by T. C. Boyle
Neither Wouter nor Jeremy uttered a word as they felt their way down the path to Acquasinnick Creek in the gloom of dusk. They’d been up and down the trail so many times the figure approached infinitude, and though it was barely light enough to see, they knew every dip, drop-off, pothole and rib of stone as if they’d carved them themselves. In less than five minutes they were sitting on the high undercut bank of the creek, listening to the suck and pop of rising trout and the flatulent complaint of the bullfrog. Wouter had made off with six cakes. He handed three to his cousin.
For a long while they merely chewed, the water dodging the rocks at their feet in rhythmic wash, mosquitoes cutting the air, crickets chirruping. Wouter broke the silence. “Damned if I’m going to bust my back for the patroon,” he said in a sort of ruminative, octave-shattering yelp. He was at that stage in his life when his father was a small deity, reverenced and wise, incapable of error, the very oracle of truth and decision. If Jeremias told him that geese knew algebra and the creek flowed backward, he’d never doubt it, all appearances to the contrary.
Jeremy said nothing. Which wasn’t unusual, since he rarely spoke, even if directly addressed. He was tall, dark, with the spidery limbs and prominent Adam’s apple of his late progenitor, and though he knew Dutch and English both, he declined to use either, communicating in gurgles, grunts and belches, or in an elaborate sign language of his own device.
“You know vader won’t do it,” Wouter said, reaching out to snatch a firefly from the air and smear its phosphorescence in a greenish streak across his forearm. “He’s no slave.”
Night was deepening around them. There was a splash downstream, from the direction of the bridge. Jeremy said nothing.
“It’ll be us, you know,” Wouter said. “Vader won’t do it, and then moeder and grootvader Cats’ll make us do it. Just like the wood. Remember?”
The wood. Yes. Jeremy remembered. When the rent came due last November and Jeremias retreated, muttering, to the back room, it wasn’t just the pounds and pence, the butter, wheat and pullets the patroon demanded, but two fathoms of firewood to boot. No son of mine, Jeremias had blustered, or nephew either … but his voice had trailed off, and he’d taken a pull at the bottle and staggered out into the yard to be alone with his indignation and his rage. Neeltje, moeder Neeltje, had seen to it that Wouter, Harmanus and Jeremy cut and split the patroon’s wood for him. The three of them—Harmanus was only eight and not much good—worked through two bitterly cold afternoons, and then had to hitch up the oxcart and drive out to the upper manor house with the firewood to warm the patroon’s crazy skeletal old mother, who’d been living there ever since the old patroon kicked off. That was in November, when the wood needed cutting. Now it was July, and the road needed widening.
“Well I’m not going to do it,” Wouter growled. “No matter what moeder says.”
Though he heartily concurred, still Jeremy said nothing.
A long moment passed, the night sounds of the forest crepitating around them, the water spilling ever louder over the stones at their feet. Wouter tossed a handful of pebbles into the black swirling water, then pushed himself up. “What are we going to do?” he said. “I mean, if the patroon comes.”
Jeremy’s reply was so guttural, so strangled, so full of clicks and grunts and pauses, that no one but Wouter, his bosom companion and bedmate, would have known what he said. But Wouter heard him as clearly as if he’d spoken the purest King’s English—or stadtholder’s Dutch—and in the darkness he smiled with the comfort of it. What his cousin had said, in his arcane and contorted way, was this: “The patroon come, we fix him.”
Inevitably, like frost in its season, like corn blight or bread mold, like the crow that arrives to feast on the dead ox or the fly that hovers over the pan of rising dough, the patroon came. He came by sloop, to the landing at Jan Pieterse’s Kill, and he brought with him his wife, Hester Lovelace (who was, by happy coincidence, niece to the most powerful man in New York, his honor the lord governor), his four children, three rooms of furniture, two crates of crockery, a spinet and several somber family portraits meant to enliven the dreary atmosphere of the upper house. Pompey II, now eighteen and the only male issue of the union between the late patroon’s domestic slaves, Ismailia and Pompey the First, rode shotgun over the crates, stores and furniture. His sister Calpurnia, a light-skinned girl with something of the old patroon in the crook of her nose and the odd, almost spastic skew of her limbs, kept Mijnheer’s three young boys from drowning themselves and saw to the tonsorial needs of Saskia, the patroon’s ethereal ten-year-old daughter.
Stephanus was met at the Blue Rock by a fatter, older and considerably richer Jan Pieterse, and by a delegation of slow-moving, baggy-breeched farmers with chaff in their hair and clay pipes in their pockets. His factotum, an unctuous, incessantly twitching whipsnake of a man by the name of Aelbregt van den Post, took charge of the unloading of the sloop and the concurrent loading of the two wagons that stood ready to receive the patroon and his effects. Summoning all his sinewy energy, van den Post, who was said to have survived a shipwreck off Cape Ann by clinging to a spar and eating jellyfish for three weeks, flung himself into the task like a desperate man. He skittered up and down the big slab of rock, shouting orders to the sloop’s torpid crew, handing Mijnheer’s wife down from the gangplank and up into the wagon, steadying the horses, cuffing the hapless carpenter for lagging behind with his tools, castigating Pompey, chiding the children and managing, in the intervals, to bow and scrape at Mijnheer’s heels like a fawning spaniel. When all was ready, the patroon and his family went ahead in the light wagon, Pompey at the reins. Van den Post and the carpenter, hunched over a pair of evil-smelling oxen on the rough plank seat of the overladen farm wagon, brought up the rear.
The patroon was anxious to get to the house. He’d paid a visit during the spring and was shocked by the general decline of the place, the millstones ground to dust, the farms run down, the house itself sagging into the earth like a ship listing at sea. Mismanagement was what it was. That, and his own preoccupation elsewhere. How could he expect his tenants to advance at more than a crawl if there was no one to crack the whip over them?
Well, all that was about to change.
He planned to live at the upper house himself till the weather turned, tightening the reins on his tenants and putting things in order so he could install his dunderhead of a cousin in the place without having to worry about its falling to wrack and ruin. In a decade’s time he’d want the house for Rombout, his eldest boy, and when he passed on himself, the lower house—and the Cats farm—would go to Oloffe, his middle son, and Pieter, the youngest. But for now he was here with his family to live beneath the roof of the fine old stone house his father and uncle had raised not thirty years ago, and he meant to put all his energy into it. Old Ter Dingas Bosyn, the commis, would look after the lower house and the goods due in from Rotterdam at the end of the month, and he had Cats to see to things in Croton as well. And then, of course, it wasn’t as if he were going into exile on a desert isle or anything—the lower house was no more than half a day’s ride, if something should come up.
It took him a week to get settled. His mother, who’d been living there alone, was cold and irascible, and he spent the first several days trying to disabuse her of the notion that he’d come to turn her out to her martyrdom among the beasts of the wilderness. Then there was Vrouw van Bilevelt, the housekeeper, who took every suggestion as a personal affront, regarded Pompey and Calpurnia as cannibals in Dutch clothing, and fought bitterly over every cup, saucer and stick of furniture Hester brought into the house. And finally, there was the sticky question of the de Vries. It was they—Gerrit Jacobzoon de Vries, his wife and two cretinous sons—who’d managed the farm all these years—and managed it badly. On the very first night, after a dinner of stewed eel and cabbage charred into the pan out of spite by a murderous-looking Vrouw van Bilevelt, Stephanus summoned Gerrit de Vries to the front parlor. He began by saying
how much he appreciated the long and honorable service Gerrit had given him and his father before him, sketched in his plans for the upper house and mill, and ended by offering him a new farm out beyond the van der Meulens’ place, on the same terms he’d offer any prospective tenant—a stake in building materials, livestock and farm machinery, all improvements descending to the patroon, quitrent due in November.
De Vries was struck dumb. His face flushed; he turned his hat over in his rough hands. Finally, in his peasant’s Dutch, he managed to stammer, “You—you mean, start all over again?”
Mijnheer nodded.
The rest was simple. De Vries spat at his feet and the patroon had van den Post show him to the door. The following morning, after thirteen years at the upper house, the de Vries were gone.
Once all that had been settled, the patroon set van den Post to work on the farm and ordered the carpenter to begin reroofing the house and hauling stone to frame the two-story addition that would more than double the size of the place. Then he turned his thoughts to road building. And widening.
It was on a fine hot August morning, while the blackberries ripened in the woods, the corn grew sweet in the fields and the crabs crawled right up out of the bay and into the pot, that the patroon called on his tenants to give him the labor that was his due. By eight o’clock they were there, gathered in front of the house with their carts and teams, their axes and shovels and harrows. The patroon, dressed in flowing rhinegrave breeches and a sleeveless silk jerkin, and mounted on the sleek Narragansett pacer the schout had brought up from Croton for him, acknowledged each of them with a lordly nod of his head—first the van der Meulens, old Staats and his son, Douw, who leased his own farm now; next the Cranes and Ten Haers and Reinier Oothouse’s boy, who’d taken over after the delirium tremens softened his father’s brain; and finally, the Lents, the Robideaus, the Mussers and Sturdivants.
All told, there were nearly two hundred people living on the Van Wart estate, upper and lower manors combined, but the majority of these were gathered along the Hudson in Croton and sprinkled inland along the Croton River. Up here, on the northern verge of Stephanus’ estate, there were only ten farms under cultivation, and a total, at last count, of fifty-nine souls—excluding, of course, the ragged band of Kitchawanks at Indian Point and the twenty-six free subjects of the Crown who lived at Pieterse’s Kill, on plots the trader had sold them for fifty times what he’d paid for them. Ten farms. That was four more than there’d been in his father’s time, but in the Jongheer’s eyes it was nothing. Not even a start.
He’d been buying up land to the east from a degenerate tribe of the Connecticuts, and to the south from the Sint Sinks. And by skillful recruitment among the dazed and seasick immigrants who staggered ashore at the Battery with little more than the wind at their backs and stuffed-up noses, he’d managed to find tenants for nearly all the choice Croton plots—and he would find more, a hundred more, to domesticate the wild lands up here. What he wanted was nothing less than to amass the biggest estate in the Colony, a manor that would make the great estates of Europe look like so many vegetable patches. It had become his obsession, his overmastering desire, the one thing that made him forget the paved streets, the quiet taverns, the music, art and society of Leyden and Amsterdam. He looked out over the sun-burnished faces of the farmers who’d come to build him a road—a road that would bring swarms of beholden peasants up from the river to fell the trees, fire the stumps and plow up the ground—and for the briefest moment he saw it all as it would one day be, the hills rolling with wheat, onions sprouting from the marshes, pumpkins and cabbages and crookneck squash piled up like riches, like gold. …
But then one of the farmers cleared his throat and spoke up, and the picture was gone. It was Robideau, a bitter, leathery Frenchman who’d lost an ear in a calamitous brawl outside the Ramapo tavern, which mysteriously burnt to the ground a week later. Robideau sat high up on the hard plank seat of his wagon, his close-set eyes gleaming, the whip lazily flicking at the flies that settled on the blistered rumps of his oxen. “And what about Van Brunt,” he said. “The pegleg. Where’s he?”
Van Brunt? For a moment the patroon was confused, having so successfully suppressed the memory of that ancient and unseemly confrontation that he’d forgotten Jeremias existed. But in the next moment he was back in that miserable hovel, the schout laid out on the hard dirt floor, Jeremias Van Brunt defying him, challenging him with a crude aboriginal weapon, and slim pretty dark-eyed little Neeltje regarding him from her bed of sin. You don’t own Neeltje, Jeremias said. And you don’t own me.
“It is because he’s married to the schout’s daughter—is that why he gets special treatment?”
Van Brunt. Yes: where in hell was he? Stephanus turned to the schout, who’d come up from Croton the previous evening to oversee the road work. “Well?” he said.
Cats was bowed nearly to the ground as he shuffled forward to make his excuses. “I don’t know where he is, Mijnheer,” he said in a voice so halting and reluctant he seemed to gag on each word. “I’ve informed him, and—and he said he would come.”
“Oh, he did, did he?” The patroon leaned forward in his saddle, the great billowing folds of his breeches engulfing his stockings, his buckled pumps and the stirrups too. “That’s very generous of him.” And then, straightening up again so that he towered over the schout like an equestrian monument come to life, he cursed so vilely and emphatically that young Johannes Musser snatched a hand to his mouth and Mistress Sturdivant, the stoutest woman in Van Wartwyck, fainted dead away. “I want him here within the hour,” he said, speaking through clenched teeth. “Understand?”
The day was half gone, and the patroon in a rage approaching apoplectic closure, when finally the Van Wart wagon, drawn by a pair of gaunt, toothless and half-lame oxen, appeared around the bend and made for the work crew at a somnolent pace. Joost Cats, leading his nag and listing so far forward it looked as if he were about to plunge face down in the dirt, limped beside it. The patroon glanced up angrily, then turned to the first farmer at hand—young Oothouse—and began an earnest chat about manure or dried shad or some such nonsense; he wasn’t about to give Van Brunt the satisfaction of thinking that he, Stephanus Oloffe Rombout Van Wart, landowner, patroon, shipping magnate and member of the Governor’s Council, could experience even the slightest anxiety over the whereabouts of so insignificant a creature as he.
The crew—men and women both, including a revived Mistress Sturdivant—had cleared and graded the outside lane in front of the patroon’s house, and were now taking their de noen break. They lounged in the shade, appropriating a round from one of the felled trees for a table, chewing hard black bread, cold bacon and cheese. One of them—Robideau, from the look of his stockings and shoes—was snoring blissfully beneath a blackberry bush, a soiled white handkerchief spread over his face. As the patroon listened to young Oothouse apotheosize dung, he was aware of every creaking revolution of the wagon wheels behind him, of every snort and wheeze of the winded old oxen. Finally, with an excruciating shriek of the axles, the wagon ground to a halt at his back.
Lifting his nose, and turning around with all the imperious dignity he could muster, the patroon was prepared to be mollified, Van Brunt’s very presence—however reluctant, however tardy—proof positive that yes, he did own him, just as he owned all the rest of these sorry soil grubbers, his word the law, eviction and banishment his prerogatives. He turned, but what he saw wasn’t at all what he expected. This wasn’t Van Brunt hunched over the reins—this was a boy, a half-breed, with the soupy staring eyes of the mentally deficient. And beside him another boy, younger, weaker, thinner, the sort of boy you’d send out to gather nuts, not build roads.
“I’m—I’m—” Cats was trying to say something. The patroon speared him with a savage glance. “—I’m sorry, but my son-in-law, I mean, Farmer Van Brunt, is, uh, indisposed, and he, uh, sent, his, uh—”
“Silence!” the patroon exploded. “I ordered yo
u,” he roared, advancing on the shrinking schout in the great boatlike mules he wore over his pumps to protect them from the dirt of the road, “to bring him here, did I not!?”
“Yes, Mijnheer,” the schout said, whipping off his hat and working it in his hands. He was staring at his feet. “But instead because he, he was ill—”
It was then that the boy spoke up—the smaller one, the white boy. His voice was as high and shrill and discordant as a badly played piccolo. “That’s not it at all, grootvader,” he said, working himself up. He turned to face the patroon, as bold as a thief. “He won’t come, that’s all. Said he’s busy. Said he’s paid his rent. Said he’s as good a man as you.”
The patroon said nothing. He turned his back on them, shuffled over to the pacer, kicked off the mules and swung himself into the saddle. Then he motioned to young Oothouse. “You,” he growled, “go fetch Heer van den Post.” Everyone—even Mistress Sturdivant, who’d been addressing herself to a shepherd’s pie the size of a football—turned to watch him go. No one moved, and no one said a word, till he returned.
Young Oothouse, an indolent young man given to fat and a measured pace, jogged all the way, and he was red-faced and running with sweat when he appeared around the bend in the road, van den Post loping easily at his side. In the next moment, van den Post stood before the patroon, gazing up steadily at him from beneath the brim of his steeple hat. “Yes, Mijnheer?” he said, barely winded.