Pete Hamill - Forever

Cormac embraced him.

“Well,” he said, “we have work to do.”

“Yes,” Mr. Partridge said. “Work.”

He took the coins now, hefting them, and walked to the doors and stared into the street.

“There are some dreadful people in the world,” he said, slipping the coins into his pocket, where they made a bulge. “They must be fought. They must be beaten back, caged, prevented from spreading their misery. Your Earl of Warren is one of them. There are many others.”

“And what can be done about them?”

“Plenty.”

“Such as?”

“Such as destroying them.”

He turned to the printing press.

“With that. ”

Mr. Partridge lived in a blur of movement. He set type, pulled proofs, handed them to Cormac to dry. He’d be gone for two hours and return with jobs: tax notices, wedding invitations, advertisements for shoes and medicines and coffee, for dance instruction and English tutoring and lessons in French. He printed anything and everything, except posters about escaped slaves.

Cormac had no time for Hughson’s, but even if he had a few rare empty hours, he stayed away. He thought: What can I tell her? How can I tell her that I have these other things I must do, that I’m searching for a man from Ireland? And yet he began to yearn for her. To hear her dirty mouth, to feel her rebellious spirit. One humid Sunday night in late August, he walked to Stone Street. He stood outside the back door in the darkness. Africans passed him in the dark, entering, departing, and a few nodded and went on. Then a familiar face appeared. Quaco.

“What you standin’ here for?” he said.

“Just getting the night air.”

“You a bad liar, mon.”

“I miss some people, I suppose.”

“What people?”

“You. Some of the others.”

“You mean that little girl Mary, ain’t that it?”

Cormac shook his head.

“Wait here.”

Quaco slipped inside the tavern. Cormac could hear water sloshing against pier heads, and sails flopping on the dark river, and somewhere the squeal of a lone pig. From inside, the music of a fiddle and the instruments of Africa were joining. He heard a muffled roar. Then the door cracked open, and Mary Burton stepped into the hot night air, closing the door behind her.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello, Mary,” he said.

“What is it ye want?”

“To be sayin’ I’m sorry, Mary. For going off so quick that morning. For not saying a proper good-bye. For not comin’ back to see you.”

“Feck off.”

She turned to go, and he grabbed her arm. In the dim light he could see her eyes glistening with anger and tears.

“Mary, listen, please listen. I’ve been workin’ eighteen hours a day, I’ve been grinding and hauling and pulling in the print shop on Cortlandt Street and…”

“Ah, you poor wee lad,” she said, voice heavy with sarcasm. He was holding her rough-skinned hand now, which was warm in his grip.

“And there’s more. I’m looking for a man, a man I’m sworn to find, a man I must kill. I have to find him. And if he’s not here in New York, then I must know that too.”

She said nothing.

“I don’t want you mixed up in any of this,” he said. “It’d not be fair to you, Mary, if I do what I must do and the constables came looking, or the bloody redcoats.”

She pulled her hand away and folded her arms across her breasts.

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “I think you just wanted to be up in me quim, and have your fun, and be done with it. I think you see me as some low, common trollop. You with your fancy accent from some fecking school somewhere, and your books, and your fecking poetry spoutin’. I think you look at me and think, She’s just another feckin’ slave. And one that can’t read or write and has only one thing to offer, and that’s between her legs.”

“Not true, Mary,” he said in a soothing way, pulling her close. “Not true.”

Her arms dropped, and he could feel her soften. She pressed her hard breasts against his chest. He wanted to take her down to the river edge. And then he heard a voice. The door cracking open. Sarah.

“Mary? Are you out there, Mary? Come in at once, the tables are filthy with plates!”

Mary kissed him and touched him and then hurried back into Hughson’s, where Africa drummed steadily on gourds and tabletops.

The weather turned. He saw his first October in New York: the harbor sparkling, the air crisp and bright. He met Mary Burton one Monday evening and they made love on the slopes above the Collect. That night he told her his true name. She was not surprised. Early one Sunday morning two weeks later, when the sky was just brightening in Brooklyn, they met at the Battery and held hands while seated on a large stone and she talked about how she’d like to go to a right school and learn to read, even if it meant putting up with the preachers at Trinity.

“Tell me I can do it,” she said, as the breeze shook leaves from the trees above them and a four-masted ship turned in the harbor, bound for the East River quays.

“Of course you can do it, Mary,” he said. “I’ll loan you a book for starting. Just march into Trinity and say, ‘I want to read this book.’ Just don’t say ‘feck’ when you ask.”

“Feck off,” she said, then turned her head and laughed at herself.

Cormac was working with Mr. Partridge one Saturday noon on fifty large copies of legal advisories when he glanced out the windows. Mary Burton was standing in a doorway, staring into the shop. The light was so hard and bright (Cormac thought) that she must have been unable to see through the glass. She waited, as people teemed around her. Then a horse-drawn wagon came by, loaded with crates of dry goods, and when it passed, she was gone. She was trying to send him a message. He was sure of that. But she could not write a simple note. That night, he went back to Hughson’s on Stone Street.

The bar was packed, every table filled, and Mary Burton was moving around in the blue tobacco fog, taking orders, grim. She didn’t see him come in. The fiddler was fatter and playing more joyfully. Sarah came to Cormac.

“Are you here with the ten shillin’s?” she said.

“I can leave now if you like, Mrs. Hughson.”

“No, we’ll take your money one way or another.”

He eased past her, trying to move among three large Africans who were joking at the bar. The sound of singing and clomping feet grew louder. Suddenly Mary Burton grabbed his hand.

“I must talk wit’ you,” she said. “Tuesday night, on the north end of the Common.”

She turned away, gathering empty glasses, forcing passage to the bar. John Hughson started filling the glasses. He didn’t notice Cormac. Against the far wall, British soldiers were on their feet, arms on shoulders, loudly singing a marching song, as if challenging the Irish to fight. Mary threw them an ugly look, then grabbed a half-dozen full glasses and whirled back into the stomping crowd. John Hughson saw Cormac now. His face was different, more furrowed with care and seriousness.

“You’re back,” he said.

“Aye—in want of a glass of porter.”

“But it’s not the porter, is it? It’s not the porter that’s pulled you back at all.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He leaned forward.

“It’s a priest you’re after, isn’t it, lad?”

Cormac laughed.

“A priest?”

“An R.C.,” he said.

“You mean a Catholic priest?”

“Aye.”

He was so serious that Cormac didn’t want to disappoint him. He shrugged. Although he was curious about the presence of a secret Catholic priest. After all, if such a person did exist, and the British found him, he’d be hanged.