Brookland (11 page)

“Soon enough we shan't be taxed any longer,” Prue offered.

Her father began wiping down the press once more. “Not by the Crown; but mark well, wherever there's a government, an honest man has fees to pay. And you will, too, if you become a distiller.”

Prue did not care for that “if.”

That day, she watched him work and smelled the various extracts he produced; and later in the week made some of her own, with his help with the lever. She came to understand how a gifted rectifier introduced these sundry essences in novel and harmonious proportion to the final distillation of spirit, such that their individual properties would be less evident than the balance of the whole. The product had to be recognizable to the palate and nose, have a taste that stamped it as
Winship
gin, a thing a man would willingly plunk down his wages for when beer could be had at half the cost.

So into the autumn of I78z, Prue spent whole mornings roaming Brooklyn and asking if she might pick spices from her neighbors' gardens, or begging specimens of rarer varieties from Mrs. Friedlander. She knew this behavior—even more than her knee britches—made Mrs. Livingston click her tongue. She could not operate the press without assistance,
but one of the slaves would help her crush whatever leaves and berries she acquired. And under her father's tutelage, she learned to taste and smell her herbs indoors and out, in the hot stillhouse and down by the cool river, by themselves on a fresh palate and in combination with other herbs and food. Her father brought her a small ledger from New York, and to its lined pages she entrusted inexpert drawings of plants, along with detailed notes on their tastes and interrelationships. Each week, she brought this book to her father for review; and though he chuckled over her sometimes zealous choice of adjectives (“The lemon balm was ‘sprightly,' was it? I'll take your word, missy”), he seemed pleased, overall, to find her palate educable and her attention not yet flagging. He began to speak so often of her progress to the family that Roxana's eyes would glaze over when ginger and cinnamon came up at table.

“Might you teach her to cook and bake in the off hours?” she asked him one evening. “It'd prove a far sight more practical; and I daresay she already knows her spices better than I do.”

Matty laughed. Tem, meanwhile, had finished her meal, and began marching around the kitchen, hollering commands to invisible workers. She had never been to the distillery, so she'd copped most of her phrases from what she'd overheard on the wharves. Though Prue thought she herself should have had enough poise to disregard her sister, Tem's mimicry nettled her.

At the end of November 1782, a preliminary peace treaty was at last signed at Paris. Word did not reach Brooklyn until late December. The war had lasted all Prue's sentient life, and she realized that although she'd known it would someday come to an end, and had hoped with her father it would come to this one, she had always half considered it a permanent fixture, like a house. It would take some while, the men speculated down at Loosely's tavern, for the Crown to pack up its troops and send them home; so the Cortelyous had time left to grumble about pocked fields and poached pheasant, and the Winships might yet earn a tidy profit from the soldiers' love of the barroom. No one knew how long the occupying forces would remain, but to celebrate, Matty Winship put in an order for a doll-sized rectifying still, to be made to order at the English foundry from which all the original equipment had come. He had a talent for drawing, and when he explained the manner in which he thought she might practice her future art upon a gallon of spirit at a time, and showed
her his delicate pencil sketch, she thought him as good as an Old Master. When the still arrived in early spring, she began to use it exactly as he had described, while the fires of the rectifying house roared and spat all around.

Prue had been using her new still a few weeks when Congress declared the official end to the war; and soon after came the order for those soldiers garrisoned in Brooklyn to return home across the sea. Those few remaining Loyalist families who had not yet left New York voluntarily began to pack up their homes to move to Canada; Prue saw how awkwardly they were treated at Mrs. Tilley's or on the street. She had imagined there would be general jubilation, but there was little; the process of making peace had dragged on so, most of the neighbors seemed weary. After all the complaints the occupying forces had engendered, Prue had thought the Livingstons and Cortelyous would rejoice to see them go. But the soldiers had been in Brooklyn a long time, which made their parting bittersweet. White women and Negresses were suddenly to be seen crying in the streets—the mistresses and whores, many of them holding babies, or with small children clustering around their skirts and shrieking for their papas. Prue asked her mother and Johanna what would become of them, but found them both, conveniently, stone deaf. Many of the neighborhood boys, including Ben, were also heartbroken at the prospect of the troops' departure.

“There won't be any more quoits, or shooting lessons, or card games for money,” he complained to Prue as the neighborhood children watched some of the enlisted men tie up their bedrolls with hempen twine. Ben had his hands tucked under his armpits as if for warmth, though it was a balmy spring day.

“But it's a good thing they'll finally go,” Isaiah told her. “And I, for one, shan't miss the gambling.”

“Because you've been too much of a girl to take part in it,” Ben said.

“Because I've been stalwart in the face of temptation,” Isaiah corrected him, “which we shall all be better off without.”

“I should knock you senseless for saying that,” Ben said, but he kept his arms folded and his eyes on the soldiers.

Later in the week, the officers hitched their carts to the farmers' horses, and went in clusters down to the waterfront, where they waited with long faces to begin their journey home. When at last they were all
gone, Prue could see the full extent to which they'd devastated the landscape of Brooklyn—hewed down the forests, furrowed the fields with trenches, eaten up most of the livestock, and riddled the sides of barns with holes from their countless drunken games of darts—and the quiet that reigned in the village at night seemed unnatural.

When Prue wrote to Recompense about that period, she described it thus:

A few prisoners had survived the foetid English prison ships in Wallabout Bay and were set free, but most succumbed soon thereafter to putrefaction or despair. A score of the natives of Brookland, Bedford Corners, Flat Bush, & Midwout were found among the dead, but only one Brooklander was recovered among the living:—Ivo Joralemon, a grandson of the farmer who'd sold my father his land. I had only a vague recollection of Ivo as a quiet, slender boy in the years before the war, but he came home skinny as a hoppergrass & seemingly more aged than his parents, with one leg so gangrenous, Dr. de Bouton had to amputate it. The Joralemon house stood close by our own, to the opposite side of the Ferry Road; and when Ivo's cries pealed out across the countryside, my own leg could feel the pain in sympathy, & I gritted my teeth till at last he must have fallen unconscious. I should not have been surprised had people heard his shouts all the way to New-York, where I half imagined his soul would soon be bound. Ivo Joralemon recover'd from the surgery, but limped around town hunched over his crutches, and never again spoke. The Livingston daughters joked he would marry Pearl. I pretended not to hear them.

My parents, the Looselys, & the Philpots had profited from the war, but the rest of the village was hard hit. When I took breaks from my work at the distillery, I sometimes saw fathers in their best suits of cloaths, standing together in threes or fours on van Nostrand's landing. I was not close enough to read their expressions, but their postures were glum; and I knew they were going to beg the bank for new mortgages on their properties, or for leniency on the terms of their current liens. Joe Loosely, who during the war had run his auctions only sporadically, now advertised one almost every week. On any given Saturday, the hammer rang on his block as carefully husbanded stores of lumber & seeds sold for pennies. Even the cost of a hired laundrywoman had
grown prohibitive, and my father & Joe Loosely were the only men in Brookland who still had clean linen on workdays. All the other men wore starched collars out on Sunday, then grew progressively sootier till the Saturday next. One could tell in an instant who was too poor to have his razor ground.

And yet Brookland as a whole did not succumb, as I had thought it might do, to melancholy. Many families,—the Joralemons, Remsens, Rapaljes, & Cortelyous,—had lived on the land under Dutch rule, and their ancestors had weathered the change when the English arrived; they rebuilt after the long occupation with what must surely have been the same doggedness & faith. The King's officers had purchased the far western portion of Mr. Remsen's fields,—the area whose boundary everyone in the village knew to be pounded by the waves,—for a cemetery; & now, instead of crops, their dead were planted there in neat rows. Some of the westernmost were almost immediately unburied by the tide, but the rest slumbered peacefully. After a decent interval, Mr. Remsen returned the field to the cultivation of asparagus, and the resulting shoots are still counted the most succulent in King's County. (Do you shudder, dear Recompense, to hear what you have et?) As farms were parceled off on the auction block, some new arrivals bought up land for the Friends' meeting a short distance out the Jamaica Turnpike. From the way the men had long griped about the ravages of the war, it had seemed to me my village must be doomed; but appearances spoke otherwise.

And for me, the pleasures of working with herbs, concocting recipes, & trying them upon my father's sensitive tongue were legion. My mother's attention yet wandered when I spoke of my progress and discoveries, but my father could no longer doubt my aptitude for the business, & he rewarded this with high praise. I held on to this knowledge when I approach'd him to ask if my next task might be to learn the workings of the mill's machinery.

—What, you want to know how the drive train works? he asked. He could not disguise the condescension in his voice.—You've already learned how to
make gin
. It's a far sight more than anyone thought I could teach a girl.

I felt smaller than my years, but I made my self hold my shoulders square.—I know how the drive train works, I said, looking out the
countinghouse window toward the wharf, as if the direction of my gaze could lessen the strength of my impertinence.—The crown wheel hooks into the lantern pinion, and it sets the whole thing spinning.

My father went over to the shelf & poured him self a nip of the wares. It was early for this; he ordinarily waited until operations were complete for the day.

—If I'm to run it some day, sha'n't I have to know the mechanicks of everything?

He drank his cup down, and placed it carefully on the desk he shared with Israel Horsfield.—I suppose. But it might be thirty years from now.

—Even so, I said.

He shook his head at me & said,—Gears an' drive belts it shall be, then. But I warn you, I'm condemning you to a life of spinsterhood. No man in 'is right mind will share his bed with a woman knows so much of machines.

I faced my father as bravely as I could. At that time I did'n't care about marriage. I could see plain enough what it had made of my mother;—but I could not dream of saying such a thing before him.

Reading this, Recompense thought how well her mother's knowledge of machines had served her; and smiled to see how incorrect her grandfather had been. The world contained at least one man who, looking around a village of girls trained in the domestic arts, preferred the distiller. Now that she was so far from home, Recompense thought perhaps she did, too. She curled deeper into the smooth cushions of the divan, and did her best to picture the machinery her mother spoke of, truly to apprehend, for the first time in her life, how her mother's manufactory worked.

P
rue spent four years studying her father's trade—the first two perfecting the manufacture of the product itself while learning the intricacies of the manufactory's machines, and the second two training to run the business: learning the proper methods to care for the buildings and equipment, design and inspect casks, keep books, deliver goods, dun the company's debtors, and distribute payroll while persuading the paid workers to take only a fraction of their due in wares. She seldom found herself at leisure, and when she did was often bone-tired or foggy-headed, but she was still resolved to study what she could of engineering. She learned that in the year of Tem's birth, a bridge constructed entirely of cast iron had been built in Shropshire, and she pleaded with the Fly Market bookseller to order a volume detailing its methods. He scowled at her, and her father browsed the shelves elsewhere, as if to minimize his connection to her, but eventually she gave over her thirty-seven and a half pence and folded the bookman's promissory note into her pocket. When the book arrived an age later, Prue applied herself to its diagrams of stress and strain until her mind ached.