World's End (31 page)

The last of the Kitchawanks grew older, and as he did so, he grew increasingly embittered. The world seemed a bleak place, dominion of the people of the wolf, the bosses ascendant, the workers crushed. He was doomed. His people were doomed. Nothing mattered—not the sun in the sky, not the great Blue Rock on the verge of the Hudson or the mystic hill above Acquasinnick Creek. A decade came and went. He was in his mid-fifties—still vigorous, still powerful, still young—and he wanted to die.

Yes. And then he met Joanna Van Wart.

The first of the Jeremy Mohonks, son of Mohonk son of Sachoes, distant ancestor of that sad radicalized jailbird whose tribe seemed destined to die with him some three centuries later, was two and a half years old and uttering his first halting words of Dutch when the shadow of Wolf Nysen fell over his world like a month of starless nights. It was October 1666, late in the afternoon of a dark graceless day that promised a premature sunset and heavy frost. Jeremy was under the kitchen table playing with sticks and dirt clods and rehearsing the words he liked best—
suycker
and
pannekoeken
—while his mother stoked the fire and stirred things into the soup. He was also watching his mother's feet as she stood at the table chopping cabbage or crossed the room to poke the fire and adjust the blackened cauldron on its armature. When he saw those feet slip into their clogs and head out the door in the direction of the woodshed, he crawled out from under the table. In the next moment he was on the
stoep,
and in the moment after that, he was gazing up at the great swirling columns of smoke that blotted the sky at the far end of the cornfield. Though he couldn't yet put it into words, he had an intuitive grasp of the situation: Uncle Jeremias was burning stumps.

Jeremy was two and a half years old, and he knew several things. He knew, for instance, that until recently his name had been Squagganeek and that he'd lived in a smoky wet hut in a smoky wet Indian village. He knew too that the wood brooding over him was home to wolves, giants, imps, ogres and witches and that he was never to leave the immediate vicinity of the house except in the company
of his mother or uncle. And he knew the penalty for transgression. (No
suycker.
No
pannekoeken.
Three clean swats across the bottom and bed without supper.) Still, the shapes those columns of smoke made against the sky as they fanned out—there a butterfly, here the face of a cow—were not to be denied. Before he could think twice, he was gone. Down the steps, across the yard and out into the field with its weathered furrows and sheaves bound up like corpses.

He ran like a shorebird, stiff-kneed and quick-legged, tottering from one furrow to the next, splashing through puddles, falling flat on his face and as quickly scrambling to his feet again. When he reached the nether end of the field, he saw the stumps, a whole army of them like decapitated little men spouting smoke from their headless trunks. His uncle was nowhere to be seen. But there before him was a family of scuttling grouse, and to these he gave chase with a shout of joy. Round and round he chased them, through a funnel of smoke and a half-cleared thicket, right on up to the verge of the wood. And then he stopped. There was Jeremias, right in front of him. And another man too. A big man. A giant.

“You know who I am?” the giant roared.

His uncle knew, but he spoke so softly the boy could barely hear him. “Wolf,” he said, and that was when Jeremy called out his name.

As it happened, Wolf Nysen didn't cleave Jeremias in two. Nor did he set fire to the hogpen, rape Katrinchee or devour the livestock. In fact, he merely gave Jeremias a lopsided grin, tipped the brim of his deerskin cap and slipped back into the woods. No matter: the damage was done. Just as Jeremias had taken up the yoke, just as he'd bowed his head and accepted the imprimatur of the patroon, here came this renegade to mock him and inflame all his old hate and rancor.
Who gives you the right?
The Swede's words echoed in his ears as he bent to his soup that evening, as he laid his head on the pillow that night, and when he pulled on his underwear in the morning. But that wasn't the worst of it, not by a long shot. The sequel was a steady downward slide in the fortunes of the little family at Nysen's Roost, as if the madman were indeed the evil genius of the place and they the victims of his curse.

Though they were now well-furnished (in addition to what the
van der Meulens and the others had donated, the patroon, on coming to terms with his newest tenants, had sent them a wagonload of farm and household implements—on loan, of course—as well as a yoke of sway-backed oxen, a yearling calf to go with the manorial cow Oom Egthuysen had lent them, and three Hampshire shoats), nonetheless Jeremias had planted late and harvested little. The wheat, which was customarily sown in the autumn rather than the spring, had done poorly, as had his crops of rye and peas, which he'd hoped to use for winter fodder. He'd done well with Indian corn, largely because of Katrinchee's expertise, and their kitchen garden—cabbages, turnips, pumpkins and herbs—had flourished for the same reason. Still, with little grain for bread or porridge and the lion's share of the corn reserved for the stock, the menage at Nysen's Roost would be almost wholly dependent on game during the coming winter.

Problem was, the game was gone.

In the days and weeks following Wolf Nysen's visit, wildlife became increasingly scarce, almost as if the madman, like some insatiable Pied Piper, had taken the birds and beasts with him. Where Jeremias might have shot a dozen pigeons in the past, he now came back with one. Where he might have swatted gobblers from the trees and tucked them in a sack that bulged so he could barely carry it, he now found none. Ducks and geese eschewed the marshes, the deer had vanished, and bears, which tasted like pine gum and tallow anyway, had gone early to their dens. Even the squirrels and rabbits seemed to have disappeared. Of necessity, Jeremias took to the river, and for a while the river sustained them. Through November and the grim crowded days of early December, as the sun faded from the sky and the breath of the Arctic stretched a sheet of ice across Acquasinnick Bay, Katrinchee made fish balls, fish pie, fish in blankets, fried fish, boiled fish, fish with turnips and pine nuts, fish with fish. But then winter settled in in earnest, the ice stretched to the foot of Dunderberg and back and there were no more fish.

Day by day it grew colder. The well crusted over. Wolves sniffed at the door. In the woods, jays and sparrows froze to their perches, as lifeless and hard as ceramic ornaments on a Christmas tree. There was an ice storm at the New Year, followed by dropping temperatures and snow that accumulated like the sands of Egypt. When the wolves
made off with one of the shoats, Jeremias moved the animals indoors.

In spite of it all, Katrinchee seemed to grow stronger by the day. She took the fish regimen in stride, put on weight, grew her hair out. For the first time in years she slept through the night. When Jeremias inventoried the corn and cut their daily ration by half, she became a genius of conservation. When the snow mounted and Jeremy took cold, when the winds blew through the house with such force as to snuff the taper on the mantelpiece, when it was dark as night though half past one by the clock, she never uttered a complaint. Not even the uncomfortable proximity of the animals could discourage her, though the shoats capered underfoot, the old cow moaned in the dark like one of the unburied dead and the oxen drooled, stank, chewed their cuds, dropped their dung and breathed their hot foul breath in her face. No, it was a small thing that undid her finally, a serendipitous discovery Jeremias made out on the front
stoep
one icebound morning toward the end of January.

What he discovered there on the porch, come to them like an answered prayer, was meat. Rich, red, life-sustaining meat. He pulled open the door to step outside and relieve himself, and blundered into the stripped and freshly dressed carcass of a doe, hanging by its hind legs from the roof of the porch. He couldn't believe it. A doe. Hanging there. And already butchered. Jeremias let out two hungry hoots of joy—Staats, it must have been Staats—and in the time it takes to draw a knife he had one haunch on the spit and the other in the pot. He was so excited his hands were trembling. He didn't notice the look on his sister's face.

When finally he did notice, the aroma of roasting venison filled the room and Katrinchee was backed up in the corner, shrunk in on herself like a spider starved in its web. “Get it out of here,” she said. “Take it away.”

Already the flames licked up to sear the meat; fat gilded the joint and dripped hissing into the coals. Little Jeremy stood transfixed before the fire, hands in his pants and a rhapsodic smile on his face, while Jeremias hustled around the room, hunting up the odd vegetable for the pot. The tone of his sister's voice stopped Jeremias cold. “What? What did you say?”

She was twisting the hem of her dress in both hands as if she were
throttling a doll. Her hair was in her face. And her face—drawn and blanched, the eyes big with terror—was the face of a madwoman clinging to the bars in the asylum at Schobbejacken. “The smell,” she murmured, her voice trailing off. In the next moment she was shrieking: “Get it out! Get it out of here!”

Jeremias could barely speak for the saliva foaming in his mouth, barely think for the knife and fork sawing away in his head, barely focus on her for the vision of the golden dripping haunch on the spit and the pretty little hoof projecting from the lip of the pot. But then he looked hard at her, and all at once he understood: it was the meat. The venison. She wanted to take it away from him. When he spoke, the words came in a rush. It was all in the past, he told her—she had to be reasonable. What were they going to eat? They were into the seed corn already. Should they kill the livestock and starve next year? “It's venison, Katrinchee. Fresh meat. Nothing more. Eat it to keep up your strength—or don't eat it if you really can't. But surely you couldn't … you wouldn't prevent me, your own brother … and what about your son?”

She just shook her head, back and forth, implacable, inconsolable, shaken with regret. She was sobbing. Biting her finger. Jeremy buried himself in her skirts; Jeremias rose from the hearth to hold her, comfort her, remonstrate with her. “No,” she said, “no, no, a thousand times no,” and shook her head late into the night while her brother and son sat down at the table and picked clean the least bones of the butchered doe and then cracked them with a mallet to get at the grainy rich marrow. By then, Katrinchee was beyond caring. For the second time in her short life she'd found the edge and slipped over it.

It was February. The snow fell steadily, relentlessly, mountains of it lying over the countryside in frozen blue ripples that were like the folds of a shroud. They were down to quarter rations of corn now, and even so they were decimating next year's seed. “Half a bushel of this,” Jeremias would say, pounding the hard kernels to meal, “would yield a hundred next summer. But what can you do?” Katrinchee could barely lift the spoon to her mouth for guilt. She was having trouble sleeping too, the images of her father, mother, little Wouter haunting her the minute she closed her eyes. The deer hadn't come from Staats—he was having a terrible time finding meat himself, he
told them a week after the second one, gutted, skinned and butchered, had appeared mysteriously on the porch. She'd known all along. Not from Staats, not from God in his heaven. It was her father, poor scalded man, who brought them … to punish her.

One night Jeremias woke from a dreamless sleep and felt a draft of cold air on his face. When he looked up, he saw that the door stood open, and that the hills and trees and naked snowfields had come to bed with him. Cursing, he pushed himself up and crossed the room to slam shut the door, but at the last moment something arrested him. Tracks. There were tracks—footprints—in the fresh dusting of snow on the
stoep.
Jeremias puzzled over them a moment, then eased the door shut and called to his sister in an urgent whisper. She didn't answer. When he lit the taper, he saw with a start that little Jeremy was sleeping alone. Katrinchee was gone.

This time—the first time—he found her huddled beneath the white oak. She was in her nightdress, and she'd taken a knife to her hair; strands of it lay about her in the snow like the remains of a night-blooming plant. Inside, he tried to comfort her. “It's all right,” he soothed, pressing her to him. “What was it—a bad dream?”

There they were, in tableau: the animals of the manger, the sleeping child, the mutilated brother and mad sister. “A dream,” she echoed, and her voice was distant, vague. Behind them, the calf bleated forlornly and the hogs grunted in their sleep. “I feel so … so …” (she meant to say “guilty,” but that's not how it came out) “… so
hungry.”

Jeremias put her to bed, fed the fire and boiled up some milk for porridge. She lay motionless on the husk mattress, staring at the ceiling. When he brought the spoon to her lips, she pushed it away. And so the next day, and the next. He made her a stew of turnip and dried fish, baked some heavy hard bread (full of weevils, unfortunately) and gave it to her with a slab of cheese, cut the ears off one of the shoats to make her a meat broth, but she wouldn't eat. She just lay there, staring, the white parchment of her skull gleaming through the stubble of hair, her cheeks sunk in on themselves.

It was in early March, on a night that dripped from the eaves with the promise of warmth, that she wandered off again. This time she pulled the door shut behind her, and Jeremias didn't notice she
was gone till first light. By then the snow had started. A wet warm drizzling snow that changed twice to rain, hovered a while on the brink of freezing, and finally, propelled by gusts blown in off the river, became a whirlwind of hard stinging pellets. By the time Jeremias had dressed the boy and started off after her, the wind was steady and the visibility no more than twenty feet.