Johnny One-Eye

by Jerome Charyn

  The yobs had found what they were looking for—Little Africa, land of outcasts, paupers, and slaves. The high sheriff never bothered about a man once he was on the far side of our Indian wall. But it wasn’t a lawless region, even if it was lacking in lamps. Prince Paul was his own constabulary. He broke heads when he had to. He protected his nieces from drunken soldiers and pirates. He cut off the hand of more than one thief, but there weren’t all that many highwaymen in a ward that had so few highways, and where the proudest pirate might get lost in a maze of unlit streets.

  But Jaggers hadn’t led his caravan into Little Africa by any accident. He’d brought Prince Paul a black king. He was making fun of the district’s most important holiday, “Pinkster,” or black Pentecost, when Little Africa elected its own king and paraded him around the ward in a sedan chair like mine.

  His lads had lit half a dozen torches. “Blackies,” he shouted, “I brung you your king.” He was edging for a fight. He had to take his mind off the Brits in our bay. He had to destroy. And who would have held him accountable if he ran amok in Little Africa among a black rabble that sided with King George?

  Prince Paul appeared in the fickle light of the torches. He was much more noble than any of these men. He wore a satin coat and britches with a waistband. He had to use all his cunning to save the women and children of Little Africa. He got down on one knee. I could read the quivers under his eye. I knew how much it cost him to be civil to such a gang.

  “Prince,” Jaggers said, “how do you like your Johnny boy?”

  “Very well. He’s a most sensible king.” “I figured the feathers was a nice touch. I mean, if you’re goin’ to tar a man, you might as well have a deeper purpose, like the Lord’s design. Black Easter may be months away. But heck, if we ain’t manufactured a fine king with feathers and frills. I’d be obliged if you’d kiss Majesty John on the mouth and wipe his feet.”

  He expected Prince Paul to rant and rave. Then Jaggers could pounce and set fire to every hovel, ravish as many African princesses as his heart desired. But Paul stood up and approached my chair. I could feel his rage even in my delirium, but there was something else in his eyes, compassion for a white man who’d been turned into a forest of feathers. And I started to cry, because it was the only tender look I’d had since these yobs had dragged me off the roof. No one else on Manhattan Island had looked at me with anything but hate.

  “Paul,” I whispered. “I’m sorry. I—”

  “Cottonhead,” he hissed in that African dialect of his. “You want to get both of us kilt?”

  Paul didn’t hesitate. He kissed me on the mouth. His lips were as rough and thorny as mine. Then he unwound his waistband and wiped my feet with that splendid piece of silk.

  Jaggers was horrified. And he didn’t like what he found in the shadows. Colored boys with bayonets.

  “Paul, I’d lend Johnny to you and your kin, but the rest of the island would like to have a look at him.”

  Jaggers knocked on my chair and led the caravan back across the Indian wall. He had a terrible fury in his face. A black prince had outsmarted him. And he wanted to seek some revenge. There was an outpost of poor whites in Montgomerie Ward, and he could menace this outpost, steal some women, and put the blame on me. “His Majesty encouraged us,” he’d sing to some magistrate. But he couldn’t control his anger. He and his men began to pillage on the way to Montgomerie Ward.

  We were still in some no-man’s-land near the Indian wall when I heard the rhythmic clap of hoofs that could only have belonged to a blooded horse. A very tall man in a three-cornered hat was coming toward us on a white charger. Jaggers froze in his tracks. I wished it was my general, but no amount of wishing could bring me Benedict Arnold. Arnold was a robust man, a compact man, and this man was lean and tall. He rode like an aristocrat.

  It was the commander in chief himself. I wondered if he’d gone to exercise his horse and heard all the hullabaloo. He drove right into that mob, spilling muskets and men, and walloped Jaggers with the flat of his sword. And Jaggers still hadn’t moved. He trembled and took the blows.

  “Excellency, we couldn’t sit idle while the British fleet was upon us. And we caught this here lieutenant signalin’ to soldiers and sailors.”

  “Knave, to what end? Shall he repeat to Sir William Howe what Sir William already knows? That we are a vile band of men who tar and feather people for our own amusement.”

  General Washington knocked Jaggers to the ground and then he reached low and plucked me out of the chair. I landed on his saddle like a lad swinging from a magic trapeze.

  Twelve

  I WOKE UP ON A NARROW COT WITHOUT MY TAR and feathers. I wore a nightshirt. George Washington sat on a bench nearby with a black orderly who brushed his hair. He was eating a dish of peas, always peas, and drinking Madeira. They started a game of whist and decided not to notice me.

  The orderly’s name was Sparks. He’d been Washington’s valet in Virginia.

  I was astonished to learn that the general loved to cheat at cards. Sparks had to fine him a guinea every game.

  “Sir, you keep signing notes, but soon you will be a bankrupt. I will own your farms and all your land reaching to the Ohio.”

  “I cannot concentrate if you jabber about money. A pox on all my bad luck!”

  “It has nothing to do with luck. You are a poor player. And you deceive me with your tricks.”

  “I will send you to the hangman. Mark my words.”

  “You’re a candidate for the hangman, I should think. A general who leads a revolt. They will draw and quarter you, send your handkerchiefs to the king as a memento of America’s biggest barbarian.”

  “They will not catch me alive. I will fold my tent and move to the wilderness.”

  “And who will brush your hair?” Sparks asked.

  “You will.”

  “And if I side with the British?”

  “I’ll hound you into hell.”

  “Sir, you will give this sick boy a rather poor impression of us.”

  “He’s a varlet. He tried to poison my soup,” said the giant.

  “Yet you allow the poisoner into your very own quarters for the second time. You sleep beside him. Admit. You’re fond of the boy.”

  “As I’m fond of snakes. I intend to turn him into my best viper…are you listening, child?”

  I tried to sit up. My back burned and my arms ached. But I had to answer the general. I couldn’t just lie there in silence while he slandered me.

  “I am not your child. I was bloodied in the war. I lost me an eye.”

  “Sparks, look how he whimpers. He’s a nanny goat, not a viper.”

  “A nanny goat who went through Maine, fought at Arnold’s side,” I said.

  “That’s odd. Arnold disremembers you. He has not mentioned your name in a single dispatch. And I described you to a whisker. ‘Dear Arnold, dost thou recall a little snotty-nose who went by the name of John Stocking? This said Stocking swears he was your secretary.’ And not a word from Arnold…. Sparks, tend to the child. He makes me ill.”

  The general abandoned his cards and his Madeira and his peas and strolled out of the bald little room that served as his private quarters. Sparks rubbed me down with wool grease. That white concoction soothed all the blisters.

  “Pay no attention to the general, Mr. John. He’s a worrier. And when he worries, he cheats and says what he ought not say. He’s a melancholy man until the action starts.”

  The general returned after midnight, and Sparks had to put him to bed. He must have been out drinking ale and wine with the young officers of his family. The general had the longest arms and legs I’d ever seen. That’s why he could pick me out of a sedan chair. It took Sparks half an hour to fit all of him into a nightshirt. The three of us slept on narrow cots in a room that was no bigger than that closet on Holy Ground where the nuns stored their shoes.

  My blisters got worse, and I had such a high fever that the general himself helped carry me on a
stretcher to the hospital that had been set up at King’s. Washington warned the surgeons: “Gentlemen, I brought him here alive and see to it that he comes back alive.”

  These surgeons were scared to death about dealing with me, but they did administer laxatives and leeches and a liquid that made me vomit, piss, and sweat. The leeches sucked my blood until my ears and lips were blue. But I didn’t feel faint, or delirious. I was as lucid as a clock.

  There was lots of howling on my ward, lots of unrest. More British supply ships and men-o’-war appeared on the horizon this same July, under the command of General Howe’s older brother, Admiral Lord Richard Howe, alias “Black Dick,” master of His Majesty’s North American fleet. The New World had never seen such a pair of military masterminds as the two brothers. Black Dick was rumored to be dark as a Gypsy, while Sir William was a tall, reddish man, like George Washington. Black Dick had brought a secret weapon from England: Hessian troops with brass helmets, hired by King George. Our surgeons had watched them with their telescopes from the college’s bell tower. The Hessians swaggered on board Black Dick’s tubs with fixed bayonets, while rebel volunteers on York Island or inside Washington’s Brooklyn works had no bayonets and wouldn’t have known how to stab a man with one—I wasn’t a Loyalist, lads, and I wasn’t a rebel, but faith, I did not want Black Dick’s bayonets to win.

  The British slept on Staten Island with their fleet, and it looked like a long, brutal slumber. The whole world could have been asleep. Black Dick fired a few of the guns on his flagship, but it wasn’t to menace us. He was saluting his fellow officers, or something as harmless as that. And we were in suspended animation all the while, somewhere betwixt the living and the dead. Manhattan and Brooklyn braced for a war that only Sir William and Black Dick had the power to commence. Washington’s lads dug deeper and deeper ditches and lugged their cannons closer to the Battery, but they were like feeble dancing masters with nowhere left to dance, and Washington himself scuttled between Brooklyn Heights and the Manhattan docks on a ferry that was always about to sink.

  My own high fever made me tremble like a dog. My doctors preferred their telescopes to me. In their eyes I was nothing but a sick puppy who belonged to the commander in chief.

  Thirteen

  I WAS IN A WARD WITH NINETEEN OTHER BEDS, with soldiers who screamed in the night and suffered from malaria and the shits. But there was a sudden hush on my ward when a man entered in a tricorn, a cape, a powdered wig, a gorgeous neckcloth, and one gold epaulette. In my fever I thought at first it was Black Dick, or the Divil pretendin’ to be Dick. Had the commander of the British fleet come to kill me? Black Dick’s marines must have established their own beachhead near Peck Slip or the Battery. Yet I wasn’t convinced. Admirals of the line didn’t run around in a rebel uniform. And this rebel was limping from that bullet he took in Quebec.

  I was happy as a harlot to see him, but I did not reveal my affection. He had a poke of bonbons in his hand.

  “How are ye, Johnny boy?”

  “Is that Arnold?” I asked with as much wickedness as I could muster. “Or is it but a shadow of him?”

  “That’s unkind. I brought ye bonbons.”

  “They say Arnold does not recognize the existence of those who served under him, not even his own secretary.”

  “Ye gods, I had no choice. You shouldn’t have told His Excellency that I had a punctuation problem. Congress will never promote a general who cannot spell. I didn’t deny ye, Johnny. I was protecting my flank.”

  “Always the soldier,” I said, but I grabbed the bonbons. And we chewed on them like a couple of conspirators. I admired his dark complection, that hawk’s nose of his. He was still wearing a black ribbon, his widower’s weeds, tho’ his wife had died before we’d ever gone into the Maine woods.

  He removed a packet from under his scarf. It was a letter folded into four parts. “John, there’s a certain Miss Betsy Deblois of Boston, an angel, a heavenly gal, seventeen if a day, and I mean to marry her.”

  “But General, you’re still wearing your weeds.”

  “I have three children, John. They would profit greatly from a new mother. Come. I’ve started a letter. ‘Twenty times have I taken my pen to write you, and twenty times has…’”

  I couldn’t leave him hanging in midair.

  “…and twenty times has my trembling hand refused to obey the dictates of my heart.”

  “That’s delicious, John. But here, you scribble it for me.”

  I scribbled the entire letter with the pen and ink Arnold removed from his pocket. We finished the bonbons. My general signed his name, folded up the letter into the same neat packet, and thrust it under his scarf.

  “Bless ye, Johnny. Wish I could dally, but I have to beat the Brits to Lake Champlain.”

  “Take me with you. I won’t be a nuisance. I’ll carry your spyglass and write to a hundred Betsy Debloises.”

  “But I can only marry one…I’ll send for ye, John. When you’re up and about.”

  “General, couldn’t you tell Mr. Washington that I was with you in Quebec?”

  “Ah, I will, I will.”

  And he darted out of the ward on that limping leg of his, strapped into a high boot. I missed him sorely the moment he was gone. I’d been less of a homunculus in Maine. None of our lads was lost. We had Arnold’s hot blood in us, Arnold’s love of the impossible, of finding Canada through some Indian trail that might not be there. For a minute I wasn’t Harold’s creation. I had no secret meetings in the woods. There was nobody to meet with, unless a wild pig that had strayed down from Acadia. I kept no memorandum book, nothing but the notes that Arnold demanded of me. He would dictate while our stomachs growled.

  November the fifth, 1775. We slaughtered our last dog. I’m filled with heartbreak. It was a Newfoundland I admired. We’d dubbed him Hercules. He belonged to the entire troop. He’d followed us into the wilderness, and we could only thank Hercules by turning his bones into broth. But it strengthened the lads who were ill. They would not drink of Hercules until I commanded them. I hid my tears. I was not mourning our brave Newfoundland. Nor was I pitying myself. I was decrying our circumstances, the sadness of soldiers.

  I saw the forest and the revolution through Arnold’s eyes, and I was never so bold as I had been then.

  I looked up from my bed. It was the middle of the night. And I wasn’t in the Maine woods with Arnold. I was in a hospital ward at King’s, and another general now sat beside me, the commander in chief, with his raw red face and reddish hair. His wig was awry. He looked exhausted. He must have come from Brooklyn, crossed over on the ferry long after dark. No one could predict with much clarity where the man-killers and their Hessian mercenaries would strike. Washington couldn’t be in Brooklyn and Manhattan at the same time to catch the Howe brothers, with their bayonets and their battleships.

  “We’ll lose New York,” he said in a whisper. “’Tis a matter of hours, days, or minutes—not more. The Howes will move their armada. It makes no difference where or when. Our forts will not hold. And I will need a man on this island. John Stocking, are you that man?”

  He would have me killed, kill me himself, right here in the hospital, had I said no. I could read that much in his pale blue eyes. George Washington was his very own secret service.

  “Are you that man?”

  “Yes,” I said, and not out of fear.

  “And if I asked you to burn this village to the ground, would you accomplish such a mission?” “Yes.”

  “You will sit here on York Island until we have need of you. And should you betray us, even once, I will weave a path of destruction around you that will feel much worse than a plague of feathers. You’ll be kept alive, but not your loved ones.”

  Washington gripped my hand. Then he was gone.

  Fourteen

  I SAT ON MY BED IN THE HOSPITAL AT KING’S, wondering when the cannonade would begin. But I heard no cannons. Sir William’s warships didn’t bombard our shores. And our batter
ies delivered nothing. There was the noise of wagons, of men bustling about. My ward began to empty. Soon I was the only customer.

  From my window I could see wagons filled with families and furniture—bedposts and pillows with trails of running thread, and dogs that ate the thread in desperate need of nourishment. Slaves ran behind the wagons, with half a mountain of dry goods tottering on their backs. Other servants and slaves wore silly uniforms: extra hats and fur cloaks, as if a man might turn himself into a dancing clothes tree in the thick of August’s infernal heat. ’T was a heartless, sickening sight.

  Despite the mayhem in the rest of Manhattan, I had a visitor on my deserted ward. Madame in her summer cape, her hair like a beehive. She’d brought me vittles from Robinson Street and chocolate from France.

  “Child, no one would tell me where you were. Harold bribed all the sheriff’s men. But they’re useless in time of war. I had to beg the commander in chief.”

  “He loves you, Your Highness. You seem to remind him of a certain lady. Why won’t you tell me her name?”

  “I cannot—will not—betray his confidence.”

  But I knew she was dying to tell. She was fond of the general. Washington was her cavalier, her North American knight, tho’ the Brits were about to be Gert’s main business.