Pete Hamill - Forever

In the bright, sultry haze of the main deck, Kongo and the three others looked even angrier than they did in their dark cage on the bottom deck. The crew gazed silently at the Africans as they stretched their bony bodies for the first time in many weeks. But the white men didn’t come forward to join the ceremony. Cormac seethed with a mixture of rage and a jumbled emotion he could not name. Thinking: Tomora, you are so beautiful. Thinking: And now you’ll be dropped into the sea far from home on a voyage that you did not want to take. Thinking: A voyage forced upon you by men with swords or guns or whips or branding irons. Thinking: By men like the Earl of Warren. From a world that allowed one group of human beings to own another group of human beings.

When Kongo bent with the other Africans to lift the lumpy shroud, Cormac stepped forward and took a corner. Kongo threw him a suspicious look but didn’t shove him away. Together, four Africans and an Irishman, they carried Tomora’s shrouded body to the plank. They laid her flat. Her shrouded feet faced the immobile sea.

The captain, holding his Bible, uttered words in English, the same words they had heard uttered over other bodies, and then nodded to Kongo. The African began speaking in his click-clock ing language. Short bursts of words that snapped like whips. The other Africans bowed their heads. Kongo’s deep voice was grave and strong. He finished and nodded at the captain.

Finally the lumpy shroud was slipped over the side. They all stared at the motionless sea that had now swallowed Tomora, the princess from Africa. A full minute went by in silence. And then, a hundred yards away, something small and black burst from the sea. A bird. Fluttering its wings. And then rising into the sky, making a turn, and heading finally toward the west. A raven.

They all seemed to exhale at once.

A breeze stirred.

A sail flapped lazily. And then another. And then one sail made a sharp, cracking, explosive sound.

The captain spun on the deck, shouting orders, exuberant, released, alive, and the men began climbing into the rigging. The captain peered through his spyglass at the point where last he had seen the raven. They were under way. To America.

They smelled the land before they saw it. A rich, dark odor of sweet earth, coming at them through a misty rain. Then seabirds appeared, crying and screeing. Cormac was on deck, his hair and beard trimmed, his new brown suit and long blue coat fashioned by Mr. Partridge, who had refused his money. He had a new sling for the sword too, strapped down his back, clipped across his chest, the weapon in a flat leather sheath. When he donned the long coat, the sword could not be seen by any police inspectors who might peer in suspicion at the bearded face of someone named Martin O’Donovan. Even Mr. Partridge, with his high standards of craft, admired the handiwork of the crew member who had fashioned the sling, a dour saddle maker from Mayo. Mr. Partridge was now a smaller version of himself. Almost thirty pounds had melted away in the cauldron of his fever. Now his flesh hung off him as loosely as his clothes (which he insisted must wait to be tailored after a few weeks in New York). Under his smart beaver hat, his eyes were clear and bright with anticipation.

“Almost there, lad,” he said, inhaling deeply.

Then a dark line spread across the horizon, and there was a huge cheer and waving of hats. Haggard Irish faces peered up through open hatches, still barred from the deck by Mr. Clark. “Stay below!” he bellowed. “Stay below, you lot! Yiz’ll get kilt up here.” Mr. Partridge explained that because of tides and currents and prevailing winds they had come around in a wide arc to their destination. The land on the right was the Long Island. Dutch farmers were scattered over much of it, he said, along with their slaves. But all were intelligently huddled far from the sea with its summer hurricanes and fierce winter winds. All Cormac saw were long strands of beach, white in the rain, and thick forests so dark they seemed black. And then up ahead, rising from the sea, there was a small mountain. Like the small meshed mountain he had seen in the Irish fog on the day, long ago, when they had set out upon the ocean. The island where Mary Morrigan had waved good-bye.

“Staten Island,” Mr. Partridge said. “It’ll be to port as we turn into the Narrows.”

For a long moment, he was quiet on the bustling deck.

“Now remember all I told you, lad,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“We have much to do together.”

“We do.”

He had given Cormac the address on Stone Street of a place called Hughson’s, where he might rent a room while Mr. Partridge looked for a place for his print shop. He himself would be staying at the Black Horse Tavern. Run by friends. Booked long ago. Cormac should call on him once a day, that was the plan, and Mr. Partridge would tell him of his progress. He had given Cormac a crudely printed map of the town, along with a litany of dire warnings. Don’t let anyone carry your bag, or you’ll never see it again. (The fastest thieves in the world live here.) Don’t get drunk and lose control, or you’ll lose even your shoes. (Lock your door, button your coat, strap your hat, tie your laces.) Don’t sleep with any woman who offers her services (It’s a city of whores), or you’ll end up with a pox that will swell your tongue to the width of a plank. New York was a dangerous place, Mr. Partridge said. Full of thieves from many nations. (They speak seventeen different tongues, not counting the African languages.) The English were the worst. Lazy buggers. Rather steal than work. (As an Englishman, they fill me with shame.) There were hundreds of Englishmen transported to America for crimes committed in English cities. (They start by cutting their mothers’ throats and then go downhill.) And they weren’t even the worst.

“The most dangerous of the lot are the ones who now think they’re respectable,” he had said when they were a week away from America. “They go to church. They wear fine clothes. They use snuff. And they’d steal the eyeballs out of your head.”

He paused, staring at his journeyman’s hands.

“Still and all, they’ll give us much to print.”

And he laughed out loud.

They had agreed to work together in New York. Or rather, Cormac would work for him. As soon as Mr. Partridge found a place for his press and his shop, he would teach Cormac the printing trade. The prospect thrilled Cormac. He could always work as a blacksmith, but to learn to set type and print Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope and who knew what other great writers: that made his skin tingle and his blood rush. To be sure, he had a mission in New York, one he did not mention to the older man. But if the Earl of Warren was not there, or otherwise eluded him, then (Cormac thought) he could master a trade that would give his life a purpose.

Now the Fury moved steadily toward New York, passing the small mountain rising in Staten Island, and Cormac thought that he might never come this way again and so should remember the thrill of arrival. He might die in prison. He might be pursued into the blank interior. Indeed, in his pursuit of the earl, he might lose his own life. He might not even get past the pier, if someone recognized him. Some policeman or redcoat who knew that in Ireland he had killed a man. Or even two (for Cormac did not know the fate of the man who had crawled without a hand from the earl’s stable). If they had a list, an alert, a warrant, they’d be looking for a young man named Robert Carson. Not Cormac O’Connor. Not Martin O’Donovan. They could be looking for him without need of a name.