Johnny One-Eye

by Jerome Charyn

  I had no gift for gambling, gambling with cards, but I’d served with the greatest gambler of all, Benedict Arnold running into battle like some immense carrier of death.

  I never took my seeing eye off Tobias. I bore into him like a menacing drill. I wanted him to know that I was here to kill him. I was his executioner, not some jackal in the dark. He shouldn’t have pawed Anne with his fat fingers, shouldn’t have dropped her into the marsh.

  He called out the cards. He collected chips, and still I looked.

  “Johnny One-Eye, your nigger’s too close to the table. He’s casting his nigger shadow on my cards.”

  I wouldn’t engage him in talk.

  “Do ye miss that stinking whore what worked for André? Can you ’magine how many times I tasted her on the Jersey, Johnny-O? I broke her back with my lovin’, and left you all the bitter pieces of her heart.”

  He could only read my one relentless eye.

  I saw him twitch, and knew he meant to unman me under the table, blow out the fork between my legs with his pistol, but I shifted in the chair and stabbed him in the lower region of his belly, twisted the blade until he rose up in the chair in confusion and pain and complete surprise.

  I never stopped. His mouth opened like a whale with little yellow teeth. His own fat body pushed down on the sword, and his trembling was close to suicide.

  He died, lads, with my sword roving in his belly, and ’t was as if he’d scared himself into dying.

  I left the hanger in him and got up from the table.

  Another jailer from the Jersey began to claw at my clothes. The prince shot him between the eyes. The jailers and soldiers of the tavern looked at us with fear and disgust frozen into their faces.

  Paul and I stood back to back. No one harmed us, no one interfered. Once out the Dove, we ran like the Divil. I wasn’t a trained assassin like the Brits. I’d stumbled into killing. But I had to avenge Anne Harding, or I would have remained sleepless until the next revolution.

  “You put us in a pickle,” Paul said as we ran. “Now the rebels and the Brits have a price on our heads, Master John.”

  “Cut the fanfare,” I said, huffing a little. “The tables are turned. You’re the prince and I’m the commoner.”

  The redcoats would never find him, an African in Little Africa, whereas I had the burden of my pink complection. I had a “history,” where Paul had none. I wore a feather in my hat.

  And that feather would protect me for a few more hours. I’d cross over to Brooklyn, hide in the marshes near Wallabout, next to Anne’s watery grave, and then slip aboard some victualler bound for Canada. But I went at things willy-nilly and was seized by a sudden paroxysm—I had forgotten to say goodbye to Clara and my mum.

  I did not have to avoid the British lookout posts. News of Fat Tobias had not traveled far from the tavern. I crossed Crown Street, marched to St. Paul’s, and entered Holy Ground with an eerie silence at my back. Not a nun was about, not a sailor boy, not a mouse. The lamps inside the nunnery were not lit.

  Two men interrupted me in Gertrude’s garden. One was very large. The other had a rodent’s feral eyes. I had not counted on this, but they, it seems, had counted on my coming here. The shorter one began to stroke his flint. I could see his face in the little scratches of light, the face of Malcolm Treat, and the colossal mug of Sergeant Champe.

  “Not a sound,” the sergeant said. “Not a peep. Looking for Mistress Clara, eh? A mangy lad always returns to his whore.”

  And he socked me so hard it created a stirring—a fury in my ears—that drove all the intrigue out of my head.

  Fifty-Three

  I WOKE WITH A NOOSE ROUND MY NECK. I WAS ON a wagon, with a coffin under my feet; the wagon was hitched to a couple of mares. And for my gallows I had a hanging tree. There were three witnesses at the side of the wagon—Champe, Treat, and another man, who was not in uniform. This third man wore a handsome neckcloth, a velvet waistcoat, velvet britches, and boots that were polished a deep purple. He had white powder in his hair. I would not learn until later that he’d come to Weehawken in his wedding clothes—he’d left his bride in Albany to plan and control the hanging of Benedict Arnold. Even in his velvet britches, he did not have the air of a civilian, or a copyist and aide-de-camp who sat on his arse and lived behind the lines—no, my former schoolfellow, little Hamilton, had that lean look of war.

  Treat began to implore him. “Sir, why wait? He’s guilty of treason. He let that traitor slip through our hands.”

  “Mr. Treat, we came for a hanging and a hanging we shall have. But not until His Excellency appears. I would not deprive him of that pleasure.”

  I must have reminded Hamilton of a leper or a toad. He would not glance at me, offer me the simplest regard. Champe walked behind the wagon. I liked it not. He could have launched me with one little shove of his hand.

  “Colonel Hamilton,” he said, “the Chief has better things to do than involve himself with one-eyed vermin.”

  There was a second of hesitation in Hamilton’s eyes, and the sergeant major seized his chance. He shoved the wagon with both hands. The horses did not hesitate. And I swung in the air—be a liar if I said I had a great moral rebirth just before my suffocation. I didn’t think of André’s hanging, so similar to mine. I imagined Clara with blood in her mouth, licking the wounds of some poor slave in Dominica. I cried as the noose tightened, cried with a rage against the world, a rage that Clara would never lick blood off my broken neck. And just as I started to swoon, I stopped swinging. Little Hamilton had grabbed my legs.

  “You will do me the honor, Sergeant Champe, of putting some solid support beneath this man.”

  Champe was a horseman, alright. He slapped one of the mares on her withers, and the wagon wheeled backwards enough to slacken the rope and put my feet on top of the coffin again.

  “Sir,” Major Treat said with utmost contempt. “The child weeps. Soon we’ll have to wipe his snot.”

  “Mr. Treat, you will refrain from picking on this lad. He is a prisoner of war.”

  Hamilton grabbed Champe’s canteen and fed me water, wiping my lips with his handsome scarf.

  And then the commander in chief arrived on a great big chestnut mare, without a single bodyguard. I had not seen him since his perilous game of vingt-et-un at the nunnery, when he wore my mother’s ribbon round his neck—he did not wear a ribbon tonight.

  “Excellency,” Treat said, “Arnold has got away because of this miserable boy.”

  Washington looked at me from under his long hat. “Why have you trussed him up to a tree?”

  Champe and Treat quivered in front of Washington, but Hamilton would not.

  “Sir, you mean to save this”—pointing his chin at me—“when you would not offer André a much more decent death…in front of a firing squad, as he deserved.”

  “Hamilton, I will not quarrel. Stocking wasn’t caught with suspicious papers on his person.”

  “He has done worse,” Hamilton shouted, his forehead bulging.

  “He’s wearing the uniform of Arnold’s wretched rangers.”

  “But he is not Arnold,” Washington said.

  “Excellency, shall we lock him in a barn?” Champe asked with a certain shyness.

  “Bring him to headquarters. And you, dear Hamilton, may return to your bride.”

  The commander in chief rode off on his chestnut, her buttocks trembling with a love of movement, while I stood on my coffin and watched him ride into the dark.

  WE CROSSED THE HUDSON AGAIN. This time I was awake. We were far above Manhattan, in the precinct of New Windsor. Champe wasn’t spiteful while we sat in his wagon. The ferry had a most difficult time holding him and the weight of two horses. I suspicioned we would sink. But the ferryman, himself a soldier, leaned on one knee and dug his pole into the currents like some astounding spear. We did not topple, thanks to him.

  I was billeted with George Washington, much to my surprise. His headquarters was in an old Dutch farmhouse ri
ght on the river. His entire military staff lived there, four to a room. Washington liked to have his lads around should he need them in the middle of the night. He occupied a bedchamber on the second floor of the farmhouse, next to his office. It felt like former times, when I’d spent several days and nights with the farmer at the beginning of the rebellion. His orderly, Sparks, occupied a cot, while I slept in the same bed—a four-poster—with the commander in chief.

  I knew not what to think. Was this how other prisoners of war were billeted? Sparks seemed joyous to see me again—his hair had gone gray. He walked with a limp. But it was the farmer himself who had aged the most. He was near fifty, and he’d had to cobble together an army for the past five and a half years, provide it with shoes, survive the cabals of congressmen and carping generals under his own command. ’T was Washington who fed the army, clothed it, fought the battles, ran his own stable of spies. Congress was bankrupt. Washington could not pay his soldiers. Some officers had already rebelled. But still he cobbled. His critics could not comprehend this. He was larger than their contradictions, relentless in his desire that the army not melt away, and with it the nation itself.

  The British could not wear him down—’t was the little ingratitudes of men who were supposedly on his side. He had to fight a war in front of him and in back. That is why he needed his family of aides—Hamilton and the others had rescued him from chaos. And as he sat in his nightshirt, with biscuits and morning coffee, and without his war cloak, I was dismayed. He had to put on spectacles to read the simplest note or dispatch. His hand would follow each line, like some faltering music master. And his red hair, without its pigtail, seemed dullish at the roots.

  “Sparks,” he said, while I was still under the covers, “what shall we do with the boy?”

  “Dispose of him, I’d imagine. Bury him in the garden.”

  “I have a better idea. I shall enlist him as my informal secretary. Mr. Hamilton is on his honeymoon. I dare not recall him from his wedding bed just to borrow his hand—Sparks, what have you done with the boy’s uniform?”

  “Burnt it and buried it, Gen’ral.”

  “Excellent—Mr. Stocking, will you not join us for some coffee or a dish of tea?”

  I climbed out of bed wearing one of the general’s nightshirts. I could have swum to China inside of it.

  “Sir,” Sparks said to the general. “The lad’s neck was raw and I took the liberty of layin’ on some grease last night.”

  “He deserves no grease. He ruined the hanging party I had prepared for Arnold—by the by, how is your general, Mr. Stocking?”

  The trap was set before I drank my coffee—I was lost whether I damned Arnold or sang his praise. I considered it best not to lie while I was under Washington’s roof.

  “Excellency, he is but the shell of a man. He wanders about. The British love him not.”

  “Yet Clinton sends him to Virginia like some bulldog, so he can bite, bite, bite.”

  “He’s been muzzled,” I said. “Clinton has his own colonels behind him—’tis not Arnold who should worry you, but Arnold’s wife. She’s the vixen. She wrote the map of his betrayal. She was John Andre’s pet and his spy.”

  Washington reached across the table with one long arm and delivered a slap that sent me flying—I could not imagine him capable of so ungentlemanly a sting.

  “Stocking,” he said, with blotches of anger on his very pale skin. “We do not speak of women in such a vile fashion. Not at this table. I shall make myself clear. You have no defined existence at New Windsor—in fact, you do not exist. For if you did, I should have to agree with Hamilton and hang you from the nearest tree.”

  He abandoned his coffee, flung a cape over his nightshirt, and strode out of the bedroom, leaving Sparks to deal with me.

  Fifty-Four

  THE GENERAL HAD A FONDNESS FOR FAIRY TALES. I’d recite to him about children lost in a forest, about mischievous wolves, princes turned into monsters by some strange alchemy, princesses who were only beautiful in the eyes of the most unmerciful men. He adored both the children and the monsters in these tales. And I could sense the remorse in him that he’d never had “monsters” of his own—save a bastard or two.

  Like little John.

  The one place where Washington allowed me any privileges was in the dining room—I took my dinners with his family, I supped with him and his aides, who could make neither hide nor hare of me.

  Malcolm Treat had joined us at the table. He was no longer on parole. Washington had exchanged him for a pair of British colonels. He dared not attack me in front of the general. But Treat spread his poison behind the general’s back, said I was the whoreson of Holy Ground, that I’d bewitched the general. I could not contradict him. Sergeant Champe was always near the farmhouse. He was a member of Washington’s Life Guard, two hundred ferocious lads who surrounded Washington when he wanted to be surrounded.

  But headquarters began to empty out close to Christmas—members of his staff requested time with their wives, away from the war; soon his whole military family had come down to Sparks and myself. And only then, in this hiatus, did I become his “second Hamilton.” I would offer him a choice of words when he had to chide a general for some particular lapse. And he would hurl maledictions upon my head.

  “Damn you, Stocking, I’m not enticed by your familiarity with the pen. There’s evil in it! A wordish boy like you should never have been born!”

  And Sparks would whisper in my ear. “The gen’ral’s warming to you, Mr. John, he really is.”

  But mostly he was silent—Washington was a very silent man. He would sit and brood over his mutton and ask me for another fairy tale.

  THERE WERE RUMBLINGS in the barracks. Soldiers had not been paid. Many of them were farmers, like the general. They’d lost their crops. Their wives had been menaced by British raiders. Their children did not have enough to eat. And then one barrack did rebel—threatened to march to Philadelphia and kidnap the Congress.

  Hamilton would have arrested the entire barrack, had its leaders whipped. But Hamilton was not around. And the general, who wouldn’t tolerate sedition, took another turn.

  A few days after Christmas he visited this barrack without his Life Guard, and he brought me along. I filled our haversacks with hardtack and our canteens with Madeira; Washington loved to “nip” on wine. He wouldn’t even lend me a horse. I rode with him on his sorrel, next to her beautiful white mane. We followed the Hudson, heard the sound of ice.

  Several pickets saw us, but no one asked for the password of the day. Who could have impersonated this tall man with pale skin? And he was no less authentic, even with a strange civilian soldier sitting on his saddle horn. An officer met us outside the barrack, next to Newburgh, where the army had its main camp. He was puzzled to find us alone. “Excellency, these men are mean. They shot at my hat.”

  “Captain, should I turn the place into a slaughter yard? The boy and I will go inside.”

  The barrack had no windows, just narrow slits in the walls. The soldiers inside could see us, whereas we were blind to them. Washington jumped down from his horse, then seized me right off the saddle. Next he removed his hat and asked me to unwind his pigtail. I was astonished—he would always have Sparks dress his hair whenever he went abroad. But he was coming to these soldiers in a state as wild as theirs.

  The soldiers had barricaded the door. He would not bargain with them. We waited until we could hear the rumble of furniture being removed. Then Washington bowed and shoved me inside the barrack.

  Meseems ’t was but a prison ship on dry land—men living like wolves in a wooden cave. The floor was common earth without the little benefits of a garden. The entire barrack was lit by a lone lantern. And in the near darkness these men did look like wolves, wolves with bayonets. There was a full forest of them.

  “Does this barrack have its own commander in chief?” the farmer asked.

  First there was silence and then a voice barreled out of the dark. “It dot
h.”

  “And who may this commander be?”

  Someone as tall as Washington strode into the lantern’s narrow light. “Corporal Baines, Adam Baines.”

  I could not determine his features, whether they were hard and wolfish.

  “Are ye a farmer?” Washington asked with a measured gruffness.

  “A bit of one,” said Baines. “I’m also a schoolmaster.”

  I had expected farmers and blacksmiths, not a schoolmaster. Yet Washington did have an advantage—he and the corporal could parlay like a couple of tall men.

  “I have not come here to pay you. I cannot. Nor have I brought you a Christmas treat. There is none. I can promise you nothing. But my aide and I will share with you whatever is in our sacks…we cannot win this war without you.”

  The general did not speak another word. The soldiers put down their muskets and welcomed us into the barrack’s hearth—a bench near a fireplace that breathed no fire. I opened the haversacks and passed around hardtack and cheese…and the Madeira in our canteens. We supped together in silence.

  One or two soldiers sobbed—their own officers had declared a holiday and deserted them, but Washington had come into their wild land, had risked their wrath. He was clever not to bring Sergeant Champe. I was pitiful as a bodyguard. The barrack wolves could see that.

  The general shook Baines’ hand and we left the barrack with our canteens and haversacks. He hoisted me onto the horn, and we rode back to New Windsor near nightfall.

  Pickets shone lamps in our faces, blinding us. “Who goes there? Speak, or I’ll…”

  Washington did not answer. His soul was still inside that barrack. But every single picket waved our sorrel through.

  Anno Domini 1781

  YORKTOWN

  The Jersey Palisades

  MARCH 1781

  He would creep along the Hudson, observe Manhattan with his spyglass from the Jersey cliffs. He could glimpse not a single tree in the lower part of the island. The landscape was utterly denuded. He could not attack Manhattan without the French fleet, and waiting for such fleet had become the biggest folly of the war. The French would not risk their battleships in an open conflict with the Crown.