Forever

by Pete Hamill

  His enthusiasm seemed to press against the walls of the cabin. He showed Cormac the books he planned to print in his own New York editions, volumes that would give the barbarians some instruction and pleasure. Like an excited schoolboy (he was at least thirty-five) Partridge rummaged in his cloth bag, dropping items on the bunk, and when Cormac saw the titles of the older man’s books, his heart beat more quickly. There were four by Alexander Pope: his translations of the Odyssey and the Iliad, his own Rape of the Lock and Dunciad. Partridge seemed startled when Cormac quoted a few lines from Pope’s poem on Heloise and Abelard. And when he showed the young man his copies of Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels, Cormac took from his satchel The Drapier’s Letters, and Mr. Partridge’s eyes widened and his lower lip trembled.

  “Well, at least you will not add to the barbarism of New York, lad.”

  Then he saw the banknotes folded into Swift’s pages and looked surprised.

  “You have a lot of money for a young man,” he said.

  “My father died and left it to me,” Cormac said, telling the truth. Or a truth.

  Mr. Partridge looked at Cormac in a dubious way and handed back the book with its folded notes.

  “How old are you anyway?”

  Cormac told him.

  “Sixteen? And do you have a trade?”

  “I can blacksmith a bit, Mr. Partridge, sir.”

  “Well, you can learn to print then too,” he said, his jolliness returning. “Everybody should have more than one trade. I’ve got more than one myself.”

  He handed Cormac a copy of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and a Milton pamphlet called Areopagitica. He caressed the pamphlet in a loving way.

  “Read that, lad. It’s the best argument ever made for freedom of the press. Perhaps we can personally hand it to this Mister Zenger.”

  He talked of Milton and Pope and Swift as if he knew them (and, of course, he knew the best of them) while they walked the decks and ate their meals. His tone was enthusiastic and always personal and very serious. Cormac thought: O Father, I wish you could have met this Englishman.

  Hour after hour, when he was not reading or dozing, Mr. Partridge explained what the sailors were doing in the rigging, which they climbed like athletes, and why there were so many objects lashed to the deck. All had to do with the voyage. The rough wooden cage was called the barnyard, with its four segregated pigs and many chickens, and that grave, solemn man peering through the slats was Jeffries, the cook. Other bundles contained provisions for the voyage: kegs of water, salted beef, limes for scurvy. The rest were the luggage of sailors and passengers alike. Mr. Partridge said that among his several trades (barber and knife sharpener, along with printer), he was a tailor, and one of the lashed bundles contained cloth for suits he planned to make in New York, or even during the voyage. He eyed Cormac’s ill-fitting clothes when he said this.

  “You’d best get a suit yourself, lad, or they’ll think you’re a fugitive. That thing you’re wearing looks pulled off a dead man. And, yes, we’d better trim your hair before you land.”

  Cormac’s nerves trembled then; if Mr. Partridge believed he looked like a fugitive, perhaps some of the ship’s officers would too, and they might wonder about the money he was carrying and hold him for arrival in New York. On general suspicion of felony. He vowed silently to get himself a new suit, quickly cut to fit by Mr. Partridge. But he said nothing, because at this point Mr. Partridge was serving as a guide to the world called Belowdecks.

  32.

  Down there, Cormac began to see what he had never seen before. The crew’s quarters, Mr. Partridge explained, were all in the bow, on the first deck below the main deck. Holding a lantern, he showed Cormac the next deck, and for the first time the young man saw the deck of the emigrants. They lived in four rows of bunks hammered together from rough plank, with no bedding supplied by the ship, jackets serving as pillows, coats as blankets. All slept in their clothes. The only natural light came dripping down from the fore and aft hatchways, but in the orange light of Mr. Partridge’s lantern, faces peered at them in a wide-eyed way. A few old men stared at the deck, blinking, ignoring the light. Strapping young men tried to stretch, smoking from short earth-colored clay pipes, nodding, smiling, or throwing hostile glances at the visitors. Children scampered about, up one aisle, down another. Many women were seasick, their faces ghastly with the loss of control, and the air was stained by a mixture of vomit and shit. On that deck, they were all Irish.

  A moment of silence greeted Cormac and Mr. Partridge and was broken by a man crooning in Irish from the shadows, a melody Cormac knew, a melancholy tale of a lover’s journey. Then dozens of them joined in, and someone produced a fiddle and began to play in counterpoint, and all of them were shaking heads about the loveless land that was vanishing behind them and then smiling about the magic land to which they were going. The land ahead, of course, was Tir-na-Nog. The land of eternal youth.

  “They have no idea how far it is,” Mr. Partridge whispered. “They think crossing the Atlantic is like crossing the River Shannon. The educated ones know but won’t explain to the others. Afraid of what might happen, I suppose, afraid of despair, or riot. They’re almost all Presbyterians, the educated ones, fleeing the Church of Ireland and its endless bloody cruelties. But the ones singing in Irish, they’re real Irish, out of the hills and the bogs and the hungry towns. Most of them don’t speak English. And they’ve signed on as indentured servants. Poor buggers.”

  He explained what an indentured servant was (for Cormac had never heard the words), and how these hungry Irish people, listening to the siren call of America, signed on. They pledged five to seven years of their lives, without pay, without schools, five years of labor for English planters in America, in exchange for their passage. They would be free of heartbreaking Ireland and the terrible hunger. The English were, of course, happy to see them go, particularly the Presbyterians, who were gifted at making trouble. In America, they’d work in the earthly paradise, and when the passage was worked off, they’d be free to live their lives.

  “But except for knowing they’ll someday be free, they’re no different from the poor, bloody Africans. They’re owned, lad. D’ye understand me? Other men own them. And in America, the men who own them, who have them under contract, those men sell them, just the way they sell the Africans. Although on this ship, the Africans are in even worse shape than the Irish.”

  “What Africans?”

  “Come.”

  With the fiddle playing behind them, and the Irish joining in their sad, hopeful song about Tir-na-Nog, Mr. Partridge moved down still another ladder, with Cormac behind him, descending into the bottom level of the ship. He told Cormac to mind his head, since the space was cramped, only four feet of room. In the lantern light Cormac saw the grillwork of a jail and beyond the timbered grille, the glistening forms of men. Black as coal. Black as midnight. Eyes stared at him and at Mr. Partridge. Eyes yellow in the light. Eyes sullen. Eyes angry. Mr. Partridge raised the lantern, said a polite hello (to no reply), and told Cormac that there were thirteen men in this fetid place, with its smell of swamp (as Cormac remembered the rotting Irish corpses in the river that made Thunder change his course). And there was one woman, he added (citing the captain himself as his authority), a woman who claimed to be a princess. In the far corner of this small prison, there were lumpy shapes covered with rough blankets. Cormac thought: One of them must be the woman.

  “It’s a dirty business,” Mr. Partridge said. “But it’s England’s favorite business because it’s so easy. They buy Africans for three pounds from the Arab traders and sell them in New York for fifty pounds. So you’re looking at, what? Seven hundred pounds’ worth of living, breathing merchandise, lad.”

  The pieces of living merchandise looked at Cormac, breathing lightly but saying nothing, asking nothing, expressing nothing except some muted, wordless, seething anger. In his mind, Cormac saw the shop on the Belfast quays, the shop of the slave trading co
mpany, and the earl’s face, and wondered if these human beings could be his property.

  “Let’s get some air, lad,” Mr. Partridge said in a desperate way, holding a handkerchief to his nose.

  They retraced their steps to the main deck. A clean wind was blowing, filling the sails, and the swishing sound of the ship was louder as it cleaved through the Atlantic waters. But the clean wind couldn’t scour from Cormac’s mind the images of the Africans and the Irish, jammed on their separate levels below his feet. The words of his father’s letter rose in him: I hope you will never oppress the Weak, that you will oppose Human Bondage in all its guises, that you will bend your Knee to no man.…

  33.

  The captain’s name was James Thompson. Tall, with a gimpy right leg. Face fleshy, his long nose veined from weather or whiskey or both, his mouth held in a tight slash. He had kind eyes, brown and liquid. The captain found time to explain his charts and instruments to Cormac, and how the prevailing Atlantic winds blew from west to east. All ships bound for America in these cold months were forced to sail south into warmer waters, where their sails could take the winds at an angle. Even this route had its perils. On the ninth day out, when they were hit by a roaring, terrifying two-day gale, Captain Thompson was in full command, sharing the deck with his sailors. When they ran into the region of windless calm called the Doldrums, he wore a worried look and tried to be just in doling out the shrinking rations. As the Irish began to die, he was dignified as he presided over their burials in the ocean sea.

  The old died first, and then some taut, frail women, and at least six infants. Cormac soon stopped counting. He nursed Mr. Partridge through the delirium of fever, and each day took his uneaten food and a jug of water to the Africans on the bottom deck. They never said thanks. They never spoke at all. On one of those furtive trips, while a fiddle played from the deck above his head, he saw at last in the light of his lantern the face of the African princess, who, he later learned, was named Tomora. She had gleaming ebony skin, black wiry hair, high cheekbones, full lips. She glanced at him with contempt and then vanished behind a blanket that hung from the low ceiling like a wall.

  That night, another African stepped forward: tall, bare-waisted, with powerful shoulders and a hard body. Cormac pushed a loaf of bread through the grillwork that formed their jail. The African took it, his eyes wary.

  Cormac pointed at himself and said his true name: Cormac. Then: Cor-mac. Then more slowly. Cor. Mac. The African gazed at him for a long moment and then shifted his eyes to the bread, then back to Cormac. His eyes glittered with lantern light as he passed the bread behind him. The woman said something else. The African scrutinized Cormac’s face and eyes. Then he nodded.

  “Cor-mac,” he said.

  The young white man smiled and nodded yes.

  The African pointed at his own chest.

  “Kon-go,” he said.

  “Hello, Kon-go.”

  “Hel-lo, Cor-mac,” the African said without smiling.

  Cormac tossed him a small salute and went back to the ladder leading to the sky.

  34.

  One night during the second smothering week of the calm, Cormac awoke to a long, deep scream. Mr. Partridge tumbled in the dark to the floor as Cormac jerked open the door. There was the minister, Andrew Clifford, bent to the side in agony, and beyond him in the cabin was his wife. She was hanging from a beam, a scarf knotted tightly around her broken neck. Her eyes were wide open, staring at the ceiling. Clifford sobbed and lifted her at the thighs, as if to ease her out of the noose, sobbing, “God forgive me, God forgive me, oh my Martha. God forgive me.”

  Mr. Blifil arrived, officious and annoyed, bringing a lantern, making marks in a book, and then, with Martha Clifford laid out upon a cot, her neck dark purple, the captain appeared in the cabin door. His face was drained, his eyes red from too many days struggling with the sea and the vanished wind. He gazed at Martha Clifford, shook his head sadly, whispered some condolence to her husband, and went back to commanding his immobilized ship.

  Four hours later, in the first light of morning, Martha Clifford was sewn into a canvas shroud and buried at sea. At the edge of the small crowd, Mr. Clark whispered to Cormac about the minister’s wife. She and her husband had lost all four of their children during the famine in Armagh (or so the minister had told him). She was desolated by the loss, mute for weeks, and her husband believed that in America they could begin all over again, in a land blessed by God and free from famine, free from memory. She came with him reluctantly, wanting to remain in Ireland near the bodies of her children. Clifford forced her to leave. Each night on the Fury, in turbulent seas or prolonged calm, she called for her children, as if demanding the reunion of death. The captain, on his solitary midnight watches, heard her more clearly than Cormac or Mr. Partridge. She had chosen to hang herself while her husband was far forward, ministering to feverish sailors.

  “It appears that if God wouldn’t give her what she wanted,” Mr. Partridge said, “that is, reunion with her children—then she’d take it herself. May God forgive her, poor injured soul.”

  The Rev. Clifford didn’t preside at his wife’s watery burial. Captain Thompson assumed the duty. They placed the shroud on a greased plank, and the captain read from a Bible. Then the plank was lifted at one end and tipped over the side, and the packed shroud disappeared in the motionless sea. Clifford didn’t watch it go. He was staring at the silent sky.

  35.

  The rations were shorter now. The captain (or the company that had hired him) had laid in enough food and water for eight weeks at sea. But the voyage of the Fury had been slowed by the storm, pushed out of its path through the ocean and pushed back in time, and now in the Doldrums they didn’t know how long the voyage would last or how it would end. Not even the captain knew. They could be there forever. The pigs not washed overboard had now been eaten. The peas had run out. The chocolate was gone. The slabs of salt meat first became smaller and then vanished. Days passed. Nights passed. Early in the voyage, each meal was three potatoes and two sea biscuits. Now it was two potatoes and one sea biscuit. Water casks rattled emptily around the deck at night. Cormac almost never saw the Rev. Clifford, but from behind his door, his wounded voice kept up an endless punishing conversation with the invisible. Prayers and laments, the rhythms of a baffled love. For his wife. For God. Rejected by both.

  Sometimes, to rid himself of Clifford’s unseen presence, Cormac read Swift or Pope in the half dark of the cabin floor. Searching for words he might whisper to the wind. Or the sea gods. Mr. Partridge slipped into and out of fever. He mumbled, or ranted, and Cormac thought that perhaps he’d gone mad. Or was always mad and had simply disguised his madness with a civilized mask. The older man mumbled: Face it now, milord. Face your death. Face Africa.

  During the days when they were becalmed, Cormac went around without jacket or shirt, following the example of the crew, with his money pouch tied across his groin. Each day, he sipped his rationed water and brought what he could to the Africans. Small portions. Not enough for anyone. Just what he could cadge, or hoard, or steal. On each visit, Kongo looked at him and nodded and spoke the young white man’s name. Cormac’s beard began to grow. Wispy and scraggly at first, like pubic hair, then more full, shaping a rich black mask. Three times a day, emigrants were brought on deck to bathe in sea-water. Most were naked men and small children, and their bones had begun to push forward, pressing from within against blotched, yellowing skin. The women were too shy to wash naked in front of strangers, and of course the women began to die more quickly. Sometimes in the evenings, the smothering silence was broken by a fiddler, Mr. Makem from Armagh, but slowly, after days and days, his music became more mournful. A lament. An acceptance of death. From belowdecks Cormac heard less weeping and fewer groans and almost no prayers.

  The figurehead of the Fury was an angel, nameless, carved by some forgotten boatwright, and someone in the crew whispered that they needed that angel now, that they desperately
needed a guardian angel, and Mr. Clark growled that what they needed was a fecking wind. One night, while Mr. Partridge dozed and mumbled and whispered in conversation with himself, Cormac walked out on deck. The air was thick and still, and the ship seemed to be anchored to the bottom. He stared down at the carved angel on the prow.

  The head turned to look at him.

  It was Tomora.

  She smiled at him, her black skin glistening in the moonlight. He reached for her, wanting to touch her flesh, caress her breasts, to whisper to her in the hot sea air. But when he touched her ebony face, she turned back to pale painted wood.

  Tomora.

  Later, he saw her in many of his dozing hours. Above him. Below him. Beside him. Her dark body glistening with sweat, his vision made up of fragments actually glimpsed in the darkness of the slave deck and brought together by his own feverish longings. On his visits below, bringing scraps of bread and drops of water, Tomora looked at him from the darkness, flanked by the men, her eyes still refusing any expression of gratitude. In fever, she took him to her dark interior.