Pete Hamill - Forever

Thinking: He’s here.

The earl is here.

Early Christmas morning, while the sky remained blue with night, Cormac rose early, dressed warmly, and hurried down to the Fly Market to find Kongo. The streets were icy, snow-packed, and empty. Windows were rimed with ice. He found Kongo in the backyard of Guilfoyle the builder, where he and Quaco were feeding a fire with scrap wood. Both wore fur hats, cloth gloves, and heavy coats, and reminded him of the Celts in their hidden grove. Quaco bid Cormac good morning, uttered an ironical “Merry Christmas,” and smiled as they shook hands.

“How is it you’re not in the big church with all the other wonderful Christians?” Quaco said.

“I’d rather be here,” Cormac said. “I need to talk to… the babalawo.”

He gestured for Kongo to step aside and speak to him alone. Kongo excused himself to Quaco and walked with Cormac to the dark side of a shed.

“Yes?” he said.

“I need your help.”

“What for?” he said, his accent slightly Irish.

“I have to find a man named the Earl of Warren,” he said. “Last year in Ireland, he caused my father to be shot dead, and in our tribe, the son must avenge the father.”

“In my tribe too.”

“I came here to find him,” Cormac said. “That’s why I was on the Fury . I’ve looked for him for many months, and yesterday, at last, I saw him. On the street. He went north in a coach, but I couldn’t follow in the snow and ice.”

“You want him dead?”

“Yes, but I’m the only one who can do it. I’ve already killed one of his men, and perhaps a second, whose hand I chopped off. It’s my responsibility, Kongo. But I hope that, somehow, you and your friends can find him for me.”

He showed Kongo a folded drawing he’d made of the earl, and the African peered at it, his brow tightening. Perhaps Kongo could spread the word among the Africans (Cormac said), to look for the cream-colored carriage and the Englishman who looked like the man in the sketch. The diamond tooth, Cormac said, pointing, and then pulling a face to show his own bicuspid. The tooth. If they find him, he said, tell me. I’ll do the rest. He reminded Kongo that the earl had made much of his fortune in the slave trade. The African glanced again at the drawing and slipped it inside his coat.

“I’ll look,” he said. “If he on this island, we find him.” Cormac hugged him, then smiled and stepped back.

“Your English is much better.”

Kongo shrugged. “I have no, uh, choice, yes? To eat, I must speak.”

But Cormac thought: His English is now too good to have been merely lifted in passing. He has been studying. Or receiving help more mysterious than studying. Babalawo. He wanted to ask Kongo more. Instead, Kongo explained that for the next week Wilson the painter had rented him out to Guilfoyle the builder. Right here. This building. No work today. No work on Christmas. But he shook his head at the shame of being as rentable as a dray horse. Then, after a long silence (one that silenced Cormac’s questions too), he took the young man’s elbow and walked him toward the shore.

“There is something… coming?” he said. “Yes, the word is ‘coming.’ To come.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean there is something big to happen, as soon as winter ends.”

“What kind of something?”

“I let you know,” he said. “It’s about us. The Africans and the Irish. And the fleets of Spain.”

He glanced at the wan winter sun rising slowly across the river in Brooklyn.

“Say nothing,” he said. “Ask nothing.” He gestured toward the sun. “But know that… the gods know. The gods say yes.”

He turned and hurried back to Quaco and the fire. Cormac thought: I’ll have to wait to ask the meaning of the word babalawo .

Something big was indeed happening. Part of it Cormac saw. Part of it was told to him. But all the bits and pieces, the muted warnings, the whispered gossip came to the same thing: a rising. In the first weeks of 1741, the town was almost empty of redcoats, their main force now down in the Indies, defending the sanctity of Jenkins’s ear. In their absence, New York Africans and New York Irishmen were meeting in Hughson’s tavern to talk about guns and death and freedom.

“You’re very… distracted these past days, Cormac,” said Mr. Partridge one afternoon. He looked at Cormac in a worried way. “Are you homesick?”

Cormac smiled. “Sometimes.”

“What is it that you miss?”

“Oh, just…”

He paused in the process of pulling sheets for a wine seller.

“Small things, I s’pose,” he said. “The house we had, made by my father’s hands and the help of his friends. The wet grass on a summer morning. We had a dog named Bran and a horse named Thunder. I miss them. I miss my mother telling stories. I miss my father in all ways. I miss the woods and the fields and the hearth in the house….”

Mr. Partridge stared at him.

“Well, all of us here feel the same things, in one way or another,” he said. “I feel them and the soldiers feel them and the Africans too.”

“I know that.”

“It’s why some go back,” Mr. Partridge said. “They can’t bear it. We’re like colonists on the bloody moon. And yet…” He sighed. “And yet, we might have something in our hands that’s not been seen in hundreds of years, maybe never, lad. For the King and his hired hands can’t forever impose their will on us here, can they? Not with an ocean between them and us. We might have the chance to build a country. Not a colony. A country! Imagine that! And not just a country, a republic!”

Cormac realized that Mr. Partridge saw a blankness in his face. A republic? What was a republic?

“You must read Machiavelli!” Mr. Partridge said. “I think I have a copy upstairs, and if not, I’ll find one. Not The Prince . That’s the book Machiavelli wrote to get a job, full of blatherskite. No, you must read the Discourses on Livy ! Best argument ever made for a republic. Old Machiavelli knew you couldn’t have a country—or an army—or collect taxes—unless the people gave their consent. That meant, no kings! ”

He had begun to sweat, and tamped his brow with the clean side of a printer’s rag. Then turned again to Cormac.

“There’s another reason for your… preoccupation, isn’t there, lad?”

“Well, I don’t know…”

“What’s her name?”

Cormac feigned a grin, the response that he thought Mr. Partridge expected. He didn’t answer.

“I suspected so,” Mr. Partridge said. He smiled in a dubious way and turned to the press. “Well, let’s get on with it….”

In the solitude of the night, Cormac tried to sort out the separate boxes of his life. He told himself that he must arrange them as if his mind were a type case. The largest letters were in the top drawer: they spelled out the name of the earl, and his presence in New York, and Cormac’s hope that Kongo’s men would find him. His Irish vows were in that box, and the rules of his tribe, and there were mornings when he awoke on Cortlandt Street and thought he was still five years old in Ireland, about to run barefoot on wet grass.

In the drawer below was Mary Burton. She scared him in some ways, because she lived most completely in the future, in some glorious place where she was free. At the same time, she threatened his own freedom. He wanted a woman’s body, a woman’s voice, a woman’s voice in the dark. But he could not yet imagine a life with children, in a house where he would live and die, far from home. He couldn’t imagine building a hearth that would put a soul into a house shared with Mary Burton. Not now. Not yet. He could imagine no future until he had rid himself of the pursuit of the earl.