Ghost Town

by Patrick Mcgrath

  —Now, madam, you see what happens to those who will not pay their taxes!

  And with that he turned and began making his way back up toward the road, small clouds of ash rising under his horse’s hooves.

  —Will you not help us, Lord Hyde?

  But he said nothing more, merely flicked at the horse with his whip. My mama could take no more. It all burst out of her.

  —You painted whore! she shouted. You king’s strumpet!

  Suddenly all was still. I felt the first drops of rain. Slowly Lord Hyde turned his horse. My mama did not move. She set her fists upon her hips and tossed her head as the rain began to fall. He lifted his whip. All at once I saw that he would come down upon her, that he would ride her down and whip her as she lay trampled and screaming in the ashes—

  But it did not happen. He stared at her a second as though to fix her in his mind and then turned once more. He spurred the horse back up on to Broadway, where the people fell back as he cantered away. It began to rain in earnest then, and the ashes hissed and smoked all around us.

  Strange to say, the encounter with Lord Hyde roused my mother from the shock of the destruction of our home, and now that she saw what must be done it was to my brother Dan that she turned.

  Dan was a boy of fourteen who in many ways resembled my papa. He had been apprenticed to a carpenter, being suited like my papa to work with his hands. He was even then assailed by inner troubles and mysteries, a tortured boy. In later years he suffered various disasters and took to drink, and died a bitter, disappointed man. I buried him one winter in Trinity graveyard and myself wrote the death notice. But now his hour was come. He stood listening to my mama, she with her homespun shawl fluttering about her shoulders, and him in his tattered shirt and britches. There they were, mother and son, speaking low to each other as they gazed out over the black barren earth and the Hudson lapping at the bluffs beyond, and it is extraordinary to me that a woman who had lost everything in a fire and with no husband at her side could inspire her boy to construct a shelter for her. How Dan did it I do not well remember but in the space of a day and with the help of our neighbors a shack was framed with timbers from the roof of Trinity and covered with sailcloth begged and stolen from the East River wharves. Even Lizzie helped, for I can see her now with a flathead nail between her lips as she hammered a length of flapping canvas to a plank.

  It was the first of the shelters to be built after the fire of ’76. By nightfall many of those who now owned nothing but the clothes on their backs were settled inside it. Their eyes gleamed from every corner of the squat rough shack. My mama sat by the fire with a cup of rum, elbows on her knees and legs wide apart, smoking her old clay pipe and telling us that when the war was over we would remember with pride the day we built ourselves a house. She said it was the first step in building ourselves a nation.

  In the weeks that followed other women followed my mama’s example and set their children to work. Shacks and cabins began to rise across the bare earth behind the ruins of Trinity Church. So was born a new settlement. It became known as Canvas Town.

  Canvas Town. Soon enough it was a place of debauchery, violence, chicanery—the new nation indeed! It was late fall now. Winter was approaching. Strong winds blew from the harbor, and large chunks of ice drifted down the Hudson. The river began to freeze over. Wood and grain were scarce and of meat and poultry there was almost none, for New York had become a military garrison. What supplies came in from the farms of Long Island were taken by the British, and whatever went to market was priced too high for the residents of Canvas Town. Meanwhile the streets and canals ran with the enemy’s filth, and wharves where once the merchant ships of the world had docked began to sag and rot with neglect, and at low tide the East River was a murky sheet of sewage. The town stank worse than ever.

  As winter came on, the hardships of life in Canvas Town began truly to bite. I was profoundly miserable for I hated having to crawl each night into a narrow wooden box that smelled of fish. My mama said there were many in New York who would be happy of a fish-box to sleep in. I said I was not one of them and she laughed, then sat me in her lap and pressed me to her bosom. Murmuring loving words, she stroked my head. She was a strong presence in our fledgling settlement but by degrees, as the weather grew colder, her spirits weakened and a darkness at times stole over her. On hearing of some new piece of infamy on the part of the British she would not rage as once she had but sink, rather, into silence. In answer to my anxious inquiry she would say only that she did not see what was to be done.

  —I am of no use to my country, she whispered.

  —But mama, will they not sail away when General Washington has beat them?

  —They will never sail away! she cried.

  Nor could we ever forget that we lived under martial law, if law it could be called. At the top of the Common stood the Provost, most abhorred of all the prisons in the town, with the gibbet out front where American soldiers were hanged in plain view and left there for days so that nobody could forget the penalty for rebellion. Other hangings occurred at dead of night on Barrack Street and of those we were supposed to know nothing, although of course we did. They moored hulks in the East River and sent our soldiers to rot in their holds. The stink of those foul prison-ships carried clear across to Manhattan, as did the ghastly moans and cries of men and women condemned to perish within them. Dead soldiers lay among the living and the cold was so bad and the men so weak their limbs blackened and went bad with the gangrene. Those who survived were starved close to death then fed poisoned bread, and their corpses were tossed overboard in filthy shrouds like so much garbage.

  These stories made a profound impression upon me. I grew mortally terrified of being cast into one of the British prisons on the island.

  In the midst of all this suffering, British officers caroused in mansions once the property of American merchants. It was a winter of constant festivity for Lord John Hyde and his friends, of balls and banquets where sauced meats were savored and fine wines drunk. Plays were put on in the theaters and gentlemen gambled for high stakes at cards, and in elegant drawing rooms musicians in powdered wigs and silk stockings performed chamber pieces for ladies in glittering gowns. The whores did fine trade, many having premises in the vicinity of the Trinity ruins, and by night the town was raucous with the cries of drunken Englishmen howling for females like apes.

  Thus the army of occupation. See what we had by contrast. We struggled daily to secure the wherewithal to keep body and soul together and lived hopeless lives in low hovels amid the mud and filth of Canvas Town. Ragged and emaciated, we haunted the streets like the living dead, standing on bread lines, grubbing for bones, and many indeed did perish of cold and hunger and disease, though not so many as died of deliberate neglect in the East River prison-hulks. My mama lay on her straw mattress and stared at the roof. The canvas was stained now and stitched and patched where it had split open. I crawled close so as to share the warmth of her body, and at these times an animal somnolence would settle on the shack.

  Then one morning I awoke in my box to see a stranger stooped in the doorway. For some seconds I did not know if I was dreaming. He was a tall man with a red beard and a thin, sharp face. He was dressed like a Quaker in a shabby black coat and britches and he was clutching a wide-brimmed black hat in his hand, also a long stick with a brass knob at one end. He held back the blanket which hung on the inside of the door and quietly spoke my mama’s name. She struggled awake then sat up at once.

  —Miles Walsh, she murmured, hitching her shawl about her bosom.

  The foxy man stooped low and stepped inside and the blanket swung to behind him. Other bodies stirred into wakefulness. Always the shack was crowded at night. With her shawl wrapped tight about her my mama knelt at the hearth and roused the embers of the fire. Miles Walsh sat down on a box, his knees jutting out sharply on either side of his brass-knobbed stick, upon which he folded his long thin fingers, and upon them set his whiskered chin: this
the man who burned down half of New York, though at the time I had no inkling of that. Quickly, I was sent out to keep watch. I was to tell my mama at once if there were redcoats about. Some time later she emerged from the shack with this Miles Walsh and told me we were going to the seaport.

  We crossed the town by way of the twisty back streets where we would be unlikely to encounter a patrol. We passed crudely erected market stalls where the poor purchased what they could of those overpriced commodities not already commandeered by the army of occupation. A light rain was falling, the day was misty and from the harbor came the screech of seagulls. There was a smell of fish in the air and a tart smack of salt. They walked fast and I had to run to keep up. My mama wore her shawl about her head like a cowl, and her skirt as it swept through the puddles became spattered with mud. The shops and houses of merchants were shuttered, many of them, or else occupied by loyalist families who had sought protection within the garrison New York had become.

  Close to the river we slipped down an alley which gave on to the deserted back yard of a seaman’s tavern called the Rising Sun. Barrels were stacked precariously against a brick wall and to one side stood a large cart. Miles Walsh had us wait by the gate then crossed the yard in a few strides. Glancing about him he then darted up a wooden staircase fastened to the outside of the back of the building. Close to the roof was a small door with an iron hook set in the brick from which dangled a length of chain. There he paused and again looked about, a curious figure high up against the bricks that misty morning.

  A few minutes later we were standing all three in a narrow wooden gallery on the top floor of the tavern. I felt sick to be so high and with so little between me and the nothingness on the other side of a flimsy balustrade which overhung a drinking hall three floors below. Beneath us, several dozen men sat at rough tables or leaned against a counter that ran the length of the room. Redcoats stood drinking with the rest and there arose to my senses a din of human voices, a quantity of tobacco smoke and a strong smell of ale. Miles Walsh put his hands on his knees and leaned down to speak to me.

  —Stay here, boy, he said, and if they come up the stairs you find me.

  He meant the redcoats. For more than an hour I sat there in mortal fear of my life. I could not look down through the haze of smoke upon the drinkers below even if by my weakness I put my mama at risk. I had never encountered this Miles Walsh before but it was clear that he and my mama had secret business to conduct and that it must be done without knowledge of the British for it was certainly to do with some action against them. This made me greatly uneasy. I did not want to think of my mama being thrown in prison. What then would become of me?

  Thus my childish thinking as I sat shivering with terror high in the gallery above the drinkers. I was growing sleepy when I heard voices down the corridor and saw Miles Walsh, followed by my mama and three others. Two were seafaring men in canvas trousers, each with a pigtail and tattoos inked upon his skin. The third was a man in his middle years in a good suit of clothes and wearing a cocked hat with scarlet trim, a man of some standing and authority, a merchant, perhaps, or a shipowner. I did not like any of them. I wanted to take my mama away from there.

  When we were in the yard behind the tavern Miles Walsh turned to me and told me I had done well. He told me to say nothing of the work I had done and I should have more of it. Then he gave me a penny. Thus was I recruited, and thus would I be ruined: for a penny. My mama and I returned to Canvas Town by the alleys and back streets and encountered no soldiers. When we were once more safe at home my mama told me I was to be her eyes and ears, this was my work now. I was to look out for her wherever we went.

  I did not tell her that I had not been her eyes in the Rising Sun. I had been too frightened to watch the soldiers in the hall below.

  —Who are those men, mama? I said.

  —They are friends, she said. Friends of America.

  My hand trembles as I lift the glass to my lips. It is white rum from the sugar islands that I favor these days, it seems to spill at least a little sunlight into this dark constricted cell I call my soul. The silence unsettles me. Never have I known a Fourth of July so quiet as this one. We knew the pestilence was coming, of course. We knew its path lay to the west, and that having ravaged Europe it would find its way across the Atlantic. Everything finds its way across the Atlantic in the end. If our Pilgrim Fathers believed they had left the corruption of old Europe behind them, how wrong they have been proven! The corruption of old Europe—why, they brought it with them, it came ashore at Plymouth Rock! I think in my mother’s day we saw the last American effort to cleanse ourselves of the stain of old Europe; certainly it was in this spirit that she fought and died for the republic.

  All over town the living continue to sicken and anyone with dollars enough to remove to the countryside has done so by stagecoach or steamboat or wheelbarrow or even on foot, which is the reason for the silence attending this anniversary of the Declaration of our Independence. I am going nowhere. I have not the means to remove myself nor have I anywhere to go to. And like my mother I am loath to flee the town at the first sign of trouble. It will kill me, of course, New York will kill me, but better by far to perish here alone in my garret than take my chance on the high road and finish my days in some alien pesthouse or a ditch. No, I will go down, as they say in the grog shops hereabouts, with my vessel! With my ship! I am avoiding the town pumps and dosing myself with rum instead, but it is only a matter of time before the black vomit comes. The doctor as good as told me so when he visited me earlier. He did not say it in so many words but I caught the sour twitch of his lip when he turned his back on me and busied himself with his little black bag: a death sentence. I live too close to the river, he said. The pestilence that walketh in darkness, he said—for so it is called by our preachers—prefers to travel by water. What a wag.

  I was perhaps too liberal with my medicine and have had to sleep an hour. Now I take up my pen once more with this purpose only—this imperative—which is to tell the true circumstance of my mother’s last days. Few are aware of what she suffered at the hands of Lord John Hyde and fewer still of my own part in the events which precipitated her end. 1777 had dawned upon a people plagued with doubt and apprehension. The Year of the Gibbet: those three grim sevens, an invisible noose dangling from each of their crossbars, and a busy year for the gibbet it would prove to be. I was with my mama when they took her on the Hudson pier and later discovered incriminating letters on her person. They were addressed to that certain gentleman I saw on the top floor of the Rising Sun and they came from General Washington himself. It seems that they involved the firing of British ships in New York harbor.

  I cannot say I was surprised. There had been a second journey to the seaport. It was an overcast day and I stood with my mama on the windy wharf as the intrepid revolutionary with his collar turned up and his Quaker hat pulled low indicated with small quick gestures certain of the vessels riding at anchor offshore. There was talk among them about winds and tides, fireboats and gunpowder, and men whose names meant nothing to me. I remember glancing about as I had been told to do and seeing two British naval officers approaching. At once I touched my mother’s sleeve. In a second the conversation turned to the price of cheese and continued in this vein until the danger was past, at which time it returned to the fiery destruction of shipping and the conditions in which this might best be accomplished.

  These were large matters and required communication with General Washington. It became my mama’s part in the affair to take regular journeys across the Hudson and into the Jerseys. It was understood that a woman could cross the British lines with far greater ease than a man and that this was how messages might be passed between the General and his conspirators in the town.

  I well remember the first of those journeys and my surprise at what I saw. The given reason for it—the reason, that is, which my mama provided a certain army captain who signed her pass, was that she and her son needed to visit her relation
s in Newark. Of course we never once visited my mama’s relations. Instead we took the Morristown road and traveled to the American camp, where my mama retired into a tent with an officer called Tallmadge and I was left to wander by myself.

  I knew the trim tents and well-stocked barracks of the British troops in New York and had thought that our soldiers would be housed in similar fashion. But no. Ragged, bearded men, many of them barefoot, sat about campfires with blackened pots in the embers and gazed at me with incurious eyes. A few called out to me but with no real conviction. They were too cold, too dispirited and hungry to show more than a flickering interest in an unfamiliar child. I thought again of the soldiers I saw every day in New York and wondered why they did not cross the river and fall upon these poor weak men and massacre them as they had massacred so many at the Battle of Brooklyn.

  We made the return journey to New York the following day, carrying with us a small sack of rice and a basket of vegetables. As soon as we got back to Canvas Town we were visited by Miles Walsh. My mama took him into the shack, in which by now were hidden arms and ammunition of various sorts, also handbills and other documents related to the patriot cause. They talked in low voices while I stood guard in the cold rain outside. We made four such journeys and on those days when we were not traveling my mama sent Lizzie and me to the seaport to count the ships lying at anchor there. We were to remember the nature of the cargoes we saw being unloaded and listen to any conversation on which we could eavesdrop without arousing suspicion. Most important, we were to tell her if we saw redcoats being embarked for a voyage, and if so, how many. For what Washington most feared was a fleet sailing out of New York harbor and up the Hudson, so as to sever New England from the other colonies. Then like a cleft skull the country would be split into two parts and the war would be lost.