Pete Hamill - Forever

The warning didn’t surprise Cormac. Once a week now, he met Mary Burton in the fields and woods to the north of the Common, to listen to her faltering attempts to read (each week they were better), to make love in a desperate way among the leaves and the grass, until it grew too cold and they could be too easily observed among the skeletal black trees. Then they would simply talk, flattened against a tree, warming each other against winter, and sometimes she talked about what she wanted more than anything else.

“I want to walk out the door,” she said. “At any hour of the day or night, and without making up a lie or askin’ permission from no one, and just walk around the town. Without sayin’ I’m a-runnin’ an errand. Just free. Free. To be free to live with a free man, maybe you. To have him come in the door and put the rod to me, ’cause he loves me, and loves me juicy quim. No sneakin’ around. Just close the door and have it, on the floor, on a table, in a bed.” She turned her wounded eyes to him. “Do you see, Cormac? Do you see why I can’t do six more years at Hughson’s as a slave? I don’t want to have Sarah making me scrub sheets all sticky with spend or boarders’ drawers stained with shite. I don’t want to end up like poor Peggy, taking the Africans’ money to give them two minutes up me cunt.”

“Yes, I see.”

She looked at him for a long moment.

“I want to have us in a bath again,” she said.

“As do I.”

“But not at Hughson’s,” she said in a cold voice. “They’re talking a lot of fecking trouble.”

At home in the shop on Cortlandt Street, Cormac’s mind was jittery with warnings about the coming trouble. Something was surely in the air, some kind of trouble, as ominous as the warning of Mary Morrigan, and those issued long ago to the Hebrews, and Mr. Partridge began providing the American context. He was talking almost without cease about a new war and how it was wrecking the economy of New York. Britain was fighting Spain again, this time over Jenkins’s ear. Who was Jenkins? And why (Cormac asked) should anyone care about his ear? The story was splendid. The Spaniards had stopped a British ship in Spanish waters, one of those royal ships whose sole business was hijacking Spanish gold from the Americas. One of the English officers gave the Spanish captain some lip and they cut off his ear. War!

“But it’s hurting New York, lad!” he said. “You can see it everywhere around us!”

He reminded Cormac that the fort was emptying, the redcoats marching to the ships each day, bound for the West Indies and Florida to do battle with the Spaniards. That was why the waterfront was such a lonesome place these past weeks. Mr. Partridge insisted that the war wasn’t about poor Jenkins’s ear at all; it was about sugar, tobacco, and Florida.

“The English have Jamaica, and they want Cuba and Hispaniola and Florida so they can bring in another two hundred thousand slaves to make themselves even richer!” he shouted. “They can’t imagine the Spanish will come this far north. They are idiots!”

But as Mr. Partridge ranted, Cormac understood the warnings. The soldiers were going. Now was the time for revolt.

In the following days, the outrage of Mr. Partridge was mixed with a kind of joy. He sizzled with happiness. Together, they worked all one night making broadsides at their own expense, headlined “We will win!” All sorts of patriotic nonsense (as Mr. Partridge described it), expressing immense anger over the fate of Mr. Jenkins’s ear, using a medical engraving of an ear repeated fifty times as a border. He attacked the Spanish affront to justice and the law, and urged all the King’s loyal subjects to support the noble British war, wherever it might go. Mr. Partridge was merry as he set type. But he had motives other than patriotism.

“We’ll put the Partridge name here at the bottom,” he said, “and the address, and no matter what happens in bloody Barbados, or on the streets of Kingston, we shall win, lad.”

He was swiftly proven right. Cormac slapped the broadsides up on the blank walls of the town as soon as the ink was dry. By noon the next day, the name Partridge was clearly synonymous with patriot. And printing jobs flowed into the shop: wedding announcements and rallies for the troops, advertising for shoes and jewelry, special rates for travel to England and news of the arrival of a shipment of wool. The money flowed in too. Mr. Partridge put all the profits into the shop, buying supplies of paper and ink, adding cabinets and type racks. They were so busy, Cormac didn’t notice the winds howling from the northwest.

Only at night, when he was alone, did he imagine the revolt, did he add together the odd look from black man to black man, and from the Irish to the Irish. He heard again the warnings from Kongo and from Mary Burton. Only at night did he imagine what would happen if they all rose together.

In the frigid winter nights, when Stone Street seemed an immense distance from Cortlandt Street and it was impossible to meet Mary Burton out of doors, Cormac began to draw again. He used the reverse side of overinked proofs, odd scraps of board, diluted printer’s ink, and reed pens. He made drawings of Mr. Partridge, of people he saw in the streets, of soldiers in uniform, of the fort, of certain houses, and of Mary Burton: all from memory. Mr. Partridge was delighted.

“You’ve a gift, lad,” he said one night, examining a drawing of his own marvelous head. “You captured something there, the mouth, a kind of sadness. Very good. Very good.”

He tacked the drawing to a beam. Others would follow, although Cormac kept his drawing of Mary Burton in a private folio fashioned from thick brown board and tied with cord. Cormac was now so deep into the world of the print shop that other things receded. The images of bloody revolt were threaded in a minor way through his days, but for all the whispered warnings, nothing, after all, had happened. Perhaps it was the drink talking in the smoke of Hughson’s. He also brooded in a confused way about Mary Burton. What was it he truly felt for her? Was it simply lust? Or was it something more like that immense word love? That word issued from many people’s lips, from preachers to whores, and he read it in even more books. But what did it mean, really? He wanted Mary Burton to be happy, but that wasn’t love as described in the poems, some rapture that carried you into realms of bliss. And was he leading her somewhere that she could not go? Into reading and trying to find the education that had eluded her in Ireland and in her American servitude? He hoped she was not imagining a future with him. For he had no true vision of that future, or whether he would live long enough to have one.

The reason for this uncertainty was the power of the past. And his duty to old vows, to the tribe, to the rules, to the memories of his father and mother. The truth, however, was that he was thinking less about the Earl of Warren now too. Sometimes three or four days passed and the earl never forced himself into Cormac’s mind. But then he would see months-old newspapers from London in the print shop and begin scanning them for the earl’s name, to see if he had appeared at some event in London or Paris, or in dispatches from other parts of the colonies from Canada to Kingston. Always in vain. In the newspapers, the earl did not exist. Then Cormac would lie awake in the dark, picturing the earl as he must look now: perhaps bearded, as was Cormac; perhaps dressed in common clothes; perhaps lolling in the slave markets of Charleston or Savannah. He imagined himself wandering the continent on an endless search. And then thought it would be better to stay where he was. If the earl was in America, eventually he would come to New York. Better to work, better to learn the craft of the printer, better to prepare for a future, even if that future would be denied him in a moment of violence.