Dominion (42 page)

On an island in the center of the river was a great assembly, and Jasper pointed at those gathered there, as they looked back at Caleum
with keen interest and longing. His own curiosity was unbearable, and he wanted nothing more than to hear what each had to say, but Jasper would not let him cross over, although from where he stood their voices were just beyond comprehension. Among them were two who needed no explaining, as they looked at Caleum and he at them for a very long time—all wanting speech and communion: Purchase Merian, his father, and beside him his wife, who Caleum knew to be his own mother, though he had not seen her since he was a tiny boy. Each of the others was also either an ancestor or descendant of Caleum himself; Merian explained who each one was who came before him but said little about those who would come after, except to point out how many of them there were and to say some would achieve great things in their day.

How he craved to cross the water then, but Jasper Merian still held him back and began to lead him away from the shores of that river and out of that meadow.

When they reached the gates again, Jasper concluded his conversation with his grandson and bid good-bye to him until it was his time to join them there, and was instantly gone from his side. Caleum, who had been warned to take care, stood straight and marched back through that tableau of misery, until he reached the cavern he had first come down. He began to climb endlessly against those sharp walls, until he was finally back in the air and light of the earth.

He sought to stand then, thinking he had some mission to accomplish, but a brace of men stood over him, holding him down. It took all of them there to keep him from moving, for the agony he felt next filled him with inhuman strength, as the physician began cutting at his fetid wound.

He had felt pain before in his life, but nothing had prepared him for the anguish of that day. He struggled at first against the hands holding him down, but soon had no choice but to relent and bite down upon the musket ball the surgeon placed in his mouth, as he continued cutting away the skin and flesh that had gone bad. When he finished with that, the real pain started, as he took a saw and began to cut through the bone.

After the surgery was done the doctor covered the wound with flour and lint, then wrapped it in cloth to keep it dry, and moved on to the next man down the line. The hands that had been holding him came
off; there was no fear of his standing anymore—for that he had not strength to do, or means by which to do so.

He lay upon his cot, with his greatcoat pulled close beneath his chin, but shivered nonetheless, as he could neither find comfort nor stop the coldness that clung to him that night. When he looked at the picture inside his coat he turned his head away, not wanting to see, for sorrow he might glimpse himself from before.

For two weeks he stayed there, healing from the surgery. When they changed the dressing over his stump, at the end of the first week, he was told it was going nicely. He no longer cared. He only wanted to be able to move around again under his own power, and he longed to go away from that place.

By early November he was able to stand at last, and they gave him a pair of crutches to hold himself up with. He wrapped his coat around his shoulders and moved himself out of the tent—for how he did it he no longer considered to be walking.

It was three years since he had first signed up, and his natural term of enlistment would soon be over. He himself counted it done, and that he had fulfilled his terms of service. The tide of war had turned with that fight at Saratoga, and the army had moved on, and he was alone in the world again.

There was one place on earth he belonged to and ought go, and his mind was locked hard upon it. He had in his possession money enough, and this he used now to hire a coach to carry him down to New York City, where he might get a fast boat back to Stonehouses.

It was late in the evening when his hired coach finally reached town. The streets were all deserted, and he took his trunk from the driver in the darkened lane, uncertain where he would sleep the night. The coachman had suggested the hotel they were standing in front of, but, looking up at the shabby building, he knew it was not a place for him. He hoisted his trunk over his shoulder, with a rope tied to both ends, and started up Pearl Street on his crutches in the failing light. The weight of the trunk and the unevenness of the paving threatened several times to steal his balance, but he held fast and at last came to an elegant building with a small plaque on its door that seemed suitable. He turned the brass handle, entered the foyer, where a small desk stood on top of an Oriental carpet, and approached the man sitting behind it to request a room. When the proprietor asked how long he would be staying, he answered that he did not know. He only knew it would be until he had concluded his business there in the city. “A week seems right.”

The clerk stared at him, as if trying to make some determination. Caleum looked straight ahead, reached into his purse, and retrieved two gold pieces, which he slid across the counter. When he saw them the man seemed to decide quickly and stood to show the new visitor to a room.

As he clambered up the stairs, Caleum was filled by a small burst of rage each time he lifted his stump upward. What point did any of it serve? he asked himself, in this mood. Although it was being claimed that Saratoga had changed the momentum of the war, he could only curse the master of the dead that so much toil and suffering should gain
so little—other than the fulfillment of its own form. This much blood shall be let and this much death meted out, because these are the terms.

When they reached his room, the clerk put his trunk down and asked whether he required anything else for his comfort. He did. He asked the man who the best carpenter in the city was and how one might find him.

“Jacob Miles,” the clerk answered, without hesitation. “He is a shipwright by trade, but there's been little building since the British occupied the city.”

“Send around for him first thing tomorrow,” Caleum instructed.

The man lit a lantern for his new guest, nodded, and withdrew, leaving him alone in his rented chamber. Caleum stood looking at himself in the glass over the washbasin after the clerk left, and could see plainly how much his bearded face showed the strain of the last several years. He had also lost weight during his time in hospital and found that he barely recognized himself. He was grown old, and looked what seemed to him to be half possessed in the lantern light.

He washed the dust of travel from his body in the basin, put on a clean shirt, and donned his fraying greatcoat, before leaving to go find dinner. As he made his way through the streets of the town, he was still not completely used to moving himself with his arms instead of his legs and sometimes took too ambitious a piece of ground with the crutches. He had to pause then, as if before a jump, to make certain he ended up even with his arms again and not on his backside. He propelled himself down Broadway in this fashion until he came to an inn emitting a glow that seemed to him warmer than the others on the street, and so chose to venture inside.

The room was filled with the sound of men laughing and the smell of pipe smoke, both of which he found welcoming and familiar, and he was shown to a table near a latticed window facing outside. He ordered pot roast from the menu and sat looking out on the streets of the island as he ate. It was the first satisfying meal he could remember in many months, and when he finished he was one of only a few customers remaining. Still, he was not yet ready to go and wished for the first time in his life that he smoked a pipe, so he might sit in that room a while longer, looking out on the city. However, without an
excuse to linger, he paid his bill, stopping on his way out to tell the owner, a smallish Negro in a gray waistcoat, how much he had enjoyed his dinner.

“Well, you must join us again, sir,” the man replied cordially. “I will save a place for you.”

“Thank you,” Caleum said, smiling and content with the hospitality that had been extended to him. “I might do just that.” He walked back into the cold air and made his way slowly up Pearl to his hotel.

He slept well that night for the first time since his surgery and was embarrassed to be found still asleep when one of the hotel staff knocked on his door the next morning.

“Mr. Merian, Mr. Miles is here to see you,” the man announced, when Caleum at last opened the door.

He struggled to recognize the name, but then remembered his conversation from the previous evening and informed the attendant that he would be downstairs presently. He dressed quickly and took up his crutches to go meet the carpenter.

When he went downstairs, the proprietor of the hotel directed him to a room he had provided for their meeting. By the time he entered the buoyancy of the previous evening had left him entirely, and he sat down very gloomily.

“How long have you been at your craft, sir?” he asked Mr. Miles first off, wanting to know to whom he was entrusting himself but also simply to master the man and let him know what type of service he intended to have.

“Twenty years, sir,” Mr. Miles answered, although he looked to be the same age as Caleum.

“And where did you learn your trade?”

“Here in New Amsterdam. I started first as apprentice to a ship's joiner.”

“Have you ever crafted a human leg before?” Caleum asked him, getting to the point.

“I daresay I have,” the carpenter answered. “It's not so uncommon as you would think. I'll only need your measurements.”

“I didn't ask how common it was but how often you had done it.”

“Please, sir, your measurement.”

Something in the man's voice was reassuring to Caleum and he stood up, allowing Mr. Miles to take his measure with a length of cord he took from his pocket and marked expertly with a piece of charcoal.

“What sort of wood would you like it to be crafted of?” he asked when he finished.

“What is the best and strongest you have?' Caleum demanded.

“For strength, it is probably lignum vitae. To my mind it is harder than iron. If you don't mind me saying, though, it's very dear, sir.”

“Are you paying from your purse?” Caleum asked, before giving the man a gold piece weightier than any Mr. Miles had held before. “Will that be enough?”

The carpenter nodded like a mandarin. “You'll be very pleased, sir.”

“I'll be all the more pleased the better it fits and the sooner I have it.”

“For fit I can promise you will be satisfied. For the time it takes, sir, I make no promise, it being a leg, after all, and more art than handiwork. I will let you know as soon as it is done.”

Upon hearing that the man could not give him an estimate of how long he would have to wait, Caleum grew more irate but tried his best not to be rough with him.

“You'll do your best, I'm sure of it,” was all he said.

“Yes, sir,” Miles answered, feeling pity for his customer. “Nothing leaves my workshop, Mr. Merian, before it reaches the highest standards.”

“Which standards are those?”

“My own, sir.”

“Good day, Mr. Miles.”

“Good day, Mr. Merian.”

The carpenter left, and soon after a lad of twelve appeared. “My father wishes to know, would you care for something to eat?” the boy asked.

It was nearing noon, and Caleum had not eaten since the night before but had little appetite. “Just a bowl of porridge,” he answered.

“Yes, sir,” the boy replied crisply, running off to tell the kitchen. He returned a short time later in a great rush, and Caleum was amazed at the gracefulness with which he managed to lay the table before withdrawing.

When he was finally left alone, Caleum ate his meal faster than was his custom, wanting to get out into the fresh air before he lost too much
more of the day. He finished, put his spoon down on the tray, took up his crutches, and set out on a path of no particular choosing into the city.

After maneuvering his way first through a group of businessmen, then a brace of soldiers, he found himself on a wide bustling street, which was crowded with gentlemen leaving their offices for the midday meal. He moved himself against the onslaught of people and continued on to the foot of the street, where he came to the market, which was on the waterfront and guarded by its own cannon. Along the pier he paused and looked out over the East River to Long Island, staring down to the farthest visible reaches of its shore.

The last time he was here he had seen only the opposite view, the island floating on the other side of Brooklyn, unattainable to them as they tried to defend their position on the heights. After they were routed, he watched the cannons and smoke rise over the river as they retreated through the forest, so that it appeared the whole city was on fire. If it were any other town, everyone knew, they would have burned it long ago themselves instead of leaving it to the British. Instead, they had strict orders to preserve it at all costs, and so relinquished the place to the enemy. It being more important than the outcome of the war, as it was so vital to the commerce of the entire world—just as the river mingled universally with all the waters of the ocean, carrying whatever flowed on it out into that same ocean as lapped the shores of Europe and Africa.

That night it had seemed the city would burn nonetheless, and when he woke the next day he was amazed to see it still standing. It was indestructible, he thought then. It was an opinion Stanton had later confirmed, during one of his last conversations with him.

“Wheresoever there are coffeehouses that serve the brew of Speculation, and men gather to buy at one price, hoping to sell at another or else turn Information into Profit, or Time into Assets, or are in any way otherwise engaged in the Free Trade of Goods and Ideas, they are doing the business of that town, and it is useless to try to stop them in that, because it is how Free Men everywhere have conducted their affairs since the rise of civilization. None but a Tyrant would seek to suppress it or think to slow its march. If anyone ever attempted to burn it, however—a thing that must be preserved from happening at all costs—what one would find very quickly is that there is another New York beneath the first, and another beneath that. And so on. Further, beneath the very
last New York is a City that floats not on water but on the very air and it is indestructible, being the inheritor of all Free Cities before it and all their inspirited dreams. And so with great Boston. And so with Philadelphia.”