Forever

by Pete Hamill

  36.

  Did he see the things he thought he saw in the days that followed? Perhaps not. Perhaps they were only part of the fever that had touched all of them, made intense and vivid by the hard blue sheen of the cloudless sky. They seemed as real as the masts and the decks and the rigging. As Cormac gazed at the sea one still morning, a figure erupted, part woman, part fish, then submerged, then rose again, breaking from the surface. Triumphantly rising. Teasingly rising. Her breasts were pale sea blue. Her dark, wet, golden hair was streaming. Each leg was covered with silvery scales and ended with the twin tails of a fish. A mermaid. Or a dolphin. Una sirena. O una delfina. Cormac thought the vision was his alone, an invented creature leaping from cool water to calm his blistered mind. But there soon were other men at the rail, gazing slack-jawed at the sea or speaking softly, personally, to the sea creature and not to one another. Voices full of need. Wanting to believe. Until she burst again from the sea, rising high, sea-cold breasts glistening, a smile sea-chilly, hair wet and whipping the air. She turned like a marlin. Spread her scaled legs to allow one glimpse of the place between. Golden-haired. Salmon-colored. She smiled in a pitying way. And then dove hard into the sea, leaving behind only an immense stillness.

  The men looked at one another, uneasy, afraid to be labeled fools or idiots. They knew they had seen her. Knew what had appeared before their eyes. But they said nothing. They were like witnesses to something wondrous or shameful, unable to admit what they had seen. In the cabin Cormac said nothing to Mr. Partridge, who was engulfed in his own visions.

  More people died. They buried seven tiny children on one windless morning, tipping them into the sea as if they were bags of onions. They gave the sea one old man and four young women. Then they buried in the still water two men who were Cormac’s age. All emigrants. And then one of the crew was found facedown on deck, and they sent his body after the others to the bottom.

  The next day, after assuring himself that Mr. Partridge still lived, after forcing pulpy potato past his cracked lips, Cormac descended to the slave deck. The stench from the emigrant deck was thicker now than air, touchable, chewable, a substance, some fine compost of sweat and shit and decaying flesh. He struggled to keep from vomiting, helped by the fact that he had so little in his stomach to vomit. Then he heard the voice of Kongo calling desperately in his language, his voice cutting through the fevered wailing and mumbling of the emigrants between them. Cor-mac. Cor-mac. When he saw Cormac, he gestured wildly, pointing at Tomora, who was lying on the planked floor against the bulkhead. Her body was covered to her chin with rough cloth. Her eyes were open. But she was not moving.

  37.

  They prepared to bury Tomora. The captain didn’t want the crew to see her nakedness and ordered up some last piece of canvas to serve as a shroud. Cormac helped Kongo raise her body for the sail maker to make his coarse sheath. Her flesh was still warm. The captain said sadly that Kongo and three other Africans could accompany her body to the deck, to say their private farewells. Four men. No more. They protested in their own language. The captain held up four fingers and then made a slashing gesture that said: No more.

  In the bright, sultry haze of the main deck, Kongo and the three others looked even angrier than they did in their dark cage on the bottom deck. The crew gazed silently at the Africans as they stretched their bony bodies for the first time in many weeks. But the white men didn’t come forward to join the ceremony. Cormac seethed with a mixture of rage and a jumbled emotion he could not name. Thinking: Tomora, you are so beautiful. Thinking: And now you’ll be dropped into the sea far from home on a voyage that you did not want to take. Thinking: A voyage forced upon you by men with swords or guns or whips or branding irons. Thinking: By men like the Earl of Warren. From a world that allowed one group of human beings to own another group of human beings.

  When Kongo bent with the other Africans to lift the lumpy shroud, Cormac stepped forward and took a corner. Kongo threw him a suspicious look but didn’t shove him away. Together, four Africans and an Irishman, they carried Tomora’s shrouded body to the plank. They laid her flat. Her shrouded feet faced the immobile sea.

  The captain, holding his Bible, uttered words in English, the same words they had heard uttered over other bodies, and then nodded to Kongo. The African began speaking in his click-clocking language. Short bursts of words that snapped like whips. The other Africans bowed their heads. Kongo’s deep voice was grave and strong. He finished and nodded at the captain.

  Finally the lumpy shroud was slipped over the side. They all stared at the motionless sea that had now swallowed Tomora, the princess from Africa. A full minute went by in silence. And then, a hundred yards away, something small and black burst from the sea. A bird. Fluttering its wings. And then rising into the sky, making a turn, and heading finally toward the west. A raven.

  They all seemed to exhale at once.

  A breeze stirred.

  A sail flapped lazily. And then another. And then one sail made a sharp, cracking, explosive sound.

  The captain spun on the deck, shouting orders, exuberant, released, alive, and the men began climbing into the rigging. The captain peered through his spyglass at the point where last he had seen the raven. They were under way. To America.

  FOUR

  The New York Morning

  We do not worry about being respected in the towns through which we pass. But if we are going to remain in one for a certain time, we do worry. How long does this time have to be?

  —PASCAL

  38.

  They smelled the land before they saw it. A rich, dark odor of sweet earth, coming at them through a misty rain. Then seabirds appeared, crying and screeing. Cormac was on deck, his hair and beard trimmed, his new brown suit and long blue coat fashioned by Mr. Partridge, who had refused his money. He had a new sling for the sword too, strapped down his back, clipped across his chest, the weapon in a flat leather sheath. When he donned the long coat, the sword could not be seen by any police inspectors who might peer in suspicion at the bearded face of someone named Martin O’Donovan. Even Mr. Partridge, with his high standards of craft, admired the handiwork of the crew member who had fashioned the sling, a dour saddle maker from Mayo. Mr. Partridge was now a smaller version of himself. Almost thirty pounds had melted away in the cauldron of his fever. Now his flesh hung off him as loosely as his clothes (which he insisted must wait to be tailored after a few weeks in New York). Under his smart beaver hat, his eyes were clear and bright with anticipation.

  “Almost there, lad,” he said, inhaling deeply.

  Then a dark line spread across the horizon, and there was a huge cheer and waving of hats. Haggard Irish faces peered up through open hatches, still barred from the deck by Mr. Clark. “Stay below!” he bellowed. “Stay below, you lot! Yiz’ll get kilt up here.” Mr. Partridge explained that because of tides and currents and prevailing winds they had come around in a wide arc to their destination. The land on the right was the Long Island. Dutch farmers were scattered over much of it, he said, along with their slaves. But all were intelligently huddled far from the sea with its summer hurricanes and fierce winter winds. All Cormac saw were long strands of beach, white in the rain, and thick forests so dark they seemed black. And then up ahead, rising from the sea, there was a small mountain. Like the small meshed mountain he had seen in the Irish fog on the day, long ago, when they had set out upon the ocean. The island where Mary Morrigan had waved good-bye.

  “Staten Island,” Mr. Partridge said. “It’ll be to port as we turn into the Narrows.”

  For a long moment, he was quiet on the bustling deck.

  “Now remember all I told you, lad,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We have much to do together.”

  “We do.”

  He had given Cormac the address on Stone Street of a place called Hughson’s, where he might rent a room while Mr. Partridge looked for a place for his print shop. He himself would be staying at the Black Hors
e Tavern. Run by friends. Booked long ago. Cormac should call on him once a day, that was the plan, and Mr. Partridge would tell him of his progress. He had given Cormac a crudely printed map of the town, along with a litany of dire warnings. Don’t let anyone carry your bag, or you’ll never see it again. (The fastest thieves in the world live here.) Don’t get drunk and lose control, or you’ll lose even your shoes. (Lock your door, button your coat, strap your hat, tie your laces.) Don’t sleep with any woman who offers her services (It’s a city of whores), or you’ll end up with a pox that will swell your tongue to the width of a plank. New York was a dangerous place, Mr. Partridge said. Full of thieves from many nations. (They speak seventeen different tongues, not counting the African languages.) The English were the worst. Lazy buggers. Rather steal than work. (As an Englishman, they fill me with shame.) There were hundreds of Englishmen transported to America for crimes committed in English cities. (They start by cutting their mothers’ throats and then go downhill.) And they weren’t even the worst.

  “The most dangerous of the lot are the ones who now think they’re respectable,” he had said when they were a week away from America. “They go to church. They wear fine clothes. They use snuff. And they’d steal the eyeballs out of your head.”

  He paused, staring at his journeyman’s hands.

  “Still and all, they’ll give us much to print.”

  And he laughed out loud.

  They had agreed to work together in New York. Or rather, Cormac would work for him. As soon as Mr. Partridge found a place for his press and his shop, he would teach Cormac the printing trade. The prospect thrilled Cormac. He could always work as a blacksmith, but to learn to set type and print Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope and who knew what other great writers: that made his skin tingle and his blood rush. To be sure, he had a mission in New York, one he did not mention to the older man. But if the Earl of Warren was not there, or otherwise eluded him, then (Cormac thought) he could master a trade that would give his life a purpose.

  Now the Fury moved steadily toward New York, passing the small mountain rising in Staten Island, and Cormac thought that he might never come this way again and so should remember the thrill of arrival. He might die in prison. He might be pursued into the blank interior. Indeed, in his pursuit of the earl, he might lose his own life. He might not even get past the pier, if someone recognized him. Some policeman or redcoat who knew that in Ireland he had killed a man. Or even two (for Cormac did not know the fate of the man who had crawled without a hand from the earl’s stable). If they had a list, an alert, a warrant, they’d be looking for a young man named Robert Carson. Not Cormac O’Connor. Not Martin O’Donovan. They could be looking for him without need of a name.

  But as the new land surrounded him, as a new breeze ruffled his hair, as he swerved into this port in the New World, this New York, another feeling blossomed within him, nurtured by the frail, almost tender rain and the smell of American earth: a yearning to live beyond the end of his mission. In some odd way, he wanted to kill the earl in order to live on. To live with all blood obligations honored and all blood debts paid. To end one part of his life and begin another. Here, in Tir-na-Nog.

  Such thoughts vanished among shouts and cheers, the creaking of timbers and the swishing of water against the hull, as they turned into the great harbor. That was Brooklyn to the right now (Mr. Partridge said), named for a town in Holland, covered with woods that climbed in a long slope to a ridge of hills. Its scattered houses faced the harbor, with plumes of smoke rising from chimneys like pennants. Small boats were tied along the Brooklyn shore, and fishing boats, in from sea and river, were aimed at wharves. A few figures moved on a morning wharf and one of them waved in welcome and the crew cheered and waved back. Sails flapped. Flags streamed in the breeze. Captain Thompson watched in melancholy silence as his ship moved steadily to Manhattan.

  At last the emigrants were released to the freedom of the deck. Blinking and trembling. They were now a ghastly remnant of those who had embarked so hopefully from Galway: red-eyed and wretched, their hair matted and greasy, pallid skins grimy with thirteen weeks of filth and fever and death. All were silent. Tears streaked the grime on some women’s faces, but they could not even manage a sob. They gazed at Brooklyn as if it were the seacoast of the moon.

  Manhattan grew larger and more clear. A fort at the tip. Four squat cannon aimed at the bay. Or at the Fury. Low houses behind the fort, and the steeple of a church, and away off to the north, ridged green forests. Small boats crossed before them. Sloops and skiffs. To the right the East River moved sluggishly between Manhattan and the Long Island, its marshy shore thick with masts. As they drew closer, the seabirds were braver, more aggressive, yipping and snarling around the masts. Cormac glimpsed scarlet uniforms near the fort and remembered them on the roads of Ireland. Along with the one British redcoat who had shown him the body of the dead girl after the Great Cold, his stricken face, his small lament for people who had died drinking piss.

  Captain Thompson guided them into the East River. The Fury slowed, idled for a time, then turned with its stern toward what Mr. Partridge told him was Wallabout Bay. The seamen worked expertly, shouting curtly to one another, all engaged in the docking of the ship. Then they were pointed directly at the foot of Wall Street (although Cormac didn’t yet know its name, and Mr. Partridge, his guide to geography, had retreated to his cabin to retrieve his precious personal cargo). Creaking timbers. Seabirds. A billowing of sail. A collective holding of breath. They saw other ships tied up at timbered piers. And parts of the shoreline dwindling into mud.

  Mr. Partridge returned. Directly before them on shore was a large, empty, tin-roofed shed. Beneath the roof, an elevated stage. A large, still-faceless crowd watching the Fury’s approach. “That tin-roofed building,” Mr. Partridge said, “is the Slave Market.” Cormac thought: This is where Kongo will be sold. This place. Kongo and his men. But not Tomora. She has escaped this disgusting stage.

  They entered the slip. The crew worked at mooring the Fury. Now Cormac could read the signs on the three-story buildings behind the Slave Market. Coopers. Meat sellers and victualers. Cordwainers and fishmongers and shipping agents. A pyramid of empty barrels climbed to the left, and beside them stood great piles of wooden crates awaiting shipment. Black men moved among the whites on shore, dressed in the same coarse clothes. Lifting, hauling, watching the ship as it docked. Behind the Slave Market, Wall Street cut through row houses up a long slope, and in the distance was the steeple they’d glimpsed from the harbor.

  Ropes were thrown. Knots tied to stanchions. Mr. Partridge and Cormac were there, lashed to the American shore. The Rev. Clifford was now on deck. He was dressed in black, his eyes dead, standing behind them as Captain Thompson offered the top-deck passengers his thanks and his apologies for the rigors of the journey. The captain wished them good luck and gestured toward the wide plank leading to the wharf. Clifford’s skin was dusty with seclusion, his eyes beyond all offers of luck or thanks. He went down the plank first, into the waiting crowd, in his salt-stained black suit, carrying his black bags and his black Bible. Mr. Partridge and Cormac in turn embraced the captain, shook hands with Mr. Clark, waved to the crew (which paid them little attention), and walked down to the land. There were no policemen or soldiers waiting with lists, and Cormac took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

  Then, to Cormac, it was as if the land were tilting and shifting, and some in the crowd laughed as they wobbled and lurched and tried to turn sea legs into land legs. Mr. Partridge laughed back, and so did Cormac. Someone shouted, “Welcome to America!” They mumbled their thanks and drifted to the side of the crowd. “Carry your bag, sir?” came one voice. “Food and lodging, gentlemen?” said another. “A nice warm woman after a long cold voyage?” whispered a third with a knowing giggle. “Absolutely not,” said Mr. Partridge, speaking for the two of them, his face wearing an expression that said: We’re not idiots.

  They were waiting at the quayside becau
se Mr. Partridge couldn’t take possession of his printing press until all passengers had cleared the ship. He told Cormac to go on to Hughson’s on Stone Street and have a bath and breakfast. Cormac insisted on waiting with him. The older man went off to find help, while Cormac stood with his own bag on top of Mr. Partridge’s suitcase and his foot on top of both. The sword felt heavy in its hiding place between his shoulder blades. A few minutes later Partridge returned in the company of a stevedore with a large cart who promised to deliver the press to Van Zandt’s warehouse, three blocks south. But Mr. Partridge didn’t trust its safe portage without being with it every minute. They waited together, with the stevedore off to the side.

  The rain was falling harder now, drumming on the peaked tin roof of the Slave Market. They found dry refuge under a lean-to used by the stevedores, and while Mr. Partridge went for a look at the warehouse, someone offered Cormac a cup of coffee. His first in America. He ignored the dark warnings of Mr. Partridge and accepted. It was thick, sweet, dark, delicious, and if it contained some drug, Cormac didn’t care. His bones began to warm.

  Now the emigrants were tottering down the wide plank, looking like the risen crew of a death ship. A few of them were freemen, not prisoners of an indentured contract. They responded to a name shouted from the crowd—Here, Billy! Right here, Robert—and rushed to collapse into the arms of some relative. The rest were herded toward a brawny man in a leather vest who waited at the bottom of the plank, with an African holding an umbrella over his head. He was clearly a boss. Or the boss. Four men stood to the side, watching him the way lieutenants always look at a captain, the way the earl’s men had looked at him before the killing of Cormac’s father. They tensely gripped muskets, as if ready for battle—not for England or America or even themselves, but for the boss.