Pete Hamill - Forever

Cormac was always hungry, always mildly sick, but while others died, he lived on. Month after punishing month. And thought himself lucky. At least they had not moved him beyond Manhattan to the prison ships in Wallabout Bay, for he would surely have died before being slammed in the fetid holds. I must stay here, he thought, stay in this Manhattan, this piece of the world defined for me by Kongo when he passed me the gift. Manhattan is my jail.

And in the jail, time was suspended. There were no calendars, no newspapers, as days turned into weeks and then into months. Men scratched lines into the walls with nails, trying to keep count, but lost the sums to fever and injury. They asked new arrivals what month it was, what day, what year.

The Bridewell was soon called by the prisoners the Bribewell. Every guard was corrupt. Everything forbidden was available for a price, except weapons. The guards looked the other way when relatives smuggled food, tobacco, or cash to prisoners. They knew the contraband was the currency of the prison, which was to say it helped them to earn a living. But Cormac had no relatives. And all his friends were dead.

On the western side of Broadway, trailing away to the Hudson, there were rows of shabby two-story houses, and from a few high windows of the Bridewell, the prisoners could see the Holy Ground, where the whores worked at their bitter trade. One chubby woman would emerge at dusk and fondle her naked breasts and place a hand between her chubby thighs while dying men masturbated in their cells; it was a whore’s version of charity. Or of a sweet American solidarity. Cormac too longed for a woman, and then erased that possibility with images of the dead and the dying. Of Bantu caressing a cub. Of Aaron longing for a home.

The whores’ numbers were swollen by the arrival of two thousand Liverpool women sent to provide comfort to the British soldiery. They were housed in the older homes of Tories who had fled. But Cormac knew, from watching, from words spoken by agents before his capture, from other prisoners, that the whores were, in fact, neutral. They serviced English soldiers and secret American patriots, gathering money for themselves and intelligence for both sides. Whores, Cormac knew, were always citizens of the country of money. But even in the Bridewell, with his skin scabbed by sores, his bones protruding from his eroded flesh, his hair crawling with lice, he soon discovered that he could not escape his past.

One morning a new prisoner passed him a sheet from a smuggled newspaper, and Cormac began to read every line. If there was a report about the war, it must have been on another page. On this page, there were items about shipping, and a disease without a name that was infecting North African ports, and then some social notes. Down at the bottom of the social notes, a name caught his eyes.

LADY WARREN SAILS

It said:

Lady Warren of Carrickfergus has sailed for Charleston on the Intrepid. She was in New York visiting her son, who is serving with the Crown forces. From Charleston, she will return to her estate in Ireland.

Lady Warren of Carrickfergus.

Bridget Riley.

Visiting her son.

It never ends, Cormac thought.

It never fecking ends.

The commander of the Bridewell was a major named William Cunningham. The older prisoners included a victualer named Anderson, who knew how Cunningham worked.

“He pockets half the money allowed for food and sends it home by courier,” Anderson said. “He doesn’t give a fiddler’s feck if we starve to death on half rations, and they are starvin’ right now on them ships in the Wallabout. He wants the war to last forever, so he can bank enough to join the gentry.”

Cunningham didn’t come often to see the victims of his corruption. But eight months into Cormac’s stay in the Bridewell, he looked up to see Cunningham’s new second-in-command. He was walking beyond the bars down a safe corridor beside Cunningham.

The son of the Earl of Warren and Bridget Riley. His hair was lighter, with highlights of red, but otherwise he could have been a twin of the earl in that year when he stepped from the black coach to look upon the broken body of Rebecca Carson lying in the mud.

They called him Tony Warren. He worked under Cunningham, but in all the small ways, Cunningham deferred to his noble blood. Together, they helped men die. The prisoners died of typhus. Died of floggings. Died of hunger. Died of tuberculosis. Died of cholera. Died because William Cunningham, the provost marshal, stole half the ration money while Tony Warren shrugged and cocked an eyebrow and chuckled.

All the prisoners knew the system and how it worked. They heard from new arrivals how Cunningham’s men starved and flogged and tortured the prisoners on the ships across the river on the Brooklyn side, over in Wallabout Bay. Eleven thousand of them were packed in those ships that never sailed. The soldiers tossed the bodies into the tides or shoved them into the mudflats, where the shrouds soon rotted and American bones could be seen at low tide. His men tortured the Africans who paid for their revolt in the Old Sugar Factory. In the Bridewell, Cunningham executed those he thought were Obnoxious Persons and those who were Cormac’s old comrades in the Sons of Liberty, their activities revealed by men who took the King’s shilling. A man could die for refusing to bow or defer to some red-coated dandy. A man could die for reading Thomas Paine or the secret newspapers of the Revolution. Trials were not necessary. Suspicion was enough. The killing took place at night, against the walls of the army barracks, all doors ordered shut in the neighboring houses of the Holy Ground, all windows sealed, all lights extinguished, and the prisoners were brought, blindfolded and gagged, and walked up the steps of the scaffold. The rope was attached. And then they were dropped into permanent darkness.

Cormac vowed to remember the names of the dead: Guinness and Sterling, Hewitt and Roberts, Arundel and Dubois, Frankie Hannigan and Sammy Payne. Good men and true, he thought, even with (or because of) the flesh hanging loose and gray on their brave bones, wrapped in flea-ridden blankets, and to the end refusing everything: refusing collaboration, refusing deferential manners, refusing to bow to any king. On the night of the Fourth of July in 1780, the prisoners roared defiance in the Bridewell, and sang the liberty songs, and cursed the King. Cunningham came himself that night, with Tony Warren behind him, their faces dark with fury, their leather boots clacking on the stone floors. They chose the men they wanted, Guinness and Sterling, Hewitt and Roberts, Arundel and Dubois among them, and then called on the services of Bloodstone, the army blacksmith. He was carrying a twenty-pound hammer. They laid each man flat upon the floor for all to see and then Bloodstone smashed their knees and elbows. They screamed and screamed and screamed.

“Fecking rabble,” Warren said, as he followed Cunningham out of the row of cells.

And as he whirled, his coat opened, and Cormac saw that he was wearing the sword. Saw the spirals etched in steel. Thinking: My father’s sword. Telling himself: I must get out of the Bridewell. I must find Tony Warren on the streets of New York. I must get to the end of the line. I must return my father’s sword to the blood of his blood.

Whores were the agents of salvation.

One of them was named Kitty Nevins: red-haired, full-breasted, with the guts (Cormac thought) of nine burglars. She devised the code and smuggled it into the prison and then chalked the first coded messages on slate that they could read from the cell windows. She it was, with two of her sisters in the life, who seduced the guards with perfumed flesh and smuggled in the guns. Who had horses waiting. Who waited in the hammering midnight rain while the prisoners used keys wrenched from drained guards and then smashed and threatened their way out, unlocking as many cells as possible. Suddenly more than twenty of the prisoners were running free, mad and desperate, filthy as sewers, manacled and bony. Cormac was with them, running into Broadway, a pistol in his waistband, a musket in a manacled hand. Hobbled, weak, fierce with life. In the break for the street, the shooting started. Cormac shot two redcoats, one with the pistol, the second with the musket. He dropped the musket, jammed the pistol in his waistband, lunged for one horse-drawn carriage, and fell short into mud, and watched the carriage gallop toward the North River. Heard shouts. Curses. More gunfire. And ran north through the black rain.