by Pete Hamill
“Fecking rabble,” Warren said, as he followed Cunningham out of the row of cells.
And as he whirled, his coat opened, and Cormac saw that he was wearing the sword. Saw the spirals etched in steel. Thinking: My father’s sword. Telling himself: I must get out of the Bridewell. I must find Tony Warren on the streets of New York. I must get to the end of the line. I must return my father’s sword to the blood of his blood.
Whores were the agents of salvation.
One of them was named Kitty Nevins: red-haired, full-breasted, with the guts (Cormac thought) of nine burglars. She devised the code and smuggled it into the prison and then chalked the first coded messages on slate that they could read from the cell windows. She it was, with two of her sisters in the life, who seduced the guards with perfumed flesh and smuggled in the guns. Who had horses waiting. Who waited in the hammering midnight rain while the prisoners used keys wrenched from drained guards and then smashed and threatened their way out, unlocking as many cells as possible. Suddenly more than twenty of the prisoners were running free, mad and desperate, filthy as sewers, manacled and bony. Cormac was with them, running into Broadway, a pistol in his waistband, a musket in a manacled hand. Hobbled, weak, fierce with life. In the break for the street, the shooting started. Cormac shot two redcoats, one with the pistol, the second with the musket. He dropped the musket, jammed the pistol in his waistband, lunged for one horse-drawn carriage, and fell short into mud, and watched the carriage gallop toward the North River. Heard shouts. Curses. More gunfire. And ran north through the black rain.
Then saw torches ahead. Veered left. More torches.
And then from the ebony darkness he heard the whinny of a horse. Familiar. A song. And here he came, black as the night, there when Cormac needed him.
Thunder.
They galloped together into the blind watches of the night. Moved like ghosts through blank spaces, across creeks and streams, heading to what was left of the Manhattan wild. Cormac gripping Thunder’s mane with manacled hands. As the rain pounded down, making a great drumming, ceaseless sound on the trees, obliterating all voices and the sound of gunfire and even the pounding of Cormac’s heart.
Until Thunder slowed, then stopped, then shook, as if telling Cormac to slide off here. He did. And could see a low, dark house, and some shacks beyond, and hear the lowing of cattle and the shuddering of other horses. Thunder galloped into the darkness. Cormac felt boneless from fatigue and could see nothing clearly through the curtains of rain. He bent forward, gripped his knees, breathing deeply and freely, gulping air as if it were food, then stood up and lifted his face to the cleansing rain. He whispered, in Irish: “Wash away the filth, please.” He whispered, in English: “Heal the rawness where the manacles bit my flesh.” He begged, in French: “Wash away typhus and cholera and fleas. Please.” He asked in Yoruba: “Save me.”
Then an arm gripped his neck, and he felt the tip of a knife against his back. “Who are you?” a deep voice growled.
Cormac said his true name. It was too late and too dark for deception.
The arm relaxed, and he was spun around. And there, soaked and grizzled, white hairs driving like tacks from inside his black cheeks, was Quaco.
“God damn,” he said, “if it ain’t you for true, Mister Cormac.”
Quaco saved him. He snapped the manacles with wire cutters, and his wife, now white-haired, fed Cormac lentil soup and meat and bread. He handed Cormac a blanket and fresh clothes and a bowl of warm water, and then shredded the prison clothes and fed them, piece by piece, into the fire. Roger, the oldest son, then opened a trapdoor leading by ladder to a room chopped out of stone beneath the house. Actually two rooms. The first room was loaded with coal and firewood. The second room was behind a door covered with thin layers of stone. A secret room with a bed, several muskets, trunks, a sacred African drum, and jugs of water. Refuge.
On the first night Cormac slept for many hours. He woke to the sound of heavy boots on the floor. Heard indistinct British voices. The trapdoor opened, and a grunting man came down the ladder and was very still. Cormac held his breath. The man saw only coal and firewood and then climbed the ladder and left as Cormac exhaled. He did not come upstairs until it was dark.
“You not the first Irisher been down there,” Quaco said, laughing. “Passed a few of you along, sure enough.”
Quaco’s four sons moved in and out, curious about this latest white man, and wary too. They lived in an area of free blacks, with Quaco carrying faked papers dating his own freedom to 1738, before the revolt. He and Cormac talked about the night when Cormac helped Quaco to escape with his wife, telling the story more for the sons than for each other. They talked into the night about those who were burned and hanged and mutilated, and those who disappeared and what might have happened to all the inquisitors and the mysterious fate of poor Mary Burton. They laughed. They mourned. One night, in the second week, Quaco looked at Cormac in an inquisitive way.
“You ain’t aged but a day,” he said.
“I don’t feel the way I look.”
“I ain’t even goneta ask how come.”
“Good.”
“But you was close to Kongo.”
“Yes.”
“The babalawo.”
“Very close.”
Quaco didn’t go beyond this, and Cormac just stared at the fire. Then they talked about the Revolution, and the future.
“I keep dreamin’ of home,” Quaco said on another night. “I keep dreamin’ of the village where I was a boy. I keep wantin’ to go home.”
“Maybe you can.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
But he didn’t seem to believe it. And he had little faith in the Revolution.
“You notice somethin’?” he asked one night. “The English, they promisin’ freedom to their slaves, after everything’s finished. But the Americans? They ain’t promisin’ nothin’.”
Cormac said to himself, You’re right, Quaco. You’re right.
When the snows melted, Cormac found work as a blacksmith with a man named Tingle, whose love of metals had driven him into the madness of alchemy. His forge in a dark forest glen was empty when Cormac arrived, calling himself Alfred Defoe and faking a Liverpool accent. Tingle was locked in a windowless shack trying to turn lead into gold and muttering about the philosopher’s stone. He said very little while Cormac built a new fire in the forge and took over the blacksmithing and moved from Quaco’s cellar to a heatless room above the barn. Each week, more British soldiers moved north carrying axes and saws to attack the forests. On a few summer days, Cormac serviced Tingle’s gaunt, forlorn, and childless wife, Juliet.
“Thank you,” she would say, “and you know that I would not do this if my husband wasn’t mad.”
Tingle didn’t seem to know that his wife offered herself to Cormac in the woods while he was chanting cabalistic numbers in his locked shack. But if he did know, he didn’t care. Their couplings were always in late afternoon, after the horses were shod or the scythes repaired. At night, Cormac was always moving, his face sometimes stained black with berry juice, visiting the scattered Africans. He made speeches in Yoruba and English, trying to persuade the Africans and their American children that their best hope for freedom lay with the Revolution. This was not easy. The Africans heard the news too, and it seemed almost certain that the military power of the professional British Army would defeat the amateurs commanded by Washington.
“If the British wanted to free you, they would do it right now,” Cormac would say. “They were the people who enslaved you. How can you trust the word of slavemasters?”
About a dozen Africans and their children believed Cormac. Most important was Quaco’s son Roger, now almost thirty years old, intelligent, literate, careful. He put together a new version of the black patrol and made certain that Cormac was a member, but not the leader. Together, they set fires. They stole ammunition. They released rats into food warehouses.
At the same time, disguised as
a lame peddler or a hunched old man and even once as an Indian, Cormac tracked the movements of young Tony Warren. The son of the earl moved from barracks to confiscated house and back to the barracks, to the reopened John Street Theater to the whorehouses of the Holy Ground. He had the sword. Cormac wanted it back.
70.
In his pursuit of Tony Warren, Cormac moved alone. This was a private affair, after all, not the business of the Revolution. So he walked through the dark, sour, occupied city like a ghost. The gaunt skeletons of the lower town, with their cold chimneys and formless mounds, looked at midnight like a zone in the Christian purgatory: black, glistening, a place where lost men moved with the rats. On moon-bright nights, all was as clear as a drawing. Cormac seldom went out without clouds to smother the moon.
Then, almost a year after his escape from the Bridewell, he picked up the trail. Warren now lived in a house on Beaver Street. A house taken from Americans and shared with three other officers. But the Englishman was never alone there, and a redcoat stood on permanent guard at the door. There were rumors (brought to Cormac by Roger and Quaco, and whispered by another in a grog shop) that young Warren was building a new house on his father’s land, high in the Bloomingdale. That he had a young family in England. That he planned to settle in New York, once the rebels were destroyed. All rumors. All noted. Cormac knew he could not go to the Bloomingdale in hopes of somehow repeating what he and Kongo had done in 1741. There were soldiers all over the area now, making a show of their presence so that Washington would not be tempted to make a sudden assault on Manhattan, thinking he could cut it in half. If the soldiers felt safe in the denuded upper island, so, surely, did Tony Warren.
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.
