T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

A French family kept the ordinary at Rye, and this was a novelty to her. She sat by the fire, shivering till she thought she would split in two, and then, so famished from the ordeal of the road and the cold and the weather she could have eaten up every last scrap of food in the county, she asked for a fricassee, which the Frenchman claimed as his speciality. “Oh, Madame,” he told her, all the while drawing at his pewter cup, “I can prepare a fricassee to fit a king, your king or mine.” But when it came it was like no fricassee she’d ever seen or tasted, its sauce like gluten and spiced so even a starving dog would have spat it out. She was outraged and she told him so, even as Thomas Trowbridge shoveled a simple dinner of salt pork and fried eggs into his groaning maw and pronounced it as good as he’d ever tasted. “I won’t eat this,” Sarah said, piercing the Frenchman with a look. “You’ll cook me eggs.”

“I will cook you nothing,” the Frenchman said. “I go to bed now. And so do you.”

Rye to Spuyten Duyvil

The night was sleepless and miserable, the bed an instrument of torture, Thomas Trowbridge and another gentleman making their beds in the same room and keeping her awake and furious with their blowing and snorting till she thought she’d have to get up and stuff rags down their throats, and they were away at first light, without breakfast. The previous day’s snow had accumulated only to three or four inches but it had frozen hard during the night so that each step of her horse groaned and crackled underfoot. To say that she ached would be an understatement, and there was the cold — bitterer even than yesterday — and the scare her horse gave her every two minutes when its feet skewed away and it made a slow, heaving recovery that at any moment could have been its last. Did she picture herself down beneath the beast with her leg fractured so that the bone protruded and the unblemished snow ran red with her blood? She did. Repeatedly.

By seven in the morning they reached the French town of New Rochelle, and her previous experience of Frenchmen notwithstanding, had an excellent breakfast at an ordinary there. She was so frozen she could scarcely lift the fork to her mouth and found she had no desire to leave the fireside ever again, no matter that her family would never more lay eyes on her and the widowed Mrs. Trowbridge would die in penury and the life of Boston — and its gossip — would go on without Sarah Kemble Knight ever seeing or knowing of it. But within an hour of their alighting, they were back on the road even as she cursed Thomas Trowbridge under her breath and her horse stumbled and slid and made risk of her life and limb with every clumsy faltering step.

They rode all day, through an increasingly civilized country, from time to time meeting other people on the road, people on foot, on horseback, in wagons. Cold, sore and miserable as she was, she nonetheless couldn’t help feeling her spirits lighten as they came closer to their destination — here was real progress, in a peopled country, the wilderness falling away to the axe on both sides of the road. She took it all in and thought to memorialize it in her journal when they were arrived at New York late that night. All well and good. But then came the final crisis, the one that nearly prevented her from laying eyes on that so nearly foreign city with its Dutchmen pulling at their clay pipes and playing at draughts in stifling taverns, the women in their peculiar dress and jeweled earrings — even the dogs that looked to be from another world — and the amenable society of the Governor Lord Cornbury from the Jerseys and the solid brick buildings built cheek to jowl all through the lower town and a hundred other things. The sleighing parties. The shops. The houses of entertainment in a place called the Bowery and the good drink — choice beer, metheglin and cider — and a standard board that consisted of five and six dishes served hot and steaming from the fire. All this. All this and more.

But when they came to Spuyten Duyvil, the Spitting Devil, at the crossing to the north end of Manhattoes Island, with the night coming down and the wind blowing a gale and the waters surging as if it were the Great Flood all over again, she couldn’t go on. There was a bridge here, narrow and unreliable, perched high up out over the waters, and it was slick with a coating of ice that lay black and glistening in the fading light. She got down to lead her horse, because if she led him she’d be lower to the ground — or the planking — and wouldn’t be at the mercy of his uncertain footing. Thomas Trowbridge, hulking in his coats, paid the gatekeeper the sixpence for the two of them, and started across, mounted and oblivious; Sarah held back.

He was halfway across to the far shore, nearly invisible to her in the accumulating dark and the hard white pellets of ice that seemed to have come up with the wind, and the gatekeeper was huddled back in his hut giving her an odd look. All she could hear was the thunder of the roiling water where the river hit the surge of the tide even as the skin of it, black and unforgiving, stretched taut beneath her and exploded again. She was going to die. She was certain of it. She’d come all this way only to have the horse panic and trample her or bump her over the rail and into the spume or the bridge collapse beneath her. Thomas Trowbridge was gone now, enfolded in the mist, and he hadn’t even so much as glanced back. The city was on the far shore, somewhere to the south of the island, and it was what she’d come for. There was lodging there. Fire. Food. Die or not, she stepped out onto the bridge.

It quaked and quailed. The wind thrashed. The horse jerked at her arm like a dead weight come to life. But she steeled herself and put one foot in front of the other and never looked down, a whole eternity passing till she was halfway across and then another eternity till she made the far side in a hard pale swirl of spray thrown up off the rocks and frozen in mid-air. For a long while she just stood there looking back the way she’d come, the bridge fading away into the blow till it might not have been there at all. But it was there, because this was no child’s tale struck with magic, and she knew, even as she turned her mount and swung out onto the road, that she would have to cross it again.

(2003)

My childhood wasn’t exactly ideal, and I mention it here not as an excuse, but a point of reference. For the record, both my parents drank heavily, and in the early days, before my father gave up and withered away somewhere deep in the upright shell of himself, there was shouting, there were accusations, tears, violence. And smoke. The house was a factory of smoke, his two packs of Camels a day challenging the output of her two packs of Marlboros. I spent a lot of time outside. I ran with the kids in the neighborhood, the athletic ones when I was younger, the sly and disaffected as I came into my teens, and after an indifferent career at an indifferent college, I came back home to live rent-free in my childhood room in the attic as the rancor simmered below me and the smoke rose up through the floorboards and seeped in around the doorframe.

After a fierce and protracted struggle, I landed a job teaching eighth-grade English in a ghetto school, though I hadn’t taken any of the required courses and had no intention of doing so. That job saved my life. Literally. Teaching, especially in a school as desperate as this, was considered vital to the national security and it got me a deferment two weeks short of the date I was to report for induction into the U.S. Army, with Vietnam vivid on the horizon. All well and fine. I had a job. And a routine. I got up early each morning, though it was a strain, showered, put on a tie and introspectively chewed Sugar Pops in the car on the way to work. I ate lunch out of a brown paper bag. Nights, I went straight to my room to play records and hammer away at my saxophone and vocals.