by T. C. Boyle
No, he’d said, shaking his head, no, and she’d wondered whether he was responding to her question or denying some horror she couldn’t know. The fire, he murmured, and his voice was slow and halting, the voice of the hermit, the pariah, the anchorite who spoke only to trees and birds. They’d all been out in the fields that fateful afternoon, hoeing up weeds and clattering pans to keep the maes dieven out of the corn and wheat—all except for Katrinchee, that is, who was off somewhere with Mohonk the Kitchawank. Jeremias had regained his strength by then and was able to get around pretty well on the strut he’d carved from a piece of cherrywood, but his solicitous mother had sent him off to drive away the birds while she and Wouter did the heavier work. When the storm broke, he lost sight of them; next thing he knew the cabin was in flames. When Staats and the Oothouse man had come around he’d hidden in the woods with his cattle, hidden in shock and fear and shame. But now he could hide no longer.
“Jeremias?” Staats repeated, comprehension trickling into his features like water dripping through a hole in the roof. “I’ll kill them first,” he said, glaring at Joost and the agent.
It was then that the subject of the controversy appeared in the doorway to the back room—a thin boy, but big-boned and tall for his age. He was wearing a woolen shirt, knee breeches and a single heavy stocking borrowed from the van der Meulen’s eldest boy, and he stood wide-legged, cocked defiantly on his wooden peg. The look on his face was something Joost would never forget. It was a look of hatred, a look of defiance, of contempt for authority, for rapiers, baldrics, silver plumes and accounts ledgers alike, a look that would have challenged the patroon himself had he been there to confront it. His voice was low, soft, the voice of a child, but the scorn in it was unmistakable. “You looking for me?” he asked.
The following summer, a dramatic and sweeping change was to come to New Amsterdam and the sleepy settlements along the North River. It was a hot still morning in late August when Klaes Swits, a Breucklyn clam-digger, looked up from his rake to see five British men-o’-war bobbing at anchor in the very neck of the Narrows. In his haste to apprise the governor and his council of this extraordinary discovery, he unhappily lost his anchor, splintered both his oars and his rake in the bargain, and was finally reduced to paddling Indian-style all the way from the South Breucklyn Bight to the Battery. As it turned out, the clamdigger’s mission was superfluous—as all of New Amsterdam would know three hours later, the ships were commanded by Colonel Richard Nicolls of the Royal Navy, who was demanding immediate capitulation and surrender of the entire province to Charles II, king of England. Charles laid claim to all territory on the coast of North America from Cape Fear River in the south to the Bay of Fundy in the north, on the basis of English exploration that antedated the Dutch cozening of the Manhattoes Indians. John Smith had been there before any cheese-eating Dutchmen, Charles insisted, and Sebastian Cabot too. And as if that weren’t enough, the very isle of the Manhattoes and the river that washed it had been discovered by an Englishman, even if he was sailing for the Nederlanders.
Pieter Stuyvesant didn’t like it. He was a rough, tough, bellicose, fighting Frisian who’d lost a leg to the Portuguese and would yield to no man. He hurled defiance in Nicolls’ teeth: come what may, he would fight the Englishers to the death. Unfortunately, the good burghers of New Amsterdam, who resented the West India Company’s monopoly, eschewed taxation without representation and hated the despotic governor as if he were the devil himself, refused to back him. And so, on September 9, 1664, after fifty-five years of Dutch rule, New Amsterdam became New York—after Charles’ brother, James the duke of York—and the great, green, roiled, broad-backed North River became the Hudson, after the true-blue Englishman who’d discovered it.
Yes, the changes were dramatic—suddenly there was new currency to handle, a new language to learn, suddenly there were Connecticut Yankees swarming into the Valley like gnats—but none of these changes had much effect on life in Van Wartwyck. If Oloffe Stephanus throve under Dutch rule, he throve and multiplied and throve again under the English. The new rulers, hardly known as a nation for an affinity to radical change, preserved the status quo—i.e., the landlord on top and the yeoman on bottom. Oloffe’s wealth and political power grew. His eldest son and heir, Stephanus, who was twenty-one when Stuyvesant capitulated, would see the original 10,000-acre Dutch patent expanded more than eightfold when William and Mary chartered Van Wart Manor in the declining years of the century.
As for Joost, he performed his duties as before, answerable to no one but old Van Wart, who continued to exercise feudal dominion over his lands. The schout worked his little farm on the Croton River that lay within hollering distance of the lower manor house, harvested in season, went a-hunting, a-fishing and a-crabbing according to the calendar, raised his three daughters to be mindful of the laws of God and man, and satisfied his employer with the promptness and efficiency with which he settled disputes among the tenants, tracked down malefactors and collected past-due rents. For the most part, things were pretty quiet in the period following the English takeover. A few Yankees threw up shacks in the vicinity of Jan Pieterse’s place, where they would later draw up a charter for the town of Peterskill, and Reinier Oothouse got drunk and burned down his own barn, but aside from that nothing out of the ordinary cropped up. Lulled by the tranquillity of those years, Joost had nearly forgotten Jeremias, when one afternoon, in the company of his eldest, little Neeltje, he ran into him at the Blue Rock.
It was late May, the planting was done and the mornings were as gentle as a kiss on the cheek. Joost had left the lower manor house at dawn with a bundle of things for the patroon’s wife, Gertruyd, who was in the midst of a religious retreat at the upper manor house, and with instructions from the patroon to arbitrate a dispute between Hackaliah Crane, the new Yankee tenant, and Reinier Oothouse. Neeltje, who’d turned fifteen the month before, had begged to come along, ostensibly to keep her father company, but in truth to buy a bit of ribbon or hard candy at Pieterse’s with the stivers she’d earned dipping sacramental candles for Vrouw Van Wart.
The weather was clear and fair, and the sun had dried up the bogs and quagmires that had made the road practically impassable a month before. They covered the eight miles from Croton to the upper manor house in good time, and were able to meet with both Crane and Oothouse before noon. (Reinier, who was drunk as usual, claimed that the long-nosed Yankee had called him an “old dog” after he, Reinier, had boxed the ears of the Yankee’s youngest boy, one Cadwallader, for chasing a brood of setting hens off their nests. Reinier had responded to the insult by “twisting the Yankee’s great flapping ears and giving him a flathand across the bridge of his broomstick nose,” immediately following which the Yankee had “treacherously thrown [him] to the ground and kicked [him] in a tender spot.” Crane, a learned scion of the Connecticut Cranes, a family destined to furnish the Colonies with a limitless supply of itinerant pedants, potmakers and nostrum peddlers, denied everything. The schout, attesting Reinier’s drunkenness and perhaps a bit cowed by the Yankee’s learning, found for Crane and fined Oothouse five guilders, payable in fresh eggs, to be delivered to Vrouw Van Wart at the upper manor house—raw eggs being the only foodstuff she would consume while suffering the throes of religious abnegation—at the rate of four per day.) Afterward, father and daughter dined on eels, shad roe and perch with pickled cabbage in the great cool thick-walled kitchen at the upper manor house. Then they stopped at Jan Pieterse’s.
The trading post comprised a rude corral, a haphazardly fenced chicken coop and a long dark hut illuminated only by a pair of slit windows at front and back and the light from the door, which stood open from May to September. Jan Pieterse, who was said to be among the richest men in the valley, slept on a corn husk mattress in back. His principal trade had originally been with the Indians—wam-pumpeak, knives, axes and iron cookpots in exchange for furs—but as beaver and Indian alike had been on the decline and Boers and Yankees on the upswing, he�
��d begun to stock bits of imported cloth, farm implements, fish hooks, pipes of wine and kegs of soused pigs’ feet to appeal to his changing clientele. But there was more to the place than trade alone—along with the mill Van Wart had erected up the creek, the trading post was a great gathering spot for the community. There you might see half a dozen skulking Kitchawanks or Nochpeems (it was strictly verboden to sell rum to the Indians, but they wanted nothing more, and with a nod to necessity and a wink for the law, Jan Pieterse provided it), or Dominie Van Schaik taking up a collection for the construction of a yellow-brick church on the Verplanck road. Then too there might be any number of farmers in homespun paltroks, steeple hats and wooden shoes accompanied by their vrouwen and grimly linking arms with their ripe young daughters who made the fashions of the previous century seem au courant, and, of course, the horny-handed, red-faced, grinning young country louts who stood off in a corner thumping one another in the chest.
On this particular day, as Joost helped his daughter down from her mount, he saw only Jan Pieterse and Heyndrick Ten Haer sharing a pipe on the porch while a Wappinger brave lay spread-eagled in a patch of poison ivy up the lane, drunk as a lord and with his genitals exposed for all the world to see. Beyond the Indian, the river was as flat and still as hammered pewter, and Dunderberg rose up, a deep shadowed blue, to tilt at the horizon.
“Vader,” Neeltje said before she’d touched ground, “please, may I go right in?” She’d spoken of nothing but ribbon, broadcloth and velvet since they’d left Croton that morning. Mariken Van Wart had the prettiest silk petticoats and blue satin skirt, and she was only thirteen, even if she was the patroon’s niece. And armozine ribbon—you should have seen it!
Joost handed her down, straightened up briefly and then fell again into his habitual slump. “Yes,” he whispered, “yes, of course, go ahead,” and then he ambled up to shoot the breeze with Jan Pieterse and Farmer Ten Haer.
He’d been slouching there on the stoep some ten minutes or so, puffing fraternally at his clay pipe and relishing the rich westering sun in those few moments before he would ask Jan Pieterse to join him in a pint of ale, when he became aware that his daughter was talking to someone inside the store. He remarked it only because he’d assumed the store was empty. There were only two horses in the lot—his own sorry, one-eyed nag and the sleek tawny mare he’d conscripted from the Van Wart stable for his daughter—and Farmer Ten Haer’s wagon stood alone beneath the chestnut tree. Whoever could she be talking to? he wondered, but Heyndrick Ten Haer was in the middle of a story about Wolf Nysen—whether or not he was even alive still, the renegade Swede had become the bogey of the neighborhood, blamed for everything from a missing hen to some huis vrouw’s shin splints—and Joost momentarily forgot about it.
“Oh, ja, ja,” Farmer Ten Haer said, nodding vigorously. “He come up out of the swamp near that turtle pond where his farm used to be, black as the devil, not a stitch on him and covered head to toe with mud, and he had this terrific big axe with him, the blade all crusted over with blood—”
Joost was picturing this monster, this Nysen, when he quite distinctly heard his daughter giggle from inside the dim storehouse. He craned his neck to peer through the gloomy doorway, but could see nothing aside from the pile of ragged furs and the gray-whiskered snout of Jan Pieterse’s retriever, asleep in their midst. “Is someone in there?” he asked, turning to the trader.
“She was gathering mushrooms out there, my Maria was, when he come for her without warning, howling like a beast—”
“Yes, and I suppose his hoofs were cloven and he smelled of brimstone too,” Jan said, and then, leaning toward Joost and lowering his voice: “Oh, ja—the pegleg, you know, the Van Brunt boy.”
It came back to him in a rush—the night at the van der Meulen farm, the look of unquenchable hatred on the boy’s face, his own shame and uneasiness—and his first reaction was fear for his daughter. He’d actually turned away from the others and squared his shoulders for action when he checked himself. This was only a boy, an orphan, one of the afflicted and downtrodden of the earth—not some sort of ogre. He’d been overwrought that night, that was all.
“It’s the God’s honest truth,” Farmer Ten Haer declared, clamping his arms across his chest.
It was then that Neeltje appeared in the doorway, a pretty girl in petticoats and tight-waisted skirt, smiling still, as if at some private joke. Behind her, dwarfing her, was a man six feet tall at least, with shoulders that had burst the seams of his woolen hemdrok. He guided her through the doorway and then stepped out into the sunlight himself, the pegleg knocking at the floorboards like a fist at the door. Joost saw the same unyielding expression, the same arrogance, he’d seen in the boy. If Jeremias recognized him, he gave no sign of it.
“Well, younker,” Jan Pieterse said, drawing the pipe from his mouth, “have you decided on anything?”
Jeremias nodded and replied that yes, sir, he had. He held out a big work-hardened palm in which there were five fish hooks and two glossy cubes of rock candy, and paid with a coin that looked as if it had been buried and dug up six times already. And then, ignoring Joost, he pressed a cube of candy into Neeltje’s palm as if it were a jewel from Africa, tucked the other inside his cheek, and thumped off, the wooden strut stabbing rhythmically at the earth with each thrust of his leg.
They watched in silence—Joost, Neeltje, Farmer Ten Haer and Jan Pieterse—as he swayed off across the lot, awkward and graceful at the same time. His right arm swung out like a baton, his shoulders were thrust back and the dark long blades of his hair cut at the collar of his shirt. They watched as he skirted a rotten stump and passed between a pair of lichen-encrusted boulders, watched as he entered the shadows at the edge of the wood and turned to wave.
Joost’s hands were in his pockets. Farmer Ten Haer and Jan Pieterse lifted their arms half-heartedly, as if afraid to break the spell. Neeltje—only Neeltje—waved back.
The Last of the Kitchawanks
When the market crashed in the fall of 1929, Rombout Van Wart, sire of Depeyster, husband to Catherine Depeyster and eleventh heir to Van Wart Manor, did not jump from the roof of the Stock Exchange or hang himself beneath the stately gables of the upper manor house. He did take a beating, though—in both the literal and figurative senses. Figuratively speaking, he lost a fortune. The family timber business went under; the foundry—which at that time produced iron cookware, but had, during the war, turned out breeches for artillery guns—fell on hard times; he lost an unspecified sum in stock holdings purchased on margin and dropped two thousand dollars in one grim afternoon at Belmont Park. The other beating, the literal one, was administered by a transient with a hawk’s nose and burnt-umber complexion who called himself Jeremy Mohonk and claimed to be the last of the Kitchawanks, a tribe no one in the Peterskill/Van Wartville area had ever heard of. Asserting his right to tribal lands, he threw up a tar-paper shack at Nysen’s Roost, an untenanted sector of the Van Wart estate on which Rombout had recently reintroduced the wild turkey after an attack of feudal nostalgia.
It was Rombout himself who discovered the squatter’s presence. Mounted on Pierre, a bay gelding with blood lines nearly as rich as his own, the lord of the manor was taking his exercise in the bracing autumn air (and at the same time attempting to exorcise the demon of his financial woes with the aid of a silver flask inscribed with the time-honored logo of the Van Wart clan) when he came upon the interloper’s shack. He was appalled. Beneath the venerable white oak in which his great grandfather, Oloffe III, had carved his initials, there now stood a sort of gypsy outhouse, a peeling, unsightly, tumbledown shanty such as one might expect to see at the far end of a hog pen in Alabama or Mississippi. Drawing closer, he spotted a ragged figure crouched over a cookfire, and then, galloping into the miserable, garbage-strewn yard, he recognized the plucked and decapitated carcass of a turkey sizzling on the spit.
It was too much. He sprang down from his horse, the riding crop clenched in his fist, as the tat
tered beggar lurched to his feet in alarm. “What in hell do you think you’re doing here?” Rombout raged, shaking the whip in the trespasser’s face.
The Indian—for Indian he was—backpedaled, watching for sudden movement.
“This … this is trespassing!” Rombout shouted. “Vandalism. Poaching, for God’s sake. These are private lands!”
The Indian had stopped backpedaling. He was dressed in a cheap flannel shirt, torn working pants and a crushed bowler hat he might have fished out of a public urinal; he was barefoot despite the incipient cold. “Private lands, my ass,” he said, folding his arms across his chest and fixing the lord of the manor with a cold, challenging, greeneyed glare. (Indian? Rombout would later snort in disbelief. Whoever heard of an Indian with green eyes?)
Rombout was beside himself with rage. It should be said too that he was fairly well inebriated, having consumed cognac in proportion to the magnitude of the anxiety it was meant to soothe—and that anxiety, pecuniary in nature, was monumental, blocklike and impervious as marble. In fact, two days earlier he’d confided to a fellow member of the Yale Club that financially speaking he was going to hell in a handbasket. Now he suddenly roared at the Indian, “Do you know who I am?” punctuating each stentorian syllable with a flourish of the whip.
Unutterably calm, as if he were the property owner and Rombout the trespasser, the Indian nodded his head gravely. “A criminal,” he said.