Brookland (13 page)

“It's a different kind of studying,” Tem replied. “I shan't have to sit still for it.”

Roxana looked peevishly at Tem, whom she had little notion how to manage. Matty, meanwhile, was laughing, and leaned across the table to pat Prue on the cheek. “She'll be a different sort of apprentice than you were, won't she?”

“I suppose.”

When Tem gave up on her drawing, Pearl put down her pencil, seized
Tem's charcoal, and drew an actual horse on top of the fat goatlike creature on the page. Later in the week, Tem and Prue marched proudly beside their father in the huge, noisy parade. Pearl was a mere spectator, holding Israel Horsfield's hand; and the boisterous crowds along Broadway were so dense, Prue thought it was impossible her sister could have seen much. But that evening Pearl recounted the sights and sounds in great detail, and claimed thoroughly to have enjoyed her trip across the busy river on the barge.
& w. so menny in Support, shurly our Lawmakrs will let us join the Fedural Union?
she wrote.

“We can hope,” Matty told her.

I am certin they will
.

Matty shook his head and laughed when, later in the month, the papers proved his small daughter correct. Support for the Constitution had been far from universal, but at last the State of New York had given its consent.

Matty and Roxana decided Tem would be brought into the distillery that September, when the neighborhood boys went back to school after harvest. Roxana had her hands full looking after Johanna, who was spending more and more time in bed, though Dr. de Bouton could deduce no cause but old age for her headaches. (He left her with some packets of white powder to be dissolved in water and sipped when the pains struck. Prue licked her finger and dipped it in one when no one was looking, and thought it tasted like ordinary kitchen soda.) Pearl would henceforward have to look after herself. Prue, meanwhile, was furious that she, who'd wanted to learn distilling with her whole heart and showed a true aptitude for natural philosophy, had not been allowed to begin studying until the age of ten. If only, she thought, she still believed in the Other Side and could fantasize sending Tem to the orphanage. If only, instead of pledging herself so single-mindedly to herbs and rectifying, she had given even a shred of her attention to God, who might help her through this crisis, which no one in her family seemed to understand. But how could she approach Him? If she asked her parents for guidance in this regard, they'd scoff at her; Johanna believed, but if it were possible to make her understand a question, there would be no eliciting information without also summoning forth her scorn, rage, and prognostications of hellfire. The domine still bored Prue, and she felt too
awkward to ask guidance of the Friends. She did, at least, think she could find a few minutes in each workday to sit down by the water on the retaining wall and ponder her dilemma. The workers about the mill yard would wave to her, but she knew how to brush them off; and it was a relief to let her mind rest briefly while her father's slaves heaved casks of gin onto barges, and up on the Schermerhorns' wharf they loaded gigantic spools of rope. She observed how steadily Losee rowed his ferry across the straits. Weeks went by, and although she spent most of her free moments thus in fair and foul weather, she could not ascertain how to open a pathway of communication with the Infinite. She knew it was a difficult question, however, and told herself she shouldn't mind if the answer took its time arriving.

In the meanwhile, Tem was being outfitted for her work, and the pleasure she took in her new, boyish clothes made Prue's teeth itch. Tem had harangued their mother with requests for a leather vest, such as craftsmen wore, until at last Roxana had relented. Prue and her father had gone down to the tanner past the Luquer Mill the next morning and brought back a small, supple, dark brown length; Roxana had taken it to the seamstress the following day, though as she'd left the house, she'd complained quietly but audibly about having to leave Johanna alone in the house. Pearl had volunteered to stay behind, but the whole situation had left a sour taste in Prue's mouth, both because no other slave in Brooklyn was treated better than the children of the family and because her parents seemed not to mind Tem's peacockery at all. The afternoon Roxana brought the vest home from the seamstress, Tem put it on with her knee britches and high boots and paraded around the kitchen as happily as the rooster strutted around the yard. “Do I look a picture?” she asked, with an unconcern for the question's propriety that nearly sent Prue over the rafters. “I wish we had a big looking glass, like the Livingstons'. I want to see how I look.”

“You look fine,” Prue said. She noticed Pearl stabbing rather more forcefully than was necessary at her needlework.

Their mother said, “I need to rest,” and walked toward the stairs. “Wake me when it's time to start supper.”

“It hardly matters what you look like,” Prue said. She began to brush down her boots of the day's caked dust. “You'll be working.”

“I disagree,” Tem said. “I know the men watch to see what you do and how you do it. Daughter of the proprietor, and all that.” She picked her two long pigtails up in the air. “I think I should cut my hair, to complete the picture.”

“
Och God
,” Johanna muttered from the corner. Her eyes were closed and she had her palm to her brow.

Pearl quickly wrote,
How is't she only beer us when we're contemplating Mischief?
and held it up to Prue.

Johanna, who seemed to know nothing of the interjection, went on, “You'll not hear the end of it.”

Tem said, “If I'm to work like a boy, I would have hair like a boy. And so should you,” she added, nodding her head toward Prue.

“Then bring me the scissors,” Prue said.

You shall not?
Pearl wrote.

“I shall, unless you want to do it.”

Pearl's small face darkened. Johanna continued muttering in Dutch and rocked her chair to and fro.

Tem handed Prue the scissors, point-end first. “To here,” she said, indicating her collarbone. She drew up a chair, sat on it with her back to Prue, and untied her ribbons.

Prue looked inquiringly at Pearl, who still appeared vexed, but placed her slate and needlework on the chair. When Pearl took the scissors, they seemed large in her hand.

Tem's hair was fine and straight, except where the ribbons had kinked it, and it cut as easily as muslin. As the hair fell to her feet, Pearl began to laugh her quiet laugh. “Shh,” Prue told her.

Tem said, “I needed a haircut,” and the last few tendrils snaked to the floor. Pearl had cut on a slight diagonal, and gave the scissors back to Prue to straighten out the line. Prue was amazed at how satisfying it felt to feel the hair come free. When she'd finished, she wiped the stray bits from the back of Tem's vest and said, “All done. Let's have a look at you.”

Tem stood and turned to face her sisters. Her hair hung in a lank curtain to her nape, exactly as Isaiah's did, and seemed to end abruptly, as if the missing length would always suggest its absence. Pearl was hissing delightedly, and covered her mouth with both hands. In a moment, Prue's eyes grew accustomed to Tem's new appearance, which forced her to
admit the shorter hair somehow made her pretty sister even prettier. “What's'a matter?” Tem asked.

“Nothing,” Prue said. “I think you'll like it.”

Tem went upstairs to look in their small glass, shouted “Hoyay!” and vaulted down the steps on her return. From bed, Roxana called out, “Can't you leave me in peace for an hour?” Tem kissed her sisters on their cheeks. “I love it,” she said.

Pearl bowed, her face red. Prue said, “Sit down. I'll put your tails back in.”

For what might have been the first time in her life, she sat obediently. Johanna was still stewing in her chair, which creaked over the floorboards as she swore beneath her breath; Pearl was still laughing. When Prue tied the ribbons back in, Tem's pigtails stuck out slightly, resembling paintbrushes.

At that moment, Matty came in from the distillery, banging his boots against the doorsill to clean them. Tem ran to present herself in her new guise as distillery worker. “Holy Christ,” he said, and looked to see who'd done it. The scissors sat unclaimed on the table. He wiped his palm across his mouth, then stifled a laugh. “Which one of you did it?”

Tem said, “Pearl did.”

Pearl grabbed her slate and quickly wrote,
Prue help'd
.

“She did, did she?” He took one of Tem's pigtails in each hand, and pulled on them to tilt her face upward. He shook his head at her. “I'll have my work cut out for me when it's you who's sixteen.” He patted Tem's cheek, said, “Hello, Johanna,” and went up the back stairs.

Some sort of a row ensued, but when her parents appeared half an hour later, Prue thought she heard a trace of her mother's old humor when she commented, to no one in particular, “There's punishment on the Other Side for these kinds of transgressions. That's all I'll say.”

This was the first instance in which Prue caught sight of Pearl's deep strain of waywardness. Until then, she had thought her middle sister as good as gold, perhaps as the result of her own execrable actions against her. Prue was mollified to think Pearl might, after all, be merely human, and she herself free from blame. She kept an eye upon Pearl, to see when and how her perversity might again show forth.

Its next appearance came in November, when much of the talk from Mrs. Tilley's to the mill yard centered on Congress's decision to make
New York the official, if temporary, center of the new nation's government. “Does it mean we'll see Mr. Franklin and Mr. Jefferson when we go to the bank?” Prue asked Israel Horsfield.

He shook his head equivocally. “It's possible, of course, but I don't suppose it's likely. They'll be busy men, with a great deal of lawmaking to accomplish.”

“Still,” Prue said, “they'll have to eat.”

“And drink. Believe me, we're counting upon it.”

Gossip also dwelled on the influx of emigrants from France. It would be another year before that far-off country exploded in turmoil; but as rats are the first to sniff out a ship's imminent demise, some workmen must have had the premonition that all was not right. Brooklyn's recovery from the devastation of the late war had also, to Prue's surprise, been robust; it was a good time for a man to come try his fortunes in King's County. By November, a number of émigrés had arrived in Brooklyn with nervous expressions and beautiful clothes. Providentially, the Hicks brothers had that very summer decided to parcel off a portion of their sizable farm into city lots, upon which a tradesman or shopkeeper might build a home. They were calling the spot Olympia, as if it were not merely a few new streets in an old village. There had been no Frenchmen in Brooklyn since the Pierreponts had been exiled during the war, but at the time Tem came into the distillery, Prue began hearing colorful French curses in the saw pit out past the Twin Tankards and over the rising posts and beams of Olympia's homes. The whine of the van Vechten sawmill, a few hundred yards north of the ferry, pierced the neighborhood air far more regularly than theretofore; and Prue watched the progress of all the new buildings with interest, when she could spare the time from her work. She was busier now than she'd previously been, for in addition to helping her father in the usual ways, she was helping him train Tem. As Prue had suspected, Tem showed interest in learning any new thing the distillery might present her, but her attention flagged during the weeks necessary to acquire a particular skill. When Tem grew bored she also grew irritable. Prue found the autumn long and trying.

The immigrants meanwhile opened forges and a chandlery, a dry-goods shop down by the tannery and the Luquer Mill, a farrier's, and even a perfumery, dealing in flower waters and aromatic oils, which Prue haunted under the pretense of educating her nose. Soon enough, some
of the Frenchmen had purchased a plot from the Cortelyous—north of the ferry in the direction of Wallabout Bay, but close by Olympia—and begun to erect a church of their own. Domine Syrtis was by then an ancient man who shuffled around his house in a dressing gown; he had requested a replacement from Amsterdam, and apparently even in private did not deny the need for a new house of worship. The French church, which opened that autumn, began to draw a good crowd on the Sabbath, which Matty Winship remarked to Tem and Prue with some surprise. “I thought we were all heathens,” he said, leading them along the low catwalks above the fragrant, steaming wort.

“Will we have to go?” Tem asked. Prue wished she'd phrased the question differently; she herself was curious about the new church.

“Never fear. Your mother wouldn't have it.”

Tem reached her paddle down into the wort and splashed it around, releasing billows of steam.

“Easy, easy,” their father said. “You must be gentle with it. As with your mother. I don't know if Pearlie's worn her down or if it's Johanna's frailty, but she tolerates less than she used to.”

“I'm gentle,” Prue said.

“I know”

“And she needn't care for Johanna the way she does,” Tem said. “No one else in Brookland treats their slaves like royalty.”

“That's enough from you,” he said. “Your mother loves Johanna. When she arrived in this country, she knew no one but me, and when we bought Johanna of Mr. Remsen, she found her first and only friend. That's enough said against her.” He crouched down to pick a brown oak leaf from the tank, and said no more.

It wasn't long before those believers who'd been raised outside the Dutch church thought if a motley bunch of Catholics could get up the money, so could they; and a limping Mr. Whitcombe who lived down by Gowanus Creek took out a subscription for a Congregational assembly. Prue thought no one would contribute to his venture. Ben had told her that whenever Mr. Whitcombe rode to town, he passed by the ruins of the Cobbleskill Fort, which was haunted; so he must have had some truck with the dark forces. Prue also thought it about as likely her father would contribute as that he would sell one of his daughters. She was only sixteen, however, and underestimated the power of convention. Joe
Loosely convinced Matty it would be uncivil for a family of the Win-ships' prominence not to contribute at least a small sum, though Roxana's eyes flashed fire when she heard of her husband's donation. Thereafter, Matty professed a tepid interest in the progress of the new church and rectory, out near the end of Buckbee's Alley, where it abutted the Jamaica Turnpike. He packed a picnic one day and took his three daughters up there, on the theory Tem and Prue should use every available opportunity to observe construction, as the distillery would one day need to be expanded. Pearl had no need to go, but disliked being left behind. While Tem ruminated over her bacon sandwich, Pearl wrote questions on her slate, erasing with her sleeve when the need arose, so that by midafternoon, the fabric was caked hard with dust. That evening, Prue spread Mrs. Friedlander's calendula salve on Pearl's forearm to relieve the prickly rash the chalk dust had raised.