by Pete Hamill
The reason for this uncertainty was the power of the past. And his duty to old vows, to the tribe, to the rules, to the memories of his father and mother. The truth, however, was that he was thinking less about the Earl of Warren now too. Sometimes three or four days passed and the earl never forced himself into Cormac’s mind. But then he would see months-old newspapers from London in the print shop and begin scanning them for the earl’s name, to see if he had appeared at some event in London or Paris, or in dispatches from other parts of the colonies from Canada to Kingston. Always in vain. In the newspapers, the earl did not exist. Then Cormac would lie awake in the dark, picturing the earl as he must look now: perhaps bearded, as was Cormac; perhaps dressed in common clothes; perhaps lolling in the slave markets of Charleston or Savannah. He imagined himself wandering the continent on an endless search. And then thought it would be better to stay where he was. If the earl was in America, eventually he would come to New York. Better to work, better to learn the craft of the printer, better to prepare for a future, even if that future would be denied him in a moment of violence.
On some nights, he wondered exactly what Quaco meant when he called Kongo a babalawo. One slow day, he asked Mr. Partridge about the word, and the older man riffled through a fat volume, then shrugged. “It’s not in the dictionary,” he said, “but it could mean a shaman, you know, a kind of witch doctor. The parish priest, so to speak, in a tribe.” He pondered this. “Though a shaman—if that’s what it means—is also a kind of magician. So maybe your friend Kongo is an African Merlin.”
For Cormac, this image was exciting: Kongo in Camelot, searching for a black grail. He tried to draw the image but gave up in disgust and tossed the paper into the fireplace. The truth was that all images, including the possibility of riot and fire, were always erased by work. The printing life consumed them. All their type was set by hand, and Cormac was amazed at how swiftly Mr. Partridge laid out the metal letters, since all of them were in reverse. Cormac’s first job was inking the type, using wool-packed sheepskin balls with hickory handles. The fresh ink was laid on a slab beside the press. At first, Mr. Partridge did the crucial final task of pressing down on the lever, throwing his weight joyfully into the task of pulling an impression off the inked type. Then he acknowledged that Cormac was physically stronger than he was, and Cormac, within a week, got their rate up to two hundred pulls an hour. While doing this work, Cormac felt himself become part of the machine, his mind counting the sheets while the words of the posters came to vivid life: war, sale, arrival, ship, brass, shoes, instruction, now.
Sometimes Mr. Partridge delivered an aria on the beauties of type. “We’re a Caslon shop,” he said. “Look at the beauty of that T,” he said, “the elegance of that flick of a serif!” The names of fonts rolled from him like liturgy: Roman and italic and boldface, caps that were swashed and caps that were sloped. Picas and points and em quads, and the beauty of white space. Caslon wasn’t the only great type. There were other glorious typefaces, he said, his voice swelling, their names coming from him like the names of artists or generals: Bembo and Petrarca, Palatino and Griffo, Fraber and Garamond. But above all of them, close to God, was Caslon.
“Look at those letters, lad, and listen to them! Can you hear them singing? Look at those lines and those curves, and then close your eyes, and what you hear is William Caslon singing!”
Sometimes, in mid-aria, he vanished into the frozen morning, bouncing up the three steps into the street, off to do business. And Cormac worked on, cleaning and oiling the press, using stone slabs to flatten wet paper, hanging samples on the unpainted pine-board walls, cleaning the pieces of type and placing each in one of the 152 compartments of their cases. Sometimes he set type himself, slower than Mr. Partridge but loving the order and beauty of a page. Or he cleaned ink balls. Or trimmed sheets. Ink rimmed his fingernails, resisting soap and brush. He washed his hands in the same sink where he cleaned the punches. There was no running water (not there and not anywhere in New York), just two buckets, soap, and the coarse cloths he used for cleaning type. After his daily ablutions, Cormac would heave the inky water into the backyard, a blackening rectangle of frozen mud where nothing grew.
In the afternoons, Mr. Partridge returned, bursting with news and gossip and jobs for the shop. Terrible fighting in Jamaica. Dreadful cold, the worst winter in New York memory. A shortage of cordwood. Trees like iron, blunting the woodsmen’s axes. Water frozen in the Collect. Dutchmen skating. Taverns empty. Only two ships on the waterfront. A Mrs. Robbins left her husband for a notary and they’ve sailed for England while Mr. Robbins has become a sot. More soldiers departing.
Finally the night arrived. Sometimes Mr. Partridge carried home a joint or a rib, and cooked it on an upstairs stove (for he wanted no grease anywhere near his precious stores of paper). They dined together, and at such times he was calmer, and often spoke obliquely about subjects that never appeared in a newspaper. As he did one night a few days from Christmas.
“There’s something happening in the town, and I can’t put my finger on it,” he said. “Not just poor sales in the shops. Something else. An unease…”
The cold got colder and didn’t relent. For Cormac, it was as if the Irish storm that killed so many people and crops and horses had made its way across the Atlantic. The North River was frozen solid all the way to Poughkeepsie, almost eighty miles distant. He worked in heavy clothes and slept in his overcoat and remembered the tale of Joseph and his brothers. Sometimes he saw himself huddling in the house with his father and Bran and Thunder, all of them together, refusing to give in to weather or fate. Thinking: Only one winter ago, but so long ago too. Would they both survive better if he and Mary Burton could huddle together through the frigid American nights? If he returned to his room on Stone Street, would that become more possible? But it couldn’t happen. The Hughsons would never allow her out at night, for she might end up on a runaway poster on the city’s walls. And he had no money now to pay for a room.
But in some way, the brutal New York cold and his memories of Ireland combined to revive his own search for the man who had brought him here. If the earl’s own horses had survived the Irish winter better, surely he wouldn’t have gone hunting for the horses of strangers. He could have stood on the pier and juggled while Africans eased out to sea in the wooden dungeons of the slave ships. The arctic wind had changed the earl’s life too.
In Cormac’s free time, or when running errands or delivering printing jobs, he looked with renewed passion for the Earl of Warren. Snow fell through one long night. Then fell again two days later. The piles of snow and hillocks of black ice made walking difficult, and if there were fewer people on the streets, they were revealed in greater clarity. But he felt more often now that he’d made some terrible mistake in coming to New York. He began to think that he had followed the earl to a place where he had not gone.
And then, on the day before Christmas, after dropping some printed notices at the Lutheran Church, which stood then a block south of Trinity, he turned into Wall Street and there he was.
The earl.
Getting into a cream-colored carriage in front of City Hall. Cormac’s heart jumped. His chapped hands begin to sweat in the cold. The carriage started moving east toward the waterfront. Cormac thought: Is he leaving on a ship? In this cold? No, the river is frozen, with great slabs of ice crunching against one another and bending the pilings, and it’s almost Christmas. No ship will sail.
He went after the cream-colored carriage, walking cautiously at first through the most crowded, snow-packed blocks (for business had not paused yet to celebrate the birth of Christ). He steadied his pace, afraid of attracting attention, wishing he had the sword. Thinking: I could catch him and kill him. But not without a sword. Thinking: I must know where he goes. Must know where he lives.
And then the carriage picked up speed. Cormac hurried, skipping faster, shoving aside small knots of men, sliding on glossy sheets of ice, thumping through crusted snow. The
carriage turned left into Water Street, heading north, and Cormac began to run. He fell once, then again.
The carriage was too fast. It didn’t pause at any of the wharves, and rolled north. Cormac watched it vanish over the ridge and the frozen stream that spilled from the Common.
He stood there, his heart skipping beats, gasping for frigid air. His elbow ached from a fall. He bent it and gazed at the blank white haze to the north.
Thinking: He’s here.
The earl is here.
54.
Early Christmas morning, while the sky remained blue with night, Cormac rose early, dressed warmly, and hurried down to the Fly Market to find Kongo. The streets were icy, snow-packed, and empty. Windows were rimed with ice. He found Kongo in the backyard of Guilfoyle the builder, where he and Quaco were feeding a fire with scrap wood. Both wore fur hats, cloth gloves, and heavy coats, and reminded him of the Celts in their hidden grove. Quaco bid Cormac good morning, uttered an ironical “Merry Christmas,” and smiled as they shook hands.
“How is it you’re not in the big church with all the other wonderful Christians?” Quaco said.
“I’d rather be here,” Cormac said. “I need to talk to… the babalawo.”
He gestured for Kongo to step aside and speak to him alone. Kongo excused himself to Quaco and walked with Cormac to the dark side of a shed.
“Yes?” he said.
“I need your help.”
“What for?” he said, his accent slightly Irish.
“I have to find a man named the Earl of Warren,” he said. “Last year in Ireland, he caused my father to be shot dead, and in our tribe, the son must avenge the father.”
“In my tribe too.”
“I came here to find him,” Cormac said. “That’s why I was on the Fury. I’ve looked for him for many months, and yesterday, at last, I saw him. On the street. He went north in a coach, but I couldn’t follow in the snow and ice.”
“You want him dead?”
“Yes, but I’m the only one who can do it. I’ve already killed one of his men, and perhaps a second, whose hand I chopped off. It’s my responsibility, Kongo. But I hope that, somehow, you and your friends can find him for me.”
He showed Kongo a folded drawing he’d made of the earl, and the African peered at it, his brow tightening. Perhaps Kongo could spread the word among the Africans (Cormac said), to look for the cream-colored carriage and the Englishman who looked like the man in the sketch. The diamond tooth, Cormac said, pointing, and then pulling a face to show his own bicuspid. The tooth. If they find him, he said, tell me. I’ll do the rest. He reminded Kongo that the earl had made much of his fortune in the slave trade. The African glanced again at the drawing and slipped it inside his coat.
“I’ll look,” he said. “If he on this island, we find him.” Cormac hugged him, then smiled and stepped back.
“Your English is much better.”
Kongo shrugged. “I have no, uh, choice, yes? To eat, I must speak.”
But Cormac thought: His English is now too good to have been merely lifted in passing. He has been studying. Or receiving help more mysterious than studying. Babalawo. He wanted to ask Kongo more. Instead, Kongo explained that for the next week Wilson the painter had rented him out to Guilfoyle the builder. Right here. This building. No work today. No work on Christmas. But he shook his head at the shame of being as rentable as a dray horse. Then, after a long silence (one that silenced Cormac’s questions too), he took the young man’s elbow and walked him toward the shore.
“There is something… coming?” he said. “Yes, the word is ‘coming.’ To come.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there is something big to happen, as soon as winter ends.”
“What kind of something?”
“I let you know,” he said. “It’s about us. The Africans and the Irish. And the fleets of Spain.”
He glanced at the wan winter sun rising slowly across the river in Brooklyn.
“Say nothing,” he said. “Ask nothing.” He gestured toward the sun. “But know that… the gods know. The gods say yes.”
He turned and hurried back to Quaco and the fire. Cormac thought: I’ll have to wait to ask the meaning of the word babalawo.
55.
Something big was indeed happening. Part of it Cormac saw. Part of it was told to him. But all the bits and pieces, the muted warnings, the whispered gossip came to the same thing: a rising. In the first weeks of 1741, the town was almost empty of redcoats, their main force now down in the Indies, defending the sanctity of Jenkins’s ear. In their absence, New York Africans and New York Irishmen were meeting in Hughson’s tavern to talk about guns and death and freedom.
“You’re very… distracted these past days, Cormac,” said Mr. Partridge one afternoon. He looked at Cormac in a worried way. “Are you homesick?”
Cormac smiled. “Sometimes.”
“What is it that you miss?”
“Oh, just…”
He paused in the process of pulling sheets for a wine seller.
“Small things, I s’pose,” he said. “The house we had, made by my father’s hands and the help of his friends. The wet grass on a summer morning. We had a dog named Bran and a horse named Thunder. I miss them. I miss my mother telling stories. I miss my father in all ways. I miss the woods and the fields and the hearth in the house….”
Mr. Partridge stared at him.
“Well, all of us here feel the same things, in one way or another,” he said. “I feel them and the soldiers feel them and the Africans too.”
“I know that.”
“It’s why some go back,” Mr. Partridge said. “They can’t bear it. We’re like colonists on the bloody moon. And yet…” He sighed. “And yet, we might have something in our hands that’s not been seen in hundreds of years, maybe never, lad. For the King and his hired hands can’t forever impose their will on us here, can they? Not with an ocean between them and us. We might have the chance to build a country. Not a colony. A country! Imagine that! And not just a country, a republic!”
Cormac realized that Mr. Partridge saw a blankness in his face. A republic? What was a republic?
“You must read Machiavelli!” Mr. Partridge said. “I think I have a copy upstairs, and if not, I’ll find one. Not The Prince. That’s the book Machiavelli wrote to get a job, full of blatherskite. No, you must read the Discourses on Livy! Best argument ever made for a republic. Old Machiavelli knew you couldn’t have a country—or an army—or collect taxes—unless the people gave their consent. That meant, no kings!”
He had begun to sweat, and tamped his brow with the clean side of a printer’s rag. Then turned again to Cormac.
“There’s another reason for your… preoccupation, isn’t there, lad?”
“Well, I don’t know…”
“What’s her name?”
Cormac feigned a grin, the response that he thought Mr. Partridge expected. He didn’t answer.
“I suspected so,” Mr. Partridge said. He smiled in a dubious way and turned to the press. “Well, let’s get on with it….”
In the solitude of the night, Cormac tried to sort out the separate boxes of his life. He told himself that he must arrange them as if his mind were a type case. The largest letters were in the top drawer: they spelled out the name of the earl, and his presence in New York, and Cormac’s hope that Kongo’s men would find him. His Irish vows were in that box, and the rules of his tribe, and there were mornings when he awoke on Cortlandt Street and thought he was still five years old in Ireland, about to run barefoot on wet grass.
In the drawer below was Mary Burton. She scared him in some ways, because she lived most completely in the future, in some glorious place where she was free. At the same time, she threatened his own freedom. He wanted a woman’s body, a woman’s voice, a woman’s voice in the dark. But he could not yet imagine a life with children, in a house where he would live and die, far from home. He couldn’t imagine building a
hearth that would put a soul into a house shared with Mary Burton. Not now. Not yet. He could imagine no future until he had rid himself of the pursuit of the earl.
And he felt too the thrilling pressure of the conspiracy that was building in the town. He wanted Mary Burton to be free. But he wanted Kongo to be free too, and Quaco, and Quaco’s wife, serving in the fort, and all the others: Diamond and Sandy and even the wretched Caesar, and the child of his making that would soon burst from poor Peggy. They should be free. How could he even imagine putting a child into a world where men owned other men? How could he do that and be his father’s son?
And so he volunteered his name to the conspiracy. He didn’t tell this to Mary Burton, but offered himself to Kongo, who was the leader. They met briefly one Sunday morning, and Kongo accepted him, with a dubious look in his eyes. “You help with words,” he said. “With printed words. Not with gun or torch.”
Cormac learned that Kongo had found instant allies in six Spanish blacks. The young man knew their story. They were free men under the flag of Spain, working for pay on a ship captured by an English privateer named John Lush. An apt name, said Mr. Partridge, for a man who’d been seen staggering around the taverns of New York, spending his stolen Spanish pieces of eight. “He’s a terrible fellow,” Mr. Partridge said, leaning over his trays of Caslon. “The world would be better rid of him.” Lush had plenty of other money, he explained, because the English crown insisted that anyone black was automatically a slave, a thing to be sold. It didn’t matter if they’d already been freed of their bondage by other nations; if captured, they were slaves. Lush could sell them as if they were captured horses. “Human merchandise!” Mr. Partridge roared. The six captured Spanish seamen were taken to New York, protesting in vain that they were not slaves, they were prisoners of war, men who had long since earned their freedom. The British sneered. “The laws of Spain,” Partridge said, “don’t apply to Englishmen with guns.” The black Spaniards were sold at the market at the foot of Wall Street. Mr. Partridge knew this. But so did Quaco.
