Read Online The Wishing Thread by Lisa Van Allen - Free Book Online Page B

subserviently once again, the slaves returned to the church on the grassy mound—heaving its fieldstone walls higher and higher toward God and the big valley sky.
    But once again, the millpond blew its dam. And once again, the church construction was halted. Repeatedly this happened. Rupture, pause. Rupture, pause. Until finally, one of Philipse’s slaves pulled his master aside to tell him that God had sent him a dream. Until the Old Dutch Church—which was of course the
new
Dutch church at the time—was overflowing with people and prayer, the dam would never hold. And sure enough, once the little chapel was up and running, the millpond did not burst again.
    At least, that’s how the old folks told it—a story unchanged since 1697, when wolves still howled by night in the wooded hillsides of Manhattan, when the Weckquaesgeck hunted beaver in exchange for teakettles and guns, and when mast-thick forests were still dotted with healthy American chestnuts.
    But the story of the Stitchery was not so firmly fixed in people’s minds as the story of the Old Dutch Church. Nor was it so cheery. Some people had heard that the Van Ripper house was haunted by a girl with yellow braids, a pointy white-winged hat, and little wooden
klompen
on her feet. But more than likely, the true story of the Stitchery—if such a thing existed—was the story that the Van Rippers told one another, a tale passed down from generation to generation, guarded like the treasure in the tower room. And like so many stories that are meant to explain things, that come sifting down through the ages like falling snow, the story of the Stitchery was a love story, a magical one.
    On fall evenings when the river was a placid brown-gray and the Palisades were at stone-faced attention, Mariah bundled the girls into her bed
—my three little birds
, she called them—and told the story of the Stitchery’s beginnings. It was important, she said, that they always remember where they came from. For the Van Rippers, the Stitchery was at the heart of every decision they would ever make, whether they liked it or not. A person’s future could branch into infinite directions and redirections, but her past always had the same, reliable beginning point.
    And so, the story started the way so many do:
Once upon a
time
. Back when the Stitchery was born, Mariah said, the Hudson Valley was a battleground. It echoed with the sounds of camp songs, drillmasters’ orders, and gunfire. The summer of 1779 was hot, smelling of pond scum, boiled potatoes, and lightning. The Headless Hessian of Sleepy Hollow was scratching behind his ear and complaining about lice, with no notion of how he would go down in history. George Washington was stooping nightly over his maps and his Madeira and halfheartedly daydreaming about Sally Fairfax, who was perfect except for being a loyalist’s wife. The women of the Revolution camped not far from their husbands, boiling the laundry, knitting stockings for men who could wear out a pair a day, and twirling their drop spindles to make strong flax thread.
    Helen Van Ripper, whose maiden name had been buried by time, was among them. She lived in a tent near the army encampment so that she could be with the husband she had married only a few months before. Helen was young and strong; she had predictable blond hair beneath the flaps of her Dutch cap, but her fondness for a sweet
koekie
or two each evening lent her a bit of stylish plumpness beneath her chin. Every day she woke to the hot summer sun, the chirp of crickets and clatter of locusts, the cardinals whooping and blackbirds chirring in the trees, and she wondered if today she would be widowed.
    One day a sentry rushed to General Washington’s side with news that a line of lobsterbacks were marching on the camp. He saw them across the distant clearing, their bright red coats flapping in time to an inaudible fife and drum. Alarms were raised. Muskets and rifles were made ready. But when