Johnny One-Eye

by Jerome Charyn

  “Clara, was it you that fed me corn cakes while I was lying in a fever after the king’s birthday?”

  “That was my duty, child, my obligation to Gertrude. You might have starved in your sleep.”

  She puffed on her pipe and sat down on my bed, knocking her knees together like some mysterious musical instrument. It pained me to see her next to my pillow. ’T was where I had first met Mistress Clara five or six years ago, but she was hardly a mistress then. I could summon up Clara bald as an egg, with no eyelashes to speak of, and still laden with lice. She had the body of a girl, ye gods, but she might as well have been a boy. Gertrude had to shave every piece and parcel of her—her maiden hair too, tho’ I’d have blushed like the Divil had I been obliged to look between her legs. She shivered, cried, slept with a doll. Gertrude wanted to keep her away from the customers while she was in such deplorable condition. And what better accomplice could she have had than little John? I was twelve at the time. I couldn’t have ruined her. I didn’t know how. We played in that alcove when I wasn’t at school. I brought her kites and lip rouge I stole from the nuns. She’d hug me in the middle of the night whenever there was a storm. That’s what killed me, lads. Breathing skin that smelled like spring water. And after a couple of months, as blond hair sprouted on her skull and her eyelashes returned, Gert gave her a closet of her own, with mirrors and a bed as broad as a battle cruiser, so she could be far away from her suitors when she had to lie down with them. And I disappeared from her own line of sight—until she needed the little scribe.

  Now she wanted the latest fashion from London’s best bootery—leopard-skin inlays, needlelike toes, heels that could eat a man’s heart out. I thought to lose my senses dreaming of Clara’s boots. She lent me a drawing of her own foot and Madame’s (to instruct the boot-maker), clapped her knees for the last time, and catapulted off my bed without the littlest goodbye, while I had to live with her sweet musk in my mind.

  The king’s officers began to monopolize Clara’s time. I heard them boast about their exploits in the fields of Brooklyn. “Combatants? They were nothing but niggers and old men. We could have killed them all with our eyes closed.”

  But Clara let these assassins into her closet, and I could not bear it. They lost money to Madame at her card tables. They guzzled wine and champagne from Tory cellars and shops, those same Tories who had come rushing back to town with a passion to rid the foul odor of rebels from their private gardens. The slave market and the coffee houses flourished again. English officers had to have servants and stable hands. More and more of them arrived with their mistresses and wives. Manhattan had gone from an American to a British camp within a month.

  But it wasn’t clear who governed the island while Sir William was with his men, pursuing the rebels across some wheat field in Harlem Heights. He couldn’t seem to capture the commander in chief. Washington would appear like a phantom on his white horse, bemoaning the louts he had instead of an army, but when the assassins closed in on him, he vanished inside the wheat.

  “I cannot fight a man who vaporizes himself,” Sir William revealed to his officers. So said Harvey Hill.

  “The commander stood in the corn,” continued the Crier.

  “Wheat, I thought it was wheat.”

  “He stood in the corn. His troops ran right past him, fleeing from the Brits. It was north of us, near the Bloomingdale Road. The sun beat down upon him. He couldn’t halt the retreat. He trampled his own hat. Such was his despair at the sight of his men. ‘Ye gods! How shall we ever win?’ He wouldn’t move from the spot. His aides had to shield him from enemy fire. And when he saw them drop around him, he could not control his tears. ‘Good fellows,’ he said, ‘we must hasten from here, or all is lost.’”

  “Crier,” I said, “that’s no song you’re singing. You were with the commander in chief.”

  “Blood sickens me. I bandy news, not bullets.”

  “But news is your bullet. I’ll wager you’re with Washington’s secret service.”

  He began to throttle me with my own neckcloth.

  Suddenly all his crying made sense. The commander in chief had used him as a codebook. He could cry out his own keys, emphasize whatever he wanted as he delivered the news.

  “Didn’t a certain general visit you while you recovered from a lot of feathers? Didn’t that same general carry you in his own arms to hospital? Didn’t he demand something of you?” “He did.”

  “And could it have been about burning York Island to the ground?”

  “But hundreds will die in the fire,” I said.

  “Ah, do I detect a moral note from the philosopher of King’s? We will not give Sir William a free hand to use our island as his headquarters and his whore. Or should we not speak of whores, since you belong to that fictitious admiral, Sir Harold Morse. He bribed you to poison my general’s soup. Did you suppose we were ignorant of little John Stocking?”

  “You must have been. General Washington did not know of me.”

  Harvey chortled into his sleeve. I hated him and the power he had. He was like a succubus who could rip the real from the unreal. Had I visited George Washington at his headquarters, or had Washington visited me?

  “Ye gods, we could have stopped you at the picket line, dangled you from a tree, let the buzzards eat your eyes.”

  “I have but one eye, sir. You would have done well to notice.”

  “One eye, two eyes, our general wanted to see you. That’s why you got through the pickets. Your route was rehearsed.”

  “See me for what reason?” says I.

  “To have you as his changeling.”

  “A turncoat, you mean.”

  “A changeling. A fickle spy who finds his romance by serving two masters, a general and a king.”

  “And I serve neither. The king pays for my tuition, or did pay until the college collapsed.”

  The Crier throttled me again. “Did you not offer your services to my general? You were a changeling before you ever arrived at our camp. It is in your nature to be a spy who spies on other spies. Your final allegiance is to yourself. I will burn Manhattan, and you, dear John, will keep out of my way.”

  Sixteen

  I WAS NOT IGNORANT OF FIRES. PARSON SMILEY had taught us about London’s own Great Fire. It was of a Sunday morning in September 1666, when the town was asleep, more than a century ago. Not a dog or cat was astir. The fire started in a bakery on Pudding Lane. Some embers in an oven might have heated up and turned the bakery into a bomb. It could have been the malice of a boy who was brooding over a kick in the arse he’d received from the boss baker. Or perhaps it was God’s work. But a high wind shoved the fire beyond Pudding Lane. And still the night watchmen couldn’t rouse themselves from their slumber and attack the flames with the pathetic water bottles they had to carry by hand to a fire. The skies over London reversed themselves. There was no night for three days. London sat in the constant glow of wood and metal until the wind shifted and revealed an empty village. The entire population had moved outside the walls.

  I shivered to imagine the same fiery wrath on our island. I wandered the streets, went down to the slave market above Albany Pier. Prince Paul stood in irons with half his kingdom. The assassins must have gone into Out Ward looking for labor. It mattered but little that Paul was a free man and a prince. Our occupiers had seized upon Little Africa as a source of revenue.

  It swelled my spleen to see him thus. I was filled with bile. Paul could have received a magnificent bounty to join up with the redcoats. Slaves and freed blacks had come crawling into town to serve King George. ’T was Sir William Howe’s own idea. He promised freedom to every slave who was willing to fight against the rebels. And he promised a bounty to freed blacks, such as Prince Paul. But the “military life” Sir William had in mind was that of a baggage handler. He wasn’t offering a musket and a bayonet. Paul would rather have been forced into a labor gang than accept a bounty. He loved the king as much as I did. The king had never harmed him. B
ut the Yorkers had burnt his father at the stake in the bonfire of 1741, had separated him from his sisters and brothers, had banished him to Little Africa in the Out Ward, because every five or six years there would be a few suspicious fires, and the nabobs of Manhattan would shout, “The Negroes are rising, the Negroes are rising!”

  Blacks had to have their own burial ground, six putrid acres near the gallows and the swamps. They had no lamplighter because there weren’t any lamps to light. But Paul had made Little Africa his home, and neither the redcoats nor the rebels could tempt him. Only a numbskull would have offered a bounty to a black prince.

  I went up to Paul with a cup of sweet water I’d purchased from one of the water boys.

  “Scat,” Paul said. “We’re not supposed to put our blue lips near a white man’s cup.”

  “Balderdash. Your lips aren’t any bluer than mine.”

  A soldier-assassin knocked the cup out of my hand with his bayonet. “Move on, old son. This here is king’s property, and I’ll feed it water when it’s time to feed.”

  I ran to Harvey Hill. ’T was near dusk on the twenty-first of September, three weeks after Washington had disappeared from Manhattan, and the Crier stood in front of a coffeehouse retailing General Washington’s latest defeat. Merchants showered him with coins.

  “George Washington is to be carried in irons to Windsor Castle, where the king will question him before burying his bones.”

  “They say his capture is imminent, a matter of hours,” said the merchants.

  “He’s running for his life. Sir William’s redcoats will surely track him down,” said Harvey, picking up the coins and signaling to me with his eye. I followed him away from the coffeehouse.

  “John, you shouldn’t dog me like that. The Britishers will get ideas. The Town Crier mingling with a lusty lad like you. They’ll call it sedition. What do ye want?”

  “Membership in your arson ring. I don’t care for the way those assassins smell.”

  “Skittish, ain’t we? Like a colt. Well, if I had it in me to manufacture a fire, I’d start somewhere in Out Ward, close upon the gallows or the Hebrew cemetery.”

  I could see that the Crier didn’t trust me at all. A fire in Out Ward would mean nothing to the British. They’d let it burn while they dug trenches on the near side of the old Indian Palisade. They could hug each other and sing goodbye to Little Africa and its hundred hovels. No, Harvey would attack the foot of the island, where the assassins felt utterly safe. They had their fort and their Battery and a night watch that began at the Bowling Green.

  And so I followed Harvey Hill. He favored the taverns near Whitehall Slip—the Sea Horse and the Fighting Cocks—where he would dance on a table or huddle with privateers that the British hadn’t gotten around to arrest. And I could feel in my bones where the fire would start.

  I returned to Robinson Street. A tall man in a powdered wig, with painted eyes, half his face hidden in a scarf, lurched past me like a drunken sailor. But sailors didn’t wear a general’s fine boots. It was George Washington, or the ghost of him.

  I dared not call out his name in British New York. I would have compromised his mission, might even have caused his death. But why would the commander in chief enter Holy Ground in greasepaint?

  I ran inside to Gert.

  “The commander was here. And don’t bother to lie.”

  She said nothing.

  “What could be so important that he would risk capture and the very ruin of his career?”

  She wouldn’t speak.

  “I’m a babe,” I said, “a babe in a wilderness of spies…you don’t remind him of some lost love. You are that love.”

  She took a pistol out of her pocket no bigger than a rat’s head.

  “One more syllable, John, one more syllable…”

  “And you’ll do what? Rid me of my brains? I’m the injured party. I’m tossed about, tilted in the wind. I enter his camp with two ruffians when I should have been stopped at the outer gate. He pretends I’m a stranger when he has my complete story. And who could have told him that story, madam? No one but yourself.” She fired the gun. The explosion rocked in my head. The chandelier swayed above us like God’s own pendulum. Blood splattered on the wall. And for an instant I thought Gert had indeed brained me, and I was only a vapor that hadn’t yet floated down to hell. And then I started to howl. Madame had nicked my ear. She didn’t show the slightest remorse.

  The nuns brought towels and rags and an unguent with which to swab my ear. It was only Clara who had the courage to take the gun out of Gert’s hand. But Clara chastised me, not Madame.

  “You fool,” she said. “You jackanapes.”

  “Like my father. Wasn’t he Gert’s clown?”

  “Monkey, that was before my time.”

  And so I walked about with a bandaged ear, and not one person pitied me. I sat on the wall of the old French church and could catch pieces of fire in the vicinity of Whitehall, as if a small party of men was moving about with chunks of burning wood. And then the Fighting Cocks exploded into a wall of flame.

  I ran back toward the Queen’s Yard. “Poor Lawrence,” I muttered. The late Lawrence was my father, the queen’s clown. Lawrence Stocking, Esq., the original jackanapes. A forger who lived in the queen’s bed. She was always hiding men, first my father, and then Harold, the clandestine knight. But Harold didn’t entertain her, didn’t wear a coxcomb, didn’t do somersaults in the parlor, didn’t carry pails of slop like a common donkey. I missed the old man.

  He taught me grammar before Harold and the parson ever did. I received my penmanship from him. But he never mentioned a “Mrs. Stocking.” Who could my mother be but Gert? Gert, Gert, Gert. She’d passed me off as a changeling, a transient in her parlor, saving me from the orphan asylum. I would have preferred the poorhouse, with runaway slaves. I’d have forged certificates of freedom for them. Wasn’t I a runaway? A motherless, fatherless lad. The fire had already climbed to Beaver Street, and God knows when the wind would carry it to Holy Ground. I had no fire bell to ring, no trumpet to rally the nuns. But when I arrived at the Yard, I received a rude surprise. The nuns had rallied themselves. They’d collected in the parlor, save for Clara and Madame. They’d bundled up their very best hats. I grabbed a knife from the kitchen and went into the queen’s boudoir.

  Seventeen

  SHE SAT ON HER CARAVAN OF A BED WITH A SMALL valise that must have contained her treasury, but the mad and vacant look in her eye had nothing to do with treasure.

  “Mother,” I said, with as much malice as I could summon.

  “Mother.”

  She didn’t protest.

  “Why did you keep my father as a boy? Couldn’t he satisfy you, madam? Was he not built in a manly way?”

  “I’ll kill you,” she said, coming out of her trance.

  “Mr. Washington calls me his changeling. How apt, madam, how appropriate. What crib did you steal me from? None but your own. I was born into obscurity on account of you. George Washington’s changeling.”

  “I forbid you to pronounce that name,” she said.

  And my heart shivered with its own unbearable knowledge.

  “Bitch, whore, foul fox. Lawrence wasn’t my father at all.”

  She sought to scratch my eyes, but I clutched both her wrists in one hand and held the knife to her throat. Then I dragged her out of the boudoir and let her bristle in front of her own girls.

  “How would you like your mistress? With or without a scalp?”

  The nuns circled around me, shrieking, clutching at their bodices, but they didn’t dare approach. My knife was too close to Madame. Then Clara came out of her closet with a British officer, a young captain with a brutish face.

  “What’s this?” he said. “A colonial who likes to play with knives?”

  “I will puncture her, monsieur,” I said, like some wild courtier.

  “What’s this? I arrest you in the name of the king. I will haul you in front of a magistrate, even if we
have none at the moment.” He turned to Clara. “Darling, I will declare myself a magistrate. That is brilliant.” Then he turned to honest John. “We are civilized, sir. We don’t molest ladies with a knife. Captain Ned Stark of the Royal Fusiliers at your service. I’m unarmed, man. Go at me. Not Gert.”

  And he danced around me like a royal rooster. I was bewildered. I had mothers and fathers on my mind, not this musketeer. But his rapid movements put me in a trance.

  “Come on, go at me, you monster of the New World, spawned from the seed of a billy goat. You Americans.”

  I lunged at him with the knife, not to wound him, but to stop his patter. I couldn’t. There was a continent between us. I never got near his skin nor his coat. “Lovely,” he would say at the end of each lunge. “That’s lovely.” And when I was tired enough from my thrusts, he slapped the knife out of my hand, knocked me to the floor, and began to kick with all the savagery of a soldier-assassin. The nuns threw themselves at him, but he flung them away.

  Clara was as tenacious as the musketeer. “Ned Stark,” she told him, “Captain Ned, you have lost me forever.”

  He pondered that remark, mumbled “Blazes to all of you,” and continued his kicking until Sir Harold arrived covered in soot, his long admiral’s hat bent in the middle, with two broken bows.

  The musketeer saluted him. “Sir, I have decided to arrest this man. He’s been behaving like a beast to the proprietress of this inn.”

  “This inn is a bawdy house, my bawdy house, and its inhabitants—man, woman, and beast—are under my protection. Wake up. Manhattan is burning under your very nose. Can you not smell a fire?”

  “Fire,” the captain repeated, and ran out of the nunnery.

  Harold brushed the soot off his cape and assembled the nuns.

  “The fire is traveling north by northwest. I don’t believe it will swallow the island, but one can never be sure. I recommend that we go to the green. The fire cannot feed on dead grass.”

  “Harry,” Gert insisted, “I’m staying here.”