by T. C. Boyle
Jessica’s family, Conklins and Wings alike, left early. Grandmother Conklin, a starchy old patrician with dead white skin, pendulous nose and tortoise eyes, had been carried up the hill in a blanket. She sat on a folding chair in the shade of the oak tree, surrounded by aged nieces from Connecticut, a conspicuous smear of cowshit on her black patent leather pumps, glaring her disapproval of the proceedings. Half an hour after the punch was served and the cake cut, she was gone. The aged nieces soon followed, and then John Wing himself—as bland and awkwardly handsome as the star of a sitcom about the wisdom of fathers—was shaking Walter’s hand in parting and telling him to take care of his little girl. By late afternoon, all the representatives of the elder generations had departed, scratching insect bites and dabbing handkerchiefs at sun-blistered faces. Hesh, Lola and Walter’s aunt Katrina (three sheets to the wind and fighting back tears) were the last of them.
The storm began to kick up around four. Jessica, bright-eyed and thick-tongued, was giving Nancy Fagnoli an exhaustive biographical account of Herbert Axelrod, patron saint of tropical fish, Walter was swilling rotgut champagne and smoking a joint with Herbert Pompey out by the bee tenements, and Tom Crane was squatting on the porch in a cloud of smoke with Hector and half a dozen other epithalamial celebrants. Susie Cats, a big overwrought girl with soft-boiled eyes, had passed out on Tom Crane’s cot after drinking fourteen cups of tequila punch and crying without remit for two hours. She lay there now, her faint rhythmic snores drifting across the clearing to where Walter stood with Herbert Pompey. Someone was strumming a guitar somewhere up in the woods.
Walter watched the low belly of the sky as it edged over the treetops, sank into the cleft of the hill behind him and billowed up to snuff out the sun. Within minutes, the sky was dark. Squinting against the smoke, Herbert Pompey handed him the yellowed nub of a joint. “Looks like it’s going to rain on your party.”
Walter shrugged. He was feeling pretty numb. Champagne, pot, a hit of this and a hit of that, the bourbon in his coffee that morning and the excesses of the night before: the cumulative effect was leveling. He was married, and over there by the oak tree stood his bride, that much he knew. He knew too that in a few hours they would take the train up to Rhinebeck and check into a quaint hotel full of gloomy nooks and dusty bric-a-brac and that afterward they’d make love and fall asleep in each other’s arms. As for the weather, he could give a shit. “What’d you expect?” he said, dropping the bottle in the grass. Then he took Pompey by the arm and went looking for another.
The storm didn’t break until nearly an hour later, and by then the second uninvited guest had shown up. Though he’d been fighting it, Walter understood just how susceptible he was at this moment to history, nostalgia and the patterns of the past, and throughout the day he’d half-expected to glance up and see his father perched on the edge of the porch between Tom Crane and Hector Mantequilla or picking his way through the high grass with a bottle of cheap champagne clamped in his big iron hand. But it wasn’t his father who emerged from the shadow of the trees as Walter stood urinating against the side of the shack—it was Mardi.
She made straight for him, half a smile caught on her lips, a package wrapped in tissue paper in her hand. He tried to be nonchalant, but as it turned out he was too hasty with the business of micturition, with stowing away his equipment and zipping up, and he turned to face her with warm urine on his thigh and in the crotch of his pants. “Hi,” she said. “Remember me?”
She was barefoot, wearing a miniskirt (not paper this time, not anything that might dissolve in his wet hands, but leather) and a shimmering low-cut blouse that matched the color of her eyes. There were Indian beads around her neck and she wore earrings fashioned from tiny shells and feathers. She looked like her mother. She looked like her father. “Sure, yeah,” Walter said, “I remember you,” and they both glanced down at his foot.
“I brought this for you,” she said, handing him the package.
“Oh, hey, you didn’t have to—” he began, looking reflexively over his shoulder for Jessica, but no one was there. They stood alone at the rear of the shack; the birds had gone quiet suddenly and the sky was like the underside of a dream. The package was small and heavy. He tore back the paper. Brass and wood, the heft of metal: he held a telescope in his hand. Or no, it was a telescope with something else grafted to it, a dull brass quarter-circle ticked out with calibrations and festooned with clamps, screws and mirrors. She was watching him. He caught her eye and then glanced down at the thing in his hand, trying to look knowledgeable and appreciative. “It’s, uh … nice. Really nice.”
“You know what it is?”
He shook his head slowly. “Not really.” The brass was green with age, the wood of the telescope chipped and gouged as if gnawed by some marooned mariner in times gone by. “Looks old,” he offered.
Mardi was grinning at him. She wasn’t wearing any makeup—or maybe just a trace. Her legs were naked and strong, and her feet—uniformly tan, fine-boned, with perfect arches and a tracery of rich blue veins—were beautiful. “It’s a sextant,” she said. “They used to use them for navigation in the old days. My father had it lying around.”
“Oh,” said Walter, as if it should have been obvious to him all along. He’d just been married, he was stoned and exalted, the sky was splitting open and lightning sat in the trees. He was holding a sextant in his hand, and he wondered why.
“It’s kind of a joke,” she said. “So you can find your way to me, you know?” He didn’t know, but the words stirred him. “Don’t you remember? That night down at the river?”
He gave her a numb look: maybe he remembered and maybe he didn’t. A lot had happened that night. Suddenly, maddeningly, he felt a terrific itch in his missing foot.
She was fishing for something in a leather pouch: Walter saw a comb, a mirror, a tube of lipstick. “I mean our date.” She found what she was looking for—cigarettes—and she shook one from the pack and lit it. Walter said nothing, but he watched her as if he’d never seen match or cigarette before. “My father’s sailboat,” she said. “I’m taking you out to the ghost ships.” She glanced up at him and her eyes were cold and hard as marbles. He felt the first few heavy drops of rain through the back of his shirt. There was a rumble of thunder. “You didn’t forget?”
“No,” he lied. “No, no,” and he knew in that moment he would take her up on it, knew he would go back and walk the barren rusted decks as he’d gone back to stand yearning and bewildered before the road marker, knew he was bound to her in some frightening and unfathomable way.
“How does it feel?” she asked suddenly.
“What?” he said, but he didn’t have to ask.
“You know: your foot.”
The rain was coming harder now, big pregnant drops that tickled his scalp and wet his cheeks. He shrugged. “Like nothing,” he said. “It feels dead.”
And then, just as he was about to turn and jog around the corner to huddle with the others beneath the leaky roof of Tom Crane’s shack, she took his arm and pulled him toward her. Her voice was a whisper, a rasp. “Can I see it?”
Thunder crashed in the trees, a bolt of lightning lit the branches of the big white oak that snaked over them. He didn’t know what he must have looked like at that moment, but his face showed what he felt. She let go of him. “Not now,” he heard her say as he turned and plunged through the quickening rain, seeing the pall of mist, the road marker and the swift glancing shadow all over again, “I don’t mean now.” He kept going. “Walter!” she called. “Walter!” He’d reached the corner of the shack and could see Jessica, Tom and Hector huddled under the eaves before him by the time he stopped to look over his shoulder. Mardi was standing there, indifferent to the rain. Wet hair clung to her face, her hands were outstretched in supplication. “Not now,” she repeated, and the skies broke open above her.
With the Patroon’s Blessing
Dominie Van Schaik, as yet churchless, had to hike all the way out t
o the Van Brunt farm for the christening. He’d spent the previous night on a pallet at the upper manor house and had breakfasted on hard biscuit and water before conducting a dawn service for Vrouw Van Wart, a service followed by two rigorous hours of prayer and meditation (rigorous, to say the least—the woman was a fanatic). He could feel every amen in the crook of his knee as he shambled over the crude footbridge and struggled up the steep stony path to the farm.
It was late September, overcast but warm—oppressively warm—and by the time he was halfway up the hill he found he had to sit a moment and refresh himself beside the stream that chattered along the path in a ribbon of fern and skunk cabbage. The local farmers, he recalled, referred to the runlet as Blood Creek for some superstitious reason, something about a filicide who supposedly stalked these woods. Rustic superstitions had little effect on the Dominie, a man who followed Gomarus and walked the path of righteousness, but still he had to admit that these woods were particularly gloomy and ominous. What was it? The trees were thicker here, he supposed, the light more tenuous. And there seemed to be a disproportionate number of rotting trunks among the healthy trees, big Cretaceous giants that leaned precariously against their still vital neighbors or stretched out prone—their bark gone in patches and covered all over with earlike growths of fungus—until they were swallowed up in the shadows of the forest floor.
The Dominie had just cupped his hands and bent forward to drink from a limpid stony pool, when he glanced up and spotted the figure of a man poised amidst the scrub oak and mountain laurel. It was a shock, and for all his certainty, for all his contempt for the bogeys that haunt the primitive mind, he felt his heart turn over in him. But the shock was momentary: this was no red-bearded Swede with a dripping axe, this was … nothing. The figure, if it had been there at all, had faded into the undergrowth like a phantom. Had his eyes been playing tricks on him? No. He’d seen it clear as day. A man of flesh and blood, gaunt, tall, with the facial features of an aborigine and wrapped in a coat of animal fur. Shaken, the Dominie rose cautiously to his feet. “Hello?” he called. “Is anyone there?”
Not a leaf stirred. From an invisible perch, high above him, a crow called out in its harsh mocking tones. All at once the Dominie was angry with himself—he’d fallen prey to superstition, if only for an instant. But then anger gave way to fear: rational, cold, self-serving fear. If what he’d seen out there wasn’t an apparition, it occurred to him that a painted savage was even then lurking amidst the bushes, stalking him—the Dominie—as he might have stalked a turkey or quail. Recollections of the Indian massacres of the forties succeeded this revelation, and the Dominie, picturing splayed limbs and tomahawked scalps, gathered himself up and hurried on his way.
He was winded by the time he reached the crest of the hill, and he took a moment to catch his breath and survey the untidy little farm that lay before him. The place was even worse than he’d imagined. A recent thunderstorm had made a quagmire of the yard out front of the house (if you could call it a house), the stone fences were in disrepair and there was a pervasive reek of human slops about the place. The woman, with her shaved head and dumb-staring eyes, came out to greet him. She was wearing a dress that might have been scavenged from a corpse, and the half-breed child—he looked to be about two or so—trailed behind her, naked as the day he was born. The Dominie made his greetings and sat out front on the chopping block, drinking more water—didn’t anyone serve ale any more?—and nibbling at a sourish corn cake while the child ran to fetch his uncle, and a Canada goose with clipped wings looked on expectantly.
Young Van Brunt came in from the fields and extended a callused hand. “Pleased to see you again, Dominie,” he said. “We’re thankful you could make it.”
The pastor had meant to be severe, to give the boy a piece of his mind with regard to raising half-breed bastards, defying the patroon’s authority and running afoul of the schout, but Jeremias’ humble greeting softened him. He took the proferred hand, looked past the angry reddened welt the schout’s sword had left like a surveyor’s plumb line on the boy’s face, and into the shifting deeps of his eyes. “It’s more than God’s duty,” he murmured. “It’s a pleasure too.”
The ceremony was nothing—a saying of words and a sprinkling of water the woman fetched from the creek—a ceremony he’d performed a hundred times and more, but what gave him trouble was the name. He actually stumbled over it, twice, before Jeremias’ soft assured tones corrected him. Jeremy—the Englishers’ version of Jeremias—was no problem; it was the patronym that made his tongue cleave to his palate like a half-baked honeycake. “Mohonk?” he said. “Is that right?”
Two months before, on that stifling July afternoon when Jan Pieterse left his store to dip crabs on Acquasinnick Bay and Joost Cats rode out to Nysen’s Roost on the patroon’s business, Jeremias was hoeing up the weeds between the high sweet burgeoning rows of corn in the stand behind the house. It was a messy proposition. The ground was wet as a sponge with the runoff from the previous night’s storm, and it tugged at the hoe with a whistling suck and plop and clung to his pegleg like the grip of a dirty hand. He swatted insects, sweat dripped from his nose, there were yellow smears of mud on his face and clothing, on his pegleg and the wooden clog he wore on his left foot. It was only because it was so hot and still—even the birds were at rest till the cool of evening—that he was able to hear the shudder and whinny of the horses, and then the voices—one of them was Katrinchee’s—that came to him over the fields in a sunstruck rhapsody. Staats, he thought. Or Douw.
On his way in from the field he found Squagganeek bent over an anthill with a stick, and took him by the hand. “It’s grootvader van der Meulen,” he told the boy. “Come to visit on his horse. And Uncle Douw too, I’ll bet.” But when he rounded the corner of the house, the boy at his side, he saw how wrong he’d been—how bitterly, painfully wrong. He’d expected an embrace from Staats, a walk with Douw, something from moeder Meintje’s oven, and the sight of the schout, with his flugelhorn nose, bowed back and ugly black dab of a beard, stopped him cold. For a moment. A moment only. Then the anger took over. Trembling with it, his heart hammering and his throat gone dry, he crossed the yard, heard what the ass had to say and bent to pluck a stick of firewood from the ground.
He was so enraged—again, the son-of-a-bitch had come to evict him again—that he barely glanced at the second rider hovering at the edge of the trees. Until she called out, that is. Until her father unsheathed his sword and raised it above his head and she cried out in shock and horror and the keenest pitch of lamentation. Jeremias shot her a glance, her name on his lips even as the stick splintered in his hands and the force of the schout’s blow drove him to his knees, feeling somehow awkward and embarrassed, ashamed of his clothes and his uncombed hair, regretful of his rage, his station, his life, wanting only to hold her but holding nothing. Then there was blood in his eyes and he was on the ground.
If the sun stirred in the sky and the shadows lengthened, he was unaware of it. When he opened his eyes he could barely see for the blood that filmed them, but he knew she was there, bent over him, pressing something that smelled of her most intimate self to the side of his face, while Katrinchee sobbed somewhere in the background and Squagganeek, closer at hand, howled like a wild beast. Then it came to him: her skirts. He was bleeding, he was hurt, and she was stanching the blood with her skirts. He could see her now, the light trembling around her in an otherworldy nimbus, the coils of her hair fallen loose, her face gone dead white and her dress steeped in his wet black blood. “Neeltje?” he said, trying to shake it off and sit up.
“I’m right here,” she said, appending his name in a startled whisper, “—Jeremias.”
And then there was the other voice, the voice that stirred him with a thrill of hate even as he lay there flat on his back. “I’m sorry it’s come to this,” the schout said, and Jeremias could see him now too, gargantuan, all nose and broad-rimmed hat, as tall as any tree and broad enough to blot out th
e sun, “and I’m sorry I’ve struck you down. But you’ve got to learn respect for authority, you’ve got to know your place.”
“Oh, vader, please. Can’t you see he’s hurt?”
The schout went on as if he hadn’t heard her, as if she were made of air or paper. “Under the authority vested in me by the lord and proprietor of these lands, Oloffe Stephanus Van Wart, patroon,” he said, his voice gone nasal in official pronouncement, “I hereby inform you, Jeremias Van Brunt, that you are now in custody of the law.”
Jeremias walked the eight miles to Croton. In his filthy blood-stained clothes, with bits of grass and leaves in his hair, and the side of his face swollen to twice its size with the poultice of mud and medicinal herbs Katrinchee had applied, after the Weckquaesgeek fashion, to his open wound. His hands were bound behind his back, as if he were a thief or axe murderer, and a cord cinched around his waist connected him to the pommel of the schout’s saddle. It was tough going. The nag would quicken its pace unexpectedly and jerk him forward or suddenly slow to a virtual stop, causing him to stagger out to his right to avoid it, the strut digging like a goad at the stump of his leg. Another man would have complained, but not Jeremias. Though horseflies and mosquitoes made him dance with their stings, though he felt light-headed from loss of blood and sick from thirst, though the gash that leapt across his right eye, exposed the bone beneath it and opened up the flesh all the way to the hinge of his jaw felt as if it were being probed with hot needles, he never said a word. No: he just concentrated on the slow, working shift of the nag’s flanks and stepped aside when the animal relieved itself.