Forever (15 page)
We do not worry about being respected in the towns through which we pass. But if we are going to remain in one for a certain time, we do worry. How long does this time have to be?
—P
ASCAL
T
hey smelled the land before they saw it. A rich, dark odor of sweet
earth, coming at them through a misty rain. Then seabirds appeared, crying and screeing. Cormac was on deck, his hair and beard trimmed, his new brown suit and long blue coat fashioned by Mr. Partridge, who had refused his money. He had a new sling for the sword too, strapped down his back, clipped across his chest, the weapon in a flat leather sheath. When he donned the long coat, the sword could not be seen by any police inspectors who might peer in suspicion at the bearded face of someone named Martin O’Donovan. Even Mr. Partridge, with his high standards of craft, admired the handiwork of the crew member who had fashioned the sling, a dour saddle maker from Mayo. Mr. Partridge was now a smaller version of himself. Almost thirty pounds had melted away in the cauldron of his fever. Now his flesh hung off him as loosely as his clothes (which he insisted must wait to be tailored after a few weeks in New York). Under his smart beaver hat, his eyes were clear and bright with anticipation.
“Almost there, lad,” he said, inhaling deeply.
Then a dark line spread across the horizon, and there was a huge cheer and waving of hats. Haggard Irish faces peered up through open hatches, still barred from the deck by Mr. Clark. “Stay below!” he bellowed. “Stay below, you lot! Yiz’ll get kilt up here.” Mr. Partridge explained that because of tides and currents and prevailing winds they had come around in a wide arc to their destination. The land on the right was the Long Island. Dutch farmers were scattered over much of it, he said, along with their slaves. But all were intelligently huddled far from the sea with its summer hurricanes and fierce winter winds. All Cormac saw were long strands of beach, white in the rain, and thick forests so dark they seemed black. And then up ahead, rising from the sea, there was a small mountain. Like the small meshed mountain he had seen in the Irish fog on the day, long ago, when they had set out upon the ocean. The island where Mary Morrigan had waved good-bye.
“Staten Island,” Mr. Partridge said. “It’ll be to port as we turn into the Narrows.”
For a long moment, he was quiet on the bustling deck.
“Now remember all I told you, lad,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“We have much to do together.”
“We do.”
He had given Cormac the address on Stone Street of a place called Hughson’s, where he might rent a room while Mr. Partridge looked for a place for his print shop. He himself would be staying at the Black Horse Tavern. Run by friends. Booked long ago. Cormac should call on him once a day, that was the plan, and Mr. Partridge would tell him of his progress. He had given Cormac a crudely printed map of the town, along with a litany of dire warnings. Don’t let anyone carry your bag, or you’ll never see it again.
(The fastest thieves in the world live here.)
Don’t get drunk and lose control, or you’ll lose even your shoes.
(Lock your door, button your coat, strap your hat, tie your laces.)
Don’t sleep with any woman who offers her services
(It’s a city of whores),
or you’ll end up with a pox that will swell your tongue to the width of a plank. New York was a dangerous place, Mr. Partridge said. Full of thieves from many nations.
(They speak seventeen different tongues, not counting the African languages.)
The English were the worst. Lazy buggers. Rather steal than work.
(As an Englishman, they fill me with shame.)
There were hundreds of Englishmen transported to America for crimes committed in English cities.
(They start by cutting their mothers’ throats and then go downhill.)
And they weren’t even the worst.
“The most dangerous of the lot are the ones who now think they’re respectable,” he had said when they were a week away from America. “They go to church. They wear fine clothes. They use snuff. And they’d steal the eyeballs out of your head.”
He paused, staring at his journeyman’s hands.
“Still and all, they’ll give us much to print.”
And he laughed out loud.
They had agreed to work together in New York. Or rather, Cormac would work for him. As soon as Mr. Partridge found a place for his press and his shop, he would teach Cormac the printing trade. The prospect thrilled Cormac. He could always work as a blacksmith, but to learn to set type and print Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope and who knew what other great writers: that made his skin tingle and his blood rush. To be sure, he had a mission in New York, one he did not mention to the older man. But if the Earl of Warren was not there, or otherwise eluded him, then (Cormac thought) he could master a trade that would give his life a purpose.
Now the
Fury
moved steadily toward New York, passing the small mountain rising in Staten Island, and Cormac thought that he might never come this way again and so should remember the thrill of arrival. He might die in prison. He might be pursued into the blank interior. Indeed, in his pursuit of the earl, he might lose his own life. He might not even get past the pier, if someone recognized him. Some policeman or redcoat who knew that in Ireland he had killed a man. Or even two (for Cormac did not know the fate of the man who had crawled without a hand from the earl’s stable). If they had a list, an alert, a warrant, they’d be looking for a young man named Robert Carson. Not Cormac O’Connor. Not Martin O’Donovan. They could be looking for him without need of a name.
But as the new land surrounded him, as a new breeze ruffled his hair, as he swerved into this port in the New World, this New York, another feeling blossomed within him, nurtured by the frail, almost tender rain and the smell of American earth: a yearning to live beyond the end of his mission. In some odd way, he wanted to kill the earl in order to live on. To live with all blood obligations honored and all blood debts paid. To end one part of his life and begin another. Here, in Tir-na-Nog.
Such thoughts vanished among shouts and cheers, the creaking of timbers and the swishing of water against the hull, as they turned into the great harbor. That was Brooklyn to the right now (Mr. Partridge said), named for a town in Holland, covered with woods that climbed in a long slope to a ridge of hills. Its scattered houses faced the harbor, with plumes of smoke rising from chimneys like pennants. Small boats were tied along the Brooklyn shore, and fishing boats, in from sea and river, were aimed at wharves. A few figures moved on a morning wharf and one of them waved in welcome and the crew cheered and waved back. Sails flapped. Flags streamed in the breeze. Captain Thompson watched in melancholy silence as his ship moved steadily to Manhattan.
At last the emigrants were released to the freedom of the deck. Blinking and trembling. They were now a ghastly remnant of those who had embarked so hopefully from Galway: red-eyed and wretched, their hair matted and greasy, pallid skins grimy with thirteen weeks of filth and fever and death. All were silent. Tears streaked the grime on some women’s faces, but they could not even manage a sob. They gazed at Brooklyn as if it were the seacoast of the moon.
Manhattan grew larger and more clear. A fort at the tip. Four squat cannon aimed at the bay. Or at the
Fury
. Low houses behind the fort, and the steeple of a church, and away off to the north, ridged green forests. Small boats crossed before them. Sloops and skiffs. To the right the East River moved sluggishly between Manhattan and the Long Island, its marshy shore thick with masts. As they drew closer, the seabirds were braver, more aggressive, yipping and snarling around the masts. Cormac glimpsed scarlet uniforms near the fort and remembered them on the roads of Ireland. Along with the one British redcoat who had shown him the body of the dead girl after the Great Cold, his stricken face, his small lament for people who had died drinking piss.
Captain Thompson guided them into the East River. The
Fury
slowed, idled for a time, then turned with its stern toward what Mr. Partridge told him was Wallabout Bay. The seamen worked expertly, shouting curtly to one another, all engaged in the docking of the ship. Then they were pointed directly at the foot of Wall Street (although Cormac didn’t yet know its name, and Mr. Partridge, his guide to geography, had retreated to his cabin to retrieve his precious personal cargo). Creaking timbers. Seabirds. A billowing of sail. A collective holding of breath. They saw other ships tied up at timbered piers. And parts of the shoreline dwindling into mud.
Mr. Partridge returned. Directly before them on shore was a large, empty, tin-roofed shed. Beneath the roof, an elevated stage. A large, still-faceless crowd watching the
Fury’
s approach. “That tin-roofed building,” Mr. Partridge said, “is the Slave Market.” Cormac thought: This is where Kongo will be sold. This place. Kongo and his men. But not Tomora. She has escaped this disgusting stage.
They entered the slip. The crew worked at mooring the
Fury
. Now Cormac could read the signs on the three-story buildings behind the Slave Market. Coopers. Meat sellers and victualers. Cordwainers and fishmongers and shipping agents. A pyramid of empty barrels climbed to the left, and beside them stood great piles of wooden crates awaiting shipment. Black men moved among the whites on shore, dressed in the same coarse clothes. Lifting, hauling, watching the ship as it docked. Behind the Slave Market, Wall Street cut through row houses up a long slope, and in the distance was the steeple they’d glimpsed from the harbor.
Ropes were thrown. Knots tied to stanchions. Mr. Partridge and Cormac were there, lashed to the American shore. The Rev. Clifford was now on deck. He was dressed in black, his eyes dead, standing behind them as Captain Thompson offered the top-deck passengers his thanks and his apologies for the rigors of the journey. The captain wished them good luck and gestured toward the wide plank leading to the wharf. Clifford’s skin was dusty with seclusion, his eyes beyond all offers of luck or thanks. He went down the plank first, into the waiting crowd, in his salt-stained black suit, carrying his black bags and his black Bible. Mr. Partridge and Cormac in turn embraced the captain, shook hands with Mr. Clark, waved to the crew (which paid them little attention), and walked down to the land. There were no policemen or soldiers waiting with lists, and Cormac took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
Then, to Cormac, it was as if the land were tilting and shifting, and some in the crowd laughed as they wobbled and lurched and tried to turn sea legs into land legs. Mr. Partridge laughed back, and so did Cormac. Someone shouted, “Welcome to America!” They mumbled their thanks and drifted to the side of the crowd. “Carry your bag, sir?” came one voice. “Food and lodging, gentlemen?” said another. “A nice warm woman after a long cold voyage?” whispered a third with a knowing giggle. “Absolutely
not,
” said Mr. Partridge, speaking for the two of them, his face wearing an expression that said:
We’re not idiots.
They were waiting at the quayside because Mr. Partridge couldn’t take possession of his printing press until all passengers had cleared the ship. He told Cormac to go on to Hughson’s on Stone Street and have a bath and breakfast. Cormac insisted on waiting with him. The older man went off to find help, while Cormac stood with his own bag on top of Mr. Partridge’s suitcase and his foot on top of both. The sword felt heavy in its hiding place between his shoulder blades. A few minutes later Partridge returned in the company of a stevedore with a large cart who promised to deliver the press to Van Zandt’s warehouse, three blocks south. But Mr. Partridge didn’t trust its safe portage without being with it every minute. They waited together, with the stevedore off to the side.
The rain was falling harder now, drumming on the peaked tin roof of the Slave Market. They found dry refuge under a lean-to used by the stevedores, and while Mr. Partridge went for a look at the warehouse, someone offered Cormac a cup of coffee. His first in America. He ignored the dark warnings of Mr. Partridge and accepted. It was thick, sweet, dark, delicious, and if it contained some drug, Cormac didn’t care. His bones began to warm.
Now the emigrants were tottering down the wide plank, looking like the risen crew of a death ship. A few of them were freemen, not prisoners of an indentured contract. They responded to a name shouted from the crowd—
Here, Billy! Right here, Robert
—and rushed to collapse into the arms of some relative. The rest were herded toward a brawny man in a leather vest who waited at the bottom of the plank, with an African holding an umbrella over his head. He was clearly a boss. Or
the
boss. Four men stood to the side, watching him the way lieutenants always look at a captain, the way the earl’s men had looked at him before the killing of Cormac’s father. They tensely gripped muskets, as if ready for battle—not for England or America or even themselves, but for the boss.
Each emigrant gave a name, and the burly man checked them off a list and pointed to a space in the rain to the left of the Slave Market where they must wait. The lieutenants took up positions at each corner of an imaginary square enclosing these indentured servants. The message was clear: If one of the Irish runs, he (or she) will be shot. Other men (in fancier clothes, with their own Africans holding umbrellas) began to bargain over their fate, pointing and choosing, and pinning small colored ribbons on the emigrants’ soaked clothes. These were badges that made each emigrant the property of specific American agents. Some would remain in New York. A few were sent to New England. Most were bound for South Carolina or Virginia to work with the African slaves. Now some of the indentured servants found their tongues. This woman needs to go with that man and not be separated from him (for they’d fallen in love in the purgatory of the crossing). Or that woman is carrying my child, for the love of God (in pleading Irish and clumsy English). Or I’ll not move a bloody inch until my child is fed!
A huge black man suddenly detached himself from a group of agents. He was about six-foot-two with muscles rippling under his denim vest. A leather whip was curled in his huge hand. Cormac heard some of the stevedores call his name. Quaco.
