by Pete Hamill
On many nights, Cormac went sleepless with rage.
71.
On Evacuation Day, the victorious army of George Washington came into New York through McGowan’s Pass. They moved down the east side of the island, and Cormac, Quaco, and the others joined the ragged troops near the grave of Big Michael in Kip’s Bay. At the head of the long line of soldiers, Washington sat high on a pale gray horse, shoulders squared, head held as erect as a Roman statue, his uniform pressed and clean and sparkling. Other officers trailed behind him on horseback and his soldiers came on foot. Their uniforms were tattered and patched, their shoes held together with rope. Some of the men limped along, swinging on crude crutches. Some wore bandages across foreheads. Some were hunched and weary. All carried rifles. There was a small band of musicians, but no music. Hundreds of people came out to see them, most of them women and children, some of them cheering, many just peering at this rabble in arms, as a British general had called them. The children tagged along with the soldiers. The grown women stared with arms folded across chests, as if wondering what would happen on the morrow.
Cormac said good-bye to Quaco and slowly moved toward the head of the long column as it entered the Bowery. Then they all stopped. Washington dismounted, ran a fond hand on his horse’s brow, and walked into the Bull’s Head Tavern at Bayard and Pump. Here they would wait until the last English soldier had boarded the last English ship and moved out toward the Narrows. The general turned to his army and waved. He did not smile. The soldiers cheered him, and cheered themselves too. A cool November wind blew from the east.
“General Washington!” Cormac shouted from the crowd at the foot of the tavern’s wooden deck.
The general turned, smiled slightly, showing his caried yellow teeth. His nose was puffier, his hair whiter. He looked straight at Cormac.
“I’m the man who saved your life at Kip’s Bay!” Washington squinted. Two guards flanked him, bayonets at the ready. The general seemed to be searching his memory for one dangerous night out of two thousand. Then he nodded.
“Of course…. Do come in.”
He waited for Cormac to join him and then led the way into the crowded tavern. Everybody hushed. Washington was taken to a small table against the far wall. The air smelled of beer and sweat. They sat down while attendants created a small human fence around them. His officers remained standing against the wall to his right.
“I’m glad you’re alive,” Washington said.
“And I’m glad to see you too, sir.”
A fat man brought a pitcher of water and two glasses. Washington poured. The exhaustion seeped from him like fog.
“You grabbed the bridle of my horse,” he said.
“I did. Cormac O’Connor is my name.”
“You slapped the haunch and sent me flying.”
“That actually was done by a man named Bantu, one of the Africans.”
“A brazen lot,” Washington said, an amused smile on his mouth. “But you have my thanks.”
“We needed you alive, General.”
“Not everyone agreed with you—including some of my officers.”
“The men knew,” Cormac said. “Including my fellow soldiers.” Washington sipped the cold water. “You were commanding coloreds, if my memory serves me.”
“I served with five African soldiers, sir. We were irregulars. There was no commander.”
Washington’s nostrils widened and twitched, the old hunter detecting hostility.
“And where are those soldiers now, Mister O’Connor?”
“Dead, sir.”
Cormac quickly told him about the deaths of Big Michael and Bantu, of Aaron, Silver, and Carlito. He mentioned the great fire, and the Bridewell, and the escape, and the long campaign within the city.
“God…”
“But those soldiers had children, sir, three of them had children. They had wives. They talked sometimes about the future. About going to free schools. About working their own farms as free men, about opening shops…”
Washington drummed the fingers of his right hand on the tabletop. His mouth tightened.
“Yes?” he said, as if knowing what was coming.
“I hope, sir, that you will do all in your power to honor the promises made by our Revolution.” Hating the self-righteousness of his own words. “I told my men of those promises. I read them the Declaration of Independence, one that you read to us here in 1776.” Appealing now to Washington’s vanity. “They fought for those words, for ‘inalienable rights,�� for ‘all men are created equal…’ And right now, General, Americans are roaming New York, chasing their former slaves as if they were dogs gone astray….”
Washington sighed.
“All of that will be debated, I assure you,” he said. “But not in a tavern.”
He took a longer sip of the water. Cormac leaned forward, his anger rising.
“Debate will not be enough, sir,” Cormac said. “There can be only one decision. Slavery must end. Or all those men will have died for a lie.”
Washington was now annoyed. He was waiting for a ceremony of triumph, waiting to mount his horse and ride majestically into New York. He was waiting for the British flags to be lowered and the American flags raised. He was waiting for a moment of immortality.
“For now, all of that is in the future, Mister O’Connor.”
“This is the future, General Washington.”
The general stood up, his chair scraping on flagstones. He offered a hand to be shaken. Cormac gripped his large hand but didn’t shake it.
“If you don’t give the slaves their freedom,” he said, “this country will die in its crib.”
“Thank you,” Washington said in an icy way, withdrawing his hand and motioning with his head to his officers. “I have much to do now.”
Washington turned his back and moved to his waiting men. The guards stepped between him and Cormac. He had been dismissed. Cormac turned and walked through the crowded tavern into the American morning, hoping he’d live long enough to heal his aching heart.
He wandered alone to South Street to watch the last British ship leave. There were American flags waving now on some buildings, looking tentative and modest. Many Americans were moving toward the river and the Battery, some joking and laughing, others solemn. There were no Africans among them.
Around noon, they saw the ship easing from its pier above Wall Street, its decks crowded, its flags and pennants waving as if in triumph. Cormac could not read the name of the ship as it floated slowly downriver and he felt nothing. The crowd cheered and blew whistles and small horns, and then grew quiet and started moving toward Broadway to wait for the procession of Washington.
SIX
The Time of the Countess
What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life’s page, And be alone on earth as I am now.
—LORD BYRON, “CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE,” 1812
72.
Cormac eased to his left outside the doorway of the basement room at 7 Cedar Street, trying for a better view of the slaughtered woman on the bed. A tall mustached policeman barred his way. Floor-boards creaked above his head, the heavy tread of a detective named Ford, who was speaking to the owner of the bordello. Cormac put a hand on the stone wall beside the door, trying to steady himself. The wall was scummy with a decade’s worth of damp. He felt as if some dark yellow fluid were beginning to drip through his veins.
He made notes, using pencil on a small cut pad, forcing himself to concentrate on what lay before him. About twenty-five, perhaps younger. Dark brown hair, thickened by blood. Rouged cheeks beneath the drying blood. A red dent above the brow. Her throat cut from the left ear to the right clavicle bone. Her tongue jutting from her mouth. One ear severed. Puncture wounds in her small left breast.
“Do you have a name yet, officer?” Cormac said.
“Dubious,” the policeman said.
“That’s her n
ame?”
“Yeah. Dubious Jones. No wonder he killed her.”
He laughed a cop’s dark laugh.
“Who’s the he?” Cormac said. “The one who killed her.”
“Fucked if I know,” the cop said.
Cormac kept making notes. A single thick candle burned down to a saucer, the wax glazing the table. A wick like a thin stump of charcoal. Her left leg bent at the edge of the bed, one bare foot on the greasy stone floor. A laced black boot on the other foot, caked mud on the heel. Dark blood soaking the bed beneath her buttocks. The dress jerked up. Cut there too.
A rat with a leathery tail appeared under the bed, licking the drying blood.
Cormac turned away, the yellow fluid thickening in his veins. He heard footsteps coming down the stairs behind him. Inspector Ford. And Jennings from the Journal-Advertiser, notebook in hand.
“What’s it we’ve got here?” Jennings said.
“What’s it look like we’ve got here?” said Inspector Ford. His reddish mustaches looked fierce, his nostrils flared. “We’ve got a fucking murder.”
“Can I quote you on that?” Jennings said, smiling. He flashed his rabbity front teeth, touched the brim of his bowler hat. Thin, young, a British edge to his accent. “Jesus,” he said, “it smells like a bear’s ass down here.”
“It would smell like that if you filled it with flowers,” Cormac said.
“Ah, an aesthetic observation from the aging veteran of the Evening Post,” Jennings said.
“Why don’t you interview the rat under the bed, Jennings?” Cormac said. “He must’ve been an eyewitness.”
“Totally unreliable.”
“Perfect for you,” Cormac said.
“Will you two goddamned shite-for-brains shut up, please?” Inspector Ford said. “I’m trying to work.”
Cormac turned, the bile rising, the yellow fluid surging, and hurried up the stairs. He walked through the barroom, with its watercolors of the Hudson and its worried owner, and made it to Cedar Street. He held on to a tree and then vomited into the gutter.
A fine way to spend a birthday, he thought, walking toward the Evening Post on Pine Street. A fine way to celebrate another ninth of September. Puking my guts out on Cedar Street. Happy birthday, in the year of the Lord 1834. And even now, I don’t feel much better. The air is the same as it was before I got sick. And it’s filling me and rotting my guts.
Who killed Dubious Jones? he asked himself.
I don’t care, he answered.
The morning had been cool and quiet, and as always on his birthday, he walked to the edge of the North River and dropped a white rose into the flowing waters. As always, he wished for it to sail out past the many-masted ships and through the Narrows and into the Atlantic. With any luck, it would float all the way to Ireland. He sent that rose each year to his mother. She, after all, had done all the work on the day he was born. She was the one who should be celebrated. As always at the edge of the river, he thought about the coat of many colors and the magical pots simmering on the fire and her dark hair and wonderful smile. Then he went to work.
That morning, as on most weekday mornings for the past twelve years, he left the river’s edge and went to the office of the Evening Post on Pine Street. The morning was hot, with steamy August lingering into sweet September. The odor was beginning to rise from the streets, the buildings, the people.
He spent the morning scanning month-old newspapers from London, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Paris, freshly arrived on the Liverpool packet. On slow days, he would cobble together stories from those newspapers, including the dailies in French. In a way, such work was like painting, which he did in the rooms on Cortlandt Street that he’d rented now for sixteen years. You took various elements, you were precise about each one of them, but you made them fresh by the way you arranged them. The process kept his brain alert and alive. Or so he thought, as the months became years, and the years became decades.
He liked the work of journalism from the day he started at the old Commercial-Advertiser just before the century turned. He’d been urged into the craft by a printer who had employed him for night work when his business was heavy. For the first ten years Cormac used the name Ridley Rattigan, but it never mattered what name he used in his new life since no article was ever signed. The same was true at the Evening Post. The skills of the acting craft helped him in several ways. He could make himself gradually look older, so that when he announced his retirement from the Commercial-Advertiser, he could go off, paint for a year on his savings, and then apply for work at the Evening Post as a new young man, eager to work on a newspaper. The other skill of the actor’s trade was technical: He could write in whatever voice was required. He could be a Hamiltonian conservative or a Tom Paine radical. He could be lyrical and melancholy or sarcastic and scathing. And he could supply what his editors most frequently demanded: a tone of numbing banality. Cormac worked at this craft ten hours a day, six days a week, which left him about twenty hours a week for his painting. He soon discovered that he needed both: the journalism to eat time, help it pass swiftly, to give him a sense of human proportion; the painting to slow it down, to allow him to meditate on sky and weather and the endless varieties of the human body.
He had a talent for newspaper work, delighting in the discovery of stories and then writing them in units of five hundred or a thousand words. He became quick and accurate. He enjoyed the company of other journalists, even the unspeakable Jennings. He liked the way the day’s routine could always be interrupted. He’d be assembling a tedious story about the fate of the Bonapartes, a story that would be read by about seventy-five people in New York, and someone would rush in the door, breathless and urgent. As had happened this morning. “Bloody murder! Woman killed at seven Cedar Street.” And out the door he’d go. There were more and more homicides in the town these past ten years, because of the opening of the Erie Canal and the flooding of the town with strangers. The newspaper had to record them. But Cormac knew that the gory details would never make it into the sanitized columns of the Evening Post. Such details, said his editors, Mr. Bryant and Mr. Leggett, were low and common. But still, someone had to go. Someone had to ask a policeman: Who killed Dubious Jones? Even if the answer never appeared in the newspaper.
There was one other part of newspaper writing that he came to need more than all the others, including the regularity of a paycheck.
It was about other people, not himself.
He walked to the office of the Post and paused at a stall on the crowded Broadway corner to buy a cup of mocha coffee and a piece of plain bread from a heavy black woman named Beatriz Machado. She was also selling corn and oysters, but he needed something plain in his trembling stomach.
“You look like you swallered a boiled ferret, Mist’ Co’mac,” she said.
“I feel worse than I look, Beatriz.”
She leaned in and whispered, “You need somethin’ special?”
“No,” he said, “just a hot bath.”
“Now, that’s harder for to get you,” Beatriz said. “Easier for to get a hot woman than a hot bath in this dirty ol’ town.”
In addition to corn, oysters, and mocha coffee (introduced the year before by seamen from Jamaica), Beatriz sold other things, secret things, ranging from magical roots, fried insects, and herbs to opium. These were not displayed in her stall, but she had them for her special customers. Adding and subtracting, Cormac tried to remember how long he’d known her. It was now fifty-seven years since Bantu died, and Big Michael died, and Aaron died and Silver died and Carlito died. Beatriz had been born a slave, up by Albany, but came with her parents to New York when she was seven, right after the Revolution, and had lived to see the final end of slavery in New York. That was just seven years ago. Forty-four years after the Revolution. Cormac had met her with Quaco at the African Bookshop on Lispenard Street when she was seventeen. She had just given birth to her first child. Cormac couldn’t recall the name of her husband but remembered him as
a grave, humorless young man who forbade her to talk with white men. He was soon gone, but Cormac didn’t see Beatriz again until Quaco died at ninety-eight years old in 1816. They met at the burial ground. She was then heavier, the mother of four boys, living with her third husband.
“You some strange white man,” she said, “talkin’ that old Africa talk, that Y’ruba talk.”
“I speak French too,” he said. “And Irish. And a little English.” She laughed. “You some strange white man.”
Now she handed him the bread and mocha, and as always refused his money. He sipped in silence as she poured coffee and handed sweets to other customers and dropped their money in an apron pocket. Most took their coffee in cups from Beatriz, but some brought their own cups and carried their coffee away to their offices. Cormac’s coffee was sweet and the bread fresh, but his body was still in a state of runny rebellion. Other people, he told himself. Think of other people, look at other people; you’re a journalist and other people are your business. Who killed Dubious Jones? Who gave her the name?
Down Greenwich Street he could see old black men sleeping in doorways or standing on corners, waiting for work that did not come. Their masters had held them to the end and then were happy to see them go. They no longer had to care for these old men. No longer feed them and clothe them. They’d simply cast them out. Like old dogs. Now the white-haired Africans begged for alms, and Cormac wondered which of them had fought for the Revolution when they were young, which of them had believed all the shiny words from the likes of Cormac O’Connor. He could not look at them without feeling shame. He had trouble listening to them too. Like almost everybody in the city, they asked about a place to wash. They were too old for the treacheries of the summer rivers and there were no baths in the winter churches. They had no homes. After every blizzard, two or three were found dead in alleys, sometimes hugging each other for warmth that finally vanished. All had lost or outlived their children and their women. Sometimes Cormac gave them a few pence and offered his apologies in Yoruba. He could do nothing about the water.
