Pete Hamill - Forever

John Hughson emerged from the bar, large and slow, holding the Gazette .

“What’s all this?”

Mary Burton whirled on him. “Your bloody wife wants to charge this boy for the use of me quim.”

Hughson laughed out loud, and Cormac smiled in relief.

“You’ve got some mouth on you, Mary,” Hughson said.

“He owes us, John,” Sarah insisted, her back splayed against the front door.

Hughson sighed and put a hand on Cormac’s shoulder.

“Run along now, lad,” he said, “before this gets worse.” Then to Sarah: “Get out of his way, Sarah.”

There was a kind of fed-up menace in his voice, and Sarah retreated from it, easing away from the door.

“You’re a bloody softhearted fool, John Hughson,” she said. She pushed past Cormac and Mary and John through the blue door into the bar, slamming it behind her.

“Thank you,” Cormac said to Hughson. “You’re a very sensible man.”

“No, I’m not. I’m just soft. Go. Please go.”

Cormac lifted his bag and opened the door to the New York morning. He turned to say good-bye, but Mary Burton was climbing the stairs.

And so he entered the printing trade. Mr. Partridge had found an unused former stable on Cortlandt Street, over by the North River, a place so forlorn and anonymous that they had passed it at least three times on their walks without actually seeing it. When Cormac first walked through the chipped, flaked double doors, his heart sank. The space was dark and cobwebbed, reeking of ancient shit and rotting vegetable matter. The windows were so caked with grime that no light entered. He followed Mr. Partridge across the lumpy brown mat of the floor. High up in the back he saw the trace of a ladder rising to a second-floor loft. Behind them, the double doors on the Cortlandt Street side were immense, built for carriages, but so thick with crusted paint, dampness, and bad care that only one of them moved on its runners. A smaller door opened into the muddy backyard.

Cormac was appalled. But Mr. Partridge saw the place with other eyes, the same eyes that gazed at New York. Seeing it for what it could become, not for what it was.

“You see,” he gushed, “it must have been a stable—attached to the Dutch house next door. That’s why the ceiling’s so high, to make room for hay…. The rooms upstairs must have been added later,” he said, noting a ridge in the high wall where the stone of the ground-floor walls give way to gray planed pine. “The Dutchman next door must have got prosperous at something, become a patroon instead of a horse-handler, and sold the stable. Then…”

He jumped around, too excited and full of youthful joy to finish his thoughts, and together, without much ado, they began to prepare the space for the Monday arrival of the printing press.

“Those front windows,” he said. “We’ll have to scrape away the crusty dirt so a person can see in at us, see what we do, feel like entering . I’ll attack that problem, and you can…”

Cormac went to work scrubbing the flagstones: pulling stringy tufts of weed from the spaces between the stones, raking mushrooms from the narrow trenches where the stones had once abutted the walls (before the house had settled). He scattered beetles and worms from around the dead, ashen fireplace. He used wire brushes on the floor, removing years of impacted dirt and coats of ancient horseshit. His breath quickened when he saw the first blue gray quarried stone beneath the brown fibrous carpet, and he worked almost frantically to uncover each of its buried brothers. All day Friday, until the light was gone, he washed stones, his pouring sweat mixing with the precious water (carried in heavy buckets from the Tea Pump by the same black men he’d seen on Broad Street). In the center of the room, he discovered the rim of a blocked and rusted drain, packed with a cement formed of dirt and horse piss. He jammed a stick into it and moved nothing. Then he picked up his sword and cored out a passage, breaking open some unseen blockage underneath. Abruptly, the spilled water from his bucket flowed in a gurgling way into the unseen earth. He shouted in happiness—“The drain works!”—and Mr. Partridge turned from his glistening windowpanes and exulted at the sight.

“A bloody drain!” he shouted. “Without which no print shop can exist!”

Then Mr. Partridge vanished for a few hours, returning with bread and beef and water, and a large pink-faced Dutchman and two Africans, who carried in a pair of cots that he’d bought in the Dutchman’s shop behind Trinity. One cot was for Cormac, and they parked it beside the fireplace. The Africans carried the second cot up the ladder to the loft where Mr. Partridge would live, while the Dutchman, looking dubious, waited for his money.

After midnight Cormac took off his shoes and fell upon the cot. He thought for a while of the hard, taut body of Mary Burton and her small, hard breasts and rosy nipples. He thought: I must be done with her. I did not say a proper good-bye, and that was rude of me, but I must be done with her. I have things to do here that come first. Before a woman. Before anyone. Still, I had no intentions of hurting her, and I have. She gave me her body. She washed me and fed me and made me laugh. And I’ve put one more hurt upon her. Ah, Mary: I’ll try to make it up. I will. Then he eased into a dreamless sleep.

On Saturday morning, he was back again at the stones, scraping, washing, polishing with emery, until by early afternoon they were gleaming. Meanwhile, two Norwegian ship’s carpenters arrived, carrying planed lumber and leather sacks of hammers and tools. After discussing measurements and placement with Mr. Partridge, they went immediately to work building a platform upon which the press would stand. Rectangular, rising about a foot off the flagstones, with a base beneath it. Almost like an altar. The Norwegians spoke little English, and said very little in Norwegian. They simply worked. With care and speed, using spirit levels for adjustments, fitting each joint with uncanny precision and exactitude. Mr. Partridge had them add a door to the platform, to provide storage space beneath the press, and they designed it so that it was flush to the sides. No locks were needed. Simple hand pressure popped it open. The smell of fresh-cut lumber helped drive out the odor of shit and time. And after Mr. Partridge peeled away the last of the gray film that clouded the windows and polished them with soap and rags, bright bars of summer light streamed in upon the fresh boards and polished stones. Cormac and Mr. Partridge smiled in delight. So did the Norwegians.

The town was shut down on Sunday, but the Norwegians didn’t observe any religion except work. As Cormac and Mr. Partridge filled chinks in the stone walls with cement and erected rope lines from which paper could be hung by pegs, the Norwegians swiftly fashioned shelves for paper and ink and type, glancing at diagrams and old woodcuts for guidance. They adjusted the legs of an old table to make it balance on the uneven flag-stones. They used a wood plane on the back door until it opened and closed as if buttered. They placed a bookcase beside the fire-place. They grunted. They muttered in Norwegian. And in the scalding summer heat they worked and worked. They worked without shirts and then without trousers. They paused to smoke seegars. They took long drafts of water. And they worked.

By Monday morning, all was ready for the arrival of the press. At a few minutes after eight, it appeared on the back of a horse-drawn wagon from Van Zandt’s warehouse, still in its huge crate. Two black men eased the crate on rollers into the backyard, then opened it carefully with chisels, then snapped the wires and cables that had kept the press suspended in the crate during the long journey. On the floor of the crate beneath the press was a long smaller crate. “Type!” Mr. Partridge said. “Without type, we print nothing!” He asked the Africans to carry the box of type inside and lay it in a corner against the wall. Then they lifted the printing press itself, an African at either end, with Mr. Partridge on the left side and Cormac on the right. Hauling and muttering and gasping for breath, they carried it around to Cortlandt Street and in through the open double doors. A small crowd had gathered to stare at them, to observe the new tenants, the beginning of a new shop. They positioned the press on its fresh new altar, moving it and shifting it until it stood exactly where Mr. Partridge wanted it to be, with space on the platform to walk around it on all sides.