The Orphanmaster (20 page)

Kees had given Blandine a bird once, years ago, when he noticed her again after their childhood together, seeing his former playmate as a woman for the first time. His gift was not a live bird but a preserved specimen. He had smothered a hummingbird and carefully pressed it between sheets of clean white parchment, as though preserving a flower.

She recalled extracting the paper-thin pressing from its wrapping, a luminescent, almost transparent figure of a trapped animal, arrested in mid-flight. Its wings shone green like those of a dragonfly. Kees professed himself unable to decide if the thing was insect or bird.

Pim noticed Blandine looking toward Lace and Mally. “You know, you know,” he chattered. “Too much time. You spend too much with them.”

“Why could it be any of your business?” Blandine said.

“Let the blackamoors take care of their own.”

“Stick it,” Blandine said, a school-yard taunt.

“You ask too many questions about them African children,” Pim said. “Leave off or you’ll be hurt.”

He slapped her butt once more. She retaliated by giving him a sharp crack across the cheek. “Don’t touch me again,” she said.

He laughed a harsh laugh and disappeared into the crowd.

Angry at the assault, Blandine turned from the concourse back toward the market square.

She did not see Drummond, but at the waffle booth was the orphanmaster, crouched on the ground holding a thick, steaming waffle and breaking off chunks to hand to a group of boys and girls crowded around him. By Visser’s side, mingling with the children, was Lightning.

“May I get a piece of waffle?” Blandine said, smiling at Visser.

“You can take over for me,” said Visser, half-rising, staggering, being saved from a fall by Lightning. He was drunk.

“Aet, I see your dinner coming by,” Lightning said.

Theo Michaelis, the town’s most popular butcher, led a fattened beeve along by a leather strop. He had painted lines on the beast’s hide, marking off the cuts he would make at slaughtering time. His
kermis
customers need merely point out which part of the animal that they wished to buy. Visser made haste over to Michaelis so as to reserve the rump cut he favored.

Blandine found herself left alone in a crowd of children with Lightning. They had nothing to say to each other. The man wore his customary felt hat, greened with age, covering his scar. He stared languidly at Blandine.

“I think you might be frightening the little ones,” she said. The children had, in fact, sidled away from the half-indian to cluster around her.

Lightning smirked and stepped back into the flow of fairgoers, again taking his place at Visser’s side.

Blandine approached Mally and Lace. She leaned down and made kissy sounds at their caged robins. Mally stared at her. She was taller and thinner than Lace, and had a stern streak running through her right alongside her good parts.

“Two others now,” Mally said.

Blandine straightened up. “Oh, Mally, no,” she said.

“The slave Steven, up at Stuyvesant’s farm, he tell a tale about a Dutch boy coming in from the wilderness. Say the boy saw two of our kids being flayed alive by an indian demon. Didn’t say who they were, but Small Bill Gessie and his sister, Jenny, they gone.”

“Why were they alone?” Blandine asked. “We said no child should be north of the wall without an adult.”

“They don’t have parents to watch out for them,” Mally said.

“Orphans,” Blandine said.

“Uh-huh,” Mally said. “Who knows what happened? We put out the word, yes, nobody go out alone. God may mark the fall of every sparrow, but we ain’t him.”

“Our people are crying,” Lace said.

“Did you send for the
schout
?”

Mally and Lace stared blankly at Blandine. “I’m sorry,” she said.

She knew as well as they did that the officials of New Amsterdam, from the
schout
up to the director general, would not trouble themselves about the disappearance of an African child. They had never done so in the past, so why would they do so now?

It was impossible to overstate how death-inflected New Amsterdam was, all of the new world, all of the globe, really. There were celebrants present at this
kermis
festival, and not just one or two, either, who would be dead within the month.

Children died. Especially children. Love failed to save them. Prayer failed. Influence failed. They were born dead, of course, or died in infancy. But other times the parents were allowed to get to know them, to love them for a few years before they were taken. Children died from contagion, from marasmus, from a cut finger that became infected.

The enemies of the young were legion. The triple-threat killers, typhoid, dysentery and cholera. Yellow fever, a.k.a. dock fever, a.k.a. “King Death in his yellow robe.” An onslaught of other fevers: winter, spotted, camp, puking, putrid, congestive, diary, ship, remitting, black, blackwater, brain. The small pox, a great victimizer of native Americans.

Nothing to be done against any of it. Get them abed, cram them with ineffectual potions, bleed them. Pray. Sit at bedside through the night.

Nothing helped.

What did it mean to love a human child, a creature with such a tentative hold on life? Who might at any moment vanish into the long deep dark? Does a parent’s love become more guarded, more careful, perhaps a little withholding? Or does it become more fierce in the face of constant, imminent threat?

Piteous Gullee. With all this death, did it matter that one child more had disappeared? And a child who was from “outside the wall” at that? Her death had taken place almost a month before. Old news.

Now two more. It was happening again.

Inside Blandine’s head, a small chirping robin’s song repeated, “There’s nothing I can do! There’s nothing I can do!” Over and over, rising to a panicked shriek. She beat the voice back.

“I’ll go to the
schout
,” she said.

“You do that, Miss Blandina,” Mally said. She turned away.

They were disgusted over her lack of action on Piddy, as Blandine was disgusted with herself.

A roar rose from the parade ground. Blandine guessed that she had missed Kees’s triumph at the goose-pulling.

The carnival turned nasty on her. She reeled through the market toward her home on Pearl Street, confused and ashamed. The red faces of the fairgoers appeared crass and wolfish. The crowd seemed to teeter on the edge of violence.

A bare-chested bald man passed Blandine hoisting a green-skinned, long-fanged effigy strung up on a pole: the witika. Children and a few adults coursed after him, pelting the goblin figure with clods of dirt.

Blandine saw Tommy van Elsant, the son of the funeral caller, hunkered down with some of his friends at the edge of the marketplace, behind a stall that was not in use. He held a glass jar in his hands, and the youngsters around him leaned in, openmouthed, to gaze at its contents.

They each had paid a small token—a jaw harp, a knuckle-buckle, a string of seawan the length of a finger—for the opportunity to peer at a tiny fetus, adrift in its small bath of saltwater, cast off the last time Cara Reynoutsen miscarried.

As drink took the populace, the Dutch country dances on the parade ground became more and more frantic. Cross-dressing ran rampant. In the aisles of the drinking booths, brandy-boiled fairgoers lay where they fell. The recently harvested fields of the Company near the Doden Acker turned into crowded rutting grounds.

Blandine fled. Away from
kermis
, away from her countrymen, away from sickly sweet waffles and fat-smeared geese and her guilt over missing children. Lost in her thoughts, she made her solitary way down Pearl Street toward her dwelling-house.

“How-do, Miss Blandina,” the street urchin Gypsy Davey said to her, appearing suddenly at her side.

“Hello, Davey, you little imp,” Blandine said. The sight of the renegade orphan always cheered her. “Come with me, I’ll treat you to a pickle.”

“You best watch yourself,” the red-kerchiefed boy said. “Walk the straight and narrow line.”

Blandine laughed. Gypsy Davey wouldn’t recognize the straight and narrow if it came up and bit him. She was going to tell him so, but when she looked again, Davey had vanished.

“R
emember that the Devil is chained up, and wholly at the will and beck of God,” preached Johannes Megapolensis from the pulpit at the Dutch Reformed Church.

As soon as the fair was over, to counter its sinful excesses, the
director general had declared a settlement-wide day of prayer, fasting and contrition.

Visser sat in his pew, his brain bursting with the headache that had been waiting for him at the end of
kermis
. There was nothing like a good sermon after a spree. It settled the gut and righted the soul.

“Remember that Christ hath conquered the Devil in his temptations, on the cross, by his resurrection and ascension. The prince of this world is conquered and cast out by Our Lord, the prince of the next. Wilt thou fear a conquered foe?”

Through the fog on his senses Visser perceived the thrust of the sermon. It really concerned the witika, the only subject anyone in the whole settlement seemed to be talking about.

Witika fever swept through town quicker than the plague. The
schout
enforced a curfew for children. Parents locked their sons and daughters inside, day and night. Sponsors of Adolph Roeletsen’s school had a debate whether to close temporarily, for safety’s sake.

“Remember how you honor the Devil by fearing him, and pleasure him by thus honoring him. As tyrants rejoice to see men fear them, so the Devil triumpheth in your fears as his honor.”

Ah, Visser thought, now the dominie was getting to it. Johannes Megapolensis and the director general were famous enemies. Even though the minister had acceded readily to this day given to the service of the Lord, he could not resist inserting a swipe at Stuyvesant in his sermon on the witika.

“As tyrants rejoice to see men fear…” Yes, yes, that was the dominie all the way.

An odd political declension had developed in New Amsterdam over the last year. The Dutch colonists, chafing under the harsh rule of the director general, had begun to rebel against him. The director general, in turn, increasingly sought his partisans among the colony’s English populace.

Visser was sure it would all come to a bad end. The Dutch governor fought his own people and favored the foreign-born. Up was down. Sixes were at sevens.

The orphanmaster picked his nose, inspected the product and flicked it away. He himself avoided Stuyvesant as much as he could.

No worse a powerful man can there be than an impulsive one, and odd whims seized the director general with regularity. He shuttered taverns, ordered work details, issued proclamations on trade, all purely on impulse. Once the man attempted to place a ban on the Humpty Dumpty, the brandy concoction, which came to the colony direct from London.

Visser was afraid that if the director general’s gaze should ever happen to fall upon him, he would end up much the sorrier for it.

Already, George Godbolt had high-hatted Visser at this very service. He and Rebecca passed him by with not even a bow of their heads. Resentful, no doubt, the two of them were, for Visser having sicced Edward Drummond on them.

Drummond himself sat two rows behind Visser. He listened first to the director general scare the living daylights out of the assembled by telling what Ansel Imbrock saw in the forest, implying this new attack was judgment for the colony’s sins. Then Drummond attended as the dominie talked about the Devil. Also known as, just at that moment in the colony, the witika.

Day of prayer. More like the day of pride, Drummond thought. He had long ago turned his back on this personal God the preachers preached about. No god heard your prayers, no god watched over you, no god could be summoned for a throw of the dice. That was all just human vanity.

Especially vain were men who claimed God spoke to them, Drummond thought, such as the two who had mounted the pulpit at this church today.

Vanity, saith the preacher. Pride goeth before the fall, and also before the winter, spring and summer.

The new world, Drummond found, was an excellent place for doubting such a personal God. Inside the soaring cathedral at Reims, say, it was easy to believe. But in wilderness America, how could you venture to think that the Supreme Being pays humankind any mind? Take a short walk out your back door, brother, head into the desolate forest and tell me your old graybeard God is around. And if God wasn’t present there, then he wasn’t infinite, and if he wasn’t infinite, he wasn’t God.

No, Drummond was much more interested in this new God of Spinoza’s. Not a father in heaven at all, but rather a… Drummond found it hard to describe. An entity, an endlessness, a totality. There were moments, on the voyage to New Netherland, at night in his hammock on
Margrave
, reading Spinoza’s
A Short Treatise
by candlelight, when faith in this sort of God seized him and wrung his soul completely out.

Call Spinoza’s God nature, the nature Drummond met wrapped in a bearskin robe in a pelting rain on the trail to New Haven. Call it infinity, which he glimpsed through his perspective tube when he stared at the night sky.

An inhuman God? A god that didn’t care whether you capitalized his name or not? A god for which the terms
caring
and
loving
made no sense, since these were human terms, and thus too limited to apply to the God of Spinoza.

A god of space. A god of infinity. Of wilderness.

An inhuman God. Could Drummond live with that? Thus was his constant struggle, whether he was in church sitting two rows behind Aet Visser and smelling the alcohol on the man’s breath from that distance, or if he was at an afternoon’s fair, gazing at the face of Blandine van Couvering.

He would not, he decided, return to Europe.

Rumor, the real and true witika, a hobgoblin more powerful than any other, tore through the
groot kamers
and taprooms of New Amsterdam. It struck first during
kermis
, running like a virus among the reeling fairgoers. A new witika killing had been discovered, it whispered, this one close to home, right outside the wall. The name Ansel Imbrock became known to the populace. The boy had actually witnessed the demon doing its dark work.