City of Dreams (4 page)

“What one thing, barber?”

“My fee.”

“Are you mad? I’ll have you horsewhipped. Of course your fee will be paid. What do you take me for?”

“A strict man but a fair one. I’m told your word is absolutely to be relied on.”

“It is. I take it you mean to ask for something other than money.” The words came hard, with wheezing breath, limned by pain. “Ask then. Quickly.”

“A homestead closer to the town than the one my sister and I have been assigned. And a place inside the town to practice my trade.”

Stuyvesant turned his head, looked at Lucas over his shoulder. “There is no place inside the town. In Nieuw Amsterdam the one thing even I can’t control is the roofs over people’s heads. Fifteen hundred souls between the wharf and the wall, and all of them building where they… For the love of the Almighty, barber, this is an odd sort of conversation to be having with a man when your arse is in his face.”

“I do not need much space to practice my craft, mijnheer, a small room will do.” Lucas still hadn’t touched his instruments.

“But I tell you … Very well. We’ll find a corner for you. Now—”

“And a different piece of land for my sister and myself. As I said, it need not be inside the town, only close to it. In the Voorstadt, perhaps.”

Stuyvesant looked into Lucas’s eyes for a second more. “Get on with it,” he said finally. “You’ll have what you ask. A barber shop this side of the wall and a homestead in the Voorstadt. But only if I live to issue the orders.”

“I expected you’d see that part of it, mijnheer.” Lucas pushed his rolled sleeves further up his arm. “This is only the examining part of the surgery. The forty-five seconds doesn’t start until I’m done.”

He inserted his finger deep into Stuyvesant’s rectum. The governor grunted, but he didn’t move. The soft wall of the intestine yielded to probing. Lucas could feel the bladder, and when he pressed a little harder, the stone. “Ah, a pebble of some size, Governor. No wonder it’s causing such trouble.” Stuyvesant’s only answer was his labored breathing. “Now, mijnheer, the forty-five seconds begins. You may start counting.”

Lucas yanked the bucket into position below his patient’s dangling genitals. He withdrew his finger from the governor’s body and took up his scalpel. One quick cut between testes and rectum. Two inches long. Deft and swift, with his arm wrapped around the man’s waist to hold him in position. Stuyvesant’s body jerked once, but in a second he was again rigid, and he made no sound except for a soft groan.

Blood was obliterating the cut. Lucas grabbed the pincers and inserted them into the wound. One quick snap and the handle opened wide, spreading the flesh apart. He could see the wall of the bladder. He chose another scalpel, smaller than the first, made another quick cut. Less than half an inch, but the sharp reek of urine told him he’d opened the right place. And through it all, Peter Stuyvesant neither moaned nor twitched.

Piss gushed into the leather bucket. And a second later, clearly, a sound that could not be mistaken in the silence broken only by his patient’s wheezing breath, the ping made by the stone as it fell. Thanks be to God, he wouldn’t have to probe for it.

Lucas had three ligatures ready, thin strands of sheep’s intestine. He tied off the blood vessels and mopped the wound with the cloths Anna Stuyvesant had given him. A slow but steady flow of blood was oozing from some vessel he’d cut but couldn’t see. There was nothing for it but to lengthen the original opening and tie off the vessel. A lesson he’d learned from bitter experience. Fail to do that and no matter how tightly and neatly you sewed together the flesh, the patient died.

Thirty-five seconds were gone. If he was to live up to his boast he must begin to stitch, but he dared not.

He reached for the smaller scalpel, made the wound half an inch longer at each end. There, the source of the blood was near the top of the cut, close to the kidneys. Lucas grabbed the vessel with his probe, pulled it forward, and tied it off. Forty-two seconds. And not a sound or a movement from the man who was bent over the chest. If anything, the silence was deeper than it had been.

Sweet Jesus Christ, maybe Stuyvesant had stopped breathing. “Mijnheer Governor,” Lucas whispered, “can you hear me?”

“
Ja
.” The voice was weak.

Lucas felt a moment of triumph. He and Sally—finally, fate was smiling on them. “Just checking on you, mijnheer, almost finished.” He sponged the wound with hot water, sprinkled on some of Sally’s stanching powder. Finally he released the spring on the handles of the pincers, removed the instrument and tossed it aside, then grabbed the needle threaded with a thin strip of sheep’s intestines and began to stitch.

“Done,” he said a few seconds later. “It’s over, Governor. The stone is out. Such pain as you’ll have for the next few days is from the wound, and when it heals you’ll be cured. Meanwhile you must have a bran and salt enema every day. There is to be no straining at stool.”

Lucas helped his patient back to bed while he spoke, supporting the other man with an arm around his waist. “I’ll call your sister, shall I,” he said when the governor was back in bed and the covers were drawn up over him. “Perhaps you’ll sip some ale to restore your—”

“Fifty-two seconds,” Stuyvesant said. “I counted.” There was a thin line of blood along the margin of his lower lip. And tooth marks. He’d bitten through his own flesh rather than cry out. “It took you fifty-two seconds, barber, not forty-five.”

Lucas nodded. “You had a high bleeder. I had to make a second cut to find it. If I had not, Governor, though I sewed you well up, you would bleed inside your body and be dead before morning.”

For a moment he thought Stuyvesant might denounce him as not the stone expert he claimed to be. Instead, “Go down to the waterside. Tell Heini the clerk I said to let you sleep inside the fort tonight, in the storehouse. And that he should come see me in the morning. Tell him I mean to change your land appropriation.”

II

It turned out the pitch-blackened corpse hanging near the dock was a kind of scarecrow, a warning to potential wrongdoers, but there were plenty of tall trees in the colony and no lack of real hangings. Inside the fort there was a stockade open to all weather that served as the town jail, and two whipping posts.

Nieuw Amsterdam was not, however, as desolate and forbidding as Lucas and Sally imagined at first sight. Apart from the crumbling earthworks of the fort—forever in need of repair—and the macabre display at the waterfront, there was much to please the eye.

Thirty-five years had passed since Peter Minuit bargained with the local tribes for the island. Now the compact settlement occupied about a third of the narrow southern tip of Manhattan, running a scant half-mile from the fort to the wall and sheltered by the hilly, thickly wooded landscape of the rest. To be sure, Nieuw Amsterdam’s streets were crooked and narrow, created by simply widening the footpaths of the red men, and it was not long since the settlers were living in pits roofed with reeds, but by 1661 proper houses had been erected. Stuyvesant and his council, the burgomasters and schepens, had outlawed thatched roofs because of the fire hazard they presented, and had begun importing enough glazed yellow bricks to allow the wealthier residents to duplicate the sturdy, cheerful dwellings of Holland.

To Lucas’s eye, even the simpler wooden houses built of local materials were unmistakably Dutch. Most were small two-story structures with steeply pitched roofs and dormered windows, nestled side by side and built gable end to the road so there might be more of them in a row. The Netherlanders had long considered it a sign of affluence to live in a populous city.

Doubtless thoughts of home also inspired the tidal canal that had been dug from the beginning of the curve of the eastern shore northwest for some eight hundred of a tall man’s strides. When it froze the locals used it for skating. Those who had neglected to bring their blades to the New World strapped beef shinbones to their shoes instead.

The rest of the year the canal made it possible for cargo ships to offload directly into the warehouses of the richest merchants. They were the ones who built their substantial yellow brick residences along the canal’s banks, and found space for a garden in front of each house. There were gardens as well in front of the brick homes on the street called Pearl that ran beside the waterfront (almost the first thing the Dutch did when they arrived was to pave the river road with shells from the nearby oyster beds) and still more gardens adjoining the prosperous dwellings lining both sides of the Brede Wegh.

If Lucas put his back to the sea and stood on a high point such as the middle of the three bridges crossing the canal, his strongest impression was of a neat little town hugging the tip of the island, protected by the mountainous and wooded terrain to the north. It was “a brave and a pretty place,” as the pamphlet encouraging immigration had put it. What the view from the bridge concealed was the rowdy and raucous life that made this town unlike any other in the New World.

Boston and Providence and the rest had all been founded in pursuit of some high ideal of philosophy or religion, and were occupied by English folk of like mind. Nieuw Amsterdam was created by rich Dutchmen who wanted to become richer. Any who could further that aim were welcome. On a given day you might hear eighteen different languages at the intersection of the Brede Wegh and Wall Street.

Lucas did not find here the huddled poor who were such a fixture in Dover and London and Rotterdam. There appeared to be money to be made in every lane and at every crossing. All you needed was an eye for a trade. And courage. And, of course, luck and a strong stomach.

In New England a shared theology created order. In the seething mix of nationalities, beliefs, and nonbeliefs that the Dutch West India Company had created in Nieuw Amsterdam, not even an iron fist like Stuyvesant’s could alter the fact that the making of a quick fortune was a disorderly and a boisterous affair. Once they had money, men—particularly the trappers and traders and sailors who crowded the town’s narrow streets—craved pleasure. A good number of the upstanding Dutch burghers liked something on the side as well.

Whores were tolerated as long as they kept themselves to Princes Street and did not mingle with the good Netherlander
huisvrouwen.
There were twenty-one taverns, taprooms, and alehouses in the little town. The mix pleased Lucas: fucking and boozing led to arguments and mayhem. A man of his skills was bound to be kept occupied.

Stuyvesant had assigned him a tiny shop built against the easternmost end of the wooden palisade that gave Wall Street its name. Lucas’s place was really a lean-to, no more than five long strides in each direction. There was no window, only a fireplace against the back wall, and across from it a door split horizontally in the Dutch fashion. “The wily bastard just barely managed to keep his promise,” Lucas told Sally. “It’s almost inside the town.” Nonetheless, a steady stream of customers found him from the first day he banged the striped red-and-white pole into the summer-parched earth outside the door.

A good many came to be bled, often for the aftermath of drink. Lucas was not entirely sure that opening a blood vessel in the temple of the sufferer, or even setting the leeches to him, really would relieve the nausea and the pounding headache, but it could do no harm.

Large quantities of rum and geneva could also be counted on to result in broken bones that needed to be set. Lucas built a sturdy wooden frame to assist him in carefully aligning fractured arms and legs before forcing them back into position. The ship’s surgeons who were his only competition in the colony—mostly men who stayed a short time, then got restless and went again to sea—set bones by brute force, using as many vicious yanks as the patient could endure. The pain was equally intense using Lucas’s frame, but the results were far more satisfactory. He put the apparatus to use three or four times a week.

Also thanks to drunkenness, he was twice asked to trepan a man’s skull. Desperate
huisvrouwen
hoped that boring a couple of holes in a husband’s head might rid him of his craving for alcohol. Lucas knew that was unlikely, but he had recently made himself a new drill and was interested in refining his trepanning techniques. Those two operations were among the most interesting he performed during his first few months in Nieuw Amsterdam. They occupied a page each in his journal.

From the day he set up shop, Lucas made copious notes about every procedure, even ordinary barbering—delousing and shaving and bleeding and lancing boils—but he took special pains to write in detail about the more intricate surgeries, cutting away fistulas and tumors and removing stones. He did a great deal of the latter. Since the operation on Stuyvesant he’d become famous for it. Sufferers made the journey to his little room beside the wall from remote farms on the long island and Staten Island. Some arrived from as far north as Nieuw Haarlem. One came from a large holding, a
bouwerie,
in Yonkers.

At first it was Lucas’s speed that mattered. He knew it didn’t hurt his reputation when he had whoever accompanied the patient stand on one side of the room and count the seconds between the initial cut and the last stitch. But in the autumn, after Sally’s first crop of poppies bloomed, Lucas was best known for the fact that he could, with a few spoonfuls of one of his sister’s decoctions, make the patient so groggy and fill his head with such soporific dreams that he felt considerably less pain.

As in the case of the barber shop, Stuyvesant had almost kept his word about their land assignment. The Turner homestead was small, what the Dutch called a
plantage
rather than a
bouwerie,
and it was beyond the Voorstadt, nearly a mile from the town, not far from the Collect Pond. But it took them twenty minutes to walk to Wall Street, not half a day. And, after a lifetime of being misfits and almost three years of wandering, here in the wilderness of Manhattan Lucas and Sally had a place of their own.