The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  How does the superior man live in a godless world?

  Late at night, when the street lanterns on the parade ground burned down and the moon had begun to set, Martyn Hendrickson slid through the side door to his mansion’s hearth-room. He removed his big leather belt and set it on the sideboard, where the heavy buckle clanked as it fell. He picked up a small brass bell and rang it.

  Though Martyn kept entirely random hours and oftentimes did not return to the big dwelling-house on Market Street for whole stretches of days, he required that a servant always be at the ready when he did. Tonight Myrthe Mueller stood on call, a gawky girl who at the age of fifteen was well nigh Martyn’s own height. His brothers, Adias and Abraham, chose the house servants for Martyn. They liked them ugly and at least in their mid-teens. Fewer problems that way.

  All the girls had crushes on handsome Martyn. When she heard his bell, Myrthe rose from a pallet in front of the smoldering fire.

  “Good evening, sire,” the sleepy-eyed girl said, with a heavy German accent. She gave a halfhearted curtsy. “May I get you something?”

  “Tea,” said Martyn. Tea had barely arrived on Manhattan. Most residents could not afford it. But the Hendrickson family’s merchant ships sailed regularly to East Asia. Martyn could have had a tea party every day if he so chose.

  As Hendrickson waited for the kettle to sing, he leaned back in a silk-embroidered chair by the bay window in the spacious new groot kamer, an addition to the dwelling-house that looked out on the grounds. A shadow moved in the settlement’s four a.m. stillness. A black cat, crossing the yard toward the fort.

  Martyn never asked that the tapers be lit, as he favored the dark. With a grunt, he offered Myrthe his high-topped boots. Kneeling before him, she yanked them off. He stretched out his legs and waggled his toes.

  It had been a long, cold night. A long, pleasurable night. Suzy, the drunkest, most slatternly, cackling witch of a whore on the Strand, offered up her services for the measuring of men’s members. Taking on all comers, so to speak. Kees Bayard failed to measure up. The laughter was loud enough to drown out the howl of the wind off the harbor.

  The house lay chilly and empty. Martyn’s brothers had not come to town for many months. He did not miss them, as they tended not to amuse him.

  Myrthe set the tray in front of Martyn with a steaming cup of tea and a cone of white sugar. The tea china came from England, a pattern only a gentleman could afford. The sugar, a rich man’s treat as well. Martyn brought back so many of his tastes from Paris. Chocolate, an aphrodisiac that children loved.

  “Anything else, sir?”

  “Cake?”

  Myrthe disappeared through the doorway, but looked back as she went. There sat the master, his dark eyes glittering like his many-jeweled rings. He leaned his head forward on one hand as though he were weary. Myrthe wondered after him, as always. Whether he might be lonely. Whether he might fancy her.

  Myrthe readied the master’s cake on a plate. She had cared for two families before the Hendricksons, one in Germany and then, when she lost her parents, one here in New Amsterdam. She found Martyn breathlessly good-looking, with features that were almost delicate, womanly. Those marvelous green eyes of his.

  Yet Martyn gave off a disturbing body odor. When he sat at the close-stool in the cubby off the hearth, his scheisse could stench up the whole house. Myrthe had the job of emptying his chamber pot, and the man’s excrement showed black as blood sausage.

  In Germany, they liked to interpret such things.

  “Master, might I inquire about your diet?” she made bold to ask Martyn once, after a particularly loathsome bowel movement appeared in the best chamber pot.

  Her master did not take the question well. He appeared not to be accustomed to the German openness about bodily functions. In fact, he directed Myrthe that if she did not like the way his turds looked, she should take them into her mouth and swallow them down herself.

  Then he laughed and tugged on her braid, the way he often did. But after that, Myrthe shut up about the motions of her master’s bowels.

  Not all dogs take the collar. Not all men accept the strictures of civilized society. And not all New Amsterdam orphans recognized the authority of Aet Visser as their master.

  Settlers glimpsed these renegades only occasionally, flitting down alleyways, prowling the Strand. They filched day-old bread from the bakeries and slit the purses of drunkards exiting the taprooms. Any normal person contemplating a street urchin’s existence would conclude that such ones had two possible paths forward. They would be dead before twenty, or they would grow up to be rogues. The former was much preferable to the latter.

  Twelve-year-old Tibb Dunbar was an orphan renegade who lived outside the colony’s authority. At least, Tibb Dunbar was one of his names. He had many. Werner van der Boorsum, when he wished to pass for Dutch. Brian Wilkins, when he wanted to be English. Frederick, Jules, Sven. He was not above dressing as a girl to get away with a crime spree.

  “Heya,” he’d say to his street urchin gang, batting his eyelashes and swishing his petticoat. “My name is Prunella.” The gang laughed heartily.

  Even dressed in female attire, Tibb always had a red kerchief about his person, tied around his neck or stuffed into an inner pocket, his marker, his signifier, his nose-wiper and meat-sopper.

  The townsfolk knew the red-kerchiefed orphan boy as Gypsy Davey, and the schout had him registered on the colony rolls (the veracity of which the boy strenuously denied) as Davey Burrows. Preachers stalked him as a heathen, ripe for baptism.

  “The Devil will steal your soul, Gypsy Davey,” the churchy ones warned him.

  “The Devil best be watching out,” Tibb responded, “that I don’t steal his.”

  Most householders hated Tibb and shooed him away whenever they saw him. But a few matrons doted on him. He had regulars—Blandine among them—who left meat pies out on their stoops for him. Ah, Gypsy Davey. Dashing, debonair, even with dirt on his face.

  His exact age, his whereabouts whenever he was sought, all particulars of his parentage and how long he had been in the colony remained a mystery. Aet Visser attempted to make arrangements for Gypsy Davey to “go up the river,” to work at the great estate of the Hendrickson family. But the boy slipped the leash.

  Tibb didn’t need a goose-feather pillow. Gypsy Davey liked rooftops. Werner van der Boorsum haunted the wharves. Prunella vanished whenever the schout turned the corner.

  In fine weather—and to Tibb, any weather that didn’t involve a howling blizzard was fine—he slept under a great oak on the east side of the island, beyond the wall. He welcomed all urchins into his gang, which he called the High Streets, after the address of the work yard behind Missy Flamsteed’s taproom, where a boy could always cadge a beer.

  Tibb had his partners in crime, their numbers ranging from a handful in winter to a good two dozen in summer. The High Streets lived high. They loved to prank the burghers, slipping straight-pins into the hanging laundry. They ate, swam, slept, stole, laughed, ran, drank, smoked entirely at their leisure. One June day they picked every bloom out of Sacha Imbrock’s flower garden and sold the roses before anyone could catch them at it. Tibb himself had a great taste for pickles, so pickles were always a target.

  “Fetch the pickles” became a code-phrase for “let’s get it started.”

  The early October blizzard bothered Tibb not at all. But a worry nagged him as he lay on a tattered beaver pelt under his oak, the last remnant of snow melting beneath his body. He chewed a sassafras stick.

  Something bad was happening. Well, something bad was always happening, but this was special bad. A beast went abroad in the colony. That didn’t mean anything either, but this beast had a special liking.

  Children.

  Nobody in the settlement realized it yet, but Tibb Dunbar did.

  10

  That their ankles became moistened as they passed through the thick drifts of autumn leaves made no difference to Johanna de Laet an
d Hans Bontemantel. They felt eager, randy. The freak snow had kept them away from their private glade for a week.

  Now they ran off into the forest near the Maiden’s Brook, holding hands. Hannie toted the basket. She had told her mother she would collect morels for supper.

  Yet even a growth of Phallus impudicus, the common stinkhorn, could not distract their attention from the matter at hand, which was (Hannie reached brazenly into Hans’s trousers) the matter at hand.

  “What does that look like?” Hannie teased about the mushroom. “It looks like yours.”

  “Except mine’s bigger,” said Hans, laughing.

  She laughed, too, and ran away deeper into the woods, toward their private place.

  Hannie and Hans slowed and walked solemnly together through groves of oak and birch. He told her he loved her, she said she loved him. There were many private places on the island of Manhattan, out of sight of God and parents.

  Hans grabbed Hannie around the waist as they reached the clearing they had visited nearly every day over the summer. He pulled her to him and clutched a handful of her glossy chestnut curls.

  “Wait until we get to our place,” she said.

  The spot lay beneath a black elm, where the grasses grew long and full. Just like a feather mattress, they always said.

  The weather was a little cool. Hannie had a sense of sadness. They would not be able to come here much longer, once the snows began in earnest.

  Even as it was, a pretty fall day, she was glad she had brought a woolen blanket in her basket. They would go underneath it, hiding like children. With the difference of having shucked off their clothes.

  Hannie lay down, throwing back her arms in an exaggerated posture of repose. Hans did not take his eyes off her, but removed his jacket as he kneeled.

  They were really going to marry. No one believed it, but everyone would see.

  With her eyes closed, she lifted her skirts, the bunches of white petticoat, to reveal black stockings that reached to her thighs. She saw no reason to kick off her clogs.

  When he had lain atop her for a while, she smilingly pushed his face back in a gesture he understood. He complied, turning over onto his back. Hannie rose on her knees, readying to position herself for utmost pleasure. A horsefly buzzed near her face. She brushed it away.

  She suddenly realized that the branches of the black elm above her were studded with silent crows.

  Then she saw it.

  In the center of the clearing appeared the remains of a cook-fire. She knew it had not been there the week previous, before the storm. Wooden stakes had been driven into the ground in a circle around the blackened ash-pit. A cord of some kind hung from the stakes.

  “Hannie?” Hans said, as the girl rose unsteadily from the patch of grass that was her prenuptial bed.

  “Wait,” she said. “Wait a moment.”

  She stepped toward the center of the clearing, brushing down her petticoat as she walked. The bombinating flies swarmed, targeting her eyes.

  “Hannie!”

  She needed to get to the cook-fire. To see. She felt she could not turn back.

  Bones. Bones piled in a neat tower on the scorched earth. Big bones, too, nothing like those of a chicken or the remains of a pig roast.

  Bones bladelike and white as frost.

  The cord swung a yard from her eyes. Soft and viscous, it resembled the intestines of the lambs her family butchered every spring.

  She turned around to see Hans lying inert, on his back, his hand thrown over his eyes.

  “Hans, come see.” He ignored her. “Hans!”

  A rustle from the woods at the far end of the clearing. A deer?

  She looked back to the ash-pit, not wanting to, unable to resist.

  Next to the bones, a fan of… What was it?

  Fingers. Tiny fingers, such as those of her little sister Trude. Splayed out carefully in sequence, as though they were still part of a hand.

  Next to the severed fingers, a corn-husk doll directed its mocking gaze toward Hannie.

  And a symbol, drawn in blood everywhere, on the trees, the stones of the fire ring, the half-burnt logs. A circle cut by a cross:

  The last thing Hannie saw was a piece of cutout deerskin stuck with an indian hatchet to a pinewood tree, fashioned into a kind of mask, with gaping holes for eyes and an eerie, twisted shape for a mouth.

  Hans looked up when Hannie started shrieking. She didn’t wait for her beloved to come and see. She started moving her feet in the direction of home.

  The tiny golden bat folded its wings, clung upside down to the ceiling of the lodge and whispered to Kitane of his coming death.

  “Brother, why are you alone?”

  “You, too, are alone,” Kitane responded soundlessly. “Where is your colony?”

  “Where is your family?” the bat echoed. It spun slowly around into the shadows, then again caught a golden light. Hunching its leathery wings, it made the reddish hairs on its neck ruffle up like the collars of the Dutch.

  Outside, the locusts raised a dry-husk chorus. “Why are you alone?” they said.

  An old lodge, long abandoned, its mother and children no doubt dead from the plague. The lice inside were lonely for their people. They welcomed Kitane.

  Mid-moon in the harvest month. Kitane played his mind over what should be happening now, the sunlit life he should be leading, seeing it from the shadows of now.

  Bringing in maize from his clan’s plantings. Hunting deer. Dressing deer. Cutting the venison into strips, hanging it above a fire. Looking toward winter.

  Kitane and Showma and Munn, together with the clan.

  That life gone. Swallowed by shadow. Instead, he was alone in an empty lodge on the edge of a pond-fed marsh. On his back in bed, watching a yellow bat hunch across the rough bark roof.

  “It’s morning,” the bat observed. “I’ll be going to sleep now.”

  “Go ahead,” Kitane said.

  “You’ll be all right? I’m worried about you.”

  “Sleep well.”

  “Why don’t you sleep, too? This is, what, the third day of your waking?”

  Kitane rolled away to face the wall, the willow sticks of his bed snapping in their dryness. If the lodge were alive, the women would have watered the beds once in a while, keeping their woven branches supple and comfortable.

  The swannekins came, the swannekins bore sickness, the swannekins wrecked everything. The Dutchmen. The English. The French.

  Kitane heard the scritch, scritch, scritch of the bat crawling down from the ceiling. The creature appeared before his face, glowing like a little moon.

  “Jesus,” Kitane said, taking the name of the swannekin’s lord-god in vain. “Get away from me.”

  He closed his eyes and turned his mind to the girl Makitotosimew. Her name meant “she has large breasts.” And she did. They grew larger and larger in Kitane’s mind until they became gross and hideous.

  He opened his eyes again. Brother bat spoke.

  “Why are you alone?”

  “I am Chansomps, a man of the locusts,” Kitane said. “Hear my friends outside the lodge. I am not alone. I don’t need to listen to you.”

  “You are Kitane. The brave, the chronicler, the survivor, the slave, the godless, the revenger, the smasher of faces. You walk without sound.”

  Last night, Kitane heard the witika calling him from the darkness at the edge of camp. He had never been more afraid.

  And he envisioned not his past but a future life, one he had been seeing in his mind for the recent few days. He was walking down the street in Dutchtown. He had been there often, and he remembered well what it looked like, the swannekin lodges that it would make a stone sick to live inside.

  As he walked a round-headed war club came magically into his hand. He touched his face and it was painted. He had burned the hair from his head with hot stones, leaving only a single roach, a rat-tail woven with turkey feathers that hung down his back and beckoned his enemies, “catch
me if you can.”

  And in this future life of his, Kitane would break into a run and lift the war club. He would pass quickly down the street killing men, women and children. Counting how many swannekin heads could he possibly crush before they got to him. Five? Fifteen? A score?

  His father told him that before Kitane went into battle, he should know what he would do when he saw his own blood. Would the sight of his own blood mean that his fight was over? Or would it mean his fight had finally begun?

  Perhaps he could kill thirty. He was Kitane, smasher of faces.

  The vision of this future life was horrible and pleasurable at the same time. He returned to it again and again, like an itch.

  Dying with Dutch blood on his hands. His blood and his enemy’s blood, comingled. Horror and pleasure. Afterward, they would place his body in a canoe and set it adrift from the shore.

  Why are you alone?

  “Because the world is on fire,” Kitane answered, out loud this time.

  “Have you seen Kitane?” Blandine asked the question of every river indian she encountered in Beverwyck, getting only negatives in reply.

  Well, perhaps not every Lenape. There were too many, hundreds, stalking through the town, mixing with the Five Nation natives from the Mohawk River and interior lake valleys, all of them eager for trade.

  “Swannekins,” the river indians called the Dutch. No one knew what the word meant, none of the Lenape would tell them. One theory had it translated as “fake men,” another as “a sharp stick upon which I mistakenly sit,” and another as “the saltwater people.” Likewise, Manhattan either meant “place of hills,” or “the place where we all got drunk.” And the Mahican tribal name, some said, actually meant “flesh-eaters.”

  During the trading season, Beverwyck burst at its deerskin seams. From the steep promontory that marked the end of the town, it was possible to see straight down Yonkheer Street to the narrowing, placid river, now full of small-boats and anchored ships. A palisade encircled the community, surrounding dwelling-houses and shops, offering protection against the creatures, human or otherwise, that inhabited the wilderness.