World's End

by T. C. Boyle

  Nothing for nothing, Walter’s grandmother said, giving the far carp a round and staring eye with a swirl of her little finger. The old chief owed that canny Dutchman, and he knew it.

  Well, Jan Pieterse, so the story goes, had a friend. Two friends. They were the Van Wart brothers, Oloffe and Lubbertus. Oloffe, who had influence in the Company, was granted a patroonship by Their High Mightinesses that encompassed not only all the Kitchawanks’ tribal lands, but those of the Sint Sinks and Weckquaesgeeks as well. It was already carved up and mapped out, plenty for him and his brother and half the population of the Netherlands too. All he had to do was satisfy the original owners, who, as everybody in Haarlem knew, were a bunch of naked, illiterate, drink-besotted and disease-ridden beggars who couldn’t add up their fingers and toes, let alone survey the land and read the fine print of your basic, binding, inviolate and ironclad contract. Jan Pieterse, an adept in Indian ways, was to be his go-between. For a fee, of course.

  Now Sachoes didn’t know anything of this—couldn’t begin to imagine the polders and dikes and cobbled streets, the factories, breweries and cozy pristine parlors of that distant and legendary Dutch homeland—but he did know that come morning, with its pale streaks of Arctic light, Composed of Mouth would be on his hut step, with the great mustachioed and bloat-bellied patroon-chief in tow, and that the patroon-chief was hungry to own what no man had a right to own: the imperishable land beneath his feet. But what could the old chief do? Deer were dropping dead in the woods, their stomachs stuffed with bark; snowdrifts buried the village; Mother Corn was comatose till spring; and the people wanted everything the trader put up for sale. If he didn’t deal with Jan Pieterse, then Wasamapah, his bitterest rival for control of the tribe, a man who understood credit, spoke with the wind and leaped tall trees in a single bound, would. And Manitou help the old chief if he let Composed of Mouth and the patroon-chief cheat him.

  But cheat him they did, Walter’s grandmother said, rising with a groan to rinse her hands at the sink in the kitchen. And do you know how they managed it? she asked over her shoulder.

  Walter was nine years old. Or maybe ten. He didn’t know much. Uh-uh, he said.

  She shuffled back into the room, a big gray-haired woman in a print dress, rubbing her thumb over the tips of her first two fingers. Vigorish, she said, that’s how.

  When Sachoes sat down in his hut the following morning with Composed of Mouth and the patroon-chief and his brother, Wasamapah sat down beside him. And rightfully so. For Wasamapah was the memory of the tribe. As each term of a treaty was struck, he would carefully select a polished fragment of clam, mussel or oyster shell from the pile spread out in the dirt before him, and string it on a piece of rawhide. Each article, each proviso, amendment and codicil had its own distinctive signifier; afterward, when the dust had settled over the mountain of exchanged gifts, when the kinnikinnick had been smoked and the yokeag and doe’s tongue eaten, Wasamapah would convene the council of elders and repeat for them, over and over, the significance of each buffed and rounded shell.

  And so it was this time. Sachoes put on his most inflexible face, the patroon-chief tugged uneasily at the joints of his puffed-up fingers, Composed of Mouth talked till he was hoarse, Wasamapah strung shells. With dignity, with stateliness and a serenity that belied his unease, Sachoes accepted the gifts, made his demands on behalf of the tribe and grudgingly gave ground in the face of Composed of Mouth’s verbal onslaught. Then they passed a pipe and feasted, the patroon-chief eating sparingly of the cornmeal and tongue and plentifully of the Dutch stuffs—stinking cheeses, rock-hard loaves, salted this and pickled that—that he’d brought along. The new dogs took care of the scraps.

  As he smoked, as he gnawed at the foul-smelling cheeses and chewed the tongue, Sachoes felt elated. In addition to the heap of gifts piled up outside the longhouse and distributed throughout the tribe, he’d bargained for barrels of meal, for blankets and bolts of cloth, for beads by the hundredweight and sturdy iron plows and adzes and cookpots. Even better, the patroon-chief’s brother had been persuaded to give up the gold ring that encircled his little finger, Jan Pieterse threw in a gilt-edged mirror and a keg of black powder, and in the crowning moment of the negotiations, the patroon-chief himself presented Sachoes with a great floppy-brimmed sugarloaf hat that trailed a plume half as long as his arm. And best of all, Sachoes had given up practically nothing in return—a little plot of land that ran north from the Blue Rock to the Twice Gnarled Tree, south only as far as Deer Run and east to the Brook That Speaks. Nothing! He could walk the length and breadth of it three times over in an afternoon. Finally, finally he’d bested them. Yes, he thought, pulling at the ceremonial pipe and inwardly gloating, what a deal!

  But alas, his elation was short-lived. For Wasamapah, eager to make the old chief look bad and with the patroon’s note for two thousand guilders stuffed in his moccasin, had surreptitiously added three jagged bruise-colored shells to the treaty string, shells that extended the boundaries of the patroon’s purchase till they encompassed every last verst, morgen and acre of the Kitchawank’s homeland. Where Sachoes had heard the Twice Gnarled Tree, Wasamapah, so he claimed, had heard the Twice Gnarled Tree Struck Twice by Lightning. And where Sachoes had agreed to Near Deer Run as the southern boundary, Wasamapah had registered Far Deer Run, another matter altogether; so too with the Brook That Speaks, which Wasamapah had recorded as the Brook That Speaks in Winter. When Wasamapah told over the treaty shells for the council of elders, outrage crept into the worn and weary faces of that august body, the light of recrimination flickered in their ancient eyes.

  Six months later, Sachoes was dead. Unable to eat, to sleep, unable to stand or sit or lie flat in his robes, the old chief ate himself up with grief over what he’d done. Or rather, what Jan Pieterse, Oloffe Van Wart and Wasamapah had done to him. Not a brave in the tribe sided with him—he was senile, doddering, a woman in a breechclout, and he’d dealt away the soul of his tribe for a few baubles, for dogs that had run off, a white man’s hat that mouldered away to nothing, for food that had been eaten and beads that hid themselves in the grass. He was done. Finished. Wasamapah, stern, righteous, unforgiving, a man of sudden wealth and confidant of the great patroon-chief who now held dominion over them, stepped in to replace him. Outcast, hunched with grief, a traitor to his own tribe, Sachoes fell away to nothing, his life as tenuous as the fluff that clings to the dandelion. Wahwahtaysee tried to protect him, but it was no use. One day, in the middle of the strangely pale and wintry summer that succeeded the patroon’s coup, the wind blew. Blew hard. Blew a regular gale. And that was. the end of Sachoes.

  “Yeah, Sachoes,” Piet sighed, and Walter started and looked around him as if he were waking to a nightmare. “Got taken by one of his own, wasn’t that the story?” The imp was leering at him now, showing acres of gum at the edges of his grin, his eyes recessed in twin sinkholes of wrinkle. “Betrayed, fucked over, stabbed in the back. Right?”

  Walter only stared.

  And then Piet leaned way out over the abyss between the beds, his face still squinched in that unholy leer, and hit Walter with everything he had: “So what do you hear from your old man?”

  What does he hear? The question choked him with bitterness—he could barely get the words out. “I haven’t heard from him. At all. Not since—since I was eleven.” He looked down at the floor. “I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

  The dwarf fell back into himself with surprise—or feigned surprise. His eyebrows shot up. He fanned himself with a quick hand. “Eleven? Shit. I got a card from him just—when?—shit, must of been a week before my accident.”

  The whole of Walter’s being was caught up in the sudden hammering of his heart. “Where?” he blurted. “Where is he?”

  “He’s teaching,” Piet said, and let a beat go by. “In Barrow.”

  “Barrow?”

  “Point Barrow.” Pause, grin, lick lips. “You know: like in Alaska?”

  Next morning,
Piet was gone. Walter woke to the clatter of the dayshift nurse and the furtive tones of desperation and bewilderment that trickled down the corridor to him, and saw that the bed in the corner was made up as if it had never been occupied. After breakfast, Lola appeared with the big dusty clothbound atlas from the bookshelf in the front room, and Walter barely had time to graze her cheek before snatching it from her hands. “Barrow, Barrow, Barrow,” he muttered to himself, flipping impatiently through the pages and then scanning the jagged, glaciated outline of the big bleak mysterious state as if he were seeing it for the first time. He found Anchorage, Kenai, Spenard and Seward. He found the Aleutians, the Talkeetna Mountains, Fairbanks, the Kuskokwim Range. But no Barrow. He had to consult the index for Barrow—G-I—and follow his finger to the top of the map. There it was, Barrow, the northernmost city in the world. Barrow, where windchill took the temperature down to a hundred below and night reigned unbroken for three months of the year.

  Lola, looking on with a bemused smile, had a question for him: “Why the sudden interest in Alaska—thinking of doing some seal hunting?”

  He looked up as if he’d forgotten she was there. “There was a thing on TV about it last night,” he said, flashing his winning smile. “Sounds cool.”

  “Cool?”

  They laughed together. But the minute she left he got an outside line and phoned a travel agent in Croton. Round-trip from Kennedy to Anchorage/Fairbanks alone was $600, plus tax, and service from Fairbanks to Barrow was spotty at best, and could cost another hundred on top of that, not to mention cabs, food and hotel. Where was he going to get that kind of money?

  This time, when Walter was discharged from the hospital to continue his recuperation at home, it was not the sweet-smelling champagnetoting Jessica who came to retrieve him; this time Walter departed those depressing tangerine and avocado hallways in the company of his adoptive mother, haunted more than ever by ghosts of the past. Lola drove: white hair, skin tanned to leather, the turquoise earrings she’d picked up in New Mexico. The Volvo ratcheted and wheezed. Did he want a monster burger? she wanted to know. With pickle, relish, mayonnaise, mustard and three-star chili sauce? Or did he just want to go straight home and rest? No, he told her, he didn’t want a monster burger, though the food in the hospital had been crap—tasteless, overcooked and heavy on the Jello end of the scale—but he didn’t want to go home either.

  Where to, then—Fagnoli’s? For pizza?

  No. He didn’t think so. What he really wanted was to go to Depeyster Manufacturing. On Water Street.

  Depeyster—?

  Uh-huh. He had to see about a job.

  But he’d just got out of the hospital. Couldn’t it wait a few days?

  It couldn’t.

  Walter didn’t bother with the entrance marked EMPLOYEES ONLY—he had Lola park out front, and he swung through the big double doors that gave onto the carpeted vestibule of the inner sanctum, fluid as a gymnast on his crutches, all his weight on his arms and what was now, by default, his good leg. He didn’t bother with Miss Egthuysen either, clumping down the hall as if he owned it, pausing half a moment to knock at the frosted-glass door of executive office #7, and then, without waiting for a response, pushing his way in.

  “Walter?” Van Wart gasped, getting up from his desk. “But I thought … I mean, my daughter told me—”

  But Walter had no time for explanations. He leaned forward, the padded supports of the crutches cutting like knives into the pits of his arms, and waved his hand in dismissal. “When do I start?” he said.

  Open House

  All right, he was thinking, so maybe the place did need a new coat of paint, and perhaps the wisteria was lifting the slate off the stepped gables out front, and yes, the window frames were gouged, the roof leaked and the interior, big as it was, had grown too small for the clutter of ancestral furnishings, but for his money Van Wart Manor was still the best-kept place of its kind in the Hudson Valley, bar none. Sure, there were the museums—Philipsburg Manor, Sunnyside, the lower Van Wart house itself—but they were soulless, husks of houses, uninhabited, ghostly, useless. Even worse were the private restorations like the Terboss place in Fishkill or the Kent house in Yorktown, owned and occupied by strangers, parvenues, interlopers with names like Brophy, Righetti, Mastafiak. Talk about tradition—it went all the way back to some tramp steamer out of Palermo in 1933. It was a joke, that’s all. A bad joke.

  Depeyster Van Wart stood in the loam of his rose garden at the base of the great sloping manorial lawn and gazed up at the house with a rush of proprietary pride, secure in his heritage, in his position, and now, with the unhoped-for miracle of Joanna’s news, secure in his future too. No parvenu he—he was born here, in the master bedroom on the second floor, between the Chippendale chest-on-chest and the Duncan Phyfe wardrobe. His father had been born here too, in the shadow of that same wardrobe, and his father before him. For better than three hundred years, none but Van Warts had trod those peg-and-groove floors, none but Van Warts had mounted the groaning staircases or crouched in the ancestral dirt of the hoariest and bottommost cellar. And now, at long last, he knew in his heart that none of it would ever change, that Van Warts and Van Warts alone would walk those venerable corridors into the golden, limitless, insuperable future.

  For Joanna was pregnant. Forty-three-year-old Joanna, bride of his youth, mother of his daughter, lover of unguents and creams and the cuisines of Naples, Languedoc and the Fiji Islands, champion of the dispossessed, stranger to his bed and purveyor of rags, Joanna was pregnant. After fifteen years of desperate longing, recrimination, rancor and despair, she’d come to him and he’d responded, simple as that. He’d risen to the occasion, impregnated her, knocked her up, got her with child. But not just a child, not just any child—a male child. What else could it be?

  He remembered the cruel disappointment that had followed on the heels of that intoxicating, primal, woodsy tryst before the fireplace last fall—Honey, she’d said to him a scant month later, darling, I think I’m going to have a baby. A baby? He could barely speak for astonishment. Had his prayers been answered, his hopes exhumed? A baby? Was it true? Was he really going to have one more shot at it?

  The answer was as unequivocal as the flow of blood: no, he wasn’t. It was a false alarm. She was late with her period, that was all, and he fell into a despair more profound than he’d ever known. But then, just after the New Year, she came to him again. And then again. She was frenzied, urgent, wild, her skin darkened with smears of some reddish pigment, a smell of swamps and cookfires and bitter uncultivated berries caught in the heavy braids of her hair, buckskin against naked flesh. He was John Smith and she was Pocahontas, untamed, feverish, coupling as if to preserve their very lives. Who was she, this stranger beneath him with the musky smell and the faraway look in her eyes? He didn’t care. He mounted her, penetrated her, spilled his seed deep within her. Blissfully. Gratefully. Thinking: this Indian business isn’t so bad after all.

  Then there was the second alarum, the trip to the doctor, the test, the examination, the indubitability of the result: Joanna was pregnant. So what if she was mad as a hatter? So what if she shied away from him even more violently than before and redoubled her visits to the reservation? So what if she humiliated him at the market in her paints and leggings and all the rest? She was pregnant, and Van Wart Manor would have its heir.

  And so it was that on this particular day—this day of days—as he clipped roses for the big cut-glass vases stationed strategically throughout the house for the delectation of the sightseers and history buffs who would any moment now begin to arrive with appropriately awed and respectful faces, Depeyster felt supreme, expansive, beyond hurt, felt like Solomon awaiting the morning’s petitioners. It was June, his wife was pregnant, the sun shone down on him in all its benedictory splendor, and the house—the ancient, peerless, stately, inestimable house—was open to the public and looking good.

  “Did you hear about Peletiah Crane?”

  Mar
guerite Mott, in a huddle with her sister Muriel, balanced a white bone china cup on its saucer and looked up expectantly at her host. It was late in the afternoon, and a small band of the historically curious, eyes glazed after an exhaustive three-hour tour of the house and grounds that left no shingle undefined or nook unplumbed, was gathered for refreshments in the front parlor. Lula, in white apron and cap, had just served tea and a very old but distinctly musty sherry, and set out a platter of stale soda crackers and tinned pâté, and the group, which consisted of two nuns, a legal secretary from Briarcliff, a self-educated auto mechanic and the withered octogenarian treasurer of the Hopewell Junction Historical Society, as well as young Walter Van Brunt, LeClerc and Ginny Outhouse and, not least, the redoubtable Mott sisters, fell upon these humble offerings like wanderers come in off the desert.

  Marguerite’s question caught the twelfth heir in the middle of a complex architectural dissertation on how the present house had managed to grow up over the generations from the modest parlor in which they now stood. Buoyant, with the energy and animation of a man half his age, Depeyster had driven the octogenarian and the legal secretary up against the Nunns, Clark & Co. rosewood piano in the corner, urging them to appreciate the thickness and solidity of the wall behind it. “Built from native fieldstone and oyster-shell mortar, all the way back in 1650,” he said. “We’ve painted it, glazed it, repaired the mortar, of course—go ahead, feel it—but that’s it, the original wall put up by Oloffe and Lubbertus Van Wart three hundred and nineteen years ago.” Depeyster had been talking for three hours, and he wasn’t about to stop now—not as long as anyone was still standing. “The patroon settled in Croton, at the lower house—you know, the museum—and he built this one for his brother, but after Lubbertus passed on he alternated between the two houses. Ironically, the lower house went out of the family just after the Revolution—but that’s another story—while this one has been continuously occupied by Van Warts since the day—” he suddenly broke off and turned to Marguerite. “What did you say?”