“I’ll see you there,” Kongo says, and slaps Thunder’s haunch.
124.
They move north through the park to the place of farewell, to the hidden cave. Delfina is pressed against him and he can feel her breath against his chest. A woman dressed like an Eskimo in a fur-trimmed coat comes toward them on the path, holding seven dogs on seven leashes. All are docile, heads pressed to the ground, anxious to be taken to dry rooms. Neither the Eskimo nor her dogs seem surprised by the presence of a horse in the rain, holding two riders.
They make good time. Away in the distance to the east, he sees the bright lights of the Metropolitan Museum, and suddenly imagines an airliner packed with fuel smashing into it and destroying the finest works of man. They could do it. They want to do it. Here, and everywhere. He turns Thunder to the west, away from the revealing lights of the Metropolitan. He hopes the musicians are back on its steps. He wishes he could take Delfina there and dance. You will dance on marble terraces, boy. You will feel candle wax dripping on your shoulders from the chandeliers. You will waltz. You will mambo. Vaya. Raindrops now look like a shower of atoms in the more distant lights of the park lamps. The rain fills the world with a steady drumming sound, without accents from bata or toques, without congas or bongo, just steady drumming, erasing the sounds of the city, mashing time, cleansing the filthy air. Delfina murmurs through unconsciousness. Oh, shit… oh, shit… Her head stirs, her nose sounds clogged. He holds her closer with a free hand, her head flat against his chest.
He can see the turrets and battlements of Belvedere Castle as they move across the Great Lawn into the North Meadow, empty now of people, of children, of ballplayers. He loves this place. A place created long ago by the sweat and muscle of Irishmen and Africans and Germans who came here from the Bloody Ould Sixth when Cormac was already old, who loved one another, who married one another, who huddled together in the shacks of Seneca Village. All these eight hundred and forty-three acres were then a wilderness of rock and scrub and shanties, where men and women and children shared the land with the last of the free animals and five hundred thousand birds. They were the same people who changed the place, who moved the earth and drained the swamps and cut the roads from a master plan, knowing that when they were finished they could not come back to live, only to visit. Cormac thinks: They left us this tamed sylvan man-shaped place, and all of them are dead and buried, and I am still here. The only man left alive who ever saw them work. Now, on a wet, moonless night in the wounded city, the lawns drink the rain, the last birds huddle in nests, and even the ghosts are silent.
Thunder carries them out of the park at 106th Street, following the smell of earth westward into the strip of Riverside Park. Man, woman, and horse are joined now, like a single creature, pelted by the rain. They pass the gloomy monument they visited together in the summer, and Cormac remembers Delfina saying, “I want to be buried in Grant’s Tomb.” You will be buried nowhere, he says now. Not for a long, long time. Thinking: You will see Rome, you will stroll in the piazzas of Florence, you will see our child walk and read and dance. I will not. But you and the boy will swim in the azure waters of the Mediterranean, off the point named for Palinurus. You will read The Aeneid at a table where lemons await you in a white ceramic bowl. You will teach the child to be strong and kind.
Through the rain, he sees a rusting freighter plowing toward Albany. He glimpses it between buildings, and then the ship is gone. The rain is now washing away the city’s cargo of fine ash. The great swooping arc of the George Washington Bridge is dotted with the red taillights of stalled commuters heading for New Jersey. No cars are coming into Manhattan. Cormac feels Harlem’s presence from the heights to the right, here where Washington fled to the killing plains of New Jersey. He was not a face on a dollar bill, boy, he was a great big tough son-of-a-bitch who made a country. Cormac sees Washington as he always sees him: slashing the air with his own swift sword. And sees Bantu and the others, sees them fighting for the liberty that Washington did not deliver. All of that in a year when he was still too young to know that most great hopes end with a broken heart.
Then Washington disappears, and now Cormac feels Duke Ellington beckoning him to a table at Frank’s, in a year when he was writing about music for the New York Sun, and there too is Charlie Parker raising his alto to the night and Lady Day whispering through the rain. What was the name of the hotel on 118th Street where Minton’s Playhouse opened the stage to the true geniuses of the wretched twentieth century? Cormac can no longer remember, but there was Max behind the drums and here came Birks and there was Bird and in from the coast one night came Art Tatum. That was the night, hearing Tatum shower the room with music, when he knew his own work on a piano was a pathetic counterfeit. His hand drops to Delfina’s belly.
You will hear them all, son, the greatest artists of the century; you will hear their music smile, or protest, or console, and you will hear in them what the Africans made of America, all of them in you, as I am in you, and Ireland is in you, and the Jews are in you, and the Caribbean is in you, from me, from your mother, even in the blood I carry still from Kongo, and always, in all years, no matter where you go, son, you will be of New York.
His hand is above what he is sure is the boy’s beating heart, although he cannot feel it. If only the musicians all could have seen the towers fall, seen the Cloud, reached for their horns or the black and white keys. Make it into art, man, he once heard Miles tell Coltrane. For they all knew one immense New York secret: no pain, no art. Here in these streets the alloy of Irish and Africans invented the new world. Here is where Master Juba’s spirit floated in the wings, dancing beside his Irish friend John Diamond, the two of them inventing tap-dancing. Harlem was the true northern border of the Five Points, after all the Know-Nothing race bullshit broke the Irish away from the children of Africans. Except for those who loved one another. Except for the Africans who took Irish wives and the Irishmen who took African wives and loved them until death did them part. Here on the right. Up there. In this place. This Harlem. Far from the North Tower. Far from Ground Zero.
Oh, how I want music now, Cormac thinks, high on this great muscled horse, this immortal stallion, moving north with my last woman. Moving north with my unborn son. Moving north to die. I want to hear music as I ride through cleansing rain, with my back turned to the great downtown necropolis. Music to redeem the murderous spectacle that now dwarfs all other New York deaths, starting with my own.
They pass under the bridge, gradually rising on wooded slopes into Fort Tryon Park, passing the Cloisters, still moving north, where he will keep his appointment.
The woods are denser now, the trees taller, more majestic and primeval, the rain harder, and Thunder moves cautiously, avoiding small escarpments of rock. They are deep inside Inwood Hill Park. Cormac can see tiny waterfalls, where rivers of rain are rushing over cliffs and pouring down in swift, glassy sheets. Some trees rise more than a hundred feet above them, trees that have been here since he arrived in the lost village on the southern tip of the island. Then Thunder stops. They are before a vaguely familiar wall of jagged rock. Delfina murmurs and Cormac pulls back and sees that her eyes flicker, blink open, close again.