World's End

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  She found Christina sunk into the davenport, shoulders bunched, legs clutched to her chest. Beside her, stretched out prone atop an avalanche of children’s books, was Walter. He was asleep—mouth agape, eyelids half-closed—and she was reading to him. Oblivious. Her voice sunk to a weary monotone. “Jack Sprat could eat no fat,” she read, “his wife could eat no lean.”

  “Christina?”

  Christina looked up. In the past six hours she’d been through every fairy tale and nursery rhyme in the house. Cinderella, Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, they all lived happily ever after. Babar, Alice, Toad of Toad Hall, life a bowl of cherries. Then there was Jack—Jack of the beanstalk, Jack of Jill, Jack the housebuilder and Jack the candlestick jumper—and Humpty Dumpty, Wee Willie Winkie and poor Cock Robin. “Have they found him yet?” her mother asked.

  Slowly, reverently, as if it were part of some ritual, Christina closed the book in her lap. Her mother was standing there before her, tanned from her month on the stony shingle of Lake St. Catherine, her hair newly done and a look of permanent anguish on her face. Found him? What she wanted to know was who killed Cock Robin.

  Her mother’s voice came back at her: “Is he all right?’

  She looked up into her mother’s face, the face that had been her sun and moon, her comfort and refuge since she lay helpless in the cradle, the face that vanquished all those horrific others that infested the shadows and leered through her dreams, but all she could think of was poor Cock Robin and the birds of the air that fell a-sighing and a-sobbing when they heard the news. “They found him,” she said finally.

  Her mother was unconsciously clenching and unclenching her fists, there was the rumble of a second car in the driveway, Walter murmured something in his sleep. “They found him,” she repeated. A car door slammed. She could hear her father’s footsteps on the pavement, the stoop, she could see his anxious face through the mesh of the screen.

  “Yes?” her mother said.

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s dead.”

  He wasn’t dead, but far better that he were. By nightfall the Alvings had heard the rumors—had heard Hesh’s version, Lola’s, Lorelee Shapiro’s and Rose Pollack’s—and Christina, stretched the length of her childhood bed like a corpse laid out for embalming, finally admitted the truth. Truman had left her. Left her unprotected at the concert, left her to agonize through two sleepless days and nights, then packed up his things and left her for good. “I can’t believe it,” her mother said. Her father rose from his chair. “I’ll kill him,” he said.

  There was the second concert at the end of that week, big with triumph and pared down with defeat, and then August gave way to September, with its lingering warmth and deluded butterflies, with the fullness that yields to decay. By the time the trees turned, Christina had lost twenty-two pounds. For the first time since she was fifteen she weighed less than a hundred pounds, and her mother was concerned. “Eat,” she said, “you’re wasting away to nothing. Forget him. Forget him and eat. You’ve got to keep your strength up. Think of Walter.”

  She was thinking of Walter. On the first of October, while her mother was out, she met with a lawyer from Yorktown and drew up the papers giving legal guardianship to his godparents in the event of her death. As for her mother’s injunctions, they were meaningless. Eat? She might as well have urged her to fly. One ate to replenish oneself, to renew cells, to build bone and muscle and fat, to live. She didn’t want to live. She wasn’t hungry. Meat sickened her, the smell of cooking was an anathema, fruits were vile and vegetables hateful. Milk, cereal, bread, rice, even potato latkes—they were all poison to her. Her mother would make her pudding, doughnuts, eggs Benedict, she’d appear in her room with a tray of soda crackers and broth and sit there chiding, holding the spoon to her lips as if she were a child still, but it did no good. Christina would force herself to take a swallow, if only to smooth the lines in that kind and solicitous face that hung over her, but the broth was like acid on her stomach and within the hour she’d be hunched over the toilet, gagging till the tears stood out in her eyes.

  Dr. Braun, the family practitioner who’d assuaged her childhood fevers, dabbed at her chicken pox and stitched up her knee when she’d fallen from the precipitous step of the schoolbus, prescribed a sedative and felt it might do her some good to chat with Dr. Arkawy, a colleague who practiced psychiatric medicine. She didn’t want to chat. She spat out the sedatives, clutched Walter and his bright hopeful books to her chest and saw faces, rabid hateful faces, Truman’s the most hateful of all. By the first of November she was down to eightyeight pounds.

  They fed her intravenously at Peterskill Community Hospital but she jerked the IV from her arm whenever they left the room. She was dreaming when they moved her to the other hospital, but she smelled the river strong in her nostrils in that little space between the ambulance and the great heavy fortress door. When they pinned her arms down and started that drip of life, she could feel the water rising around her. Gray, lapping waves, nothing severe, a ripple fanning out across the broad flat surface, rocking the boat as gently as the breeze rocked the cradle of that baby high in the treetops. She was with Truman suddenly, long ago, long before Walter, the bungalow, long before the papers and the books and the party meetings that found his hand entwined in hers. Long before. They were out on the river in his father’s boat, the boat that stank of fish and that was gouged across the gunwales by the friction of a thousand ropes hauling up secrets from the bottom. He’d spread a blanket for her in the bow, there was that peculiar sick-sweet smell of exhaust, the sun was high, the wind had fallen to nothing. What’s that, she asked, over there? That point across the river? He sat at the tiller, grinning. Kidd’s Point, he said, after the pirate. That’s Dunderberg behind it, and straight ahead is what they call the Horse Race.

  She felt the water swell beneath her. She looked up the river to where the mountains fell away in continents of shadow and seagulls hung in oceans of filtered light. Above that, and around the bend, he told her, it’s a clear channel up to West Point. Then we hit Martyr’s Reach. He knew an island there, in the middle of the river, beautiful spot, Storm King on the one side, Breakneck on the other. He was thinking maybe they’d land and have lunch there.

  Lunch. Yes, lunch.

  Pity was, she just wasn’t hungry.

  Sons and Daughters

  It was the morning of Neeltje’s sixteenth birthday, a morning like any other: damp, dismal, curdled with the monotony of routine. There were eggs to be gathered, ducks, geese and chickens to be fed. The fire needed stoking, the porridge thickening, she could feel her fingers go stiff with the thought of the spinning, churning and milling to come. Her father was gone, off somewhere on the patroon’s business and not due back till nightfall, and though it was barely light yet, her mother already sat stiffly at the flax wheel, her right arm rising and falling mechanically, her eyes fixed on the spindle. Her sisters, girls still, warmed themselves at the fire and gazed expectantly into the pot. No one so much as glanced at her as she lifted her cloak down from the hook and slipped into her clogs.

  Feeling hurt and angry—she might as well have been one of the patroon’s black nigger slaves for all the notice anybody took of her—Neeltje slammed out the door, crossed the yard and stopped to poke through the grass for the morning’s eggs. She didn’t ask much—a smile maybe, best wishes on her birthday, a hug from her mother-but what did she get? Nothing. It was her birthday, and no one cared. And why should they? She was just a pair of hands that chopped and milked and scrubbed, a back that lifted, legs that hauled. She was sixteen today, a full-grown woman, an adult, and no one knew the difference.

  Absorbed in bitter reflections, she bent for eggs, her skirts already heavy with dew. Unmilked, the cows mooed emphatically from the barn, while a troop of ragged hens pecked at her heels and cocked their heads to rebuke her with their bright censorious eyes. A pall of mist breathed in off the river with a smell of sludgy bottoms, the dead and drowned, and she shive
red, pulling the cloak tight around her throat. In the next moment she plucked an egg from the new grass along the fence, found two more beneath the canopy of the woodshed, and rose to dry her hands on her apron. It was then—as she straightened up, the basket caught in the crook of her arm, hands bunched in the folds of her apron—that she became aware of a movement off to her left, where the outline of the barn sank into mist. She turned her head instinctively, and there he was, cocked back on his leg, smiling faintly, watching her.

  “Jeremias?” She made a question of it, her voice riding up in surprise, conscious all at once of her uncovered head, the utter plainness of her cloak and skirts, the mud that spattered her yellow peasant’s clogs.

  “Shhhhhh!” He held a finger to his lips and motioned her forward, before receding into the fog at the nether end of the barn. She glanced around her twice—the cows protesting, chickens squabbling, ducks and geese raising an unholy racket down by the pond—and turned to follow him.

  Behind the barn, in the spill of briars and weeds and with the smell of cow dung wafting up around them, he took her hand and wished her a happy birthday (gefeliciteerd met je verjaardag), then dropped his voice and told her to forget the eggs.

  “Forget the eggs? What do you mean?”

  The mist steamed around him. The smile was gone. “I mean you won’t be needing them. Not now.” He opened his mouth to expand on this abrupt and rather cryptic proposition, but seemed to think better of it. He looked down at the ground. “Don’t you know why I’ve come?”

  Neeltje Cats was sixteen years old that day, as short and slight as a child, but ancient with the sagacity of her entrepreneurial and poetical ancestors, the bards and shopkeepers of Amsterdam. She knew why he’d come—would have known even if he hadn’t sent old Jan the Kitchawank to tell her three separate times in the past eight months. “I know,” she whispered, feeling as if, for form’s sake at least, she should fall down at his feet in a swoon or something.

  He’d let go of her hand in the rush of his eloquence on the subject of the eggs, and now he stood there, looking awkward, his arms hanging like empty sleeves. Frustrated, impatient, suffering, the cows bellowed. “It’s all right, then?” Jeremias said finally, addressing a tree trunk twenty feet behind her.

  All right? She’d been dreaming of this moment for months, lying on the rough mattress between her sprawled sisters in the dead black night, struggling to summon the image of him before she drifted off (Jeremias, the prince who would ascend the ladder of her tresses and free her from the hag’s tower, who would slay dragons and crush villains for her, Jeremias of the stonemason’s build and sea-green eyes). She never doubted he would come for her. She’d seen it in his eyes, seen it in the slump of his shoulders as he limped past her in his humiliation and slouched up the Peterskill road, felt it in his touch, heard it in his voice. When old Jan took her aside after delivering missives to the patroon and singing a three-note greeting to her mother from a cousin at Crom’s Pond, she knew before the words had passed his lips that Jeremias Van Brunt sent his good opinion and best wishes. And she knew too when he pressed a slip of paper into her hand that it was from Jeremias and that it would open her life up for her.

  Heart pounding, she’d ducked away from the family gathered around the tottering Indian and hurried out the door in the direction of the privy. When she was out of sight, when she was sure she was beyond the prying eyes of her father, her mother, her sisters, she tore open the slip of paper. Inside, she found a laboriously worked copy of Jacob Cats’ paean to matrimonial ethics. She skimmed the lines, but it wasn’t the poem that stirred her, it was the valediction. In the crude block letters of an unpracticed hand, Jeremias had written Eye wll cum for u, and then scrawled his signature across the bottom of the page in a deluge of loops and slashes. And now, as Neeltje stood there in her muddy clogs and uncombed hair, the basket of eggs clutched to her chest and the dust of sleep barely wiped from her eyes, she saw that he was as good as his word. All right? It was perfect.

  “Your father doesn’t think much of me,” he said.

  She reached up to trace the scar along the length of his cheek. “No matter,” she whispered. “I do.”

  It took him a minute—a minute punctuated by the lowing of the cattle and suffused with the fishy reek of the river—before he moved into her arms. There was the fog, the tsk-tsking of the hens, the rank wild odor of the awakening season. When he spoke finally, his voice was thick. “Put down the basket,” he said.

  The basket was still lying there in the mud at four that afternoon when Joost Cats climbed down from the bony back of Donder, his purblind nag, and smoothed the seat of his sweat-soaked and tumultuous pantaloons. He’d spent the morning in Van Wartville, mediating yet another dispute between Hackaliah Crane and Reinier Oothouse—this time over the disposition of a lean, slack-bellied sow the Yankee had caught rooting up his seed onions—after which he’d hurried home with a pair of Jan Pieterse’s best Ferose stockings for Neeltje on her birthday. As he led the wheezing nag into the barn, thinking of how Reinier Oothouse, in his cups, had gone down on his knees before the Yankee and pleaded for the sow’s life like a father pleading for his child (“Don’t kill her, don’t hurt my little Speelgoed, she didn’t mean it, never been naughty before, anything, I’ll pay anything you ask”), his two youngest burst from the house, arms and legs churning, faces lit with the joy of disaster. “Vader! Vader!” they cried in breathless piping unison, “Neeltje’s gone!”

  Gone? What were they talking about? Gone? But in the next instant he saw his wife at the door, saw the look on her face and knew it was true.

  Together, led by the fluttering Trijintje and intoxicated Ans, they rounded the corner of the barn to hover over the spilled basket, the tracked and muddy earth, the shattered eggs. “Was it Indians?” Ans shouted. “Did they kidnap her and make her their white squaw?”

  Bent like a sickle and stroking his puff of chin hair, Joost tried to picture it—naked red devils slipping from the weeds to bludgeon his defenseless little Neeltje, a rough hand cuffed over her mouth, the stinking hut and moldering furs, the queue of greasy randy braves jostling at the door. … “When?” he murmured, turning to his wife.

  Geesje Cats was a dour woman, hipless, fleshless, wasted, a woman who bore only daughters and wore her troubles at the corners of her mouth. “This morning,” she said, her eyes stung with dread. “It was Trijintje—she found it, the basket. We called and called.”

  The mud was puckered in dumb mouths that told the schout nothing. Staring down at the sad upended basket and the spill of egg yolk that seemed to claw at the earth like the fingers of a grasping hand, he relived the scenes of violence and depravity he’d encountered in his seven years as schout, drowned men and stabbed men floating before his eyes, women abused, bereft, violated, bones that poked through the flesh and eyes that would see no more. When he looked up he was shouting. “You searched the orchard?” he demanded. “The river? The pond? Did you inquire at the patroon’s?”

  Startled, shamefaced, his wife and daughters lowered their eyes. They had. Yes, vader, yes, echtgenoot, they had.

  Well, then, had they gone to the de Groodts, the Coopers, the van Dincklagens? To the inn? The ferry? The pasture, the stable, van der Donk’s Hill?

  A light rain had begun to fall. Ans, ten years old, began to sniffle. “All right!” he shouted, “all right: I’ll go to the patroon.”

  The patroon was supping, bent low over a plate of pickled beets, hard cheese and a shad in cream sauce he was glumly forking up as if to remark the disparity between this and Zuider Zee herring, when Joost was shown into the room. The patroon’s unburdened hand was bandaged against the knife thrusts of his gout, and his face was flushed the color of a rare wine. Vrouw Van Wart, a woman given to the denial of the flesh, sat stiffly beside him, a single dry crust before her, while his brother’s widow and her daughter Mariken perched on the hard bench opposite her. The Jongheer, in a lace collar the size of a wheel of Gouda, oc
cupied the place of honor at the foot of the table. “My Savior in Heaven!” cried the patroon. “What is it, Cats, that couldn’t keep?”

  “It’s my daughter, Mijnheer: she’s disappeared.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Neeltje. My eldest. She went out for chores this morning and there’s been no trace of her since.”

  The patroon set down his fork, plucked a loaf from the pewter dish before him, and turned it over in his hand as if it were the single telling bit of evidence left behind at the scene of the crime. Joost waited patiently as the florid little man split the loaf and slathered it with butter. “You’ve, er, contacted the, er, other tenants?” the patroon gasped in his dry, windless voice.

  Joost was beside himself with frustration—this was no time for the niceties of leisurely inquiry. They had his daughter, the heart and soul and central joy of his existence, and he had to get her back. “It’s the Kitchawanks,” he blurted, “I’m sure of it. They snatched her”—here his voice broke with a sob—“snatched her as she, she—”

  At the mention of Indians, the Jongheer was on his feet. “I told you so,” he roared at his father. “Beggars in their blankets. Aborigines, criminals, vermin, filth. We should have driven them into the river twenty years ago.” He crossed the room in two great strides and lifted the harquebus down from the wall.