Brookland (9 page)

He opened the barn-sized door to the brewhouse, and Prue could feel the rumble of the great machines thrumming in her feet and her rib cage. At one end of the room, fires were lit beneath three copper cauldrons, each large enough, Prue thought, to hold a small outbuilding; and the moment the door was shut again, she began to sweat in her tall, heavy boots. Men were shouting to one another as they scrambled over the ramps and ladders surrounding the wooden mash tuns in the room's center; she had no idea how they could hear one another above the din. The agitators inside the first two tuns made a violent racket as they turned, and when boiling water spilled from the cauldrons down the chute to the third tun, it was loud as the river after a hard rain. Leather drive belts whirred and clattered over their wooden drums.

Her father leaned down close to her ear. “You know why it's called the mash room?” he asked her.

She craned her lips up toward his face. “Because they're mashing grain in there,” she said.

“And you know why that's done?”

Prue thought a moment before giving her answer; she was anxious to get everything right. “To extract the sugar from it.”

“Yes,” he said. “We pump the water to the cauldrons from the liquor-back, which collects groundwater a good distance from the taint of salt in the straits. When it's good and hot, it spills into the tuns, as you just saw, there to be mashed for three hours. The fires beneath are just warm enough to keep things goin'.”

Four men went running up the ramp to the third tun with paddles in
their hands to prevent clotted grain from sticking in the agitators. They all had the necks of their shirts unbuttoned and their sleeves rolled up past their elbows.

“Are you ready to help?” Matty asked.

Prue was somewhat frightened by the noise and bustle but excited to be part of it, too. “Perhaps this first time, I can simply watch,” she said.

“Nah.” He gave her a courage-inducing rub on the arm, and she stumbled against him from its force. “You're going to be a distiller. You want to know simply by the smell how the wort is coming along.”

So up the ramp to the first tun they went. The men made room; and a young fellow, whose florid mustache was already drooping in the steam from the tun, cracked a smile at Prue and said to her father, “You think she'll manage it, Mr. Winship?”

Matty took the man's paddle and gave it to Prue. “She's the best I've got, Mr. Southey. She'll have to.”

Even above the din of the drive train and the moving agitator, she could hear the commentary this provoked. She wanted to run down the ramp and up the hill and take Pearlie for a walk; and she wanted to stay put and prove them wrong.

The lip of the tun stood shoulder high to a girl, and each spiked agitator within was twice as long as she. Prue had had no inkling how dangerous this process could be. If she fell in, she could easily drown, if her skull was not smashed instantly by the thrust of the agitating arm. She put the paddle's butt end on the ground and leaned into it as if it were a staff while she contemplated the roiling mess of the mashing. Her father leaned down beside her.

“Don't be afraid of it,” he said, “and don't take it for granted, either. Whatever you do, don't go in. If the paddle drops, shout out. There's a warning bell over there”—he pointed to the northeast corner of the room, where a bell hung with its rope wound neatly around a cleat—“and the nearest man will ring it. As soon as he hears it, the windmill keeper disconnects the crown gear from the drive shaft, and the whole manufactory shuts down. It may seem a lot of fuss for a paddle, but it'll keep a whole batch of wort from ruination by splinters, and probably save your arm besides.”

To have her arm caught thus seemed a fair repayment for what she'd done to Pearl. Prue determined to put this thought out of her mind.

He taught her to watch the rhythm of the agitator, so she might put her paddle in and stir the mash without threat of injury, and she worked all morning alongside Mr. Southey, who seemed eager to catch her out in a fault. The sweat streamed down her face and arms and the channel between her shoulder blades. Her palms were rubbed raw, and her arms burned with exhaustion, but she determined she'd work as well as a man if it broke her. When the bell rang for lunch, she wished she could ask her father to carry her to the countinghouse, but she clung to her pride; and once there, devoured her bread and cheese as greedily as would a coyote. She could hardly believe his collar hadn't wilted after a morning of such arduous work.

Prue spent a month in the brewhouse, sometimes accompanied by her father, more often working side by side with the men while her father saw to other business. The work brought out a deep, semipermanent flush in her cheeks, sinews in her arms, and calluses in her palms, but though Ben teased her about it, she could see he was jealous he had to spend his mornings in the domine's school. She began to notice subtle differences in the scent of the wort—the way it smelled light and sweet, like honeysuckle nectar, when the mashing began, but nearly approached the odor of young beer when it was ready to move on. That first month, she had no real idea where it went when the mashers had done with it. One man would disconnect the agitator from the drive train, and another tripped a switch that opened a large, screened valve in the bottom of the tun. The wort went cascading downward, who knew where, leaving the mash behind. Soon a second batch of boiling water would be let into the tank, so the mash might be reused for another, slower mashing. After this second mashing, the spent grains would be brought up in buckets, loaded onto a wagon, and sent out for the nourishment of Mrs. Luquer's pigs. Then came the enjoyable task of scrubbing down the tun, for which purpose the men let ladders down into it. Prue always volunteered to go inside, and often thought of Jack and the Beanstalk while she did the work, as if the tun might turn out to be some giant's butter churn.

By March, her father thought her knowledge of the brewhouse sufficiently advanced to move forward. “And I think she's an inch taller, too,” he told Roxana one Monday morning over breakfast.

“I'll be sorry to leave the mash room, for all the hard work,” Prue added. “I do love the smell of the wort.”

Roxana flared her nostrils at her eldest daughter, but was too busy wiping porridge from Tem's face to reply.

“I've been amazed how much variation there is, from one mashing to the next,” Prue continued, though she knew better than to prod her mother so.

“As if I haven't heard enough about wort in my lifetime?” Roxana said. “About wort and feints and gin?” Tem still refused to place her porridge spoon square in her mouth, and her mother took it from her and forced it in. “Christ, Reverend, while you're training her, you might teach her to raise less tedious subjects at table.”

Prue was hurt by her mother's rebuke, but Tem shoved her wooden bowl to the floor and began howling, and there would be no further discussion. Prue could not decipher the glimmer in Pearl's black eyes as she sat primly eating her oats.

“Your mother's ill humor notwithstanding, it's a good-luck day for you,” Matty told Prue as they walked down the lane. Indeed, it was a balmy March morning that could lull a body into believing winter wouldn't last until May. “The next stage of the distilling process is considerably less work—a perfect job for a little woolgatherer like ye.”

Prue smarted under the epithet, but knew it was true. Pearl was her own odd case, but though Tem was still well shy of her third birthday, Prue could already see she'd never bog herself down with reflection. It was Prue's own intrinsic nature, not everyone's, to wonder and brood. “I didn't mean to anger her,” she said.

“No, you didn't,” her father replied, providing little solace.

That morning, he took Prue down to see where the wort traveled when it left the tuns—deep into the brewhouse's cellar, into a cast-iron cistern called the under-back. The under-back's chamber was dank and noisy, as the power train kept two pumps whirring constantly to dispatch groundwater back to the sea, and the stone walls magnified their sound. The wort came cascading down the chute into the cistern, and a second set of pumps worked to draw it up and over to the cooling floor in the next building. A gruff, taciturn man called Hank Rapalje presided over this operation; his job was to check from time to time that all the pumps were functioning correctly. His skin had acquired a subterranean pallor, and Prue stayed as far from him as possible during her weeks under his tutelage, as he gave off a musty odor that reminded her of Johanna.

By contrast, the cooling house seemed like paradise. One climbed a short set of open stairs to reach it, as it was elevated on stilts, some eight feet off the ground. The cooling floor was a shallow tank into which the wort was pumped from the under-back. This tank was as wide and broad as the room it occupied—twenty feet long by fifty across—and paved in cast-iron sheets to make it impervious to water. The room's pretty gambrel roof was supported by great unfinished beams, and its walls could open almost entirely to the breezes by a series of curtains and doors. A scant distance above the cooling floor's surface hung a latticework of planks resembling the top crust of a pie; and a balcony hung higher up the entrance wall, so the cooling house's foreman might stand aloft for a better view. Six men were ambling along the planks when Prue and Matty first entered, all holding paddles shorter than those in the brewhouse. Only two of the men looked to be slaves. The place was warm and smelled like rising dough, and a balmy breeze wafted in through the long, open walls.

“Quite the place, isn't it?” Matty said.

Prue only then noticed she had, indeed, been daydreaming. “What's the work to be done here?” she asked.

“You'll like it,” he said, and took down a paddle from the wall and handed it to her. It was much lighter than the one she'd used in the mash room. “And it's perfect weather in which to learn it—it's less idyllic in December. D'ye smell the bready smell of the wort?”

Prue nodded her head.

“That's well and good, but if it ferments too quickly, we've got beer instead of spirits—and we can't turn a profit on beer. So the cooling men walk about the planks and stir. In that way, the wort at the tank's bottom is continually brought up to the top, where it can be cooled and freshened by the breezes.”

“That's all the work?”

“That, picking out any debris that happens in, and helping wayward birds find their way back outdoors before they soil the goods with their excrement. And like the tuns, the thing has to be scrubbed down after each few batches to keep the product clean. How d'ye think you'll do?”

“Very well, thank you,” Prue said.

“Then I'll leave you to enjoy yourself. Follow Mr. van Voorhees's instructions, if he has any to give you.” Here a slightly built fellow raised
his hand from across the room. “Mr. Horsfield or I'll be back to fetch you for lunch.”

The cooling floor seemed incontrovertible proof there was a merciful God in Heaven. How else, Prue reasoned as she took up her paddle and began to walk and stir, could she explain work such as this existing in the world? It would leave her the entire day to dream. She held the paddle by its end and gingerly let it down to touch bottom; the tank, as it turned out, was less than two feet deep. One of the slaves laughed when he saw her do it. “Not so frightening, is it?” he asked her.

“No, not at all.”

She would be able to amble along lost in her thoughts, with no danger whatsoever if she happened to fall in. The men with whom she'd be working also looked cleaner and more refined than Mr. Rapalje. She wagered they'd smell better as well.

“What's he, training ye up to manage the cooling floor when I'm a grizzled old man?” van Voorhees asked when they passed each other on the boards. “That's a nice bit of work for a girl.”

“No,” she said, and drew herself up to her full height. She was learning to brace herself against people's usual reaction to her undertaking. “He's training me to run the works entire.”

He smiled and nodded, perhaps insinuating he'd already known what Prue was doing and believed she was bound to fail. She reminded herself not to take offense. This had been the response of the brewers as well, but she'd done a good enough job to keep them quiet.

Prue learned the business of cooling within the hour—the work was to wander and stir. Midmorning, a bossy jay flew in the west wall and Prue whistled and flapped her arms to shoo it out; van Voorhees told her that in autumn, there would also be leaves to remove. This was all, however. A batch of wort took most of a morning or afternoon to cool, and when it was ready, the men used their paddles to direct it toward a series of chutes near the north wall. Thence it descended to the fermenting-backs, which were housed belowground, exactly as the under-back had been. There, van Voorhees told her, the fermenting master introduced yeast to ferment the wares in a controlled fashion.

Prue would gladly have remained in the cooling house a year, and felt glad her father hadn't removed her the very next morning, by which time she'd learned all there was to know. When, after a few weeks, she stood
looking at the countinghouse floor and told him she'd imbibed all the lessons the cooling house had to offer, he lifted her chin and countered, “You're a diligent thing, but you're a child yet, too. A little more time enjoying yourself won't harm ye.”

“Thank you,” Prue said.

From across the desk, Israel Horsfield said, “Don't spoil her, now”

“I won't,” Matty answered. “She earns her keep.” He let her walk the boards of the cooling house a few weeks longer.

In April, while the papers reported Ben Franklin was in Paris negotiating the peace, Prue moved on to help the fermenting master, the freeman Elliott Fortune, measure yeast and time the wort's ripening. News from the larger world interested her—she could not help hearing about it, either directly from her father or out on the streets—but Prue was far more concerned with learning to keep her eye on the clock, though she soon began to be able to judge her product's readiness by odor and taste. (The liquid that entered the fermenting-backs as wort left them as wash, which was pumped through pipes up to the stillhouse's copper wash-stills.) Matty Winship came down every few days to challenge her knowledge of the subject, but each time, he agreed with Mr. Fortune she was learning well, and might soon be able to manage a batch on her own.