Pete Hamill - Forever

During his walks through the lower town, Cormac saw Tony Warren four times, but he was never alone. The city remained ruled by martial law, but it was more relaxed now, as social life returned. Cormac could even hear the music of string quartets drifting from a few of the mansions. The English had created routine to make their duty both safe and pleasant, and a guard on the doorsteps of officers’ quarters was part of that routine.

Then, one rain-drowned night, easing out of Canvastown into Cortlandt Street, Cormac started toward Broadway. Across the street, Warren stepped out of a bordello. He was alone. He began walking toward his billet on Beaver Street, ignoring the rain, taking small, precise steps, like a man who had sipped too much wine. Cormac moved past him, then turned and placed himself in front of the man. Warren was suddenly tense. He squinted at Cormac and drew his sword. The sword.

“Clear the way,” he said in a slurry voice.

“Sorry,” Cormac said. “I can’t do that.”

“I’m ordering you to do that.”

“I respectfully decline the order, Mister Warren.”

Warren’s eyes widened.

“What is this? Who are you and what do you want?”

“I want that sword,” Cormac said. “It belonged to my father.” Warren squinted, his face puzzled, and raised the sword. Cormac took a dirk from his belt.

“This is my sword,” Warren said. “I paid for it. I own it. And if you don’t leave, you’ll taste it quick.”

He smiled then in a cold way and stepped forward.

“I want that sword,” Cormac said.

Warren took another step, put his weight on his left foot, and swung. Cormac stepped inside the arc and deflected the sword with the dirk. Warren smiled, shifted to another angle, grunted, and swung the sword in a wider arc. Cormac backed away almost daintily. A third swing knocked the dirk from Cormac’s hand. Then Warren charged, lifted the sword to finish the fight, and Cormac stepped inside the arc of his swing, grabbed Warren’s right arm, and spun him, slamming him against a wall. Before Warren could again cock the sword, Cormac grabbed his sword hand in both of his own and drove his thumbs into the cleft between his first and second knuckles. Drove them with splitting force. Until Warren made a whimpering sound, dropped the sword.

“You’ll be hanged for this,” Warren said.

“Perhaps.”

Cormac picked up the dirk, then started for the sword. Warren jerked a pistol from inside his coat. Cormac didn’t wait. He rushed Warren, pushed the gun hand aside, and drove the knife into his chest.

Warren’s eyes widened. His lips moved, but no words emerged. The rain pelted him. Then an arm jerked and a leg moved and he fell to his side on the wet street with the knife handle jutting from his heart.

Cormac picked up the sword and walked quickly into the rainy wilderness of burned houses.

Something went out of Cormac after he killed Tony Warren and recovered the sword. He could feel it in his bones, and in the odd lack of feeling about killing another man, another Warren. It was something he was bound to do, by the terms of an old contract. And Tony Warren was a mean man. The earl without the smile or the juggling. But he felt no satisfaction. The earl sometimes appeared in his dreams, floating in black rivers, but there was no trace of his son. It was as if he had never existed. Or that the killing on Beaver Street had been an affair between two strangers.

There was, of course, no notice of the death in the newspapers; the censors would not permit such dreadful news. So Cormac didn’t know where Tony Warren had been buried, and whether his mother would come to visit his grave. He had killed him. That was that. Now he’d go back to the war. Except that in New York, there was no war. The war was elsewhere. Upstate. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey and in the South. Cormac continued gathering bits and pieces of intelligence and passing them to couriers. He continued walking the streets of the sullen town, looking for vulnerabilities, for targets. He worked with the Africans on small acts of sabotage and carried his sword with him, strapped again across his back. But after Tony Warren, he never killed another British soldier.

“You lost something, Cormac,” said Quaco one evening.

“I did,” said Cormac. “And I don’t know what it is.”

The news came about Yorktown and the end of the war, and Cormac celebrated with Quaco and his wife and three of their children. There was little talk of the future. “We see what they do,” Quaco said, “not what they say.” The peace conference was held in Paris, lasting for months while Washington sheltered with his army up the Hudson in Windsor Forest. The war was finally settled, the treaty signed, a date set for the departure of the British armies. Cormac wandered among exuberant Americans who gathered around the Common, and greeted the few men he still knew from the Bridewell, as they were released a dozen at a time. Nobody talked about the Africans, and he saw them in small, cautious clusters, quiet in the celebrations, watching, pondering.

Now the Tories were leaving by the many thousands, boarding boats for Canada and England, carrying with them huge trunks and crates of goods and their slaves. On the ships, many of the Africans were smiling. They were going, they truly believed, to freedom.

A few Tories wept as they left the town they had come to love too well. Many turned sullen and withdrawn. Families from Canvastown began moving into the abandoned Tory houses, chopping furniture into pieces to make fires under the carved mantels. Bands of small boys threw stones and horseshit at redcoats and were smashed with rifle butts or chased down alleys. But the commander didn’t respond with great force; to avoid clashes, he ordered the redcoats confined to their barracks. The rented Hessians had been gone since Yorktown. Now English officers were forced out of the houses they had taken from Americans, and Cormac watched as officers loaded wagons outside the house on Beaver Street where Tony Warren had lived his last days. He felt no sense of victory.

In late summer, many Americans who had supported the Revolution began to return, to see what was left of their lives. They filled the taverns. They sampled the Shakespeare at the John Street Theater. They combed the flea markets in search of their stolen furniture, the portraits of their Dutch and English ancestors, engravings made of their now-ruined houses. Most of their businesses had been destroyed by fire, but they began to sketch out plans for what would rise from the ashes. They would drain the swamps and level the hills. They would build stone buildings. They would dig deep wells for water. Cormac asked some of them what they wanted in a constitution. They had clear ideas about individual liberties. With one major exception. Slavery would continue. “It must,” one of them said, “or we’ll have no country.”

They began searching for their own slaves, forming small posses of armed men to gather them as if they were stray horses. Many Africans fled into what was left of the woods above the town. Cormac and Quaco assembled a dozen armed Africans, divided into groups of four, all wearing the badges of the Revolution. They followed the slave-gathering posses, placed themselves between the Americans and their African quarries, and liberated them at gunpoint. But the Americans were relentless. They placed bounties on their former slaves, posted their names on the town’s walls. In one encounter, two of the bounty hunters were killed by Quaco’s sons. One enraged American pursued a slave in a longboat to one of the ships anchored in the East River. Cormac watched from the shore as the blacks rowed hard in a longboat of their own, came alongside the American boat, fought briefly, and then tipped the Americans into the river.