Pete Hamill - Forever

It was the Americans.

A dozen of them, dressed in the uniforms of the Continental Army, bursting among them, seeing the dead redcoats and the four men with black faces. One shouted: “We’ve broken their lines! They’re running!”

And rushed past them, raising weapons, leaping into forest, crashing forward, shooting. Cormac realized that they were in the midst of the first victory of the Revolution.

But still the black patrol did not move. The wolf cub made a crying sound. Somewhere in the woods were other cubs, a mother, perhaps all of them dead, killed by fearful men.

“We go now,” Aaron said. “We fetch Big Michael.”

They moved toward Kip’s Bay through the morning. Along the way, they saw scattered corpses in Hessian blue or English scarlet, providing a harvest for flies and worms. At a small river, they entered the cold waters and scrubbed at the blood on their bodies and clothes, Bantu holding the cub over his head, its jaws now shut by gold braid torn from an English corpse.

A hard gray rain began falling. When they came to an abandoned farmhouse, they entered and bolted the doors behind them. The farmers must have been gone for only a few days, fleeing the war. Carlito started a fire in the hearth and they boiled potatoes and carrots and fried strips of bacon and slathered butter on hard bread. “Better it does not spoil,” Silver said, and smiled, his mouth full of wobbly wooden teeth. “Better we eat.” There were apples too, and grapes, and they ate quietly, peering out at the falling rain and the rolling forests. Bantu fed bread and bacon to the cub and put water in a dish for him to drink. With his back to a wall, staring at the fire, Cormac remembered his hunger in the arctic winter in Ireland, devouring cheese in a dairy, more hungry than he’d ever been before or since. He told the others to sleep while he stood the first watch. They would go for Big Michael in the dark.

They slept, the wolf cub curled into Bantu’s armpit, and Cormac surveyed the house. It was more than a house, he thought: It was a home. He and the others were sleeping within its walls, but it was not their home. Men like us, he thought, have no homes.

He entered the next room, where there were two hard, narrow beds covered with quilts. The closets held women’s clothes. Shifts and dresses for a large woman, broad-beamed, large-bosomed. The others were for a smaller, thinner woman. Mother and daughter, perhaps. Or sisters. Mother and cub.

The clothes and bodies and faces of women flooded through him as he moved on bare feet around the room and then back into the place where the men were sleeping. It was thirty-five years since he’d seen Bridget Riley sail out of New York, thirty-five years since he’d last looked upon the hard, confused face of Mary Burton. There had been many women since then. Which was to say, he’d had no women.

He knew enough about himself now to understand his habits of holding back, of refusing. He had read much poetry and a few novels, and had listened to many women, to their questions, to their tears. He knew that the combination of Bridget Riley and Mary Burton had put fear in his heart in the place where love demanded fearlessness. He knew that not all women were like those women of 1741, that no woman was exactly like any other woman. But their presence remained alive, full of the potential for betrayal, for illusion, for inexplicable loyalties. Bridget was loyal to the earl; Mary had been, in her way, loyal to Cormac. How could he think all women were alike?

And more important, there was this other thing, this gift granted to him in a cave in Inwood. There was no way, at first, to know if this was a dream, a wish born in his own brain. He could only know its truth by living. Now he knew it was true. He had continued to live while others died, he had remained young, in all obvious ways, while others withered and turned gray and walked Broadway in feeble, palsied steps. That affected him with women. How could he remain with one woman who would gaze at him and then gaze in the mirror? She would know he was different. She would know that he was beyond the normal cycles of a life.

Better to let each woman know that he was a passing fancy, that they could enjoy the pleasures of each other’s body, but that each could be alone in the morning. Many women welcomed such an understanding. Widows, the wives of seagoing men, women locked in loveless unions, older women whose children had gone off. They welcomed the excitement of aroused flesh. They welcomed whispered words. They welcomed the gift of a rose or a locket. As years passed, more of them thought he was a handsome young man, when he was actually older than any of them. All were excellent teachers, and he thought of some of them as if they were books he had taken down from shelves.

“There’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” they would say, and then do what he had done many times with women in his rented rooms. The town was filling up with strangers, with women who did not know one another, and were thus free of the intimacies of gossip. The village he’d come to as a boy was becoming a town and was certain to become a city. And in the anonymous crowds, all was possible.

Bantu stirred, without benefit of a clock. He would now take the watch. Cormac nodded and went into the bedroom, to lie down and inhale the odor of a woman’s body.

At some hour before midnight, they found Big Michael where he had fallen, facedown in the earth. Animals had gnawed the flesh on his neck and arms. Aaron started digging with a spade stolen from the farmhouse, and the others gazed toward Kip’s Bay, visible under the moon, with lanterns blazing on the English frigates and men still crossing to the shore in longboats. They must be quick. Silver took the spade, followed by Bantu and Cormac and Carlito. Grunting and digging, until the trench was deep enough to keep Big Michael from the paws of foraging animals. They lifted Big Michael’s body together, the wolf cub yipping and excited, and then lowered him gently. His bones would be part of this island, Cormac thought, for as long as there was an island.

Bantu spoke in Yoruba, consigning Big Michael to the care of the gods.

“We will see you in the Otherworld, O brother,” he said.

And then they started the long journey to the north, to meet with Washington’s triumphant army. They passed small groups of redcoats sullenly guarding campfires. They forded streams. They saw bodies of Americans and Englishmen and Hessians. They paused to rest, then began again. At last they saw the escarpment of Harlem Heights, outlined against the dawn.

It was empty. Washington’s army was gone.

“They’ve marched to White Plains,” an American scout told them. “The whole lot of them.”

“And will fight in White Plains?” Cormac said.

“I suppose. They don’t tell the likes of me such things. But I guess they’ll fight a bit, then cross the river. The English are now between us and White Plains, they came in the morning, so the only place for Washington to go is New Jersey….”

The black patrol was silent, staring at one another’s stunned faces. They’d been left behind. Abandoned. God damn it. Silver asked if there were any other boats that could take them across the river.

“Not that I know,” the scout said. “My orders are to go home in another day.”

“Where is home?” Carlito asked.

“Westport.”

“So Washington is handing New York to the Crown?” Cormac said.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. I know I go home tomorrow.”

Cormac looked south. The sun was seeping into the sky above Brooklyn.

“Let’s go,” he said to the others.

“Where?”

“New York,” he said.

Bantu took the braid from the muzzle of the wolf cub and walked him into the woods and set him free.