Pete Hamill - Forever

On some nights, he wondered exactly what Quaco meant when he called Kongo a babalawo . One slow day, he asked Mr. Partridge about the word, and the older man riffled through a fat volume, then shrugged. “It’s not in the dictionary,” he said, “but it could mean a shaman, you know, a kind of witch doctor. The parish priest, so to speak, in a tribe.” He pondered this. “Though a shaman—if that’s what it means—is also a kind of magician. So maybe your friend Kongo is an African Merlin.”

For Cormac, this image was exciting: Kongo in Camelot, searching for a black grail. He tried to draw the image but gave up in disgust and tossed the paper into the fireplace. The truth was that all images, including the possibility of riot and fire, were always erased by work. The printing life consumed them. All their type was set by hand, and Cormac was amazed at how swiftly Mr. Partridge laid out the metal letters, since all of them were in reverse. Cormac’s first job was inking the type, using wool-packed sheepskin balls with hickory handles. The fresh ink was laid on a slab beside the press. At first, Mr. Partridge did the crucial final task of pressing down on the lever, throwing his weight joyfully into the task of pulling an impression off the inked type. Then he acknowledged that Cormac was physically stronger than he was, and Cormac, within a week, got their rate up to two hundred pulls an hour. While doing this work, Cormac felt himself become part of the machine, his mind counting the sheets while the words of the posters came to vivid life: war, sale, arrival, ship, brass, shoes, instruction, now.

Sometimes Mr. Partridge delivered an aria on the beauties of type. “We’re a Caslon shop,” he said. “Look at the beauty of that T, ” he said, “the elegance of that flick of a serif!” The names of fonts rolled from him like liturgy: Roman and italic and boldface, caps that were swashed and caps that were sloped. Picas and points and em quads, and the beauty of white space. Caslon wasn’t the only great type. There were other glorious typefaces, he said, his voice swelling, their names coming from him like the names of artists or generals: Bembo and Petrarca, Palatino and Griffo, Fraber and Garamond. But above all of them, close to God, was Caslon.

“Look at those letters, lad, and listen to them! Can you hear them singing? Look at those lines and those curves, and then close your eyes, and what you hear is William Caslon singing! ”

Sometimes, in mid-aria, he vanished into the frozen morning, bouncing up the three steps into the street, off to do business. And Cormac worked on, cleaning and oiling the press, using stone slabs to flatten wet paper, hanging samples on the unpainted pine-board walls, cleaning the pieces of type and placing each in one of the 152 compartments of their cases. Sometimes he set type himself, slower than Mr. Partridge but loving the order and beauty of a page. Or he cleaned ink balls. Or trimmed sheets. Ink rimmed his fingernails, resisting soap and brush. He washed his hands in the same sink where he cleaned the punches. There was no running water (not there and not anywhere in New York), just two buckets, soap, and the coarse cloths he used for cleaning type. After his daily ablutions, Cormac would heave the inky water into the backyard, a blackening rectangle of frozen mud where nothing grew.

In the afternoons, Mr. Partridge returned, bursting with news and gossip and jobs for the shop. Terrible fighting in Jamaica. Dreadful cold, the worst winter in New York memory. A shortage of cordwood. Trees like iron, blunting the woodsmen’s axes. Water frozen in the Collect. Dutchmen skating. Taverns empty. Only two ships on the waterfront. A Mrs. Robbins left her husband for a notary and they’ve sailed for England while Mr. Robbins has become a sot. More soldiers departing.

Finally the night arrived. Sometimes Mr. Partridge carried home a joint or a rib, and cooked it on an upstairs stove (for he wanted no grease anywhere near his precious stores of paper). They dined together, and at such times he was calmer, and often spoke obliquely about subjects that never appeared in a newspaper. As he did one night a few days from Christmas.

“There’s something happening in the town, and I can’t put my finger on it,” he said. “Not just poor sales in the shops. Something else. An unease…”

The cold got colder and didn’t relent. For Cormac, it was as if the Irish storm that killed so many people and crops and horses had made its way across the Atlantic. The North River was frozen solid all the way to Poughkeepsie, almost eighty miles distant. He worked in heavy clothes and slept in his overcoat and remembered the tale of Joseph and his brothers. Sometimes he saw himself huddling in the house with his father and Bran and Thunder, all of them together, refusing to give in to weather or fate. Thinking: Only one winter ago, but so long ago too. Would they both survive better if he and Mary Burton could huddle together through the frigid American nights? If he returned to his room on Stone Street, would that become more possible? But it couldn’t happen. The Hughsons would never allow her out at night, for she might end up on a runaway poster on the city’s walls. And he had no money now to pay for a room.

But in some way, the brutal New York cold and his memories of Ireland combined to revive his own search for the man who had brought him here. If the earl’s own horses had survived the Irish winter better, surely he wouldn’t have gone hunting for the horses of strangers. He could have stood on the pier and juggled while Africans eased out to sea in the wooden dungeons of the slave ships. The arctic wind had changed the earl’s life too.

In Cormac’s free time, or when running errands or delivering printing jobs, he looked with renewed passion for the Earl of Warren. Snow fell through one long night. Then fell again two days later. The piles of snow and hillocks of black ice made walking difficult, and if there were fewer people on the streets, they were revealed in greater clarity. But he felt more often now that he’d made some terrible mistake in coming to New York. He began to think that he had followed the earl to a place where he had not gone.

And then, on the day before Christmas, after dropping some printed notices at the Lutheran Church, which stood then a block south of Trinity, he turned into Wall Street and there he was.

The earl.

Getting into a cream-colored carriage in front of City Hall. Cormac’s heart jumped. His chapped hands begin to sweat in the cold. The carriage started moving east toward the waterfront. Cormac thought: Is he leaving on a ship? In this cold? No, the river is frozen, with great slabs of ice crunching against one another and bending the pilings, and it’s almost Christmas. No ship will sail.

He went after the cream-colored carriage, walking cautiously at first through the most crowded, snow-packed blocks (for business had not paused yet to celebrate the birth of Christ). He steadied his pace, afraid of attracting attention, wishing he had the sword. Thinking: I could catch him and kill him. But not without a sword. Thinking: I must know where he goes. Must know where he lives.

And then the carriage picked up speed. Cormac hurried, skipping faster, shoving aside small knots of men, sliding on glossy sheets of ice, thumping through crusted snow. The carriage turned left into Water Street, heading north, and Cormac began to run. He fell once, then again.

The carriage was too fast. It didn’t pause at any of the wharves, and rolled north. Cormac watched it vanish over the ridge and the frozen stream that spilled from the Common.

He stood there, his heart skipping beats, gasping for frigid air. His elbow ached from a fall. He bent it and gazed at the blank white haze to the north.