Brookland (5 page)

Please write as soon as you may. We all miss you keenly; your father has constructed quite a noble phantasy of your life in Hudson, in the absence of detail regarding the true facts. For the nonce, if he has not gone up to the Liberty Tavern to join Aunt Tem, he must wonder where I am,—it has long since grown dark. I await your word, if I have overspoke or if this missive has pleased you. The latter, I pray,—

Yours ever,

Yr loving Mother

P
rue remembered the day on which she'd learned New York was simply New York. The realization hit her as a clapper strikes the side of a bell—the result, she believed, of her diligence at her lessons and her responsibility for her sisters. She was coming, by degrees, to comprehend the logic of science, arithmetic, and grammar; and her studies and duties provided ever more solid ground upon which her thinking might found itself. One warm morning in the autumn of 1781, she glanced up from the retaining wall separating the mill yard from the straits, and noticed old Mr. Remsen loading a herd of goats onto a barge tethered at his dock. The animals' hooves beat a tattoo on the wooden ramp, and they bleated accusingly as Remsen herded them down, saying, “That's enough, that's enough. It's not like you'd have any better a time of it here in Brookland.” He raised a hand to Prue when he saw her; she waved back. Two of his slaves pushed off from the wharf, and Prue continued to hear the goats' yells and complaints until they were well into the river. She crossed her arms and watched the barge's slow progress across the water. When it arrived at the other side, the slaves laid the plank to the dock, and Remsen commenced the considerably more difficult task of driving the animals up it. As Prue looked on, she had the most prosaic of realizations—Oh,
they keep livestock there—but
this fact, which she had surely always known if she'd but bothered to remark it, was enough to startle her out of the delusion she'd labored under for years.
And if thy keep livestock
, she reasoned,
they must be as ordinary as we Brooklanders
. She might have stood there marveling all morning had Israel Horsfield not
leaned out the countinghouse window, put his fingers to the corners of his mouth, and whistled to her. She hoped he was calling her in to learn something of bookkeeping; but this never happened. He simply waved—content, no doubt, to have put a stop to her woolgathering—and ducked back inside to his work.

General Cornwallis had recently surrendered to the Continental Army; to Matty Winship, at least, the colonies' eventual independence seemed secure. A peace had not yet been declared, however, and some of the king's troops still lingered in Brooklyn. The Winships, the Looselys, and Tony and Tobias Philpot, who owned the Sign of the Twin Tankards, an alehouse a quarter mile down the Jamaica Turnpike, made a good profit from the presence of lonely, half-idle soldiers on guard duty; and they did the occupying army such a service in providing them the solace of liquor, they had no men quartered on them. But Prue's father's other friends had long been grumbling about the horses, livestock, firewood, and produce the troops commandeered, the game they poached, and the fields they ruined with their tent staves. The Livingstons, Hickses, and Cortelyous still had the Fourth Prince of Wales garrisoned on their land, and they were tired of the disruption and the expense. Mrs. Cortelyou believed their living in such close proximity bred pestilence, and Mrs. Livingston further worried for the welfare of her daughters, Patience and Rachael. To Prue they were dull as the domine's sermons, but their mother clearly considered them vibrant enough to catch an officer's eye, and she clucked around them like a broody hen. Even the Philpots' upstairs whores had begun to gripe about their constant duties and ailments, though if Prue's mother had known she had anything to do with them, she'd have tried to chain her to Johanna's chair. Brooklyn's forests had been denuded of all but their sapling trees, and the general mood had grown so dark, Prue sometimes wondered if her own spirits were not more subdued than her toddling sisters' simply because she was older. Perhaps somberness accrued to one as did longer legs and better pronunciation. This seemed true of Isaiah Horsfield, six months Prue's junior: The great blue eyes on his pointy Horsfield face were growing more thoughtful by the day. That his eight-year-old brother, Ben, still insisted on playing a marauding pirate and brandishing his knife in every game of frigate did not necessarily contradict Prue's theory. She expected
his flaxen curls to straighten and go brown as his brother's had done, and his mood to turn color likewise.

To her surprise, however, she awakened one morning in January 1782 to whoops and hollers rising from the river. She could pick out the clear sopranos of both Horsfield brothers calling, “Hoyay, hoyay!
Lo-seee
!” but many of the other happy voices were unmistakably adult. The bedroom Prue shared with her sisters faced eastward, away from the river, but their two dark heads immediately popped up and pressed against the window. Tem began to scratch at the jewels on the glass.

“What's that?” she asked Pearl. She was not yet three, and the question sounded more like “Whuzzat?” Pearl understood her; she pulled the corners of her lips down and began to wipe persistently at the cleared space with her sleeve. Through the dewy opening, Prue saw their father running, in his nightclothes and with his boots on, over the frozen grass. “Daddy!” Tem shouted, slapping the window. Her palm made a dull knock he couldn't hear. Both Tem and Pearl had their small, dark eyes set closer to their noses than was the norm, which Prue thought made their expressions look comical as they turned to her for explanation.

“Well, I don't know,” she said. One or both of them had wet their bed in the night, and Prue turned back their fragrant eiderdown to dry. “Could be it's a shipwreck, or someone feared drowned. Could be a fire.”

“Quit frightening 'em,” their mother called up from the kitchen, her voice gravelly as if she'd slept ill. Prue sometimes thought Pearl's preternatural hearing was partial compensation for her lack of speech; but she knew it was something Pearl had acquired from their mother, as were the sharp eyes. Downstairs, Roxana cleared her throat and said something more quietly to Johanna, who replied with a vigorous “Mmm-hmm.”

Prue was certain they were talking about her. “Off with the nightgowns,” she said to her sisters.

“Fire,” Tem said, as if it sounded like fun. Fires were, indeed, among the more entertaining events in the village. All the fathers, and slaves of both sexes, ran out with their leather buckets; and if the fire could not be contained, the bells at the distillery pealed out an alarum. This alerted the New Yorkers' volunteer fire company to climb aboard their great floating engine and row it lumberingly across. While Prue hoped no one's house was burning, she agreed with Tem it would be a treat to see the engine. It
had seemed monstrous to her when she'd thought New York the land of the shades, but now she could watch with fascination as it pumped water through its hose, making a most satisfactory racket.

Tem and Pearl battled their gowns off over their heads and stood before Prue, their bright, swaybacked bodies topped with fine black hair sticking out in all directions and crackling with static. She pulled on their smocks and worked their arms through. They both tried to wedge their feet into the incorrect shoes. Before Prue could dress herself, Matty Winship came banging through the kitchen door.

“Frozen,” he said, stamping his feet. “Clear across. And there was one more egg.” Prue heard it clack dully into the wooden egg bowl.

“Clear across, Reverend?” Roxana asked. “You're exaggerating. It was but halfway frozen yesterday, and that hasn't happened since—”

The rest of her words, however, were cut off by the artillery of Tem's and Pearl's small wooden-soled shoes clattering down the stairs. Their father growled, and picked up a child; Prue could hear from the giggling it was Tem. “My little piss-pants,” he called her, and kissed her loudly. She laughed some more.

“You'll spoil them,” Roxana said, without much force.

Prue was proud of her ability to go up and down stairs without waking the dead, and did not arrive until her father had a daughter on each shoulder and Johanna was cracking eggs by feel into the skillet.

“Boilt,” Tem shouted. “
Boilt!”

“
Jezus
, I hear you, Major General,” Johanna grumbled, and kept one egg back for the pot.

“You,” Father said to Prue. His cheeks and chin were marked with stubble, spotted, unlike his hair, with gray. He was already well laden with girls, so Prue didn't imagine he'd come tickling. “When shall it be your tenth birthday?”

“Wednesday next.”

“Well, your gift has come early. What have you asked me for till my ears rang, and never received?”

“To learn distilling?” Prue asked.

Her father shifted Pearl's weight to get a better grip on her. “Beyond that.”

Prue had to think a moment to arrive at an answer. She had never, in
truth, asked for much else; her late adventures with God had given her the impression it was best to keep one's mouth shut. “To go to New York with you, on the barge?” she asked.

“Indeed,” he answered. “But it'll be better than a gin barge. We are not only going to New York today—we shall walk there over an ice bridge.”

“Oh!” Prue cried, imagining a frigid structure had somehow been erected overnight. She could not help jumping into the air, noisy shoes and all. “Oh!”

“ ‘Oh, oh'; that's enough,” Roxana said, and cleared her throat again. She spat into her palms to smooth down Tem's and Pearl's hair. She had some difficulty reaching the girls—aloft as they were on their father's shoulders, and squirming to try to escape her—and this obviously displeased her.

“No, Roxy, I'd worry if she wasn't excited,” Matty opined. “Did you hear that shouting come off the river just now?”

Prue nodded.

“That was Losee and a handful of neighbors who couldn't row home after market yestereve. This morning, they walked across. Losee had his arms up and pumping, as if his dog had won a fight.”

Prue was still trying to imagine who'd had the time to cut and stack all the ice, but Johanna, parceling the eggs into bowls with moderate accuracy, said, “Dangerous, walkin' across rivers. Don't you remember when that little Luquer drowned?” Tem's egg slithered over her toast.

“Nicolaas Luquer fell off a boat,” Prue said.

Johanna felt for the table and put down Tem's bowl.

“He
fell off a boat
.”

“But didn't one of the Sands daughters plummet through the ice of the millpond?” Roxana asked.

“Christ, yes, a lifetime ago,” Matty said. “Must you mention it in front of the gells? It was a warm day, and it was the millpond. Today's cold enough to freeze a witch's—”

Roxana whistled sharply at him through her teeth as she reached over to swat him. He shook his head in annoyance, but Pearl smiled. No doubt, Prue thought, she liked it when someone else communicated as she did.

“It's bloody bitter outside,” Matty went on, putting Tem down, “and the whole river's frozen. Believe me, the men who walked across this morning read the ice as carefully as the ancients read entrails.”

Roxana sniffed, and hoisted Pearl free of her father's arms to place her on her chair. She said, “Let them eat before their eggs get cold.”

Prue had heard of the North River freezing, up by Kingston, but never of any such happening in her own, more southern clime. Until the previous day, the river had only been frozen to about a hundred yards from shore; the men had dragged gin and timber out on sleds, and had loaded the goods onto barges at the edge of the ice. Prue could smell her eggs beckoning, but all she could think of was the fathers of the neighborhood. She pictured them wrapped (“like
Esquimaux
,” she wrote Recompense) in skins and furs, and gathered on the far bank, in the sad light of five in the morning, looking eastward to their homes and the dawn. She could imagine them consulting in low voices with their slaves. The person who'd taken the first step must have considered himself brave, but after that, they must all have felt themselves on holiday.

Matty Winship said, “The gells won't see the like again for years. Roxy, come. We'll wrap 'em up tight against the cold.”

“Eat your egg,” Roxana said, tapping lightly at the back of Tem's hand. “Good thing Losee's home safe. Mrs. van N. must've had a fright yesterevening when he didn't return.”

Tem poked her finger into the yolk to break it, then smeared it down Pearl's hair. Pearl turned to Tem with a look of shock on her face, and opened her mouth in what would have been a piteous yowl had she been her sister; as it was, she merely hissed. Almost as soon as the egg was smeared, Roxana slapped Tem smartly on the cheek. Tem, of course, began to bawl; and Johanna limped off, muttering, to prod at the fire.