Johnny One-Eye Page 2

  “And from your perch in the bell tower you signal to the British fleet, I fancy.” “The fleet is gone. But I have infiltrated your secret service to the last man,” says I, fibbing like a drunken brigadier. “I can sing every name.”

  “I have no such service,” he said, his pale blue eyes narrowing to merciless points. I’d offended the giant, talked about his precious secret service. And I knew I’d have to play him in gentle fashion.

  “Excellency, can you not recall? We have met before…at King’s. Ere three years ago. You brought your stepson up from Virginia to have a little taste of the college. ’Tis a pity he didn’t last very long. I was fond of young Jack.”

  Jack Custis was no scholar. He gambled, kept spiders in his closet, bullied some of the other lads, but he had a strange fondness for me. I was useful to Jack. I fed him Aristotle, tho’ he cared not a fig about philosophy. He eloped after a month or two of classes, bequeathing his soiled neckcloths and shirts to me. He never spoke of the woman he meant to marry. She might have been a tart or a rich widow, like his mum. But I couldn’t forget the giant who accompanied him to King’s, his stepfather in long white stockings and a cocked hat, a ribbon in his red hair. He remained with me as the giant who looked after Jack, manly and tender with him, whilst I ate my heart out wishing I had such a giant as my dear old dad.

  “Stocking,” he said, “I can recall every other man and boy I met at the college, not you.”

  “That’s because I was in the president’s black book. I had to live in the shadows, like some dark thing. But I did kiss your hand, sir, I swear. I asked your blessing…as an orphan at the mercy of the college. And you the father of my only friend.”

  His ruddy face softened a bit. “I will not hang you, boy.”

  “Sir, ’t would give me much pleasure to kiss your hand again.”

  He had a very long hand. The joints were gigantic, and his knuckles as large and various as the gold crowns on the gates at King’s. I kissed Georgey’s hand. It was like brushing against a porcupine with its quills removed, harmless and scratchy. I was immortal at that moment, an angler playing with his worms.

  Washington’s young aide returned, led me into the officers’ mess without so much as a look at me. And that’s when I realized who was the angler and who was the worm. The two yobs hadn’t been brought out to the gibbet tree in their blindfolds. They weren’t blindfolded at all. They sat with the officers, grease on their lips, chewing mutton and leering at your unfortunate friend.

  Two

  A PAIR OF SERGEANTS OPENED A TRAPDOOR AND kicked me down into a cellar that must have belonged to the cook. I fell against a mountain of potatoes. Then the sergeants pummeled me, and I was left without human companionship.

  I began to rot beside that moldy mountain, sprouting carbuncles like a potato. I’m not sure how long I lingered underground. No one bothered to look after my wants. I went unwashed for days, wondering if their plan was to starve me to death or have me die from mental injury. But I wasn’t starved, sirrah. I had my own imaginings. And this mountain became my universe. The stars tasted of salt. I had wings with talons on them, such as some perverse angel might use as a weapon.

  And then a crack of light appeared in the roof of my little firmament. A man climbed down the stairs with a dish of dried peas…and a lantern swinging from his belt like a coxcomb on fire. He wore the buff and blue of Washington’s military family, with their cocked hats and epaulettes and pigtails all wrapped in silk. But this was no young aide with an aristocratic brow, the son of some merchant prince who sided with the rebels. He had an eyepatch like myself, and runnels that ran along his cheek, souvenirs of the Indian wars. I recognized Major Malcolm Treat of Washington’s secret service.

  “I wouldn’t have fed you. The peas are from His Excellency’s own ration. He’s awful fond of peas.”

  The major hadn’t come with cutlery. I had to dig my face into the dish.

  “We took a vote. I was for hanging ye without the bother of a tribunal. But His Excellency kept saying how you might have been the companion of young Jack, tho’ Jack never mentioned a John Stocking. And I practically raised that lad. I also sent dispatches to General Arnold, hoping he would verify your existence, but he doesn’t seem in much of a hurry to confirm or deny that you were with him at Quebec. So far, we have proof of nothing, Sir John. And I can’t even grant that you were at King’s. The registry has disappeared. And some maudlin hermit has declared himself as keeper of College Hall, giving lectures from time to time, but anyone could have wandered into King’s during all the chaos. You didn’t go to grammar school in the colony, I’ll wager that.”

  “I went to Parson Smiley’s Free School for colored people. I was the one white boy in the class.”

  “Never heard of Parson Smiley’s.”

  “That’s because the school no longer exists.”

  “Then I can’t examine the parson’s ledgers, can I? And what would I have found? A pack of pickaninnies, without a pinch of pedigree. Where were you raised, Mr. Stocking?”

  “Right on Robinson Street.”

  He pulled his cocked hat over his eye patch and chortled like a fiend. “In a nunnery? Then your mama must be a whore on Holy Ground.”

  Treat wasn’t so wrong, alas. The Holy Ground was a pigpen and a paradise rolled into one, with gilded carriages and sailors slobbering their guts. I’d seen Major Treat many a time at the Queen’s Yard, the nunnery that ruled York Island. I’d seen royal governors enter and leave by a private porch. In truth, I’d seen Giant George and his aides at poker and whist in the Yard’s main parlor, tho’ he’d never spotted me. But it wasn’t poker that drew these men, or wine, or the mulatto mistresses that a general or governor might keep in an upstairs patio with its own secret garden. It was the royal mistress of the house, Mrs. Gertrude Jennings, with the beauty marks on her shoulder, the headdress that was like a castle of burnt red hair, the outrageously long neck, a bodice made of silver and bone, legs and arms that moved like machines with their own indescribable musk, a face as strong as it was beautiful, with gray eyes and an intelligence that could have been found nowhere else on the island. I can’t swear that Gentle George took Gertrude to bed. But he played cards with her, watched her bosoms breathe under a certain layer of silk, talked about rebels, plantations, and kings. The nuns tell me that Gert reminded George of his own lost love, some married harlot who haunted his youth and could still disturb his dreams.

  I’d grown up at the Queen’s Yard, as Treat surmised. Can’t even say who my mother was. Perhaps she was a nun who died of yellow fever, perhaps a chambermaid. I was told my father was a forger who escaped the death penalty by smuggling himself out of Leeds and had spent half his life in one nunnery or another, hiding from the Crown. He was a drunkard who attached himself to Queen Gertrude as her confidant and pet. He understood her, was her mime and storyteller. She would beat him, then toss him a mutton chop. He died before I was ten, but Gertrude did not rid herself of me. I warmed the nuns’ blankets with a brazier, delivered messages to the queen’s suitors. I wasn’t her jester the way my father had been. But I did have a roof until I moved across the road to King’s.

  Treat squinted at me. “That’s how you got so thick and easy with the king’s men. You fed them wine and wormwood.”

  He was shrewder than he could have imagined, this handler of spies.

  “Who was your patron, boy?”

  “Queen Gertrude.”

  “Monster,” he muttered. “You got close to some Brit in Gert’s bed. And he sent you to His Excellency with a fantastic tale.”

  “I came of my own accord.”

  He slapped humble John, and the dish clattered to the ground with my precious peas.

  “I have broken grander liars than yourself. Confess, you are an adventurer in the employ of the Crown, hoping to wedge yourself into our good graces.”

  “And why, Major Treat, would the Crown trust me?”

  “Because you were clever enough to s
neak into our camp with two Cowboys and impertinent enough to poison His Excellency’s soup.”

  “Soup that you would feed to your dog before it ever arrived at His Excellency’s lips.”

  He kicked me with his boot, drowned me in potato dust until I was blind.

  I rotted another two days with that dust in my eye before he returned with a second dish of peas, the lantern swinging like an obscene engine between his legs.

  “His Excellency seems worried about ye. But I’ve already dressed the hanging tree. The gibbet, that’s your reward.”

  And this lovely major beat me harder than before. I wasn’t much of a stranger to blows. I’d been crowned with broken bottles, bitten and beaten by Gert’s suitors, those frustrated and forlorn sons of the gentry who could not please Her Highness or ply favors from her. She was particular about the lads she would let kiss her beauty marks. Gold or silver wasn’t much on her mind. She had generals in her kitchen and merchants who could have bought and sold Robinson Street. She demanded conversation and wit. The poorest philosopher could have won her to bed as long as the queen could bathe him first. I’d seen Madame with pirates, peddlers, paupers, and drill sergeants, while she scorned captains, chevaliers, and the president of King’s, who stole from the college’s endowment to pay for his afternoons in her parlor.

  But my hunger in this infernal hole must have given me palpitations. I saw a vision in the potato pile, a ghost with green eyes and an uncanny resemblance to one of Gertrude’s girls, Mistress Clara, an octoroon from the Windwards. I was in love with the wench, tho’ Clara never bothered to notice me. I was as unremarkable to her as a dish of hardened peas. And the greatest torment of my life occurred when I was still at college. I thought that Washington’s stepson, young Jack, had run away with Clara. He would visit with her all the time at the Queen’s Yard. He would buy her little baubles. And when I heard that he’d eloped, I fell into a melancholy that near devoured me. I couldn’t find Clara. I mourned her with a stinking candle. But she hadn’t gone with Jack. She’d cruised Manhattan Island with some nabob or another—a pirate, a general, or an aristocrat with holes in his britches. I cared not a nonce. I was jealous only of Jack.

  Treat visited me six more times, prattled on and on about his hanging tree. But he was near to desperation, so he kicked and kicked, and turned my peas to porridge. Finally, after a month meseems, he said, “You’re free to go, Mr. Leapfrog.”

  “I am not a frog.”

  “You are. The frog who leaps back and forth between the royals and us. You ain’t worth a sack of shit.”

  And he rose up through the trapdoor with his lantern, taking with him the last wrinkle of light and my ghost with green eyes.

  Three

  THE YOBS RELEASED ME AT LAST, EVEN MADE some pretense of brushing off potato dust. But I looked like a pickaninny. My complection had changed in the dark. I was kicked out of the American camp, manhandled, called Blackie and Son of Ham.

  I marched all alone from Montgomerie Ward, where Washington was, at the northern edge of Manhattan, to West Ward and Robinson Street, with its caravan of sailors. Once upon a time, there had been college boys and redcoats with their allowance from the king. But the nunneries weren’t accustomed to this new American way of life, where silver was scarce. The nunneries had to reflect Manhattan’s patriotic mood. They couldn’t even hold onto their names—Royal Court, Piccadilly Palace, King’s Road, or Rotten Borough—not in the spring of 1776. The Piccadilly was now Emma’s Roost. The Royal Court had become Patriot Hall; Rotten Borough was Island Inn. Only the Queen’s Yard remained. Gert was much too powerful a force to be whittled down by the radical committees that governed the island; these governors and sheriffs were Gertrude’s clients and supplicants. “Hark,” sang the high sheriff of Manhattan, “ain’t Gert an American queen? The one and only queen of Queen’s Yard.”

  The lamplighter had come to light the lamps on Robinson Street, change the wicks, and fill their reservoirs with sperm oil; every sixth house was furnished with a lamp, but the nunneries were allowed extra lamps, and Holy Ground was lit up like a bazaar. Children were urged to avoid the route, since it was cluttered with highwaymen and sailors who might seize a lad and press him upon some privateer that patrolled the waters, looking for British bounty. Last year, when fighting broke out between rebels and the king’s men, certain sailors saw their chance and seized my own skin. Queen Gertrude had to descend into the bowels of some miserable ship to rescue me. She poked the pirate captain with her parasol, threatened to banish him from the island if he didn’t return poor John Stocking. The captain laughed and considered waylaying Gertrude and setting up a brothel on board his ship when the high sheriff suddenly appeared with his constables, struck the captain, and denied him a license to land in our waters. The high sheriff hadn’t the right to strip a privateer who had been chartered by Congress, but no one dared question his rank and authority on York Island. He’s been a highwayman himself, this grandson of Captain Kidd, who had ungodly rages where he might chew off a man’s leg, but was devoted to Gertrude and would permit no harm to her customers or her kin.

  And now he was in the parlor at Gert’s place, wearing a ridiculous wig that might have been in fashion in 1750, during the reign of George II; but George III, our George, barely wore a wig at all. And the captain sat snoring with one leg propped over the arm of Gert’s prize chair. He weighed three hundred pounds, and the chair would rock under him. I flew right past Captain Kidd. But the queen had her spies, those nuns who waited on her hand and foot, and they captured me, smacked the dust off my coat with their brooms, stripped me naked, carried my carcass to the queen’s porcelain tub, their hands on my privates, as if they were fondling their favorite sheep. They sat me down in Madame’s perfumed water and kept bringing fresh pails like some mischievous fire company. They washed behind my ears, their open bodices rising above me. They cackled and smoked their pipes, since the nuns of Robinson Street were addicted to tobacco and would rather smoke than please a man or welcome a prince into their beds. They never ate tobacco or scooped it into their nostrils, but not even Madame could cure them of sucking on a pipe. They were fine Christian women who went to the mariners’ church, the only one that would have them, and indebted themselves to the tobacco dealers who took advantage of their passion.

  I didn’t have a pipe of my own. But the nuns would always lend me theirs. And I was puffing on a clay pipe with a tiny bowl and a stem that was almost as long as my arm. It was Clara’s pipe, Clara of the Windward Islands, the nun who loved me not.

  She claimed that the pipe belonged to a British planter who had married her mother and then wanted to take Clara as his second wife. But Clara had come to Manhattan instead, and the queen found her living on the docks like a wild animal, with lice on her eyelashes. She brought her to Robinson Street, bathed her, and never insisted that she sleep with a man. There wasn’t a captain or a merchant on York Island who hadn’t considered buying Clara from the queen or renting her as a concubine with woolly blond hair. But Clara wouldn’t remove herself from Robinson Street with just any man, no matter how rich he was. Within a month the Queen’s Yard had become her home. And she would only share her pipe with someone who took her fancy.

  She still shared it with me, humble John, who had never received a single kiss from Clara. Her green eyes didn’t dwell on me for very long. She had her own recipe for tobacco, with cured leaves from Jamestown, and petals called blue fire from the private stock of an Algonquin chief named Tall Water. This said chief had sought to buy Clara from the queen. And Clara must have been smitten by this strange man who was much less of a savage than the high sheriff or the king’s soldier-assassins.

  She left the convent, and I was terrified never to see her again. I’d already been accepted at King’s, had my rooms in College Hall, but I’d wander into the Queen’s Yard looking for Clara, suffering her absence like a fit of fever. And then, one afternoon, Mistress Clara was back sitting in the parlor, smoking her
long clay pipe, as if she’d never been gone. The queen hadn’t given Clara’s closet to another girl. It still had her blankets and her dolls from Dominica, the dolls she’d carried with her across the ocean, that had been covered with lice when the queen first found her on the docks. Not a living soul dared ask her about Tall Water. She smoked blue fire from a different chief. It was cannabis or some other flower that got your brains to float…

  Now I sat in the parlor in a fresh suit of clothes that the nuns had extracted from my closet at King’s. I had a shirt with a ruffled collar and britches with tiny tassels that the best Englishmen wore. The nuns brushed my hair, tied my tail with a piece of silk. I stared in the mirror and saw only one girl. Clara. We took turns puffing on her long pipe, Clara and I. Her green eyes had begun to spin.

  “Johnny,” she said, to torture me, “have you been stealing my slippers again?”

  She was like some prophetic black and blond witch with a complection that was half coffee, half cream. I had pilfered her slippers and shoes from time to time. They were marvelous talismans. I’d never had so propitious a good-luck charm as one of Clara’s silk and leather beauties with a silver buckle and a broken heel. I’d kept it on my person all the while I was in Maine with Arnold. I would have drowned in the Dead River were it not for that shoe. But the shoe had begun to unravel of late and I hid it in my new quarters at the college.

  “Mistress,” says I, in as formal a tone as I could muster. “I have but one of your shoes, a pathetic thing I found in the trash barrel. I use it as a memento.”

  “Memento of what?”

  “Of my better days.”

  It was pure twaddle. I’d had no better days. There was only one heaven on earth: to watch Clara as her bodice went up and down ever so slightly with each of her breaths. And while I pondered, a hand knocked the pipe from my mouth, spilling a fiery dust across the parlor.