Johnny One-Eye

by Jerome Charyn

  And that’s when I catapulted myself, shot onto the lawn with my crutch, like some coxcomb at Windsor Castle, or my own dad, who had been Madame’s personal slave. I did half a somersault on my singed heels, flaunted my eye patch, so that the patriotic men and women could peek at the hole in my head.

  The women took a marked interest in me.

  “Johnny One-Eye,” they said, and whilst they all laughed, I led the nuns into College Hall with my gambols and somersaults. The scholars were glad to welcome Clara and the other nuns, to feast on marmalade after managing to smother bits of fire and smoke in College Hall with their own wet blankets, but they did not have much use for me. I had no place in their little calendar of highborn souls. They didn’t offer me the least snippet of cake. I cared not. ’T was Clara’s frowns that hurt, the coldness and condemnation in her eyes.

  “Always the clown, ain’t you, John?” she sang, while the scholars pawed at Clara and fed her cake.

  It was Gertrude who defended me of a sudden. “Quiet, Clara. He saved these lads, saved their lives.”

  “Couldn’t he have charged into those committee women with his crutch? I was gettin’ hungry for a battle royal.”

  “While the college burned? Johnny did what he had to do.”

  “Then can’t he eat in a corner?” asked a scholar. “Where clowns are supposed to sit while their betters amuse themselves.”

  Gertrude slapped the scholar. His mouth quivered, but he took the slap. Clara would have scratched his eyes out had he ever moved on Madame. He smoldered and stuffed his face with food from a silver dish whilst Gertrude took out her gold windup watch, a bibelot she’d won in a card game at the Queen’s Yard.

  “Eat your tea,” she said. “You have five more minutes of fun.”

  “But Gert,” another scholar said, “we’re making our stand. No rebel will drive us out of King’s.”

  “The rebels aren’t driving you out. You’re leaving of your own volition.”

  “And why is that?” said the same scholar. “We have our books and our desks.”

  “Desks fated to be firewood.”

  “We’d soon as die than surrender to a band of smelly mechanics and their smelly wives.”

  Gert slapped him too.

  “Never malign your enemies,” she said. “That’s the first lesson of war.” She ripped the shirt off a scholar’s back, draped it upon a stick, and manufactured her own flag of truce.

  “Aw, can’t we stay?” said yet another scholar.

  “And have my girls roasted as harpies and witches? Because that’s what will happen.”

  The scholars turned gallant. “Madam, we would be mortified to watch fingers of smoke crawling out of Clara’s hair, like some perverse picture of the Medusa. We could not—nay, would not—ever allow this to happen.”

  And they marched out of College Hall with Clara holding the flag. I limped behind them, like some one-eyed animal. Neither the committee men nor their wives molested us. But I could sense the hatred in each woman’s eye. Had the mechanics and merchants not been present, their wives would have set us all on fire.

  The scholars followed Gert into the nunnery. They sported with the girls, guzzled our best sparkling wine. I would have wandered into the shoe closet, had my own champagne, but I might have been noticed in the hurly-burly of scholars, and I did not relish being spied upon.

  Gert stood apart, seemed to look at me, as if to imply: We will have our own party, John. And I never felt closer to Madame than on that day, six little months ago, when I gamboled on a lawn and kept my college from burning to the ground.

  Seven

  FIVE MONTHS LATER AND I’M THE HERMIT OF King’s. I’d moved out of the Queen’s Yard. I could neither be near Clara nor apart.

  I had no right to a room at the college. Washington had turned King’s into a hospital and hotel for his militia. But no one seemed in charge, and I could slip in and out at my leisure. Since our former president had fled to England, I lived in Matthew Pin’s old rooms. The militiamen had seized the furniture, tore whatever wealth Pin had on the walls. I had nothing but a narrow bed and scraps of clothing that the militia hadn’t bothered to steal. The college no longer had a cook, and I had to grab whatever vittles I could. The nuns fed me. They brought soup and bread and wine from Robinson Street. Gert was the instrument. I probably would have starved without the queen. But she wouldn’t send the nun I wanted most.

  I wasn’t a minister, as Matthew had been before he assumed the presidency. But I did lecture once or twice a week inside the chapel that was no longer a chapel, since Matthew Pin had stolen all the artifacts, including the college Bible embroidered in gold. The militiamen had ripped out half the pews, deposited them in the dining hall that was now their barracks, and I was left with nothing, nothing at all. But the yobs crowded into the chapel to hear me speak. Sailors, militiamen, mechanics and their wives, half the nuns of Holy Ground. “Domine Johnny,” they called me, and I didn’t even have a churchman’s hat or robe. But they longed for a preacher in such precarious times, and preachers were hard to get. York Island was like a lost world, waiting for the redcoats to come. The town was near to madness, and I had to soothe a sorry lot of souls.

  I lectured to a band of unwashed patriots, posed as the college’s last remaining moral philosopher. I had few credentials but the lies I’d picked up from Harold and the balderdash of my drunken tutors, who were ridden out of town, pelted with stones, pissed upon, because they had ranted against General Washington, had even sentenced him to death in their diatribes. Careful I was. And also confused. I loved a king I’d never met and couldn’t seem to hate the rebel commander in chief. I was a Yorker, lads, a child of Holy Ground, but sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference between God and the Divil. So I removed myself from the here and now, retreated from the territory of rebels and Loyalists, from Howe’s armada and Washington’s breastworks and redoubts, the chains he sank in the Hudson to trap the British fleet, the surgeons he’d brought to King’s to assuage the certain slaughter of his men. He had neither the arms nor the maneuverability nor the skill to fight the strongest armada in the world—a phantom armada that was hiding somewhere, waiting to pounce, like a monstrous sea lion in a floating field of mice; and it was the palpable aura of General Howe and his invisible brother, Admiral Lord Richard Howe, that poisoned our tranquility.

  My subject that day was King Saul, the unfortunate pilgrim who couldn’t please God because he was a man without a voice. Saul was one of us, isolated, alone, stuck inside the island of his own skin. “God isn’t fond of silence,” I said. “God preferred David and his lyre.” But the mechanics interrupted me. I knew what was on their mind. The profound shortage of available black bodies. Blacks had run to the British, both slaves and free men, and the mechanics could find no one to toil for them. The British had been freeing slaves by the dozen, offering them jobs as stevedores or baggage handlers. And the mechanics were frozen up with fury.

  “Domine, why do ye waste our time with shepherd boys and kings? Instruct us. Do black men have a soul? The blacks are signing up with King George. If we find one nigger in a red coat, we’ll burn him in hot oil. And we’ll burn Little Africa. So what is your belief? Do blackies have a soul?”

  “They’re the children of Ham, and Ham had a soul.”

  “That’s sedition,” they said. “Prove to us, Domine, that a black man can reason?”

  They were looking for an excuse to rush into Out Ward and capture as many blacks as they could, harness them as packhorses, and pay them a pittance. Thus Little Africa would become one more colony of mechanics. I couldn’t stop them. What militia could?

  A tall woman strode across that sea of broken pews in a cardinal that obscured her face. She removed her hood when she arrived at the table that served as my lectern. It was Clara, here at King’s again, her green eyes blazing at the rabble. Perhaps she’d been to all my lectures in that cardinal of hers and didn’t want to give a lad the satisfaction of knowing
she was around. I’d never seen her so angry. She brushed me away like a useless fly, but not before she hissed in my ear. “I can’t believe a college boy would listen to such trash.”

  And she turned on the rabble. “I ought to spit. Sailors philosophizing about the human soul. A bunch of devils with light skin.”

  “Aw, Clara, sit yeself down. We didn’t mean you. Whoever heard of a nigger with blond hair?”

  “I’ll nigger you,” she said, and rushed right into the rabble. There was pandemonium.

  “Order,” I shouted, “order,” while the sailors and militiamen surrounded Clara with colossal planks of wood they tore out of the pews. I stood beside her, covering Clara’s flank and waiting for a massacre when the high sheriff appeared without a single constable.

  “John, are you insane? Encouraging this crowd.”

  He didn’t have a cudgel. He swatted at the sailors with a corner of his hat. “Out, out,” he said, and invited the whole mob of women and men to depart from the chapel.

  I couldn’t find Clara. She must have fled in secret and returned to Holy Ground.

  Eight

  WENT BACK TO MY ROOMS TRYING TO CONSOLE myself with the one hero I’d ever had. Benedict Arnold. I first came across him during the summer of ’75. I’d enlisted with the rebels right out of King’s. ’T was the brainchild of my mentor, Sir Harold Morse. His great plan was to have me join up with Manhattan’s own regiment of rapscallions and disgraced Sons of Liberty, the Irregulars, because it was much easier to hide within such a chaotic little kernel of men. How could he have known I would lose an eye at Quebec?

  “Attach yourself to a general,” my mentor told me.

  But there were no generals or colonels even close to Fresh Water Pond, north of Robinson Street and the Negroes Burial Ground, where we trained in our britches, just madmen and Sons of Liberty looking for battle. We marched to Massachusetts in fifteen days, and would have arrived sooner if some of the madmen and Sons hadn’t stopped to steal from farmers and chase the farmers’ wives into the woods, calling them King George’s harlots while they ripped off their clothes. I’d have lost my reason had I not reminded myself that I was Harold’s homunculus, robbed of all human warmth, put there to join up with some general. But it troubled me to hear such madmen blame my benefactor, George, a king who wouldn’t have run after farmers’ wives in the fields or helped himself to vittles that ne’er belonged to him. Only once did I lose control and betray the trust that Harold had in me. A yob was chasing after a farmer’s wife who looked like a mere child. “Johnny,” he said, “will ye have this here harlot first or last?”

  I hit him over the head with a rock, told myself that I was taking care of the king’s business, that George wouldn’t allow one of his American colonists to be ravished in so rough a fashion.

  We didn’t find much comfort in Cambridge, a town of tents filled with ratty rebels hovering over Boston and a British army in brilliant red uniforms and a barracks with stovepipes and beautiful white tents on Boston’s big green. And there wasn’t a mound of dust left to billet the Manhattan Irregulars. We had to forage for ourselves like Gypsies. I lived inside a blanket with holes in every corner. And it was the holes that kept me alive. I could watch for thieves who would cut your throat to acquire a powder horn or a colored neckerchief.

  A colonel rode in front of us, sitting on a huge chestnut with an arse as wide as a hill. He was searching for volunteers. And I told myself that he was as near a general as I’d ever get. He intended to grab Canada from the British with a single regiment. He wouldn’t go by water. He would follow an old Indian trail in the wilds of Maine, catch Quebec by surprise, seize the city while it slept on its rampart, tranquil in the belief that no one would be crazy enough to cross an impenetrable forest, no one but Benedict Arnold. He was not a giant, like George Washington, but rather a smallish man with thick fingers and a bearish chest, tons of silver and gold on his tunic.

  The colonel received me in a tent made of the finest sailcloth. He wore a scarf at his throat, sucked on a pipe, and sipped at a tankard of rum with a silver beak. The rum was meant to swallow his sorrow, I imagine. He was selecting soldiers while he mourned. He’d lost his wife and was left with three sons.

  “Private Stocking, show me your hands.”

  I did.

  “Pah,” he said. “You have a girl’s hands. And I need woodsmen who can deal with a bateau. What can ye offer?” “Loyalty.”

  “I can buy all the loyalty I want with a letter of credit.”

  “But you can’t read too many letters while you’re high on a horse,” says I.

  “I don’t like your tongue. Were you a magistrate’s assistant before ye started to soldier?”

  “I was a college boy.”

  “At some Tory hellhole. And you’ve been sent to haunt me and my men.”

  I’d heard that the Indians of the north had named him Dark Eagle. He did have an eagle’s black glare. And he must have told fortunes with his blue-gray eyes; he could already read me as a homunculus.

  “Can ye spell? Are ye good at grammar? Then I’ll attach ye to my person.”

  “As your bodyguard?”

  “Not on your life. As my scribble boy.”

  He looked at me once with his fortune-teller’s eyes, started to swoon, and fell right into my arms. “It’s my new mistress,” he said, “mistress rum…shouldn’t let a man drink when he has the gout. I’m raising ye one rank, Corporal Stocking. And you’ll be a sergeant come midnight, if ye can restore me to my table, so I can interview the next lad.”

  And that’s how my short career began at Arnold’s side in tent town, in the wilderness, under the walls of Quebec, where I lost me an eye and Arnold was shot in the leg, and at the little Catholic hospital where both of us lay wounded. Congress named him a brigadier right from his hospital bed, and I, who was an acting lieutenant by now, fell back into anonymity. He resumed his command without a word of goodbye to his scribble boy. He was hotheaded, mercurial, and must have found another scribe. But he never seized Quebec. And I had to get out of that little hospital in a nonce or become a prisoner of war.

  It was Madame and the nuns who nursed me back to whatever health a one-eyed man can have. And I reclaimed my territory at King’s, tho’ in truth I was nothing more than a watchman who presided over the dismantlement of College Hall.

  I HAD A DREAM the very night that Clara had appeared in her cardinal to chastise our mechanics for their woeful disregard of black men. In my dream I could see a one-eyed general wearing a long winter coat, the very coat that Arnold wore when he attacked the Lower Town of Quebec, and plunged, sword in hand, into the heart of a blizzard. “Rush on, brave boys! Rush on!” But Holy Ground was on the far side of the blizzard, not Quebec.

  I didn’t realize how pregnant my dream was, how ripe with unfortunate meaning. A one-eyed man moved in right across from me at College Hall—Washington’s own little major, Malcolm Treat, who guided America’s secret service and liked to lock a lad in a potato bin. Treat inherited the apartment that had been set aside for King George himself should His Majesty ever have the whim to cross an ocean and visit the college of kings. This apartment-palace was situated in a corner that looked out upon Robinson Street. The king could have watched all of whoredom from his window.

  But I was forlorn when I heard a familiar laugh coming from the king’s bedroom. Major Treat had a visitor I longed to know very little about. The laugh was unmistakable. A nun had arrived in full regalia, with a pinched waist and a wide skirt of so many hoops it could have hid a small army. Clara, my Clara, was wearing a wig piled high in the lush manner of Madame de Pompadour, she who could terrorize the entire French court until the day she died.

  Clara had always been independent, a nun who picked her own clients, who puffed on her pipe and remained aloof from the traffic at the Queen’s Yard, and here she was painted up like a harlot. Gertrude’s hand was behind it all. Madame had sent her to this truculent little major, and I had to
know why. I suffered her cooing for a week, and then I pounced. She was on the way to Treat in her hoops and her tower of hair when I opened my door and kidnapped Clara, one hand over her mouth.

  “I’m desperate,” I said. “If you promise not to scream, I’ll let you go.”

  Her green eyes were like mirrors to my own terror. I unclasped her mouth. We were lying on my barren floor. I’d never been so near her beauty. Her heart palpitated under my fist, like the bald head of a bird.

  “Dear John,” she purred. “I will visit you in your sleep and unman you with Harold’s razor. I will parade your prick along the harbor and leave the bloodiest of trails. You will not have one morning or afternoon of peace.”

  “It will be worth the pain if you tell me why you are with such a man.”

  “Ah,” she said, “my poet, the little gentleman who was raised in a brothel and never thought to sample our wares…the American major is more of a man than you’ll ever be.”

  Clara must have seen an infernal color pass in front of my face. “Child,” she said, “I am simply an ambassadress for Gertrude’s brothel. It seems that General Washington is like to close us down. And I have to remind the major what he might miss.”

  “But you have put too much gusto into being an ambassadress.”

  “It’s a labor of love. Now climb off unless you have some real business.”

  Clara kicked at me, rose up, and glided her hands across the bumps in her skirt until the line of each hoop was perfect. She looked for but a second in my mirror and calibrated her wig like a gunnery sergeant. And then she was off to her American major.

  Nine

  IT WAS THE ONE TIME IN MY LIFE I WAS GLAD TO be a spy. A spy could preach moral philosophy, could appear lovable and gay, yet have murder on his mind. I meant to visit Malcolm Treat while he slept and crack his skull with a spade.