Ghost Town (2 page)

I ran home and told my mama about the painted officer with the hook nose and the feathers who rode like a lady and acted like a king. There were other women in the kitchen and they looked at one another, lifting their eyebrows and nodding. My mama was gutting a fish. She sniffed with contempt.

—Lord John Hyde, she said, wiping the slime from her hands. She sat down and stood me in front of her and put her hands on my shoulders. All at once this was serious.

—Did he speak to you, little one?

—No, mama.

—Good boy. Stay clear of him, do you understand me?

The other women murmured their agreement.

—Yes, mama.

As I turn her poor skull in my fingers now a strange heat rises within me, and I plant my lips briefly upon her cranium, which is yellowed, and beginning to reveal a fine network of tiny cracks. I set it back down upon the table and take up my pen once more. I am not known as a man of unswerving sobriety but I do not exaggerate when I say that what befell us next was a thousand times worse than anything that had thus far occurred.

Late one night barely a week after the occupation began, a fire started in a tavern on Whitehall Slip, set by an American incendiary, it was said, who was following Washington’s secret order that the enemy be denied winter quarters in New York. The identity of that incendiary has never been established. There have been rumors over the years, many of which point to an American sea captain named Miles Walsh who caused great trouble to the British on several occasions. I remember my mama coming into our bedroom in the middle of the night and telling us to get dressed for the town was ablaze.

Then I was outside buttoning my britches and staring at the sky over the Battery which was lit by a furious red glow. All was heat and smoke. People were shouting, dogs howling, figures running to and fro, and though the fire was still some way off I could hear buildings falling and the roaring of flames. We joined the crowd moving north on Broadway. The night was pierced by the screams of women, and windblown embers and scraps of burning cloth and paper floated about me in the darkness. I was bewildered and afraid and then I heard my mama cry out. When I turned I saw that Trinity was blazing like a fired ship, ghostly black ribs
of beam and rafter for a second visible within the flames before being engulfed once more.

Then with a great crash the roof fell in and moments later the steeple came down after it in a fountain of fire.

The blaze cut a swath from Whitehall up the west side to the grounds of King’s College, where it died for lack of fresh buildings to consume. No surprise that men wept and some were driven beyond weeping: for having first been turned into a fortified camp, then bombarded for days by cannon, then invaded by the British, the town now lay devastated by fire. If it
was
Miles Walsh who started it, then for all his revolutionary ardor he did no good to the people of New York that night. For in this wrecked and smoking place, in this
ruin
, there was no glory, no victory, only suffering.

I do not know where we slept that night. We made a sorry sight, I am sure, at dawn, the crowd tramping homeward but without homes to go to. It was into a wasteland that we returned. Where once stood houses and orchards there was now no more than a smoking tract of black earth with here and there fragments of chimneys and parts of
walls. Families knelt in prayer, others stood in silent shock or picked among the ashes attempting to recover what was left of their property. I saw bodies burned almost beyond recognition and they haunted my dreams for many months after.

Down Broadway we shuffled through this spectacle of desolation. Dan was silent, his expression one of anger and bewilderment while Lizzie was as distressed as I had ever seen her, careless even that her dress was trailing in the ashes. My mother showed only the thin grim line of mouth which I knew well, that way she had of clamping her out-thrust jaw so tight the sinew in her neck stood up, and her eyes ablaze as fierce as anything I saw the night before. Her hair was wild and she pushed it back unaware of what she was doing, and her face became blackened with soot.

Of Trinity Church all that remained were ruined walls. Smoking beams lay tumbled upon one another and in the churchyard the headstones were charred, many of them cracked and split or fallen over in pieces, leaving only a snagged fraction like the remnant of a rotted tooth. A part of our own chimney still stood, being made of brick, the stump of it but nothing
else. Nor were we the only ones. Almost every house west of Broadway was gone. We stood with the few pitiful possessions we had carried away in the night and stared at the burnt ground where our house had once been. I looked up at my mama and all at once her eyes filled with tears, though none spilled down her face. She shook her head, she could not speak. It was Lizzie who finally broke the silence.

—Where are we to go, mama?

And then our mama showed her mettle. Her shoulders heaved, she lifted a fist. She said again what she had said when Howe’s fleet dropped anchor in the Lower Bay. Many of our neighbors had packed up and gone but not us, oh no, we did not flee, my mother was having none of
that
! She had relations in Jersey but she had quarreled with them years before. She declared she would rather fight the British with her bare hands than go creeping to her people at the first sign of trouble.

—Where are we to go, she said. Where should we go, Lizzie? There is nowhere for us to go but here!

And it was then that we heard from somewhere behind us a bark of laughter. Above the slow-moving tide of homeless people streaming
down Broadway sat a lone, plumed horseman on a tall bay mare.

All that I have suffered this last fifty years has its beginning in what next occurred. The Englishman’s horse picked its way down past the ruins and into the scorched trees of the graveyard. Lord John Hyde sat swaying in the saddle, and I realized only later that he was drunk, having come, it may be, from some convivial gathering of his fellow officers after the excitement of the night before. My mama did not hesitate. She strode up through the headstones to where the horse pawed the earth among the blackened tree-trunks. I remember thinking how brave she was to be challenging this proud officer atop his huge animal, for he certainly terrified me. Trails of smoke and occasional spurts of flame arose from heaps of smoldering wood scattered about the graveyard, and horse and rider appeared to shimmer like a visitation from out of a romance. Our neighbors gathered about us, drawn by this plumed and swaying horseman come to inspect us in our loss and my mama standing there before him. His drawling voice carried clear in the damp heavy air of the morning.

—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.