Brookland (4 page)

She led me down through the ravine & brought me into the brewhouse, where the agitators were making a great din of the mashing, and told Father that Domine Syrtis had pronounced me hopeless; and that it was her opinion the only remedy for my melancholick spirits would be a younger sibling; and presently, she broke down in tears, audible even above the slosh & whine of the machines. While the workers looked on uncomfortably, Father packed me off into the yard, but I knew why she was crying: Infant after infant had quit her womb, unfinished. I had learned this from Johanna, who had, I thought, intimated the foetuses might have chosen to return to God because they were unwilling to call such a gloom box as me Sis.

Yet my mother's tears worked some alchemy, for that very winter, Pearl took root inside her. They did not tell me until I had long since deduced her imminence; and in my grief at being, as I saw it, first ignored, then displaced in their affections by some newcomer, I felt flashes of scalding hatred for the unborn child, and could not douse that inner flame.

How it shames me to tell this to my own daughter! Particularly as I recall your joy at the birth of your younger brother. I have long shrouded all this from you, as if, by keeping my distance, I could prevent your curiosity. We both see now, it is not so. And if it is possible I can diminish your love for me by these admissions,—well, I shall pray it is not possible & press on.

I tried to anticipate the baby's arrival. I carried my doll, Nell,—for whom I'd never much cared,—everywhere with me, cradled in my arms; but when no one was looking, I pinch'd a hammer and nails from the cooper's shed, lifted Nell's yarn hair, and honed my skills on her wooden skull; though the very fact I wished to do so filled me with shame. When I paced along the crest of Brookland's Heights, battered Nell in
hand, I raged less against the interloper than against my own mortifying rage. My inner voice cried out to God,—knowing full well my parents did not believe in Him,—to help me, or to strike me for my sin; or, if He did not exist, to let my parents themselves rescue me from it; and one spring afternoon, in a whisper, begged Him to smite the usurper before it drew breath. Immediately I tried to take back what I'd thought, but my prayer had already sailed out, on a puff of smoke from the stillhouse, over the river. There it settled in some New-York treetop & grew.

For as it happened, no prayer was answered but that one. My sister was born with a terrible defect to her vocal cords: Even when she emerged from the womb, she could emit no sound but a rasping sigh, such as a person makes choking on a fishbone. Had I dropped her into a boiling pot, she could not have turned an angrier red than when she eked out this exhalation. She would not take the breast. Johanna, who, though confined by infirmity to the house, ordinarily sat peeling potatoes or letting down my hems, now rocked my sister day and night. She sang her tuneless lullabies, in Dutch, English, and some tongue of her own devising, and tried to coax the baby to suck from a washrag a spoonful of our mother's milk sweetened with maple sugar. When I was not out anxiously walking the fence, I sat by her & dandled Nell, as if this could nullify my dark deed. But though Johanna's eyes were blurred with cataract, she could see me clear enough.

—It's your fault for cursing her, she said, as usual a bit too loudly, and with that odd lilt her voice had from having grown up speaking Dutch.

I checked to make certain my parents were beyond earshot, but did not respond.

Johanna cocked her head to the side.—I know you're there, Prue.

—I did'n't curse anybody, I said lamely.

—Did the Devil come and do that work on Nell's head, then?

It was true: Nell was nearly as bad off as the baby. I was considering burying her, next new moon, in the yard.

—I know what you've done, Johanna went on, her voice lowering. I wondered what had possessed her to poke her fingers around Nell's skull. She leaned in close to me, her milk-filmed eyes on the ceiling and the sloe-eyed bundle against her chest.—And the Lord knows, too.

This babe is hardly longer for the world than those that come before. And I know who prayed that it be so. She transferred the baby into one arm, and took the other palm to her temple. She said
—Krijg de tyfus
. You make my head ache.

A wellspring of tears bubbled up behind my nose. The baby frightened and disgusted me, but my prayers had mostly been for a change of heart I only now,—too late!—experienced, and for my parents to mind me, which would not happen now they had an ailing infant. I thought if my sister died, my mother might never look at me more. Waves of guilt crashed over me for having prayed to send a critter no larger than a loaf of bread yonder in the sloggy bottom of a
canoo
. She flailed her spindly arms as if to illustrate her helplessness.

I ran upstairs to confess to my mother, but she was in bed, as she had been since the birth, knitting a frilled infant's jacket. She did not look up, though she must have seen or heard me at the threshold; in those days, it seemed she only surfaced from beneath her thoughts for my father. Seeing her so intent on the jacket, which I felt sure would never be worn, made my nose and throat burn the more, so I ran outdoors to find my father; but I saw only the hired men out tasseling the Indian corn and picking cherries in the orchard, some workers shooting dice in the mill yard, & the Hessian soldiers from upferry, out practicing their drills in their spit-shined boots. I went up to the summit of Clover Hill, therefore, to brood by the fence. The onion grass was growing plentifully, and I pulled some up to eat the hot roots; but I found my mouth so full of tears, I could not enjoy them.

For, dear Recompense, my father could argue with Dr. de Bouton until Judgment Day,—and he did argue with him of an evening, until they were both near insensate with liquor; and he once rode all the way across Mr. Boerum's estate to fetch Mrs. Friedlander, who could only stroke the poor infant's bald head and prescribe her a tincture of slippery elm,—but I knew the cause of my sister's deformity, and was stunned by the magnitude of the wrong I'd committed. My parents had told me their parents' God was a blackguard, and Pappy had impressed on me that his Lord was terrible fierce; but if this God of his and the domine's could turn so capriciously on an infant, His heart was even darker than my own. I was sick with unhappiness. I dreaded pulling the covers from my face each morning, for fear my features would some day
be revealed as deformed as my nature. I still found my sister uncanny, but could not imagine her being ferried across the straits to live for all eternity in dun brown New-York. Who would tend her, so small and frail? I thought the Other Side must contain some safeguard against such an eventuality: some cold, grim orphanage in which she might lie listlessly about with the stillborn and those taken by the pertussis & diphtheria before being baptized, damned forever through no fault of their own. Our brothers and sisters might be there also, but each would feel himself in a private hell, as none had lived long enough to earn a voice or a name; they would have no means by which to recognize one another.

And so I prayed God to spare her. I prayed she be able to stand with me in the dooryard, the salt breeze on our cheeks, & eat the spicy roots of onion grass. I did not bother to ask for a lusty voice or a long life for her;—now young Nicolaas Luquer'd been drowned, and I knew how many babies went down in the churchyard unnamed, I knew it was no use, begging. The bargain I sought to strike with God was, if He would let her live three or four summers more, He could do with her as He pleased.

It seems as impossible to me as it must to you the Creator would do business on such terms, but again I found my prayer answered. That very day, my sister began to suck more greedily at Johanna's milk-soaked rag; the next, she accepted some of Mrs. Friedlander's tincture, and later took the breast. Though she'd shriveled to a sack of saffron skin and chicken bones, she began to fatten; and her complexion soon faded to a cherry blossom pink. She sprouted some wisps of dark hair. My father resumed the careful superintention of his grain and distillery, & Dr. de Bouton returned to his usual, solitary tippling. I missed having him around the house; I had been fascinated by the bushy black brows beneath his snow-white hair, and had liked watching them move as he spoke. At summer's end, my sister was brought into the church and christened. I never learned by what means my parents chose her name, but I think they must have meant to call her,—with a different sort of irony than that with which they'd named me, or else reverting in those dark days to the faith & fear of their childhoods, with no ironickal import whatsoever,—our
Pearl
of great price, our kingdom of Heaven.

So you see, in my imagination my sister was always tied to the world
beyond, in a way your Aunt Temperance,—born the next summer, and named, as I had been, according to your grandfather's queer sense of humour,—never could be. From the moment she arrived, Tem could call for my attention as surely as if she were a mosquito in the bedroom; but each time Pearl whistled (an otherwise rude habit for which she early showed proficiency, and which she imbued with uncommon grace) or opened her mouth in a rasping laugh, she reminded me by how fine a thread she was moored to this world, by how narrow a margin I had escaped punishment for my sin. You will learn soon enough how otherworldly a thing a small child can be,—if you do not remember this about your brother because of the strapping fellow he's become,—but Pearl's affliction made her doubly so. Remember, too, that her very existence had spelled the end to my childhood freedoms. As Pearl could not shout out when in danger or pain, she was never trusted to her own devices as I had been. Thus, while Tem babbled to herself and banged on pots, I followed Pearl as another child might follow a push toy, as she rolled & lurched about the house. She came to like onion grass as much as I did, but if she accompanied me outdoors to dig it up, I could not stand idly by dreaming, lest some accident befall her there at the edge of the bluff. She showed stealth in hunting down the eggs of the fractious hen who laid outside her box, and was of great assistance in chasing the motley-patterned, six-toed kittens who roamed our yard; but I could not have explained to her how when I caught them, I was entranced by the way their hearts beat fast within their delicate ribs, or how I wished I could cut one open, to lay bare the clockwork within. (—Never fear; I desisted.)

I learned my letters & numbers and the rudiments of natural philosophy of my father, & begged him to teach me to distill, which he said I could not learn, being female. I had desultory shouted lessons in sewing and cookery from Johanna. I roughhoused with Ben and Isaiah, the sons of my father's overseer, Israel Horsfield. Father's cooper, Scipio Jones, taught me to make up a paste of whiting and linseed oil,—after I pled with him, having seen Mrs. Livingston's men do likewise when re-fixing her old glass to new window sashes,—to fill the holes in Nell's head. This gave her bruised scalp enough solidity to support more yarn hair, and Scipio praised her beauty lavishly. I straightaway attached myself to the cooperage, whose staves could be used for all manner of
miniature building projects, now I had returned my stolen hammer. When my father sent a wagon down to Luquer's mill to retrieve the day's yeast and ground grain and to leave off the spent wash to fatten Mrs. Luquer's pigs, I would ride down to the pond, where oysters then grew as large as the span of my two hands. One of the men would prize them open for Cornelis and me, so we might slurp the sweet, springy flesh off the shells. Interesting things were, then as now, wont to wash up in the logs of the millrace's trash rack, and old Nicolaas Luquer,—who died when you were yet small,—would lay them out to dry on the rack's small pitched roof, for the delight of his children. When I arrived in my father's wagon, he would sometimes take me down by the plashing water wheel, and we would squat together on that low roof, marveling over a bloated single shoe or a rusted hinge. He would show me these treasures with conspiratorial glee, as if Cornelis & Jens were nowhere near so temperamentally well suited as I to appreciate the curious bounty our river brought him.

But again, I digress; or realize, rather, I am growing old, and have begun to fear my memories of Brookland & my childhood,—which are among my dearest possessions,—will dissipate along with my breath and spirit when my bones are laid in the confines of the grave. I shall leave you half a thriving manufactory; but how I wish I could also bequeath you that vanished world and the people you have never known, who were so dear to me.

You see! You promise a grandchild to a gloomy old woman whose heart has ever seemed to you devoted singularly to business, and in an instant she waxes sentimental. You asked of my bridge, your father's bridge, and here I sit, telling you a whole novel's worth of Johanna & Nell & Pearl. Perhaps I should say, in conclusion upon those topicks,—for this letter, at least,—that my sisters kept my hands busy, and, as the domine had promised, this kept me if not altogether clear of the Slough of Despond, then walking a small elevated berm around its periphery. While I believe my melancholick humour continued to vex my mother, I was never again marched out to the rectory.

Forgive me for going on at such length about my self. I reckon you, who've always been so modest, will consider there is rather too much
I
in this letter; yet I also reckon you'll pardon me the transgression. It is, after all, a sin born of a worser one,—the sin of silence on many
subjects most central to the formation of my character and our family. I hope it suffices to redress the wrong now; & the bridge,—I shall arrive there shortly.

I am full of questions for you, if you feel inclined to answer them: How do you get on with Jonas, having seen him now every day of the past six months? How well do you like a house with servants? Have you come to think Father & me odd for keeping house so minimally? You have much to tell.