World's End

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Old Jan nodded. Then he turned to point at a gap in the trees beyond the barn, and Jeremias, standing at the door now with Staats and Meintje, with Douw and Barent, Klaes and little Jannetje, saw a gaunt figure wrapped in a raccoon coat emerge from the shadows. “Your sister,” old Jan began, turning back to him, and all at once Jeremias could feel the blood beating in his ears. Katrinchee. He hadn’t given her a thought in ages. For all he knew she might have been dead, so completely had she vanished from the community. “Your sister,” the Indian repeated, but his voice trailed off. He looked at Jeremias and his eyes were asleep.

  “Yes? What about her?” Staats said.

  From across the field came the sound of Mohonk’s voice, urgent and nagging, and old Jan’s head jerked up as if he’d been caught napping. “She thinks,” he murmured, “you are burned up and dead. “She’s—” and his voice gave out.

  “Jan, Jan—snap out of it,” Staats growled, taking the Indian by the arm, but it was the sound of Mohonk’s voice that brought him around again. Mohonk cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted a second time, and old Jan’s eyes cleared momentarily. He swept their faces with a distant gaze and said, “A glass of beer.”

  “Yes, yes, beer,” Staats said. “But first the message.”

  He looked at them as if he’d just come into the world. “Your sister,” he repeated for the third time, “she’s a Weckquaesgeek whore.”

  Staats van der Meulen was a compassionate man. There was no room for her in the house, but he fixed up a pallet in the barrack of the barn and Katrinchee crept into the straw with her child like some shorn and abandoned madonna. Oxen snorted, cows lowed, swallows flitted among the shadows. Meintje bit her lip and sent a basket of day-old bread and a bit of milk cheese out to her. “This is only temporary,” she warned Staats, leveling her wooden spoon at him. “Tomorrow—and here she might have been talking of a matricide or leper—“she goes.”

  Tomorrow became the next day and then the next. “We can’t just turn her out to go back to the savages,” Staats argued, but Meintje was adamant. The girl was fallen, she was subversive and unrepentant, a miscegenator, and they couldn’t have her around the children. “I give you to the end of the week,” she warned.

  For his part, Jeremias knew nothing of the conflict broiling around him. He was spending most of his time out in the barn with Katrinchee and Squagganeek, relearning the past, and he was too elated to notice much of anything. A week before he’d been fatherless, motherless, bereft of siblings, his nearest blood relation an uncle in Schobbejacken he hardly knew. And now, not only had his sister been restored to him, but wonder of wonders, he’d become an uncle himself. He sat for hours with Squagganeek, playing at cards or Trock, staring into the child’s eyes and seeing his father, his mother, seeing little Wouter. There was never any doubt in his mind: of course Staats and Meintje would take them in. Of course they would.

  But when the week was up, Meintje took matters into her own hands. There were no tears, no fits, no raised voices or recriminations. When Staats and the children awoke at first light to the bleating of unmilked goats and the petulant squabbling of unfed chickens, they found the hearth cold, and Meintje, still in her nightgown, seated in her rocker on the far side of the room. What’s more, her hands were clasped together, as if in prayer, and she was facing the wall. “Meintje—what is it?” Staats cried, rushing to her. “Are you all right? Is it the grippe?” She said nothing. He took hold of her hands. They were lifeless, they were dead. She was staring at the wall.

  Within minutes, the house was in an uproar. Meintje, who’d never before sat down in her life except to shuck peas or darn stockings and whose hands had never been idle, had been stricken by some terrible and enervating affliction—she’d become one of the living dead, unhearing, unseeing, unmoving. “Moeder!” cried little Jannetje, flinging herself at her mother’s feet, while the baby, little Klaes, howled as if all the world’s dole had suddenly been revealed to him. Meintje never even turned her head. Jeremias hovered uneasily in the background, exchanging looks with Douw. Then he went out to see to his sister.

  Meintje sat there for six days. No one saw her move, not even to get up and relieve herself. Sometimes her eyes were closed; sometimes they were fixed on the wall in an unblinking stare. Talking to her—asking if she wanted to eat, sleep, see a doctor, send back to Volendam for her aged mother—was like talking to a stone. Meanwhile, the family managed as best it could. Douw and Barent tried their hands at cooking, Staats did the wash, and once, in desperation, Jeremias attempted a batch of corn cakes that looked and tasted like the residue of a chimney fire. Before long, Meintje’s kitchen—the envy of the neighborhood, refulgent as an ice pond and scoured right on down to the cracks of the floorboards—was a festering quagmire of food scraps, barnyard muck and shattered crockery. Finally, on the eve of the seventh day, she spoke.

  The family was startled. They’d got so used to her silence and immobility they’d forgotten she was there at all. This was not the wife and mother they’d known a week ago, this was a piece of furniture, a footstool, a coatrack. Odds and ends had begun to accumulate around her like detritus: socks, vegetable peels, a half-chewed carrot. Jannetje’s doll lay nose down in her lap, Klaes’ cap was flung over the back of the chair and the Trock board had somehow become wedged between her shoulder and the chair arm. Now, as she spoke, the entire family started up in fright, as if the floorboards had shouted “You’re trampling me!” or the kettle had shrieked as the kindling caught fire beneath it. For all that, her message was pretty straightforward. Staats slapped his forehead, Jeremias went cold. Meintje spoke to the wall, four words only, each one bitten off as if it cost a thousand guilders: “Is she gone yet?”

  For Jeremias, the choice was clear. He wheeled around, thumped through the door, stalked across the yard and into the barn. Five minutes later he emerged with Squagganeek on his back and the shorn and wild-eyed Katrinchee at his side. He took nothing with him: no clothes, no tools, no food. He didn’t look back.

  It took Staats nearly a week to find him. He traveled as far south as the Sint Sink village, went north to Cold Spring and east to Crom’s Pond. He knocked at farmhouse doors, poked his head into shanties, wigwams and taverns, and got the same answer everywhere he went: no one had seen a one-legged boy, nor a shorn meisje or half-breed toddler either—it was almost as if they’d vanished from the face of the earth. But Staats persisted. He had to find them, had to tell Jeremias how he felt, had to explain and absolve himself. It was Meintje—he couldn’t do anything with her. If it was up to him he would have found room under his roof for Katrinchee and her bastard too. He would have. Jeremias knew that. It was just that Meintje was a strong-willed woman, that’s all, a woman who stuck to her principles. …

  Staats wasn’t a man for words, but he rehearsed his speech like a practiced orator as he plodded through the woods or walked his horse along the glittering mud banks of the river. If it weren’t for Douw, though, he might never have had the chance to deliver it. Jeremias wasn’t in Croton or Crom’s Pond or Beverwyck or Poughkeepsie either. Douw could have told him that. After all, they’d slept in the same bed for two and a half years, they’d roamed the hills together, sat over hornbooks in the Crane parlor, filched pumpkins and crept up side by side on nesting quail and dozing frogs—Douw knew him as well as he knew himself. When finally his father thought to ask, and Douw let him know where Jeremias would almost certainly have gone, Staats stared at him dumbfounded for a moment, then cursed himself. Of course: the old farm.

  That evening Staats ate a hurried supper of bread and porridge, and then made his way on foot out to the Van Brunt place. It was dusk when he got there, fireflies cutting holes in the shadows, the boles of the trees slipping in and out of rank, cicadas chattering, mosquitoes on the wing. At first he saw nothing—or rather, he saw leaves and trees, the ruins of the cabin, the white oak in its full vigor—but then, as he edged closer, he saw that Jeremias’ rotting lean-to, the lean-to of
his exile and abandonment, was freshly covered with sheets of elm bark. And there was a sound he picked up now too, a scraping or rasping that could have come from no animal he knew.

  He found Jeremias crouched over the carcass of a rabbit, skinning it with a sharpened stone. Katrinchee and Squagganeek, who’d been gathering kindling, looked up with startled faces. “Jeremias,” Staats said, and when the boy shot him a glance over his shoulder, his eyes were feral and cold.

  Staats repeated the name twice more, then delivered his halting speech. He’d brought along an axe and a knife, and he held them out now to Jeremias, along with the basket of food—bread, smoked shad and cabbage—Meintje had packed for him. Jeremias said nothing. “Won’t you come home?” Staats asked him, and it was almost a whisper.

  “This is my home,” Jeremias said.

  It was crazy. Hopeless. Irresponsible. June already, and the crops in the ground, and Jeremias wanted to make a go of it. A cripple with a half-mad sister and her little shit-pants bastard, and he wanted to rebuild the cabin, reclaim the fields, put in a tardy crop and harvest for winter. Meintje clucked her tongue over it, Douw stared down into his cup of cider. But the following morning, Staats, Douw and ten-year-old Barent were there with their tools and a hamper of food that could have provisioned the English fleet. Jeremias embraced them solemnly, one by one. Then they started plowing.

  Over the weeks, the entire community pitched in. Reinier Oothouse lent a hand with the carpentry, Hackaliah Crane stopped by with his team, Oom Egthuysen pledged a milk cow that properly belonged to the patroon and Meintje took up a collection among the huts vrouwen for the odd cup and saucer, bedding and cookware. Even Jan Pieterse got into the act, donating two barrels of ’Sopus ale, a sack of seed onions and a new plowshare and moldboard. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to get them on their feet. By early July, Jeremias had wheat and corn in the ground and a patch of pumpkin, calabash and turnip sprouting outside the door, and Katrinchee, now nearly nineteen, was presiding over her own kitchen for the first time in her young life. The cabin had gone up in two weeks, right over the charred remnants of the old one, and though it was crude, musty, close and dank, it would keep them alive through the winter. Things were looking up.

  How the patroon got wind of it was a mystery to Staats (old Van Wart was afflicted in knuckle and toe by a virulent eruption of the gout, and hadn’t been up from Croton in six months or more), but get wind of it he did. The patroon was incensed. He was being taken advantage of while he lay on his sickbed. There were squatters at Nysen’s Roost, freeloaders, vagrants who’d moved in like skulking savages and laid claim to his land without bothering to acknowledge his sovereignty or make arrangements to pay him rent. It was intolerable. An outrage to the laws of man and God, and a thumbing of the nose at the very lineaments of a just society. He sent the schout to investigate.

  Joost didn’t relish the job. And he didn’t want to bring Neeltje along either. He really didn’t. It wasn’t that he expected trouble—not at this stage, at any rate—but that he was afraid she might see something she shouldn’t. Who knew who these people were? They could be drunk and depraved, living in sin, eating offal and sucking oyster shells; they could be half-breeds or Yankees or runaway slaves. All he knew was that a family—man, woman and child—had taken up residence on the Nysen place and that it was his job either to settle them in properly as tenants of the patroon or evict them. No, he definitely didn’t want to bring his daughter along. But then Neeltje had other ideas. “Vader,” she pleaded, giving him a look that would have stripped the feathers from an angel’s wing, “won’t you take me along with you? Please?” It would be so easy, she argued. He could leave her at Jan Pieterse’s while he saw to his business and then come for her afterward. Moeder had a whole list of things she needed, and why shouldn’t he save himself some time and let her get them? She could pick up little presents for the younkers too. “Oh, please, please?” she begged, and Ans and Trijintje, nine and ten respectively, looked on with hopeful faces. “There’s so much we need.”

  So he’d saddled the one-eyed nag and gone up to the patroon’s stable for the mare, and they set out for the upper manor house for the first time since spring and the Crane/Oothouse dispute. Joost was miserable. The day was hot, the deerflies were a plague and a menace, the baldric tugged at his shoulder and the silver plume hung in his eyes, and with each lurching step the nag took he swore he’d rather be out on the bay dipping for crabs, but he went on anyway, ever responsive to the call of duty. Neeltje, on the other hand, didn’t mind the heat a bit. Or the deerflies either. She was going to Jan Pieterse’s, and her sisters weren’t. That was enough for her.

  They stopped in at the upper manor house for a bite to eat, and the place was as cool as a cellar with its great three-foot-thick walls. Vrouw van Bilevelt, who, along with Cubit the slave and his wife, looked after the place, served them a cold cream soup and crabcakes. They paid their respects to Gerrit Jacobzoon de Vries and his family, who’d managed the upper farm and overseen the mill since the death of the patroon’s brother, and then made their way down to the Blue Rock so that Neeltje could do her shopping while Joost saw to the interlopers at Nysen’s Roost. But when they got there, they found the trading post deserted and the door barred. Neeltje, biting her lip in frustration, tried the latch sixteen times and.knocked at the door till Joost thought her knuckles would crack open. Then she discovered Jan Pieterse’s note. In the dirt. Dipping crabs, she read aloud. Back at six. Joost shook his head. It was barely two-thirty. There was nothing to do but take Neeltje along with him.

  On the way up the hill from Acquasinnick Creek, through the woods that were haunted by the phantoms of murdered Kitchawanks and the unhappy daughters of Wolf Nysen, he told her that he didn’t expect any trouble, but that for her own safety she should come no nearer than the edge of the clearing and under no circumstances should she attempt to interfere or to speak with these people. Was that clear? Neeltje looked glumly at the splintered rock and rotting trunks that lay around her, at the shadows that were like pools in the belly of a cave, and nodded her head. She had no interest in this place or these people, no interest in her father’s affairs, for that matter. All she cared about was Jan Pieterse’s, and Jan Pieterse’s, of all days of the year, had to be closed today. She was so frustrated she felt like shrieking till her lungs turned inside out. And she would have done it too if her father weren’t there—and if the place weren’t quite so hushed and gloomy.

  Before long they’d reached the top of the rise and emerged on a clearing dominated by a single high-crowned tree. On the left was a tumbledown wall and to the right a crude cabin of notched green logs. There was no barn, no pond, no orchard and no animals but for a sickly cow tethered beneath the tree. The place seemed deserted. “Stay here,” her father said, and he straightened up in his saddle and jogged forward into the dooryard. “Hello!” he called. “Anybody home?”

  Not a sound.

  Her father called out again, and the cow gave him a baleful look before dropping its head to crop a tuft of grass at the perimeter of its tether. It was then that a woman appeared from around the corner of the house, a bucket in her hand. The first thing Neeltje noticed was her feet. They were shoeless and filthy, gleaming with fresh muck as if she’d just waded out of a bog or something. And her dress—it was an obvious hand-me-down, patched, faded and stained, and so worn the flesh showed through. But that wasn’t the worst of it. As the woman drew closer to her father, Neeltje saw with a jolt that what she’d taken to be a cap was no cap at all—this wasn’t linen, but flesh. The woman was bald! Scalped, plucked, denuded, her head as smooth and pale and barren as Dominie Van Schaik’s. Neeltje felt something tighten in her stomach. How could a woman do that to herself? she wondered. It was so … so ugly. Was it lice, was that it? Was she a harlot cast out of Connecticut? A Roman nun? Had the Indians got hold of her and … and violated her?

  “I’m the sheriff here,” she heard her father say, “Joost Cats. I
’ve been sent by the lawful owner and proprietor of these lands to inquire as to your presence here.”

  The woman looked bewildered, lost, as if it were she who’d arrived at this place for the first time in her life and not Neeltje. Did she speak Dutch even?

  “You have no right here,” Joost said. “Who are you and where have you come from?”

  “Katrinchee,” the woman said finally, setting down the bucket. “I’m Katrinchee.”

  But then two more figures appeared around the corner of the house—a child, pale eyes in a dark face—and a man swaying awkwardly over a muddy wooden peg. It took her a moment—everything so different, the place so strange—before she recognized him. Jeremias. The name had been on her lips before. In the spring. For a month or so after the last trip it had been with her at the oddest moments—in the early hours of the morning, at prayers, as she sat at the loom or butterchurn. Jeremias. But what was he doing here?

  She was no more surprised than her father. The schout jerked his head back as if he’d been snatched by the collar, springing up out of his customary slouch like a jack-in-the-box. “Van Brunt?” he gasped, his voice breaking with incredulity. “Jeremias Van Brunt?”

  Jeremias crossed the yard to where the schout perched atop the one-eyed nag. He stopped directly in front of him, no more than a yard away, measuring him with a steady gaze. “That’s right,” he said. “I’ve come back home.”

  “But you can’t. … These are private lands.”

  “Private lands, my ass,” Jeremias said, and he bent to pluck a stick of firewood from the ground. The woman drew back and pressed the child to her.

  Joost snatched angrily at the reins and the nag shivered and showed its teeth in protest. The boy was impossible. A renegade. A loser. He had no respect for authority, no knowledge of the world and nothing to sustain him but his self-righteous smirk. Joost remembered the defiant little face in the van der Meulens’ doorway, the cocky thrust of the shoulders at Jan Pieterse’s, his daughter’s laughter and the gift of sugar candy that was like a violation of his fatherhood. He was beside himself. “You owe the patroon,” he snarled.