Johnny One-Eye by Jerome Charyn

Author:Jerome Charyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

Thirty-Eight

SHE LOOKED LIKE A SPINSTER IN HER SHAWL, not the queen of the finest nunnery from here to Newport. The rawness in her eyes disquieted me, turned me cruel. Perhaps André was right, and I was a hunter of men—mothers and men. And like André, she brought me food and clothes in my attic cell.

“Has Sir Harold switched sides?” I asked. “Why is he not here with you?”

“You should not blame him. Harry has gone begging to the British. You are like a son to him.”

“Mother, I forbid you to talk about fathers and sons. You have utterly flummoxed my paternity.”

Gertrude began to cry, she who never cried. I could not bear it, lads. I took her in my arms.

“Forgive me, Mum. I have no right.”

I stroked her hair, and I was caught in a tide I could not comprehend—the brokenness of her was killing me. I kissed her hair, her cheek, her eyes, and she did not shove me away as she was wont to do. However strange my circumstance, or odd my upbringing, she was still my mum.

“I love thee, little John.”

I could not help my feelings. I blubbered like a baby boy.

“Mum, you and Clara are dear to me—dearer than the world. You must flee with her from this godforsaken town.”

“I cannot, little John.”

“André will get Clara in his clutches and never let her go.”

“I would still have to stay,” she said

“Dost thou love her less than thy revolution?”

Forgive me—I made my mum cry again with my rotten canister of words. But had I been gentler with her, she might not have told me more about Clara—Clara’s arrival, she said, had rescued her from months and months of morbidity. ’T was exactly seven years ago. Mum had wrenched me from her mind—the changeling, the secret child, who’d become the sweep and beer boy in her own establishment. And she had not the slightest hope of ever seeing Washington again, the Virginia farmer with his stepson and stepdaughter and a plantation larger and longer than a town. All she had was a pile of silver and a few nabobs in her bed. Then she found Clara at the docks, a runaway from the Windwards with enough lice on her to make a small plantation. The high sheriff would have delivered Clara to the poorhouse, fed her stale meat, and sold her into slavery.

But Gert brought her to Holy Ground. This strange girl—a woman at thirteen, with a woman’s tallness, a woman’s bones—never whimpered and kept looking at Gert with outlandish green eyes. It must have been fatal for the two of them, a devotion without much history, and they were almost never apart. But Gert couldn’t bed her down in her own apartment with so many nabobs about, leaving their coins and their slaver on every pillow. She gave her to the beer boy, let her sleep in my closet. And it cured Gert of her melancholy. Now she had a daughter, a girl as mysterious as a jungle plant, a girl she did not have to hide.

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