Brookland (2 page)

Prue was discomfited by the request. She had always loved her daughter, but had given most of her adult life to keeping Winship Daughters Gin solvent enough to repay the high cost of insurance and her own significant debts. The distillery was the legacy her father had bequeathed her, and she had slaved to make it profitable enough to pass on to her own son and daughter. The children themselves had been, she admitted now, of secondary importance. And after placid Recompense had declined a third time to be trained in the family business, Prue had felt herself powerfully betrayed, and had wondered, with a flash of a coldheartedness she had not experienced in some time, if she would ever again have use for such a daughter. Jonas Sutler, the son of a man in the whaling trade at Hudson, had come soon after to ask for Recompense's hand; and as her husband had given his warm consent, Prue had sat wondering why anyone would want such an unadventurous creature and why she herself was too hard-hearted to feel any of the emotions appropriate to the occasion. Yet when the August wedding day had arrived, Prue had felt a terrible, wrenching ache at the thought of her daughter leaving. She'd wished she could say she had never known such an ache before, but its pain had been so poignant because of its familiarity. It had reminded her in an instant of every loss she had ever suffered; and as Mr. and Mrs. Jonas Sutler had departed for their wedding tour of the Upper Hudson, Prue had stood on the landing of the New Ferry and wept into her husband's coat.

Prue had struck up the correspondence to ease the intolerable pain of
having a little-valued daughter vanish from sight. She herself had once passed the town of Hudson by boat, but not knowing she would ever wish to envision the particulars of its streets, she had committed nothing but its vaguest outline to memory. Now she peppered her daughter with questions, and learned the Sutlers had a tall house bounded by a fence, with a garden that continued to produce cabbage and chrysanthemums well into October. The household employed three Irish servants. Jonas had grown up in educated society, and the wives and sisters of his cousins and childhood friends were lively conversationalists, zealots for good books, the manumission of the few remaining local slaves, and politics. Yet for all this, Recompense confessed to missing Brooklyn, with its old Dutch houses scattered across the landscape despite a newly laid grid of regular streets. She was homesick; in addition to which she was spending the longest evenings of the year propped up on a sofa and trying to keep down salt biscuits and tea. Prue realized it was only natural her daughter should seek out the missing pieces of her family history. And though she herself had taken pains to conceal the story of the bridgeworks all this time—one evasion leading to the next until at last she had lost sight of the original reason for her reticence—her love for her far-off daughter, and her compunction at having ignored her before she'd moved away, made Prue believe she could change her course. It was thus that on the first full day of the sixth decade of her life, Prue Winship thanked her daughter for the beautiful shawl, expressed her delight at the prospect of a grandchild, and commenced in a roundabout way telling the story Recompense wished to hear. The correspondence would hold them both in its thrall the remainder of that winter and spring.

“There is much to tell you,” she wrote,

though of course if you were here I would brush off your questions and return to my gin as ever I have done. But distance changes much;—I have missed you with a pain very like that of yearning for the dead since you've been gone. And you were a decade since old enough to hear the whole of it. I would like to think only my busyness in the distillery has kept me from relating it, but this is not so. My silence on this matter has been partly due to bad character; which I hope at this late date I can emend.

You ask for the story of the bridgeworks, but if I am to give you not
only the history of that matter but its justifications, I must begin by relating a metaphysickal crime I long ago committed against my sister Pearl. I laid a curse upon her when I was still a child. Perhaps you will think it peculiar of me to recall such a fancy now; but that tale itself unfolds from my twin obsessions, with Mannahata & with Death; and all three must stand in some wise as the founders of the bridge. To relate the story properly, dear one, I shall begin there.

I was born in January of 1772 and Pearl in July of 1778, which gave me six and one half years to grow accustomed to being my parents' only child. This was more time than you had before Matty came along, but you must surely know what a long span it seemed. My parents, Matthias and Roxana Winship, were an odd lot. As I may not have hitherto told you, my father had escaped the seminary at Cambridge to jump on the
Eliza Dymphna
in Boston Harbour, and he set sail for the West Indies, slaves, and rum. To the chagrin of his father, a dissenting minister, Matty Winship,—your grandfather, that is,—realized what the colonies lacked was good, native-brewed
strong drink
, produced on a large scale; so he took his next passage to England & there apprenticed himself to a rectifier of distilled spirits. Eight years later he returned with a receipt for an excellent and most alcoholick geneva, and with my sharp-tongued mother, Roxana Parker (also a refugee from dissenting parents), in tow. They settled here in Brookland, where stood a derelict windmill, as old Mr. Joralemon had tried his inexpert hand at distilling once before, only to burn his operation to the ground. Here on the East River, Father reason'd, would also be easy shipping for the forthcoming gin. Father had no license to distill liquor,—none was granted at that era, as the Crown's policy was to keep the colonies dependent on the mother country for finished goods,—but he resolved from the start to pay the inspectors handsomely; & there was no man among them so loyal he could not be tempted by a small gift of money and a monthly allotment of good gin. This, of course, until the colonies engaged in open rebellion, at which time the manufacture of goods in defiance of royal decree became an act both lucrative
and
patriotickal.

Because he'd not been born to the business of distilling, in those first years my father often asked my mother's advice on the savour of the finished product (this though she knew little about gin, though she did have her fair measure of sense); as a result of which, in my early
childhood I was largely left to do as I pleased, so long as I kept within the bounds of our stone fence. I was forbidden to wander the distillery lest my hand be smashed in the herb press, and forbidden to run out in the road lest, Mother told me, some officer with wrist frills try to offer me a pear. I had only a hazy notion what the war meant beyond the movement of troops, the building & toppling of forts, and the occasional fusillade of artillery fire, which sent the slaves & housewives running to gather the children indoors and left me quaking with fear for my Daddy, who would not leave the distillery to come up the hill and check on us until the gunfire had subsided. I saw men both in uniform and ordinary cloaths limping about town with bandages on & leaning on crutches; and there was a sad autumnal funeral in which the children of the Sands family bawled their eyes dry because they'd lost their father in the fighting. As their mother had died the previous year, they were hastily removed to their grandparents' property east of Bergen's Hill, a location which at that time seemed so far distant, I feared I would never see them more. Thus I gathered early on that soldiers, even those who dressed neatly, were not to be trusted, though the local boys seemed to find them congenial company. I was also denied free access to our kitchen, but only because our slave, Johanna, was blind and half deaf with age, and likely to stumble over me or set me on fire. She was a gruff old woman; you would'n't have liked her. All these rules were my mother's, by the bye; it had been Father's original notion to fit me out with a pint-sized firearm and set me loose upon the neighbourhood;—which, when he suggested it (rather, I should add, to my pleasure), resulted in my mother huffing up the front stairs to reappear only well past sunset with her lips pursed shut. Johanna, meanwhile, tisked and muttered much of the afternoon, which gave me to understand she could hear well enough, were the topick sufficiently juicy.

Because of this lack of direction I was often lonely and bored; but it was my solace the long leg of our fence ran along the crest of Clover Hill, uninterrupted that quarter mile. I paced its length in all kinds of weather, looking north-westward across our manufactory, the port, and the river, to the great city on the far shore. Just past dawn and right before dusk, when no fires were lit at our distillery or the Schermerhorn ropewalk, I could see clearly all the way to Mannahata.

As I'm sure you well remember from your own childhood, the
booming straits was a feast for the eye of a watchful girl. There were no steamboats then; everything on the river was powered by wind or by oar. Packets from the far continents discharged drab passengers along with barrels and bright fruits. Losee van Nostrand plied the only ferryboat between his landing and Fly Market, loudly crying,—Over! each time he returned. Pointy-tipped wherries and flat-bottomed dories wove among the hulking ships, and in winter dodged the flotillas of ice that hugged both shores. When barges set out for New-York, they hung low in the water with timber, vegetables, rope, or my father's gin; and when they returned they rode high & empty on the grey waves.

I could see best by standing atop the tumbledown fence, though I could do so only when safely beyond your grandmother's purview.
—Mannahata!
I'd whisper to the city, straining ever northward against her dense forest, and
—Scheyichibi!
to the green hummocks of Jersey, stretched out before me in a broad, flat band.
—Ihpetonga!
I'd think passionately, feeling the resonating power of the rocky Heights on which I stood as I called it by its ancient name. The natives of the place had been driven east into Nassau and Suffolk generations before my parents had arrived (though, on occasion, I dug one of their arrowheads, or a wampum shell, or a shard of pot from the soil of our yard), but I still liked to let their words roll round my mouth, like smooth river stones. These were clearly the names by which the places knew themselves. I felt them respond to my call, however quietly I voiced it; and I half expected the ground to tremble and send forth some spirit, either to squash me like a bug or to do my bidding.

I kept an eye trained ever on New-York, to learn what I could of that foreign place. The spire of her largest church rose higher than her trees, and her three- and four-story buildings,—veritable
exaltations
of window glass,—stood ranked up each morning to reflect the rising sun and the broad dome of sky. Yet the windows never opened, and I could neither see nor imagine families stacked one atop the other within. The bluffs of Clover Hill sang with birds and nickering horses, but no sound but the booming of ships' guns came from across the river. The scents of ripe corn, horse dung, & my father's juniper berries tickled my nose in summer, but though the westerly wind blew fierce, New-York had no smell but brine. All the life I could see was of people and horses in the immediate vicinity of the docks. Some other child would have thought
nothing of these circumstances, but it was by these signs,—fueled, I admit, by that same natively dark imagination that later jumped to conclude, whenever you or Matty were tardy for supper, that you'd been drown'd in the millpond or run down by the stage; and woefully unchecked by parental intervention,—that I came to believe the Isle of Mannahata was, in fact, the City of the Dead. Once I had chanced upon this notion,—which another might have tossed out, but which I, made nervous by the sights & sounds of the war & by my mother's weird rules governing my ingress and egress, determined could be nothing but the dark truth the world strove to hide from children,—everything I saw across the water added to New-York's sepulchral mystery. All those goods that travelled thither were offerings to appease the shades; and it was a grim but necessary duty my father fulfilled when he loaded his barge with libations. That he bore the task so lightly & returned each time with the same blithe expression on his brow, I took for the mark of his good character and valour.

It did not help that your dry-witted grandparents spoke often of the Other Side, that life to which each of us was doomed or blessed, according to his merits, to go when this one expired. (I was too young to understand these references as sarcastickal, or to know I was living in a house of non-believers, who'd named me as much to mark their freedom from the strictures under which they'd been raised as because they thought it pretty.)
Viz
., my father once said, through the fug of tobacco smoke that surrounded him of an evening,—Let's sleep late on Sunday, Roxy. The hell with church.

I shouted,—Hooray! as Domine Syrtis spoke half the time in Dutch, some of the time in German, and muttered the rest, which made my skin itch as if I'd rolled in poison sumac.

—Mind your tongue, Reverend, Mother answered, with her particular roll of the Rs and a flare of the nostrils she often directed at him. Like yours and mine, her hair was russet as a winter apple and kinked as a piglet's tail, and it rendered her already extravagant expressions even more so. The humour of his epithet was lost upon me, as it was only later, and by driblets, I learned of his escape from godliness.—If she says that in front of Johanna, she'll get her mouth warshed.

I looked to see what Johanna was doing. She'd fallen asleep in the
rocking chair by the hearth, her silver head thrown back, her pulse flickering in the velvety patch of cream-in-the-coffee skin beneath her jawbone.—Not my Prue, Father answered. She knows one only says the hell with church in
pitickular
company. She knows it's our secret. He puffed on his pipe and widened his grey eyes at me encouragingly.

But I was mighty confused, & had a fleeting realization that if I'd been born to the Livingstons across the way, my life would have been duller, but I'd likely have understood, in such situations, what was wanted of me.—But I should'n't give a tinker's damn if Johanna heard me say the hell with church, I told them. Would'n't it be a miracle if she heard annithing?