The Fisherman (10 page)

Because he’s that kind of man. He’ll horsewhip you himself if he thinks you’ve wronged him, and his definition of what constitutes wronging him is pretty loose. No one cares for him much. No one ever has. He’s stern and unfriendly, a shrewd businessman who’s increased his family’s fortune through a series of deals that have forced more than one family from their land. When the stranger climbs down from his cart and walks to Cornelius’s front door—moving no more quickly by foot that he did by cart—you can be sure anyone watching—mostly kids, hiding in the trees—expects him to make a quick and painful acquaintance with the toe of Cornelius’s boot.

When that doesn’t happen, when the heavy door opens and admits the man and he doesn’t come running out two minutes later, Cornelius close behind, yelling at him to peddle his wares elsewhere—well, there’s a fair amount of head-scratching. Then someone snaps his or her fingers and says, “Beatrice,” which is immediately picked up by everyone else. You can practically hear the fingers snapping in succession like a row of dominoes falling, the mouths saying the name, “Beatrice,” as if, “Of course.” Beatrice is Cornelius’s young wife, a pretty girl a good twenty years his junior who accepted his proposal, popular legend has it, to forestall him taking her father’s hotel over in Woodstock. It’s a cliché to say she’s the apple of everyone’s eye, but there you have it. Spring past, she was pregnant with the couple’s first child, an event that seemed to sand the ragged edges off Cornelius just the slightest. You saw her all over the place, a tall girl with pale, milky skin and black hair. She liked to ride. Story goes, that was how she first caught Cornelius’s eye, riding up the road to his front door to plead her father’s case. When she fell pregnant, she didn’t stop riding, despite her doctor’s warning to the contrary, and that was how disaster struck. While she was on her way to visit her sister in Hurley, her horse, which she’d raised from a foal, spooked and threw her into a tree. She lost the baby, and fell into a lingering sickness she’s been unable to pull herself out of. After first hacking Bea’s horse to death with one of the axes for the woodpile—his face calm, the stablehand said, icily calm—Cornelius went through every doctor in the area—not a few of whom have felt the toe of his boot—before bringing in the specialists from Albany. When they proved unable to help, he brought in men from New York, Boston, Philadelphia. A steady stream of doctors young and old has tramped up the path to Cornelius’s front door and tramped back down it. No one has had anything to offer. Whatever is wrong with little Bea, as folks call her, it’s beyond the scope of the medicine of the day. Beatrice has grown worse, and Cornelius has grown more desperate.

The newcomer moves in with the Dorts the same day he arrives. Theirs is a large house, and Cornelius pretty much gives the second storey of it to the man, so the maid says. What the stranger promises Cornelius in return, that maid can’t say, since the door to the library, where they spoke, was very deliberately shut, but most assume it’s little Bea’s recovery.

That assumption is wrong. Two days after the stranger’s arrival, Beatrice’s struggle comes to an end. She’s buried in the cemetery of the Dutch Reformed Church down in West Hurley; though it takes her two full weeks to get there. That’s a long time, in the first half of the nineteenth century. I guess it still is, but there’s no embalming like we have, you know? Especially in the hot summer—and this summer’s a scorcher—you don’t want to leave the dead out of the ground too long. After Bea’s been gone about a week and no word yet of a funeral, folks start talking, amongst themselves, of course, since, even in his grief, Cornelius continues to inspire respect and fear. There’s word that Beatrice’s father plans to talk to Cornelius, demand he release his daughter back to him for burial with her family, but after a day that proves to be only rumor. In the afterlife, it seems, as in this life, little Bea’s family have abandoned her to Cornelius. Finally, when the second week draws to a close, the minister at the West Hurley Reformed Church—Reverend Pied is the fellow’s name—screws up his courage and rides to the Station to tell Cornelius what’s what. No one’s known Cornelius to offend against a man of the cloth, but that’s what everyone who sees the minister, a tall fellow come all the way from Amsterdam, riding to the Dort house expects. To everyone’s surprise, Cornelius agrees with the minister’s request straight away, says that Bea can be buried tomorrow if Reverend Pied thinks he can be ready. The minister figures he’d best take advantage of his good fortune, so says yes, without a doubt, and that’s the matter settled. The stranger is nowhere to be seen.

Those who attend little Bea’s funeral, a surprising number, given the suddenness of it, report that Cornelius appears bored with the whole thing. He’s never struck anyone as the most devout of men, unless money is the god in question, but he’s always known the value of keeping up appearances. You may kick folks up and down your front walk; you may maneuver them out of their businesses, land, and homes; but if you show up in church and contribute generously to the collection plate, it helps to mollify public opinion some. Even today, if you search out that same church, which was moved lock, stock, and barrel during the construction of the Reservoir, you’ll find a host of little brass plates on things ranging from pews to the lectern with the words “Gift of Cornelius Dort” on them.

The morning of his wife’s funeral, though, Cornelius sits in the front pew with his arms and legs crossed, bobbing one foot up and down like a boy who’s impatient for home. During the minister’s sermon, he makes a sound that some take for a sob, others a laugh. When the service is finished, Cornelius strides out of the church ahead of everyone, mounts his horse, and rides for home. It’s the last time he’ll see the inside of a church. He doesn’t wait to accompany Beatrice to her resting place in the Dort family plot. Some, watching him gallop away, contend that Cornelius is fixing to take his revenge on the stranger for not having saved his wife. Others disagree. If he hasn’t by now, they say, he won’t.

That second group is right. Cornelius’s guest, as the man comes to be called—eventually the Guest for short—remains in place, Cornelius not showing the slightest inclination to dislodge the man from the second floor of his house. No one sees much of the stranger, just glimpses here and there. The Dort estate borders that spring I mentioned, the one the Station was built around, and once in a while you’ll see the Guest walking by it, a length of string looped from one hand. Folks like to joke he’s fishing, earning his keep. Occasionally you’ll see him walking with Cornelius, strolling through one of the Dort apple orchards. The Guest appears to be talking, gesturing with his hands every now and again, making big, sweeping gestures as if he’s conducting a symphony. Cornelius walks with his hands clasped behind his back, his head bowed, brow furrowed, obviously hanging on the Guest’s every word. That the man has made an impression on Cornelius, no one will deny. What they discuss, no one can guess.

Which is not to say that folks don’t try. Some adventurous child overheard the Guest mention the Leviathan during one of his and Cornelius’s orchard walks, and that, combined with the fact that the man continues to dress all in black, gives folks the idea that the man’s a preacher. What denomination claims him remains a mystery, but it makes a certain sense to think that Bea’s death has driven Cornelius to God. That is, if you don’t remember Cornelius’s performance at her funeral. Then news comes from one of the tanneries about some hides Cornelius sent up to have tanned. Did I mention that used to be a big business in these parts, hemlock tanneries? Well, apparently the hides Cornelius wants treated are like nothing the fellows at this particular tannery have encountered. I’m not sure what made them so strange, but the tanners state flat out that they’re more like the skins of devils from hell than any beast they’ve ever seen. Along with these hides, Cornelius sends very specific instructions for how they’re to be handled, and pays three times the going rate to insure his instructions are followed to the letter. At first, no one can understand how Cornelius could have come by such hides, not to mention how he’s become so expert in tanning. It doesn’t take long, however, for suspicion to light on the Guest, with that cart full of boxes and bags.

III

The incident at the tannery—they did the work, by the way—marks a change in people’s attitudes toward the stranger. While there had been some folks suspicious of him from the moment he appeared on the turnpike, most have been more curious than anything. Now, that curiosity has been mixed together with unease. I wouldn’t go so far as to say folks are afraid of Cornelius’s Guest as that they’re ready to be, you know? Suddenly, everyone’s noticing the strange goings-on at the Dort house. There are a lot more storms than there used to be, or so the old-timers say, lots more thunderstorms, and don’t they linger over the Station? Haven’t the Dort house’s windows been seen shining with a weird, blue light late at night? Hasn’t one of the local children reported seeing something in the local spring, something she couldn’t stop crying long enough to identify? There are stories that Cornelius has been seen, during a fierce summer storm, the lightning falling almost as fast as the rain, walking through one of his orchards, accompanied by a figure in black—not his Guest, no, this figure is distinctly feminine, wearing a long dress and a long, black veil. No one can make out her features, but there’s something about the way she walks that seems off, as if she isn’t used to using her legs her way, or has forgotten how. Certainly, she’ll haunt the dreams of one man who witnesses her stroll with Cornelius, a minor painter named Otto Schalken, who’s up from Brooklyn visiting his brother Paul, the schoolmaster in West Hurley. Otto’s caught out in the storm when he ignores Paul’s warning to delay his daily constitutional. Needless to say, he finds the experience of being in the thick of a true Catskill thunderstorm a bit traumatic; though, when all is said and done, it’s not half so bad as the sight of Cornelius and the woman in black. Like I said, she walks through his dreams. Otto, whose previous claim to fame was illustrating an edition of Coleridge’s poems, achieves the only celebrity he’ll know for a half-dozen canvases rendering that woman in the long black veil. He doesn’t include Cornelius in the paintings, which show the woman wandering not in a Catskill apple orchard, but next to the sea. I’ve seen a couple of them in art books, and there’s something about the sea—it’s black and storming, and the way he painted the woman’s dress and veil, it’s like she’s wearing that angry sea. No one’s sure what Otto was up to—I mean, a few critics have taken educated guesses, but the man himself left no word aside from a packet of cryptic letters he wrote to his brother once he’d returned to his apartment in Brooklyn. He was pursued, Otto wrote, “by a very Geraldine, to whom my soul is no more than water to drink.” The brother sent a reply asking him what he meant, but he never received an answer. After completing the final canvas in the series, Otto sat down in the bedroom, took his straight razor in hand, and slit his throat from ear to ear.

Nothing like a bit of melodrama, huh? Otto Schalken’s story aside, if you look into most of the reports about Cornelius and his Guest, you find that they trace back to one person, who tends to have been less-than-reliable: a child, say, in trouble for staying out playing too late and blames his tardiness on what he saw over at the Dort house, which is passed on by his gullible parents. There are one or two things that a number of people agree on. During the summer of, I think it’s eighteen forty-nine, might be eighteen fifty, an especially bad storm blows in and hangs over the Esopus valley for the better part of a day and half. There’s rain, yes, but folks will remember this storm for its thunder and lightning. The thunder shakes houses like an earthquake—in fact, it’s blamed for cracking the rear wall of one of the houses in the Station. As for the lightning, there’s so much of it night practically turns into day. Several people living in or staying at the Station swear that the Dort house takes more than a dozen direct strikes. The house has a lightning rod, of course, and those who witness the lightning touching that rod say that it seems to hang in the air for an instant longer when it does, like a long, snarled thread being drawn from the sky. The other thing folks agree on is that, after the night of that storm, the Station’s spring tastes different. Most say the spring has become sulfury, but a few insist that isn’t it, that the water tastes burnt, somehow.

If things have been strange at the Dort house, they never become so strange that folks feel they have to do anything about them. After the night of that legendary storm, the Guest appears less and less, and he was never that visible in the first place. Other things occupy people’s attention. The tanneries start to close. By the time the Civil War breaks out, they’ll be a thing of the past. The whaling industry’s pretty much belly-up, too. I bet you didn’t know that the towns on the Hudson used to send out huge whaling fleets. What was it? At one point, Hudson—the town, I mean—had more ships than Manhattan. Big part of the local economy, then the bottom fell out of it. And in the background of all this were the debates about slavery and states’ rights that were laying tracks to the Battle of Bull Run. As time goes on, Cornelius Dort and his Guest become the kind of bogeymen you use to keep your children in line, and less anyone’s real concern.

Years pass—decades. The Guest rarely if ever shows his face, to the point that younger folks, the ones who had been the audience for those tales of the man in black, doubt his existence. There’s no doubting Cornelius, though. While the march of time stamps the red out of his hair and wears deep lines in his face, he remains as full of vim-and-vigor—not to mention vinegar—as ever. People say it’s because Death himself is afraid of the man. What’s that saying, you know, “Heaven doesn’t want me, and hell’s afraid I’ll take over.” That fits Cornelius to a T. Investing in munitions, he makes a ton of money off the Civil War, to the point he’s one of the richest men in the country. He never remarries—doesn’t keep company with anyone, really. When he reaches eighty, he suffers a stroke, which only slows him up for as long as it takes him to master using a cane. When he reaches the century mark, there are articles on him in the local papers, even a piece in the
New York Times
. The
Times
reporter rides all the way up from the City to try to interview Cornelius. For his trouble, he receives a jab in the gut from Cornelius’s cane and the front door slammed in his face. He still writes a decent story about the old man. Like everyone else, the
Times
has no desire to stir Cornelius to wrath. None of the local reporters attempts to approach Cornelius.