We loaded all these things onto the cart, covered it with our waxed ground cloth, and set out on a systematic search of the wharves and their attached boathouses.
We divided into two groups, Joseph and myself to go one way, Elam and Seth the other, leaving Minor again in charge of the animals in a scrub pasture that used to be the football field of a public school on DeWitt Street. The school building itself was a scavenged ruin. One of the goalpost uprights remained in place. It was already hot out in the field. Plenty of rainwater stood in puddles for the animals. Minor found a spot of shade under a sumac tree and seemed content there while the horses grazed peacefully. I gathered that Joseph didn’t trust Minor’s hot head in the kind of search we were about to undertake, mixing with the locals and all. Joseph and I said we would work the wharves from the north end down. Elam and Seth would start near the waterworks and work up. We said we’d meet up in between somewhere.
So we set off, making like we were looking for a boat to buy. In fact, there were a lot of boats for sale along the wharves, given the depressed conditions lately, and we had to pretend to inquire about them, so it took the whole morning to work down the row, but we didn’t come across the Elizabeth. Along the way, we caught quite a bit of news chatting with the owners, traders, and dockmen and boatmen. For instance, we learned that a recent hurricane had crossed the east end of Long Island and swept up along the New England coast, drowning many of the towns east of Providence before swerving out to sea at Cape Cod. Boston was spared, but Boston might have benefited from a bath, one sloop owner said with a gallows laugh. The violent thunderstorms we’d seen in the Hudson Valley were a backwash of all that rough weather, he said. We heard that a gang of pickers had nearly burned down the town of Kinderhook while plundering the place. Several were captured and hanged. A bad gypsy moth infestation was moving north and had reached as far as Rhinebeck. At night, they said, you could hear the caterpillars munching on leaves, their numbers were so great. In some places down there, the trees were so denuded it looked like November. One boatyard owner said that the Chinese had landed on the moon, but his partner scoffed at the notion and said that the other man also believed there was still plenty of oil in the world, and a conspiracy between the Arabs and the Asian Coprosperity Alliance had deprived America of its share because “they hated our freedom.” Who really knew anymore? On the bright side of things, the shad run in the Hudson had been the best ever seen by people still living, though a lot fewer people were living than a decade ago.
At half past noon, having found nothing up along the north end of the waterfront, we met up with Seth and Elam, who said excitedly that they were sure they’d found the Elizabeth in the fourth place they looked, a boatyard associated with VanVoast’s Import. It was inside a big red boathouse which stood out in the distance against the china blue sky.
“How do you know it’s the right boat?” Joseph said.
“Oh, it’s her all right,” Seth said.
“The name Elizabeth is spelled out on the transom with a rose painted to each side of the name,” Elam said. This was what Mr. Bullock had specified in his written instructions. No sign of the crew. There was a manager on the premises and a few idle dockmen, waiting for a cargo. Elam and Seth had looked over the boat and left the place with a cursory thank you. We decided to go back immediately all together and ask some hard questions.
The manager of the VanVoast terminal, a well-fed man named Bracklaw, he said, sporting a set of bright green suspenders to hold up a pair of slovenly linen trousers, showed a high degree of alertness as the four of us entered the dim, cavernous boathouse, with swallows careening through the sturdy trusswork overhead. In fact, he seemed downright nervous seeing how Seth and Elam had suddenly multiplied to four of us. A couple of catboats occupied one side of the main slip, and there were side slips too, where the Elizabeth sat among an assortment of small craft. Bracklaw’s dockmen were not on the premises, perhaps off on lunch.
Joseph suggested we all go into the office and talk. Bracklaw resisted the idea but Joseph more or less shoved him in and we all followed. Elam closed the curtain on the window that faced Commercial Row. Seth kept his eyes on the opposite window, looking into the interior of the boathouse. Bracklaw was allowed to occupy his own ancient swivel chair behind a very disorderly desk piled with old cargo manifests and assorted junk. The chair squeaked every time he moved.
“Can you imagine what we’re after?” Joseph said.
“I ain’t clairvoyant,” Bracklaw said.
“Do you suppose we came to rob you?” Elam said.
“That would be very unwise.”
“We’re looking for the crew of that light bateau yonder that you have took in,” Joseph said. “The Elizabeth.”
Bracklaw didn’t answer. He glared at us as if we had a nerve for asking.
“Four men came down here on her,” Joseph said, “Out of Union Grove, with families and all. Any notion about ’em?”
Bracklaw just crossed his arms.
“How’d you come across that boat out there?” Joseph said.
“Mr. Curry’s people brought it in,” Bracklaw said.
“That’d be Mr. Curry of the waterworks and such?”
“The very one.”
“I understand it was carrying ten kegs of cider, among other things.”
“That so?”
“I don’t suppose you’d have a bill of landing for that here on your desk.”
“I don’t recall any such a cargo recently.”
“Not of slight value, I’d think,” Joseph said. “Given how times are.
“Whatever.”
“You’re not inclined to say?”
“I’m not inclined to being put upon in my own place of business,” Bracklaw said.
“Well, we’re hardly putting upon you. We could I suppose. Actually, it hadn’t occurred to me until you suggested it—”
“You’d be wasting your time. And in the end you’d have to answer to Mr. Curry anyway, and he would be displeased.”
“I wouldn’t want to displease Mr. Curry.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“Then do you suppose we might go see Mr. Curry about the crew of that boat?”
“That’s exactly what I would do if I were you.”
Thirty-four
Joseph and I proceeded down to the waterworks, leaving the others behind with Bracklaw to keep down any news of our doings. It was a five-minute walk. The great waterwheel itself was a marvel of construction. It groaned on its axle as it turned in the sluiceway. Beside the big brick cube that housed the pump machinery, stood a gallows, a place of execution, a symbol of order and terror meant to reinforce the basis of Dan Curry’s administrative authority. Just up the bank from that loomed a building designed to be formal and dignified, but in a crude approximation of Greco-Roman construction: Dan Curry’s headquarters. It sat on a high sturdy brick foundation, above the hundred-year flood level, which required an imposing flight of stairs to reach the portico, where four squared-off columns of rough-sawn boards held up a pediment. The columns had neither bases or capitals. The windows were salvage, and not identical in either size or the number of lights within each sash. The whole thing was unpainted, as though it had only recently been finished, and you could even smell the sawn wood at some distance. It made up for its roughness by its impressive mass, and altogether the place radiated an aspiration to be dignified within the limited means of our hard times. It possessed a kind of swaggering charm, of something new, alive, and breathing in a time when most things were shrinking or expiring. This was reinforced by the numbers of people, mostly men, hanging around the portico, which was a good fifty feet wide by twenty feet deep-a spacious outdoor room in its own right, well supplied with chairs. They were gathered in groups and knots, some dressed in clean summer linens like businessmen, and others the kind of roughnecks who might have worked the wharves and flocked to Slavin’s taproom at night. I assumed they were all, in some way or another, dependent on Curry’s favor. They hardly glanced at us as we stepped up and made for the entrance.