New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [225]
One picture in particular struck her. It was taken on the West Side, where the line of railroad tracks ran up alongside the River Hudson. Above, there were heavy clouds, whose gleaming edges seemed to echo the dull gleam of the metal tracks below. The river was not gleaming, though, but lay like a huge, dark snake beside the tracks. And upon the tracks, some close by, others already far in the distance, walked the sad, scattered figures of Negroes, leaving town.
It was a common enough sight, she had no doubt. The underground railroad, as everyone called it, had always brought escaped slaves up to New York. But now, with the Civil War raging, that trickle had turned into a flood. And when this tide of Negroes reached New York, they mostly found neither jobs nor welcome, so that, on any day, you might see them setting off up another kind of railroad, hoping maybe to catch a ride on a passing train, or at least walk along the iron road that led to the far north, in the hope of a warmer reception somewhere there.
With its strange, eerie light, the hard gleam of the tracks and the blackness of the river, the photograph captured perfectly the desolate poetry of the scene.
“You like it?” asked Theodore.
“Oh yes,” she answered. “It’s so sad. But …”
“Harsh?”
“I didn’t realize that a rail track like that”—she hardly knew how to say it—“could also be so beautiful.”
“Aha.” Theodore looked at his sister with a pleased expression. “Mary has an eye.”
They had to leave soon after that. But as the carriage took them southward toward the ferry, Mary turned to her friend and said: “I wish I understood photographs the way you do, Gretchen.”
Gretchen smiled. “Theodore taught me a little, that’s all. I can show you some things, if you want.”
The ferry left from near Battery Point, and the journey took a couple of hours. It was delightful, on a sunny day, to pass across the upper corner of the great harbor where the ships entered the East River. From there they followed the huge curve of Brooklyn’s shore until, reaching the narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island, they sailed gradually out into the vast openness of the Lower Bay.
At one point, passing a small fort that lay just off the Brooklyn shore, one of their fellow passengers remarked: “That’s Fort Lafayette. They’ve got a bunch of men from the South in there. President’s holding them without charge and without trial.” Though whether he approved or disapproved of this violation of the Southern men’s rights the gentleman didn’t say.
Nor just then did Gretchen or Mary want to know about the fate of the prisoners. For as the salty Atlantic breeze caught their faces, and the ferry began to dip and roll excitingly in the choppy waters, they got their first glimpse, to the south-east, of the broad and sandy beaches of their destination.
Coney Island.
The quarrel between Frank Master and his wife the following afternoon went exactly as he planned. It was four o’clock when he got home and he found her in the parlor.
“Tom here?” he asked cheerfully. He was told their son was out. “Well, anyway,” he said with a smile, “it’s all fixed. He won’t be drafted. Paid my three hundred dollars and got a receipt. Then I went uptown to see how the draft was going. Didn’t appear to be any trouble.”
Hetty greeted this information with silence.
In the two years since the armed conflict between the Northern and Southern states of America had begun, all the Union regiments had been volunteers. Only recently had President Lincoln been obliged to order a draft. The names of all eligible males were put into a big lottery, and a selection made by a draw.
Unless you had money, of course. If you had money, you sent a poor person to fight in your place, or paid three hundred dollars to the authorities, who’d find someone for you.
To Frank Master it seemed reasonable enough. And it sure as hell seemed a good idea to young Tom, who had no desire to go down to