World's End

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The patroon had risen now to his gouty feet, and the ladies pressed powdered hands to their mouths. “But, er, what’s this, mijnzoon?” the patroon wheezed in some alarm. “What are you thinking?”

  “What am I thinking?” the Jongheer shrieked, the blood rushing to his face. “They’ve raped an honest man’s daughter, vader!” The harquebus was about as wieldy as a blacksmith’s anvil, and twice as heavy. He raised it over his head in a single clenched fist. “I mean to exterminate them, annihilate them, pot them like foxes, like rats, like, like—”

  It was then that a knock came at the door.

  The deferential head of the tattooed slave appeared between the oak door and the whitewashed wall that framed it. “A red man, Mijnheer,” he said in his garbled Dutch. “Says he’s got a message for the schout.”

  Before either patroon or Jongheer could give the command, the door flew back and old Jan stumbled into the room to exclamations of excitement from the ladies. Jan was wearing a tattered cassock, out at elbows and shoulders, and an ancient crushed caubeen with half the brim missing. His loincloth hung from his hips like a tongue, his legs were spattered with mud and his moccasins were as black as the muck in the oyster beds of the Tappan Zee. For a long moment he just stood there, swaying slightly, and blinking in the light of the candles hung around the room.

  “Well, Jan,” the patroon wheezed, “what is it?”

  “Beer,” the Indian said.

  “Pompey!” Vrouw Van Wart called, and the black reappeared. “Beer for old Jan.”

  Pompey poured, Jan drank. The patroon looked befuddled, the schout anxious, the Jongheer enraged. Mariken, who’d been Neeltje’s playmate, looked on with a face as pale and drawn as a mime’s.

  The old Indian set down the cup, composed himself a moment and began a slow shuffling dance around the table, all the while chanting Ay-yah, neh-neh, Ay-yah, neh-neh. After half a dozen repetitions, he sang his message—in three tones, and to the same beat:

  Daugh-ter, sends you,

  Her greet-ings, neh-neh.

  And then he stopped. Stopped singing, stopped dancing. He was frozen, like a figure in a clocktower after the hour’s been struck. “Spirits,” he said. “Genever.”

  But this time, Pompey didn’t have a chance to respond. Before he could so much as glance at the patroon for his approval, let alone lift the stone bottle and pour, the Jongheer had slammed the Indian into the wall. “Where is she?” he demanded. “Is it ransom, is that what you want? Is it?”

  “Let him go,” Joost said, taking Stephanus by the arm and pushing his way between them. “Jan,” he said, his voice faltering, “who is it? Who’s got her? Mohonk? Wappus? Wennicktanon?”

  The Indian stared at his feet. There was a smear of dirt on his cheek. He was pouting like a hurt child. “No more message,” he said.

  “No more? You mean that’s it?”

  “Listen, you son of a bitch,” Stephanus began, making another charge at him, but Joost held him off.

  “But—but who gave you the message?”

  The Indian looked around the room as if he were trying to remember. In the background, Joost could hear Vrouw Van Wart berating her husband in a terse rasping voice. “Herself,” Jan said finally.

  “Neeltje?”

  The Indian nodded.

  “Where is she? Where did she give it to you?”

  This was more difficult. Joost poured Jan a pewter cup of genever while the Jongheer breathed fumes and the patroon and his wife and sister-in-law and niece sat in silence, as if they were at the theater. Suddenly the Indian made a slash in the air with the flat of his hand; then he made the sign of two fingers walking.

  “What?” Stephanus asked.

  “Speak up, man,” the patroon croaked.

  It was only Joost who understood, and he held on to the knowledge for a stunned moment, as a knifed man might have held on to the haft of the blade in his belly. The Indian had made the sign of the cripple, the one with half a leg—the sign for Jeremias Van Brunt.

  Next morning, before the dogs had lifted their muzzles from the nests of their forepaws or the cock had had a chance to stretch the sleep from his wings, Joost saddled a sore and reluctant Donder and set out for Nysen’s Roost. He was accompanied by the Jongheer, who suddenly, it seemed, had taken a passionate interest in his daughter’s welfare, and he carried a brace of dueling pistols the patroon had ceremoniously retrieved from a chest in the seignorial bedroom (in addition, of course, to the silver-plated rapier that had already wrought such havoc on young Van Brunt’s physiognomy). The Jongheer, in silk doublet, French cuffs and midnight-blue cassock with matching knee breeches, had given over the unwieldy harquebus in favor of a fowling piece loaded with pigeon shot and a Florentine dirk that looked like a surgical instrument. To complete the ensemble, he wore a jeweled rapier at his side, a floppy hat surmounted by a three-foot yellow plume, and so many silver and brass buckles he actually jingled like a sack of coins as his mount picked its way up the road.

  The day was typical of April in the vale of the Hudson—raw and drizzling, the earth exhaling vapor as if it were breathing its last—and they made slow progress on the slick river road. It was late in the morning when they passed the cluster of buildings that would one day become Peterskill and turned east on Van Wart’s Road. The schout, hunched in the saddle, had little to say. As he bobbed and swayed to the nag’s erratic rhythm, he focused on the image of Jeremias Van Brunt with such intensity the world was swallowed up in it. He saw the watchful cat’s eyes squinted against the onslaught of the summer sun, saw the squared jaw and defiant sneer, saw the blade come down and the blood flow. And he saw Neeltje, kneeling over the fallen renegade and glaring up at him, her father, as if he were the criminal, the trespasser, the scoffer at the laws of God and man. Had she gone with him voluntarily, then? Was that it? The thought made him feel dead inside.

  If Joost was uncommunicative, the Jongheer never noticed. He kept up a steady stream of chatter from the time they left Croton to the moment they forded the rain-swollen Van Wart Creek and Joost hushed him with a peremptory finger tapped against his lips. Stephanus, who’d expatiated on everything from the Indian problem to the poetry of van den Vondel, and who, despite the inclemency of the weather and the dead earnestness of their mission had been humming a popular ditty not five minutes before, now slipped from his mount with a stealthy look. Joost followed suit, dismounting and leading the nag behind him up the steep slick hill to Nysen’s Roost. Wet branches slapped at their faces, the Jongheer lost his footing and rose from the ground with a stripe of mud painted the length of him, armies of gnats invaded their mouths and nostrils and darted for their eyes. They were halfway up when the drizzle changed to rain.

  The house was silent. No smoke rose from the chimney, no animals chased around the yard. The rain drove down in sheets of pewter. “What do you think?” the Jongheer whispered. He was hunched in his cassock, water streaming from the brim of his hat.

  Joost shrugged. His daughter was in there, he knew it. Defying him, betraying him, lying in the arms of that recreant, that nose thumber, that uncrackable nut. “He’s taken her by force,” Joost whispered. “Give him no quarter.”

  They approached the house warily. Joost could feel the mud tugging at his boots; the plume hung limp in his face and he flicked it back with a swipe of his dripping hand. Then he drew his rapier. He glanced over at the Jongheer, who did likewise, the firearms rendered useless by the damp. Water dripped from the tip of the Jongheer’s well-formed nose, the yellow plume clung to the back of his neck like something fished out of the river, and he wore a strangely excited look, as if he were off to a fox hunt or pigeon shoot. They were twenty feet from the door when a sudden burst of sound froze them in mid-step. Someone was inside, all right, and whoever it was was singing, the lyric as familiar as a bedtime song in old Volendam:

  Good evening, Joosje,

  My little box of sweetmeats,

  Kiss me, we are alone …


  … I call you my heart, my consolation, my treasure.

  Oh! oh! how I’ve tricked you!

  There was a giggle, and then Neeltje’s husky contralto (unmistakable, no doubt about it, the schout knew that voice as well as he knew his own) rose up out of the patter of rain to reprise the final line—“Oh! oh! how I’ve tricked you!”—to a spanking of applause.

  That was it, the breaking point, the moment that confirmed his worst fears and gravest suspicions. The schout was across the yard and slamming through the door before he could think, brandishing the rapier like an archangel’s sword and sputtering “Sin! Sin and damnation!”

  The room was dark, cold, damp as a cave; it reeked like a hog pen and the water dripped almost as persistently inside as out. Joost saw a crude table, a wall hung with kitchen implements, the cold hearth, and there, across the room, the bed. They were in it. Together. In their nightshirts still and with a mound of stinking furs piled atop them. He saw his daughter’s face as a spot of white in the gloom, her mouth open to scream, eyes twisted back in her head. “Slut!” he roared. “Filth, whore, woman of Babylon! Get up out of your harlot’s bed!”

  The next moment was a crowded one. Everything happened at once: the half-breed child sprang up from the shadows like a cat and scurried across the room to cower behind his uncle; the smirking Jongheer appeared in the doorway, sword at the ready; a cookpot fell from the wall; Neeltje cried out. And Jeremias, surprised without the strut that supported him, rose up out of the bed and came at the schout with a prejudicial look in his eye.

  No slash this time, but a thrust meant to kill: the schout squared himself and shot his arm forward, and so would have skewered Jeremias like a sausage and left his daughter sans husband and honor both, but for this: Jeremias slipped. Slipped and fell heavily to the floor while the tip of the rapier danced over his head like an angry hornet.

  Now Joost Cats was a reasonable man, prone neither to fits of temper nor acts of violence, happier far with the role of mediator than enforcer. He’d pitied the Van Brunt boy on that chill November day when the officious and soft-bottomed ass of a commis had dragged him, the schout, out into the naked wild to evict the half-starved lad from a worthless and unlucky plot of land, had felt foolish and ashamed standing before Meintje van der Meulen’s hearth with his plumed hat in hand, regretted with all his heart the brand he’d struck on the boy’s face. But for all that, he wanted to kill him. He looked into his daughter’s eyes and then down at this human garbage that had stolen her away, and he wanted to cut him, perforate him, pierce his heart, his liver, his lights and bladder and spleen.

  If the first thrust was instinctive, the second was a liberation. Guilt, anger, fear, resentment and jealousy broke loose in him and he jabbed the hilt forward with all the punch of his uncoiled arm. Jeremias dodged it. He rolled to his right, Neeltje flashing up off the bed with her hands outspread, the Jongheer lunging into the room, the child howling, the rain rising to a crescendo on the roof. “Spuyten duyvil!” Joost cursed, and struck a third time, but again the tip of the sword betrayed him, wagging wide of the mark and burying itself in the beaten wet earth of the floor.

  He was drawing himself up for the fourth and fatal thrust, when Neeltje, entering the fray, flung herself down atop Jeremias, shrieking “Kill me! Kill me!” Stooped over double, his back murdering him, reason and restraint flung to the winds, he paused only long enough to reach down his free hand and fling her roughly aside. She hated him, his own daughter, a mouthful of teeth, claws tearing at his sleeve, but no matter. The blade flashed in his hand and he thought only of the next thrust and the next and the next one after that—he’d make a pincushion of the son-of-a-bitch, a sieve, a colander!

  If Joost was deranged, he was also deluded: there would be no more thrusts of the rapier. For in the confusion Jeremias had clawed his way to his feet (or rather, foot) and snatched a crude weapon from the inglenook. The weapon, known as a curiosity in those parts, was a Weckquaesgeek pogamoggan. It consisted of a flexible length of fruitwood, to the nether end of which a jagged five-pound ball of granite had been affixed by means of leather ligatures. Jeremias swung it once, catching the schout just behind the ear and plunging him into the rushing interstitial darkness of a dreamless sleep, and then braced himself to face the Jongheer.

  For his part, the heir to the Van Wart patent looked like a man who’s nodded off in his box at the opera only to wake and find himself at a bear baiting. In the instant the schout pitched forward, the smirk died on the Jongheer’s face. This was more than he’d bargained for. This was sordid, primitive, beastly—not at all the sort of thing a lettered man should hope to experience. He tried to draw himself up and project the authority of his father, the patroon, whose rights, privileges and responsibilities would one day devolve upon himself. “Put up your weapon this instant,” he demanded in a voice that sounded like someone else’s, “and submit to the legally constituted authority of the patroon.” His voice dropped. “You are now in my custody.”

  Neeltje was bent over her father now, pressing a handkerchief to his head. The child had stopped his unearthly howling and Jeremias had propped himself against the back of a chair. The club, with its freight of human hair and blood, swung idly in his hand and the scar stood out on his face. He made no answer. He turned his head and spat.

  “Vader, vader,” Neeltje cried. “Don’t you know where you are? It’s little Neeltje. It’s me.” The schout moaned. Rain drummed at the roof. “With all due respect, Mijnheer,” Jeremias said in a voice reined in with the effort to control it, “you may own the milch cow, the land under my feet, the house I’ve built with my own hands, but you don’t own Neeltje. And you don’t own me.”

  The Jongheer held the blade out before him as if it were a fishing pole or divining rod, as if he didn’t know what to do with it. He was soaked to the skin, his clothes were filthy, ruined, the plume of authority hung limp over the brim of his hat. For all that, though, the smirk had returned to his face. “Oh yes,” he said, so softly he was nearly inaudible, “oh yes, I do.”

  At that, Jeremias idly swung the war club to his shoulder, where the weight of the ball bowed it like the arm of a catapult. The door stood open still and the elemental scent of the land rose to his nostrils, a scent of vitality and decay, of birth and death. He looked the Jongheer full in the face. “Come and get me,” he said.

  Two weeks later, on an afternoon in May as soft and celestial as the one on which they’d first met amongst the furs and hogsheads of Jan Pieterse’s trading post, Neeltje Cats and Jeremias Van Brunt were married by a subdued and solemn Dominie Van Schaik, not thirty feet from where Katrinchee lay buried. By all accounts, the feast that followed was a rousing success. Meintje van der Meulen baked for three days straight, and her husband Staats set up a pair of temporary tables big enough to accommodate every tippler and trencherman from Sint Sink to Rondout. Reinier Oothouse and Hackaliah Crane buried the hatchet for the day and drank the bride’s health side by side. There was game and fish and cheese and cabbage, there were pies and puddings and stews. Drink, too: ’Sopus ale, cider and Hollands out of a stone jug. And music. What would a wedding be without it? Here came young Cadwallader Crane with a penny whistle, there Vrouw Oothouse with her prodigious bottom and a bombas that made use of a pig’s bladder for a sound box; someone else had a lute and another a pair of varnished sticks and an overturned kettle. Mariken Van Wart came up from Croton and danced the whole afternoon with Douw van der Meulen, Staats led Meintje through half a dozen frenetic turns of “Jimmy-be-still” and old Jan the Kitchawank danced with a jug till the sun fell into the trees. Neeltje’s sisters were dressed like dolls, her mother cried—whether for joy or sorrow no one could be sure—and the patroon sent Ter Dingas Bosyn, the commis, as his official representative. But the crowning moment of the day, as everyone agreed, was when the schout, dressed in funereal black and standing as tall as his affliction would allow, his head bound in a snowy bandage and with good leather boots on his
feet, strode resolutely across the front yard and gave away the bride.

  When Mohonk, son of Sachoes, appeared on the doorstep of the little farmhouse at Nysen’s Roost some three months later, Jeremias was a changed man. Gone was the wild-eyed glare of the rebel, the underdog, the unsoothable beast, and in its place was a look that could only be described as one of contentment. Indeed, Jeremias had never known a happier time. The crops were flourishing, the deer were back, the shack had been elevated to the status of domicile through the addition of a second room, furniture both functional and pleasing to the eye and that hallmark of civilized living, a clean, planed and sanded plank floor that soared a full foot and a half above the cold dun earth below. And then there was Neeltje. She was a voice in his head, a presence that never left him even when he was adrift in the canoe or roaming the scoured hilltops with a musket borrowed from Staats; she clove to him like a second skin, each moment a melioration and a healing. She mothered Jeremy, managed the house, spun and sewed and cooked, rubbed the tightness from his shoulders, sat with him by the river while fish stirred in the shallows and the blue shadows closed over the mountains. She made peace with her father, baked as fine a beignet as moeder Meintje, arranged and rearranged the front room till it looked like a burgher’s parlor in Schobbejacken. She was everything that was possible, and more. Far more: she was carrying his child.

  All this the Indian saw in Jeremias’ face as the door swung open. Just as quickly, he saw it fade. “You,” Jeremias choked. “What do you want?”

  Mohonk was gaunter than ever, his face rucked and seamed with abuse. He was a nose, an Adam’s apple, a pair of black unblinking deep-buried eyes. “Alstublieft,” he said, “dank u, niet te danken.”