Brookland (29 page)

Until that moment, I had not, however, been able to reckon how anything could be built across the broad East River without grossly curtailing the passage of ocean-going ships. I had, a few years previous, read a
Treatise on Bridge Architecture
, and had seen therein, with my own eyes, the aqueducts of Rome side by side with various constructions of timber & iron in Europe & the Americas; I had seen the steeply pointed bridges of the Chinese, drawbridges and rope bridges, & swings made of living vines by the natives of the world's deep jungles. I had read with interest of Pritchard & Darby's iron bridge at Coalbrookdale and of the former's plans for a nearby masonry bridge, with elegant pierced spandrels. Cornelis Luquer & I had debated about a Mr. John Smeaton's invention, while he built a lighthouse at Eddystone, of a sort of mortar of calcified lime that could set underwater & remain impermeable to
that corrosive element evermore. Yet nor the wisdom of the ancients nor the great modern thinkers on angles & abutments could tell me how I might hope to span anything broader than Gowanus Creek without letting the weight of the structure rest at intervals on piles driven into the riverbed.

Yet I knew it was possible. The previous summer, Cornelis had constructed a springboard high over the millpond, that his eight younger sibs might avail themselves of some healthful recreation when their work was through, & keep clear of his business in the tidal mill &c. When he boasted to me of it and suggested I might give it a go, I my self rode down with the distillery's wagon next day to drop off the slops for his mother's pigs & to fetch the first load of the day's ground grain. There,—high above that same pond in which the Luquers & Hors fields & my sisters & I had brawled & attempted to drown one another many a happy summer day,—stood a jumble of dripping, laughing Luquer children, their sundry types of carroty hair all wet to a uniform cinnamon brown. Eelkje, the smallest, was at the outside of the group curled picking at her pink foot. The springboard was bent rainbow-wise under their weight, but even when Jens,—who ought to have been on his way to work, and not goading his brothers & sisters into a phrenzy,—jumped lustily to get the thing abouncing, it held; and it pitched them into the air with a satisfying rattle, Eelkje tumbling gleefully off behind. Jens spied me from the water, & wiping the wet hair from his eyes, cried out for me to jump in, too; but though the day was hot and the pond enticing, I had the distillery to 'tend to. I meanwhile also had an inkling the springboard might have aught to do with my idea of building a bridge, but my errand was foremost in my mind.

The dream, however, at once revealed to me, as only a dream can do, that Cornelis's springboard
was the answer—for
all it required was that a lever projecting over the water be sufficiently anchored & strong enough to bear the weight at its tip. Cornelis's board was perhaps eight foot in length, of a single plank's thickness, and could hold up a whole rowdy clot of Luquers. Could not two boards, placed tip to tip across the breadth of the pond, support every child in Brookland? Could not a similar construction of a number of planks' thickness cross Gowanus Creek solidly enough to let a horse and cart pass over?
This was how my
bridge would work;—two
gigantic springboards, end to end. The dream did not spell this out for me in good English prose, but the idea was manifest perfectly. It would be strong & supple enough to support the burthen of traffick, yet soar high enough above the water, the masts of tall ships would not touch the parabola of its backbone. I was well nigh certain no bridge had yet been attempted upon this plan, but this fact excited rather than discouraged me.

Pearl's whole bodice, meanwhile, was stained with streams of red, and the blood trickled down her arms. Prue yearned to ask her sister's forgiveness, but still found herself with no voice. When she tried to speak, she managed only to blow Pearl's flaming hair toward New York. She began to paddle more quickly, steering the boat for the Fly Market wharf, where someone was sure to pounce upon her for her crime. But Fly Market was empty. The only sound Prue heard as she approached the landing was the mournful cry of a gull swooping down over the water. When the airy substance of her boat struck the gray-green pilings of the abandoned wharf, the jolt shook her awake.

She was relieved to find herself in Brooklyn, in the bedroom she'd slept in all her life. Some willow branches she'd tossed on the embers late in the night were crackling. Pearl was asleep on her side in the other bed, under the eaves. She was curled toward the wall as if it afforded her protection, and her long, fine hair spilled back over the sheet and toward the floor. Tem had moved to the room across the hall after their father had died. This suited Pearl and Prue fine, as her restless sleep had often kept them both awake.

It took Prue what seemed an hour to quiet her heart and recover from her guilt over what she'd dreamed of Pearl. It seemed one thing to utter a mindless curse as a child, but quite another to concoct such a gruesome crime in one's sleep. After a time, however, she soothed herself, and found her mind still buzzed with the image of the bridge her dream had brought her. Her practical guides, until then, had been few: the wooden balconies she'd designed for the distillery, the other work she'd engineered and witnessed during the distillery's expansion, and the three stone beaver dams that galumphed across Gowanus Creek. She had known the jumping board contained the key, but had not been able to figure out how. The books she'd inherited from her father contained engravings
of the Pantheon at Rome and the Hagia Sophia of Constantinople, which inspired her but did not provide models for what she wished to build. She and Cornelis had acquired every book on the subject they could find, but even the thoroughgoing
Treatise
had not described a bridge that could cross the East River without disrupting it. People in both New York and Brooklyn—with the notable exception of Losee van Nostrand—had griped intermittently about the need for a bridge as long as she could remember, and proposals had been put forth and hotly contested. Telford's drawbridge was the one she recalled most clearly, but she also remembered an eager debate at the Old Stone Tavern in her childhood. She had been standing at her father's elbow, choking in the haze of tobacco smoke, when Joe had produced a newssheet featuring a design by an eminent Frenchman (if memory served), for a bridge modeled after the Ponte Vecchio in far-off Florence. Joe, after traveling around to exhibit it to every man in the barroom, with a particular flourish toward Prue, retired to a table to pore over it and smoke his pipe.

“No,” he'd said, shaking his head as if the drawing truly made him sad. “No, I say it is
too damned ugly
for this New World!” And with a comical growl, he'd leapt from his chair and tossed the sheet into the fire, to general applause from the menfolk of Brooklyn.

It was always thus, Prue thought, with a bridge: Its merits might be weighed, but unless it was perfect, it would come to nothing. Every bridge that had yet been proposed for Brooklyn had either been too fanciful or too mundane, too expensive to build or too disruptive.

But as she sat up in her creaking bed that morning, she thought if she could prove her bridge as sound as her dream of it was beautiful; if she could draw it, and build a working model; and if it could be accomplished at reasonable cost, it might be possible to build it. People from Loosely's tavern to Mayor Varick's office across the water would stand behind such a proposition, for everyone knew the East River needed a bridge. Few had believed her father could train up a girl to be a distiller, and it had been done. Why could she not, by dint of research and that same diligence that had brought her all her success thus far, propose a viable plan? She suspected it would be a more complex and finical operation than managing a distillery, but not by an order of magnitude.

Pearl sighed in her sleep and rolled onto her belly. Prue wished she could still gather her up in her arms, as she'd been able to do when Pearl
was small. She was sorry to have dreamed of killing her. She'd already injured Pearl enough for one lifetime, and brooded on it ever after; her imagination had rehearsed each fashion in which Pearl might come to know of her misdeed, and rejected them all as too awful for further consideration. For a moment, she wished she could sweep the dream aside, no matter how beautiful the bridge had been.

The sky beyond the whorled glass of the bedroom window was black. It could only have been three or four in the morning; but though it was January, with a late-rising sun, in a few hours' time Tem and Prue would need to be supervising the distillery. Pearl slept on as Prue sat in bed and watched the dawn steal across her patch of wall. When the fire had died out, she arose and went down to the kitchen, her feet falling into the grooves they'd helped wear in the back stairs.

Tem was at the table, wrapped in the remaining tatters of their father's red robe and poring over the distillery's account books by the light of a candle. Her dark hair was rumpled, as if she'd worried it while she ciphered. When she looked up, the light cast deep shadows beneath her close-set eyes.

“What are you doing?” Prue asked quietly. Abiah was still sleeping, and deserved another hour's rest.

“The accompts,” Tem said. “For your birthday.” Beside the book was a paper covered with scribbles, tots, and tallies. “I know what you're thinking,” she said, raking her ink-stained fingers along her scalp. “I'm checking my sums.”

“It's kind of you to do the books,” Prue said, “but Isaiah would have done them in the morning.” She reached for the tumbler at Tem's elbow, and though Tem put out her hand to swat her, she did so halfheartedly, or too slowly to effect her desired result. Prue sniffed the glass and took a sip to be sure of its contents. She had guessed she'd find their own gin inside—and it turned out to be a good if unripe batch, redolent of cardamom. She took another sip and felt it shimmer down her pipes.

“I don't want a lecture, Prue,” Tem said. She laid her forehead down on her crossed arms. Prue knew she had probably been awake, and cranky about it, for hours; but it still stung to know Tem's first thought was that she would deliver a sermon.

“I won't, Tem. I wouldn't.”

“Go,” Tem said lazily into the table. “Go back to sleep, or go fish oysters from the millpond, but please don't stand there watching me count.”

Prue wanted to put the kettle on, but Tem looked so exhausted, she knew the noise of building a fire would grate on her. Tem's coat was on the chair by the door, where she had probably flung it after a late-night ramble, and her boots lay on their sides nearby. Prue pulled these things on as quietly as she could and went out into the morning—the first day of her twenty-seventh year, and a gray Tuesday dawn, promising what looked to be another year of hard work and unfavorable weather—to gaze out at her beloved East River.

She remained out by the back fence until the day turned brighter and the cock began to crow When she returned to the kitchen, the sound of the door closing awakened Tem, who had fallen asleep over the ledger. The sound also startled Pearl, who was crouched making a fire in the hearth, wearing a threadbare blue jumper Prue had knit her ten years before. After Tem saw Prue, she saw the blotch her pen had left on the accounts and said, “Shit.”

Pearl turned from the hearth and replied with alacrity,
Language!

“Hoy, who's awake?” Abiah said from her bedroom. She sounded as if she'd still been sleeping.

“All of us,” Prue answered. “Sorry to've woken you.”

“No matter. I'll be out shortly.”

Tem picked sleep from the corner of her eye.

“How much did you drink?” Prue asked. Tem continued to pick her eye. Prue asked, “Will you have one egg or two?”

“Enough to ascertain its quality,” Tem said, and it took Prue a moment to realize she'd answered the first question.

Pearl placed the heavy skillet on the hob. She already had a pot on to boil Tem's singular egg. As she was reaching for the butter crock, Abiah came out from her room, braiding her hair as she walked. “Leave it, Pearl, I'll do it. Happy birthday, Prue.”

“Thank you,” Prue said.

She watched Pearl as they ate breakfast. Pearl could no more intuit the grisly thing Prue had dreamed than prognosticate the next month's weather, but the image of her sister's bleeding mouth filled Prue with shame. Prue knew she must have been staring at her sister, because Pearl
opened her eyes wide at her, as if to say,
What, then?
But Prue did not take the invitation. She knew she ought to have confessed the dream right away, and dispelled its hold on her; but because of the bridge, she also wished to remain in its thrall. Coupled with Tem's foul temper, this kept her silent.

The day, however, passed slowly. Isaiah had told the men it was Prue's birthday, so every-odd-where she went there were jibes and congratulations to contend with, when she was half feeling herself a murderess and half nursing an idea that, like a word stuck on the tip of the tongue, might well evaporate if she did not find some opportunity to blurt it out. Pearl brought down sandwiches in a pail for lunch, and stayed for an interminable conversation about the week's groceries, Prue feeling guilty about her dream the whole while. She was almost relieved when the valve controlling the chutes in the brewhouse floor stuck shut. Of course when she'd heard the danger bell, she'd worried someone might be prostrated or dead, but when she arrived and found it a matter for the carpenter, she was glad for the distraction.

Isaiah was unwilling to let the mash room workers go for the day, as he thought it better to pay them for half an hour idling than to lose a whole afternoon. But Tem immediately had the idea to order out a cask of the wares to entertain them, and soon, so many pipes were lit in the mill yard, the smoke rivaled the still fires', and men from elsewhere in the manufactory stepped out to join them when they found leisure to do so. Realizing the afternoon was now certain to slip down the latrine, Prue excused herself and walked all the way past the Luquer Mill to the tannery and back, though her toes were numb in her boots. The exercise felt good, and gave her time to think.