Forever (20 page)

47.

O
n the Friday morning of his third week in New York, everything
changed. Cormac was finishing breakfast in the quiet bar at Hughson’s, reading the
New York Gazette
. At separate tables, two commercial travelers did the same, preparing for the rigors of the day with bread, butter, and tea. The knocker banged, the front door opened. Cormac heard a few murmured words. Mary Burton appeared, mop in one hand, a sheet of paper in the other.

“It’s for you,” she said. Her blank stare told Cormac that she’d read the unsealed note. He took it from her and saw Mr. Partridge’s handwriting.

PACK YOUR BAGS AND COME AT ONCE. I’VE FOUND A PLACE. P

Cormac thought:
At last!
At last, I can leave Hughson’s and be in my own small piece of New York, doing work, learning a trade. He glanced up, and Mary Burton’s eyes were drilling holes in his skull.

“So you’re leaving,” she said.

“Leaving here. But not leaving New York, Mary. I’ll be back.”

“No, you won’t.”

“I will,” Cormac said, waving the slip of paper. “But this is what I’ve been waiting for. You know that. I told you.”

“Oh, just go, without the feckin’ blather.”

“All right.”

He packed his things quickly and strapped the sword to his hip, letting it show. When he came down the stairs carrying his bag, Sarah Hughson blocked the front door. The blue door to the bar was closed, and Mary Burton was out of sight.

“You owe us ten shillings,” Sarah Hughson said.

“I do not,” Cormac said. “I paid for my room in advance. And I’m leaving two days early. You should be returning me—”

“You owe us ten shillings,” she repeated. “For the use of Mary Burton.”

The blue door opened, and Mary Burton burst in, gripping her mop.

“How feckin’ well dare you!” she shouted at Sarah.

“Stay out of this, girl.”

“I never missed a feckin’ minute of labor for you, Mrs. Hughson! I’ve been a perfect wee slave!”

“Shut up!” Sarah Hughson said.

“I will not.”

“This is my place, you dirty wee thing. I make the rules!”

John Hughson emerged from the bar, large and slow, holding the
Gazette
.

“What’s all this?”

Mary Burton whirled on him. “Your bloody wife wants to charge this boy for the use of me quim.”

Hughson laughed out loud, and Cormac smiled in relief.

“You’ve got some mouth on you, Mary,” Hughson said.

“He
owes
us, John,” Sarah insisted, her back splayed against the front door.

Hughson sighed and put a hand on Cormac’s shoulder.

“Run along now, lad,” he said, “before this gets worse.” Then to Sarah: “Get out of his way, Sarah.”

There was a kind of fed-up menace in his voice, and Sarah retreated from it, easing away from the door.

“You’re a bloody softhearted fool, John Hughson,” she said. She pushed past Cormac and Mary and John through the blue door into the bar, slamming it behind her.

“Thank you,” Cormac said to Hughson. “You’re a very sensible man.”

“No, I’m not. I’m just soft. Go. Please go.”

Cormac lifted his bag and opened the door to the New York morning. He turned to say good-bye, but Mary Burton was climbing the stairs.

48.

A
nd so he entered the printing trade. Mr. Partridge had found an
unused former stable on Cortlandt Street, over by the North River, a place so forlorn and anonymous that they had passed it at least three times on their walks without actually seeing it. When Cormac first walked through the chipped, flaked double doors, his heart sank. The space was dark and cobwebbed, reeking of ancient shit and rotting vegetable matter. The windows were so caked with grime that no light entered. He followed Mr. Partridge across the lumpy brown mat of the floor. High up in the back he saw the trace of a ladder rising to a second-floor loft. Behind them, the double doors on the Cortlandt Street side were immense, built for carriages, but so thick with crusted paint, dampness, and bad care that only one of them moved on its runners. A smaller door opened into the muddy backyard.

Cormac was appalled. But Mr. Partridge saw the place with other eyes, the same eyes that gazed at New York. Seeing it for what it could become, not for what it was.

“You see,” he gushed, “it
must
have been a stable—attached to the Dutch house next door. That’s why the ceiling’s so high, to make room for hay…. The rooms upstairs must have been added later,” he said, noting a ridge in the high wall where the stone of the ground-floor walls give way to gray planed pine. “The Dutchman next door must have got prosperous at something, become a patroon instead of a horse-handler, and sold the stable. Then…”

He jumped around, too excited and full of youthful joy to finish his thoughts, and together, without much ado, they began to prepare the space for the Monday arrival of the printing press.

“Those front windows,” he said. “We’ll have to scrape away the crusty dirt so a person can see in at us, see what we do, feel like
entering
. I’ll attack
that
problem, and you can…”

Cormac went to work scrubbing the flagstones: pulling stringy tufts of weed from the spaces between the stones, raking mushrooms from the narrow trenches where the stones had once abutted the walls (before the house had settled). He scattered beetles and worms from around the dead, ashen fireplace. He used wire brushes on the floor, removing years of impacted dirt and coats of ancient horseshit. His breath quickened when he saw the first blue gray quarried stone beneath the brown fibrous carpet, and he worked almost frantically to uncover each of its buried brothers. All day Friday, until the light was gone, he washed stones, his pouring sweat mixing with the precious water (carried in heavy buckets from the Tea Pump by the same black men he’d seen on Broad Street). In the center of the room, he discovered the rim of a blocked and rusted drain, packed with a cement formed of dirt and horse piss. He jammed a stick into it and moved nothing. Then he picked up his sword and cored out a passage, breaking open some unseen blockage underneath. Abruptly, the spilled water from his bucket flowed in a gurgling way into the unseen earth. He shouted in happiness—“The drain works!”—and Mr. Partridge turned from his glistening windowpanes and exulted at the sight.

“A bloody drain!” he shouted. “Without which no print shop can exist!”

Then Mr. Partridge vanished for a few hours, returning with bread and beef and water, and a large pink-faced Dutchman and two Africans, who carried in a pair of cots that he’d bought in the Dutchman’s shop behind Trinity. One cot was for Cormac, and they parked it beside the fireplace. The Africans carried the second cot up the ladder to the loft where Mr. Partridge would live, while the Dutchman, looking dubious, waited for his money.

After midnight Cormac took off his shoes and fell upon the cot. He thought for a while of the hard, taut body of Mary Burton and her small, hard breasts and rosy nipples. He thought: I must be done with her. I did not say a proper good-bye, and that was rude of me, but I must be done with her. I have things to do here that come first. Before a woman. Before anyone. Still, I had no intentions of hurting her, and I have. She gave me her body. She washed me and fed me and made me laugh. And I’ve put one more hurt upon her. Ah, Mary: I’ll try to make it up. I will. Then he eased into a dreamless sleep.

On Saturday morning, he was back again at the stones, scraping, washing, polishing with emery, until by early afternoon they were gleaming. Meanwhile, two Norwegian ship’s carpenters arrived, carrying planed lumber and leather sacks of hammers and tools. After discussing measurements and placement with Mr. Partridge, they went immediately to work building a platform upon which the press would stand. Rectangular, rising about a foot off the flagstones, with a base beneath it. Almost like an altar. The Norwegians spoke little English, and said very little in Norwegian. They simply worked. With care and speed, using spirit levels for adjustments, fitting each joint with uncanny precision and exactitude. Mr. Partridge had them add a door to the platform, to provide storage space beneath the press, and they designed it so that it was flush to the sides. No locks were needed. Simple hand pressure popped it open. The smell of fresh-cut lumber helped drive out the odor of shit and time. And after Mr. Partridge peeled away the last of the gray film that clouded the windows and polished them with soap and rags, bright bars of summer light streamed in upon the fresh boards and polished stones. Cormac and Mr. Partridge smiled in delight. So did the Norwegians.

The town was shut down on Sunday, but the Norwegians didn’t observe any religion except work. As Cormac and Mr. Partridge filled chinks in the stone walls with cement and erected rope lines from which paper could be hung by pegs, the Norwegians swiftly fashioned shelves for paper and ink and type, glancing at diagrams and old woodcuts for guidance. They adjusted the legs of an old table to make it balance on the uneven flag-stones. They used a wood plane on the back door until it opened and closed as if buttered. They placed a bookcase beside the fire-place. They grunted. They muttered in Norwegian. And in the scalding summer heat they worked and worked. They worked without shirts and then without trousers. They paused to smoke seegars. They took long drafts of water. And they worked.

By Monday morning, all was ready for the arrival of the press. At a few minutes after eight, it appeared on the back of a horse-drawn wagon from Van Zandt’s warehouse, still in its huge crate. Two black men eased the crate on rollers into the backyard, then opened it carefully with chisels, then snapped the wires and cables that had kept the press suspended in the crate during the long journey. On the floor of the crate beneath the press was a long smaller crate. “Type!” Mr. Partridge said. “Without type, we print nothing!” He asked the Africans to carry the box of type inside and lay it in a corner against the wall. Then they lifted the printing press itself, an African at either end, with Mr. Partridge on the left side and Cormac on the right. Hauling and muttering and gasping for breath, they carried it around to Cortlandt Street and in through the open double doors. A small crowd had gathered to stare at them, to observe the new tenants, the beginning of a new shop. They positioned the press on its fresh new altar, moving it and shifting it until it stood exactly where Mr. Partridge wanted it to be, with space on the platform to walk around it on all sides.

As they finished, one of the Africans looked at Cormac with recognition in his eyes. They moved together out the back door, where Cormac began collecting the remains of the crate to use as firewood.

“Hughson’s?” Cormac said.

“Yah.”

“I’ll not be there for a while.”

“Yah.”

“Can you do me a favor?”

He stared at the young white man.

“I’m looking for a man. An African. A… friend. His name is Kongo.”

He looked at Cormac in a blank way that said more than he intended; the name Kongo carried weight with him.

“If you see him, tell him Cor-mac is looking for him.”

“Yah,” he said, and walked off toward the waterfront.

Back inside, Mr. Partridge sat on the lip of the fireplace, staring at his wonderful machine. He wiped his sweat-blistered brow. Cormac sat beside him and gazed at the press. It looked to him like some strange, godlike giant insect. An immense grasshopper. Or a praying mantis. They stared at it together, then stood up, exhausted by heat and toil, and bolted the creature’s feet to the platform. When they were finished, Cormac felt like singing a hymn.

“By God,” Mr. Partridge whispered, shaking a fist, “we’ve done it, lad. We’re in business.”

Not quite.

That evening, as they sat on the edge of the platform eating fish and chips from a tavern in the light of candles, Mr. Partridge grew silent. His exuberance ebbed. His body slumped. It was as if the past three days had drained him of some invincible spark.

“Are you feeling all right, Mister Partridge?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“You… don’t seem all right.”

“Well…” He sighed. “The truth is, lad, I’m almost out of money. And we still need many things here…. Paper, above all. And ink, of course. And other things. This has been
so
bloody expensive. The storage fees at Van Zandt’s—”

Cormac unbuckled his money belt. Along with the paper money, there were eleven gold crowns left from those passed to him by his father. He pocketed one for himself and handed ten crowns to Mr. Partridge.

“Here,” Cormac said.

The older man looked embarrassed. He wouldn’t accept the money, and Cormac laid it upon the edge of the platform. He sat down with the heavy coins between them.

“No, absolutely not!” Mr. Partridge said. “You’re a boy, an apprentice—”

“I’m not a boy, Mr. Partridge. I’ve already killed a man.” He looked at Cormac with eyes wide and steady.

“You have?”

“Yes,” he said. “Maybe two.”

49.

H
e sketched his story for Mr. Partridge. He revealed his true name
and told him everything he could remember about the Earl of Warren and what had happened in Ireland. He explained the oath of blood and tribe that had sent him here, to New York. He left out many details. But the words flowed from him like water breaking through a weir, and he felt his rage rising again as he told of the day his mother died and the day his father was murdered for a horse. While Cormac talked, the eyes of Mr. Partridge never left him. And when the young man finished, the older man stared at him for a long moment.

“How sad,” he said finally. “How infuriating. And how very sad.”

Cormac stared at his hands, which had already wielded a sword, and must wield one again (soon, he hoped, soon), relieved now that one lie had been removed between himself and Mr. Partridge: the lie of his name. Martin O’Donovan was, for the moment, dead. Cormac Samuel O’Connor was now living here on Cortlandt Street. He looked up from his hands. Mr. Partridge was staring out through the polished windows in the double doors to the unlit street.

“Have you ever killed anyone?” Cormac said.

A pause.

“Not directly.”

In the confessional intimacy of the large warm room, Mr. Partridge began to speak.

“This was eleven years ago,” he said, his voice containing a kind of echo, enforced by the emptiness of the workshop. “In a terrible London winter. I was married then to my Esther. My beloved, thin, sweet Esther. We had four children. Robert. Michael. James. And the baby girl, Catherine. I was then certain that I wanted to move us all to America, to this new land, to a place far from kings and princes, dukes and earls, a place where the children could grow up strong and prosperous. A country that was new, where men and women could correct all the mistakes of the Old World.”

He cleared his throat, turned to Cormac. The money Cormac had offered was still lying on the lip of the platform made for the press.

“I had made one trip,” Mr. Partridge said. “Bringing printing supplies to Mister Bradford, and that journey convinced me. When I told her all about it, Esther shared the vision.” He turned uneasily on the edge of the platform. “Such a move would take money.” His eyes moved toward Cormac’s money for a moment. “So I was working then at two printing establishments, day and night and Sundays too. Saving money. Saving for a press and the passage and some money to begin again in America.” He exhaled strongly. “To save money,
to save bloody money,
we lived in a filthy slum. You don’t know London, do you, lad? Of course not. Well, the neighborhood was vile, criminal, evil. But the rent was low, which is why we were there, and my Esther somehow fortified our little piece of it while I worked, and we both saved. She was following my vision, my belief that one must sacrifice in the short run so as to have an amazing future.”

He stood up, touching the press, walking around it with a heavy tread.

“Well, one night I came home from Sorby the Printer’s, very late, after midnight. There were constables blocking the street. What’s this? Hello, what’s this? And they told me the cholera had taken the street, that it was quarantined. Nobody in, nobody out. No, but I
live
here, I said, my
wife
is here, I said, my
children
are here! Sorry, nobody in, nobody out. There were others like me, of course, those of us who worked in the watches of the night. And when we tried to push through, to see wives, children, they beat us with clubs and charged us with horses and arrested some of us. Starting with me.”

His hand involuntarily touched his head and he ruffled his graying hair.

“I woke up in an alley by the Thames, where I’d been tossed. My face was bloody, and my clothes too, and my shoulder wouldn’t work.” He made a grinding movement with his right shoulder. “And when I reached our street, long after dawn, with the rain falling, they were all dead. My Esther. The children. Along with twenty-seven others. All dead. Dead of bloody disease. Dead of bloody filth. Dead because of me.”

His eyes were brimming, but he didn’t cry. He sat down again, talking as much for himself as for Cormac.

“After I buried them, I took the America money and got drunk for seven months,” he said. “I spent it all. Every shilling. On rum and spirits. I slept in filthy rooms, praying for the cholera to take me too. I slept in alleys by the river. I was crawly with lice. I was as thin as a bird. I howled at easy ladies and their ponces, at constables and doctors. I raved outside Westminster. I was moved on, moved on, beaten, pummeled, laughed at, as I wandered in my frayed and filthy rags.”

He looked at Cormac in a steady way. The younger man was holding back his own tears.

“And then one morning, I woke up in a brickyard, huddled for warmth against the side of a kiln. I stared at the sky, and the clouds, and heard the whistle of some bird, defying the city: and got up. I was scabbed, hurt, scarred, broken. But I said then: enough. Just that word.
Enough.
And I stood up. I went to a shelter run by some upper-class ladies. I had a bath. I donned some old clothes that didn’t quite fit. And I said: Esther, I am sorry. My children, I am sorry. But now I will do something that will give this all some value. I’ll begin again. I will go to America. In your name.” A long pause. “And I’m here.”

Cormac embraced him.

“Well,” he said, “we have work to do.”

“Yes,” Mr. Partridge said. “Work.”

He took the coins now, hefting them, and walked to the doors and stared into the street.

“There are some dreadful people in the world,” he said, slipping the coins into his pocket, where they made a bulge. “They must be fought. They must be beaten back, caged, prevented from spreading their misery. Your Earl of Warren is one of them. There are many others.”

“And what can be done about them?”

“Plenty.”

“Such as?”

“Such as destroying them.”

He turned to the printing press.

“With
that.
”