Pete Hamill - Forever

Washington snorted. He turned, flexing his hands, rolling his shoulders. He was breathing hard, struggling for control.

“What’s your name?”

“Cormac O’Connor.”

“Irish, of course.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Catholic?”

“No.”

He paused, breathing more normally now.

“How many men did you kill today?”

“Our patrol killed about thirty.”

“Your patrol? What patrol?”

“The black patrol, sir. There’s me and five blacks. One of them was killed today. We’d like to go in tomorrow, sir, and bring out his body.”

Now he was staring at Cormac.

“Are they all slaves?”

“They were, sir. They’re soldiers now. American soldiers.” “Have they been fed?”

“Yes, sir. They’re looking for ammunition now. They used all they had.”

“And they’re good soldiers?”

“You saw them. They didn’t run.”

He sat down again in his camp chair and offered the empty chair to Cormac.

“Why did they fight while so many ran?”

“They want to be free, General. That’s why they’re with us. That’s why they listened to me when I recruited them. That’s why they won’t disappear when times get hard. They want to be free, sir. Free.”

Washington looked at him for a long moment and there was something moving in his eyes that Cormac couldn’t identify.

“Would you like a glass of wine?” Washington said.

The cannon screamed through the night, exploding around them, scattering soldiers, collapsing tents. Cormac knew what was happening: The English and their hired Hessian soldiers wanted to smash the Americans here in Harlem Heights, splinter and ruin their five thousand troops, capture or kill Washington. If they could do that, the revolution would be over. They could all sing songs, get drunk, sleep with whores, and get ready to go home.

Washington that night would not let them do any of that. He was everywhere, sword in hand, his face filled with furies, shouting, commanding, calling on pride. “Your children will remember you for this night! Don’t fail them!” And, “Die on your knees, you crazy American bastards!” And, “Send them all to Hell, boys!”

And they held. They held the lines, Cormac and Bantu, Aaron and Silver and Carlito among them, pouring fire into the moving lines in the dense wooded hollow below the heights. Still the cannon roared, the balls tore through young bodies. An old man rose in fury, his white hair spiky against the dark sky, and cried: “Come and fight, you feckers! Come and die!” And then was smashed by a cannonball, knocked over into death like a bowling pin.

Cormac looked up and there was Washington on his horse, right above them.

“Their cannon are killing us!” he shouted. “Get your niggers and destroy the cannon.”

Cormac thought: They are not niggers, they’re Americans.

But Washington was gone, and there was no time for debate. Cormac and the black patrol slipped down the western side of the ridge, seeing the distant shimmer of the river, trying to estimate the location of the cannon from the arc of the balls. Then they saw the first scouts of an English flank, coming up the west side of the forest on a dirt road. Bantu gestured at a stone Dutch barn, its doors open, its animals gone. From its weed-sprouting walls, the path was a pale line under the moon. They hurried to the barn, spread themselves from the loft to the doors, waited, and then started killing soldiers. They shot the first two men who came up the rise, then the next three, then two more, all of them falling upon one another, forming a mound. All were redcoats. All kept coming as if they were toys, and the Americans kept firing and reloading and firing again, hands moving in a blur, fingers squeezing triggers. Redcoats fell to the forest floor.

Then the first cannonball tore through the roof of the barn, caroming wildly off the flagstone floor, and then another, and Cormac and the others slipped out the back and into the woods between the road and the river. Cormac thought: I killed the earl somewhere up here. Long ago. In another life.

They made a wide arc, moving the way wolves would move, drawn to the sound of the cannon. The moon did not penetrate the forest. Cormac strapped his rifle to his shoulder and drew the sword. So did the others. They did not need to explain to one another that here in the darkness they would fight silently. They came upon two Hessians, who turned in fear at the sight of four black faces. Too late. Bantu and Silver cut their throats.

Then they saw the clearing. Five cannon on wheels, a dozen redcoats loading balls, pouring powder. Cormac and the others hunkered low in the shrubs. They spread out, each charged with attacking the crew of one piece. Bantu was to shoot as many as possible while the others pounced with sword and knife. They watched as all five cannon were fired at once, the crews jamming fingers in their ears, some of them grinning. Then the Americans charged. Bantu had two rifles now, one lifted from a dead soldier, and he fired one, then the other, rolled on the ground to reload, and fired twice more. Three redcoats went down. Others turned in horror, reaching for rifles as their throats were slit. Cormac beheaded two men, then chopped another man’s arm at the shoulder.

They became a single creature made for killing. There was nothing else now. Just the killing. No fear, no choice, no thought. They stabbed and slashed and ripped. They chopped at necks. They drove swords through hearts. Few words were spoken as men grunted, or gagged on blood, or groaned, and then died.

Then it was over.

Cormac sat down hard on the thick leafy floor of the clearing. His hands were slippery with blood. It coated his sword and his clothes and his boots. He looked at the others. Silver leaned on a cannon, Bantu lay back against a tree. Aaron seemed dazed and drained, standing with short sword in hand, while Carlito draped a hand on his shoulders. All glistened with blood. They didn’t even look at the men they had slaughtered.

“We should take the heads,” Bantu said.

“Yah,” said Aaron.

Take the heads, Cormac told himself. The way the Irish always took the heads, the way the Fianna took the heads. Sever them. Hang them on poles. No. Don’t take the heads. Please don’t take the heads.

“They weigh too foogin’ much,” Silver said.

They laughed, and then went silent.

Now they could hear the trees riffling and sighing in the wind, and away off the crackle of rifle fire. A lot of rifle fire. But they still didn’t move. The air was thick with the odor of powder, of burning trees and smoldering leaves, of ripped-out guts, of leaking shit.

Finally Bantu stirred. Suddenly alert. He gripped his short sword, and turned to peer behind him into the darkness. The others tensed. He went on hands and knees, and then moved into some shrubbery. He came out grinning, holding a wolf cub.

“Yah!” he said. “Look.”

The cub was small and gray with a white face and yellow eyes. Bantu held it close, cradling it, and the animal began licking blood from his neck and face. Bantu smiled.

“American!” he said. “American!”

Each of them came to touch the cub, playing knobby fists against its small sharp teeth, stroking its fine new hair. Cormac felt a surge of emotion, as if he were again the boy on the fields of Ireland, with Bran barking beside him. They kept saying in the city that all the wolves were dead, and here was one of them, alive, separated, like every member of the black patrol, from the pack.

And then, as time stretched and compressed, an hour later or three minutes later, they heard another sound: a distant roar. They stood still, listening, hands clenching weapons. The roar was louder, coming to them through the trees and across boulders and above the bodies of the dead. Louder and louder. Louder than any sound he’d ever heard, punctuated by rifle shots.