by T. C. Boyle
And so it went, till Adriaen was settled in, the silent Jeremy and his equally silent wife became fixtures at Nysen’s Roost, and the incestuous little community of Van Wartwyck could doze off again.
To Wouter, the fact of his cousin’s return was miraculous enough, but that he had a place to return to was even more miraculous. The autumn of their impending doom came and went and still the Van Brunts were in possession of the five-morgen farm at Nysen’s Roost. On November 15 old Ter Dingas Bosyn wheeled up in the wagon and collected the quitrent, which vader, obsequious as a lapdog, counted out and loaded up himself. The patroon had moved his family back down to Croton as soon as the first frost put the trees to bed for the winter, and he took his schout, the jellyfish eater, with him. And that was that. No eviction. Another year rolled by and again vader paid his rent without demur and again the globular old commis accepted it and made his precise notation in the depths of his accounts book. Wouter, who’d expected the worst—who’d expected to be driven from his home while his mother and sisters wrung their hands and his father fawned and begged and licked the patroon’s boots—was puzzled. He’d been dreading the day, dreading the patroon’s sneer, the dwarf’s evil stare and stunted grasp, the cold naked steel of the rapier that had once laid his father’s face open, but the day never came.
Word had it that the patroon had relented. Geesje Cats had gone down on her knees to the patroon’s mother, and the crabbed old woman, that eschewer of pleasure and comfort both, had interceded in the Van Brunts’ behalf. Or so they said. And then too, Wouter remembered a week in late October of that fateful year when Barent van der Meulen came to keep him and the other children company while moeder and vader hitched up the wagon and drove down to stay with grootvader Cats in Croton. No one knew what went on then, but Cadwallader Crane, who’d got it from his father, claimed that Neeltje and Jeremias had petitioned the patroon indefatigably, haunting his garden, crying out their fealty day and night, even going so far as to kneel to him and kiss his gloved hand as he sauntered to the stable for his daily exercise—all in the hope that they might convince him to change his mind.
However it was, the whole thing revolted Wouter. He almost wished the patroon had come and chased them off his lands, wished that they could have gone west and started over, lived as beggars on the streets of Manhattan, hacked their hair and scarified themselves to live naked among the Indians. At least then his father might have come back to life. As it was now, he was a slave, a gelding, a sot who lived only to serve his betters. He worked the fields, anesthetized, from dawn till dusk, whitewashed the house, cleared acreage, put up stone fences—and all for the patroon, for the profit and increase of the man by whose magnanimity he drew breath from the air, water from the ground and bread from the oven. After that horrific day in the patroon’s back lot, he shied away from Wouter, always his favorite, and fell into a sort of trance, like an ass harnessed to the wheel of a gristmill. He was a husk of his former self, a man of straw, and his son—his eldest, the joy of his life, the boy who’d made an icon of him—regarded him with contempt, with pity, with the unassuageable hurt of the betrayed.
Wouter turned twelve in the bleakness of that first winter, thirteen in the second. It was the most hopeless period of his life. He’d lost his father, lost the cousin who was a brother to him, lost his own identity as son to the man who defied the patroon. For the longest while, he couldn’t eat. No matter what his mother served him—pancakes, cookies, the most savory roast or meaty stew—the very smell of it made him sick, his throat constricted and his stomach seized. He lost weight. Wandered the woods like a ghost. Found himself sobbing inexplicably. If it weren’t for Cadwallader Crane, he might have gone off the deep end of his grief, like his Aunt Katrinchee before him.
Young Cadwallader, who had attained the physical age of twenty by the first of those miserable winters, was the last-born and least quick-witted of that scholarly and grallatorial clan presided over by the ancient Yankee intellectual, Hackaliah Crane. For some fifteen years, the elder Crane had maintained Van Wartwyck’s sole institution of learning, known among the wags at Jan Pieterse’s as Crane’s Kitchen School, in reference to its venue. Each winter, when the crops were harvested and stowed away in attic and loft, when the days grew short and the weather wicked, Hackaliah gathered his six, eight or ten reluctant scholars in the kitchen of the rambling stone house he’d built with his own blistered hands, and lectured them in the mysteries of conning the letters of the alphabet and doing simple sums, throwing in a smattering of Suetonius, Tacitus and Herodotus for good measure. He held his sessions because he had a calling, because it was the purpose and office of his life to keep the lamp of learning lit and to pass it on from hand to hand, even on the wild and darkling shores of the New World. But, of course, it wasn’t solely a labor of love—there was a small matter of recompense. And the Yankee preceptor, notorious skinflint that he was, exacted his basket of apples or onions, his string of cucumbers dried for seed, his bundle of combed flax or his turkey gobbler battened on corn as if it were tithed him—and woe to the unsuspecting scholar who was remiss with his payment. It was in this rudimentary seat of learning that Wouter, over the desolation of the months, gradually began to attach himself to Cadwallader Crane.
In happier days, Jeremy had expertly mimicked the younger Crane’s erratic gait and the darting, birdlike movements of his scrawny neck and misshapen head, while Wouter had done an inspired impersonation of his laryngeal squawk of greeting and the tepid washed-out drone with which he read from slate or hornbook, but now, in his loneliness, Wouter felt strangely drawn to him. He was ridiculous, yes, five years older than Tommy Sturdivant, the next oldest student in the class, unable to master his lessons though he’d been through them five hundred times, the bane of his venerable father’s existence and a sore trial to his mother’s love. But he was interesting too, in his own way, as Wouter would soon discover.
One forbidding January afternoon, when Wouter lingered after lessons were over, Cadwallader took him around back of the house to the woodshed and produced, from a hidden corner, a board on which he’d tacked a brilliant spangle of moths and butterflies caught in hovering flight. Wouter was dumbstruck. Chocolate and gold, chrome blue, yellow, orange and red: there, in the dim confines of the winterbound shed, the breath of summer touched him.
Astonished, Wouter turned to look at his friend and saw something in Cadwallader’s eyes he’d never recognized before. The habitual glaze of stupefaction was gone, replaced by a look at once alert, wise, confident, proud, the look of the patriarch showing off his progeny, the artist his canvases, the hunter his string of ducks. And then, miracle of miracles, Cadwallader, the lesser Crane, the hopeless scholar, the beardless boy-man who couldn’t get out of the way of his own feet, began to discourse on the life and habits of these same moths and butterflies, speaking with what almost approached animation of worms and caterpillars and the metamorphosis of one thing into another. “This one, do you see this one?” he asked, pointing to a butterfly the color of tropical fruit, with regular spots of white set in a sepia band. Wouter nodded. “He was a milkweed worm, with horns and a hundred ugly feet, just last summer. I kept him in a stone jar till he changed.” Wouter felt the wonder open up like a flower inside of him, and he lingered in that comfortless shed till he couldn’t feel his feet and the light finally failed.
In the coming weeks, the awkward enthusiast—now bounding over a precipice to pluck a wisp of moss from between two ice-bound boulders, now shimmying up a decayed trunk to retrieve a two-year-old woodpecker’s nest—opened up the visible world in a way Wouter had never dreamed possible. Oh, Wouter knew the woods well enough, but he knew them as any white man knew them, as a place to pick berries, hunt quail, bring down squirrels with a sling. But Cadwallader knew them as a naturalist, as a genius, a spirit, a revealer of mysteries. And so Wouter followed him through the stripped bleak woods to gaze on a slit of barren earth in the midst of a snowbank where Cadwallader assured him
a black bear was sleeping out the winter, or to listen as he pulled apart a handful of wolf droppings to speculate on the beast’s recent diet (rabbit, principally, judging from the lean withered turds bound up in cream-colored hair and flecked with tiny fragments of bone).
“See that?” Cadwallader asked him one day, indicating the frozen hindquarters of a porcupine wedged in the crotch of a tree. “When the sun warms it in spring, that meat will give rise to new life.” “Life?” Wouter questioned. And there, on the lesser Crane’s thin lips and hairless cheeks, crouched a smile all ready to pounce. “Blowflies,” he said.
Though there was eight years difference in their ages, the friendship was not so one-sided as one might imagine. For his part, Cadwallader, long an object of contempt and denigration, was happy to have anyone take him seriously, particularly someone who could share in his private enthusiasm for the underpinnings of nature, for worms, caterpillars, slugs and the humble nuggets of excrement he so patiently scrutinized. Wouter suited him perfectly. No rock of maturity himself—any other man of twenty would have had his own farm and family already—he found the Van Brunt boy his equal in so many ways, a natural leader, really, persuasive, agile, curious, but not so much his equal as to challenge him seriously. As for Wouter, his fascination with the scholar’s son was a distraction from the emptiness he felt, and he knew it. Cadwallader, absorbing though he may have been in his own skewed way, made a poor substitute for Jeremy—and for the lapsed father who worked the farm like an encumbered spirit, an old man at thirty. Thus, like all incidental friends, they came together out of mutual need and because each propped up the other in some unspoken way. Cadwallader sought out Wouter, and Wouter sought out Cadwallader. And before long, the scholar’s unscholarly son became a regular guest at Nysen’s Roost, staying to supper and taking Jeremy’s spot at the table, occasionally even spending the night when the weather was rough or the company too stimulating.
The company, yes. Though Jeremias faded into the background as if he were fashioned from the stuff of clouds, Neeltje was busy with her spinning or sweeping or washing up and the younger children, confined to the house throughout the endless winter, hissed, squabbled and caterwauled like aborigines, the young long-nosed Yankee nature lover found the company irresistible. Ah, but it wasn’t Wouter, either, who moved him, though he liked him well enough and would claim him as his closest friend till nearly the time of his death—no, it was Geesje. Little Geesje. Named after her grandmother, inheritor of her mother’s fathomless eyes and rebellious ways, ten years old the day he first stepped through the door.
They played cards through those long winter evenings—Cadwallader hunched over his knees like a singing cricket, Wouter with a ferocious zeal to win that sometimes astounded even him, and Geesje, her legs drawn up beneath her, the cards masking her sly child’s face, playing with an insouciance that belied a will to win every bit as ferocious as her brother’s. They skated on the pond where Jeremias had long ago lost his foot to the swamp turtle. They played at big ball, I spy, flick-fingers, hunt-the-slipper and quoits, the gangling, awkward scholar’s son as eager and excited as the children he was playing with. By the time the second winter came around, the winter of Adriaen Van Wart’s ascension and Jeremy’s return, Wouter began to understand that it was no longer for him that Cadwallader Crane came to the house.
If Wouter felt betrayed, he didn’t show it. He played just as hard, followed his long-legged companion just as often through copse and bower, bog and bramble, lingered as usual in the Crane woodshed to marvel over a set of fossilized horse’s teeth or a pipefish preserved in pickling brine. But inwardly he felt as if he’d been knocked off balance again, shoved from behind just as he’d begun to regain his footing. Disoriented, uneasy, thirteen years old and set adrift once again, he went to the door one raw February night and found his cousin standing there in a blanket of sleet, and in the grace of a single moment he felt redeemed: Jeremy was back.
But redemption doesn’t come so easily.
Even as he embraced him, even as he shouted out his cousin’s name in triumph and heard the household rouse behind him, he knew something was wrong. It wasn’t the Indian getup—the ragged bearskin, the string of seawant, the notochord cinched around his cousin’s brow—or the fierce primordial reek of him either. Nor was it the strategic emplacement of bone, sinew and flesh that had transformed him from boy to man. It wasn’t that at all. It was ice. His cousin was made of ice. Wouter embraced him and felt nothing. Cried out his name and saw that his eyes were glazed and impenetrable, hard as the surface of the pond. In confusion he let go of him as the doorway filled with jostling children, with moeder’s smile and vader’s lifted eyebrows and fallen lip. Jeremy merely stood there, rigid as stone, and for a terrible moment Wouter thought he was hurt—he’d been gouged, stabbed, they’d cut out his tongue and he’d come home to die, that’s what it was. But then Jeremy stepped back into the shadows and there, in his place, stood a squaw.
A girl, that is. A female. Calves, thighs, bosom. Wrapped up in deerskin, otter and mink, her hair greased and queued, mouth set in a pout. And in her arms, an infant. Wouter was stunned. He looked up into the shadowy features of his cousin and saw nothing. He looked at the girl and saw the quiet triumph of her eyes. And then he looked at the infant, its face as smooth and serene as the Christ child’s. “In, in,” moeder was piping, “it’s no night for visiting on the stoep,” and all at once Wouter became conscious of the sleet pelting his face, of the dank subterranean breath of the wind and the restlessness of the night. Then the squaw brushed past him and the infant, dark as cherrywood and not half the size of a suckling pig, opened its eyes. Its eyes were green.
A moment later Jeremy was sitting in the inglenook, mechanically spooning porridge into the dark slot of his mouth, while the girl crouched on the floor beside him, the baby at her breast. Where had he been? the children asked. Why was he dressed like that? Was he an Indian now? Moeder’s voice was tender. She hoped he was home to stay, and his wife too—was this his wife? She was welcome, more than welcome, and what was her name? Vader wanted to know the obvious: was this his child? Wouter said nothing. He felt as if the floor were buckling under him, he felt jealous and betrayed. He looked from Jeremy to the girl and tried to imagine what it was between them, what it meant and why his cousin wouldn’t look him in the eye.
For his part, Jeremy couldn’t begin to fathom their questions, though he felt for them and loved them and was glad in his heart to be back. Their voices came at him like the rumble of the foraging bear, like the soliloquies of the jays and the clatter of the brook outside the door, rising and falling on an emotional tide, a song without words. Dutch words, English, the markers and signifiers of the Weckquaesgeek and Kitchawank dialects he’d once known—all was confusion. He knew things now as Adam must have known them that first day, as presences, as truths and facts, tangible to touch, sight, smell, taste and hearing. Words had no meaning.
His wife had no name—or no name that he knew. Nor his son either. He looked shyly at Wouter and he knew him, and he knew Jeremias, Neeltje, Geesje and the other children. But to summon their names was beyond him. He knew, in an immediate and concrete way, in the way of enzymes churning in the gut or blood surging through the veins, that Jeremias had killed his father, that the jellyfish eater had wanted to lock him up in his infernal machine, that the people of the wolf were ravening unchecked over the face of the earth. He knew too that Jeremias had raised him as his own and that Wouter was his brother and that his place was both here and among the Weckquaesgeeks at the same time. He knew that he was grateful for the food and for the fire. But he couldn’t tell them. Not even with his eyes.
In the morning, Jeremy went out beyond the last deadened tufts of the farthest, stoniest pasture and built himself a wigwam. By late afternoon, he’d covered the ground with a mat of sticks, on which he meticulously arranged an assortment of moldering furs. Then he got a cookfire going and moved in the girl and the baby. Over the y
ears to come, as he fell into the old ways with Wouter, as he bearded the patroon and lived off his land without once breaking the ground, as he watched the pestilence take two of his daughters and scar his son, he rebuilt, remodeled and expanded the crude bark domicile he’d erected that morning, but he never left it. Never again. Not until they came for him, that is.
As for Wouter, his cousin’s return devastated him. Here was yet another stab in the back, another wedge driven between him and the savior he so desperately needed. First it was Cadwallader and Geesje, now Jeremy and this moon-faced girl with the pendulous teats and the green-eyed little monkey who clung to them. He was hurt and confused. What was it about his spindly-legged little sister that could so captivate Cadwallader? What did Jeremy see in an evil-smelling little squaw? Wouter didn’t know. Though he was awash with hormones and driven by indefinable urges, though he ducked away from the fields to spy on Saskia Van Wart as she romped with her brothers on the lawn at the upper house, though he ached in the groin to think about her and woke from tangled dreams to a bed mysteriously wet, he still didn’t know. All he knew was that he was hurt. And angry.
In time, as he began to reforge his relationship with Jeremy, as he worked around the inescapable conclusion that Cadwallader Crane cared more for his little sister than he did for him, he recovered. Or at least outwardly he did. He was fourteen and thought he was in love with a girl from Jan Pieterse’s Kill by the name of Salvation Brown; he was fifteen and followed Saskia Van Wart around like a tomcat with the scent on him; he was sixteen and stood best man when Cadwallader Crane took his sister’s hand in marriage. It all passed—the death of his father’s spirit, the renunciation of Cadwallader Crane, the blow he’d received from his cousin on that sleet-struck night when the squaw stepped between them. He grew into his manhood, and to look at him you’d never know the depth of his hurt, never guess that he was as crippled in his way as his father before him.