Dolph Staats, eldest of Johannes’s six children, was born in 1664, the year English military might sublimated Dutch power without seriously altering the daily life of Albany Dutchmen Commerce proceeded apace, pigs roamed the streets, and the old burghers in their cocked hats and worsted caps still filled the air of the town with pipe smoke and, as one English visitor noted, with phlegmatic gravity as well. Dolph Staats came to enjoy the energetic English and traded profitably with them, expanding his father’s moderate fortune through mercantility, selling the productions of Europe — Bibles and snuffboxes, fiddle strings and China teapots, love ribbons and dictionaries, satinets and shalloons — to his townfolk. His concern with garmenting impelled him to ask the governor of the province to take pity on the ill-clad English soldiers garrisoned in the town, their tatters so advanced that ladies were advised to avert their eyes when passing lest their gaze intersect with the soldiers’ private physical portions. It was also Dolph who left the family signature on two stained-glass windows of the old Dutch church: one the family coat of arms in four colors, and, uniquely, the glazened image of a supine infant whose physiognomy combined the blond ringlets and eyebrows of a Dutchified Jesus, with the crossed eyes of Dolph’s only son, Jacobus.
Jacobus, as he grew into ascetic adolescence, loathed his father’s mercantile life; loathed also the town’s wandering pigs, which he saw as an image of fattable Dutch desire. And so he apprenticed himself to his grandfather Johannes, with whom he sat for long hours, listening while the old man curled pipe smoke around his balding pate and recollected his days with canoe, blade, and rifle, abroad in the land of the red maple, the redwing, and the redskin.
Jacobus married Catrina Wessels, the wall-eyed niece of the Patroon, that absentee landlord who by the fourth decade of our own nineteenth century had held for two hundred years, along with successive heirs, an estate of seven hundred thousand acres, an entity so all-encompassing that arguments prevailed as to whether the Patroon’s demesne was within the bounds of Fort Orange, or whether Fort Orange trespassed upon the Patroon, and on which some one hundred thousand tenant farmers and lesser vassals paid rent and servitude in perpetuum; and while this colonizing was doubtless the great expansionist stroke that created our present world, it was also the cruelest injustice American white men of the New World had ever known, and would precipitate warfare that itself would continue for decades.
The marriage of the wall-eyed Catrina to Jacobus, who remained cross-eyed into adulthood, was a matter of considerable discussion in Albany, and it was speculated they would give birth to children who could look both left and right at the same time they were looking straight ahead. Social conversation with Catrina and Jacobus together was also said to be a nerve-racking experience since one never knew to which of the four eyes one should properly send one’s gaze. But the union was blissful, and the Patroon, mindful of the boon to the family in Catrina’s marriage to even a mal-orbed primitive, bestowed a wedding gift of land on the couple, whereupon Jacobus immediately moved out from the town, taking with him the hybrid image of himself and Jesus in stained glass, installing it in the cabin he built in his new and personally owned wilderness three miles to the north in the midst of a primeval forest, and leaving his father to fill the hole in the church wall and to make moral amends for his son’s profane deed. On his land Jacobus felled timber, burned it in an ashery, extracted lye from the ashes, boiled the lye into black salts, and then sold the salts to the town’s only soapmaker for melting into potash.
He built then (this being the mid-i730s) a sawmill alongside the erratic creek that took his name, the Staatskill, a stream with wellsprings in the western plateau beyond the town, and which, at normal flow, coursed placidly eastward toward the river. But the creek was given to flooding after heavy rain, which Jacobus discovered as the water rose over its banks and diluted into uselessness his large holding of black salts. Jacobus thereafter focused his salvation on his sawmill, which he built on the edge of the stream’s lone cataract, Staats Falls, where the waters collapsed with great aesthetic gush and spume into an effervescing pool and then ran for an arrogant mile down the slope of Staats Hill to meet the river at a point by the Patroon’s Manor House, near where a handful of Irish immigrants in the employ of the Manor were throwing up one humble dwelling after another in what would eventually be called The Colonie.
Catrina bore Jacobus two sons: the elder called Volckert, a pleasant, boring child of surprisingly normal eye structure; the younger an infant boy whose birth brought about Catrina’s sudden demise, but who was himself baptized in time to join his sinless mother in the Dutch Reformed parlors of heaven. With the help of Volckert, Jacobus spent the next decade building the earliest frame building of the mansion in which we fugitives of the wild river would find refuge a century later; and he lived there with Volckert in celibate isolation, an irascible, pointy-headed, and spindly terror to the Irish children who spooked his footsteps on his daily walks through the slowly vanishing wilderness on the mansion’s periphery.
Then, in his dotage, the old dog Jacobus kicked up his fleas, traded a pint of gin for an Indian squaw named Moonlight of the Evening, who had been a house servant of the Patroon in her adolescence, installed her as mistress of the Staats ur-mansion without the benefit or liability of wedlock, and with that single act translated his own eccentricity into public depravity and his mansion into a house of miscegenational vice. The affront was not only to white purity but also to the red nations of the New World, for Moonlight’s eldest brother had been halved by an ax wielded by a white woman he had sought to rape while drunk on white man’s rum. The killing of his favorite son undid Taw Ga Saga, the father of Moonlight and a sachem of one of the five Indian Nations; and yet Taw Ga Saga tempered his hatred of white with an eloquent plea to the Governor of New York, pointing out that when Indians brought beaver skins and other peltry to Albany for sale, the white men first gave the Indians a cup of rum. They did the same when the Indians sat down to sign a bill of sale for a piece of land. And in the end, said Taw Ga Saga, the peltry and the land always went for more rum: “For it is true, O our father, that our people crave rum after they get one taste of it, and so long as Christians sell it, our people will drink it. We ask our father to order tap on rum barrel to be shut.”
But it was never shut and Taw Ga Saga, ousted from power because of his son’s act, took to drink himself, lost all pelts and all land, and finally died in abject disgrace after selling Moonlight of the Evening to Jacobus for the infamous pint of gin.
Jacobus’s son Volckert was thirty when Moonlight of the Evening became his unlawful stepmother and he left home the same day, becoming peerlessly Godful in mortification for the family shame and earning the sobriquet Venerable Volckert. The year after she moved in, Moonlight of the Evening bore Jacobus a son, called Amos after the rustic Hebrew prophet. Amos became the first chronicler of the Staats family, keeping voluminous journal notes of his father’s and his mother’s memories, from the time he entered adolescence. But Amos lived only to the age of sixteen, dying a young hero, the first soldier of the Continental Army to bring the glorious news to Albany that Burgoyne had surrendered and was no longer a threat to the city. Amos’s valiant thirty-mile ride was accomplished with a wound that proved fatal, but he was made an immediate legend. The switch with which he had whipped his horse was salvaged by a woman after he dropped it when toppling from his saddle, and she planted it in her front yard on Pearl Street, where it grew into an enormous tree that for several generations was known as Amos’s Oak. Jacobus buried the boy under the floorboards of the cabin he himself had built when he settled the land, and placed a marble sacrophagus in the middle of the main room, which had been long empty but was still of sound construction, and into which the sun beamed at morning through the crossed eyes of the Jacobus-Jesus window.