “She still danced, John, every single day.”

  My mind was swollen with images of Clara dancing on the dock; my brains might have burst had Paul not shook me out of such imaginings. He dressed me in the most beautiful of shirts with brocaded sleeves and cuffs, a silk neckcloth, silk stockings, shoes with silver buckles. He braided my hair, doused me in French perfume, and put a cocked hat on my head.

  “The Duke of Bowling Green.”

  I WENT DOWNSTAIRS on legs that had had so little exercise, and Clara still in my mind’s eye, dancing the minuet with an invisible partner—me. And then another image broke through my idyll, ripped at
its edge. I saw a woman in a sea-green morning gown and a honeycomb of blond hair flit across the parlor. Salome herself, she who had enticed her poor husband into treachery, fooled Hamilton and the farmer in chief at West Point. I’d call her Satan’s strumpet.

  “Will you have cocoa with me? I’m the new Mrs. Arnold. But you must call me Peggy. The general talks about you incessantly. He swore in the strictest confidence that he could never write a love letter until he met you. So I’m indebted to you for my marriage.”

  She bowed to me in a most playful manner.

  Didn’t even have a chance to duel with Salome. She’d disarmed me with chatter that sounded like a chickadee.

  We drank the cocoa, had little cakes with cream on top.

  “You will help him, won’t you? He does so much need a friend. He’s prideful, and he does not get on with the young British officers.”

  The lady of the house took my hand, squeezed it ever so slightly, her skin like warm and vital flesh. A current passed through me, the tail of a storm. The serpent had already struck.

  “Might I hold you to such a promise?” she asked.

  I had promised nothing, but was feeble of a sudden before this strumpet.

  “I am your servant, madam.”

  She ruffled her pert little nose, while her bosoms began to heave under her bodice.

  “You make me sound like a grandmama,” she said.

  “Perhaps I am the grandmama.”