City of Dreams (22 page)

Slowly, holding the hen high, Peter made a full revolution, showing the bird to everyone in the room. Showing everyone to the bird. He sang out the strange words that only he and the hen understood.
“Coo-ha! Tami! Tami! Tami!”

One of the West Indians remembered being a small child on a sugar plantation where once someone had managed to find both a hen and the courage to perform the ancient ceremony. He remembered when the overseer discovered what was happening and put the man of courage into a pit with his hands chained behind him and his ankles chained together and let the dogs tear out his throat, then tried to whip the memory out of the rest of them. But now, all these years and all these whippings later, the child was a man who still remembered. “
Tami,
” he chanted softly, blending his voice with that of Peter the Doctor. “
Tami, tami, tami.
”

Deep in their bowels, wherever they were from, all the Africans understood. Kinsowa the Ibo and the two Fantis and the nine Ashantis who were among the latest to have come from the slave fortress off Guinea. Even the one woman in the group, an Ashanti lucky enough to have been sold with her man and taken with him to the home of a family in the town. This was a faraway place with its own spirits, who nonetheless served the one great spirit. This ceremony said the same thing as their ceremonies. The same with different words.
“Tami, tami, tami,”
they chanted with Peter and the West Indian man.
“Tami, tami, tami.”

The Africans began to move their feet. Back and forth, back and forth. Holding themselves upright, only their feet shuffling on the cabin’s dirt floor.
“Tami, tami, tami.”
The words and movement drawing in the New York blacks, the ones cut off from their roots, turned into beasts of burden, made ignorant up there in the slave compound in the woods. The Ibo and the Ashantis and the Fantis made them all part of one thing. One freedom prayer.
“Tami, tami, tami.”

“Coo-ha!”
Peter the Doctor sang out the ritual words.
“Jaba! Jaba! Jaba!”
Again he raised the hen toward the sky.
“Coo-ha!”
Then he turned to face the woman and thrust the hen toward her.
“Coo-ha!”

The woman looked into Peter’s eyes. She clasped her hands over her protruding belly, offering the child inside to the great spirit.
“Tami, tami, tami.”
The child would be born free. Or it would die.

Peter moved closer to the woman. The others parted and gave them room. The hen made a sudden clucking sound. Peter held the bird tighter, stretched it toward the woman. She knew what he wanted, what the bird wanted. She parted her lips and opened her mouth wide. Her sharp white teeth gleamed in the firelight. Peter the Doctor put the head of the hen into the woman’s open mouth. Without hesitation she snapped her jaws shut and bit through its neck.

The chicken blood ran down the woman’s chin and she reached up and wiped it away with her two hands; then she spat the head of the bird into the fire and licked her palms clean.

The Doctor carried the red hen to each of them, and one after another they sipped its blood. “For strength,” Peter said. “To bring good fortune. To bring you free.” Then he held the carcass of the dead bird by its crossed legs and swung it three times above his head before flinging it into the fire.

The old man outside could watch no more. Even though he’d come out to the swamp because folks said you could cure an arm like his by dipping it in swamp water and he hadn’t done that yet. Sick as he was, bad as the fever was, much as his arm ached and throbbed, he turned and began running back toward the town, propelled by terror.

In the cabin Peter the Doctor took a knife smeared with the entrails of the hen and cut the wrist of each of the thirty-six. They sucked one another’s blood. “Now we cannot fail,” Peter told them. “If any one of us betrays the others his spirit will never be free. After he dies, he will still be a slave.”

The bellman discovered the old man at five in the morning on the first day of the new year of 1712. He lay on his back among the deserted stalls of Fishmongers’ Alley, in a pool of mud and slush in which floated coagulated nuggets of vomit.

At six the fish stalls would open. Soon after the alley would be filled with the good people of New York. The four bellmen who patrolled the streets by night were hired to announce the weather, the hour, and to see that the waking residents were not bothered by sights that wouldn’t please them. “Here, you. On your feet.”

The man opened his eyes and blinked a couple of times. “Leave me be … not harming anyone.”

“C’mon, old man, you know you can’t stay here.”

“Why not? Told you, not harm—”

“The decent folk will be abroad soon, that’s why not. On your feet. Fetch a bucket of water from the well round the corner and clean up the mess you’ve made, then be on your way.”

“Leave me be and I’ll tell you what I saw. Out by Beekman’s Swamp. They was—”

“I’m not interested in Beekman’s Swamp. Just you, right here in Fishmongers’ Alley. Now, will you move before or after you’ve tasted my fist?”

The bellman was young and strong, and he carried a heavy brass bell that would do for a weapon in a pinch. The old man staggered to his feet and managed a few steps before the dizziness and nausea overcame him again and he fell facedown in the same noxious puddle.

“Here! You can’t do that. I told you—” The bellman turned the drunk over with his booted foot. Mud and vomit coated the man’s stubble of gray beard and clung to his mouth and his nose.

The bellman leaned down. Something was wrong with the man’s left hand; it looked as if he’d had some sort of accident. “Burning up with fever,” he muttered. “And upchucking your rum-rotted guts. Well, you can’t die here.” He grabbed the man under the arms and began hauling him over the cobbles, away from the waterfront and toward the corner of Dock Street and Broad.

The old man regained consciousness for a moment as he was being dumped into the bellman’s two-wheeled barrow. “Not the hospital,” he whispered. “For the love of Jesus Christ, lad, for the souls of your own father and mother, not the hospital.”

The hospital the Dutch had created from five tiny workshops down near the docks had been abandoned in 1700 when the old Dutch Stadt Huys and a number of surrounding buildings were judged unfit. The mayor of the time was charged with finding some new place to put the dying indigent. Meanwhile temporary arrangements were made: three beds in a portion of the attic of a seldom used warehouse well north of what used to be the Voorstadt, at the outer limits of what was, by royal decree, no longer New York Town but New York City, near the intersection of the Broad Way and the King’s High Road to Boston. Now, twelve years after the decision to find something better, the makeshift hospital was still in use. But only by those who could not manage to avoid it.

The various churches—Anglican, Dutch Reformed, and Scots Presbyterian—all had charity boxes beside the doors, and all assigned wardens to visit every household and identify the deserving poor. When such people were ill the churches paid for them to be cared for in their homes like decent folk. The rest—a handful of incorrigible drunks and whores—died where they lived, hidden from view in the narrow streets and back alleys. Unless, like the old man, they had the bad luck to be picked up by one of the bellmen and carted off to the hospital.

He was the only patient that day, and he was all but incoherent with fever by the time Christopher Turner unlocked the attic door and found him. The first thing the young man did was throw open a window to the cold, gray damp of the New Year’s morning. Then, holding a cloth over his nose, he went closer.

No matter how badly they stank—and this one made him gag—vagrants always interested Christopher. People who came to the barber shop on Hall Place could say no if he suggested a surgery they thought too drastic, and often they did. The paupers brought to the hospital were subject to his authority.

He laid a hand on the patient’s shoulder. “What’s wrong with you, old man? Where does it hurt?”

The old man opened his eyes. His breath came in wheezing gasps, and he struggled to sit up. “Listen, lad. You let me out … Tell you what I saw.”

“Is it your belly? Are you in pain?”

“Tried to tell the bellman …. Wouldn’t listen …. They was drinking chicken blood.”

“How long have you been ill?”

The old man fell back, exhausted. “Out by Beekman’s Swamp,” he mumbled. “A chicken … And the moon was full.”

“It was full as well right here in the town, my friend. And I trust a chicken or two could be found if we looked.” The cot was covered by a sheet of rough burlap stained with the excretions of countless previous patients. Christopher saw fresh additions close to the patient’s head. “Been vomiting, have you? When was the last time? Any blood?”

“That’s it. They drank blood. Did the chicken dance. Saw it with my own eyes.”

Without touching him Christopher could feel the scalding heat of the man’s fever. Small wonder the old geezer was crazed. Christopher pressed the cloth tighter over his nose and mouth and leaned closer. He thumbed up one of the man’s eyelids. The part that should have been white was sickly yellow, and the skin of the forehead felt dry and taut.

The man tried to sit up, and his good hand grabbed at Christopher’s arm. He was too weak. “They drank the chicken’s blood,” he whispered, sinking back on the filthy cot. “Saw it. Didn’t do nothin’ else. Shouldn’t be in this place only for that.”

The bellman who’d brought the man in had covered him with a stiff horsehair blanket. Christopher pulled it back, looked for a moment, then sighed with satisfaction. The source of the man’s fever and delirium was at last obvious.

The lower half of the left arm was liverish, swollen to three times normal size. The hand and the fingers were badly mangled. Christopher had seen such wounds many times before: the old man’s hand was half eaten. One of the hazards of being a falling-down drunk was providing the city’s rats with a meal.

Christopher ignored the foul smell, shoved up his sleeve the cloth he’d been holding over his nose, and used both hands to palpate the swollen arm. It was rock-hard and, if possible, hotter than the rest of the body.

The man began to whimper. “Chicken blood. Truth, I told you. Chicken blood.”

Christopher bent closer. “Here, old fellow, look at me. Now, try to understand. You have two choices. Lose the arm or lose your life. Which is it to be?”

The old man was weeping. Big tears rolled down his filthy cheeks. “Not lying, lad. I swear it. Saw the chicken dance.”

The entire arm had to come off.
In the Case of a Blackened Limb, the Amputation must be made at the unaffected Joint closest to the Torso. If none such Presents Itself, it is Already too late.
Such surgeries weren’t easy at the best of times. Under the brutal conditions of the hospital, where Christopher worked entirely alone, the preparations took the better part of the morning.

He had his instruments with him, and he knew there was a coil of strong rope in the locked cupboard under the stairs. Six months before, when he had been put in charge of this makeshift facility—the job was worth eight pounds a year—he’d been given a bunch of keys. He found the one that opened the stair cupboard, hoisted the rope, and took it up to the attic. Next he tied the old man’s torso and his legs to the cot, and made sure to tie the right arm firmly in place as well. The left, the one that was to come off, he bound to a sturdy board.