Johnny One-Eye

by Jerome Charyn

  These cutthroats could ply their trade elsewhere and then return to our cove. Despite their many crimes, they were punctilious students of history, devoted to each relic of the revolution.

  I wondered if my mum had sent her own silver bullet to Saint John. The brigands knew about my days and nights on board the Jersey, about my adventures at Yorktown—’t was the brigands who told me how the “Frenchies” had captured Redoubt Nine, albeit several of their own men had been impaled on the sharp sticks of a cheval-de-frise. They considered Hamilton and Johnny One-Eye as the essential heroes of Redoubt Ten.

  And they screwed up their own eyes with much suspicion.

  “Why are you in this godforsaken woods?”

  I could not tell them that the American command had picked one mad major and his secret service over Johnny One-Eye. They would not have understood George Washington’s serpentine ways.

  “Lads,” I said, “you’re right about Ham. He charged into the Hessians with all his might. But I was one of the last to climb into the redoubt. None of us could have done much climbing without the Moors.”

  The brigands did not believe me. “Colored boys won the battle of Yorktown? It beggars the mind.”

  Cornwallis had surrendered Yorktown soon after we took Redoubts Nine and Ten, according to the brigands. But the Moors had already disappeared from America’s imagination. And no matter what I said, I could not convince the brigands that there ever was or had ever been a black regiment from Rhode Island.

  But they would not rest until I showed them my green sash. “Might we touch it, John?”

  These brigands were patriots to the last man, full of worship for anything that touched upon Washington, even my sash.

  They elected me their leader, with rights to my own tavern on the wharves. I called it “Little Manhattan,” because as much as I admired the Bay of Fundy and the freedom of its wharves, I was lonesome for my island, with its own wharves, with Holy Ground.

  I had to cast about for news of Benedict Arnold. After Yorktown there was little reason for Arnold to remain in America. He sailed to England with his family at the end of 1781, sailed on separate ships, I learned—Arnold cloistered in a man-o’-war in case the Americans tried to capture him, and Peggy in a merchantman with no other passengers but her maid. The king awarded Peggy Shippen a lifelong pension of five hundred London pounds a year—’t was more than her beauty that had charmed the king. George III, my patron at college, was rewarding her prowess as a spy.

  Peggy had become a great success at court, we were told. The queen strolled in the gardens of Windsor with her, gave Peggy another small pension out of her own purse. She would have been the sensation of London without her Ben. He bought a carriage and fell into debt. He was reviled when he and Peggy went to the opera. Loyalists living in London walked the other way when they encountered Arnold on the street.

  While I could glean the latest news of London Town, I learnt almost nothing of New York. I hired Canadian victuallers to visit Holy Ground. They could tell me precious little about Clara and Gert. They were not even allowed into the nunnery—’t was either a disused British brothel or some kind of barracks and officers’ hotel, they told me. I wanted to send Clara and Gert a packet of London pounds, but I did not know how to deliver it. I had to depend on the ingenuity of the victuallers. These men were able to bribe a young British officer, who did deliver the pounds to Gert. I waited months and months. And then the victuallers brought me back a note from my mother—’t was brutally brief.

  My Dearest Johnny. You must not be in touch again. And you must not return. The redcoats will arrest you at our door. And you must not send me money. It throws suspicion upon us.

  Know that Clara and I love you. We talk of you every night.

  The note was unsigned, and I wondered if it had a censor’s touch. But I did recognize Clara’s childish scrawl—she must have become Gertrude’s secretary.

  SOON ALL THE COVE was called Little Manhattan, and by some strange default, or act of God, I became its squire. My brigands could neither read nor write, so Squire John had to serve as the bloody landlord of Lower Cove.

  But something suspicious happened. My best yobs were getting beaten up within the boundaries of Little Manhattan, and not a living soul would claim responsibility. Then the most senior of my lieutenants was kidnapped, and no ransom asked—’t didn’t feel like the tactics of some other brigand. This felt more like an Indian fighter. I kept hearing whispers: “The Regulator, the Regulator.”

  The Regulators, I knew, had been a wild band in North Carolina, as far as twenty or thirty years ago. They fought against the corruption of the Crown. They stole back horses that had been stolen from them. They kidnapped tax collectors. They burnt the barns of British sympathizers. They massacred Indians sympathetic to the Crown. They panicked the whole countryside, rode into villages and swiped every singe emblem of George III. But the redcoats went into battle, overwhelmed the Regulators, and executed their leaders right on the battlefield. Other Regulators were rounded up; some ran off to Ohio and still others were hanged. But no one could tell what happened to their general, “Gentle Jack,” a ruthless and mysterious man. The Crown might have corrupted Jack, bought his services, or killed him. And I didn’t like it at all when his name was bandied about Little Manhattan. Lads couldn’t hide their hysteria from me.

  The Regulators, the Regulators.

  Why would Gentle Jack come to the end of the world? Had the Crown run him off every other cove? Still, I was careful as a king. I traveled abroad with boys just as burly as Washington’s own Life Guard. But I could not have imagined the sheer brutality of the Regulators. They struck one night, burnt a boardinghouse, a home for enfeebled pirates. The Regulators brought them into the parlor and flayed them alive with their scalping knives, and left their carcasses to crackle in the fire.

  The stench of these burning bodies wafted across our cove with a storm of ashes. I ran down to the harbor with my brigands and scuttled Jack’s little fleet. I would not burn his ships or the few lads he left on board. I was not a scavenger or an arsonist, like the Regulators. We hammered into their hulls, ’til the ships sank in shallow water, their masts like strange leaning turrets. Now Jack had no armada.

  But I hadn’t counted on his ingenuity, his diabolic will to win. He’d have cut the throats of half my Life Guard if he could. Then one afternoon the Regulators visited me whilst I lay abed above the tavern. They wore black kerchiefs and the clothes of different climes—silks and fur cloaks; they clutched torches in their hands and looked at me in a most peculiar fashion.

  “Lads,” the surliest of them said, “summon the captain, if ye please?”

  “I dare not,” said another of these ruthless men. “He’ll murder us, he will.”

  “Then we’ll just have to set Squire John on fire and suffer the consequences.”

  But not one of these yobs approached me with his torch, and I did not know why.

  I heard a rumble from the floor below, where the tavern was, and someone began to climb the stairs and shout, “Well, have you burnt his feet yet?”

  And then he appeared—Gentle Jack or the ghost of him. Now I understood why the Regulators were so alarmed. Jack wore my face—older perhaps and gray about the ears, and minus an eye patch, but he was still my double. The Regulators watched him like a band of hawks, searching for the least sign of weakness, I suppose. His lip trembled but an instant, and it must have doomed him. He stopped asking these yobs to set my feet on fire. They smiled among themselves. They’d caught their captain unawares. He hadn’t expected to find a curious replica of himself in Saint John. He ordered them out of my bedchamber with their torches.

  He wore silks and furs, like his crew, but he also had a long red scarf.

  “Jesus,” he said, “I’m parched. Will ye not offer me a glass of wine?”

  I kept a flask of Madeira close to my bed. I poured some into a goblet. But he would not drink ’til I drank with him.

 
; “Are you daft?” he asked. “Or just deaf and dumb? Do ye not recognize your own da?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I sire only cretins,” he said. “Jason Jennings at your service, beknownst as Gentle Jack because of my magnanimity to cripples, cretins, and blacks…lemme look at ye. Fess up, isn’t your mum a certain Stella of Barbados?” “No, sir.”

  He touched his forehead with a rather long finger. “Not my Stella? But a wench with blond hair—I cannot recollect her name. Thin as a wisp. Rosalind, or…”

  “Sir,” says I, emboldened all of a sudden, since he’d kill me no matter what I said. “You have small reason to discuss my parentage. Our resemblance is but a freak accident. I could not possibly be related to you.”

  I’d plucked his interest. “And why is that, pray tell?”

  “Because no relation of mine would ever carve up enfeebled pirates.”

  “And if ye know my business, how else could I have frightened an entire town?”

  “By dueling with my brigands,” says I.

  “Dueling, ye say?”

  “Yes, in a sporting manner.”

  He began to cackle. ’T was most unbecoming—a hyena in a red scarf.

  “Are we Regulators or Christian knights? Tell me your mum’s name.”

  “I would not sully it, sir, in your presence.”

  He moved to slap my face, but seemed inexplicably deterred.

  “And if I promised to do penance…and not mutilate a single soul for the next six months?”

  “How could I ever believe a wholesale liar such as yourself? But I will tell you this much. My mother’s surname is the same as your own.”

  “Sonny, I have made more than one Mrs. Jennings in my lifetime.”

  And why did I suspect that my mother’s Christian name—the mere mention of it—would wound the fellow?

  “She is none other than Gertrude of Holy Ground,” says I.

  And I could scarce believe it. This cruel man started to cry. It was piteous to see. A pirate, a murderer of men, bawling like some infant out of the cradle.

  “Are ye Gert’s?” he asked, wiping his eyes with his own red scarf. “Then I am indeed your da. Is her hair still the reddest in the land?”

  He commenced to hug me, and I did not resist for some reason. He had carnage on his person—in the ruts of his face, in the folds of his boots—but his love of Gert still attached him to me. Nonetheless, I had great difficulty accepting him as my da. Perhaps I had brooded too long on the farmer, the same man who had condemned me to this wilderness through no fault of my own. Wasn’t Washington also a Regulator? Wouldn’t he have sacrificed Manhattan, burnt it to the ground, to save his army of men without shoes?

  But I shouldn’t have speculated so long while Gentle Jack was in my bedchamber. He had his own extravagant ideas about filial obligations. He’d pulled a dirk out of his sleeve and held its point against my throat.

  “Best be quick,” he told me. “Did my Gertrude ever love another man?”

  I could appraise this Jack, even whilst I was a pinprick away from permanent slumber: he’d just as soon slaughter his own son as any stranger. And perhaps I was as willful as he was.

  “Mr. Jack Jennings, she has adored one man to the very edge of distraction these past twenty-five years.”

  “Speak his name, or I’ll pin ye to the wall.”

  And that’s when his Regulators returned, each with a cutlass in one hand, a torch in the other. They were pleased as the Divil to catch their captain at my throat. “Ain’t that divine, Jack? Finish him and we’ll leave this pestilential place.”

  “You are interruptin’ my interrogation,” Jack said. “And it is of the most personal nature.”

  “But we can assist you,” said his subaltern, the surly one. “I could burn out his brains.”

  And when the subaltern thrust his torch tantalizingly close to my scalp, Jack dug the dirk between this same subaltern’s eyes. Lord-a-mercy, my head was near on fire. I howled with pain—’t was almost like being crowned with hellishly hot thorns. But in saving me, Jack had wrecked his own chances. The Regulators attacked him with their cutlasses, furious that he’d killed his own subaltern with a dirk. They stabbed him before he could pull out his cutlass, but he still began leaving cadavers all over my bedchamber. He drove the living and the half dead down the stairs.

  My brigands must have been hiding somewhere. Once they noticed that fortune was now in their favor, they reappeared and hacked all the wounded Regulators to pieces. Their nostrils quivered when they pulled close to me. The smell of my singed scalp was truly unbearable.

  “Squire,” they asked, “shall we escort Gentle Jack to the hanging tree?”

  “Ye gods, will you get him a doctor?”

  But we had no doctors in Saint John, except at the fort. And I didn’t have much faith in an army surgeon. I had my lads haul the cadavers down the stairs while I ripped apart the bedclothes and stoppered Jack’s wounds as best I could. I dared not move him. He lay on my floor with a pillow behind his head. He was still lucid in spite of all the blood he’d lost.

  “Squire John,” he said with a cough, “will ye tell a dyin’ man who the rascal was that replaced me in your mum’s affection?”

  “George Washington, the commander in chief.”

  The brow of his bloodless face was all in a wrinkle. “Him who fancies fat widows? He stole my Gert?”

  “Sir,” says I, “since my mother did not so much as mention your existence, I must assume that you abandoned her.”

  “And gallant George did not? He has remained with his Martha, unless I err…and your humble servant has a price on his head. But I’d bet my life I laid eyes on her before gallant George ever did. Her dada was a local gunsmith in tidewater country, a squire like yerself. And your mum was a volunteer nurse in one of the king’s hospitals…unless I confuse her with another wench. But I cannot disremember a face full of freckles and how she tended to Jack the Regulator in a hospital of redcoats.”

  “Were you wounded, sir?”

  “’T was an ignominious wound. In the arse. I’d been burning barns, creating havoc amongst all the king’s loyal squires, and a redcoat comes out of nowhere with his musket and massacres my bum. I’d have met my Maker if Gert had not administered to me, swearin’ to the hospital that I was some representative of the Crown. And one morning, while she was doin’ up my bandages, I could resist her freckles no longer and I declared my love. I had the cheek to kiss her with redcoats all around…and we were married a month later—in ’56 or ’57, if I can still recollect.”

  “And what happened next?” I asked, curious as the Divil.

  He coughed and spat a gob of blood. “There was no next. The king was on my trail. Merry Jack had to kiss your mum goodbye.”

  “But you might have come back for her.”

  “I’d wandered too far. Yet I am glad I have found ye. I won’t dissemble now. I’ve met five—no, six—six of my other sons. And I did not have one moment of pride.”

  “And how, sir, am I different?”

  “Are ye still a cretin? You gave me Gertrude again.”

  This was the last remark he uttered that made sense. He continued to gurgle blood while he held my hand. I could not love a murderer, even if he called himself my dad. But I buried him in Saint John, hired a few Indian maidens to chant Christian songs as we delivered him into the ground.

  I was sorely confused. He’d arrived out of nowhere, a Regulator, and could have started an incendiary in Saint John that might have burnt us all and given Manhattan’s Great Fire the appearance of a most minor catastrophe. Instead, he’d saved my life and plundered his own. Had he been searching for his son in some purblind way? If I hadn’t come to this pirates’ cove, would I ever have found him? Perhaps it was Divine Will that had sent a changeling called Johnny One-Eye to Canada. Was I a child of Providence, or a child of chance?

  Sixty-Three

  EVEN AS A CHILD OF CHANCE, I STILL HAD FAITH i
n Washington, believing all the while that he would redeem a lad who had never harmed him, and that I would be led out of this wilderness. I imagined him coming to Lower Cove, drinking beer from a pannikin, as we called our dented tin cups. I waited through the summer with little else on my mind, and suddenly I felt the unfairness of it all. I had a rage in me I could not quell. It worsened as winter approached. I plunged into the foulest of moods. All human company was anathema to me.

  I would not get out of bed. I had meat pies brought upstairs with my grog. And things got worse in Saint John. Without a squire or local king, the town had fallen into disrepair.

  The brigands broke down my door.

  “Lads,” I said, “has George Washington come to our cove?”

  “No, Squire John, not yet.”

  “Then why are you molesting me?”

  “Because you are a hermit living in a hermitage. Your own tavern has run out of beer and ale.”

  “But I have my daily grog.”

  “Squire John, you are drinking spit from the bottom of the barrel.”

  “’Tis a mere detail,” I said, tossing my pannikin at them.

  They returned in an hour with wondrous wrinkles upon their pates.

  “John, I do believe the general has arrived. He wears a tricorn, hides the better part of him in a cape.”

  “Washington here? Is his head a little too small for his hat?”

  “Would seem so,” said my ablest brigand. “With an enormous beak of a nose, as far as I can tell.”

  “That’s Washington,” I said.

  They uncovered a clean neckcloth, and I went downstairs in that piece of silk and a nightshirt. Silence reigned as I appeared. The pirates raised their pannikins. Lord knows what they were drinking!