Ghost Town

by Patrick Mcgrath

  With her arms around our shoulders, her throat bare and strands of hair falling loose, my mama stepped into the clear bright morning. Drawn up in the middle of the yard, at attention, with shouldered arms, stood the execution squad, also a boy with a drum. For a moment my mama surveyed the scene as though she was in command of it. Then Lord Hyde stepped forward. He was powdered and painted. We all then followed the execution squad, watched from every window and doorway. Only once did my mama’s composure fail her, when the stillness of the morning was broken by the crack of a musket over by the shore. She startled as though the ball had entered her own flesh.

  The gibbet stood outlined against a chill blue sky. A noosed rope hung from its crossbeam. Beneath it was drawn up a flatbed wagon with a pair of horses harnessed to it. A squad of redcoats stood to attention in the roadway close by and a small crowd of Americans was gathered a little distance away. The drummer began a slow, muffled roll. A chaplain fell in step beside us and murmured a few words but my mama shook her head and kept her eyes on the road ahead. Lord Hyde moved at a slow, dignified step at the head of the procession and the captain brought up the rear.

  When we reached the gibbet the soldiers fell in with the squad already in place there and the rolling drumbeat ceased. The watching Americans were silent. Standing close to the gibbet Lord Hyde slipped off his coat and handed it to the chaplain. In the cold of the morning he stood there, a stout Englishman in a white shirt with lace at the cuffs, an embroidered waistcoat of gold silk and a gleaming white stock with a diamond pin. His wig was powdered as white as his skin, in sharp contrast to his rouged cheeks and scarlet lips.

  The captain stepped forward and touched Lizzie on the arm. All at once we realized that we must come away and our mama go forward alone. We embraced her, and the silence was at last broken as from within the crowd of Americans there came a cry of grief which seemed all at once to animate what had become a frozen tableau: the ranked soldiers, Lord Hyde beneath the gibbet, the condemned woman and the watching crowd, and Lizzie now weeping into the chest of the captain while Dan stood by with clenched fists pressed to his bowed head.

  Lord Hyde stepped swiftly up on to the wagon and barked at my mama to follow. Only then did it become apparent to all those present that his lordship intended to hang her himself. A murmur of anger was heard and the soldiers stiffened. My mama quickly mounted the wagon, holding her skirts up as she did so. She stood beneath the noose with her head erect and her chin thrust out, her eyes dry and her mouth turned down in an expression of fierce disgust. Her hands were tied behind her back. She refused the blindfold.

  She did however wish to speak. The crowd pressed forward. For several minutes all stood in rapt silence. She spoke in a clear voice, her breath turning smoky in the cold of the winter morning, and it was remarkable to me that with Death so close she was unafraid, indeed she seemed at peace, and not because she craved release from a life grown wretched, for she did not. She stood quite still as she spoke and there was no sweeping of the arms, no raising of the clenched fist, for her wrists were tied behind her back. Simply the lifted chin and the shining eyes and the words being flung out, so it felt, for nourishment to the Americans present and as poison dashed in the face of the enemy.

  —I am not sorry for what I have done! she shouted.

  The silence briefly broken by a few ragged cries of assent.

  —I am not sorry that I have tried to help my country drive these monsters from our shores!

  She gazed out across the wintry scene. We did not move, we made no sound. Her eyes closed for a second. All at once I remembered our house by Trinity Church, and what had become of that place. I believe she was thinking of it too.

  —Once, she cried, we lived here in peace, until England became greedy for what was ours! Now I have no wish for peace, I wish for war! There must be war if my children are to have peace! My children—

  A pause here. With her hands tied behind her back and her head thrust forward she seemed to be pleading with us to acknowledge her sincerity in these the last moments of her life. At last the tears came spilling down her cheeks, and she could not wipe them away. I flung a quick fearful glance at Lizzie, who held her head high, eyes wide and unblinking, her lips parted. I was suddenly afraid the soldiers would seize us, and carry us up onto that wagon, and hang us with our mama. Perhaps she thought the same, for she spoke no more of her children.

  —I hate all kings! she shouted. And if by my death—

  Now came cries of “Shame!”. A rock was hurled from the back of the crowd and struck a redcoat on the shoulder. With a hissed command Lord Hyde held the soldiers in their ranks. It seemed he wanted my mama to empty her heart before he stopped it forever.

  —If by my death I help my country then it is not in vain that I am hanged here today!

  Then all at once her head sank down and her hair drifted about her face. Hushed silence. No one spoke, no one moved. She seemed to have gone someplace else, somewhere inside herself, perhaps to touch some lodestone of her faith. Then up came her head again, a fierce light now burning in her damp eyes. Once more she refused contrition, she refused to accept any guilt, refused to admit her wrong. In ringing tones she repeated her former declaration.

  —I am not sorry for what I have done!

  I later heard it said that her words that day gave inspiration to many in the cause, not least Washington’s ragged army. When she was finished there was more cheering and then Lord Hyde placed the noose about her neck. He tightened the knot. He lingered over the task. Still she stood bravely, and still I could not believe that this was the end. Lord Hyde stepped smartly down off the wagon, which shuddered a little. He went forward to take the horses’ reins. He nodded at the captain, who drew his sword and lifted it high.

  There was nothing in the universe then but a woman standing on a wagon beneath a gibbet, a rope around her neck, her head uplifted in the wind, a faint smile upon her lips—she was looking at us, at me!—until down came the captain’s sword—Lord Hyde put the whip to the horses—the wagon lurched forward—

  The black vomit will soon begin its awful depredations and when it does my life is measured in hours. The clock ticks on my mantel and the tapping has resumed, but nobody is at the door and I do not trouble to cross the room. I must finish. I have told how I was with her when my mama went to the gibbet and how Lord Hyde conducted the hanging himself—it seems a particular predilection of that noble gentleman to play the hangman. A coffin lay in the back of a wagon and it was in an atmosphere of the bleakest desolation when the crowd had dispersed and the soldiers, all but two, had marched back to the house, that the body of my mama was lifted into it and the lid nailed down. Even now, I can hear their hammers in the stillness of that day! Tap-tap-TAP, tap-tap-TAP!

  I stared at the coffin for many minutes. The rough pine box lay so heavy, so unmoving beneath the clear sky that it made no sense to think of her there. I had not seen her die. I could not watch when the wagon rolled forward; I had turned my back and closed my eyes and put my fingers in my ears and so I had remained until Lizzie touched my shoulder and said it was over. I stared at the coffin and the sight of it was like an acid in my brain, and it burned so deep that though I forget it in the day, by night I see it again, and again I hear her tapping inside it and know it is beyond me to save her.

  I have had a lifetime in which to weigh in the scales of my own conscience the extent of my guilt. It is true that I was only a young boy when I aroused suspicion at the Hudson pier, and my youth goes some way to excusing me. Such is the case for the defense as it might be put before a court of law or a moral tribunal, although the only such body which I recognize, being a godless man, is that which convenes in the dark constricted place to which I have referred before, I mean my soul. And in my own soul’s tribunal I am guilty as charged, and deserving of the capital punishment which will soon surely be carried out. And that, you might think, is all there is to it.

  It is not. The events of that day and of th
e day that preceded it left me a haunted man. I suppose it is possible to regard such disorder of the mind as evidence of madness but that would be a mistake. I do not believe I was mad, though I was forced into the kind of existence which the mad know; I mean that my guilt set me apart from others. And it was in that state of wretched solitude that I encountered my mama’s ghost, and not once, no, repeatedly.

  I felt no fear, no horror. Her absence was far more terrible to me than her ghost. It was her absence that did for me! I do not know now how I survived without her and Lizzie was no kind of help or support, being herself broken in spirit after seeing her mama hanged. It was dusk the first time. She stood gazing at the Brooklyn shore where the prison hulk Jersey rocked and stank in Wallabout Bay. Somewhere a distant dog was barking. I had seen something from the dock, a human form, a woman standing at the end of the pier, and with a sudden surge of joy I recognized her. Cautiously I advanced along the pier and stood at a little distance from her, careful not to disturb the silence or the twilight or the damp splintered planks beneath my feet. Her hair was lank and her eyes were dead. Her skin had the consistency of lard. She smelled bad. She paid no attention to me but it was enough to be near her. I looked out at the British warships anchored in the bay, their masts thin lines of graphite in the smudged sketch of the evening. They had not burned as Washington had hoped and plotted that they would, I believe because Miles Walsh and my mama and the rest were betrayed. Certainly I never saw Miles Walsh again and can only surmise, from the shrouded fragments which have come down to me in the form of his legend, that he too went to the gibbet, late one night on Barrack Street, or that he died in the Provost or aboard the Jersey or any one of the fatal prisons of New York at that time.

  I remember that when I returned to Canvas Town and told Lizzie I had seen her she did not properly understand me. She took me to mean that our mama’s death had caused me such profound distress that I was unable to thrust her memory from me. But I did not mean that. All that was true but there was something more.

  —What more?

  She gazed at me with dull eyes red from weeping. Lizzie as I say lost something of her spirit the day my mother was hanged, she ceased to be young. I never again heard her laugh. She never married. And although she lived into the new century she sank into illness during the Madison administration and at the end I believe she was glad to be leaving us, indeed she spoke of joining our parents very soon. She said there was a better place than America and she hoped to reach it. Those were her last words.

  —A nightmare, no more than that, she said.

  —No, I said. In the light of day.

  —Your imagination!

  —It does not matter. I have seen her.

  She said later she would never forget the chill sensation she felt at those words of mine. Many times that summer and fall she came into the town with me. She did not believe me but her need was greater than her doubt. We would go at twilight. I was alert to all movement in the gloom, each footfall in the empty streets, each flickering shape in the glow of a campfire in the places made desolate by war.

  —There! Do you see her?

  I would seize her sleeve and sink to my knees to stare with trembling, outstretched finger at some shadow, some nothing moving about by the river or down an alley in the quiet parts of the town. She would look where I directed her but saw only rats. Then I would go swiftly forward to pursue whatever it was and she followed me but there was never anything there, not when Lizzie was with me. What was it that I wanted from my dead mama? I do not exaggerate when I say that this question has consumed me down all the wasted years of my life and I believe now that at last I have the answer. I believe that Death, who is very close to me, for we have an appointment a few hours hence—and is that not Death at my door even now?—Death whispered the answer to me while I slept this afternoon. I pursued my dead mama not because I wanted to release her from her coffin, but because I wanted to be in her coffin with her.

  There is little left to tell. Half a century has passed since the Year of the Gibbet, and the war has been transformed in the minds of my countrymen such that it now resembles nothing so much as the glorious enterprise of a small host of heroes and martyrs sustained by the idea of Liberty and bound for that reason to prevail in the end.

  But I am haunted. I have lived out my days as a working hack, a lonely little man to be found with his pipe and bottle in the back parts of the Rising Sun or some such establishment over by the East River docks. I have never been free of my mama. She has shown herself to me on the shores of Manhattan Island in the hour before the dawn, it may be, or at dusk, when the light begins to go. These times, the border times, the middling uncertain hours when it is neither day nor night, it was at these times that I would come upon her as she stood on some abandoned wharf and I always knew that one day she would come for me. And this, now, is the time. She is here.

  She stands in my doorway with her empty eyes, her soiled clothing open at the seams and her teeth loose in her skull. The noisome odor of the grave is strong upon her. She lifts her pulpy, rotten fingers, and in the street below I hear the death-cart rumble over the cobblestones and come to a halt outside the house. In the back of that death-cart her coffin awaits us and now, at last, as I take my mama’s hand, and we move together to the staircase, I know that the contagion is truly upon me.

  It is no more than I deserve.

  Julius

  Noah van Horn was a ruddy, raw-boned man with a will of iron, and nobody ever got the better of him in argument except perhaps his daughter Charlotte. To judge from his portrait, which first hung over the mantel in his townhouse on Barclay Street, he must have been a quite alarming character in the flesh. Bullish, loud, domineering, impatient—possessed of an ungovernable temper—it is all there in the face, and I say this because the picture is now in my possession and I spend far too much time in front of it. For with his grizzled whiskers and wild black eyes he looks more like an Old Testament prophet than a merchant who spent his days on the South Street wharves—he seems literally about to burst from the canvas and lay about the viewer with a stick!

  He built the foundations of his fortune in the Atlantic trade, running raw cotton out of Savannah, Georgia, carrying it to London then working his way down the eastern seaboard, turning a profit in every port—this would be the early 1800s and him barely twenty years old. In the decades that followed his wealth rapidly accumulated as he ploughed his profits into shipbuilding, real estate, construction and the like. He may not have been one of the old-money elite, and he was certainly not as devoted as some to the Presbyterian virtues thought conducive to a useful, godly life—sobriety and frugality, to name two—but he had a powerful commitment to aggressive enterprise and the getting of money. In 1832 he married a girl called Ann Griswold who was more than twenty years his junior and the daughter of a Yankee merchant with whom he did business. Over the next years she bore him three daughters, Charlotte being the eldest.

  In his domestic life Noah now found some measure of tranquility. He gave up what he thought of as the manly pleasure of drinking brandy with his fellows in the hotels of lower Broadway, and cultivated an interest in the history of ancient civilizations, accumulating a library of some two thousand volumes. In business he continued to prosper, and with him the city. Often he spoke of the day when New York would surpass even London as the greatest port and marketplace in the world, and he said it with the confidence of a man who could expect to pocket a large share of the profits when that day came. But what he did not possess, and for this he would have paid any price at all, was a son.

  After the birth of Charlotte, Noah decided to move his young family to a more salubrious location, the business quarter of Manhattan having become increasingly susceptible to the diseases which according to him came in through the port with the Irish and found fertile breeding grounds in the narrow filthy streets and fetid courtyards where they lived. He secured a plot in Waverley Place and set an architect to designing him a
house in the Greek manner, all fluted columns, heavy cornices, and triangular pediments—an ugly building which to my eye looked more like a mausoleum than a house. The work was completed in the winter of 1835 and the family moved in. A week later one of the worst disasters ever to befall the city occurred. A fire in a Pearl Street warehouse spread through the downtown business area and in two days destroyed nearly seven hundred buildings, along with tens of millions of dollarsworth of merchandise. Among the private houses burnt to the ground was the recently vacated van Horn residence on Barclay Street. Noah gave thanks. He considered himself blessed.

  It was in the house on Waverley Place that Ann van Horn gave birth to the last of her children, and to his great relief Noah finally had a boy. He was christened Julius.

  It was a prosperous, established family into which the child was born, but his way would not be easy. When he was an infant his mother died, exhausted by this last delivery; and despite the attention of his sisters, Charlotte in particular, from then on Julius’ upbringing lacked the maternal influence which might have tempered his father’s unbending severity. For Noah was devastated by the loss of his wife, and in his grief he imposed impossibly high standards on his son. In later life Julius’ sisters spoke often of how Noah would beat the little boy for the smallest infractions of the rules of the household. They heard his cries from behind the door of their father’s library, and suffered for him, and hated their father. But curiously Julius never seemed to grow bitter at this treatment, for as soon as his tears were dry he would come back as cheerful as before and ask his dear papa if there was anything he might do to be of service to him; and even Noah van Horn, that grim, turbulent man, could not help but be moved by the happy innocence of this gentle child of his.

  Noah’s intention had always been to educate Julius to take over the House of van Horn when the time came. But he realized before the boy was ten years old that he possessed no sort of a head for business, although what he did possess a head for was not at all clear. In his disappointment he became for a while still more brutal to the child, to the point that Julius emerged weeping from his father’s library on one occasion with blood running down his legs, and his daughters could tolerate it no longer. They went in a body, led by Charlotte, and with no little trepidation, to beg their father to desist.