Pete Hamill - Forever

They fought their own war now. They sawed through the beams of bridges at midnight, spilling carriages and caissons into streams. They broke into warehouses and killed guards and stole rifles and sent them on boats across the river to New Jersey. They spread posters on the walls of buildings, advising English soldiers to save their lives by going home. Most of all, they burned houses.

“They keep taking houses for their soldiers and their officers,” Cormac said. “We have to force them to sleep in the rain.”

He explained what had been done in 1741, and how the conspirators had waited a day for the wind. They must set up everything carefully, straw, paper, oil, kindling. So they did, with Bantu and Silver posing as water carriers, lamp oils suspended at each end of poles. Aaron was a carpenter, with papers stating that he was a freeman, manumitted by a dying owner (printed at night by Cormac in the shop of one of the Sons of Liberty). He went from door to door, offering his services, peering around storerooms and workshops. Carlito met with the Spanish slaves, learning the vulnerabilities of the homes and workplaces of their masters. Cormac marked maps. In the afternoons, one at a time, they wandered past the places where the fire pumps were stored and punctured the bottoms of water buckets and sliced holes in the hoses. At night, Cormac dreamed of fire and destruction.

The rest of life seemed almost normal. As the English officers arrived in New York, the Tories welcomed them, throwing elegant parties, hosting nights of song and loyalty at the John Street Theater. They called down God’s blessings on the Sovereign while clavichord music tinkled from the mansions near the Bowling Green. Tory mothers presented their daughters like offerings. Whores began ringing the fort. One or two at a time, and then in larger numbers, the Americans had been slipping away, some carrying their valuables to country places, others boarding ships for the South. Some were loyal to Washington. Others wanted to avoid what was certain to come to the streets of New York. The English did not interfere with their flight. They wanted the abandoned American homes.

Cormac, dressed as a mechanic, was watching part of this sad American exodus one evening on Broadway when a large redhaired man came up beside him. He was wearing a cape, his hands hidden.

“They’ll be back,” the red-haired man said. The accent Irish.

“Aye,” Cormac said.

“Don’t ye think?” the man said.

Cormac shrugged. It was impossible to know the sides that each man had chosen in this town; this Irishman could be just another English spy. “Where do you come from?” Cormac asked in Irish. The man seemed startled, and answered, “Armagh.” Another voyager from Ulster. They stood together, and as the last carriage passed on its way north, Cormac heard the sound of uilleann pipes. He was surprised. The sound was mournful, sad, angry, all at once, and seemed to come from the chest of the red-haired man from Armagh. Cormac stepped back and realized the man was playing his pipes under the cape, using his right elbow for power.

“Good day, sir,” Cormac said, and walked quickly away as the man gave voice through his pipes to the ghosts mixed with the higher-pitched howl of the banshee.

Then one night, as a hard wind blew toward the west, the fire began. Cormac set it off in the empty upstairs rooms of a tavern called the Fighting Cocks, down by the waterfront off Whitehall. The barroom was full of Hessians, singing in German, and Cormac left through a window. He moved languidly through the streets toward the East River, then cut north and back west toward the Common. When he turned, the sky was red. Bells replaced the tinkling of clavichords. Soldiers ran in a dozen directions and then backed away from the roaring flames. Water once more dribbled from hoses as small geysers arose from punctures. The buckets were like sieves. Horses whinnied and bucked and pounded at stable doors. There were screams and lamentations.

Cormac and the patrol moved separately north. Then, at the bottom of the Common, he stood very still and saw flames rising in the immense steeple of Trinity Church. The tallest building in New York. The symbol of English domination. The flames burned on the surface. They burned inside the church. The tongues of the fire were pointed toward New Jersey, blowing hard, and were jumping roof to roof all the way to Barclay Street, somehow missing St. Paul’s Chapel. But he could not stop himself from gazing at Trinity. That was not one of their targets. And now the flames were eating at it. The steeple wobbled, then gave off a noise like an immense complaint and fell straight down in a giant roar. The burning pinnacle of the steeple lay on its side in the graveyard, like a corpse. Screams of awe filled the air. He remembered the way, on an afternoon thirty-five years earlier, Diamond had been burned on the edge of this Common, and the way John Hughson’s corpse had turned black and Sandy’s turned white, and the way the Rev. Clifford had grasped at his crotch in a delirium of death.

It was time to go. He hurried to the hill above the Collect, where the Africans waited. The sky to the south was as bright now as at noon, and they could see tongues of flame rising from many houses below Wall Street.

“Let them sleep in snow,” Bantu said.

When the long night was over, 407 houses had been reduced to smoking rubble. Now it was the Tories’ turn to trudge north to their estates or to board ships for England. And the redcoats came down upon the Americans with all of their fury. Every young man was a suspect. Men with histories in the Sons of Liberty were arrested and questioned and executed by firing squads. Others were crammed into the Bridewell prison, built upon the grass of the Common. Six men were hanged from the ancient gibbets on the hill above the Collect. Others were rounded up and press-ganged into dousing water on the smoldering rubble of the 407 ruined houses. All events were canceled at the John Street Theater. There were no more tinkling dinner parties. Soldiers, hard Tories, and Americans settled in for a long occupation.

Cormac and the black patrol found shelter in the swamp beyond the Collect, in an old cabin shrouded by tangled vines and dense thickets. Each day, one of them would slip into the town, to find food, to pick up news and gather information about future targets. They learned that the English were making concessions to the Africans now. They didn’t call them concessions. They called them pledges. But the message was simple: If the Africans swore loyalty to the Crown, if they defended their masters, they would be freed at the end of the war.

“Do you believe them?” Cormac asked Bantu one cold night in the swamp.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You take freedom. Nobody give it to you.”

Silver said: “But some Africa people listen. They want to believe. You tell them, this is a trick. They say nothing. But they thinkin’ ’bout it, all sure.”

“They think Washington is finish,” Carlito said. “They think it be over soon, so they listen, they listen.”

“What do you think?”

“I think we keep fighting,” Bantu said.

On another early morning, after a night spent cutting ditches through a main road to harass coach traffic, Cormac asked them what they would do when they were free.

“Farm,” said Aaron. “With my woman, my children. Farm up in the island. Grow potato and yam. Have chickens to sell. Milk… Send my boys to school. And girls too, ef I have girls.”

“Open a shop down by Wall Street,” said Silver. “Make all kinds of leather stuff, belts and shoes and cases, all leather things. Live upstairs. Drink rum on Saturday night. Eat turkey on Sunday.”