Brookland Read Online Free

see it with my own eyes.
    While the mouse-brown Livingston daughters set traps for chipmunks & coddled their dolls, I stood watch on the fence each time my father set out on a barge to deliver his wares. He could not understand why I’d hug him so fiercely before he left, and he’d return home, inevitably, that same afternoon, with the scent of fried food and pipe smoke in his hair, and something stowed in his pocket for me;—some sweet, or fruit, or picture pamphlet. These gifts undid me, so great was my desire for them, and so equally great my fear of his truck with the shades. When I’d look at the peach with tears in my eyes, he’d rumple my hair, call me a
silly little goat
, and head over to the pump to wash. Any gift that was not perishable, I took to my room, where I lifted up the one loose plank on the floor, just as you did,—I know you thought without my knowledge,—when you were a girl; and tucked it in for safekeeping.
    I observed the busy wharves of New-York with care. I reasoned the damned must have been travelling thither from everywhere around, the
wampum
grounds to the east and Pavonia to the west; why else should they have needed everything in such vast quantities? This convocation of the accursed also surely explained why so many ships were sunk in Henry Hudson’s River and up at Hell Gate, and children like Nicolaas swept off in the current of our own tidal straits. It only stood to reason that those eternally condemned would seek to churn up our waters; and this was the first thing made me think we wanted a bridge from here to there. If the living were blind to the spirit boats, they were much imperiled by them; & while I did not suppose one could cajole the deadto use some other mode of transport, it did seem possible to get my father, on his delivery trips, up out of harm’s way. If he could cross by bridge, I reckoned, he could avoid the danger of the water, and perhaps simply fling the goods over to the Other Side, never leaving so much as a hair or a footprint in the Land of the Shades. I could not think how he’d get past having to take their money.
    There were precious few bridges in Brookland, then as now,—none of any magnitude in the colonies. Had I known enough of the topick to study the bridges of the mother country, I’d have learned that a structure of a hundred feet in length was considered a prodigious span. I was no more than five years of age, but I resolved in my childish way to learn what I could of building, to store up against future use. I began following your grandfather around his distillery, asking him to explain the functions of the stills, liquor-backs, chutes, gears, drive belts, & machines. He complied, with a bemused grin on his broad countenance, though the doggedness with which I’d determined to learn these things obviously unnerved him.
    Had my parents asked what troubled me, I’d have told them, and all the vapours would have been dispelled; but they did not ask. For reasons of friendship & a perverse understanding of loyalty, my mother refused to hire any other help while Johanna yet lived; and as Johanna was next to no assistance to her, the sheer work of the house kept her grim-faced & busy the day long. Managing our household also seemed to cost my mother an inordinate lot of fret. Mrs. Livingston, after all, had
two
daughters, yet still found time to hang over the open top of her Dutch door when a neighbour passed by with gossip. Mother spared herself no such luxury and did not appear to have any such friends, and I sensed she had neither time for nor interest in my moods. Father, more ample in all directions, brought home ribands and books from Fly Market, and would lean back in his chair & spin me yarns that would have banished the shades from some other girl; and he ever addressed me with a smile whose import, I knew, was to coax me to do likewise. Yet his efforts did not strike their mark. I remain’d