Ghost Town Read Free Page A

fall. He lifted his whip. All at once I saw that he would come down upon her, that he would
ride her down
and whip her as she lay trampled and screaming in the ashes—
    But it did not happen. He stared at her a second as though to fix her in his mind and then turned once more. He spurred the horse back up on to Broadway, where the people fell back as he cantered away. It began to rain in earnest then, and the ashes hissed and smoked all around us.

    Strange to say, the encounter with Lord Hyde roused my mother from the shock of the destruction of our home, and now that she saw what must be done it was to my brother Dan that she turned.
    Dan was a boy of fourteen who in many ways resembled my papa. He had been apprenticed to a carpenter, being suited like my papa to work with his hands. He was even then assailed by inner troubles and mysteries, a tortured boy. In later years he suffered various disasters and took to drink, and died a bitter, disappointed man. I buried him one winter in Trinity graveyard and myself wrote the death notice. But now his hour was come. He stood listening to my mama, she with her homespun shawl fluttering about her shoulders, and him in his tattered shirt and britches. There they were, mother and son, speaking low to each other as they gazed out over the black barren earth and the Hudson lapping at the bluffs beyond, and it is extraordinary to me that a woman who had lost everything in a fire and with no husband at her side could inspire her boy to construct a shelter for her. How Dan did it I do not well remember but in the space of a day and with the help of our neighbors a shack wasframed with timbers from the roof of Trinity and covered with sailcloth begged and stolen from the East River wharves. Even Lizzie helped, for I can see her now with a flathead nail between her lips as she hammered a length of flapping canvas to a plank.
    It was the first of the shelters to be built after the fire of ’76. By nightfall many of those who now owned nothing but the clothes on their backs were settled inside it. Their eyes gleamed from every corner of the squat rough shack. My mama sat by the fire with a cup of rum, elbows on her knees and legs wide apart, smoking her old clay pipe and telling us that when the war was over we would remember with pride the day we built ourselves a house. She said it was the first step in building ourselves a nation.
    In the weeks that followed other women followed my mama’s example and set their children to work. Shacks and cabins began to rise across the bare earth behind the ruins of Trinity Church. So was born a new settlement. It became known as Canvas Town.
    Canvas Town. Soon enough it was a place of debauchery, violence, chicanery—the new nation indeed! It was late fall now. Winter wasapproaching. Strong winds blew from the harbor, and large chunks of ice drifted down the Hudson. The river began to freeze over. Wood and grain were scarce and of meat and poultry there was almost none, for New York had become a military garrison. What supplies came in from the farms of Long Island were taken by the British, and whatever went to market was priced too high for the residents of Canvas Town. Meanwhile the streets and canals ran with the enemy’s filth, and wharves where once the merchant ships of the world had docked began to sag and rot with neglect, and at low tide the East River was a murky sheet of sewage. The town stank worse than ever.
    As winter came on, the hardships of life in Canvas Town began truly to bite. I was profoundly miserable for I hated having to crawl each night into a narrow wooden box that smelled of fish. My mama said there were many in New York who would be happy of a fish-box to sleep in. I said I was not one of them and she laughed, then sat me in her lap and pressed me to her bosom. Murmuring loving words, she stroked my head. She was a strong presence in our fledgling settlement but by degrees, as the weather grew colder, her spirits