Johnny One-Eye

by Jerome Charyn

“Will you promise not to duel with Hamilton?” he asked, his calm a bit restored.

  “I cannot, sir.”

  “And if I locked you in the cellar?”

  “I would only escape.”

  “Then we are at an impasse.”

  And he left—for a moment I thought he’d never been there, that I’d conjured him up. But the sound of Gertrude’s name still sat in my ears.

  Then there was another knock—Hamilton sans neckcloth. I bade him enter. Can’t help it, lads. I could not remain in a froth over a man who seemed filled with such despair.

  “John,” he said—he hadn’t called me “John” since our days at college. “You must tell Clara that it was not Hamilton who spoke ill if her, but Hamilton’s demon—his worst side. She is a most exotic creature. On another occasion, I might have flirted with her until your own head started to spin.”

  I laughed, but lightly. “Then we would have had to duel on the spot, dear Alec.”

  That’s what I had called him at King’s—Alec.

  “Then we can be friends,” he said. “My Betsey would like that.”

  “But I did slap your face.” “A trifle,” he said, “the bark of a flea.”

  “A flea that knocked you off your chair.”

  “And deservedly so.”

  We hugged as only classmates have the right to do. I did believe Ham—he hadn’t meant to harm Clara.

  BUT HE COULD NOT RECONCILE himself with the life of a soldier in the rear echelons. He disparaged his own worth to Washington, who needed him now that the French, hunkering off Rhode Island in their scarlet britches and white coats, would not move their royal arses an inch closer to Washington’s war. Ham was fluent in French, could speak it like a bird, while Washington knew not a syllable. The French officers delighted in Hamilton, preferred him to Washington’s generals. Hamilton wove an elaborate web around Washington, seemed to anticipate his thoughts, and articulate them with a grace and speed the farmer did not himself possess. Hamilton had become the fluency of this silent man.

  Washington was more and more despondent. He could not feed his couriers and their horses—messages would get lost in the middle of nowhere. “We are at the end of our tether,” he told Sparks, and Sparks told me. That was why he wanted to recapture Manhattan, strike while he still had an army, but he couldn’t strike without the French. And he would never convince Rochambeau, their commander in chief, without Ham. But he seemed to have his own private duel with Hamilton. They hardly spoke outside the war room. And once, on the stairs, Hamilton kept him waiting longer than he wished, and Washington snapped at him. “Colonel Hamilton, you treat me with disrespect.”

  Hamilton, who was as gloomy as Washington, snapped back. “I am not conscious of it, sir, but since you have thought it necessary to tell me so, we part.”

  The duel should have ended over a glass of Madeira, but did not. Washington made entreaties, but Ham would not be reconciled—’t was as if he’d delivered a mortal blow. Washington’s face was like a death mask with a little moisture under the mouth.

  I was a witness to such sad conversation, since the Life Guard moved Sparks, myself, and the prodigious camp cot out of the attic. Martha had gone to visit friends, while we went back to our old routine in Washington’s bedchamber. Sparks would comb Washington’s hair and I would read fairy tales to the Old Man. His teeth ached. He dreamed of his own doom.

  ’T was early in March. Hamilton was still at the farmhouse. He would ride with the commander in chief to Newport, confer with Rochambeau, then leave Washington’s family forever. He was too distempered to bid me adieu.

  The journey itself began with an ill omen. Washington’s favorite sorrel fell through a hole on a rotting Connecticut bridge and plunged headfirst into the Housatonic. Washington had leapt off the sorrel’s back just in time to spare his own hide, but the image of a plunging horse tormented him, and he had three of his Life Guard remain behind to look after the sorrel.

  He accomplished little in Newport. The French gave him trifles, badges of honor to wear, but would not help him recapture Manhattan while their own main fleet sat in Caribbean waters. “Suicide, mon cher général. It should be suicide for your soldiers, I swear to God,” said General Rochambeau. Not even Hamilton with all his fancy patter could persuade the French.

  WHILE WASHINGTON WAS AWAY, I had my own little cabal. I was wandering near the Hudson in a little mountain of snow, dreaming of Clara, wondering when she would visit me again.

  And as I ruminated along the river, with its own firm crust of ice, two men wearing hangman’s hoods fell upon me and abused my person with such violent blows I could no longer bear the torment of it. But even in my decrepit state I knew these were not local highwaymen, but the savage sons of Washington’s own retinue.

  I could recognize Sergeant Champe and Major Malcolm Treat under their hoods—Washington had left both lads behind.

  “Divil,” Champe said, “ye have bewitched our Old Man—the Chief is caught in one of your webs.”

  And Malcolm Treat poked me with a pigsticker, a knife with a very narrow point. “Pack your things, you piece of filth. Even Washington can’t save you. Breathe a word, and we’ll mutilate your bitch. I promise you, I will personally chop off Clara’s teats.”

  I realized in a nonce who was the real head of the household—Ham. These two yobs were frightened to death of him. Hamilton ruled headquarters, and the yobs had decided to pounce once he was gone.

  They whispered among themselves and removed their hangman’s hoods. ’T was as ill an omen as Washington’s plunging horse. They’d decided on a simpler solution—murder me and bury my bones under the ice.

  “Major,” Champe said, “methinks I’ll anchor our lovely boy with a rock.”

  I’d ruined their chance of immortality by not allowing them to grab Benedict Arnold. But Champe frowned when Treat poked me a second time with the pigsticker. “No need to bloody him, Major. Even after the ice melts, the currents will carry him to Connecticut.”

  A voice crackled in the silent snow. “Connecticut my arse!”

  ’T was Sparks with a pistol in either hand. He must have caught sight of us from the window near his cot and hurried down with Washington’s own weapons.

  “Sergeant Champe, you will pick up Mr. John and brush his clothes.”

  “And supposin’ I didn’t?” Champe said.

  “Then I will shoot out your eyes and subject both of you to a court-martial.”

  Champe began to snort. “Who’d believe a nigger and a half-blind scribble boy?”

  Sparks struck him across the face with both pistol butts.

  “It ain’t fair,” Champe blubbered. “Johnny wouldn’t be alive today if he wasn’t our Old Man’s rotten little bastard.”

  “Quiet,” Treat said. “Shouldn’t noise such tales about—Sparks, I could arrest ye for pointing firearms at an American major.”

  “And I could arrest you for being a rattlesnake—go on back to the house with Sergeant Shit.”

  Sparks sat down in the snow and allowed my head to lie in his lap. The silence behaved like a balm—I’d have to leave the farmhouse before that rattlesnake struck again. I could do my own minuet around Champe, but Treat controlled the general’s secret service, could harm the nuns, get Clara killed. I could petition the general, but he was brooding over Hamilton, and I did not want to create yet another rift in his family. I’d lick my wounds, fill my haversack with food, and light out for the woods.

  Fifty-Seven

  DAYS PASSED, A WEEK, BUT I COULD NOT LEAVE the general. When he returned to headquarters without Ham, there seemed to be a black hole in the farmhouse. He had other young aides to accomplish Hamilton’s tasks, secretaries who could parse his sentences, give them a melodic ring. But not one had Ham’s agility of mind, Ham’s flair to be all things at once—soldier, minister, moral philosopher, manager of money. The others were content to sit with Washington, work and dine with him, while Ham wanted to go to war.


  I didn’t have Ham’s gift to pluck at the general, goad him like a gadfly, and draw him out of his melancholy. I did try whenever I wasn’t watching my own back. Sergeant Champe seemed to have a single wish—send me to my quietus.

  I had to walk with a light step, sniff in all directions, and also tend to Washington, sweeten his load a little. “Child,” he said on a bleak afternoon, “tell me about Gertrude—and all the minutes, hours, and days I missed.”

  He’d had too much Madeira, and I couldn’t reckon what he wanted. I did not mouth a syllable. And he began to reminisce about my mother.

  “She had the reddest hair in the world when we met. I could not take my eyes off her hair. I was talking to a maiden whose head was on fire. I did not find it extravagant. I was ill, and Gertrude fed me porridge with a great wooden spoon. I opened my mouth like a babe and listened to every command.”

  He did not summon up Gert more than twice, but when he did, this silent man had as much language—as much song—as a hundred Hamiltons.

  I RECEIVED A PACKAGE from Albany at the end of April, wrapped in the finest paper—from Ham. ’T was the green sash he had worn as an aide-de-camp to the commander in chief. With this sash was a note in Hamilton’s hand.

  Little Stocking,

  You must forgive poor Hamilton for not having bid you a proper au revoir. I was in a most unfortunate condition—estranged from the Commander and encumbered with loathing for myself. I want you to have this sash. It is my proudest possession, but I will feel most fortunate should you wear it one day, or have it simply as a token of my esteem.

  Adieu.

  Your Alec.

  I could not keep from crying. No one had ever given me a gift of such magnitude. Could Ham have sensed how much I coveted the sash? Sometimes I wore it under my blouse where it could not be seen except by Sparks.

  ON THE VERY LAST DAY OF JULY, Hamilton was given his own command—a New York light-infantry battalion. He’d been pestering Washington for months. I admired his steadfastness, that absolute faith in knowing what he wanted. I rejoiced with him, but in my heart I could not help but feel it was a demotion. He’d never been as firm a soldier as that soldier in the green sash. At headquarters he was heir to Washington’s whole army.

  Ham had helped Washington with a plan to recapture York Island, and now Washington watched that plan slip away as Clinton grew stronger and stronger inside his own deepwater base. “We have never seen more parlous a time,” bemoaned the commander in chief.

  Then, like some conjuration, Rochambeau and his white-clad troops appeared in Peekskill and settled in near Washington’s own sprawling army, as if he’d suddenly agreed to grab Manhattan away from King George. The French were bemused by American soldiers, reminding them of brigands—a potpourri of white and black men, either half-naked or in hunting shirts, and without a genuine kettledrum to march with.

  Rochambeau’s headquarters were now on the Hudson, at Dobbs Ferry. He’d taken over half the village. His whitecoats were not like British or Hessian brutes. These lads bowed to women on the street, played with children, and would descend upon village taverns, where they stood locals to round after round of drinks. They were not just convivial—French army engineers would flatten prodigious bumps in the roads, mend steeples and weather vanes, pluck lost cats off trees with a newfangled machine that consisted of pulleys and ropes attached to a wire basket.

  And in mid-August, while frogs went berserk in the heat, Washington received a summons from Rochambeau—seems Admiral de Grasse and his armada had decided to leave Caribbean waters and would soon arrive in the Chesapeake Bay. And Rochambeau, a squat little man with the build of a bull terrier, hinted that the next theatre of war should be Yorktown, not Manhattan Island. General Cornwallis, Clinton’s second in command, had moved his men and war machines to Yorktown, where he was busy constructing a deepwater base. But Rochambeau had realized it was also a deepwater grave—surrounded by water on three sides, Cornwallis’ citadel could be overrun the moment a French armada appeared in the Chesapeake and blocked off his escape to the sea.

  WASHINGTON AGONIZED OVER THIS STRATEGY, fearing that he couldn’t move a French-American army across four hundred miles of terrain and not have Clinton discover his whereabouts. He would fail unless Clinton’s spies were utterly convinced that Washington still planned to seize Manhattan. And that’s when Rochambeau consulted his engineers, who built magnificent ovens on the Jersey Palisades, ovens that could provide bread for thousands of troops. Not a single loaf was ever baked, but Rochambeau’s ovens were like sorcery—watching huge metal caves with fiery mouths rise above the Hudson, right across from their Manhattan headquarters, the king’s men could almost feel the specter of an invading army.

  Alas, I had other specters on my mind. We’d moved our headquarters to a farmhouse near the French, and Washington seemed lost in the dream of war. He was plotting the route of his army—a sea voyage on land—since he had to find some “sea” where he could conceal his men from British eyes. And the more Washington hid in his war room, the bolder Malcolm Treat and his cohorts grew.

  Why did I vex him so? He must have wished in his heart of hearts that he were Washington’s love child, not I. ’T was most unreasonable. He looked upon me with utter malice—as if I had appropriated his eye patch and his general. I had become, for him, the Divil.

  There was so much turmoil inside headquarters, Treat could move against me at will. One of his lads from the secret service tried to lure me into the woods with the promise that Clara was waiting—I was sorely tempted to go. And once, while I was in the parlor, a pigsticker flew right past my ear. Champe must have crouched in some closet, familiarizing himself with my footsteps.

  I was a little safer at night when I lived in the same bed with the commander in chief. We would lie together in the dark, near a dying candle. And while Sparks snored on his cot nearby with great stentorian grunts, Washington broke his silence and interrogated me like some manor lord. “Dost thou love thy mother, boy?” “Yes, Excellency.”

  “And wilt thou promise never to abandon her?”

  “I cannot promise, sir, but I will try.”

  I dared not mention my own misfortune while he was so abominably tired. And what could I have said? That his spymaster, Malcolm Treat, who had conspired with Rochambeau to create such monstrous ovens and had lured Clinton’s spies into countless death traps, was insane on a single subject—Johnny One-Eye? Treat had contributed to Washington’s war. I had not. I remained silent, while Washington stared at the candle’s last little tail of smoke.

  “I have wronged ye,” he said. “I ought to have taken you hunting—at least once in your life. I ought to have thrown you in a crick.”

  “But I might have drowned.”

  “My bird dogs would have saved you,” he said. “I ought to have tended to your tuition—instructed you in the art of skinning a rabbit. I gave you very little.”

  “But wherever I am, and in whatever straits, I will imagine what it would have been like to hunt with you.”

  “I have no love of imaginings, John. And so I do not imagine.”

  “How could you, Sir? You have a whole country to consider.”

  I could not sleep. My brains swelled with the sadness of my lost tuition. I tried to dream of skinning a rabbit. I failed. And I thought of the Old Man, who seemed so awkward he could not decide what to do with his enormous hands and feet. His feelings, his intimacy, all his vital lines were never on the surface. He was someone who did not like to show. He would have been pitiful inside a playhouse. But he could stroll into British Manhattan, redcoats all around, play vingt-et-un with Sir William Howe and win.

  Sir William could not measure my general—saw nothing beneath the eyes. And Washington would never have gone to see Gert on Holy Ground without gambling his own life. Gert was his America—not the America of Martha and Mount Vernon—but of a certain bawdiness that seemed to elude him, of imagination he seemed to fear. He could not have conducted a
war without such imagination, conjuring up a people and an army with the force of his mind.

  I did start to dream—I plunged into the Housatonic with Washington’s chestnut mare. ’T was delightful to fall through a bridge. I was never so certain of myself. I rode on that sorrel’s back with the water up to my chin, the currents ripping away at the saddlebags. I clutched her reins with both hands, and when the reins unraveled with the violence of the water, I clutched her neck—it was the only thing in the world that could compare with Clara.

  Fifty-Eight

  A FACE PULLED ME FROM THE HOUSATONIC, ruined my sleep. Then I recognized him with his reddish hair and azure eyes. He did not have a manly figure. His shoulders were much too slim. But he had a certain puissance in the way he moved—like a leopard light on it feet. He’d come with coffee and little cakes. He was wearing a powder horn and a white plume in his hat—Sparks and the commander in chief were already gone.

  “Rise up,” Ham said. “I have stolen you from the Old Man and suborned you to my battalion. Johnny, I have seized all your rights. You will ride with me.”

  Alec was my rescuer angel—with Malcolm Treat around, I might not have lived out the month.

  “I repeat,” he said. “You will ride with me and have the rank of honorary lieutenant.”

  “Ham—beg pardon, Colonel Hamilton. I do not wish to have a rank.”

  “Honorary, I insist, rather than acting lieutenant, since our government cannot afford to pay you. You will not be issued a uniform, but you may wear your green sash.” “Your green sash, sir.”

  “For God’s sake, we’re not in the field—call me Alec. And ’tis now officially your green sash,” he said.

  “But I have no right. I have never been an aide-de-camp.”

  “I consulted His Excellency. You did from time to time perform the duties of an aide. John, you will wear the sash!”