Forever

by Pete Hamill

  But on this late morning, his last on earth, Diamond was impenitent. He walked to the stake with his head high, his face composed, and a look of contempt in his eyes. Some turned away from his scalding look as he was tied to the post. Others cheered when the hooded man ignited the kindling. “Off to hell, you savage!” a plummy voice bellowed, while others laughed. Cormac saw the Rev. Clifford speaking directly to the sky, his words lost in the general chatter.

  But then there was silence, even from the Rev. Clifford, as the flames gathered strength, and Diamond writhed and his mouth opened against his will and they could smell a sickening odor and the flames rose around the African’s head. Then Diamond screamed. He screamed and he screamed and he screamed. A woman fainted. And the screaming went on. The flames crackled and sparked and roared. And finally Diamond was burned into silence. His smoking body didn’t move. The flames kept burning, poisoning the air with the odor of ruined flesh. Some black flakes of his charred skin floated above the pyre.

  And then the Rev. Clifford began to laugh. A wild, high-pitched cackle of a laugh. Laced with pleasure. With satisfaction. With death. A heavyset man shoved him rudely, as if to force him into solemnity, but Clifford fell to his knees, laughing and laughing, and rolled to his side and drew up his legs and plunged his clenched hands between his thighs until the laughter turned to tears.

  Cormac felt nauseated. At what was done to Diamond. At the sight of the Rev. Clifford. He turned away, fighting off a surge of vomit. He needed clean air and there was no clean air. Others trudged away in silence, stained by the odor of burning human flesh and burning human fat and burning human blood. But as he walked south toward Cortlandt Street, Cormac noticed that some men had not had enough. Their nostrils flared, their eyes glittered, they formed angry clusters on the Common and shouted for more hangings, more burnings, more death. That night, they gathered together as the first of the mobs.

  63.

  Mr. Partridge was alarmed, for he had been moving among the fearful men who ran the town and were prepared to unleash the mobs. “You’re in mortal danger, lad,” he whispered. “They want every African, except the ones they own. They want every Irishman.” Cormac offered to leave, to keep Mr. Partridge out of danger. He could go to Boston or Philadelphia, or find refuge for a while in the northern forests. When this had settled down, he could return. Mr. Partridge shook his head in a vehement no.

  “It might come to that, and soon,” he said, “but we’ve got work to do first.”

  Together they began packing the best books and most important documents. His precious books made by William Caslon. Swift and Pope, a copy of Don Quixote in Spanish, books by Plato and Machiavelli on forming republics, sheaves of slave trading invoices. “These must be saved first,” he said. “We must hide them, in case the mobs come here.” Some went into a wide worn leather bag. He opened the storage space beneath the printing press and shoved the bag into the darkness. “Let me think about where they’ll be safe for a year or two.”

  As they packed, mobs were sweeping the town. For three nights, Cormac searched for Kongo and saw white mobs beating blacks with clubs or kicking them into meat. One African, accused of stealing, had both hands chopped off at the wrist without charges being presented to the grand jury. An African woman suspected of sympathy for the rebels had her clothes torn from her body on Beaver Street and was tossed from man to man until she was sent raving through the streets, naked and alone and wailing. The decent whites closed their shutters and locked their doors: seeing nothing, hearing nothing. Cormac saw that the white men in the mobs were crazy now: muscles and faces distorted, tendons stretched like cables in their necks, hair wild. They were armed with pistols, muskets, and certainty. All of them were drinking something: rum, gin, whiskey. “Instant courage,” Mr. Partridge sneered. “To keep the shite from their trousers.” At night, their torches lurched through the streets, and there weren’t enough redcoats to control them. They shouted back and forth, one mob to another, claiming the right to certain streets, reporting on their quarries, their instant trials, instant judgments, and instant punishments. “One Irishman tarred and feathered, one nigger with his balls cut off!” When a black man was spotted, they roared like valiant warriors, although there were four of them for each black man, and they ran in pursuit like hounds after a fox.

  That Saturday night, the mobs were larger, moving everywhere in their purging fury, and searching homes and shops and workplaces. Cormac suggested to Mr. Partridge that they rent a horse and move books and documents somewhere north, out of the city, to hide them, wait a few weeks, and then return when the mobs had gone quiet.

  “I’m afraid you’re right,” he said. “I’ll go for a horse.”

  Off he went, and then Cormac heard a mob coming down Cortlandt Street, and looked out and saw Kongo. Stones and bottles were smashing around him. He saw Cormac but kept running. Cormac grabbed the sword and stepped outside as the mob rushed by the shop.

  Kongo was down, his skull bloodied. He was bent into a small target, hands covering his head, while the whites kicked at him, cursed him, jammed the blunt ends of poles into his ribs, trying to get at his balls. They were screaming fecking cannibal and goddamned savage and black bastard.

  Cormac broke through, holding the sword.

  “Enough,” he said. “Let him be. If you kill him, you’ll all be charged with murder. I’ll make certain of that.”

  They backed up, wary of the sword, scrutinizing Cormac’s bearded face. One jittery-eyed man with glossy black hair shoved a hand inside his coat.

  “You Oirish bastard,” he said. “You’re one of them, ain’t you?”

  Another rushed from the side holding a club, and when he raised it Cormac knocked him down with a punch. Then they started poking at him with the poles and bats. Cormac ducked and bobbed, and glimpsed Kongo’s eyes in the light of a torch, angry and cold, in a sitting position now, thinking of what could be done. One man lunged with a pole and Cormac cut it in half. Another made a thrust with his own crude lance and Cormac sliced it clean an inch from the man’s hand. Then Michaels, the old constable, pushed through the crazed men, his lantern held high.

  Not another kick, you lot. Away with ye.

  His severe tone was enough to stop them. Cormac stood back a few feet, the sword hanging loose behind him, out of sight. The whites consoled themselves with a simple fact: They’d captured an African. The constable told four of them to remain, to help him bring Kongo to a holding pen, and the rest turned and went off toward the waterfront, chanting words Cormac couldn’t fully hear, brave as any mob. The constable reached down, bringing thick twine from a pocket, and lashed Kongo’s hands behind his back. Kongo stood up. He said something in Yoruba, and the constable clubbed him across the brow.

  “He was thanking you, Mr. Michaels,” Cormac said.

  “For what? I wish they’d killed him.”

  Kongo was bleeding from a deep gash in the back of his head and from a rip above his right brow. The sight of blood encouraged one of the four men. He stepped forward and kicked Kongo in the groin. And then smiled as Kongo doubled over, refusing to utter a sound.

  “You must have balls of iron, nigger.”

  Kongo spat some blood.

  “Let’s try it again,” the man said.

  Cormac stepped forward, now holding the sword for all to see. They looked at him in amazement. Michaels paused. Kongo stared.

  “Release him,” Cormac said.

  Nobody moved.

  “I said, let him go.”

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

  “Perhaps. But you’ll be dead.”

  The constable looked anxious. Then one of the whites rushed from the left side, a club raised high. Cormac cut the club in half and then smashed the man’s face with the wolf-bone handle of the sword. But he didn’t see the man on the right. The man who fired the pistol. The sound was very loud. Pain cut through Cormac’s left shoulder. Above the heart. He thought: I’ve b
een shot in the back. Cormac turned, bleeding from chest and back. He pivoted. Swung the sword down, cut into a meaty thigh, and a fat man holding a pistol fell in a gush of blood and high-pitched wailing. The pistol clattered on cobblestones. Another man drew a sword. Cormac wobbled, losing blood front and back, a red film falling across his eyes, but even a feeble swing severed the swordsman’s hand from its wrist. The man yelped in shock, gripping his forearm, fell to one knee, rose in panic. The constable ran after him, and so did the others. They only wanted to fight if they were winning.

  Cormac sliced through Kongo’s ropes. The walls of shuttered houses seemed to bend forward, then back, tottering like drunks. He saw three moons in the sky. From the distance, he heard an unseen chanting mob. The voices getting louder. Thinking: Get the bag of documents. Thinking: Get the horse. As he heard shouts for blood and death.

  And then he was on a horse. Lashed to Kongo. His blood seeping: into Kongo’s body. As Kongo’s blood seeped: into his own. He felt the sword lashed to his bleeding back. There was a worn saddlebag behind him. Slippery with blood. He was up on a great horse. Under a red moon. The horse knew the way. This sleek black horse. A horse called Thunder.

  They galloped through farms and forests.

  64.

  He was a long way away, drifting in silent seas. The air was wet. But the wetness had no form, no edge, no shore. He went out and returned, went farther, soaring through wet, empty galaxies, and returned through watery voids where all was the color of emeralds. And then went out again on the dark, cold tides. He had no body. No bones or flesh and no warming blood. He saw nothing but the emerald water, and dreamed no dreams, and longed for nothing. He did not want food or flesh, and no part of him moved, and yet he was moved through the silent seas.

  And then came awake on a bed of hay and thatch on the floor of a cave with a high granite roof. Pain gave him back his body. He was pierced in back and chest, and when he tried to rise it was as if a spear were lodged in his flesh. His mouth felt as if he had eaten sand. The wetness had been replaced by the parched, coarse touch of his tongue upon the roof of his mouth. I’m so dry (Cormac thought) that my blood must all have drained away.

  He moved his fingers against one another and then into the sandy earth upon which he lay. His fingers felt swollen, as if his hands were made of thumbs, but they could touch and feel. His eyes moved from roof to side. He saw the worn leather satchel of Mr. Partridge a dozen feet away. He saw his sword lying upon a thatch mat that made it seem almost sacramental. He tried again to rise, but his body refused the command. He could smell a fire burning somewhere, but his teeth clacked against one another in the cold.

  Then he heard footsteps, bare feet on sandy earth.

  And from some dark place, Kongo appeared above him. He was wearing a white robe. White horizontal bars were painted on his cheeks. He squatted and took Cormac’s hand and stared into his eyes.

  “Good,” he said.

  “Hello, Kongo,” Cormac said, thinking: My voice is coming across a very long distance.

  The African smiled without showing teeth.

  “W-where are we?” Cormac said, his teeth still fluttery with cold. “You’ve been dead for nine days,” Kongo said in Yoruba. Cormac thought: He speaks Yoruba to me and I understand each word.

  Kongo went somewhere out of Cormac’s vision and returned with a cup.

  “Drink,” Kongo said. “All of it.”

  The African held the cup to Cormac’s mouth, and he sipped a cold, bitter liquid. Cleansing. Cooling. It seemed to flow through all of his body, and although he could not yet move without pain, his senses were returning. One thing he sensed was the presence of someone else in the cave. When he finished the drink his mouth tasted of lime. The juice of emerald fruit. He tried again to sit up, rose a few inches, and saw a brown gullied scab above his heart. His back felt tightened by another scab. He turned to his side, and pain surged through him, making him gasp.

  “Lie back,” Kongo ordered.

  Cormac asked again where they were, and in an almost diffident way Kongo told him they were in a cave at the very top of the island of Manhattan. In a wild place. Just below the smaller river that cut across the top of the island. The trees were very tall and there were wolves in the forest. As he spoke, Cormac heard breathing from somewhere else in the cave.

  “Will you bury me here?” Cormac asked, trying weakly to grin.

  “You will not die. Not here. Not yet. Not for a very long time.”

  Then a figure emerged from the darkness behind Kongo. Tall in her flowing white cotton gown. Her face as beautiful as Cormac remembered.

  “Hello, Tomora,” he said in Yoruba.

  She gave him a pitying smile in reply but said no words. Kongo moved out of the way. Tomora stretched out her brown arms, the sleeves of the gown falling aside. She closed her eyes and began to chant in Yoruba. Cormac knew that she was offering a prayer. To the wind god and the moon god, the river god and the forest god. Kongo bowed his head, closed his eyes, and responded to each call with a blurted word that meant “So be it.” She prayed to all the inhabitants of the Otherworld. She begged them to reject Cormac. She implored them to keep him here on earth. She urged them to heal the young man. To give him life.

  “Here is a man who did not abandon me,” she said.

  “A man who did not abandon any of us,” Kongo replied.

  “Here is a man who gave his life to save another, one of us.”

  “Gave his life for another, O mighty gods. I am the one.”

  “Here is a man destined for more time on the earth.”

  “This earth, this island.”

  “We must reward him.”

  “Reward him, O mighty gods of wind and moon, of rivers and forests. Give him life.”

  Then they bowed their heads in silence, standing together at the feet of Cormac. Tomora turned to Kongo.

  “Go,” she ordered. And he padded on bare feet into the darkness.

  Tomora knelt beside Cormac’s head, her legs tucked under her. He could smell musk and forest, rain and the sea.

  “O gods of earth and sky, heal him,” she whispered in Yoruba. “O gods of wind and rain and sun, give him life. Give him this place between rivers. Let wind and rain and sun fall forever upon his face.”

  Then she ran her tongue over the scabs on his chest, licking their pebbly brown surface. She lifted him with strong hands and ran her tongue over his scabbed back. He felt his flesh shudder and curl like a flower at sunrise.

  “Give him the gift,” she whispered, eyes tightly shut. “The reward of the just. The long-lasting gift of women and meadows and water. Give him your eternal gift and do not make it a curse.”

  Then she was silent. Her eyes opened, liquid and dark. She kissed Cormac on the lips, and he felt her warm breath mingling with his own. She pressed her fingertips to each of his temples and then kissed each of his eyes until they closed into sleep.

  * * *

  When he woke, Tomora was gone and Kongo was dressed in the clothes of the American world.

  “I must go soon,” the African said.

  “Wait. Not yet.”

  Cormac sat up without pain. His scabs were gone, the skin of his chest marked only by a thin white line. He was naked.

  “How long have I been here?” he asked in Yoruba.

  “In your time, almost three weeks, including the nine days when you were dead.”

  “I understand your language.”

  “Of course,” Kongo said, smiling. “My blood is mixed with yours and yours with mine. We always say that words are a kind of blood.”

  Cormac began to say that he had dreamed a long strange dream.

  “That wasn’t a dream. Tomora was here.”

  Cormac stared at Kongo’s face as the African seemed to search for precise words.

  “She gave you a gift,” he said at last. “A rare gift. More precious than diamonds.” He paused. “You must take it.”

  And then, in careful languag
e, turning his head to gaze at the walls of the cave, he explained.

  The gift was life.

  Long life.

  Perhaps eternal life.

  “You can live as long as the world lives,” he said. “When the gods are finished with the world, when they decide that they have seen enough, then all will die, and you with them. But even then…”

  He waved a hand as Cormac rose, his joints stiff, hunger gnawing at him.

  “You must understand,” Kongo said, his voice now solemn. “Even the gift of life has its terms. Its rules.”

  Cormac lifted a blanket, covered himself against the chill.

  “Otherwise,” Kongo said, “a man would be a god. Only gods have no limits.”

  “I understand.”

  “No, you don’t. Not yet, for you are a boy, too young. But you will. You will learn.”

  “And how old are you, Kongo?”

  He shrugged. “Old.”

  Then he laid out the rules, the terms, the limits.

  “Your life,” he said, “will be lived here, on this granite island, this Manhattan. If you leave, if you cross the waters, you will die, and be forever barred from entering the Otherworld.” He paused, letting Cormac absorb the words. “Choosing to leave would be choosing to kill yourself, and that would keep you from crossing over to the true place. The place where your father waits, your mother, the people you will love.”

  Cormac thought: The Otherworld is always the Otherworld, no matter who tells of its existence. And in Africa or Ireland, suicide bars the way.

  “You can be shot or stabbed, your bones can be broken, your blood can flow, you can sicken with disease and suffer its agonies. Life will not free you from pain. But you will not die.”

  He was speaking without emotion, while Cormac listened. “But in order to live,” Kongo said, “you must truly live. You cannot simply exist, Cor-mac, like a cow or a tree. You must live.”