World Made by Hand (18 page)

And that's how we acquired a donkey-which Brother Minor named Jenny because it was a jennet, a female-and also the cart, which we unburdened of its cargo of bricks and helped ourselves to, thinking it might be useful if we found anything worth trading for in whatever remained of the capital city of New York state. We left the previous owner of the donkey and cart in the mud by the bridge to reflect on his conduct. I felt no qualms about confiscating his property. Jenny seemed happy to come with us once her load was lightened.

The drizzle had turned into a driving rain with thunder and lightning added by the time we got near the heart of the city, such as it had become. We were hungry, weary, and uncomfortable in our wet clothes. Perhaps a half an hour of daylight remained, and it was meager light given the dreary weather. I remembered Albany years earlier as just another down-on-its-luck small American city that had sacrificed its vitality to a whirring ring of homogenous suburbs. A flickering residue of life had persisted in the row house district near the capitol building. But that phase of its history was over, and the whole place had fallen apart from the edge to the center. Meanwhile, a strange new settlement had grown up like fungus on a log along the riverfront underneath Interstate 787 and the tangle of ramps that soared off the once mighty Clinton Avenue interchange. This new settlement was no shining city or sciencefiction fantasy of gleaming towers. Rather, it was a patchwork of spare parts, salvage, and refuse, both material and human.

Along the riverbank itself, which for decades had been a littleused "park" functionally cut off from the city by the freeway, now stood ranks of rickety wharves, some with boats docked along them, rowing crafts of different kinds, homely prams, skiffs, even canoes, and a number of the shallow-draft, gaff-rigged catboats that were the workhorses of the Hudson River trade. There were quite a few larger pilot cutters, sleek, fast boats with a lot of deck, that came from as far away as Baltimore, and skipjacks that were favored by the fishermen downriver in the broad Tappan Zee. A battered sloop sat in a drydock with its mast down and hull scraped. These wharfs led onshore to boathouses, warehouses, and stores associated with them. None of the new buildings were up to the quality of the ones that had been demolished earlier to make way for the freeway.

Albany once again looked like a frontier town. A few of the new buildings along the waterfront were brick, almost surely salvage, and fewer were a full three stories. The majority of wooden ones were generally clad in unpainted rough-sawn board-andbatten or clapboard. They fronted a new unpaved street called Commercial Row. Not all of the buildings had been completed, and it looked as though work had ceased months ago due to some calamity and had not resumed. Some wooden scaffolds remained in place but no sign of tools or materials. The buildings were designed to contain trading establishments on the ground floors, but at least half were vacant, and nothing was open for business when we rode in at eight thirty on a stormy evening. Overall, the place gave off the odor of a society that was struggling desperately to keep business going, and largely failing.

As it happened, we found one fellow working on accounts by candlelight in an establishment called Ricketts Finished Goods. We stopped before his lighted window and he looked up at us arrayed out there on our horses. Joseph and I went in to talk with him. The others remained outside under the shelter of the elevated freeway. The ground floor storeroom contained a scant few rows of barrels, crates, and empty pallets, but not much else was visible in the gloom beyond this fellow's guttering candle and the occasional lightning flash. He said his name was Jim Ricketts. In the old days, he said, he was a purchasing agent for the state's department of health. His current business was wholesale textiles, yarns, findings, fasteners, and paper products, ". . . and frankly anything I can get my hands on these days," he said, "which isn't much." He said he was sick of being there, and sick of corn bread morning, noon, and night, and nearly sick of this world. He had been writing letters to his suppliers in Baltimore and Philadelphia, whose communications had fallen off, and he doubted that the packet boat mails were getting through anymore.

"New York City is finished," he said. "They can't keep order there, and you can't have business without order. It'll take a hundred years to sort things out and get it all going again."

"What do you hear of the U.S. government?" I said. "We don't have electricity an hour a month anymore and there's nothing on the air but the preachers anyway."

"Well, I hear that this Harvey Albright pretends to be running things out of Minneapolis now. It was Chicago, but that may have gone by the boards. Congress hasn't met since twelve twenty-one," Ricketts said, using a common shorthand for the destruction of Washington a few days before Christmas some years back. "We're still fighting skirmishes with Mexico. The Everglades are drowning. Trade is becoming next to impossible, from everything I can tell, and business here is drying up. It all seems like a bad dream. The future sure isn't what it used to be, is it?"

"We believe in the future, sir. Only it's not like the world we've left behind," Joseph said.

"How's that?"

"We're building our own New Jerusalem up the river. It's a world made by hand, now, one stone at a time, one board at a time, one hope at a time, one soul at a time. Tell me something: do you know Jesus Christ."

"No, I never met the fellow."

"Would you like to?"

"Is he outside there on one of those mounts?"

"He's in your heart."

"Well, that's news to me," Ricketts said. "All these years I thought it was single occupancy. And who the hell are you, sir?"

"We're the New Faith brotherhood, sir, and if this enterprise isn't working out for you any longer, come north and join us. We're always looking for new blood."

"You're not the only ones out for blood," Ricketts said. "Anyway, I'm not your man. Count me out. The more I hear of religion -and any of it's more than I want to hear-the less I like it. In God we trust! I curse the idea. All these different gods is what started this mess in the first place. Allah, Jesus H. Christ, and What Have You Almighty! Haven't we seen enough vengeance and punishment? To hell with them all-and I suppose they each have their own hell to go to anyhow."

"We're more into the practical side of things," Joseph said.

"Sure, whatever that is. Maybe one of these gods will have mercy on me and send a hundred yards of four-hundred-count cotton moleskin and another hundred each of calico, gingham, muslin, buckram, and voile. Now what can I do for you gentlemen at this late hour on a such a dismal night?"

I explained that we were looking for a particular boat, the bateau Elizabeth, a twenty-five-foot-long rowing packet with a single gaff-rigged sail, and her crew of four, and how she belonged to the planter Stephen Bullock of Union Grove, forty miles north. Ricketts said he had traded with Bullock now and then, though he hadn't seen the boat or its crew recently or heard anything about them. But, he added, the new scarcity of goods had induced a lot of desperate behavior up and down the river, and he was not confident that things could move around safely nowadays, which only made him despair again for his business. I didn't want to bother him further, except to ask for someplace we might put up for the night, and he said Slavin's Hotel at the south end of Commercial Row.

Slavin's was a ramshackle structure cobbled up against a trestle of the old elevated freeway running to Clinton and Pearl Street. A lightning flash lit it up in its stark fullness. Ironically, it was a stone's throw from the old Albany train station, still standing and visible in the downpour, a beaux arts period Greco-Roman temple that had been rescued by preservationists in the 1980s and turned into a bank, and was now an empty, looted hulk in need of rescuing again. Hotel was perhaps a grandiose term for Slavin's three-story log and clapboard jerry-built eyesore that was more accurately a flophouse for river rats, as boatmen were called, with a tavern on the ground floor that served pretty good food, Ricketts had said, when the cook was not drunk.

The tavern room in Slavin's was a lively scene in contrast to the desolation of the streets and wharves outside. Whatever its other shortcomings, the management was liberal with the candles. The rain had driven the denizens of the waterfront inside that night, rough boatmen, wranglers, dockmen, plus half a dozen bar girls who were "friendly and available," we were told. Some card games were in progress. Smoke wreathed the ceiling beams, both cannabis and some real tobacco. A wan youth about fifteen played tunes on a small accordion while a younger female child-his sister? -performed a loose-limbed clog dance beside him. Both seemed to be drunk. The aroma of things cooked in butter wafted from the pass-through window to the kitchen behind the bar. It put a keen edge on my hunger. With rain dripping off the eaves and thunder crashing outside, even this squalid scene was a relief.

The barkeeper, a keg-shaped man about forty with close-cut black hair and a Vandyke beard, a damp bar towel over his shoul der and a stained apron on, introduced himself with a kind of distracted patter: "I'm Henry Slavin and this is my place and you can apply to me a drink, a meal, a bed, a chippie, or any combination, what'll it be, boys?"

We asked first for someplace to stable our animals and he said they maintained a boarding barn on the other side of the trestle. It was "self-serve." They couldn't afford to keep a man out there and couldn't vouch for security and suggested that some member of our party might put up in there with the animals. The diligent Brother Minor volunteered if we would bring him something to eat and a bottle of anything potable. So we helped Minor get the tack off and settle the animals. The stalls lacked fresh bedding and Minor took it upon himself to rake them out, since the management didn't. Elam tossed down a bale of stalky hay from the lofts above.

We couldn't turn up any oats or other grain. But to our surprise there was a faucet on an iron pipe with running water, and when we returned to the tavern, Slavin explained that the "boss" of the city, or what remained of the city, Mr. Dan Curry, had installed a waterworks the previous year near the old Rensselaer Bridge ramp, with a great undershot wheel that used the river current itself to lift water to Commercial Row and a few streets beyond. Curry was regarded as a hero because of it. It had required the digging of a half-acre reservoir pond on what had historically been Cornelius Place. They hoped someday to resume water service "up the hill" to the former heart of the city, Center Square, now largely uninhabited, and the area around the capitol, but that day was still somewhat over the horizon. Curry also ran a fire department, policed the docks, operated the justice court, deported "pickers" (vagabonds) downriver, and collected substantial taxes in connection with these ventures. For practical purposes, he was mayor, but disdained the title, Slavin said. Brother Elam volunteered that Slavin was talking to the new mayor of Union Grove, up in Washington County. Joseph told Elam to shut up. Slavin cocked a knowing grin at me and said, "I hope you're thriving, sir, like our Mr. Curry is."

"It's not a paid position," I said.

"Neither is Mr. Curry's," Slavin said with a wink. "But he manages pretty smartly all the same. Now, how do you boys propose to pay for your rooms and meals? Paper dollars or real money?"

"Silver coin good enough?" Joseph said.

"We take that here. Two bits each, bed and a meal. One dollar for the horses. Drinks are extra, of course."

Joseph took out a leather drawstring purse and dropped a handful of old quarters and half-dollars on the wooden bar, where they rang musically. Slavin looked impressed. Whatever the other failures of the U.S. government were, it had managed to print an excess of dollars which, combined with the collapse of trade and communication, had severely eroded the currency's value. People always liked silver better, if it was offered. Gold, on the other hand, was rarely seen. People tended to hoard it.

In a little while, Slavin's kitchen produced a chowder that he said was made from a locally caught sturgeon "the size of a Nile crocodile," stewed with plenty of butter and cream, green onions, and firm new potatoes. The portions were substantial, befitting a place that served hardworking men. We sent Seth out with a crock of the stuff to Minor in the stable, along with several slabs of buttered corn bread, a big hunk of what they called Duanesberg cheddar, and a quart bottle of pale ale Slavin swore he brewed himself.

We asked Slavin if he'd heard anything of the Elizabeth and its crew. He snorted saying boats were coming and going all the time and he had no idea, but I might inquire in the morning at Dan Curry's office at the waterworks; his people seemed to track every last corncob that passed in and out of the port.

Finally, we were advised to "double up," two to a bed because the other rooms were let out to the girls quarter-hourly, and by the way, Slavin said, were we interested in some of that action, for an additional two bits each? We declined. Joseph and I paired up, and Seth and Elam together, and soon we went to the rooms above.