Taking stock of the situation the following morning, Jeremias understood that his options were limited. He’d just turned seventeen. He was short a leg and wore the brand of the outlaw on his face, his parents were dead, his sister’s mind was like a butterfly touched by the frost, and the gaping hungry mouth of his half-breed nephew haunted his dreams. What was he going to do—bring the patroon and his smirking son to their knees by starving himself to death in the winter woods? Wearily, painfully (the stump of his leg ached as if his father were taking the saw to it at that very moment), he pushed himself up from the damp straw pallet, took a mouthful of cornmeal, and went out to his chores. He finished hoeing up the weeds, split a cord and a half of wood to take the buzz of the Jongheer’s disdain out of his head, and decided, between two random and otherwise unremarkable strokes of the axe, to have his nephew christened in the church and admitted to the community as a Dutchman and free citizen of the Colony of New York.
When he came to Katrinchee with the idea, she looked down at her hands. Squagganeek sat on the floor, watching him with Harmanus’ eyes. “I thought we should name him after vader” Jeremias said.
Katrinchee wouldn’t hear of it. “The guilt,” she whispered, and her voice trailed off.
“Well, what about ‘Wouter’ then?”
She bit her lip and slowly shook her head from side to side.
Two days later, when Jeremias came in from the fields, his sister was smiling over a pan of rising dough. “I want to call him ‘Jeremias,’ ” she said. “Or how do the Englishers have it—‘Jeremy?’ ”
The surname was another story. On the one hand, the boy was a Van Brunt—just look at his eyes—but on the other, he wasn’t. And if he were to be christened a Van Brunt, who would the Dominie list as his father? They wrestled with the problem through a blistering afternoon and a mosquito-plagued night: in the morning they agreed that the boy should be named for his natural father, who was, after all, the son of a chieftain. It was only proper. Jeremias milked his cows, then sent for Dominie Van Schaik.
It was September before the Dominie actually made it out to the farm to perform the ceremony, but neither Katrinchee nor Jeremias was much bothered by the delay. Once they’d reached their decision, it was as if the thing had already been accomplished. Now they were legitimate. They’d weathered the worst, they’d been orphaned, deserted, evicted and shunned, and now they were members of the community once more, fully sanctioned in the eyes of God, man and patroon alike.
And so things went, on through the fall and the days that slid ever more rapidly toward night, through the harvest that was less than bountiful but more than meager, through the lulling warmth of Indian summer and the cold sting of the first blighting frost. Then one afternoon, late in October, Jeremias was out on the far verge of the cornfield, burning stumps and thinking of the way the blouse clung to Neeltje’s upper arms, when all at once he felt himself gripped by nameless fears and vague apprehensions. His pulse quickened, smoke stung his eyes, he could feel the scar come alive on his face. Not two days earlier, a half-plucked gobbler in his lap, his hands glutinous with feathers and his mind wandering all the way down to Croton, he’d glanced up and seen the figure of his father, clear as day, tearing across the field in his steaming nightshirt. But now, though the blood was beating in his temples and his scalp felt as if it were being manipulated by invisible fingers, though he looked over both shoulders and stared down his nose at the four corners of the field, he saw nothing.
No sooner had he gone back to his work, however, than he was startled by a voice that seemed to leap up out of the blaze before him, as if the very fire itself were speaking. “You. Who gives you the right to farm here?” rumbled the voice in very bad Dutch. Jeremias rubbed the smoke from his eyes. And saw that a man—a giant, red-bearded, dressed in skins and with a woodsman’s axe flung over his shoulder—stood to the right of the burning stump. The smoke shifted, and the man took a step forward.
Jeremias could see him more clearly now. His face was as soiled as a coal miner’s, he wore leggings after the Indian fashion, and the eyes stared out of his head with the exophthalmic vehemence of the eyes of the mad. A pair of coneys, still wet with blood, dangled from his belt. “Who gives you the right?” he repeated.
Backing up a step, wondering how, with his bad leg, he could possibly hope to outrun this madman, Jeremias found himself murmuring the name of his landlord and master as if it were an incantation. “Oloffe Stephanus Van Wart,” he said, “… the patroon.”
“The patroon, is it?” the madman returned, mincing his words in mockery. “And who gives him the right?”
Jeremias tried to hold the stranger’s eyes while casting about for something he could use to defend himself—a stone, a root, the jawbone of an ass, anything. “Their … Their High Mightinesses,” he stammered. “Originally, I mean. Now it’s the duke of York and King Charles of the Englishers.”
The madman was grinning. A flat, toneless laugh escaped his lips. “You’ve learned your lesson well,” he said. “And what are you, then—a man to forge his own destiny or somebody’s nigger slave?”
All at once the world rose up to scream in his ears, the harsh caterwauling of the hollow withered dead: all at once Jeremias understood who it was standing there before him. In desperation he snatched up a stone and crouched low, David in the shadow of Goliath. He understood that he was about to die.
“You,” the madman said, laughing again. “You know who I am?”
Jeremias could barely choke out a response. His legs felt weak and his throat had gone dry. “Yes,” he whispered. “You’re Wolf Nysen.”
Landless Gentry
Marguerite Mott, elder sister of Muriel, edged closer to Depeyster, scuffing the ancient peg-and-groove floor with the feet of the William and Mary side chair. Like her sister, she was a big moon-faced blonde in her mid-fifties who favored false eyelashes and cocktail dresses in colors like champagne and chartreuse. Unlike her sister, however, she worked for a living. Selling real estate. “He’s rejected the bid,” she said, looking up from the sheaf of papers in her lap.
“Son of a bitch.” Depeyster Van Wart rose from his chair, and when he spoke again, his voice was pinched to a yelp. “You kept this strictly confidential, right? He had no idea it was me?”
Marguerite pressed her lashes together in a coy little blink and gave him a look of wide-eyed rectitude. “Like you told me,” she said, “I’m bidding on behalf of a client from Connecticut.”
Depeyster turned away from her in exasperation. He had an urge to pluck something up off the sideboard—an antique inkwell, a china bibelot—and fling it through the window. He was a great flinger. He’d flung Lionel trains, music boxes and croquet mallets as a boy, squash rackets, golf clubs and highball glasses as he grew older. There was actually something in his hand, some damnable piece of Indian bric-a-brac—what was it, a calumet? a tomahawk?—before he got hold of himself. He set the thing down and reached into his breast pocket for a tranquillizing pinch of cellar dust.
“So, what are you saying,” he said, swinging around on her, “the place isn’t for sale then—to anybody? You mean to tell me the old fart isn’t hard up for cash?”
“No, he wants to sell. Word is he’s trying to raise money to leave his grandson something.” Marguerite paused to snap open a compact, peer into it as into a bottomless well, and dab something on the flanges of her nose. “He thinks twenty-five hundred’s too low, that’s all.”
Of course. The son of a bitch. The hypocrite. To each according to his need, share and share alike, the crime of property and all the rest of it. Slogans, and nothing more. When it came down to it, Peletiah Crane was as venal as the next man. Twenty-five hundred an acre for a piece of property that had been worthless since the time of the red Indians, twenty-five hundred an acre for land he’d practically stolen from Depeyster’s father for something like a hundredth of that. And still it wasn’t enough for him. “What’s he want then?”
; Marguerite gave him another demure little blink and dropped her voice to soften the blow: “He did mention a figure.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t get excited now. Remember, we are bargaining with him.”
“Yeah, yeah: what’s he want?”
Her voice was nothing, tiny, a voice speaking from the depths of a cavern: “Thirty-five hundred.”
“Thirty-five!” he echoed. “Thirty-five?” He had to turn away from her again, his hands trembling, and take another quick hit of dust. The unfairness of it all! The cheat and deception! He was no megalomaniac, no cattle baron, no land-greedy parvenu: all he wanted was a little piece of his own back.
“We could bargain him down, I’m sure of it.” Marguerite’s voice rose up in lusty crescendo, rich and strong, invigorated by the prospect of the deal. “All’s I need is your go-ahead.”
Depeyster wasn’t listening. He was reflecting sadly on how far the Van Warts had fallen. His ancestors—powerful, indomitable, hawk-eyed men who tamed the land, shot bears, skinned beavers and brought industry and agronomy to the valley, men who made a profit, for Christ’s sake—had owned half of Westchester. They’d built something unique, something glorious, and now it was finished. Eaten away, piece by piece, by blind legislators and land-hungry immigrants, by swindlers and bums and Communists. First they started carving it up into towns, then they built their roads and turnpikes, and before anyone could stop them they’d voted away the rights of the property owners and deeded the land to the tenants. Democracy: it was a farce. Another brand of communism. Rob the rich, screw the movers and shakers, the pioneers and risk takers and captains of industry, and let all the no-accounts vote themselves a share of somebody else’s pie.
And if the politicians weren’t bad enough, the crooks and confidence men were right there behind them. His great-grandfather was fleeced in the Quedah Merchant scheme, his grandfather lost half his fortune to touts and tipsters and the other half to thespian ladies in bustles and black stockings, and then his own father, a man with developed tastes, fell like a gored toreador among the trampling hoofs of the stockbrokers. Sure, there were ten acres left, there was the house and the business and the other interests too, but it was nothing. A mockery. The smallest shard of what had been. Landless, heirless, Depeyster Van Wart stood there in that venerable parlor, the last offshoot of a family that had ruled all the way to the Connecticut border, frustrated over a matter of fifty acres. Fifty acres. His forefathers wouldn’t have pissed on fifty acres.
“What do you say? Should we split the difference with him and come in at three thousand?”
He hadn’t forgotten Marguerite—she was there at his back, calculating, homing in, his woeful ally—but he was too caught up in his fugue of bitter reflection to respond. The thing that galled him above all was that the slobbering incontinent senile old pinko bastard had held his subversive rallies on the place—on land that had been in the Van Wart family from time immemorial. He’d sullied it, bloodied it, defiled it. This was land Depeyster’s ancestors had fought the Indians for, and old man Crane had turned it into a picnic ground for fellow travelers. All right, yes, Depeyster had got him back for that—got him good, what with organizing the Loyalty rallies and then pressuring the school board till they forced the old fraud into early retirement—but still, even after all this time, the thought of those ragtag niggers and Jews and folksingers trampling over his property made his face go hot with rage.
“Depeyster?”
“Hm?” He turned back around again. Marguerite was leaning so far forward she looked like a sprinter crouching in the blocks.
“What do you think?”
“About what?”
“Splitting the difference. Coming in at three thousand.”
What he thought was that he wouldn’t pay three thousand an acre for the tip of Mount Ararat when the second flood came, what he thought was that he’d wait till the old bastard kicked off and then go after the half-wit grandson. What he said was: “Forget it.”
If Marguerite was about to remonstrate with him, she never got the chance. Because at that moment the door was flung open and what appeared to be a troop of marauding gypsies invaded the cool antique confines of the parlor. Depeyster caught a glimpse of scarves and feathers and headbands, hair matted like a dog’s, the stuporous troglodytic expression of the dropout, burnout and drug abuser: his daughter was home. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Behind her, slouch-shouldered and gleaming as if he’d been rubbed with chicken fat, was some sort of spic with an earring and the sick dull eyes of a colicky cow, and behind him, speak of the devil, was the Crane kid, looking as if he’d just been hoisted up out of the Black Hole of Calcutta. “Oh,” Mardi mumbled, on the defensive for once, “I thought you’d … uh, be at work.”
What could he say? Embarrassed in his own parlor, humiliated in front of Marguerite Mott (she was gazing up at the invaders as if at some esoteric form of animal life her sister might have photographed around the Tanzanian water holes), his very hearth and home transmogrified into a hippie crash pad. He could hear the gossip already: “Yes, his daughter. Trumped up like a dope addict or streetwalker or something. And with this, this—God, I don’t know what he was, a Puerto Rican, I guess—and the Crane boy, the one that dropped out of Cornell? Yes, dope is what I heard it was.”
The spic gave him a toothy grin. Mardi, taking the offensive now, shot him a look of the deepest loathing and contempt, and the Crane kid slouched so low his body seemed to collapse in on itself. At that moment, all Depeyster sought was to act casual, to cover himself, brush the whole thing off as if it were just another minor aberration of the environment, on the order of the catalpa tree that dropped its pods in the swimming pool or the mosquitoes that swarmed in great whining clouds over the porch at dusk. But he couldn’t. He was too wrought up. First the news about the property, and now this. He looked down and saw that he was waving his hand spasmodically, as if shooing flies. “Go away,” he heard himself say. “Scat.”
This was what Mardi had been waiting for: an opening, a chink in his armor, a place to drive the spikes in. Glancing over her shoulder for support, she drew herself up, squared her legs and let loose: “So this is what I get, huh? Go away? Like I’m your pet dog or something?” She allowed a fraction of a moment for her rhetoric to hit home, and then delivered the coup de grace: “I do happen to live here, you know. I mean,” and here the great black-rimmed eyes filled with tears and her voice thickened with emotion, “I am your daughter.” Pause. “Even though I know you hate me.”
Behind her, the spic had stopped smiling and begun to shuffle his feet; the Crane kid, stricken with a sudden palsy of the facial muscles, was halfway out the door. Depeyster stood there, poised between grief and surcease, a sordid domestic scenario playing itself out on the Persian carpet while Marguerite Mott looked on. Would he blow up in a rage, take his daughter in his arms and comfort her, stalk out of the room and book the next flight for San Juan? He didn’t know. His mind had gone numb.
And then suddenly, unaccountably, he found himself thinking of Truman’s kid—Walter—and the way he’d looked propped up on his crutches in the office. His hair was longer than Depeyster would have wanted it and there was the first adolescent shadow of a mustache clinging to his upper lip, but he was a solid-looking kid, raw and big-boned, with his father’s jaw and cheekbones and pale faded eyes. Mardi had mentioned him that afternoon in the kitchen. She knew him. Tried to shock her father with it, in fact. Well, he wasn’t shocked. He took one look at these deadheads she was running around with and wished she would take up with somebody like Walter.
“All right,” she was saying, and even the smallest trace of dole had faded from her voice; when she repeated the phrase half a beat later, it had all the punch of a war cry.
He didn’t respond. Or if he did, it was with that same involuntary shooing motion, his hand working of its own accord. No, he wasn’t a bad kid, Walter. A little confused, maybe, but then who wouldn’t be, w
hat with his crazy mother starving herself to death and his father running off with his tail between his legs—worse, running off and leaving him to grow up with a bunch of bleeding hearts and fellow travelers and the like. It was criminal. The kid had heard one side of the story all his life—the wrong side, the twisted, lying and perverted side. It was just the beginning of course, a shot in the dark, one voice raised against a howling multitude, but Depeyster had tried to straighten him out on a few things that afternoon. Beginning with his father.
Patriot, Walter had spat. What do you mean he was a patriot?
I mean he loved his country, Walter, and he fought for it too—in France and Germany, and right here in Peterskill. Tenting his fingers, Depeyster had sunk back in his chair, watching Walter’s eyes. There was something there—the anger, yes, the confusion and the hurt—but something else too: Walter wanted to believe him. For Depeyster it was a revelation. If the child rejected the parent, if Mardi paraded around like a whore and espoused her dime-store radicalism at the dinner table to spit in her father’s eye and undermine everything the community held sacred, then here was a kid who was ready to turn the other way. His parents—foster parents: Jews, Communists, the worst—had fed him hate and lies and their vicious propaganda all his life till he was ready to choke on it. He was clay. Clay to be molded.
You think the Peterskill incidents were nothing? Depeyster said. Walter just stared at him. Well, look what your Communists did four years later with the A-bomb secrets. A patriot fights that kind of business, Walter, fights it with all his heart. And that’s why I say your father was a patriot.
Walter shifted his weight, leaned forward on his crutches. Yeah? And do patriots sell out their friends, their wife, their son?
Yes, Depeyster wanted to say, if they have to. But then he glanced down at the shiny new boot on Walter’s right foot and reminded himself to go easy. Look, Walter, he said, changing tack, you don’t seem to be following me. Communism doesn’t work, it’s as simple as that. Look at Russia today. China. Vietnam. The whole damned Iron Curtain. You want to live like that?
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