by David Liss
“’Tis not mine,” he said. “In truth, it’s too dull for me.”
“You, madam?” asked Skye. “You have an interest in finance and economical matters?”
“I do,” I said, feeling myself redden. I was not quite ready to reveal myself to be a budding authoress.
It was fortunate that he spared me a request for further explication. “Then perhaps you have some thoughts upon the latest news, just arrived in a mule train from the East this very day?” His gray eyebrows raised in amusement, or perhaps anticipation. “I spent the afternoon reading through the newspapers, and I cannot credit what I have discovered.”
“Then tell us,” said Andrew.
He smiled, clearly pleased to be the one to relate it, yet I could see it troubled him too. “The new treasury minister, Alexander Hamilton, has appointed an immediate assistant, the second most powerful man at the Treasury. With the influence that department is gaining over George Washington and the federal government as a whole, it makes him well near one of the most powerful men in the entire country. Can you guess of whom I speak, for he is known to us all?”
Dalton snorted. “We have no idea, so out with it, man.”
Andrew smiled. “I have no idea, but look at Joan. I think she knows.”
I had opened my mouth, but I had not yet spoken. It seemed to me impossible, but I could think of but one man who met the criteria Mr. Skye had outlined, and I could not, at first, bring myself to say his name out loud. “No,” I managed at last. “Not William Duer?”
Skye nodded. “How ever did you guess it?”
“She didn’t guess it,” said Andrew. “She merely drew the only logical conclusion. I did not myself, but now I see how she did so. He is, after all, the only man known to us all, and he did speak of his close ties to Hamilton when we met him.”
Dalton actually snarled in disgust. “It makes me ill to think that a man like Duer, who has made his living by cozening patriots, should be rewarded with such power and influence.”
“He shall do well for himself,” said Skye. “It seems that his good friend Hamilton has convinced Congress to pay in full the states’ debts from the war. All our promissory notes that Duer got in exchange for land are now to be paid at full value.”
“He knew!” I cried. “He and Hamilton must have plotted it out all along. They would trick patriots into surrendering their debt, and when they had enough they would get the American people, through their taxes, to pay off that debt, enriching themselves. It is the most monstrous abuse of power imaginable.”
“That is how things are done in England,” said Dalton, “but it is not how they are supposed to happen here.”
“No, but it is the way of things,” said Skye. “It hardly matters what principles are foremost in men’s minds. Those men are still men, and they will either be too idealistic to maintain power or too corruptible not to seize it.”
“You judge human nature too harshly,” said Andrew. “For what did we fight if this country is doomed to be no better than the one from which we won our independence?”
Dalton regarded him with the greatest seriousness. It seemed his orange whiskers stiffened, like the ears of a cat going back. “You do not submit to a harsh master because the next master may, for all you know, be no better. You fight, and that is what we did. We fought for the chance, lad.”
“And do we not fight now?” I asked, looking up from my needlework. “Is the fighting all done? We fight against England for oppressing us, but when we do it to ourselves, when our own government places men like Hamilton and Duer in a position to destroy the soul of the nation, do we take our ease and do nothing?”
“There’s nothing to do,” said Skye.
I was not so certain. I could not think what we might to do push back against the interests of greed and cruelty that had so clearly gained ground, but that did not mean I could do nothing. I thought of my book once more and considered that perhaps this novel, this first American novel—could I but write it—might be an instrument of change, or at least part of a movement for change, a movement of sincere citizens hoping to keep their government free of corruption. If this news about Duer so troubled me, it would trouble others. All over the country, honest men and women must be looking on with horror as corruption wound its way into the hearts of the political men in Philadelphia. Alexander Hamilton, once Washington’s trusted aide, had turned the nation in the direction of British-style corruption. I knew I must find my voice, and soon.
These thoughts were upon my mind as I stepped outside to clean dishes in the stream. The men, or so I believed, were still within, drinking whiskey and speculating upon the evil plans laid back east. To my surprise, Mr. Skye stepped out with me. He appeared slightly, only slightly, uneasy, with his hands in his pockets, stepping with a gait too casual.
“I observed to your husband that it might be best to have an escort with you as you went about your chores,” he said, with a slight simper. Were I unmarried, I might think from his tone that he wished to declare himself.
“I do it often enough,” I said, but not unkindly. It was a cool evening for summer, and a light breeze made the air pleasant. The night sky was cloudless, and the thin crescent of a newly waxing moon underscored the brightness of the stars without overshadowing them. Together, Mr. Skye and I strode the short distance to the creek, where, setting down my sack of dirty dishes, I squatted by the cool water and plunged in the first vessel.
He took another dish. We worked in silence for some minutes until Mr. Skye said to me, “I did not mean to make you uncomfortable before. You blushed when I first spoke of your interest in economical books. I am sorry if I stepped upon something.”
He was not sorry, he was curious. If he were sorry, he would not have pursued the subject, but I could not fault him for it. Even so, I hesitated for an instant, for I did not like to speak of my ambitions to just anyone, but I sensed in Mr. Skye a man who would embrace and not scorn my project. I took a deep breath. “I plan to write a novel. Perhaps the first American novel.”
It was dark and I did not look upon his face, but even so I sensed a look of interest and respect. “The first, you say. I believe it may be too late for that. Our own Mr. Brackenridge in Pittsburgh has set his cap at the same thing.”
I felt a twinge of disappointment, but it would not last. I had long been determined to write my book and had not done so. Surely someone with more resolve would succeed where I had only delayed. Instead of dwelling upon this point, I determined that I would have to meet this worthy. “Well, it is not vital to me that I be the first, but that it be particularly American. I know not what Mr. Brackenridge’s novel might be, but I doubt we intend to write the same thing.”
“I have seen part of it,” said Skye. “It is a picaresque—a sort of American Don Quixote, or perhaps an American Smollett.”
“Then we have very different projects,” I said, and saw no reason to say more.
“Should you ever require a pair of eyes to look at it, I hope you will call upon me.”
“You are very kind,” I said, and turned to my dishes. A moment later, because I sensed my words had so pleased him, I repeated myself. “Very kind.”
Andrew began to spend a great deal of time with these men. They helped him with the land clearing—at least Dalton and Jericho would, for John Skye avoided such work where he could, pleading age and back pain. Instead, he would aid me with the farming or join me in the cabin and ease my isolation while I prepared the evening meal. The five of us would eat together and then pass the evening with whiskey and conversation, or perhaps Andrew would join them, riding out to one of their cabins. Then, so slowly I did not notice, the land clearing diminished until it ceased entirely. Andrew would leave in the morning and come home in the evening. He would more often than not smell of whiskey, but he did not seem inebriated and I had no concern that he had found another woman. Even so, there was something furtive in his looks, as though he had been about something not entirely wrong,
but certainly something he chose not to reveal. I did not love it, but I would not ask him to speak before he was ready.
Indeed, Andrew appeared happy, self-satisfied. Though he would approach the cabin with a secretive lightness in his step, I had not seen him appear to be so pleased with himself in a long while. I was lonely, yes, and missed the company of the men, Mr. Skye in particular, but I could not protest. I was a woman, and my presence was expendable so long as I did my duty. I would have to endure the solitude even while Andrew enjoyed company.
It was not only the company of Mr. Dalton and Mr. Skye that drew him in, however. He would sometimes spend his evenings at the Indian Path tavern, where women were not welcome. There the men would talk of the things that plagued Westerners—how the politicians of the East wanted us to tame the land but cared not to help us fight Indians. They spoke of the fear of foreign agents combing Pittsburgh—the British, the Spanish, the French—looking to stir up trouble. They talked of the new government back east, their hatred of Duer, and how all must be set squarely at Hamilton’s doorstep.
So it was that, with Andrew gone so much from the cabin, my novel began to take shape in my mind—slowly at first, but the characters gathered around me, moths drawn to the flame of my mind. In the quiet, I spent the day making notes, examining the contours of my story, and, soon enough, beginning the writing process itself. I would write, I decided, a novel about our own experiences, about the evil men who defrauded patriots to line their pockets. I would write about the Duers and Hamiltons and Tindalls of the world, and about a group of Westerners who decide to exact their revenge upon them. Perhaps it was the thrill of confronting these men, if only on paper, but the words came to me as they had never done before.
This is how our time passed for two months, and then, as summer began to turn to autumn and a coolness settled over the land, Andrew spoke to me.
“Have you never wondered,” he said, “where I go each day? Where I spend my time?”
“I have wondered,” I said, “but I thought you would tell me when you were ready.”
“It is not like you to restrain your curiosity.”
“’Tis not like you,” I countered, feeling somewhat chastised, “to be secretive.”
“You have your novel,” he said. “You do not have to tell me it goes well, for I can see it upon your face. Can you not see from my face that something goes well for me?”
I could not help but smile. “I have seen it.”
“And shall I tell you what it is?”
“Do not tease me, Andrew. You know I wish it. Tell me if you are ready.”
“It is better that I show you.”
And so we set out across the rugged path to Dalton’s large cabin, some two miles away. It was a pleasant afternoon, the air filled with the buzz of insects, and we strolled in easy silence, my hand upon his arm. Somehow we were happy. Somehow in the midst of our ruin we had each found something, some part of ourselves we had been missing, I in my writing and Andrew in his secret.
At Dalton’s cabin, which I had never before visited, the large man greeted me, Mr. Skye beside him, at the door, and they both had the foolish look of boys who have done something both wicked and childishly charming. Behind the house, Jericho Richmond worked in the field. He raised his hand at us as we approached, but at once wiped his brow with his sleeve and returned to his work. Mr. Dalton invited me in, sat me near the fire, and set before me a small glass of whiskey, which I began to lift to my lips.
“You’ve come to enjoy your whiskey,” Skye said, before I could drink.
“I don’t think enjoy is the right word,” I said. “But it is part of life here.”
I took a sip of the drink, but I immediately took the cup away in astonishment. I’d had whiskey before, in quantities I would not have credited in my former life, but here was something entirely different. It was darker, I saw by the light of the fire, amber in color and more viscous. And its flavor—it was not merely the sickly sweet heat of whiskey, for there was a honey taste to it, perhaps vanilla and maple syrup and even, yes, the lingering tang of dates.
“What is this?” I asked.
“To answer that,” said Skye, “to fully answer your question, we must first make sure you understand what whiskey is. Do you know why we make whiskey? Are we merely hard-drinking men, reprobates who cannot live without their strong drink?”
“Would you catechize me?” I asked.
He smiled. “Oh, yes. You see, I’ve been planning this conversation in my mind, and I mean that it should go as I wish. Now, tell me. Do you know why we make whiskey?”
“It is the only way to profit from your harvest.”
“A woman who reads the Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce misses very little,” my husband observed.
I took another sip, attempting to dissect its intricacies. “You grow your grain, but beyond what you need for your own use, there is nothing to be done with the surplus. There are no good roads, so the voyage east is too long and too difficult, and ultimately too expensive to transport large quantities of grain. You cannot use the Mississippi to travel west, since the Spanish will not permit it. So what is to be done? The most logical answer is to turn your surplus grain to whiskey.”
“Quite right,” said Skye.
“There is always a market for whiskey,” I continued. “It becomes popular back east, and the army is increasingly replacing rum with whiskey, and though it is cumbersome to transport grain, it is far less to transport whiskey by the barrel. That is why whiskey stands as a substitute for money. At some point it may be exchanged for specie and thus is useful for barter.”
“And that,” said Mr. Skye, “is where your husband has become so useful.” He pointed at Andrew. “He almost at once recognized that there was more flavor to be got into the drink. ’Tis a barter economy, but right now all whiskey is held equal. No one’s drink is lauded above another’s. But what if we could produce something that was better than what anyone else had?”
“Of course,” I interrupted. “You introduce something more scarce; it generates more desire; you get more for your trade.”
“Exactly so once again, lass,” Skye said. “Now, Dalton and I have been in the whiskey trade for some time, and we thought that Andrew here, with his skill as a carpenter, could be of use to us. We’ve long known you get more flavor out of whiskey by storing it in barrels rather than jugs, but the difference is not significant. More flavor, but the flavor is not always good, and an abundance of bad flavor does not add much value. Beyond that, the barrels are harder to transport, and the wood absorbs some of the whiskey, leaving you with less product for the market.”
“But sometimes barrel storage is desirable,” said Dalton. “Jugs can be hard to come by in large quantity, and wood is plentiful. If you have enough surplus, it is better to lose some to barrel storage than have no place to store it at all. When we explained all this to your Andrew—well, he had other ideas than mere coopering.”
I looked at him. “Is that right?”
He smiled, somewhat sheepish.
“Let’s show her the still,” Dalton said.
We exited the cabin and went to what Dalton called the outhouse, though it was a cabin twice in size to the one he lived in, a kind of rusticated warehouse or factory. In it was a profusion of pots, jars, and tubes that jutted out from one another and crisscrossed the room in a fowling-piece blast of confusion. Wooden barrels lined the walls, small fires burned in contained furnaces, steam boiled out of pots in tight little puffs. It smelled rich and rank in there, a kind of sweet and decaying smell, combined maybe with something less pleasant—like wet waste and fleshy decomposition. It was enticing and revolting.
“The principle is fairly simple,” Dalton said. “You start with a kettle full of fermented corn, what we call the wash. Then we boil it there, over that fire. The lid goes on the kettle. You see that tube coming out of it? That catches what burns off, since ’tis the strong stuff that burns off first—the spir
it, if you will, which is why we call strong drink spirits.”
“So the drink that comes out of that tube is whiskey?” I asked.
“No,” Skye said, “that’s what we call low wine, which is run through the still once again. Now it comes out in different strengths. The first of it, the foreshot—well, that ain’t for drinking, let’s say that. ’Tis nasty and foul and strong. You can add a little bit of that to the final produce to give it some strength, but no more. After the foreshot comes the head, which you can drink, but it still ain’t good. Then comes the clear run. It looks like this.”
He handed us a glass bottle, and inside was a near-colorless liquid.
“That is more the whiskey I’m used to.”
“Aye, it is,” said Skye. “The flavor and color of ours come from the barrel. The longer it sits in the barrel, the more flavor and color it gets, but there was more to it than that.”
“It seemed to me,” said Andrew, “that more of the barrel’s flavor could be brought out by charring its insides. And so it is. The whiskeys we’ve been experimenting with the past few months are more flavorful than any we’d ever tasted before.”
“He’s done more than that,” said Mr. Dalton. “He’s been meddling with the recipe too, adjusting the proportions of the grains, adding more rye than corn to the mash. We’ve made your husband a partner in our still, and unless I’m mistaken he’s made the lot of us very rich.”
Dalton took out a bottle of the new tawny whiskey and poured us all a glass, with which we toasted our future. We had come west as victims, but now, it seemed, we would be victors. It was what we believed at the time and what we ought to have believed, because this was the America we had fought for, where hard work and ingenuity must triumph. We did not know that at that moment, back east, Alexander Hamilton and his Treasury Department schemed to take it all away from us.
Ethan Saunders
