Brookland (75 page)

On certain days, I found it unbearable to see to rebuilding the distillery & the bridge, when Pearl occupied my every thought. On others, I counted it a blessing to have such work to distract me from my more intimate cares.

The monies from our ensurance came through soon enough, but were a mixed blessing: Associated Underwriters provided us ample funds to rebuild & to replace the lost machinery, but with a concomitant increase in our rate so steep, I thought it should do us in within the year.
The war for independence had largely been fought over taxation; why, I wondered then, had no one bothered to cry out against the usury of ensurance? Nevertheless, there seemed naught to do but proceed. Winship Daughters Gin ordered timber & lumber almost worthy of a bridgeworks, all through Theunis van V., whose profit thereby was at least some consolation. We managed to keep all our indentured servants and nearly all our hired men employed full-time in the rebuilding; & the new rectifying stills & press were slated to arrive in spring, so we might resume production then. The repairs progressed as well as anyone could hope,—we would have roofs on all our new buildings before the equipment arrived,—but each morning when I woke, I felt as if the bank & the ensurance company each held a silken noose about my throat. I imagined them finely made & gossamer, yet capable of choking me nonetheless. That the hangman would in truth come not for me but for your father provided no solace.

Dear God, my daughter, I am glad you were not among us then; you would have thought you had automata for parents. We had to tread so carefully;—manage each day's work to perfection, and stretch each penny to the size of a half dollar. We still could not say if our plan of adjusting the angles of the bridge's two levers would result in a stable structure, and this caused us daily anxiety. We renounced meat for our table, and ate beans & vegetables, like the poor. Your bright-spirited father grew grim as a shade. For my part, although I suffer'd nightmares over the twin prospects of failing at the bridge & the distillery, there was no thought induced more dread than the notion of Patience packing up her four children & linens in a cart & cursing me as they drove away to who knew where. For her sake, I had to keep my mind on our eventual success. & such fancies were yet as nothing compared to my dreams of Pearl. No matter to what task I attended, images of her accompanied me. As springtime burgeoned, I marked the time when she might have given birth to a child, as sloe-eyed as she'd been on emerging from the womb. As spring turned to summer, and the Brookland lever began to arc gracefully on its now slightly diverted course out toward the river's centre, I imagined the baby smiling & drooling, holding up her own wobbling head,—for although I knew naught of this child, including that it had not been drowned in the East River & et by sea creatures, I believed her a girl child. & I sensed that, in direct proportion to the way
I'd theretofore been denied the consolation of the fruits of my womb, this girl would be Pearl's balm of Gilead,—the restitution for all she had suffered, & the emblem of her love.

I believed if my own father had brought me home to meet my Pappy, bearing that old man so little affection as he did, Pearl would one day bring this gell to meet us. I recognised I had done Pearl a grievous wrong,—both in cursing her & in treating her as cursed, the rest of her days,—but I thought she must know I had loved her the more deeply because of it. She had a temper, but she had also a good heart, and I thought the seed of forgiveness must already have taken root there. I imagined various scenarios for her return: a simple arrival, on the ferry or the stage; or a letter written in her energetick hand, containing little news but the name of her daughter & the place of her abode. I almost wished it might be the latter, that I could craft with care my reply to her,—pour out the contents of my heart and the apology I had been wrong never to muster when she walked amongst us. She might write back directly, or hold her peace; but when the weather next turned fair, she'd begin the slow journey home, the child exclaiming on every thing from the back of the mail coach or the side of the boat.

& surely you know this is why your father and I visit the Twin Tankards whenever a roaming balladeer arrives;—because I still hope one may bring a ballad of Pearl, scrubbing floors for a living in some northern town, or married to a wealthy New Bedford seaman. Though she will be a woman of middle years by now, I will recognize her by her silent tongue and her raven-black hair, shot through, like Aunt Tem's, with grey. I will recognize her by her beautiful bastard child. And I will leave the distillery in the capable hands of your aunt and your Uncle Izzy, and travel north, south, east, or west to speak with her or fetch her back home. If ever you & Jonas hear such a tale, I pray you,—report it to me right away.

We resumed production of gin in May of 1802. Many of our customers took pity on our misfortune & doubled their usual orders. A few,—Elisha Green of Albany among them,—sent charitable contributions to help us regain our footing after the disaster. The bridge we had begun to repair & realign as soon as the weather had turned warm and the timber merchant had been able to ship our materials down the North River; there was almost enough delay in this to make
me despair of the bridge's eventual completion, as we now needed more than we had supposed, & our demand sorely taxed the new merchant's supply. Your father and his crew traveled to New-York each day to continue work on their realigned lever. Marcel & I did the sadder work of making up lost ground on the Brookland side. For each day's progress, and for each section of the arm compleated without fatal accident, we ought to have given thanks; but I found I could think of nothing but the unlikelihood the two arms should actually meet midstream, & how far behind New-York's side we were, & how we had already once been where then we stood, but in happier circumstances.

By the end of that building season, the bridge stood close to completion. The New-York lever had arrived at its ultimate length, and its course seemed to have been corrected; my own lagged perhaps three months' labour behind. Oh, Recompense, I'd have danced round a fire & called out the names of the native gods could I thus have ensured even another week of clement weather, so anxious was I to see the thing done. I cannot express in words the bittersweet way its grandeur struck me. Not even a drawing as large or lovely as your Aunt Pearl's could begin to approximate its beauty as it arced so much of the way across the straits; & yet, each day it was not finished, its expenses mounted, and I began to think it was worth neither the hundreds of thousands of dollars it had cost nor the trouble it had brought us. I sometimes thought, if we eventually ruined our selves over it, at least it would be a grand thing over which to be ruined. At other times I remembered our unwilling partner, Patience, & knew such thoughts were folly.

That winter,—the same in which you were at last conceived,—proved the bitterest anyone could recall. A person could'n't go outdoors without his eye lashes turning to icicles & the hairs freezing in his nostrils. A number of our chickens lost their combs to the frost bite, despite how well we'd packed their coop with straw; and Ivo Joralemon lost two toes of his remaining foot to exposure when he fell in a snow drift & took three hours to attract the attention of a rescuer.

The frost heave was prodigious come spring, tumbling fences that had withstood twenty winters. The papers predicted a dire fate for the bridge, but your father and I knew it was founded well below the frost line. To our horrour, however, the soil must have shifted deep beneath
the Brookland footing, for it settled by three inches on its downriver side. You can imagine the panick on your father's countenance as he and Adam checked and rechecked their measurements, their boots sinking into the mucky springtime sand.

—It cannot be, he once said, as we sat together in this countinghouse, poring over his figures a fourth time. —Jesus God! We drove the piles to refusal; what could have moved? He looked to the ceiling as if it might answer him. —Some soil we did not account for. Jesus, Prue! We have only just corrected the misalignment in plan, and now we've one in elevation.

—The Schermerhorns shore up their buildings each spring, I answered him. Surely we can do likewise?

He shook his greying head. He could fret and curse until the trumpet blast, but the numbers kept coming up the same. —I cannot go on hiding this, he said. I'm certain the worry has cost me my old age. I shall write to Mr. Clinton.

—And to Mr. Pope, I said.

—And to Mr. Pope.

We anxiously awaited their replies. Mr. Pope's came first, indicating that he would board the stage as soon as it was practical, & offer whatever advice he might. The governor's response was slower to arrive. It did not reach the countinghouse until two weeks after the building season ought to have commenced. Our workers were camp'd in the yard with naught to do but drink & gamble, to facilitate which Joe Loosely set up a regular roster of cock baitings, dogfights, & greased pig contests to lure the men from Fischer's new alehouse, which stood a quarter mile closer by. Governor Clinton's letter, when at last it came, advised us to seek counsel from Mr. Pope, whose age & experience would guide him in directing us. If he believed the Brookland foundation could be adequately propped to prevent further sinking, then we were to proceed with the bridge. If not, Ben was to write Mr. Clinton at his earliest convenience for further instructions.

There was no longer any need for both of us to continue on the works, especially while the men idled in anticipation of Pope's inspection. I returned full-time to my distillery, which had never been a more welcome refuge from the greater world, though the bridge took up perhaps more of my thoughts than ever. Your father seemed the
victim of a temporary blindness. As if it were truly a remedy, he began asking his men to cut the timbers for the sides of the lever to account, ever so subtly, for this new divergence from true. To the eye, of course, such trickery would be invisible, but the chisel knew it, & the wood plane; and I thought the abutment was destined to know it, too. Before Mr. Pope's arrival, Ben also organized a second crew to build a structure to shore up the sinking side of the anchorage with stone & iron. Mr. Pope scratched his head over it when he came, as he did not see how anything above ground could compensate for a faulty foundation. Your father unleashed his powers of persuasion, however, and ultimately convinced him to think it a wise addition to the plan. Pope wrote to his colleague Mr. Avery in Massachusetts for corroboration; when it arrived, Ben considered himself to have permission to proceed.

When I had once expressed my concern about his methods, your father ceased to discuss them with me. He was as sweet with me as ever, but it was as if I wore a black veil when I spoke with him; there was something gossamer-thin but noticeable between us.

The bridge's last slightly torqued timber was secured to its position on the fifth of June, 1803. The men let up such a raucous cheer, Elliott Fortune & I heard it in the fermenting room, and hurried above ground to see what was amiss. To see it there, its span compleat, was a joy incomparable, despite all we had endured. (When I crowed my happiness at that moment, you made a flip in my womb to let me know the bridge pleased you as well.) Your father came running off the bridge and down the mill yard, hollering like a wild man, & scooped me up, weeping and laughing. The workers applauded for this, we set them free on the gin for the rest of the day; a public celebration would follow, but that afternoon, those who'd built the bridge reveled. That evening, we roped off the entries to the bridge on both sides of the river and hired guards to watch over it, lest it be swarmed with curious folk. Your father wrote to the governor, the newly appointed mayor of New-York (who was also the governor's nephew;—a circumstance I assumed was no accident), Mr. Willemsen, & Mr. Pope that very afternoon, and the date was set to dedicate the bridge in honour of the Fourth of July.

Had you been a sentient being in those next few weeks, you might have thought your native village was preparing for General Washington to march into town triumphant. Every tavern and shop in Brookland &
New-York had its red, white, & blue bunting over the door and its flag of the Republic flying, and nearly every house sported in at least one of its windows a paper silhouette of the bridge. Hawkers on New-York's streets sold paper fans & woodcuts adorned with what they called the “Rainbow Bridge,” and broadsheets with at least a dozen different songs and poems in its honour could be had for a federal penny. Joe, the Phi1pots, & Mr. Fischer laid in prodigious supplies of ale, and Tem & I stepped up production at the works, for we knew a great deal of gin would be drunk from our storehouses. Peg Dufresne was an old, old woman by then, but she set to candying fruit and baking, lest a good opportunity for profit pass her by.

I went out at dawn to observe the bridge on the morning of the Fourth, & already Brookland and the New-York docks were bustling. All three ferry boats were shuttling across the water, carrying those who wished to assure themselves the best view to station themselves near the abutments. Brookland's roads were usually quiet enough until eight in the morning, but that day, carts were rumbling in on the Ferry Road & the Jamaica Turnpike. Pedestrians streamed up the Shore Road and down Joralemon's Lane, many waving pennants with images of the bridge or patriotic slogans.

By nine, thousands of people must have packed the waterfront, and we could see a similar crowd across the water in Mannahata. Ben & Tem & I stood in our appointed place before the Brookland anchorage; and as I looked round at the cheerful, red-faced throng, I wondered if Pearl or perhaps her shade might be hovering at its periphery. I believe Tem saw me thinking this, as, without explanation, she reached up her palm to cup my cheek & held it there longer than I thought entirely comfortable. When Governor Clinton's boat entered Buttermilk Channel near the Luquer Mill, a huge cheer went up from that quarter & echoed up the straits. On hearing it, the regimental band the Philpots had hired struck up its blaring tune, and thousands of banners of welcome began to wave. The roar of cheering and applause when the governor set foot on Brookland's soil was louder than a thunderstorm. Soon after the governor landed, Mr. DeWitt Clinton, the new mayor of New-York, arrived on a bark of his own, surrounded by every last one of the aldermen. The day already promised to be sultry,—the straits stank of salt & fish,—but all these men wore their finest and
most formal attire, and dabbed at their faces with lace-edged handkerchiefs.