World's End (56 page)

And Jeremy?

Not yet seventeen, he was a married man, according to the rites and customs of the Weckquaesgeeks, and the father of a nine-month-old boy. He was healthy too, clean of limb and sharp of eye, and the native cuisine seemed to have agreed with him—he'd filled out through the chest and shoulders, and where before the sticks of his legs had merely melted into his torso, there was now the rounded definition of an unmistakable pair of buttocks. It seemed, however, that in his absence he'd totally lost the power of speech. What had begun as a predilection for taciturnity, or rather a disinclination toward noun, verb, conjunction, modifier or preposition, had developed into something aberrant during his sojourn among the Weckquaesgeeks. Perhaps it was tiggered by some particularly caustic memory of his earliest days among that star-crossed tribe, days that suffered his mother's dereliction and his own unending torment at the hands of his uniformly dark-eyed playmates. Or perhaps the cause was physical, something linked to the pathology of the brain, a failure of the speech
centers, an aphasia. Who could say? Certainly not the good squaws and shamans of the Weckquaesgeeks, who had all they could do to stanch the flow of blood from the deluge of accidents that daily befell their clumsy constituency and barely noticed that the rehabilitated Squagganeek didn't have much to say for himself. And most certainly not a physician such as the learned Huysterkarkus, who, if he'd been consulted, would no doubt have prescribed bleeding, cautery, emetics, purgatives and fen leeches, applied in random order.

At any rate, even if Jeremy had lost the power of speech, his prodigious return, coupled with the arrival of Adriaen Van Wart, gave the tongue waggers plenty of fodder over the next several months:
To think that after all this time, and who didn't know but that he was dead and disemboweled by the wild beasts and didn't he have it coming to him, running off from the law like that? to think he'd show up on his uncle's doorstep nice as you please, as if he'd been out for a stroll around the neighborhood or something. And with a woman at his side, no older than a child really, swaddled in greasy skins and stinking like the kitchen midden, and his own little half-breed bastard bound up in one of those papoosey baskets—or no, it'd be a quarter-breed, wouldn't it? Couldn't talk though, not a word. Goody Sturdivant says he'd forgot his Dutch and his English both, living up there amongst the heathens (like his mother before him, and wasn't that a sad case?), taking part in their lewd and ungodly rites and who knows what all. Mary Robideau says they cut his tongue out, the savages, but who knows what's true and what isn't these days? And did you get a load of the patroon's cousin—the one that's going to sit by his big fat bachelor self up in the grand house? Yes, yes, that's what I heard too—Geertje Ten Haer dressed her daughter up like a tart, the little one, not fifteen yet—shameless, isn't it?—and came calling the very day the young bucket of lard moved his bags in. Oh, I know it, I know it. …

And so it went, till Adriaen was settled in, the silent Jeremy and his equally silent wife became fixtures at Nysen's Roost, and the incestuous little community of Van Wartwyck could doze off again.

To Wouter, the fact of his cousin's return was miraculous enough, but that he had a place to return to was even more miraculous. The
autumn of their impending doom came and went and still the Van Brunts were in possession of the five-morgen farm at Nysen's Roost. On November 15 old Ter Dingas Bosyn wheeled up in the wagon and collected the quitrent, which
vader,
obsequious as a lapdog, counted out and loaded up himself. The patroon had moved his family back down to Croton as soon as the first frost put the trees to bed for the winter, and he took his
schout,
the jellyfish eater, with him. And that was that. No eviction. Another year rolled by and again
vader
paid his rent without demur and again the globular old
commis
accepted it and made his precise notation in the depths of his accounts book. Wouter, who'd expected the worst—who'd expected to be driven from his home while his mother and sisters wrung their hands and his father fawned and begged and licked the patroon's boots—was puzzled. He'd been dreading the day, dreading the patroon's sneer, the dwarf's evil stare and stunted grasp, the cold naked steel of the rapier that had once laid his father's face open, but the day never came.

Word had it that the patroon had relented. Geesje Cats had gone down on her knees to the patroon's mother, and the crabbed old woman, that eschewer of pleasure and comfort both, had interceded in the Van Brunts' behalf. Or so they said. And then too, Wouter remembered a week in late October of that fateful year when Barent van der Meulen came to keep him and the other children company while
moeder
and
vader
hitched up the wagon and drove down to stay with
grootvader
Cats in Croton. No one knew what went on then, but Cadwallader Crane, who'd got it from his father, claimed that Neeltje and Jeremias had petitioned the patroon indefatigably, haunting his garden, crying out their fealty day and night, even going so far as to kneel to him and kiss his gloved hand as he sauntered to the stable for his daily exercise—all in the hope that they might convince him to change his mind.

However it was, the whole thing revolted Wouter. He almost wished the patroon had come and chased them off his lands, wished that they could have gone west and started over, lived as beggars on the streets of Manhattan, hacked their hair and scarified themselves to live naked among the Indians. At least then his father might have come back to life. As it was now, he was a slave, a gelding, a sot who lived only to serve his betters. He worked the fields, anesthetized,
from dawn till dusk, whitewashed the house, cleared acreage, put up stone fences—and all for the patroon, for the profit and increase of the man by whose magnanimity he drew breath from the air, water from the ground and bread from the oven. After that horrific day in the patroon's back lot, he shied away from Wouter, always his favorite, and fell into a sort of trance, like an ass harnessed to the wheel of a gristmill. He was a husk of his former self, a man of straw, and his son—his eldest, the joy of his life, the boy who'd made an icon of him—regarded him with contempt, with pity, with the unassuageable hurt of the betrayed.

Wouter turned twelve in the bleakness of that first winter, thirteen in the second. It was the most hopeless period of his life. He'd lost his father, lost the cousin who was a brother to him, lost his own identity as son to the man who defied the patroon. For the longest while, he couldn't eat. No matter what his mother served him—pancakes, cookies, the most savory roast or meaty stew—the very smell of it made him sick, his throat constricted and his stomach seized. He lost weight. Wandered the woods like a ghost. Found himself sobbing inexplicably. If it weren't for Cadwallader Crane, he might have gone off the deep end of his grief, like his Aunt Katrinchee before him.

Young Cadwallader, who had attained the physical age of twenty by the first of those miserable winters, was the last-born and least quick-witted of that scholarly and grallatorial clan presided over by the ancient Yankee intellectual, Hackaliah Crane. For some fifteen years, the elder Crane had maintained Van Wartwyck's sole institution of learning, known among the wags at Jan Pieterse's as Crane's Kitchen School, in reference to its venue. Each winter, when the crops were harvested and stowed away in attic and loft, when the days grew short and the weather wicked, Hackaliah gathered his six, eight or ten reluctant scholars in the kitchen of the rambling stone house he'd built with his own blistered hands, and lectured them in the mysteries of conning the letters of the alphabet and doing simple sums, throwing in a smattering of Suetonius, Tacitus and Herodotus for good measure. He held his sessions because he had a calling, because it was the purpose and office of his life to keep the lamp of learning lit and to pass it on from hand to hand, even on the wild and darkling shores of the New World. But, of course, it wasn't solely a labor of love—there
was a small matter of recompense. And the Yankee preceptor, notorious skinflint that he was, exacted his basket of apples or onions, his string of cucumbers dried for seed, his bundle of combed flax or his turkey gobbler battened on corn as if it were tithed him—and woe to the unsuspecting scholar who was remiss with his payment. It was in this rudimentary seat of learning that Wouter, over the desolation of the months, gradually began to attach himself to Cadwallader Crane.

In happier days, Jeremy had expertly mimicked the younger Crane's erratic gait and the darting, birdlike movements of his scrawny neck and misshapen head, while Wouter had done an inspired impersonation of his laryngeal squawk of greeting and the tepid washed-out drone with which he read from slate or hornbook, but now, in his loneliness, Wouter felt strangely drawn to him. He was ridiculous, yes, five years older than Tommy Sturdivant, the next oldest student in the class, unable to master his lessons though he'd been through them five hundred times, the bane of his venerable father's existence and a sore trial to his mother's love. But he was interesting too, in his own way, as Wouter would soon discover.

One forbidding January afternoon, when Wouter lingered after lessons were over, Cadwallader took him around back of the house to the woodshed and produced, from a hidden corner, a board on which he'd tacked a brilliant spangle of moths and butterflies caught in hovering flight. Wouter was dumbstruck. Chocolate and gold, chrome blue, yellow, orange and red: there, in the dim confines of the winterbound shed, the breath of summer touched him.

Astonished, Wouter turned to look at his friend and saw something in Cadwallader's eyes he'd never recognized before. The habitual glaze of stupefaction was gone, replaced by a look at once alert, wise, confident, proud, the look of the patriarch showing off his progeny, the artist his canvases, the hunter his string of ducks. And then, miracle of miracles, Cadwallader, the lesser Crane, the hopeless scholar, the beardless boy-man who couldn't get out of the way of his own feet, began to discourse on the life and habits of these same moths and butterflies, speaking with what almost approached animation of worms and caterpillars and the metamorphosis of one thing into another. “This one, do you see this one?” he asked, pointing to a butterfly the color of tropical fruit, with regular spots of white set
in a sepia band. Wouter nodded. “He was a milkweed worm, with horns and a hundred ugly feet, just last summer. I kept him in a stone jar till he changed.” Wouter felt the wonder open up like a flower inside of him, and he lingered in that comfortless shed till he couldn't feel his feet and the light finally failed.

In the coming weeks, the awkward enthusiast—now bounding over a precipice to pluck a wisp of moss from between two ice-bound boulders, now shimmying up a decayed trunk to retrieve a two-year-old woodpecker's nest—opened up the visible world in a way Wouter had never dreamed possible. Oh, Wouter knew the woods well enough, but he knew them as any white man knew them, as a place to pick berries, hunt quail, bring down squirrels with a sling. But Cadwallader knew them as a naturalist, as a genius, a spirit, a revealer of mysteries. And so Wouter followed him through the stripped bleak woods to gaze on a slit of barren earth in the midst of a snowbank where Cadwallader assured him a black bear was sleeping out the winter, or to listen as he pulled apart a handful of wolf droppings to speculate on the beast's recent diet (rabbit, principally, judging from the lean withered turds bound up in cream-colored hair and flecked with tiny fragments of bone).

“See that?” Cadwallader asked him one day, indicating the frozen hindquarters of a porcupine wedged in the crotch of a tree. “When the sun warms it in spring, that meat will give rise to new life.” “Life?” Wouter questioned. And there, on the lesser Crane's thin lips and hairless cheeks, crouched a smile all ready to pounce. “Blowflies,” he said.

Though there was eight years difference in their ages, the friendship was not so one-sided as one might imagine. For his part, Cadwallader, long an object of contempt and denigration, was happy to have anyone take him seriously, particularly someone who could share in his private enthusiasm for the underpinnings of nature, for worms, caterpillars, slugs and the humble nuggets of excrement he so patiently scrutinized. Wouter suited him perfectly. No rock of maturity himself—any other man of twenty would have had his own farm and family already—he found the Van Brunt boy his equal in so many ways, a natural leader, really, persuasive, agile, curious, but not so much his equal as to challenge him seriously. As for Wouter, his fascination with the scholar's son was a distraction from the emptiness
he felt, and he knew it. Cadwallader, absorbing though he may have been in his own skewed way, made a poor substitute for Jeremy—and for the lapsed father who worked the farm like an encumbered spirit, an old man at thirty. Thus, like all incidental friends, they came together out of mutual need and because each propped up the other in some unspoken way. Cadwallader sought out Wouter, and Wouter sought out Cadwallader. And before long, the scholar's unscholarly son became a regular guest at Nysen's Roost, staying to supper and taking Jeremy's spot at the table, occasionally even spending the night when the weather was rough or the company too stimulating.

The company, yes. Though Jeremias faded into the background as if he were fashioned from the stuff of clouds, Neeltje was busy with her spinning or sweeping or washing up and the younger children, confined to the house throughout the endless winter, hissed, squabbled and caterwauled like aborigines, the young long-nosed Yankee nature lover found the company irresistible. Ah, but it wasn't Wouter, either, who moved him, though he liked him well enough and would claim him as his closest friend till nearly the time of his death—no, it was Geesje. Little Geesje. Named after her grandmother, inheritor of her mother's fathomless eyes and rebellious ways, ten years old the day he first stepped through the door.