World's End

by T. C. Boyle

  Cadwallader Crane was also planning to attend the festivities, though he wouldn’t be paying his rent. Things had gone sour on him since Geesje’s death, and he just didn’t have it. The butter he was able to churn had turned rancid (and in any case it was closer to five pounds than twenty-five), some mysterious agent of the wild had got into his henhouse and carried off the lot of his poultry, and his fields, broken by his doleful plow and seeded by his lugubrious hand, hadn’t yielded enough to bother taking to the mill. Of cash, he had none. But firewood! Firewood he’d cut and delivered with a vengeance. Six, eight, ten fathoms, he’d filled the young lord’s woodshed to the top of its canted ceiling and then built a tower of wood beside it that could have warmed all the hearths of Van Wartville right on through the winter and into the blaze of July.

  What he was hoping, as he loped down the road from his farm on the birdlike sticks of his legs, was that the plethora of his firewood might make up for his dearth of coin and the inadequacy of his produce. His heart was like a stone, of course, and he wore a suit of black clothes, as befits a widower in mourning, and he was determined not to enjoy himself. He wouldn’t lift his eyes to admire the way the petticoats peeked out from beneath the skirts of Salvation Oothouse (née Brown), nor gaze on the resplendent face and figure of Saskia Van Wart either, if she was there. No, he would just take his long face up to the refreshment table—keeping an eye out for old Ter Dingas Bosyn and his damnable accounts ledger—and drink up Van Wart’s wine and gorge on Van Wart’s food till he swelled up like a garter snake with a whole family of frogs inside.

  As for Jeremy Mohonk, the third principal player in the mortal drama about to unfold, he didn’t pay rent, hadn’t ever paid rent and never would. He lived on a seedy corner of his late uncle’s farm amid a tangle of pumpkin vines and corn stalks, in the bark hut he’d erected on a cold winter’s day back in ’81, and he claimed that corner as ancestral land. He was a Kitchawank, after all, or half a one, and he was married to a Weckquaesgeek woman. A woman who’d borne him three sons and three daughters, of whom, unfortunately, only the first son and last daughter had survived infancy. On this particular day—November 15, 1693, the day of Van Wart’s first annual harvest feast—he was sitting before the fire in his hut, smoking kinnikinnick and carefully stripping the skin from his winter bear, a great fat sow he’d shot practically on the doorstep when he went out to make his morning water. He smoked and plied his quick sharp knife. His wife, whatever her name was, busied herself over a pot of corn mush, the smell of which touched the pit of his belly with tiny fingers of anticipation. He was content. For the Van Warts and their party, he had about as much use as he had for words.

  Wouter and his mother were among the first to arrive at the upper house, where long plank tables had been set up in the yard around a great deep pit of coals, into which a pair of spitted suckling pigs dripped their sweet combustible juices. Five huge covered pots—of olipotrigo, pea and prune soup flavored with ginger, minced ox tongue with green apples and other aromatic delicacies—crouched around the pigs as if standing watch. The tables were heaped with corn, cabbage, pumpkin and squash, and there were kegs of wine, beer and cider. “Very nice,” Neeltje admitted as her son helped her down from the wagon and her daughters joined her to compose themselves for their grand entrance, such as it was.

  The day was overcast and cold, hardly the sort of day for an outdoor gathering, but the patroon—or rather, lord of the manor, as he was now called—had decided to make a grand public occasion of the paying of the rents, rather than the private and often onerous affair it had been for so many years. He would give back his tenants a small portion of what they gave him, he reasoned, and it would help keep them happy with their lot—and besides, it would save him the time and trouble of sending his agent around to collect. And so, no matter that the sky looked as if it had been dredged up from the bottom of the river and it was cold enough to put a crust on a flagon of cider left out to stand, there would be fiddling, merrymaking and feasting at both upper and lower houses on this august day.

  Nor was this the only innovation. Since the summer, when William and Mary, acting through the offices of their Royal Governor, had chartered Van Wart Manor and consolidated all Stephanus’ patent purchases with the original estate left him by his father, several other changes had come to Van Wartville as well. There was the alteration of the place name, the Dutch “wyck” subsumed in the English “ville.” A millpond was created and a sawmill erected upstream from the gristmill. Three new farms were cleared and tenanted by red-nosed, horse-toothed, Yankee religious fanatics. And finally, most surprising of all, Van Wart evicted his cousin Adriaen from the upper house, replacing him with his own eldest son, Rombout. Adriaen, like Gerrit de Vries before him, had been sent packing without so much as a thank you, and this provoked a storm of unfavorable comment among the tenants and their sharp-tongued wives. Sluggish, inoffensive, perhaps even a little soft in the head, Adriaen had been well-liked. Rombout, on the other hand, was like his father.

  At any rate, by three in the afternoon, the entire community had gathered at the upper house to unload their wagons, fill their bellies with the patroon’s good port, smoke their long pipes and dance, flirt, gossip and drink till long after the sun faded in the west. There were Sturdivants, Lents, Robideaus, Mussers, van der Meulens, Cranes, Oothouses, Ten Haers and Van Brunts, as well as the three new families, with their pinched and stingy faces and sackcloth clothes, and the odd Strang or Brown wandered up from Pieterse’s Kill. Jan Pieterse himself turned out, though he was older now than Methuselah, fat as four hogs and deaf as a post, and Saskia Van Wart, still unmarried at the advanced age of twenty-four, came down from the parlor, where she’d been visiting with her brother, to dance a spirited galliard with her latest suitor, a puny English fop in canions and leather pumps. And throughout the day, old Ter Dingas Bosyn, who was older even than Jan Pieterse—so old he’d lost his fat and shriveled away till he was nothing more than a pair of hands and a head—sat in the lower kitchen, beside the fireplace, his accounts ledger spread open on the table before him and a coinbox at his side. One by one, the heads of the families bowed their way through the low door to stand before him and watch as his arthritic finger pinned their names to the page.

  It was growing dark and the party was about to break up, when Pompey II, who’d been assisting the commis with his inventory, found Cadwallader Crane slumped over the olipotrigo pot and led him into old Bosyn’s presence. Cadwallader, towering with drink and dilated like an anaconda with the patroon’s food, belched twice and began to offer the withered commis a whole string of excuses for not having made his rent. He’d got past the death of Geesje and was unsuccessfully fighting back his tears while describing the lamentable and mysterious sacking of his henhouse, when he saw that the old man was holding up a shrunken monkeylike paw in a gesture of forbearance. “Enough,” the commis rasped. Then he wheezed, sighed, studied his books a moment, took a pinch of snuff, sneezed into a silk handkerchief with some very pretty embroidery work along the border, and said: “No need for … huffff, excuses. The lord of the manor, seeing that you’ve lost your wife and have no … hummmm, issue, has decided to terminate your lease forthwith.” The commis turned his head away quickly and spat or perhaps puked into the handkerchief with a prodigious dredging of his throat and trumpeting of his nose, after which he wiped his watering eyes on the sleeve of his jacket. “You have two days,” he announced finally, “before the new tenants take over.”

  And then it was Wouter’s turn.

  Just as he was getting set to leave, lifting his mother and sisters into the now-empty wagon, his belly full and head light with cider and beer, he felt Pompey’s deferential hand at his elbow. “Old Misser Bosyn, sir, he want a word with you.”

  Puzzled, wondering if somehow the old geezer had miscounted his produce or shortchanged him at the mill, he followed the slave into the warm and redolent kitchen. “I’m on my way out, Bosyn, got moeder and the girls wa
iting in the wagon,” he said in Dutch. “What’s the problem?”

  The problem was that the lord of the manor was reviewing his leases with an eye to more profitable management. Wouter’s farm, along with one other, had been reassigned.

  “Reassigned?” Wouter echoed in astonishment.

  The old man grunted. “The lease was in your father’s name, not yours.”

  Wouter began to protest, but the words stuck in his throat.

  “Two days,” the commis croaked. “Take the increase of the stock over what Mijnheer allowed your father, pack up your personal belongings, if there be any such, and vacate the premises for the new tenants.” He paused, drew a watch from his waistcoat pocket and consulted it, as if it could plot the course of those honest, hopeful, industrious newcomers. “They’ll be here Tuesday noon. On the sloop up from New York.

  “And oh yes,” he added, “the Indian, or half-breed or whatever he is, he goes too.”

  Wouter was too thunderstruck to reply. He merely turned his back, ducked through the open door and climbed into the wagon. His mother and sisters were chattering about the party, about who danced with whom and did you see so-and-so in that ridiculous getup, but he didn’t hear them. He was eleven years old, the boy who sat himself in the stocks, the boy who’d seen his father broken and humiliated and felt the shame of it beating like poison through his veins. The horses lifted their feet and set them down again, the wagon swayed and creaked, trees melted into darkness. “Is there anything the matter?” his mother asked. He shook his head.

  He unhitched the wagon and stabled the horses in a state of shock. He hadn’t said a word to his mother—or sisters—and his brother had stayed on at the party with John Robideau and some of the other young bucks. For all they knew, the world was still in its track, they’d acquitted themselves of their obligations to the landlord for another year and the farm at Nysen’s Roost would go down through the generations from father to son. It was a joke, a bad joke. He was rubbing down the horses, barely able to control his hands for the rage building in them, when he heard the doorlatch behind him.

  It was Cadwallader Crane. The widower, the naturalist, his sad and sorry brother-in-law. Cadwallader’s coat and hat were dusted with the fine pellets of snow that had begun to sift down out of the pale night sky. His eyes were red. “I’ve been evicted,” he said, his voice quavering. “From the farm my father … helped me … set up for, for”—he began to blubber—“for Geesje.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Wouter said, and he never guessed how prophetic the expression might prove.

  Five minutes later they were in cousin Jeremy’s hut, warming themselves over the fire and passing a bottle of Dutch courage. Wouter pressed the bottle to his lips, handed it to his brother-in-law and leaned forward to give Jeremy the bad news. Gesturing, pantomiming, running through a stock of facial expressions that would have made a thespian proud, he told him what the commis had said and what it meant for all of them. Jeremy’s wife looked on solemnly, the baby in her arms. Young Jeremy, twelve years old now and with the eyes of a Van Brunt, quietly ran his fingers over the teeth of the bear his father had killed that morning. Jeremy said nothing. But then he hadn’t said anything in fourteen years.

  “I say we go back up there,” Wouter took the bottle back and waved it like a weapon, “and let the scum know how we feel.”

  Cadwallader’s eyes were muddy, his voice lost somewhere in the pit of his stomach. “Yeah,” he wheezed, “yeah, let ’em know how we feel.”

  Wouter turned to his cousin. “Jeremy?”

  Jeremy gave him a look that needed no interpretation.

  Next thing they knew, they were standing on the lawn outside the upper house, gazing up at the parade of bright, candle-lit windows. The snow was falling harder now and they were thoroughly drunk—drunk beyond reason or responsibility. The party had long since broken up, but three hardy souls were still hunkered over the open fire, gnawing bones and making doubly sure the cider and beer kegs were properly drained. Wouter recognized his brother and John Robideau. Coming closer, he saw that the third member of the group was Tommy Sturdivant.

  The three conspirators, who hadn’t as yet decided what they were conspiring to do, joined the others around the fire. Someone threw on a few extra logs from the mountain of wood stacked around the patroon’s woodshed, and their faces flared diabolically—or perhaps only drunkenly. The news—the shocking, heartless, arbitrary news—went around the little circle in the time it took the gin to make a single pass. Tommy Sturdivant said it was a damn shame. The flames leapt. John Robideau agreed. Staats, who was more directly affected, cursed the patroon and his mealy-mouthed son in a voice loud enough to be heard in the house. Wouter seconded his brother with an enraged whoop, the like of which hadn’t been heard in the valley since the Indian hostilities of ’45, and then—no one knew quite how it happened, least of all Wouter—the bottle left his hand, described a graceful parabola through the drift of the falling snow, and took out the leaded glass window in the parlor. This was immediately succeeded by a shriek from inside the house, and then a general uproar punctuated by cries of terror and confusion.

  Pompey was the first out the door, followed closely by young Rombout and the English fop who’d been making love to Saskia. The fop lost his footing on the slick doorstep and went down on his overbite, and Pompey, recognizing the glitter of abandonment in the eyes of the little group around the fire, pulled up short. But Rombout, in his leather pumps and silk hose, came on. “Drunkards!” he screeched, slowing to what might have been a dignified, if hurried, walk if it weren’t for the outrage jerking at his limbs. “I knew it, I knew it!” he exploded, stalking up to Wouter. “Nothing’s good enough for you … you rabble. Now this, eh? Well, you’ll pay, damn your hide, you’ll pay!”

  Rombout Van Wart was twenty-one years old and he wore his hair in ringlets. He wasn’t old enough to grow a beard, and his voice had a hollow gargling catch to it, as if he were trying to speak and swallow a glass of water at the same time.

  “We’ve already paid,” Wouter said, gesturing with a sweep of his arm at the woodshed, the cellar, the henhouse.

  “Yeah,” Cadwallader jeered, suddenly interposing his long sallow face between them, “and we’ve come”—here he was interrupted by a fit of hiccoughs and had to pound his breastbone before he could recover himself—“we’ve come,” he repeated, “to tell you and your father to go fuck yourselves.” And then he stooped down, as calmly as if he were picking wildflowers or assaying the sinuous path of the earthworm, and plucked a fist-sized fragment of brick from the gathering snow. Straightening up, he let his gangling arm drop behind him, paused to give Rombout a look of drunken bravado and then heaved the brick through the upper bedroom window.

  The English fop was just getting to his feet. Pompey had vanished in the shadows. A howl of outrage arose from the upper bedroom (with some satisfaction, Wouter recognized the bristling voice of old Ter Dingas Bosyn) and the faces of the women could be seen at the door.

  Everything hung in the balance.

  Worlds. Generations.

  “You, you—” Rombout sputtered. Struck dumb by rage, he raised his hand as if to box the transgressor’s impertinent ears, and Cadwallader shrank bank from the anticipated blow. The blow never came. For Jeremy Mohonk, his lank ancestral frame fleshed out with the solid Dutch brawn of the Van Brunts, struck him a stunning warrior’s thump just over the left temple and laid him out cold. From then on, no one was quite sure what happened or how, though certain moments did tend to stand out.

  There was Saskia’s scream (or somebody’s, some female’s, that is. It might have come from Vrouw van Bilevelt or Rombout’s young wife, or even, for that matter, from that aged and decrepit relic, Vrouw Van Wart. Somehow, though, Wouter liked to think of it as Saskia’s scream). And under cover of that scream, there was the fop’s judicious retreat, followed by the icy crash of the third and fourth windows. Then, too, there was the fire. Somehow it got away from
the safe and cheery confines of the roasting pit and into the hayloft of the barn, a distance of perhaps two hundred feet. And, of course, given the hour and the meteorological conditions, there was the ensuing conflagration that climaxed with a roar of shattering timber. And finally, there was the long, cold night spent by a bitter and headachy Rombout, who gathered his family about him in the cellar of the windowless and snowswept house while the plaint of singed ungulates echoed in his throbbing ears.

  By noon the following day, Stephanus himself was in Van Wartville, accompanied by his schout, the bellicose dwarf and a posse comitatus composed of eight baggy-breeched, pipe-puffing, weather-beaten farmers from Croton. To a man, the farmers were mounted on ponderous, thick-limbed plow horses and they were armed with scythes and mathooks, as if they were going haying rather than pursuing a dangerous and degraded lot of seditionists and barn burners. Most of them, owing to the season, had runny noses, and they all wore great floppy-brimmed elephantine hats that hid their faces, banished their heads and drooped down over their shoulders like parasols.