World's End

by T. C. Boyle

  Van Wartwyck slumbered again. The decade of the eighties, which had begun so promisingly, petered out in the unimpeachable dullness of the quotidian. Nothing happened. Or at least nothing scandalous or violent or shocking. No one died even. Each spring the crops came up, the weather held—not too wet, not too dry—and the harvests got better by the year. On a still night you could hear the gossips snoring.

  It was Jeremias Van Brunt, so long the catalyst for ferment and upheaval, who woke them up again. He didn’t know it at the time, nor would he live to see it, but he unwittingly set in motion a series of events that would plunge the community into darkness, rouse the tongue waggers as if their very sheets and counterpanes had been set ablaze, and culminate finally in the last tragic issue of his youthful rebellion.

  It began on a day of unforgiving wind and flagging temperature, a blustery afternoon at the very end of October 1692, some three years after that crafty Dutchman, William of Orange, had been proclaimed king of England and all her colonies. Shouldering a battered matchlock that had once belonged to his father and with a crude flax bag cinched at his waist, Jeremias left the cabin just after the noon meal and slouched off into the woods to commune with his favorite chestnut tree. Though this was to be a nutting expedition and nothing more, he carried the gun because one never knew what one might encounter in those haunted woods.

  He worked his way arduously down the path from the cabin, snatching at trees and bushes to brake his descent, driving his pegleg into the compacted earth like a piton into rock, the wind hissing in his face and threatening in gusts to take his hat. Thumping across the bridge and wading into the marshy hollow that lay between Acquasinnick Creek and Van Wart’s Road, he startled a pair of ravens from their perch in a crippled elm. Up they rose, like tatters from the Dominie’s funereal gown, bickering and complaining in their graceless tones. Jeremias went on, a little more circumspectly than usual—the sight of a raven never brought anyone an excess of good luck, so far as he knew—until he was halfway across the marsh and the crown of the chestnut came into view in the near distance, shouldering its way above the lesser trees that surrounded it. It was then that he flushed the unlucky birds again, this time from the ground—or rather from a weedy hummock choked with vines and a blaze of blood-red sumac that seemed to float up out of the puddled expanse of the marsh like some sort of strange haunted craft.

  Jeremias was curious. He tugged at his boot, straightened the brim of his hat, and slogged off to investigate, thinking he might find the buck he’d wounded two days back, holed up and breathing its last. Or maybe the remains of the pig that had mysteriously disappeared just after the leaves turned. The birds were on to something, that much was sure, and he meant to find out what.

  He parted the vines, hacked at the sumac with the butt of the gun, paused twice to disentangle the sack from the scrub that seized it like fingers. And then he spotted something in the tangle ahead, a glint of iron in the pale cold sunlight. Puzzled, he bent for it, and then caught himself. The smell—it hit him suddenly, pitilessly—and it should have warned him off. Too late. He was stooping for an axehead, and the axehead was attached to a crude oaken handle. And the handle was caught, with all the rigor of mortis, in the grip of a hand, a human hand, a hand that was attached to a wrist, an arm, a shoulder. There before him, laid out in the sumac like the giant fallen from the clouds in a fairy tale, was the man who’d given Blood Creek its name. The eyes were sunk into the face, raw where the birds had been at them, the beard was a nest for field mice, the arms idle, the hair touched with the frost of age. He’d looked into that face once before, so long ago he could barely remember it, but the terror, the humiliation, the mockery, these he remembered as if they were imprinted on his soul.

  It took all five of them—Jeremias, his three sons and his nephew Jeremy—to haul the body, massive and preternaturally heavy even in death, out of the marsh and up to the road, where with a concerted effort they were able to load it into the wagon. Jeremias laid out the body himself, helped by the cold snap, which mercifully kept the odor down. If he’d thought to charge admission to the wake, he would have been a rich man. For the news of Wolf Nysen’s death—the death that confirmed his life—spread through the community like the flu. Within an hour after Jeremias had stretched the fallen giant out on his bier, the curious, the incredulous, the vindicated and the faithful had gathered to stand hushed over this legend in the flesh, this rumor made concrete. They came to marvel over him, to measure him from crown to toe, to count the hairs of his beard, examine his teeth, to reach out a trembling finger and touch him, just once, as they might have touched the forsaken Christ pulled down from the cross or the Wild Boy of Saardam, who’d cooked and eaten his own mother and then hung himself from the spire outside the drapers’ guild.

  They came from Crom’s Pond, from Croton, from Tarry Town and Rondout, from the island of the Manhattoes and the distant Puritan fastnesses of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Ter Dingas Bosyn showed up, Adriaen Van Wart, a wizened old cooper from Pavonia who claimed to have known Nysen in his youth. On the second day, Stephanus himself rode up from Croton, with van den Post and the dwarf, and a delegation of somber, black-cloaked advisors to Colonel Benjamin Fletcher, the new governor of the Colony and His Majesty William Ill’s loftiest representative on the continent. By the third day, the Indians had begun to pour in—maimed Weckquaesgeeks, painted Nochpeems, even a Huron, before whom all the others gave way as if to the devil himself—and after them, the oddballs and cranks from outlying farms and forgotten villages, women who claimed they could transform themselves into beasts and had the beards and talons to prove it, men who boasted that they’d eaten dog and lived as outlaws all their lives, a boy from Neversink whose tongue had been cut out by the Mohawk and who said a prayer over the body that consisted entirely of three syllables, “ab-ab-ab,” repeated endlessly. It was on the evening of the third day that Jeremias put an end to the circus and laid the giant to rest. Beneath the white oak. Just as if he’d been a member of the family.

  Well, this stirred the gossips up, sure enough. I told you, I told you a thousand times that mad murthering Swede was a fact, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you he nearly scared the life out of Maria Ten Haer that time down by the creek and can you believe this unholy fool burying the devil right there in the ground where he put his own sister and father too?

  Worse, far worse, was the sequel. For the death of Wolf Nysen—bogey, renegade, scapegoat, the monster who’d taken on all the sins of the community and worn them in his solitude like a hairshirt—was the death of peace itself. In the months that followed, the accumulated miseries of a decade rained down upon the heads of Van Wartwyck’s humble farmers, and the grave opened its maw like some awakening beast at the end of a long season’s fast.

  Under the circumstances, perhaps it was only appropriate that Jeremias was the first to go. What happened to him, so they said, was the Lord’s retribution for his unholy alliance with the outlaw Nysen and for his early sins against the patroon and the constituted authorities, against the king himself, if you came down to it. What happened to him was by way of just deserts.

  Two weeks after he’d laid Nysen to rest, Jeremias was dead, a victim of his father’s affliction. No sooner had the shovel tamped the Swede’s grave and the mourners and curiosity seekers gone on their way, than Jeremias felt the first preternatural pangs of hunger. It was a hunger like nothing he’d ever felt, a hunger that snatched him up and dominated him, made him its creature, its slave, its victim. He wasn’t merely hungry—he was ravenous, starved, voracious, as empty as a well that went down to China without giving up a drop of water. He came in after the funeral, and though for so long now he’d been invisible in his own house, he shoved in between his hulking sons and lashed into the olipotrigo Neeltje had made for the funeral supper as if he hadn’t eaten in a week. When it was gone, he scraped the pot.

  In the morning, before the family was up, he managed to devour the six loaves his good wife had ba
ked for the week, a pot of cheese, a string of thirty-six smoked trout the boys had caught in the course of three days’ fishing, half a dozen eggs—raw, shells and all—and an enormous trencher of hashed venison with prunes, grapes and treacle. When Neeltje awoke at first light, she found him passed out in the larder, his face an oleaginous smear of egg, grease and molasses, a half-eaten turnip clutched like a weapon in his hand. She didn’t know what was wrong, but she knew it was bad.

  Staats van der Meulen knew, and Meintje too. Though Wouter scoffed and Neeltje protested, Staats made them pin Jeremias to the bed and bind him ankle and wrist. Unfortunately, by the time Staats had got there, the damage was already done. The family’s winter provisions were half-exhausted, three of the animals—including an ox and her calf—were gone, and Jeremias was bloated like a cow that’s got into a field of mustard. “Soup!” he cried from his pallet. “Meat! Bread! Fish!” For the first few days his voice was a roar, as savage as any beast’s, then it softened to a bray and finally, near the end, to a piteous bleat of entreaty. “Food,” he whimpered, and outside the wind stood still in the trees. “I’m, I’m”—his voice a croak now, fading, falling away to nothing—“starrrr-ving.”

  Neeltje sat by his side the whole time, sponging his brow, spoonfeeding him broth and porridge, but it was no use. Though she begged grain from the van der Meulens, though she plucked hens she would need for eggs, though she fed him two, three, four times what any man could hold, the flesh seemed to fall from his bones. By the end of the first week his jowls were gone, his stomach had shrunk to a layer of skin thin as parchment and the bones of his wrists rattled like dice in a cup. Then his hair began to fall out, his chest collapsed, his legs withered and his good foot shrank into itself till she couldn’t tell it from the stump of the other. Midway through the second week she could stand it no longer, and when her sons left to hunt meat, she slipped in and cut his bonds.

  Slowly, painfully, like one waking from the dead, Jeremias—or what was left of him—rose to a sitting position, threw back the blankets and swung his legs to the floor. Then he stood, shakily, and made for the kitchen. Neeltje watched in horrified silence. He ignored the decimated larder, bypassed the dried fruits, the strings of onions, cucumbers and peppers suspended from the rafters, and staggered out the door. “Jeremias!” she called, “Jeremias, where are you going?” He didn’t answer. It was only after he’d crossed the yard and swung back the door of the barn that she saw the butcher’s knife in his hand.

  There was nothing she could do. The boys were God knew where, desperately beating the bushes for grouse, coney, squirrel, anything to replace the meat their wild-eyed father had squandered; her own father was all the way down in Croton and so enfeebled by age he barely responded to his own name any more; Geesje was with her husband; and she’d sent Agatha and Gertruyd to the van der Meulens, so as to spare them the sight of their father’s decline. “Jeremias!” she cried as the door blew shut behind him. The sky was dead. The wind spat in her face. She hesitated a moment, then turned back to the house, bolted the door behind her and knelt down to pray.

  He was already cold when they found him. He’d gone for the pigs first, but apparently they’d been too quick for him. Rumor, the old sow, had two long gashes in her side and one of the shoats was dragging a leg half-severed at the hock. The milch cows, confined in their stalls, were less fortunate. Two of the yearlings had been eviscerated—one partially butchered and gnawed as it lay dying—and Patience had had her throat cut. The boys found her like that, the black stain of her blood like a blanket thrown over the earthen floor, and Jeremias, his teeth locked in her hide, pinned beneath her. It was the fifteenth of the month, rent day. But Jeremias Van Brunt, former rebel, longtime ghost, spiritual brother to Wolf Nysen and sad inheritor of his father’s strange affliction, would pay rent no more. They buried him the next day beneath the white oak, and thought they’d seen the end of it.

  It was only the beginning.

  Next to go was old vader van der Muelen, who went rigid with the stroke as he was splitting wood, and from whose hands the axe had to be pried before the Dominie could commit him to the frozen earth. He was followed shortly by his stalwart wife, that merciful and strong-willed woman who’d been a second mother to Jeremias Van Brunt and whose apple beignet and cherry tarts were small tastes of heaven. The cause of death was unknown, but the gossips, stirred up like a nest of snakes, attributed it variously to witchcraft, toads under the house and tuberous roots taken with wine. Then, in a single horrific week in January, the two Robideau girls broke through the ice while skating on Van Wart’s Pond and vanished into the black waters below, Goody Sturdivant choked to death on a wad of turkey breast big as a fist and old Reinier Oothouse got away from his wife, drank half a gallon of Barbados rum, saw the devil and tried to climb Anthony’s Nose in his underwear. They found him clinging frozen to a rock high above the river, pressed to the unyielding stone like a monstrous blotch of lichen.

  The community was still reeling from the grip of catastrophe when the Indians came down with the French disease and brought it to the settlements. All the children under five died in their beds and word came from Croton that old vader Cats had succumbed and that a whole host of people who didn’t even know they were alive had passed on too. It was blackest February and just after Cadwallader Crane’s Geesje had expired in childbirth that the goodmen and goodwives of Van Wartwyck, led by the stooped and aged Dominie Van Schaik, marched up to Nysen’s Roost and hacked open the grave of the monster who’d lurked through their dreams and now threatened to destroy their waking lives too. The Swede was unchanged, frozen hard, the black earth clinging to him like a second skin. Huddied in his cloak and shouting prayers in three languages, the Dominie ordered a pyre built and they set fire to the corpse and let it burn, warming their hands over the leaping flames and standing watch till the faggots were coals and the coals ashes.

  Spring came late that year, but when it came the community breathed a sigh of relief. It’s over, the gossips said, whispering among themselves for fear of jinxing it, for fear of goblins, imps and evil geniuses, and it seemed they were right. Staats van der Meulen’s middle son, Barent, took up his father’s plow and worked the family farm with all the vigor and determination of youth, and Wouter Van Brunt, twenty-five years old and for better than a decade now the real soul of Nysen’s Roost, filled his father’s shoes as if they’d been made for him. The weather turned mild in mid-March, the breezes wafting up from Virginia with just the right measure of sweetness and humidity. Tulips bloomed. Trees budded. Douw van der Meulen’s wife bore him triplets the first of May, the cattle bred and increased and there wasn’t a single two-headed calf born the length and breadth of the valley, so far as anyone knew, and the pigs had litters of twelve and fourteen (but never thirteen, no) and to a one the piglets emerged with three comely twists to their tails. It looked as if finally the world had slipped back into its groove.

  But there was one more jolt yet to come, and it was beyond the scope or reckoning of any of the humble farmers and honest bumpkins of Van Wartwyck or Croton It had to do with letters patent, with William III, that distant and august monarch, and with Stephanus Van Wart, no mere patroon any longer, but Lord of the newly chartered Van Wart Manor. It looked forward to the near future when the power of the Van Warts would encompass the whole of northern Westchester. And it looked back to the day when Oloffe Van Wart had brought a disgruntled herring fisherman to the New World to clear land and farm for him, working its inscrutable way through Jeremias’ rebellion, Wouter’s disillusionment and the death of Wolf Nysen. Though no one yet knew it, the final cataclysm was at hand, the last dance between Van Warts and Van Brunts, the moment that would ignite the tongue waggers like no other and then pull the blankets over Van Wartwyck for a snooze that would last two and a half centuries.

  On the one side, there was Stephanus Van Wart, now one of the two or three wealthiest men in the Colony, First Lord of the Manor, confidant of the governor
, and his minions, van den Post and the impenetrable dwarf. On the other, there was Cadwallader Crane, lover of humble worm and soaring butterfly, bereaved widower, unscholarly scholar, a boy caught in a man’s jerky body. And there was Jeremy Mohonk, savage and speechless, the feral half-breed with the Dutchman’s eyes. And finally, inevitably, borne down under the grudging weight of history and circumstance, there was Wouter Van Brunt.

  Barrow

  Walter might as well have flown on to Tokyo or Yakutsk—it couldn’t have taken any longer, what with fog delays, connecting flights that ran every third day and the sleepless night he spent in the Fairbanks airport waiting for the red-eyed maniac who would fly him, an oil company engineer and a case of Stroh’s Iron City Beer to Fort Yukon, Prudhoe Bay and Barrow in a four-seat Cessna that had been stripped right down to the bare metal by weather he didn’t want to think about. The oil company man—bearded, in huge green boots that looked like waders and a parka that could have fit the Michelin Man—took the rear seat and Walter sat next to the pilot. It was November third, nine-thirty in the morning, and it was just barely light. By two, the oil man assured him, it would be deepest night again. Walter looked down. He saw ice, snow, the desolation of hills and valleys without roads, without houses, without people. Dead ahead, pink with the reflection of the low sun at their backs, was the jagged dentition of the Brooks Range, the northernmost mountain range on earth.