Forever (30 page)

“There’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” they would say, and then do what he had done many times with women in his rented rooms. The town was filling up with strangers, with women who did not know one another, and were thus free of the intimacies of gossip. The village he’d come to as a boy was becoming a town and was certain to become a city. And in the anonymous crowds, all was possible.

Bantu stirred, without benefit of a clock. He would now take the watch. Cormac nodded and went into the bedroom, to lie down and inhale the odor of a woman’s body.

At some hour before midnight, they found Big Michael where he had fallen, facedown in the earth. Animals had gnawed the flesh on his neck and arms. Aaron started digging with a spade stolen from the farmhouse, and the others gazed toward Kip’s Bay, visible under the moon, with lanterns blazing on the English frigates and men still crossing to the shore in longboats. They must be quick. Silver took the spade, followed by Bantu and Cormac and Carlito. Grunting and digging, until the trench was deep enough to keep Big Michael from the paws of foraging animals. They lifted Big Michael’s body together, the wolf cub yipping and excited, and then lowered him gently. His bones would be part of this island, Cormac thought, for as long as there was an island.

Bantu spoke in Yoruba, consigning Big Michael to the care of the gods.

“We will see you in the Otherworld, O brother,” he said.

And then they started the long journey to the north, to meet with Washington’s triumphant army. They passed small groups of redcoats sullenly guarding campfires. They forded streams. They saw bodies of Americans and Englishmen and Hessians. They paused to rest, then began again. At last they saw the escarpment of Harlem Heights, outlined against the dawn.

It was empty. Washington’s army was gone.

“They’ve marched to White Plains,” an American scout told them. “The whole lot of them.”

“And will fight in White Plains?” Cormac said.

“I suppose. They don’t tell the likes of me such things. But I guess they’ll fight a bit, then cross the river. The English are now between us and White Plains, they came in the morning, so the only place for Washington to go is New Jersey….”

The black patrol was silent, staring at one another’s stunned faces. They’d been left behind. Abandoned. God damn it. Silver asked if there were any other boats that could take them across the river.

“Not that I know,” the scout said. “My orders are to go home in another day.”

“Where is home?” Carlito asked.

“Westport.”

“So Washington is handing New York to the Crown?” Cormac said.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. I know I go home tomorrow.”

Cormac looked south. The sun was seeping into the sky above Brooklyn.

“Let’s go,” he said to the others.

“Where?”

“New York,” he said.

Bantu took the braid from the muzzle of the wolf cub and walked him into the woods and set him free.

67.

T
hey fought their own war now. They sawed through the beams of
bridges at midnight, spilling carriages and caissons into streams. They broke into warehouses and killed guards and stole rifles and sent them on boats across the river to New Jersey. They spread posters on the walls of buildings, advising English soldiers to save their lives by going home. Most of all, they burned houses.

“They keep taking houses for their soldiers and their officers,” Cormac said. “We have to force them to sleep in the rain.”

He explained what had been done in 1741, and how the conspirators had waited a day for the wind. They must set up everything carefully, straw, paper, oil, kindling. So they did, with Bantu and Silver posing as water carriers, lamp oils suspended at each end of poles. Aaron was a carpenter, with papers stating that he was a freeman, manumitted by a dying owner (printed at night by Cormac in the shop of one of the Sons of Liberty). He went from door to door, offering his services, peering around storerooms and workshops. Carlito met with the Spanish slaves, learning the vulnerabilities of the homes and workplaces of their masters. Cormac marked maps. In the afternoons, one at a time, they wandered past the places where the fire pumps were stored and punctured the bottoms of water buckets and sliced holes in the hoses. At night, Cormac dreamed of fire and destruction.

The rest of life seemed almost normal. As the English officers arrived in New York, the Tories welcomed them, throwing elegant parties, hosting nights of song and loyalty at the John Street Theater. They called down God’s blessings on the Sovereign while clavichord music tinkled from the mansions near the Bowling Green. Tory mothers presented their daughters like offerings. Whores began ringing the fort. One or two at a time, and then in larger numbers, the Americans had been slipping away, some carrying their valuables to country places, others boarding ships for the South. Some were loyal to Washington. Others wanted to avoid what was certain to come to the streets of New York. The English did not interfere with their flight. They wanted the abandoned American homes.

Cormac, dressed as a mechanic, was watching part of this sad American exodus one evening on Broadway when a large redhaired man came up beside him. He was wearing a cape, his hands hidden.

“They’ll be back,” the red-haired man said. The accent Irish.

“Aye,” Cormac said.

“Don’t ye think?” the man said.

Cormac shrugged. It was impossible to know the sides that each man had chosen in this town; this Irishman could be just another English spy. “Where do you come from?” Cormac asked in Irish. The man seemed startled, and answered, “Armagh.” Another voyager from Ulster. They stood together, and as the last carriage passed on its way north, Cormac heard the sound of uilleann pipes. He was surprised. The sound was mournful, sad, angry, all at once, and seemed to come from the chest of the red-haired man from Armagh. Cormac stepped back and realized the man was playing his pipes under the cape, using his right elbow for power.

“Good day, sir,” Cormac said, and walked quickly away as the man gave voice through his pipes to the ghosts mixed with the higher-pitched howl of the banshee.

Then one night, as a hard wind blew toward the west, the fire began. Cormac set it off in the empty upstairs rooms of a tavern called the Fighting Cocks, down by the waterfront off Whitehall. The barroom was full of Hessians, singing in German, and Cormac left through a window. He moved languidly through the streets toward the East River, then cut north and back west toward the Common. When he turned, the sky was red. Bells replaced the tinkling of clavichords. Soldiers ran in a dozen directions and then backed away from the roaring flames. Water once more dribbled from hoses as small geysers arose from punctures. The buckets were like sieves. Horses whinnied and bucked and pounded at stable doors. There were screams and lamentations.

Cormac and the patrol moved separately north. Then, at the bottom of the Common, he stood very still and saw flames rising in the immense steeple of Trinity Church. The tallest building in New York. The symbol of English domination. The flames burned on the surface. They burned inside the church. The tongues of the fire were pointed toward New Jersey, blowing hard, and were jumping roof to roof all the way to Barclay Street, somehow missing St. Paul’s Chapel. But he could not stop himself from gazing at Trinity. That was not one of their targets. And now the flames were eating at it. The steeple wobbled, then gave off a noise like an immense complaint and fell straight down in a giant roar. The burning pinnacle of the steeple lay on its side in the graveyard, like a corpse. Screams of awe filled the air. He remembered the way, on an afternoon thirty-five years earlier, Diamond had been burned on the edge of this Common, and the way John Hughson’s corpse had turned black and Sandy’s turned white, and the way the Rev. Clifford had grasped at his crotch in a delirium of death.

It was time to go. He hurried to the hill above the Collect, where the Africans waited. The sky to the south was as bright now as at noon, and they could see tongues of flame rising from many houses below Wall Street.

“Let them sleep in snow,” Bantu said.

When the long night was over, 407 houses had been reduced to smoking rubble. Now it was the Tories’ turn to trudge north to their estates or to board ships for England. And the redcoats came down upon the Americans with all of their fury. Every young man was a suspect. Men with histories in the Sons of Liberty were arrested and questioned and executed by firing squads. Others were crammed into the Bridewell prison, built upon the grass of the Common. Six men were hanged from the ancient gibbets on the hill above the Collect. Others were rounded up and press-ganged into dousing water on the smoldering rubble of the 407 ruined houses. All events were canceled at the John Street Theater. There were no more tinkling dinner parties. Soldiers, hard Tories, and Americans settled in for a long occupation.

Cormac and the black patrol found shelter in the swamp beyond the Collect, in an old cabin shrouded by tangled vines and dense thickets. Each day, one of them would slip into the town, to find food, to pick up news and gather information about future targets. They learned that the English were making concessions to the Africans now. They didn’t call them concessions. They called them pledges. But the message was simple: If the Africans swore loyalty to the Crown, if they defended their masters, they would be freed at the end of the war.

“Do you believe them?” Cormac asked Bantu one cold night in the swamp.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You take freedom. Nobody give it to you.”

Silver said: “But some Africa people listen. They want to believe. You tell them, this is a trick. They say nothing. But they thinkin’ ’bout it, all sure.”

“They think Washington is finish,” Carlito said. “They think it be over soon, so they listen, they listen.”

“What do you think?”

“I think we keep fighting,” Bantu said.

On another early morning, after a night spent cutting ditches through a main road to harass coach traffic, Cormac asked them what they would do when they were free.

“Farm,” said Aaron. “With my woman, my children. Farm up in the island. Grow potato and yam. Have chickens to sell. Milk… Send my boys to school. And girls too, ef I have girls.”

“Open a shop down by Wall Street,” said Silver. “Make all kinds of leather stuff, belts and shoes and cases, all leather things. Live upstairs. Drink rum on Saturday night. Eat turkey on Sunday.”

Carlito said nothing. He shrugged as if the idea were too far in the remote future.

“Go home,” Bantu said. “Go find my family. See who lives, who died.”

He told about how he’d been captured with a net when he was fifteen by a search party from another tribe, how he was turned over to Arabs and herded in shackles to a fort on the coast, how English traders came to change cowrie shells and rum and guns for the Africans penned in the fort.

“I don’t want to kill people,” he said. “Just find my sisters, my boy brother, and say prayers for my father, and then bring them here, all the people that’s alive.”

None of them wanted to return forever to Africa. They didn’t want to live in a land where human beings were trapped like animals and then sold to others. Africa was a bitter memory. They wanted to live out their lives in America.

“This, my country,” Bantu said, digging hands into the loamy earth that made the floor of the shack. “This.”

One night, Cormac asked the men to vote for their leader. He had recruited them, but that didn’t make him their leader for all the days of their lives. In this army, this revolutionary army, they should choose. After all, they called themselves the black patrol and Cormac was white. The blacks should make the choice. They seemed surprised at this suggestion from Cormac, and asked for time to discuss it. He felt certain they would choose Bantu. Instead, after huddling together outside the shack for about ten minutes, they returned to face Cormac.

“We all the leader,” Silver said. “You die, Bantu the leader. Bantu die, Aaron the leader. Aaron die, Carlito the leader. Carlito die—”

“Then we fucked,” Bantu said, and laughed. “Then some god the leader.”

They all laughed then and hugged one another. But Bantu slowly grew somber.

“We better die together,” he said.

For weeks, scavengers worked the mounds of ruined houses. Redcoats did the work for the first few weeks, finding pewter and scorched paintings and clothes for men and women and saddles and bottles of wine in cellars. All were taken to Fort George, where they could be awarded to friends, or passed through merchants to the empty slavers that were still heading for Africa. The later scavengers were Americans, including some loyal to the Crown, searching for remnants of their lives, or secret rebels looking for hunks of old iron, gnarled candelabra, anything that could be melted down to make ammunition. Sometimes at night, as scavengers worked the cold piles, they could hear the uilleann pipes, mournful and defiant.

The English authorities did not clear the site of the most destructive fire in the history of their colonies. They left the steeple of Trinity lying on its side. They did not replace the ruined houses. They left the rubble as a kind of monument. One that said, Here is what your Revolution brings you: destruction and rubble. Choose sides now.

The rich were gone, but the poor now gathered on the fringes of the ruined streets in tents made of old sailcloth, the place soon named Canvastown. They killed off the pigs and ate them. They stole apples and potatoes from abandoned farms and kept pots simmering on fires through the cold nights. On his forays into town, sometimes dressed as a peddler, sometimes hobbled by age, Cormac saw that the town was filling with predators. Sharpers from London bargained for goods that could be sold in Jamaica or Charleston or even back in England. Slavers offered good prices for Swedish ingots, chintz, Italian glass, brass kettles, knives and axes and guns. There was no money in Africa, other than cowrie shells; things were the currency of slavery. Men and women from Canvastown stole to supply the market, while the better-off families, their fortunes shrinking, sold off their own small treasures to the slavers, who could turn things into purchased humans.

The gray weather added to the sullen sense of corruption. Snow fell, blanketing the town, then melted, turned black, then fell again. The tents of Canvastown sagged under the weight of snow, and sometimes collapsed, and people were found frozen on the streets. Lone chimneys rose toward Heaven from the white mounds of the ruined town like the masts of ghost ships.

They received news in whispered conversations, in messages delivered by old men and Africans and a few women. Washington was losing every battle, off in New Jersey and in Pennsylvania, but he was not defeated. As long as he remained alive, the Revolution lived. The English were working hard to control Manhattan, which was the headquarters of the entire enterprise. They were mapping the island. In the spring, when the frost went out of the trees, they would begin clearing the island of its ambush lanes. The Americans continued refining their own operations. They had a system of couriers now, taking information to Washington’s small and battered army. They exercised their own rough justice against informers. A dirk in the heart. A rope tied around a neck.

The black patrol destroyed seventeen bridges. It fired two more warehouses. One night, Bantu and Aaron waited patiently in the darkness on South Street and killed a London slave merchant who was to leave at dawn for Newport. Bantu placed a cowrie shell in the dead man’s mouth.

They moved when instinct told them to move. One night, while Cormac and Bantu, Aaron and Silver packed their things for a shift to a new place, the English arrived, passing through the tangled paths of the swamp as if they had a map. A soldier from Leeds cut Carlito’s throat where he stood watch. Then an officer bellowed at the shack.

“Hallo, in there,” he said. “We know you’re there, and it’s best you surrender.”

Bantu snuffed the candle with his fingers. They listened tensely to the officer’s voice.

“You’re to walk out with your hands above your heads. You are to lie facedown on the ground. Any sign of a weapon will be a sign of hostility, and you’ll be killed.”

Cormac and Bantu glanced at each other, Aaron and Silver inhaled and then sighed.

Then they rushed out the door, firing guns, Cormac wielding the sword. The redcoats were surprised. Two fell dead. Then another, and the black patrol drove a wedge into their line. For a long moment, men screamed and cursed and shouted. Jesus Christ, Cormac thought, there must be a hundred of them. He slashed and swung and pivoted and slashed again. Men cried in pain.

He saw Bantu’s chest explode. He saw the front of Aaron’s face vanish. He turned for Silver, and then his own head exploded in high white pain. His face fell into the wet earth. He could hear the howl of a wolf. Then he was gone.