Forever (29 page)
Those cart loads of old charnel ashes, scales and splints of mouldy bones,
Once living men—once resolute courage, aspiration, strength, The stepping stones to thee to-day and here, America.
—W
ALT
W
HITMAN
, “L
EAVES OF
G
RASS
,” 1891–92
T
hey waited in the dark with the ridge of forest at their backs and
Kip’s Bay before them. Cormac moved among them, his own face as black as theirs, skin stained with ink. He nodded at Bantu, who was stocky and muscled and cradling a smoothbore musket.
“Maybe they don’t come,” Bantu said, speaking English with an Ashanti accent.
“They’ll come,” Cormac said.
“Good,” Bantu said. “I kill them and be happy.”
They squatted together for a while, listening for sounds, staring at the dull waters of the East River. All around them in the cool September night there were other soldiers, thousands of them, it was said, being very still, not smoking, all waiting. But here they only cared for one another: the black patrol. Six of them including Cormac, who had recruited them in the months before the beginning of the war. Here beside him was Bantu. Over to the right were Silver and Aaron, lean and black as night, deadly with short swords and long-bore rifles. Below him on the slope, screened by dense shrubs, were Big Michael and Carlito. Cormac went from man to man, whispering the words that had brought them there, the most important of which was “freedom.”
“We have to smash them here,” he whispered to Carlito. “After Brooklyn, we have to hurt them, let them know they will pay a terrible price.”
“Donde están?” Carlito said in Spanish that had been driven into him like nails on the sugar plantations of Cuba. “Where are they?”
“Out there,” Cormac said. “Brooklyn.”
The disaster in Brooklyn haunted all of them. Cormac hadn’t fought in Brooklyn; he could not leave Manhattan, even for a cause greater than himself. So while the armies faced each other on the fields of Brooklyn, the black patrol had moved through the lower city, setting small fires as diversions, hoping to panic the English, to draw redcoats away from the field of battle. Their work did Washington no good. The battle of Brooklyn was, by all reports, a rout. Soldiers broke and ran. Fifteen hundred Americans were killed, blown apart by artillery, shredded by rifle fire and bayonets, and more than two thousand captured. The redcoats swept the field, and Washington led the survivors down to the river and into boats to fight again on another day in Manhattan.
“We will beat them here,” Carlito said. “Then we go back to Brooklyn.”
“First we must beat them here,
’mano.
”
Silver and Aaron dozed against the trunk of a giant oak tree, swords in hand, rifles on their laps. They smiled when they saw Cormac. All glanced at the river.
“They must be praying,” Silver said in Yoruba.
“Or toasting the King,” Cormac said.
Aaron smiled. “Foog the King.”
“And all his foogin’ court,” Silver said, and laughed.
Alone, alert to sounds in the forest and echoes from the river, Cormac closed his eyes and leaned back against a tree. They had been waiting now for two days for the force that Washington was certain would come to this cove along the river. He remembered the first time he saw Washington, bending under a lintel to enter a smoky room on Beaver Street, full of conspirators. He was even larger than Cormac had imagined from the descriptions of others; in every room he ever entered, Washington was the tallest man. Six-foot-four at least, with broad shoulders, the large ass of a horseman, huge hands, large booted feet. His skin was pockmarked. His cold blue eyes had an odd Oriental cast, the eyelids slanting upward. His nose was hawked, long, the taut skin rosy from the sun, the nostrils quivering as if trying to sniff out the person who would betray him, betray them all. While Cormac picked up that thought, asking himself: Which of them, in this room packed with men, was Mary Burton?
Now, remembering that first sight of Washington on the eve of the war, hearing again his laconic words about the coming struggle, the need for all of them to take arms and if necessary sacrifice their lives in order to be free, he wondered if Mary Burton was still alive. In those months in 1741, she had given her names to the inquisitors, adding new ones as she went along, and then had vanished. He had never heard from her again. She would now be fifty-one, ancient in these colonies of the young. Across the decades, as he had eased back into New York and returned to the print shop, he hoped he would find one morning a crudely written note from her, telling him she was alive, telling him about the child. He placed several blind advertisements in newspapers.
Mary, please write, C.
But immediately thought the effort was useless, since she could barely read and almost surely didn’t care about anyone in New York. There were no replies. She was gone. As Kongo was gone. As Quaco and his woman were gone.
And I am here, he thought, obeying the command to live by taking lives, killing strangers. He looked like the same seventeen-year-old who had learned the printing trade in a shop on Cortlandt Street. The same young man who had buried Mr. Partridge after the cholera took him in 1753, while he raved about the coming republic of America. The same young man who had sold the print shop to a competitor and gone to work at the John Street Theater to be instructed in the use of masks and dyes and the postures of disguise. In the mirror he was that same young man. The one who last saw Kongo in a cave in Inwood, and learned across the years that the words he spoke to Cormac there were true. He was alive and young while everyone else his age was old or dead.
“They come,” Bantu said.
They arrived at dawn in eighty-four six-oared longboats, each carrying a dozen men. The English wore red and the Hessians wore blue. The guns of the frigates roared. All around them, the earth exploded with fire and metal. Cormac heard a young voice screaming in the dark:
“Oh, Ma, oh, Ma, help me, Ma.”
The black patrol waited, saving ball and shot. They could hear scrambling in the woods behind them, men panting. A bony farm boy came up from the river’s edge, his gun as useless as a reed, yelling,
“Run, run, there’s thousands of them.”
Bantu shot him and picked up his rifle.
The naval barrage was ferocious. Cormac didn’t need to tell the black patrol to lie flat, to use tree trunks as shields. Now trees were falling, splintered by cannon shot, and more young men were running past them in the dark.
“Don’t shoot them!” Cormac shouted. “Let them assemble in the rear!”
Now they saw four Hessians lumbering up the hill from the river’s edge. They waited. Then killed them all. Cormac felt nothing. They come to kill us, he thought, and so we kill them.
As the sun struggled to rise in Brooklyn, they could see Kip’s Bay more clearly, and the steady movement of empty longboats returning for more soldiers and packed longboats rowing toward the shore. To the left, Cormac glimpsed a long blur of scarlet. He gestured to Bantu, pointing to the rear, then went down and told the others. Big Michael didn’t want to retreat.
“I come to kill these bastards,” he said. “Let me kill them.”
“We will,” Cormac said. “Come.”
“Where we go, man?”
“The rock pile.”
They eased around in the darkness in a single file, glancing behind them at the blue-and-scarlet lines. The cannon kept exploding the earth and felling trees, and new troops of the Crown chose to pause until the fierce barrage had ended. The six men of the black patrol found their way to a cluster of jagged boulders at the crest of a hill. Now they could see the Americans in flight: farm boys and city lads, brave while marching, panicky in the face of cannon and bayonets. It was one thing to wave
Common Sense
on the streets or join the mob that toppled the statue of George III in the Bowling Green; it was another thing to face English guns. The young Americans dropped their ancient flintlocks and old fowling guns, their dragoon pistols and close-bore rifles. They abandoned a few pieces of cannon. They left tents for the invaders. They were in full flight.
“Don’t show yourselves!” Cormac told the others. “And don’t shoot our own lads. Hold as long as you can.”
They knew that the six of them would have to cover the retreat of thousands. Cormac thought: It’s absurd. The amateurs are running, and the professionals are coming. But we have to stop them, for at least an hour. And so they waited, huddled down, peering at the assembled scarlet-and-blue masses below them. Off to the left, smoke had begun to rise from a fire on the forest floor. Cormac thought: Good. That will give us some cover, a dark screen.
Then two columns began climbing the slope, about twenty yards apart.
“Wait,” Cormac said.
The climbing men were heavy with packs and rifles.
“Wait,” Cormac said.
A lanky Hessian paused, looked behind him, then squinted at the drifting smoke. He took a deep breath, said something to the men behind him, and resumed the climb.
“Wait,” Cormac whispered.
A fat, sweaty Englishman led his column into their view on the right. He mopped his brow with the sleeve of his free hand. In the other hand he held a rifle.
“Now,” Cormac said.
The air exploded as they poured fire on the troops below. Men fell like broken dolls, face forward or whipped to the side. A few knelt to fire and were knocked over. Cormac aimed at one Englishman but then saw his face explode from a shot by Big Michael.
“Gone down,” Big Michael exulted, starting to rise. “He gone down.”
Then Big Michael was dead. A ball tore open his chest, and he sagged and went down with one leg twisted under him. The black patrol kept firing, and saw the blue and scarlet uniforms turning to find cover. Cormac saw a beplumed officer and shot him between the shoulder blades. Then he turned to the others.
“Toward the smoke,” Cormac said.
They fired another volley and then ran, one at a time, squatting low, spaced apart, toward the screen of smoke, leaving Big Michael where he’d fallen. Bullets and balls whizzed around them and pinged off stone. Then they were in the smoke.
So were hundreds of the retreating Americans, coughing, gasping, climbing, falling, desperate to reach the crest of the hill and the plain beyond, all of them beaten without firing a shot. Cormac and Bantu, Silver and Aaron and Carlito aligned themselves in a picket, ten feet apart, and raised hands to break up the panic.
“Stop running!” Cormac shouted. “Stop or we’ll shoot you for desertion!”
One brawny blond-haired man lowered his rifle to shoot his way out. Carlito killed him.
“Hold this ground,” Cormac yelled at the deserters. “Face them and fight them!”
They ignored him and ran to the side or plunged back down the slope, hands in the air, to surrender. He heard shots crackling below and knew the Crown forces were killing those who wanted to surrender.
And then through the smoke and noise, they saw Washington. He was high on a sorrel horse, waving a sword in his right hand, his eyes ablaze, his mouth a tight slash.
“Are you soldiers or mice?” he shouted. “What do you call yourselves?”
He swung the sword at one fleeing man and missed, and then glanced at Cormac and the blacks and then peered down the slope at the advancing blue and red uniforms. He paused, and then started forward. Into the guns. It was as if he wanted to be shot down to end his shame.
Cormac grabbed the reins of Washington’s horse and wrenched with all his strength and turned the horse.
“Stop, you stupid bastard!” Cormac screamed.
“Unhand this horse!”
“We need you alive, God damn you,” Cormac said, and hauled the horse around and pointed him west. Bantu ran up and slapped the horse hard on the haunch, and away he went, carrying the general through the trees.
Silver and Aaron and Carlito stood laughing, bumping one another’s shoulders. Then they turned, backing up, and killed more men.
I
n the vast camp in Harlem Heights, Cormac was escorted to Wash
ington’s tent. Almost five thousand men were sprawled around the camp, cleaning guns under a dim moon, soothing horses, eating at campfires. A few were singing. Many were sleeping. Two lieutenants flanked Cormac as if he were a prisoner.
The general was seated in a camp chair, examining his gleaming fingernails. An empty chair faced him. His cocked hat was on a table, with gloves folded neatly on its crest, and the buttonholes of his frock coat were embroidered. The man took care about the way he dressed. Too much care, Cormac thought. Behind Washington was the famous six-and-a-half-foot-long cot that was carried with him everywhere. A coal fire burned in a stove. Maps were spread on a table, along with a few plates and a bottle of wine. He didn’t look up.
“You can leave, gentlemen,” he said to the officers. They stepped outside.
Washington turned over his large hands and looked at his knuckles.
“You’re the man who jerked my horse?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know that I’m the commanding officer of this army?” “Yes, sir.”
Washington stood up as if stabbed, the hands turning into fists, the eyes blazing.
“Why did you
do
such a goddamned thing?”
“To keep you from being killed, sir.”
“That’s for
me
to decide, God damn it. And how could you be sure I would die? How could you be sure that they would not run?”
“You’re one man, General. One ball could kill you. One of my men—”
“They can’t kill me!”
“They can kill anyone they can shoot, General.”
Washington snorted. He turned, flexing his hands, rolling his shoulders. He was breathing hard, struggling for control.
“What’s your name?”
“Cormac O’Connor.”
“Irish, of course.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Catholic?”
“No.”
He paused, breathing more normally now.
“How many men did you kill today?”
“Our patrol killed about thirty.”
“Your patrol? What patrol?”
“The black patrol, sir. There’s me and five blacks. One of them was killed today. We’d like to go in tomorrow, sir, and bring out his body.”
Now he was staring at Cormac.
“Are they all slaves?”
“They were, sir. They’re soldiers now. American soldiers.” “Have they been fed?”
“Yes, sir. They’re looking for ammunition now. They used all they had.”
“And they’re good soldiers?”
“You saw them. They didn’t run.”
He sat down again in his camp chair and offered the empty chair to Cormac.
“Why did they fight while so many ran?”
“They want to be free, General. That’s why they’re with us. That’s why they listened to me when I recruited them. That’s why they won’t disappear when times get hard. They want to be free, sir. Free.”
Washington looked at him for a long moment and there was something moving in his eyes that Cormac couldn’t identify.
“Would you like a glass of wine?” Washington said.
The cannon screamed through the night, exploding around them, scattering soldiers, collapsing tents. Cormac knew what was happening: The English and their hired Hessian soldiers wanted to smash the Americans here in Harlem Heights, splinter and ruin their five thousand troops, capture or kill Washington. If they could do that, the revolution would be over. They could all sing songs, get drunk, sleep with whores, and get ready to go home.
Washington that night would not let them do any of that. He was everywhere, sword in hand, his face filled with furies, shouting, commanding, calling on pride. “Your children will remember you for this night! Don’t fail them!” And, “Die on your knees, you crazy American bastards!” And, “Send them all to Hell, boys!”
And they held. They held the lines, Cormac and Bantu, Aaron and Silver and Carlito among them, pouring fire into the moving lines in the dense wooded hollow below the heights. Still the cannon roared, the balls tore through young bodies. An old man rose in fury, his white hair spiky against the dark sky, and cried: “Come and fight, you feckers! Come and die!” And then was smashed by a cannonball, knocked over into death like a bowling pin.
Cormac looked up and there was Washington on his horse, right above them.
“Their cannon are killing us!” he shouted. “Get your niggers and destroy the cannon.”
Cormac thought: They are not niggers, they’re Americans.
But Washington was gone, and there was no time for debate. Cormac and the black patrol slipped down the western side of the ridge, seeing the distant shimmer of the river, trying to estimate the location of the cannon from the arc of the balls. Then they saw the first scouts of an English flank, coming up the west side of the forest on a dirt road. Bantu gestured at a stone Dutch barn, its doors open, its animals gone. From its weed-sprouting walls, the path was a pale line under the moon. They hurried to the barn, spread themselves from the loft to the doors, waited, and then started killing soldiers. They shot the first two men who came up the rise, then the next three, then two more, all of them falling upon one another, forming a mound. All were redcoats. All kept coming as if they were toys, and the Americans kept firing and reloading and firing again, hands moving in a blur, fingers squeezing triggers. Redcoats fell to the forest floor.
Then the first cannonball tore through the roof of the barn, caroming wildly off the flagstone floor, and then another, and Cormac and the others slipped out the back and into the woods between the road and the river. Cormac thought: I killed the earl somewhere up here. Long ago. In another life.
They made a wide arc, moving the way wolves would move, drawn to the sound of the cannon. The moon did not penetrate the forest. Cormac strapped his rifle to his shoulder and drew the sword. So did the others. They did not need to explain to one another that here in the darkness they would fight silently. They came upon two Hessians, who turned in fear at the sight of four black faces. Too late. Bantu and Silver cut their throats.
Then they saw the clearing. Five cannon on wheels, a dozen redcoats loading balls, pouring powder. Cormac and the others hunkered low in the shrubs. They spread out, each charged with attacking the crew of one piece. Bantu was to shoot as many as possible while the others pounced with sword and knife. They watched as all five cannon were fired at once, the crews jamming fingers in their ears, some of them grinning. Then the Americans charged. Bantu had two rifles now, one lifted from a dead soldier, and he fired one, then the other, rolled on the ground to reload, and fired twice more. Three redcoats went down. Others turned in horror, reaching for rifles as their throats were slit. Cormac beheaded two men, then chopped another man’s arm at the shoulder.
They became a single creature made for killing. There was nothing else now. Just the killing. No fear, no choice, no thought. They stabbed and slashed and ripped. They chopped at necks. They drove swords through hearts. Few words were spoken as men grunted, or gagged on blood, or groaned, and then died.
Then it was over.
Cormac sat down hard on the thick leafy floor of the clearing. His hands were slippery with blood. It coated his sword and his clothes and his boots. He looked at the others. Silver leaned on a cannon, Bantu lay back against a tree. Aaron seemed dazed and drained, standing with short sword in hand, while Carlito draped a hand on his shoulders. All glistened with blood. They didn’t even look at the men they had slaughtered.
“We should take the heads,” Bantu said.
“Yah,” said Aaron.
Take the heads, Cormac told himself. The way the Irish always took the heads, the way the Fianna took the heads. Sever them. Hang them on poles. No. Don’t take the heads. Please don’t take the heads.
“They weigh too foogin’ much,” Silver said.
They laughed, and then went silent.
Now they could hear the trees riffling and sighing in the wind, and away off the crackle of rifle fire. A lot of rifle fire. But they still didn’t move. The air was thick with the odor of powder, of burning trees and smoldering leaves, of ripped-out guts, of leaking shit.
Finally Bantu stirred. Suddenly alert. He gripped his short sword, and turned to peer behind him into the darkness. The others tensed. He went on hands and knees, and then moved into some shrubbery. He came out grinning, holding a wolf cub.
“Yah!” he said. “Look.”
The cub was small and gray with a white face and yellow eyes. Bantu held it close, cradling it, and the animal began licking blood from his neck and face. Bantu smiled.
“American!” he said. “American!”
Each of them came to touch the cub, playing knobby fists against its small sharp teeth, stroking its fine new hair. Cormac felt a surge of emotion, as if he were again the boy on the fields of Ireland, with Bran barking beside him. They kept saying in the city that all the wolves were dead, and here was one of them, alive, separated, like every member of the black patrol, from the pack.
And then, as time stretched and compressed, an hour later or three minutes later, they heard another sound: a distant roar. They stood still, listening, hands clenching weapons. The roar was louder, coming to them through the trees and across boulders and above the bodies of the dead. Louder and louder. Louder than any sound he’d ever heard, punctuated by rifle shots.
It was the Americans.
A dozen of them, dressed in the uniforms of the Continental Army, bursting among them, seeing the dead redcoats and the four men with black faces. One shouted: “We’ve broken their lines! They’re running!”
And rushed past them, raising weapons, leaping into forest, crashing forward, shooting. Cormac realized that they were in the midst of the first victory of the Revolution.
But still the black patrol did not move. The wolf cub made a crying sound. Somewhere in the woods were other cubs, a mother, perhaps all of them dead, killed by fearful men.
“We go now,” Aaron said. “We fetch Big Michael.”
They moved toward Kip’s Bay through the morning. Along the way, they saw scattered corpses in Hessian blue or English scarlet, providing a harvest for flies and worms. At a small river, they entered the cold waters and scrubbed at the blood on their bodies and clothes, Bantu holding the cub over his head, its jaws now shut by gold braid torn from an English corpse.
A hard gray rain began falling. When they came to an abandoned farmhouse, they entered and bolted the doors behind them. The farmers must have been gone for only a few days, fleeing the war. Carlito started a fire in the hearth and they boiled potatoes and carrots and fried strips of bacon and slathered butter on hard bread. “Better it does not spoil,” Silver said, and smiled, his mouth full of wobbly wooden teeth. “Better we eat.” There were apples too, and grapes, and they ate quietly, peering out at the falling rain and the rolling forests. Bantu fed bread and bacon to the cub and put water in a dish for him to drink. With his back to a wall, staring at the fire, Cormac remembered his hunger in the arctic winter in Ireland, devouring cheese in a dairy, more hungry than he’d ever been before or since. He told the others to sleep while he stood the first watch. They would go for Big Michael in the dark.
They slept, the wolf cub curled into Bantu’s armpit, and Cormac surveyed the house. It was more than a house, he thought: It was a home. He and the others were sleeping within its walls, but it was not their home. Men like us, he thought, have no homes.
He entered the next room, where there were two hard, narrow beds covered with quilts. The closets held women’s clothes. Shifts and dresses for a large woman, broad-beamed, large-bosomed. The others were for a smaller, thinner woman. Mother and daughter, perhaps. Or sisters. Mother and cub.
The clothes and bodies and faces of women flooded through him as he moved on bare feet around the room and then back into the place where the men were sleeping. It was thirty-five years since he’d seen Bridget Riley sail out of New York, thirty-five years since he’d last looked upon the hard, confused face of Mary Burton. There had been many women since then. Which was to say, he’d had no women.
He knew enough about himself now to understand his habits of holding back, of refusing. He had read much poetry and a few novels, and had listened to many women, to their questions, to their tears. He knew that the combination of Bridget Riley and Mary Burton had put fear in his heart in the place where love demanded fearlessness. He knew that not all women were like those women of 1741, that no woman was exactly like any other woman. But their presence remained alive, full of the potential for betrayal, for illusion, for inexplicable loyalties. Bridget was loyal to the earl; Mary had been, in her way, loyal to Cormac. How could he think all women were alike?
And more important, there was this other thing, this gift granted to him in a cave in Inwood. There was no way, at first, to know if this was a dream, a wish born in his own brain. He could only know its truth by living. Now he knew it was true. He had continued to live while others died, he had remained young, in all obvious ways, while others withered and turned gray and walked Broadway in feeble, palsied steps. That affected him with women. How could he remain with one woman who would gaze at him and then gaze in the mirror? She would know he was different. She would know that he was beyond the normal cycles of a life.
Better to let each woman know that he was a passing fancy, that they could enjoy the pleasures of each other’s body, but that each could be alone in the morning. Many women welcomed such an understanding. Widows, the wives of seagoing men, women locked in loveless unions, older women whose children had gone off. They welcomed the excitement of aroused flesh. They welcomed whispered words. They welcomed the gift of a rose or a locket. As years passed, more of them thought he was a handsome young man, when he was actually older than any of them. All were excellent teachers, and he thought of some of them as if they were books he had taken down from shelves.