Pete Hamill - Forever

“She’s feeding her children,” Mary Burton said. “Poor soul.”

She gazed blearily around the room, and Cormac asked her about the other whites. The six men bunched at one small table were soldiers from Fort George, all of them Irish. “Serving His fecking Majesty,” she said with contempt. “Shameless bastards.” The small, precise man at the other table was a dancing master named Holt, who claimed that the Africans were the greatest dancers he’d ever seen. “He won’t even dance with the likes of us,” she said. “But then, he doesn’t like women much.” When Holt bowed before the remaining African woman and took her hand to dance, even Quaco didn’t mind, and Caesar patiently sipped a drink. “The African men think Mister Holt wants to dance with them . In bed.”

With an African woman on the floor, the music shifted. African rhythms drowned the room. Holt the dancing master tried valiantly to adapt a minuet to the grinding music. The black woman (long-necked, large-breasted, hair piled above her brow) towered over the small white man and caricatured his steps. He smiled, knowing what she was doing, trying to be a good sport. She turned in one quick move and her right breast bumped against Holt’s face. The room exploded in applause. She turned the other way and did it again, with her left breast. That became her dance. Bumping the small white man’s face with her left breast and then her right breast, as he flushed and perspired. She moved in loose steps, her belly thrust forward, using her breasts like weapons. She stared down at Holt with an ambiguous smile. The blacks roared.

“Whip the man!” Quaco shouted, laughing now. “Whip him down, woman!”

“Do you want her? ” Mary Burton whispered.

“I want you.”

She squeezed his thigh in a playful way and got up.

“I’m too old for you,” she said.

In Cormac’s three weeks at Hughson’s, the routine was always the same. Breakfast at half-seven, eggs and rashers and buttered bread, along with coffee that looked (and tasted) like pitch. Dinner at half-five. A nap. A visit to the bar at night. A bath on Friday evening, poured from jugs into a sealed cask by Mary Burton. Each day, he’d pay a visit to Mr. Partridge at the Black Horse, to hear about his search for a shop or to join him in some new examination of a place for the press. The other hours were Cormac’s, and he used them to search for the Earl of Warren. He had learned that a man could walk all of the New York streets in a single day.

Most of the time he was on his own, wandering in the mornings down to the Battery, where four squat cannon were aimed at the harbor, fearful of the Pope’s imminent arrival on board a Spanish warship. Redcoats drilled in Fort George. Lone women gazed out to sea, where their men had gone but had never come back. The breeze at the island’s tip was heavy with salt, and he could see the green humps of New Jersey and Staten Island and boats in full sail passing through the Narrows. Not once did he see the earl.

But still he peered at faces, gazed at strangers, and walked. On some days, he wandered up Broadway, past Trinity, to the Common, where boys played games and old men sat on the grass smoking seegars or clay pipes, lost in themselves. If they’d been raised on Mars they could not be farther from home. Cormac felt disconnected from all of them. His own history was of no interest to those he passed. New York, he was learning, was a city of the present tense, an eternal now. Except for a few old Dutchmen, it was not a city of the past. Today ruled.

Tomorrow might be richer and fatter, the Christian evange-lists told them, but tomorrow also brought certain death, followed by the rewards of Heaven or the punishments of Hell. The various Christian rivers flowed through the streets of New York. Quakers quaking. Congregationalists congregating, Baptists baptizing, Dutch Reformers reforming; Episcopalians pissing on the lot. All asked for money to support the war against evil. Only the proud, haughty Anglicans of Trinity were not present on the street, since they were supported by taxpayer money and had no need to panhandle for God. All other messengers of the Lord were forced to pay taxes to support the Anglicans, just as they did in Ireland. All preachers were dressed in shades of black. From deep, fresh black to gray, faded, disappointed black. All used the same nouns: death, punishment, corruption, Hell, suffering, papist. All proclaimed that they were opposed to (or part of ) something called the Great Awakening, a religious revival spreading south from dark, witch-haunted New England. They spoke, as always, of a vengeful Puritanical God, a God of brutal whims and divine ego, quick to suffer insult and explode in wrath. Cormac thought of him as the God of bad temper. The Celtic gods would laugh him out of the room.

A few preachers were capable of surprise. One Welshman was a marvelous singer. One Cornishman had a sense of humor. One or two even agreed (under questioning) that black people might have souls. Such an admission didn’t lead in their logic to any utopian notion that the enslaved souls might be freed. Africans would have to await freedom and redemption after death, when God would sort them out in his Eternal Kingdom.

Most New Yorkers paid the preachers little heed; they were too busy rushing from one appointment to another, chasing the whims of Mammon. Blacks were not welcome among the small knots of fevered religiosos in the Common, but when each pulverizing sermon ended and the hat was passed, the few Indians who had paused to listen, dressed in wild combinations of buckskin and English jackets, usually broke into laughter. They simply could not be convinced that God was a dead carpenter. During any given lunch hour, there were more preachers than auditors, all demanding that New Yorkers be born again, give up their filthy corruptions, beg for forgiveness, endure punishment, dwell on the certainties of death and the afflictions of Hell. Although Cormac used them as cover, an excuse to stand around watching, he didn’t tarry with them very long. He was certain that the listeners would never include the Earl of Warren.

Then, on the second Sunday after his arrival, he saw a familiar face among the preachers on the Common. He was gaunt, his clothes dirty and crumpled, his boots muddy. He was holding the Old Testament. Mumbling to those who passed.

“She’s dead,” said the Rev. Clifford. “She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s dead….”

Cormac backed away in horror and slipped into a side street.

Twice, Cormac pushed beyond the city’s northern border. He found his way to the Collect Pond and walked around its edges. The Collect was no small body of water. It was sixty feet deep, more spring-fed lake than simple pond. At dawn, men scraped its bottom for oysters. At dusk they trolled in rowboats for bass. It was the primary source of the city’s water. A creek emptied to the west of the pond, meandering down through the farmlands of Lispenard Meadows. Another creek emptied to the south, into the Little Collect and on to the East River. The creeks were sluggish and dark. Each day, cartmen hired by the city heaved unburned garbage into the pond. The shore was littered with broken bottles and battered pails, the gnawed cores of apples and the shells of oysters glittering in the mud. A hill rose abruptly at the southern edge, bald and craggy and vaguely sinister. On this hill (Cormac was told) the hangman plied his trade. After dark in its thickets, young men tried to enter the bodies of young girls. He heard (from a raving preacher) that many succeeded. From the peak of the hill, he could see the island rolling north into thick forests, sliced with the silver lines of streams. Beyond the northern shore of the pond, he smelled grass and rich, loamy earth and a sweetness that helped erase the growing odor of rot from the side of the Collect closest to the city.