Johnny One-Eye

by Jerome Charyn

“Fuel is for the nabobs and men who control the marché noir. I barely have enough oil to light my lamps. Scavengers stole whatever wood we had in the shed, and then stole the shed. I have had to burn my own chairs, or we’d all freeze to death—John, you should not have troubled Clara about Mrs. Harding.”

  “Then why did you betray her to the British?”

  I saw a look of disappointment in my mother’s eyes, as if her lout of a son could not capture the missing pieces of a puzzle.

  “We did not betray her,” Gert said. “Malcolm Treat sent her to us.”

  “But Treat is head of Washington’s secret service.”

  “Not whilst he is on parole. He asked us to hide her, not knowing she was already compromised. She came to us from British headquarters, and I simply sent her back.”

  I could not believe Gert. “Mother, you can’t be certain.”

  “She kept messages in her bodice, little notes about our enterprise, where each of us was at a particular hour.”

  “And who found the messages?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  “Clara did. Clara would have kicked her to oblivion. But I did not want Anne’s blood on my hands. And so I returned André’s precious little parcel—he must have had small use of her after that. He put her to pasture as his whore at Wallabout.”

  “And she was killed by one of my jailers.”

  “You may well mourn her, John. I cannot. Did you know that Clara volunteered for the same post?”

  “Mother, my head is aching. What post could that be?”

  “Ship’s whore. Those imbeciles at Wallabout couldn’t have harmed Clara. She could always suffer insufferable men. But André would not hear of it. He knew that Clara had volunteered for one reason—to find her way to you. And that possibility ate up André’s heart.”

  I felt like some miserable hound that had let the fox flee the forest. I kissed my mother and went looking for Clara. I even had the boldness to enter her closet—’t appeared as if a hurricane had swept through. Half the furniture was gone. The nuns were selling their favorite settees as firewood.

  I wondered if Clara had gone up to the attic to finish the Oresteia and find out what happens when Orestes meets the Furies. But Clara wasn’t in the attic with Aeschylus. I heard her laugh coming from the back porch—a soft, seductive sound. She was with a British officer I had seen at Clinton’s ball. They sat on a broken chaise like bloody lovebirds.

  “Clara, may I press this young officer to allow me a moment with you?”

  “You may not,” she said without once looking at me.

  “Then may I beg your forgiveness? I was imprudent. I should not—”

  “Captain One-Eye,” she said, “we have nattered enough for one day.”

  She clutched the officer’s hand and led him into the dank interior of the house, leaving me on the porch with my own Furies—the monotonous song of crickets in Gert’s back yard.

  Fifty-One

  I DID NOT SEEK THE CAPTAINCY CLINTON HAD proposed at his ball. I despised the idea of Arnold’s rangers. But roaming with the rangers could get me firewood. There was no other coin in Manhattan, no other dream but burning wood, when everybody’s arse began to freeze as winter attacked our city. Arnold had been commissioned to raise an army of deserters and Loyalists. As his secretary, I wrote the recruiting pamphlets that were then printed up by His Majesty’s own printer to all the colonies. Washington may have been shivering in his drawers, but ’t was the rare man who would desert him for Benedict Arnold.

  Yet there was one surprise, a burly giant with the appropriate name of Champe, John Champe, who had been a sergeant major in a company of American dragoons and now emerged as our own peerless protector. We wouldn’t have done much roaming without Sergeant Champe. Gales pounded York Island and did not leave a signboard standing in front of our shops, and we had to find wood for the nuns. But we couldn’t crash into a military depot—we had no papers signed by Clinton. And Arnold’s signature couldn’t have gotten us any fuel. He was burnt in effigy, even in British Manhattan.

  So Arnold’s marauders had to maraud. We skulked about in floppy hats with feathers in them, the mark of provincial rangers. And since the town was lawless after dark, we waited until a band of scavengers appeared. We’d knock such scavengers to the ground, with Champe as our enforcer—big, burly Champe—steal their firewood, and march to Holy Ground.

  I BEGAN TO FREQUENT certain grog houses on Little Dock Street. The pirates on board the Jersey had told me about them. One such, the White Hawk, was still something of a rebel retreat. I wore my uniform, because I didn’t want these pirates to think me a spy.

  The lads of the White Hawk knew I’d suffered on Wallabout Bay, and they welcomed me. They weren’t idle. They scouted for Washington, swept the shores of Brooklyn and Staten Island in gondolas and whaleboats, harassing Loyalists.

  They swore that Fat Tobias was still about, but not for very long. I had to make him suffer for what he did to Anne. And while I drank my grog and listened to pirates playing on the mandolin, I overheard a conversation that troubled me. The interlocutors were as pickled as Moses after he parted the Red Sea. I’d have drifted off if they hadn’t mentioned “John the Giant”—John Champe. And suddenly the grog was gone from my brain. I was all ears.

  They mentioned Weehawken and General Washington, and laughed at a habit Benedict Arnold had—he’d take a walk, return at midnight, and move his bowels in the privy behind his house. And they swore that John the Giant intended to grab Arnold while he was on the privy, but when, lads, when? These pirate-patriots, with all the grog in them, were tight-lipped about the particulars. Washington would be waiting in Weehawken, that much I could gather. Waiting with the hangman. They meant to twist my general on a rope right there, without the bother of a review board. Ninny that I am, I’d never suspicioned John Champe—Washington had lent him to our rangers as his very own spy.

  Champe would loosen a picket from Arnold’s fence. And while Arnold was on his “throne,” Champe would crack him over the head—the yobs said this with a laugh. I had to fit the pieces into the puzzle. Champe would hold him as if he were carrying a drunken sailor, would avoid the night watch, bring him to the wharves, where a gondola would help him cross the Hudson.

  I still didn’t have the date. I could have struck them with my scabbard, but even if I’d loosened their tongues, I would have revealed my own hidden ace, and Washington could have found another giant to catch Arnold in the privy. But it was all posturing until I learned Champe’s particulars. I couldn’t abandon Arnold. I was in his debt.

  I was like a dustman sifting for clues, collecting old bones, old war plans, old tactics. I could walk freely into British headquarters with the hanger I was given to wear. The generals and colonels bowed and touched my shoulder. Once or twice they called me “André.” They even discussed the tactics of my own regiment. Clinton was sending along a lieutenant colonel to Virginia who was prepared to replace Arnold should he falter. Arnold was but a chit in the chain of command. And he couldn’t even afford to jump into battle, lead his men, since Washington would use all his wits to capture him, dead or alive. And so he was a back-door brigadier who would have to sit in his tent or stand on a hill with a cane in his hand. Took three men to sit him on a horse.

  ARNOLD SUMMONED ME to the house. I assumed he would badger me about Virginia—I wasn’t going to ransack Virginia with his regiment.

  I found him in his study. He sat with his tobacco jar and a jug of wine and a terror in his eyes that I had never seen in the wilderness. He didn’t need me to parley about war. But I still started my preamble.

  “Spare me, will ye, John? ’Tis Madame Arnold. I fear for her mind. Go to her. You have the words that might calm her. She likes you. She’s locked herself in her sewing room and has abandoned husband and child.”

  I went upstairs to Peggy, knocked on her door.

  “Go away,” she rasped from within.

  “John Stocking, Mum. May I enter?”<
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  “Are you alone, John Stocking? I will not be tricked.”

  “Alone, madam, alone before the Lord,” says I.

  I could hear the patter of her feet, the twist of a lock, feet again, and a slight cooing. “Come in.”

  I entered the sewing room, but I couldn’t find a piece of sewing material. She lay on a divan, with nothing on her shoulders but a nightgown. I could see the fullness of her body. She looked like some sea nymph caught in the cling of silk.

  She couldn’t fool me, lads, the way she’d fooled George Washington at West Point, with her bravura performance as victim of Arnold’s treachery, raving that Washington’s own Continentals had come to murder her child. Hysterics belonged to André’s Theatre Royal. But she was not hysterical. She was fondling a silver locket. I strained to see what was inside—a snippet of black hair.

  “Tell me about John,” she said.

  “Milady, I—”

  “My John, John André…he was supposed to escort me to the Meschianza. He’d sat with us, helped me and my sisters sew our costumes. He drew my silhouette. I was a Turkish maiden, and he was my knight. But when Papa saw our turbans and our veils, he was furious with John André. He would not let us be part of the Meschianza. I had one of my fits. I didn’t get out of bed for nine days. Papa threatened to have the whole British army knock down the door.”

  She stopped, peered at me. “What is that ridiculous thing with the feather?”

  “’Tis a ranger’s hat.”

  “Goodness, where do you range, John Stocking?”

  I’d plucked a smile out of the melancholy nymph.

  She looked inside the locket. “John gave it to me so that I might remember him. It was just before the British marched out of Philadelphia…with my life.”

  “’Tis only dreams,” I said like a reptile. “You married Arnold, and André is dead.”

  “And I am but the ghost of the girl who couldn’t wear her veil at the Meschianza,” she sang like an actress who relished her own lines.

  “Mum, would you have danced while Americans starved?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you have watched those silly knights of the Meschianza knock at each other while women and children were without shoes?” “Yes.”

  “I have no more words,” I said.

  “But you do, you most decidedly do—tell me, tell. I’m voracious. You spent more time with André than I ever did. I knew him very little.”

  Yes, Mum, I thought to say, knew him as your spymaster. But I dared not introduce that subject with Arnold in the house. He might kill me before I had the chance to save his life.

  “André?” I said. “A fastidious man, always changing his neckcloth.”

  She moved about on the divan with a certain discomfort and disdain, the silver locket in her hand. “Neckcloths are of no interest to me.”

  “I’d get rid of that locket were I you.”

  “But you are not me, dear boy.”

  I grabbed her by the silk of her gown, shook her twice. She had not considered that I would handle her so. Let her cry for Arnold. I’d have my own game of vingt-et-un.

  “Milady, I don’t have the time to coddle. Your husband is downstairs, deathly pale. He can think of nothing but you. You will go to him and ease his solitude, or I will come back and break all your bones, fingers first.”

  The nymph sank deeper into her divan. “You are a monster, John Stocking.”

  But my threat had put her into a trance. She came off the couch with her bosoms as high as her throat, and ’t was clear how she’d enthralled little Hamilton and the commander in chief at West Point, rattling on to them while her breasts were bared.

  She put on one of Arnold’s robes, her hands hidden inside the sleeves, pulled past me, and went down to her husband in bare feet.

  Fifty-Two

  I WOULD LIE ABED AND THINK OF ANNE HARDING in Manhattan and how Major Malcolm Treat had seduced her into his services. Perhaps all officers on parole pursued the business of war, but Treat should not have abandoned her to the British, and not to Fat Tobias of Wallabout Bay.

  When I wasn’t abed, I spied on Sergeant Champe. And the night before Arnold was scheduled to leave for Virginia, with more redcoats than American rangers, I caught Champe pulling up a picket as Arnold went into the outhouse. Prince Paul was with me, and both of us carried pistols and swords, like buccaneers from some Caribbean cove. I’d rehearsed what I’d have to say to Champe, but rehearsals had nothing to do with a December night outside a privy.

  We couldn’t scuffle, or Arnold would hear us, and how could we have fought with a giant of such prodigious strength? As he pulled closer to the privy, with a horrible sneer on his face, my legs buckled out, and the prince had to hold me.

  “John Champe,” I said in a whisper.

  He looked about, a primitive rage burnt into his brow. Then he recognized me.

  “This doesn’t concern you, Captain.”

  “Lower your voice, please.”

  He laughed. “Are you intending to do me bodily harm?”

  “I wouldn’t have the way or the will.”

  “Then what prevents me from walking up to the shitter and crowning Mr. Benedict Arnold?”

  “Arnold himself. If I call to him, Champe, he’ll cut you to pieces with his sword.”

  “Didn’t see him carrying one.”

  “He always leaves a sword on the shitter for urgences such as this,” says I.

  “And if I don’t believe you?”

  “Then call to him.”

  But I’d destroyed his confidence. He put the picket back into place, cursed me, and strode off with that lumbering body of his cut in half by the moon.

  The prince wanted to raise up a hundred huzzahs, but I had to silence him.

  “’Tis but the prelude.”

  We waited until the candle went out in the privy and Arnold strode across the garden and into his house—the husk of a general.

  “Are we counting stars, Master John?”

  “No, we’re like hens waiting for the first egg to drop.”

  THREE MEN TRAVELED down Broadway with the wind howling behind them. They wore long capes, scarves, and cocked hats, but I recognized Major Malcolm Treat and that pair of pirates from the White Hawk who’d babbled in their drunkenness about Benedict Arnold.

  Paul and I moved upwind to greet them, so that the sentries guarding Clinton’s headquarters could not catch sight of us.

  Treat’s face was red with fury.

  “John Stocking, you are under arrest.”

  “I think not, major. This is the king’s village if I’m not mistaken. And you are an American officer who has broken his parole.”

  “Stocking, I will have a summary court-martial right here on the street. I warned the commander in chief that you were a reptile.”

  I was no swordsman who could have disappeared with Treat to some clandestine dueling ground in the woods, so I hit him over the head with my scabbard. He sank to his knees, and the pair of pirates ran back into the wind.

  “Stocking,” the major said, “you will be a criminal for the rest of your life.”

  “And you, sir, are the reptile. Tell me how you recruited Anne Harding.”

  “I will tell you nothing.”

  “Paul, blow his brains out.”

  The prince hesitated. “But not here on Broadway, Master John.”

  “We’ll drag him into the privy.”

  We grabbed his arms and feet. The little major befouled himself.

  “Did you use all your charms on Anne, play the captured American officer on parole?”

  “She was stranded. I…”

  “And you told Anne to rid herself of Jaggers, that poor simpleton who was in love with her. And did you suggest that she move into a bordello so she could be near British officers?”

  “’T was our big chance.”

  “You pushed her deep into danger, then passed her on to Gert. But ’t was a little too late. The British to
ok over where you left off. She was a floating whorehouse that served the warders of Wallabout Bay. You continued to have her carry messages. But do you know who read your secret correspondence? Major John André.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “He was a little less brutal than you. He had all the graces of a spymaster…get on that boat to Weehawken, Major Treat, or I promise you, I’ll organize our own little trip to the Jersey.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Have you been to British headquarters of late? I’m the new André. I’ll ask for a gondola and we’ll bring you to the prison tub ourselves.”

  I kicked him, beat him like a mangy cur, mindful of the sentries outside headquarters, and Malcolm Treat crawled away in his besotted breeches.

  I SHIVERED IN THE MOONLIGHT.

  We traveled across rows of gateless gardens with their privies and arrived at the docks. It was long past curfew when the British bells had rung, when sailors returned to ships that piped the forbidden hours, but the most popular “royal” taverns were also gambling dens and hardly ever closed. I knocked on enormous oak doors; proprietors peered out at my feathered hat and let me in with my servant. There was nothing strange. Officers would bring their manservants to a gambling den with jars of cocoa. The servants would massage their backs during a game and prepare cups of chocolate.

  No one knew I was looking for Fat Tobias. He was clear as crystal in my mind’s eye—I could see him on the poop deck, the king of the Jersey, waiting to devour Anne.

  We didn’t find Tobias until the fourth tavern. He was hibernating at the Sign of the Dove. I knocked, we were let in, my hanger unsheathed, under my captain’s cape, and Paul with pistols in his pockets. The yobs mocked my hat of a provincial ranger. I laughed with them. Tobias was at the far table, his own table, where he served as the banker of vingt-et-un. His fingers flew with cards and coins and the tavern’s chips, little painted wooden owls.

  He sneered and measured me with his eyes before inviting me into the game. I sat across from him, feeling the space under the table like a blind man. I knew that Tobias went nowhere without his pistols.