Pete Hamill - Forever

“Yes, ma’am.”

Mary Burton returned with a porter for Cormac and a small whiskey for Sarah Hughson. Sarah downed hers and got up. So did Quaco. His brow was knitted into a grid.

“Don’t you go anywhere, Quaco,” Sarah said.

“I go where I want,” he said, grunting.

“Don’t go to the fort.”

“I go where I want.”

“That’s nothing but trouble,” Sarah Hughson said. “She’s surely fast asleep.”

Sandy grabbed his arm to hold him back, but Quaco jerked his arm free and headed to the back door. Diamond and Sandy hurried after him (the music pounding now) and the three of them passed into the New York darkness.

“Jaysus feckin’ Christ,” Mary Burton said.

“I shouldn’t’ve mentioned his wife,” Sarah said.

“He thinks the governor and the feckin’ officers and all the men are getting it from his wife,” Mary Burton whispered to Cormac. “And he might be right about the governor.”

Sarah moved quickly to the back door, and Mary sat down beside Cormac. She was weary now, her hair loose and tangled from the heat of the room and the long hours of the day. An African fiddler was playing his own instrument, plucking the strings in a percussive way instead of bowing them. The gourds and rattles were out. Africans drummed with fingernails on tabletops, while Mary Burton explained one other truth about the tavern (whispering, covering her mouth, looking at her glass). The Africans didn’t just come here for the drink and the freedom. They were there every night of the week because John Hughson was a fence.

“If you’re a slave,” she said, “the law is a feckin’ joke. And so most of them are thieves.”

After dark, she said, they came to Hughson’s with those things they had foraged. Things that could be turned into a form of payment for labor. Pieces of cheap silverware, bearing no engraved stamps. Stray tools. Casks of nails. Leather whips. Stolen liquor, meat, potatoes, and fruit. They stole while their masters were sleeping, or away on business, or assembled in the Christian churches, full of piety and breakfast. “It’s a way to keep some kind of feckin’ pride,” Mary Burton said. “There’s not too many ways to do that under the English flag.”

Hughson didn’t often give cash to the Africans. And it was not easy for an African to spend money, since he was not supposed to have any. What Hughson gave them was credit in his own tavern.

“I’d steal meself,” said Mary Burton, and laughed. “But I could hardly fence Hughson’s own things to Hughson himself.”

Her rebellion, what she did for pride, was a simpler matter. Hughson owned her but could not have her. “As simple as that.” He could not go between her legs or invite anyone else to do the same. “And that’s fine with Sarah.” In the end it was really Sarah’s place, not John’s. She it was who forced poor slow John to sell his house up in Westchester and come down to New York. She it was who had him rent the first small tavern, and then to lease this one, and then to spread the word that the blacks would be welcome. She it was who made certain that at least one white whore lived on the premises, and this year’s whore was Peggy, who arrived one snowy midnight from Newfoundland and never left.

“That’s Peggy there, Peggy the house whore,” Mary Burton said, and motioned toward a young woman across the room, red-haired, thick-breasted, broad-shouldered, and large. She was smiling and flirting in a mannered way. “A nice woman, in her way, but dumber than feckin’ whale shite.”

Peggy slept with the Africans too, if they had the money in cash.

“Sure, the English preachers give off lots of blather about how the blacks and the whites are meant to be separate,” Mary Burton said. “But there’s no holdin’ men from drink. And when there’s drink taken, their feckin’ rods always lead them to women. Every man in this place has offered me good money for a look at me quim. They’ve offered me everything except what they can’t feckin’ give me. Me freedom.”

The back door opened. Quaco, Sandy, and Diamond returned, herded inside by the shepherdess Sarah. She stood them drinks at the bar. The music was steady and full of rhythms Cormac had never heard before, like the beat of a heart. The back door opened again. “Here’s the African feckin’ Lucifer himself,” Mary Burton said. A large black man bent his head under the door frame. The room hushed, and even the fiddler stopped for a few beats. “That’s Caesar. The one I’m sure’s put a child in poor, dumb Peggy.” Sarah smiled in welcome. Hughson looked nervous. Peggy averted her eyes shyly and removed a hand from inside a black man’s shirt. Caesar moved slowly and theatrically, performing an image of latent violence. He smiled at Sarah in a thin way and then the talk resumed, muffled, murmurous.

“He’s a dangerous fecker,” Mary Burton whispered.

Quaco, Sandy, and Diamond reclaimed their seats. Quaco glanced across the room at Caesar, then looked down at Mary Burton.

“I think I’ll dance with you, Mary,” he said.

“You will not, Quaco. You’re a married man.” She laughed. “Besides, I’m working.”

She went off to retrieve glasses and plates (Quaco shrugging away the rebuff), and Cormac realized how thin her body was, and how long her neck. As she moved, her eyes assumed a distracted look, as if she were seeing something that was not in the room. In spite of her foul, bitter mouth, he thought she was beautiful. He noticed Caesar’s glance at her, and Hughson watching her too, and then Sarah identifying desire in Hughson’s eyes and turning to examine Mary Burton, as if wondering what her husband wanted from this thin, common Irish girl. Or knowing what he wanted but finding it hard to believe. Caesar’s back was to them now, but when Peggy eased beside him at the bar, his large ebony hand wandered casually to her buttocks and caressed them in a possessive way. A sign to all the others. Including the whites.

For while he was watching the Africans, Cormac’s attention had been diverted from the dozen white men in the place. They were scattered around the long, low room, six of them together in a bunch, others mixing with the Africans. At one point, two African women came in and joined two white men at a table. The women were tall, dressed in American clothes, with bonnets on their heads. One of them had neat scars on both cheeks, arranged in rows, and wore gold hoops in her ears. Tomora’s face moved in Cormac. Full lips. Liquid eyes. Lush body in a shroud on a windless sea.

“You’ve got lust in your face,” Mary Burton said, sliding down beside him. “Do you want one of them?”

“No,” Cormac lied.

“You can have either one for a few shillings,” she said. “Or both. God knows they need the money.”

The women were drinking rum paid for by the white men. One nodded at Caesar: the obvious ponce. “Whatever they get, he gets half,” Mary Burton said. “He’s got women in some of the other feckin’ taverns too.” Cormac noticed Quaco staring at the African women and mumbling in English to Diamond and Sandy. Cormac couldn’t hear everything he said, but he did hear words about his wife and the fort. The woman with the scars turned and looked at the blue door leading into the house and then at Sarah Hughson, who nodded her approval. “Here she goes,” Mary Burton said. “There’s one room on the top floor that’s always free.” The African woman whispered something to the white man, then went to the blue door. Quaco started getting up, as if to intercept her, but Diamond pulled him back. “Caesar cut your throat, Quaco,” he said. “Beside, the woman got two girl children she need to feed.” Indeed, Caesar was glowering at Quaco through the smoke and music. The scarred woman vanished. Within seconds, one of the two white men (paunchy, mustached) followed her.