Pete Hamill - Forever

In the dark, Cormac heard the muffled sound of a fiddle and thought he was still on the ship. But nothing rocked or creaked, no seaborne timber cleaved water. He was in a room. On land. With dim light leaking through crooked shutters. He rubbed his eyes, and the room emerged dimly, in dark gray tones. He stretched, felt the sword through the mattress and the straps of the money belt digging into his flesh. He unbuckled the money belt and rubbed his skin. Then he sat up naked. And stepped into the chill, and felt for the candle and wooden matches on top of the bureau. He snapped a sulphur head with a thumbnail, lit the wick. Almost reluctantly, yellow light revealed the room. From beyond the door, the unseen fiddler played a melancholy tune.

His suit was not in the room. He cracked open the door and peered into the darkened hallway. The sound of the fiddle was louder now, but no less melancholy. And there was the suit, neatly hanging on a rough hanger hooked upon a wall peg opposite the door. He took it in behind him. Again, he washed his face and armpits with the chilly water and dried himself with the coarse, damp cloth, dressed quickly, buckling the money belt under his trousers, and went out, locking the door behind him and pocketing the key.

He followed the sound of the fiddle down two flights of stairs to the blue door in the back of the entrance hall. The melancholy tune ended, and the music shifted into an up-tempo reel, which was greeted by a loud, growling, masculine roar of approval.

He opened the door and stepped into another world: a lowceilinged, smoky room crowded with white men and Africans, some of them up and jigging madly to the music, the floor shaking, laughter pealing, some of the black men doing wild parodies of the white men’s dances. One white woman was dancing with two black men, laughing and taunting them. And from the side came Mary Burton, all rosy in the light of lanterns. She grabbed Cormac’s forearm.

“The feckin’ suit looks better now,” she said.

“It does. Thanks very much.” He smiled. “And thanks for the water and soap.”

“You must smell a lot better,” she said. “Can you jig?”

“No.”

“Well, try anyway.”

She jerked him into the center of the dancing men, her back straight, her arms rigidly hanging at her side, her breasts bouncing to the music and the movements. The room roared. Dance it, Marymouth. Do it, do it… She glowered at Cormac until he stepped in and tried to match her moves, feeling clumsy and oafish, his legs like lumber. Until one of the Africans shouted at him.

“Don’t think, boy. Move. ”

And so he did, surrendering to the music, and the packed heat, and the smoke, and the open mouth of Mary Burton, her lips shifting as he stared, and the music pulsing, and her breasts pushing against the cotton blouse, and she was Mary Morrigan and she was Bridget Riley, and his head started seething and he felt himself hardening and her hand brushed his hardness while other dancers bumped against him, closing the tight space around Mary Burton, and she ran a tongue over her mouth in a teasing way. And then it was over. Everyone cheered. And then Mary Burton embraced him, pressing into him, pushing her small breasts hard against his chest.

“Ah, that was feckin’ grand,” she growled, suddenly turning and shoving her way through the crowd to the bar. He followed her. From the jumble of excited talk he kept hearing Marymouth, Mary-mouth, at once affectionate and charged with lust. She pushed an African aside and reached for a plate. The bar was covered with jugs and glasses and mugs, and platters of ham and venison and bleeding beef, potatoes, turnips, and cabbage, bread loaves and a butter tub, and a kind of porridge called sappaan . She heaped food on a plate. Behind the bar stood a tall, unsmiling, fleshy man with skin cratered by smallpox. His body was still, but his hands moved quickly: uncorking bottles, pouring drinks, gathering coins, and dropping them into the pockets of his greasy apron. His eyes were as soft in their own way as his body. But to be sure, Cormac thought, I’ve spent so many weeks with men made lean and hard by hunger that almost everybody else in the room looks soft.

“John,” Mary Burton said, “this is your new boarder, Mister O’Donovan, he says his name is.” Then to Cormac: “John Hughson. He owns this feckin’ dive.”

Hughson’s mouth smiled, but his eyes remained soft and disappointed.

“Welcome,” he said. “Have a drink, lad.”

He glanced at Mary Burton.

“Maybe you’ll be the one to land Miss Mouth,” he said, opening a bottle of porter.

“Oh, shush, John. Let the man eat.”

“That’s sixpence,” Hughson said, as Cormac fumbled for change. “You must be just in from the sea. You’ve got that ship hunger on you. Ah, well, you’re not alone. Some of ’em come in here ready to eat the bloody furniture.”

“The feckin’ furniture might taste better than some of your food, John,” Mary Burton said.

“Don’t give the lad a bad impression, wench.”

He turned to a foot-wide opening in the wall behind him, beyond which was the kitchen, and shouted something Cormac couldn’t hear under the sound of another kind of music. The fiddler bowed a few bars, and then the Africans joined him, using rattles and gourds and polished wooden bars that made a klawkklawk-klawk sound. Some chanted together and were answered by others. The voices were taunting, bragging, laughing, sharing the close, dense, happy air of the place to which they’d been taken at gunpoint. Cormac understood only one large thing: He was hearing Africa.

“Come on,” Mary Burton said, grabbing Cormac’s plate and pushing him along through the chanting crowd to a table near the far wall. Three black men were seated on a bench, drinking rum. In the corner, the white fiddler played in solitude, overwhelmed by the African rhythms but trying to play into and through them.

“Move over, you lot,” Mary Burton said to the three Africans, and they did, smiling and polite. “We’ve got us a new feckin’ inmate.”

Cormac had already seen one of them: Quaco, the tall man who had behaved well at the Wall Street quay that morning. He said nothing, but gave Cormac a look of recognition, perhaps remembering that he had tried to protect Kongo from the hard men. The others were named Sandy and Diamond. Sandy was Cormac’s age, the other two older. They were all dressed in clean shirts and rough trousers. Mary Burton turned her back to them and picked at some of the food on Cormac’s plate.

“Why do they call you Marymouth?”

“Because of my dirty feckin’ mouth. Or—no, that’s it.” She smiled in an almost proud way. “John Hughson says I’ve got the dirtiest feckin’ mouth in America.”

Cormac squeezed her hand.

“Well, there’s a lot worse things, I suppose.”

“Aye, like being a feckin’ slave,” she said. “They call us indentured servants, but that’s the fancy way to say it. The true feckin’ word is slave. Just like all these black fellas from Africa. There’s no bloody difference. I did two years up in Poughkeepsie with a fat feckin’ Dutchman that bought me from some feckin’ English poof. The Dutchman tried to get up into me, but I fought him off, and then his fat feckin’ wife was sure he was gettin’ me anyway, and she it was that had me sold again. John Hughson’s brother bought me for John, and I told John, You might own me, but you won’t have me body and don’t expect me to act like a feckin’ lady while I do the slave work.” She smiled. “Drives him feckin’ wicked, it does.”

She got up and went to the bar, and carried plates to another table, and sat down again with Cormac, talking and moving to the music, and then was up again. She was always in movement, cracking wise with customers, dancing variations on the jig with Africans, clearing plates, then sitting with Cormac again. Across the night she explained in bits and pieces this small part of the world into which he had arrived, turning for confirmation to Quaco, Sandy, and Diamond. “Isn’t that right, Quaco?” “Yes ma’am.” “Tell the man I’m not feckin’ lying, Sandy.” “Oh, you don’t lie, Miz Mary.” Among other things, Cormac learned that Hughson’s was one of only four taverns where blacks and whites mixed freely.