World's End

by T. C. Boyle

  “Peletiah. Did you hear about Peletiah?”

  In that moment, secretary and treasurer were forgotten, and Depeyster felt his heart leap up. “He’s dead?” he yelped, barely able to contain himself.

  The auto mechanic was watching him; LeClerc and Walter, who’d had their heads together, looked up inquisitively.

  “No,” Marguerite whispered, pursing her lips and giving him a quick closer’s wink, “not yet.” She let the moment hang over him, huge with significance, and then delivered the clincher: “He’s had a stroke.”

  He didn’t want to seem too anxious—the legal secretary was glancing around her uneasily, afraid to set her cup down, and the old boy from Hopewell Junction looked as if he were about to have a stroke himself—and so he counted to three before he spoke: “Is it… serious?”

  Marguerite’s smile was tight, the white-frosted lips pressed firmly together, the foundation at the corners of her eyes barely breached. It was a realtor’s smile, and it spoke of quiet triumph, of the thorny deal at long last closed. “He can’t walk,” she said. “Can’t talk or eat. He keeps slipping in and out of it.”

  “Yes,” Muriel said, interposing her glazed face between them, “it looks bad.”

  Looks bad. The words stirred him, gladdened him, filled him with vengeful joy. So the old long-nosed land-grubbing pinko bastard was finally slipping over the edge, finally letting go … and now it was the grandson—the pothead—who would take charge of things. It was too perfect. Thirty-five hundred an acre—ha! He’d get it for half that, a quarter—he’d get it for the price of another fix or trip or whatever it was the kid doped himself up on … yes, and then he’d find himself a horse, a Kentucky Walker like his father used to have, old blood lines, blaze on the forehead; he’d refurbish the stables, lean on the town board to erect one of those horse-crossing signs up the road at the entrance to the place, and then, with his son up in front of him, he’d ride out over the property first thing every morning, sun like fire on the creek, the crush of hickory nuts underfoot, a roast on the table. …

  Unfortunately, the grand and triumphal procession of his thoughts suddenly pulled up lame. For there, outside the window, in full Indian drag and shouldering a bundle the size and shape of a buffalo’s head, was Joanna. Back. Early. Hauling garbage out of the station wagon in full view of the legal secretary and the wheezing old ass from Hopewell Junction. But what was she doing home already? he thought in rising panic. Wasn’t she supposed to be up in Jamestown overseeing the canned succotash drive or some such thing? Suddenly he was moving, nodding his way out of range of the Mott sisters’ waxen smiles, shaking off the auto mechanic’s query about BTUs and heating costs, trying desperately to head her off.

  He was too late.

  The parlor door eased open and there she was, in fringed buckskin and plastic beads, her skin darkened to the color of mountain burgundy. “Oh,” she faltered, glancing around the room in confusion and finally settling on her husband, “I saw all the cars … but it just—it’s open house, then—is that it?”

  Silence gripped the room like fear.

  The nuns looked bewildered, the secretary appalled; Ginny Outhouse smiled tentatively. It was Lula, coming forward with the tray of pâté and crackers, who broke the spell. “Want some canopies, Mizz Van Wart?” she said. “You must be half-starved after that drive.”

  “Thank you, Lula, no,” Joanna said, dropping the bundle to the floor with a clatter, “I had some—some dried meat on the way down.”

  By now, Depeyster had moved forward stiffly to greet her. Muriel had begun to gush small talk (“How are you dear, so good to see you again, you’re looking fit, still rescuing the Indians I see”), and the murmur of conversation had resumed among the others.

  Depeyster was mortified. LeClerc and Ginny were old friends—they knew of Joanna’s growing eccentricity, and it was nothing. Or almost nothing. And Walter was his protegé, no problem there. But these others, the Mott sisters and these strangers—what must they think? And then it came to him. He’d take them aside, one by one, that’s what he’d do, and explain that his wife’s getup was part of the spirit of the open house, touching base with the aboriginal inhabitants of the Valley in a spontaneous bit of historical improvisation and all that—cute, wasn’t it?

  Trie thought calmed him, and he was turning to the shorter of the nuns with an anecdote on his lips, when the door flew open and Mardi, the wayward daughter, burst into the room. “Hello, hello, everyone!” she shouted, “isn’t it a fantastic day?” She was wearing an imitation leopard-skin bikini that showed more of her than her father cared to know about, and her skin was nearly as red as her mother’s with overexposure to the sun. She went straight for the sherry decanter, downed a glass, made a sour face, then downed another.

  It was too much, it was impossible.

  Depeyster turned away from the horror of the scene, fumbling for a pinch of cellar dust to sprinkle over his tea, the mechanic at his elbow, nuns agape, the legal secretary gathering up her things to go. “Oh, hi, LeClerc,” he heard his daughter say in a voice as false and unctuous as an insurance salesman’s. “Must be a bear to heat this place,” the mechanic opined.

  Next thing he knew, Mardi was leading Walter out of the room—“Come on,” she purred, “I want to show you something upstairs”—the nuns were thanking him for a lovely afternoon, Joanna had thrown open her satchel in the middle of the Turkish rug and was offering Indian pottery for sale, and LeClerc and Ginny were talking about dinner. “How about that Italian place in Somers?” Ginny said. “Or the Chinese in Yorktown?”

  And then he was standing at the front door, numbly shaking hands with the mechanic, who’d laid out five dollars apiece for a pair of unglazed Indian ashtrays that looked like a failed kindergarten project (what were they supposed to be, anyway—fish?). “Mind if I take a look at the plumbing on my way out?” The mechanic—he was a young man, bald as an egg—gave him a warm, almost saintly look. “I’d really like to see what you did with the pipes and those three-foot walls.”

  “Or that steak and lobster joint in Amawalk? What do you think, Dipe?” LeClerc said, pulling him away from the mechanic.

  What did he think? The Mott sisters were covering their retreat with a desperate barrage of clichés and insincerities, the old boy from Hopewell Junction announced in a clarion voice that he was going to need help getting to the bathroom, and the legal secretary left without a word. Dazed, defeated, traumatized, he couldn’t say what he thought. The day was in ruins.

  For Walter, on the other hand, the day had just begun.

  He’d been sitting there with LeClerc Outhouse, uncomfortable in his seersucker suit and throat-constricting tie, his lower legs aching from the rigors of the estate tour, discussing, without candor and with little conviction, the moral imperative of the U.S. presence in Indo-china and the crying need to bomb the gooks into submission with everything we had. And now, here he was, following Mardi’s compelling backside up the stairs and into the dark, enticing, black-lit refuge of her room. She was talking trivialities, chattering—Did he know that Hector had joined the marines? Or that Herbert Pompey landed a gig with the La Mancha road company? Or that Joey’s band broke up? She wasn’t seeing Joey any more, did he know that?

  They were in her room now, and she turned to look at him as she delivered this last line. The walls were painted black, the shades drawn. Behind her, a poster of Jimi Hendrix, his face contorted with the ecstasy of feedback, glowed wickedly under the black light. Walter gave her a cynical smile and eased himself down on the bed.

  Actually, he didn’t know that Hector had joined the marines or that Herbert was going on the road—he hadn’t set foot in the Elbow since he left the hospital. And as for Joey, the only emotion that might have stirred in him had he heard that the band hadn’t merely broken up but burst open and fallen to pieces in unidentifiable fragments would have been joy. Mardi had hurt him. Cut him to the quick. Touched him where Meursault could never have be
en touched. And he was all the better for it. Stronger. Harder and more dispassionate than ever, cut adrift from his anchors—from Jessica, from Tom, from Mardi and Hesh and Lola—the lone wolf, the lonesome cowboy, the single champion and seeker after the truth. Love? It was shit.

  No. He hadn’t seen Mardi, Tom, Jessica—any of them. He’d been seeing Miss Egthuysen, though. Twenty-seven years old, slit skirts, lips like butterflies. And he’d been seeing Depeyster. A lot. Learning the business, learning history. He’d moved out of the clapboard bungalow in Kitchawank Colony and taken his own place—a vine-covered guesthouse behind the big old place overlooking the creek in Van Wartville. And the Norton was gone too. He drove an MGA now, sleek, throaty and fast.

  Mardi pulled the door closed. Her hair was in her face, the flat flawless plane of her belly showed a bruise of sunburn, a gold chain clasped her ankle. She crossed the floor to drop the needle on a record, and the room opened up with a cataract of drums and a thin manic drone of guitar. Walter was still smiling when she turned to him again. “What did you want to show me?” he said.

  She padded back across the room, a paradigm of flesh—Walter thought about his ancestors and how inflamed the mere sight of an ankle would get them—and held out a tightly closed fist. “This,” she said, uncurling her fingers to reveal a fat yellow joint. She waited half a beat, then unfastened her halter and wriggled out of the leopard-skin panties. “And this,” she whispered.

  In de Pekel Zitten3

  Well, yes, here were a Van Wart and a Van Brunt fornicating in historic surroundings, but it had taken them centuries to arrive at so democratic a juncture. At one time, such a thing would have been unthinkable. Unspeakable. As absurd as the coupling of lions and toads or pigs and fishes. In the early days, when Jeremias Van Brunt was chafing under the terms of his indenture, when the patroon’s authority went uncontested and those that worked his land were little higher on the social scale than Russian serfs, the closest a Van Brunt had come to a Van Wart was the pogamoggan incident, in which the aforementioned Jeremias had threatened to open up the side of the Jongheer’s head for him.

  At that time, the incident seemed a serious challenge to manorial prerogatives—almost an insurrectionary act—but over the years, all that had been forgotten. Or at least covered over with a shovel or two of dirt, like a corpse hastily buried. Absorbed in looking after his burgeoning family and staving off the anarchic forces of nature that threatened at any moment to overwhelm the farm and thrust him back into the desperate penury he’d known after the death of his parents, Jeremias barely gave a passing thought to his landlord. In fact, the only time he called to mind the man who held sway over him and by whose sufferance he earned his daily bread and raised the roof over his head was in November of each year, when the annual quitrent was due.

  For weeks in advance of the date he would storm and rage and fulminate about the inequity of it all, and the old contumacious fire-breathing spirit arose like a phoenix from the ashes of his contentment. “I’ll move!” he’d shout. “Rather than pay that parasitic fat-assed son of a bitch a single penny I’ll pack up every last stick of furniture, every last cup and saucer and plate, and go back to Schobbejacken.” And every year Neeltje and the children would plead and beg and remonstrate with him, and on the fifteenth, when Ter Dingas Bosyn wheeled up in the patroon’s wagon, Jeremias would lock himself in the back room with a bottle of rum and let his wife count out the coins, the pots of butter, the pecks of wheat and the four fat pullets the patroon demanded as his yearly due. When he emerged the following day, red-eyed and subdued, he’d limp wordlessly out into the yard to repair the barn door or put a new wall in the henhouse where the porcupines had chewed their way through it.

  And for his part, Stephanus, who’d succeeded his father as patroon after the pestilence of ’68 carried the old man off in a fit of wheezing, was too busy maneuvering his way around the Governor’s Council of Ten (of which he was the guiding light), managing the shipping business he’d inherited from his father and raising his own family to worry about an ignorant dirt clod on a distant and negligible plot of land. It was enough that said dirt clod paid his annual rent—a fact duly registered in the commis’ accounts ledger for the given year. Beyond that, Jeremias could go to the devil and back for all Stephanus Van Wart cared.

  All well and good. For twelve years Van Warts and Van Brunts went their own way, and slowly, gradually, the wounds began to heal and a truce settled over the valley.

  But scratch a scab, however feebly, and it will bleed.

  So it was that in the summer of 1679, just after Jeremias’ thirtieth birthday, Neeltje’s father, the redoubtable schout, paid a visit to the farm at Nysen’s Roost with a message from the patroon. Joost arrived late in the afternoon, having spent the better part of the day making the rounds of the neighboring farms. At fifty, he was more bowed than ever, so badly contorted he looked as if he were balancing his head on his breastbone, and the nag he rode was as bony, sway-backed and ill-tempered as its predecessor, the little-lamented Donder. He’d long since reconciled himself to his fiery son-in-law (though every time he glanced at the pogamoggan on its hook beside the hearth his left temple throbbed and his ears began to sing), and when Neeltje begged him to spend the night, he agreed.

  It was at dinner—or rather, after dinner, when Neeltje served seed cakes and a fragrant steaming caudle of cinnamon and wine—that Joost gave them the news. The whole family was gathered around the big rustic table, which Neeltje had set with the veiny china and Zutphen glassware she’d inherited on the death of her mother. Jeremias—shaggy, mustachioed, huge and hatless—pushed back his chair with a sigh and lighted his pipe. Beside him, in a long tapering row on the bench that grew shorter every year, sat the boys: nephew Jeremy, with his wild look and tarry hair, now nearly fifteen and so tight-lipped he would have exasperated the stones themselves; Wouter, eleven and a half and a dead ringer for his father; and then Harmanus and Staats, eight and six respectively. The girls—each as slight and dark-eyed and pretty as her mother—sat on the far side of the table, ranged beside their grandfather. Geesje, who was nine, got up to help her mother. Agatha and Gertruyd were four and two. They were waiting for seed cake.

  “You know, younker,” Joost said, tamping tobacco in the bowl of a clay pipe half as long as his arm, “I’m up here on the patroon’s business.”

  “Oh?” said Jeremias, as indifferent as he might have been to news of the emperor of China, “and what might that be?”

  “Not much,” Joost managed, between great lip-smacking sucks at the stem of the pipe, “not much. Road building, is all.”

  Jeremias said nothing. Geesje cleared away the children’s pewter bowls and the remains of the milk soup. Erect and unfathomable, Jeremy Mohonk exchanged a look with Wouter. “Road building?” Neeltje echoed, setting down the bowl of spiced wine.

  “Hm-hm,” returned her father, sucking and puffing as vigorously as if he’d been plunged into the icy waters of Acquasinnick Creek. “He’s going to be here at the upper house for the rest of the summer. With a carpenter from New York. He’s planning to fix up the house where it’s got run-down and I guess he couldn’t persuade his brother to come out from Haarlem and take it over, but he’s got Lubbertus’ boy of an age now to move in and start a family. …”

  “And what’s it to me?” Jeremias asked, puffing now himself and sending up a bitter black cloud of smoke.

  “Well, that’s just it, you see—that’s what I’ve been going around to the tenants for. The patroon wants—”

  Jeremias cut him off. “There is no patroon—this is an English colony now.”

  Puffing, waving his hand impatiently to concede the point, Joost lifted his head up off his breastbone and went on: “Patroon, landlord—what’s the difference? Anyway, he’s calling on all the tenants to give him five days’ work with their teams—he wants to widen the road from Jan Pieterse’s to the upper house and then on out to the new farms at Crom’s Pond. There’s a post
road to go through here one day, and Mijnheer wants to be sure it won’t pass him by.”

  Jeremias set down his pipe and dipped a cup of wine. “I won’t do it,” he said.

  “Won’t do it?” Joost’s eyes hardened. He watched the angry scar on his son-in-law’s cheek as it flushed with blood and then went dead white again. “You’ve got no choice,” he said. “It’s in your contract.”

  “Screw the contract.”

  Here it was, all over again. Jeremias would never learn, never accept it, not if you locked him up in that cell for a hundred years. But this time, Joost wouldn’t rise to the bait. This time things were different. This time the renegade sat there across the table from him, husband to his daughter, father to his grandchildren. “But the patroon—” Joost began, controlling himself, trying to reason with him.

  He was wasting his breath.

  Jeremias’ fist hit the table with a shock that set the china jumping and so startled little Gertruyd that she burst into tears. “Screw the patroon,” he snarled.

  Wouter sat silently through his father’s outburst, his head bowed, his eyes on the platter of seed cakes in the middle of the table. “Jeremias,” his mother reproved in the soft, chastening voice Wouter knew so well, “you know it’s your duty. Why fight it?”

  The words were barely out of her mouth before his father turned on her, as Wouter knew he would, the stubborn disputatious tones of the old man’s voice riding up the scale to explode in a thunderous tirade against the patroon, the lord governor, rents, taxes, stony soil, wood rot, white ants, earwigs and anything else that came to mind. As his father cocked himself toward her and his mother took an involuntary step away from the table, Wouter made a quick snatch at the seed cakes, secreted a fistful in his shirt and nodded at Jeremy. “Wouter took all the cakes!” howled little Harmanus, but in the heat of the moment, no one noticed. As the two accomplices ducked away from the table and slipped out the door, grandfather Cats was raising his voice too, urging everyone to calm down, to please calm down!