“We’ll put the Partridge name here at the bottom,” he said, “and the address, and no matter what happens in bloody Barbados, or on the streets of Kingston, we shall win, lad.”
He was swiftly proven right. Cormac slapped the broadsides up on the blank walls of the town as soon as the ink was dry. By noon the next day, the name Partridge was clearly synonymous with patriot. And printing jobs flowed into the shop: wedding announcements and rallies for the troops, advertising for shoes and jewelry, special rates for travel to England and news of the arrival of a shipment of wool. The money flowed in too. Mr. Partridge put all the profits into the shop, buying supplies of paper and ink, adding cabinets and type racks. They were so busy, Cormac didn’t notice the winds howling from the northwest.
Only at night, when he was alone, did he imagine the revolt, did he add together the odd look from black man to black man, and from the Irish to the Irish. He heard again the warnings from Kongo and from Mary Burton. Only at night did he imagine what would happen if they all rose together.
In the frigid winter nights, when Stone Street seemed an immense distance from Cortlandt Street and it was impossible to meet Mary Burton out of doors, Cormac began to draw again. He used the reverse side of overinked proofs, odd scraps of board, diluted printer’s ink, and reed pens. He made drawings of Mr. Partridge, of people he saw in the streets, of soldiers in uniform, of the fort, of certain houses, and of Mary Burton: all from memory. Mr. Partridge was delighted.
“You’ve a gift, lad,” he said one night, examining a drawing of his own marvelous head. “You captured something there, the mouth, a kind of sadness. Very good. Very good.”
He tacked the drawing to a beam. Others would follow, although Cormac kept his drawing of Mary Burton in a private folio fashioned from thick brown board and tied with cord. Cormac was now so deep into the world of the print shop that other things receded. The images of bloody revolt were threaded in a minor way through his days, but for all the whispered warnings, nothing, after all, had happened. Perhaps it was the drink talking in the smoke of Hughson’s. He also brooded in a confused way about Mary Burton. What was it he truly felt for her? Was it simply lust? Or was it something more like that immense word love? That word issued from many people’s lips, from preachers to whores, and he read it in even more books. But what did it mean, really? He wanted Mary Burton to be happy, but that wasn’t love as described in the poems, some rapture that carried you into realms of bliss. And was he leading her somewhere that she could not go? Into reading and trying to find the education that had eluded her in Ireland and in her American servitude? He hoped she was not imagining a future with him. For he had no true vision of that future, or whether he would live long enough to have one.
The reason for this uncertainty was the power of the past. And his duty to old vows, to the tribe, to the rules, to the memories of his father and mother. The truth, however, was that he was thinking less about the Earl of Warren now too. Sometimes three or four days passed and the earl never forced himself into Cormac’s mind. But then he would see months-old newspapers from London in the print shop and begin scanning them for the earl’s name, to see if he had appeared at some event in London or Paris, or in dispatches from other parts of the colonies from Canada to Kingston. Always in vain. In the newspapers, the earl did not exist. Then Cormac would lie awake in the dark, picturing the earl as he must look now: perhaps bearded, as was Cormac; perhaps dressed in common clothes; perhaps lolling in the slave markets of Charleston or Savannah. He imagined himself wandering the continent on an endless search. And then thought it would be better to stay where he was. If the earl was in America, eventually he would come to New York. Better to work, better to learn the craft of the printer, better to prepare for a future, even if that future would be denied him in a moment of violence.
On some nights, he wondered exactly what Quaco meant when he called Kongo a babalawo. One slow day, he asked Mr. Partridge about the word, and the older man riffled through a fat volume, then shrugged. “It’s not in the dictionary,” he said, “but it could mean a shaman, you know, a kind of witch doctor. The parish priest, so to speak, in a tribe.” He pondered this. “Though a shaman—if that’s what it means—is also a kind of magician. So maybe your friend Kongo is an African Merlin.”
For Cormac, this image was exciting: Kongo in Camelot, searching for a black grail. He tried to draw the image but gave up in disgust and tossed the paper into the fireplace. The truth was that all images, including the possibility of riot and fire, were always erased by work. The printing life consumed them. All their type was set by hand, and Cormac was amazed at how swiftly Mr. Partridge laid out the metal letters, since all of them were in reverse. Cormac’s first job was inking the type, using wool-packed sheepskin balls with hickory handles. The fresh ink was laid on a slab beside the press. At first, Mr. Partridge did the crucial final task of pressing down on the lever, throwing his weight joyfully into the task of pulling an impression off the inked type. Then he acknowledged that Cormac was physically stronger than he was, and Cormac, within a week, got their rate up to two hundred pulls an hour. While doing this work, Cormac felt himself become part of the machine, his mind counting the sheets while the words of the posters came to vivid life: war, sale, arrival, ship, brass, shoes, instruction, now.
Sometimes Mr. Partridge delivered an aria on the beauties of type. “We’re a Caslon shop,” he said. “Look at the beauty of that T,” he said, “the elegance of that flick of a serif!” The names of fonts rolled from him like liturgy: Roman and italic and boldface, caps that were swashed and caps that were sloped. Picas and points and em quads, and the beauty of white space. Caslon wasn’t the only great type. There were other glorious typefaces, he said, his voice swelling, their names coming from him like the names of artists or generals: Bembo and Petrarca, Palatino and Griffo, Fraber and Garamond. But above all of them, close to God, was Caslon.
“Look at those letters, lad, and listen to them! Can you hear them singing? Look at those lines and those curves, and then close your eyes, and what you hear is William Caslon singing!”
Sometimes, in mid-aria, he vanished into the frozen morning, bouncing up the three steps into the street, off to do business. And Cormac worked on, cleaning and oiling the press, using stone slabs to flatten wet paper, hanging samples on the unpainted pine-board walls, cleaning the pieces of type and placing each in one of the 152 compartments of their cases. Sometimes he set type himself, slower than Mr. Partridge but loving the order and beauty of a page. Or he cleaned ink balls. Or trimmed sheets. Ink rimmed his fingernails, resisting soap and brush. He washed his hands in the same sink where he cleaned the punches. There was no running water (not there and not anywhere in New York), just two buckets, soap, and the coarse cloths he used for cleaning type. After his daily ablutions, Cormac would heave the inky water into the backyard, a blackening rectangle of frozen mud where nothing grew.
In the afternoons, Mr. Partridge returned, bursting with news and gossip and jobs for the shop. Terrible fighting in Jamaica. Dreadful cold, the worst winter in New York memory. A shortage of cordwood. Trees like iron, blunting the woodsmen’s axes. Water frozen in the Collect. Dutchmen skating. Taverns empty. Only two ships on the waterfront. A Mrs. Robbins left her husband for a notary and they’ve sailed for England while Mr. Robbins has become a sot. More soldiers departing.