World's End (23 page)

He was young, this stranger—no more than five or six years Jeremias' senior—and he was tricked out in velvet and satin like one of Their High Mightinesses Themselves. With one silk-clad leg crossed casually over the other and a smirk of invincible superiority on his face, the stranger shot Jeremias a glance of cold appraisal that ate through him like acid. For one astonished instant Jeremias locked eyes with him, and then stared down at the floor, humbled all over again. The scar seared his face, no badge now, but the mark of Cain, the brand of a criminal. He didn't look up again.

Through all that followed—through the patroon's interminable speech of admonition and reconciliation, through the
commis'
pointless pontifications and the
schout's
terse and hushed testimony, Jeremias never uttered a word but for
ja
and
nee.
The man in the corner (who, as it turned out, was Oloffe's only son and heir,
Jongheer
Stephanus Oloffe Rombout Van Wart, newly arrived from the University of Leyden to look after his interests in the face of his father's declining health) helped himself to a clay pipe of Virginia tobacco and a glass of Portuguese wine, surveying the proceedings with the air of a man watching a pair of dung beetles struggle over a kernel of manure. He merely sat there, an ironic grin compressing his thin haughty lips, holding himself aloof from the whole business—until the moment his father spelled out the terms of Jeremias' tenancy, that is. Then he came to life like a stalking beast.

“We will, in our, er, magnanimity,” the patroon intoned in a wheezy voice that bespoke ruined health and mismanaged appetites, “absorb unto ourselves the rents and damages accruing to your late, er, father's tenancy in the unfortunate year of 1663. We, er, refer of course to rent in arrears, the pilferage and wanton slaughter of one, er, rutting boar and the careless usage of our livestock, which resulted in the untimely, er, demise of two milch cows and one piebald ox.”

The agent made as if to protest, but the patroon waved him silent with an impatient hand and continued. “We consider that the physical”—here
he paused to suck in a great wheezing breath—“er, blemish that you've, er, received at the, er, hands of Joost Cats, is punishment enough for your trespass and willful, er, disregard for established law, and we will forego the levying of fines or remanding you to the, er, stocks, of which we have, er, none in any case.” Here the patroon's voice had gone so hoarse as to carry no farther than the rasp of quill on parchment, and Jeremias had to lean forward to hear him. Coughing into his fist, the old man took a glass of port the
commis
held out to him and stared up at Jeremias out of bleary eyes. “Your rent shall be the same as your, er, father's before you, payable in stuffs and in English pounds or
seawant,
as you prefer, and it will be, er, due—”

“Vader,”
interjected a voice from the corner of the room, and all eyes turned toward the
Jongheer,
“I beg you to reconsider your judgment.”

The old man's mouth groped at the air, and Jeremias thought of a tench flung up on the cobblestones in Schobbejacken so many years before. “Your rent,” the patroon began again, but faltered as his voice faded to a timbreless wheeze.

Young Van Wart was on his feet now, his hands spread wide in remonstrance. Jeremias stole a glance at him, then went back to studying the floorboards. The
Jongheer
had at some point placed atop his head an enormous, floppy-brimmed beaver hat with a two-foot plume, and it magnified his presence till he seemed to fill the entire corner of the room. “I respect your goodheartedness,
vader,”
he said, “and I agree that it will be to our benefit to settle a tenant at Nysen's Roost, but is this the man—or boy, rather—to entrust with it? Hasn't he already proven himself a criminal without respect for the law, the degenerate issue of a degenerate father?”

“Well, well, yes—” the patroon began, but his son cut him off. Regarding Jeremias with a look he might have reserved for the unhappy slug that had crawled one damp night into his glistening leathern shoe, Stephanus held up his palm and continued. “And is he capable of paying rent, this one-legged cripple in his filthy rags? Do you really think this, this … beggar can pay his debts, let alone feed himself and the tribe of naked half-breed savages he's sired up there in the muck?”

Jeremias was beaten. He couldn't respond, couldn't even look young Van Wart in the eye. The gulf between them—he was well-built and youthful, this
Jongheer,
handsome as the portrait of the Savior hanging in the nave of the Schobbejacken church, powerful, wealthy, educated—was unbridgeable. What
commis, schout
and the beast of the pond couldn't take from him with their accounts ledgers, rapiers and unforgiving jaws, the
Jongheer
had taken with a sneer and half a dozen stinging phrases. Jeremias hung his head. The utter contempt in the man's voice—he might have been speaking of hogs or cattle—was a thing that would be with him for life.

In the end, though,
commis
and patroon prevailed, and Jeremias was taken on as tenant with a year's grace so far as rent was concerned (and a warning that he would be driven off the property at the point of a sword if he was even a stiver short in his accounts at the end of that time), but for Jeremias it was no victory. No: he left the manor house in shame, his stomach rumbling, clothes filthy, the
schout's
mark burning on his face and the
Jongheer's
words charred into his heart. He didn't look back. Not even when Neeltje came to the door of her father's cottage to stand mute with her wet and glowing eyes and watch him as he limped up the road. Not even when at last she called out his name in a voice stung with hurt and incomprehension—not even then could he find it in himself to lift his eyes from the rutted road before him.

Taking stock of the situation the following morning, Jeremias understood that his options were limited. He'd just turned seventeen. He was short a leg and wore the brand of the outlaw on his face, his parents were dead, his sister's mind was like a butterfly touched by the frost, and the gaping hungry mouth of his half-breed nephew haunted his dreams. What was he going to do—bring the patroon and his smirking son to their knees by starving himself to death in the winter woods? Wearily, painfully (the stump of his leg ached as if his father were taking the saw to it at that very moment), he pushed himself up from the damp straw pallet, took a mouthful of cornmeal, and went out to his chores. He finished hoeing up the weeds, split a cord and a half of wood to take the buzz of the
Jongheer's
disdain out of his head, and decided, between two random and otherwise
unremarkable strokes of the axe, to have his nephew christened in the church and admitted to the community as a Dutchman and free citizen of the Colony of New York.

When he came to Katrinchee with the idea, she looked down at her hands. Squagganeek sat on the floor, watching him with Harmanus' eyes. “I thought we should name him after
vader”
Jeremias said.

Katrinchee wouldn't hear of it. “The guilt,” she whispered, and her voice trailed off.

“Well, what about ‘Wouter' then?”

She bit her lip and slowly shook her head from side to side.

Two days later, when Jeremias came in from the fields, his sister was smiling over a pan of rising dough. “I want to call him ‘Jeremias,' ” she said. “Or how do the Englishers have it—‘Jeremy?' ”

The surname was another story. On the one hand, the boy was a Van Brunt—just look at his eyes—but on the other, he wasn't. And if he were to be christened a Van Brunt, who would the Dominie list as his father? They wrestled with the problem through a blistering afternoon and a mosquito-plagued night: in the morning they agreed that the boy should be named for his natural father, who was, after all, the son of a chieftain. It was only proper. Jeremias milked his cows, then sent for Dominie Van Schaik.

It was September before the Dominie actually made it out to the farm to perform the ceremony, but neither Katrinchee nor Jeremias was much bothered by the delay. Once they'd reached their decision, it was as if the thing had already been accomplished. Now they were legitimate. They'd weathered the worst, they'd been orphaned, deserted, evicted and shunned, and now they were members of the community once more, fully sanctioned in the eyes of God, man and patroon alike.

And so things went, on through the fall and the days that slid ever more rapidly toward night, through the harvest that was less than bountiful but more than meager, through the lulling warmth of Indian summer and the cold sting of the first blighting frost. Then one afternoon, late in October, Jeremias was out on the far verge of the cornfield, burning stumps and thinking of the way the blouse clung to Neeltje's upper arms, when all at once he felt himself gripped by
nameless fears and vague apprehensions. His pulse quickened, smoke stung his eyes, he could feel the scar come alive on his face. Not two days earlier, a half-plucked gobbler in his lap, his hands glutinous with feathers and his mind wandering all the way down to Croton, he'd glanced up and seen the figure of his father, clear as day, tearing across the field in his steaming nightshirt. But now, though the blood was beating in his temples and his scalp felt as if it were being manipulated by invisible fingers, though he looked over both shoulders and stared down his nose at the four corners of the field, he saw nothing.

No sooner had he gone back to his work, however, than he was startled by a voice that seemed to leap up out of the blaze before him, as if the very fire itself were speaking. “You. Who gives you the right to farm here?” rumbled the voice in very bad Dutch. Jeremias rubbed the smoke from his eyes. And saw that a man—a giant, red-bearded, dressed in skins and with a woodsman's axe flung over his shoulder—stood to the right of the burning stump. The smoke shifted, and the man took a step forward.

Jeremias could see him more clearly now. His face was as soiled as a coal miner's, he wore leggings after the Indian fashion, and the eyes stared out of his head with the exophthalmic vehemence of the eyes of the mad. A pair of coneys, still wet with blood, dangled from his belt. “Who gives you the right?” he repeated.

Backing up a step, wondering how, with his bad leg, he could possibly hope to outrun this madman, Jeremias found himself murmuring the name of his landlord and master as if it were an incantation. “Oloffe Stephanus Van Wart,” he said, “… the patroon.”

“The patroon, is it?” the madman returned, mincing his words in mockery. “And who gives him the right?”

Jeremias tried to hold the stranger's eyes while casting about for something he could use to defend himself—a stone, a root, the jawbone of an ass, anything. “Their … Their High Mightinesses,” he stammered. “Originally, I mean. Now it's the duke of York and King Charles of the Englishers.”

The madman was grinning. A flat, toneless laugh escaped his lips. “You've learned your lesson well,” he said. “And what are you, then—a man to forge his own destiny or somebody's nigger slave?”

All at once the world rose up to scream in his ears, the harsh caterwauling of the hollow withered dead: all at once Jeremias understood who it was standing there before him. In desperation he snatched up a stone and crouched low, David in the shadow of Goliath. He understood that he was about to die.

“You,” the madman said, laughing again. “You know who I am?”

Jeremias could barely choke out a response. His legs felt weak and his throat had gone dry. “Yes,” he whispered. “You're Wolf Nysen.”

Marguerite Mott, elder sister of Muriel, edged closer to Depeyster, scuffing the ancient peg-and-groove floor with the feet of the William and Mary side chair. Like her sister, she was a big moon-faced blonde in her mid-fifties who favored false eyelashes and cocktail dresses in colors like champagne and chartreuse. Unlike her sister, however, she worked for a living. Selling real estate. “He's rejected the bid,” she said, looking up from the sheaf of papers in her lap.

“Son of a bitch.” Depeyster Van Wart rose from his chair, and when he spoke again, his voice was pinched to a yelp. “You kept this strictly confidential, right? He had no idea it was me?”

Marguerite pressed her lashes together in a coy little blink and gave him a look of wide-eyed rectitude. “Like you told me,” she said, “I'm bidding on behalf of a client from Connecticut.”

Depeyster turned away from her in exasperation. He had an urge to pluck something up off the sideboard—an antique inkwell, a china bibelot—and fling it through the window. He was a great flinger. He'd flung Lionel trains, music boxes and croquet mallets as a boy, squash rackets, golf clubs and highball glasses as he grew older. There was actually something in his hand, some damnable piece of Indian bric-a-brac—what was it, a calumet? a tomahawk?—before he got hold of himself. He set the thing down and reached into his breast pocket for a tranquillizing pinch of cellar dust.

“So, what are you saying,” he said, swinging around on her, “the place isn't for sale then—to anybody? You mean to tell me the old fart isn't hard up for cash?”

“No, he wants to sell. Word is he's trying to raise money to leave his grandson something.” Marguerite paused to snap open a compact, peer into it as into a bottomless well, and dab something on the flanges of her nose. “He thinks twenty-five hundred's too low, that's all.”

Of course. The son of a bitch. The hypocrite. To each according to his need, share and share alike, the crime of property and all the rest of it. Slogans, and nothing more. When it came down to it, Peletiah Crane was as venal as the next man. Twenty-five hundred an acre for a piece of property that had been worthless since the time of the red Indians, twenty-five hundred an acre for land he'd practically stolen from Depeyster's father for something like a hundredth of that. And still it wasn't enough for him. “What's he want then?”