World's End

by T. C. Boyle

  Wouter looked around him. The sun was climbing over the ridge behind him now, pulling back the shadows as if drinking them up. He watched a flock of blackbirds—maes dieven—settle back down in the corn where Jeremy and van den Post had cut their swath through it, and then he looked down at the plumed hat and rapier lying in the wet grass. Somewhere a cow was lowing.

  Wouter didn’t know what to do. He was afraid. Afraid of the cellar, afraid of the stocks and their cruel chafing grasp, afraid of van den Post and the patroon. What he wanted more than anything was to go home and bury himself in his father’s arms, ask him to explain it all to him once again—he wasn’t sure he had it right anymore. He’d stood up to the patroon, defended his father, made his stand, and what had he got for it? Pain and abuse, a pinched ear, wet pants and moldy bread. He looked down the hill, past the great house and out to the road that lay quiet before it. Fifteen minutes. He could be home in fifteen minutes, hugging his moeder, watching the light flash in his vader’s eyes when he found out what they’d done to him. …

  But no. If he ran, they’d come for him. He could see them already: a dozen armed men, the strange black among them, come with dogs and shouts, with hot pitch and feathers, their torches lighting the night. What’d he do? one of them would holler as they held him down, and another, grim as death, would answer in a voice edged with outrage: Why, he bearded the patroon, the little snipe, that’s what he did.

  Biting his lips to fight back the tears, Wouter Van Brunt, eleven and a half years old and as full of regrets as any septuagenarian, slouched around the white pine frame, sat himself down on the rough log behind it and stuck his feet out straight before him. Slowly, deliberately, giving it all his concentration, he eased down the crossbar until it clamped firm around his ankles. Then he went to work on his hands.

  He was still there when his father came for him.

  Up the dusty road, through the gauntlet of his neighbors with their bent backs and anxious faces, his shoulders thrown back, powerful arms laid bare, Jeremias never faltered. He lashed out with the wooden strut as if it were a weapon, striding with such brisk determination he might have been marching off to war, and he didn’t stop to say a word to anyone, not even Staats or Douw. Everyone looked up, of course, but they couldn’t see his face, which was hidden beneath the turned-down brim of his hat. One-two, one-two, his arms swung out at his sides, and he was moving so fast he was almost through them when Staats flung down his shovel and started after him.

  The act was contagious. One by one the farmers threw down their tools and silently followed Jeremias up the drive to the house—even Robideau, though he was the last. By the time Jeremias had reached the meadow in front of the house, the whole neighborhood—Cranes and Oothouses, van der Meulens, Mussers and all the rest—was behind him. No one said a word, but there was fear and expectancy on every face.

  The patroon had ordered the stocks erected midway up the ridge behind the house, where they would be convenient to the immediate discharge of any sentence he might pass down, and yet not so close as to discommode him with any noise, odor or other unpleasant contingency that might arise as a result. To get to them, one had to circumnavigate the kitchen garden and cross a meadow of pasturage, beyond which lay a cornfield and the woods into which cousin Mohonk and van den Post had vanished. Jeremias was in a hurry. He did not circumnavigate the kitchen garden, but instead trod right through it, intent only on the tiny distant figure imprisoned in the cruel machine on the slope above. He trampled parsnips, beets and succory, rent the leaves of lettuce, leeks and cresses, crushed cucumbers and burst tomatoes. In their agitation, the others followed him.

  They were close enough to see that only half the contraption was occupied and to see too that it was the younger boy who occupied it, when the three riders, barely settled in their saddles, shot out from the rear of the barn to intercept them. Jeremias kept going. And his neighbors, aware of the riders bearing down on them, aware of the patroon’s certain displeasure and of the wrong they were doing, followed. If you’d stopped any one of them—even Robideau or Goody Sturdivant—and asked him why, he couldn’t have told you. It was in the air. It was electric. It was the will of the mob.

  The riders cut them off no more than thirty feet from the stocks. Clods flew, the horses beat the ground with iron hoofs. “Halt!” bellowed the patroon. They looked up into his face and saw murder there. His mount wheeled and stamped while he fought to level his late father’s dueling pistols—one in each hand—on the crowd. Beside him, clinging like a leech to a dappled mare, was van den Post, the recovered rapier held high and naked to the sun, and beside him, the third rider, a stranger no taller in the saddle than a boy of eight, his wizened face set in a smirk, a musket clenched in his gnarled little fist. Now normally, at the very least, they would have remarked the arrival of this stranger—of any stranger, but particularly of such an ill-favored and lean-fleshed little radish as this one—but there wasn’t time to think, let alone gossip.

  “The next man that moves dies by this hand!” roared the patroon.

  They stopped. All of them. To a man, woman and child. Except for Jeremias, that is. He never broke stride, never wavered. He marched straight for the patroon as if he didn’t see him, his eyes fixed on the stricken face of his son. “Halt!” the patroon commanded in a voice that lost itself in the effort, and almost simultaneously, he fired.

  There was a shout from the crowd, while Wouter, impotent, unheeded, eleven and a half years old, cried out in a voice of dole—and for the third time in two days, Mistress Sturdivant fell. Hugely. Thunderously. With all the dramatic moment of a Phaedra or Niobe. Suddenly, all was confusion: women shrieked, men dove for cover, young Billy Sturdivant flung himself atop his mother’s supine hulk and the patroon ducked his head like a man guilty of the ultimate solecism. As it turned out, however, Goody Sturdivant wasn’t hit. Nor, for that matter, was Jeremias. The ball kicked up a divot at the blameless instep of Cadwallader Crane’s well-oiled boot and buried itself harmlessly among the grubs and worms.

  Jeremias kept walking. He brushed past the patroon’s horse, moving like a somnambulist, and threw himself on the stocks. Before the enraged patroon could steady the second pistol, Jeremias had thrown back the lock and lifted the crossbar from his son’s wrists. He’d just taken hold of the lower bar when the patroon fired again.

  Wouter was to remember that moment for the rest of his life. He cried out a second time, kicking wildly though his legs were held fast, no horror to approach it, no nightmare or trauma, and watched his father’s hands lock on the crossbar. Watched them lock. Freeze. As if his father had suddenly turned to stone. Was he hit? Was he dead?

  The day was still, suspended on the cusp of the afternoon, breathing down the silence of the ages. No one moved. No one spoke. Then, the kindness of a breeze. It came up from the river with a smell of the mud flats on it—Wouter could feel it in his hair—and it lifted the hat from his father’s head.

  Someone gasped, and Jeremias turned his head slowly toward them, toward the white-faced patroon and the men and women pressing their hands to their mouths. Ever so slowly he straightened up and began to move forward—a step, two steps, three—until he stood in the shadow of that powerful man aloft in the fluttering breeches, and it was then that Wouter noticed the change in his face. Vader wore an expression he didn’t recognize—this was his father, and yet it wasn’t, as if at the moment the shot rang out some ghost or demon had taken possession of his soul. The look on that face—it wasn’t fear or resignation, but a look of defeat, utter and abject defeat—hurt Wouter more than all the stocks and patroons in the world could have begun to. And then, before he could react, vader was down on his knees and begging the patroon’s forgiveness in a tearful croak.

  Wouter wanted to turn away, but he couldn’t. The shot had missed, his father was all right, a moment earlier he’d been flooded with redemptive joy. Now that joy turned to disbelief, to shock, to a deep and abiding shame. Everything his fathe
r had told him, every word, was a lie.

  “I beg you,” Jeremias sobbed, broken at long last, broken like a horse or mule, “I beg you to let me …” and his voice faded away to nothing, “to let me serve you.”

  The patroon’s face was impassive. He looked down at the smoking pistols as if they’d appeared spontaneously, through some act of bewitchment. It took him a moment, but then he dropped them to the ground and swung down from his mount. Behind him, the dwarf cocked his musket and van den Post glared at the subdued mob as if daring them to make a move.

  “And to stay, to please let us stay,” Jeremias went on, the thunder of his voice reduced to a whine, a snivel. “We’ve worked the farm all our lives, it’s the only thing we have, and you must, I beg you, I’m sorry, I didn’t think. …”

  Stephanus didn’t answer. He took a step forward, his face recovered now, the magnificent nostrils alive with disdain, and held out his foot, as if expecting the ultimate obeisance. “Who owns you?” he asked, his balance perfect, voice inflexible.

  “You,” Jeremias croaked, staring at the gleaming shoe as if transfixed.

  “And who owns your wife, your son, your half-breed bastard?”

  To a soul, the tenants leaned forward to hear the reply. Jeremias Van Brunt, the wild-eyed, the proud, the vain, heir to mad Harmanus and madder Nysen, was about to deny his manhood. His voice was a whisper. “You,” he said.

  “Good.” The patroon straightened up, and in the same instant he dropped his foot to the ground and drove it up again into Jeremias’ face. The force of the blow snapped back the petitioner’s head and sent him sprawling, his mouth bright with blood. “I don’t want your service,” the patroon hissed. And then, motioning to van den Post, who had dismounted and stood beside him now with drawn rapier, he completed the thought: “I want your blood.”

  As it turned out, no further blood was drawn that afternoon, but Jeremias was made to exchange places with his son, and sat there in the stocks, day and night, for the better part of a week. It was a painful week. His back was on fire, his legs numb, his wrists and ankle rubbed raw where his exhausted frame tugged them into the pine, mosquitoes bloated his face, agues settled in his joints. Staats and Douw stood watch over him, lest any enemy—man or beast—take advantage of him, and both Neeltje and moeder Meintje brought him food and drink. The other neighbors, even Robideau, stayed away. In the old country, when a man sat in the stocks, his enemies would gather to jeer and pelt him with stones, offal, dead cats, rats and spoiled fish. But here, the neighbors were indifferent. They held no grudge against Jeremias, and though most felt he’d got what he deserved—“Too proud is what he is,” Goody Sturdivant was heard to observe, “too proud by half”—there was also a current of sympathy for him, though it may have been weak and intermittent. Somewhere, deep within them, they too resented the young patroon in his fancy clothes, and for a moment, trampling his garden, gathered behind their one-legged champion, it had come, like an embarrassment, to the surface.

  Jeremias suffered, yes, the merciless sun in his face, the chill morning dew poking at his bones, but his inward suffering was worse by far. He was nothing, he knew that now. He was a peasant, a slave, a servant like his father and mother before him. All he’d worked for, all he’d built, all his dignity and toughness, were nothing. The patroon had showed him that. And here he’d preached to his sons, played the big man, the boaster—and for what? To crawl on his knees to Van Wart? For the rest of his miserable life he would be the mere husk of a man, no better than Oothouse or Robideau or any of them—and he knew it.

  Wouter knew it too.

  When they released him, when van den Post sauntered up to throw back the bars that pinioned him, he didn’t fall into grandfather van der Meulen’s arms or run home to where his mother sat stricken over a mound of flax and grandfather Cats anxiously paced the stoep— no, he took off like a sprinter, like a dog with a pair of sticks tied to its tail, streaking across the field and through the standing corn, hightailing it for the gap in the trees where his cousin had disappeared in the shock of dawn. He didn’t look back. When he reached the tree line he kept going—a hundred yards, two—and then collapsed in the bushes, wishing only that he might die on the spot, that the earth would open up and swallow him or the sky turn to stone. Distraught, betrayed—how could his father have sunk so low? how could he have done this to him?—he looked blindly around him for some weapon, some stone he could swallow or stick that would poke out his sorry eyes.

  How long he lay there, he didn’t know. When he regained his senses, all was quiet in those terrible fields behind him, and the pall of evening had fallen over the woods. Somewhere a woodpecker knocked at a decimated tree, a lonely random tapping that haunted him with its persistence. He got up slowly, shakily, as if the ground had shifted beneath his feet, and looked around him in bewilderment. There were no leaves, no trees, no hills, rocks, glades or streams, there was only the image of his father kneeling before the icon of the patroon. He heard the beggar’s whine of his father’s voice, saw the blood on his lips. Why? he asked himself. Why hadn’t vader risen up to choke the life out of that self-important dandy in the fancy pumps and silk doublet? Why hadn’t he burned his barn, scattered his livestock and run howling for the woods like Wolf Nysen? Why hadn’t he packed up and started over in New York, Connecticut, Long Island or Pavonia? Why, when all was said and done, hadn’t he gone out to work on the road crew in the first place?

  Because he was a coward, that’s why. Because he was a fool.

  Suddenly, with the night creeping around him, Wouter was seized with a fearful urgency: he had to find Jeremy. Jeremy was the one. Jeremy was his hope and salvation. It was Jeremy who’d stood up to them, Jeremy alone—you didn’t see him sitting in the patroon’s stocks, you didn’t see him working the patroon’s road. An hour after their race for the woods, the jellyfish eater had come back empty-handed, his face and forearms scored from the embrace of briar and bramble, his breeches muddied to the crotch, shirt torn and stockings down around his ankles. And Jeremy? He was out there somewhere among the trees, no man’s prisoner, no man’s servant.

  “Jeremy!” Wouter called, slashing through a sea of mountain laurel, nearly choked with excitement, “Jeremy!” He’d find him—any minute now, at the cave or down by the creek—and then they’d run off together. Just the two of them. Across the river, to a place where they could live alone, hunting and fishing, far from patroons, schouts, rents, stocks and all the rest—far from vader. “Jeremy!” he called, as the owl took wing and night drove down the day, “Jeremy!”

  What he couldn’t know was that his dark and elusive cousin was so far out of earshot even a salvo from one of His Majesty’s men o’ war wouldn’t have reached him. Van den Post—indefatigable, unshakable, crazed, intransigent, his limbs oiled and fluid, curses spewing from his lips—had chased his quarry up hill and down dale, through brake and briar, swamp, creek and esker. But Jeremy had seen those cuffs of pine, those gaps cut in the unyielding wood to receive him, and he was desperate. Taking the air in measured breaths, churning his legs and beating his arms, he flew through the woods like a sprite, leading van den Post under fallen trees, along ankle-turning streambeds and up slopes that would have prostrated a mountain goat. But he wasn’t fleeing blindly: all along he had a plan.

  He knew these woods as no adult did—as no jellyfish eater could ever hope to know them—and he was heading for the maze of swamps the Kitchawanks called Neknanninipake, That Has No End. It was a place of darkness at noon, of floating islands and hummocks of grass surrounded by muck that tugged you down till it took hold of you by the groin and refused to let go. It was a place Jeremy Mohonk knew as well as any snake or frog. It was a place where even the jellyfish eater would be powerless.

  When he reached the fringes of the swamp—skunk cabbage, black slime to the ankles—Jeremy’s heart leapt up. By the time he’d reached the heavy stuff, springing lightly from hummock to hummock, van den Post was out of sight, fl
oundering in the slop and cursing like a virtuoso. Five minutes later there was no sound behind him but the brak-brak of the frogs and the homely call of the warbler flitting through the thatch of the trees. But he didn’t stop. He traversed the swamp, dried his clothes and kept on going—going north, to a place he knew only in dimmest memory, a place his forgotten mother had gone for refuge when his forgotten father had turned his back on her. He didn’t know where the camp was, knew the Weckquaesgeeks only as a ragged, scarred and bandaged lot that twice a year crowded the stoep at Jan Pieterse’s, and knew only the haziest outlines of his parents’ story, but somehow something led him to the camp at Suycker Broodt.

  It was late. Dogs barked at him. Cook fires glowed in the wilderness of trees. Three braves, not much older than he, confronted him. Sentinels of that hapless and clumsy tribe, one was missing a hand, another was bereft of an ear and the third limped on a fused ankle. They regarded him in silence till the rest of their kith and kin shoved in around him. “What do you want?” One-Hand demanded in his trading-post Dutch, and Jeremy, scorner of the language of words, said nothing. One-Hand repeated the question, and still Jeremy said nothing. When finally, in frustration, the brave reached for his knife, Jeremy realized that even if he’d wanted to answer the question, even if the words were available to him, he couldn’t. What did he want? He had no idea.

  But then an old woman shuffled forward and cocked her head to regard him with eyes as opaque as a winter storm. She walked around him twice and then peered again into his face, so close he could smell the hide she’d been chewing with the stumps of her worn molars. “Squagganeek,” she said, and turned her head to spit.