World's End (10 page)

On this particular day, as Joost helped his daughter down from her mount, he saw only Jan Pieterse and Heyndrick Ten Haer sharing a pipe on the porch while a Wappinger brave lay spread-eagled in a patch of poison ivy up the lane, drunk as a lord and with his genitals exposed for all the world to see. Beyond the Indian, the river was as flat and still as hammered pewter, and Dunderberg rose up, a deep shadowed blue, to tilt at the horizon.

“Vader,”
Neeltje said before she'd touched ground, “please, may I go right in?” She'd spoken of nothing but ribbon, broadcloth and velvet since they'd left Croton that morning. Mariken Van Wart had the prettiest silk petticoats and blue satin skirt, and she was only thirteen, even if she was the patroon's niece. And armozine ribbon—you should have seen it!

Joost handed her down, straightened up briefly and then fell again into his habitual slump. “Yes,” he whispered, “yes, of course, go ahead,” and then he ambled up to shoot the breeze with Jan Pieterse and Farmer Ten Haer.

He'd been slouching there on the
stoep
some ten minutes or so, puffing fraternally at his clay pipe and relishing the rich westering sun in those few moments before he would ask Jan Pieterse to join him in a pint of ale, when he became aware that his daughter was talking to someone inside the store. He remarked it only because he'd assumed the store was empty. There were only two horses in the lot—his own sorry, one-eyed nag and the sleek tawny mare he'd conscripted from the Van Wart stable for his daughter—and Farmer Ten Haer's wagon stood alone beneath the chestnut tree. Whoever could she be talking to? he wondered, but Heyndrick Ten Haer was in the middle of a story about Wolf Nysen—whether or not he was even alive still, the renegade Swede had become the bogey of the neighborhood, blamed for everything from a missing hen to some
huis vrouw's
shin splints—and Joost momentarily forgot about it.

“Oh, ja, ja,” Farmer Ten Haer said, nodding vigorously. “He come up out of the swamp near that turtle pond where his farm used to be, black as the devil, not a stitch on him and covered head to toe with mud, and he had this terrific big axe with him, the blade all crusted over with blood—”

Joost was picturing this monster, this Nysen, when he quite distinctly heard his daughter giggle from inside the dim storehouse. He craned his neck to peer through the gloomy doorway, but could see nothing aside from the pile of ragged furs and the gray-whiskered snout of Jan Pieterse's retriever, asleep in their midst. “Is someone in there?” he asked, turning to the trader.

“She was gathering mushrooms out there, my Maria was, when he come for her without warning, howling like a beast—”

“Yes, and I suppose his hoofs were cloven and he smelled of brimstone too,” Jan said, and then, leaning toward Joost and lowering his voice: “Oh, ja—the pegleg, you know, the Van Brunt boy.”

It came back to him in a rush—the night at the van der Meulen farm, the look of unquenchable hatred on the boy's face, his own shame and uneasiness—and his first reaction was fear for his daughter. He'd actually turned away from the others and squared his shoulders for action when he checked himself. This was only a boy, an orphan, one of the afflicted and downtrodden of the earth—not some sort of ogre. He'd been overwrought that night, that was all.

“It's the God's honest truth,” Farmer Ten Haer declared, clamping his arms across his chest.

It was then that Neeltje appeared in the doorway, a pretty girl in petticoats and tight-waisted skirt, smiling still, as if at some private joke. Behind her, dwarfing her, was a man six feet tall at least, with shoulders that had burst the seams of his woolen
hemdrok.
He guided her through the doorway and then stepped out into the sunlight himself, the pegleg knocking at the floorboards like a fist at the door. Joost saw the same unyielding expression, the same arrogance, he'd seen in the boy. If Jeremias recognized him, he gave no sign of it.

“Well,
younker,”
Jan Pieterse said, drawing the pipe from his mouth, “have you decided on anything?”

Jeremias nodded and replied that yes, sir, he had. He held out a big work-hardened palm in which there were five fish hooks and two
glossy cubes of rock candy, and paid with a coin that looked as if it had been buried and dug up six times already. And then, ignoring Joost, he pressed a cube of candy into Neeltje's palm as if it were a jewel from Africa, tucked the other inside his cheek, and thumped off, the wooden strut stabbing rhythmically at the earth with each thrust of his leg.

They watched in silence—Joost, Neeltje, Farmer Ten Haer and Jan Pieterse—as he swayed off across the lot, awkward and graceful at the same time. His right arm swung out like a baton, his shoulders were thrust back and the dark long blades of his hair cut at the collar of his shirt. They watched as he skirted a rotten stump and passed between a pair of lichen-encrusted boulders, watched as he entered the shadows at the edge of the wood and turned to wave.

Joost's hands were in his pockets. Farmer Ten Haer and Jan Pieterse lifted their arms half-heartedly, as if afraid to break the spell. Neeltje—only Neeltje—waved back.

When the market crashed in the fall of 1929, Rombout Van Wart, sire of Depeyster, husband to Catherine Depeyster and eleventh heir to Van Wart Manor, did not jump from the roof of the Stock Exchange or hang himself beneath the stately gables of the upper manor house. He did take a beating, though—in both the literal and figurative senses. Figuratively speaking, he lost a fortune. The family timber business went under; the foundry—which at that time produced iron cookware, but had, during the war, turned out breeches for artillery guns—fell on hard times; he lost an unspecified sum in stock holdings purchased on margin and dropped two thousand dollars in one grim afternoon at Belmont Park. The other beating, the literal one, was administered by a transient with a hawk's nose and burnt-umber complexion who called himself Jeremy Mohonk and claimed to be the last of the Kitchawanks, a tribe no one in the Peterskill/Van Wartville area had ever heard of. Asserting his right to tribal lands, he threw up a tar-paper shack at Nysen's Roost, an untenanted sector of the Van Wart estate on which Rombout had recently reintroduced the wild turkey after an attack of feudal nostalgia.

It was Rombout himself who discovered the squatter's presence. Mounted on Pierre, a bay gelding with blood lines nearly as rich as his own, the lord of the manor was taking his exercise in the bracing autumn air (and at the same time attempting to exorcise the demon of his financial woes with the aid of a silver flask inscribed with the time-honored logo of the Van Wart clan) when he came upon the interloper's shack. He was appalled. Beneath the venerable white oak
in which his great grandfather, Oloffe III, had carved his initials, there now stood a sort of gypsy outhouse, a peeling, unsightly, tumbledown shanty such as one might expect to see at the far end of a hog pen in Alabama or Mississippi. Drawing closer, he spotted a ragged figure crouched over a cookfire, and then, galloping into the miserable, garbage-strewn yard, he recognized the plucked and decapitated carcass of a turkey sizzling on the spit.

It was too much. He sprang down from his horse, the riding crop clenched in his fist, as the tattered beggar lurched to his feet in alarm. “What in hell do you think you're doing here?” Rombout raged, shaking the whip in the trespasser's face.

The Indian—for Indian he was—backpedaled, watching for sudden movement.

“This … this is trespassing!” Rombout shouted. “Vandalism. Poaching, for God's sake. These are private lands!”

The Indian had stopped backpedaling. He was dressed in a cheap flannel shirt, torn working pants and a crushed bowler hat he might have fished out of a public urinal; he was barefoot despite the incipient cold. “Private lands, my ass,” he said, folding his arms across his chest and fixing the lord of the manor with a cold, challenging, greeneyed glare.
(Indian?
Rombout would later snort in disbelief. Whoever heard of an
Indian
with green eyes?)

Rombout was beside himself with rage. It should be said too that he was fairly well inebriated, having consumed cognac in proportion to the magnitude of the anxiety it was meant to soothe—and that anxiety, pecuniary in nature, was monumental, blocklike and impervious as marble. In fact, two days earlier he'd confided to a fellow member of the Yale Club that financially speaking he was going to hell in a handbasket. Now he suddenly roared at the Indian, “Do you know who I am?” punctuating each stentorian syllable with a flourish of the whip.

Unutterably calm, as if he were the property owner and Rombout the trespasser, the Indian nodded his head gravely. “A criminal,” he said.

Rombout was struck dumb. No man had insulted him to his face in twenty-five years—not since a brash upperclassman at college had called him “a starched-up ass” and taken a concussive blow to the
right ear in swift retribution. And here was this trespasser, this swarthy hook-nosed bum in a ragpicker's suit of clothes, bearding him on his own property.

“A criminal and an expropriator,” the Indian continued. “A pauperizer of the working classes, a pander to the twin whores of privilege and capital, and a polluter of the land my ancestors lived in harmony with for seven thousand years.” The Indian paused. “You want to hear more? Huh?” He was pointing his index finger now. “You're the trespasser, friend, not me. I've come to reclaim my birthright.”

It was then that Rombout struck him—once only—a vicious swipe of the riding crop aimed at those chilly, hateful, incongruous green eyes. The sound of it, like a single burst of brutal applause, faded quickly on the antiseptic air, till in an instant only the memory of it remained.

For his part, the Indian seemed almost to welcome the blow. He barely flinched, though Rombout had put everything he had into it. Which admittedly wasn't much, considering the fact that he was in his mid-forties and given to a sedentary life relieved only by the occasional round of golf or canter across the property. By contrast, the Indian appeared to be in his early twenties; he was tall and fine-whittled, hardened by work and indigence. Dew drops of blood began to appear in a band that rimmed his eyes and traced the bridge of his nose like the blueprint for a pair of spectacles.

“Damn you,” Rombout cursed, trembling with the chemical emissions his anger had released in his blood. He didn't have a chance to say more, because the Indian bent to snatch up a stick of firewood the length and breadth of a baseball bat and laid into the side of his head like the immortal Bambino going for the stands. It later came out—at the Indian's trial—that the attacker landed several other blows as well, including kicks, punches and knee drops, but Rombout was aware only of the first and of the blackness that followed precipitately on its heels.

He wasn't dead—no, he would live to recover his health and vigor, only to fatally inhale a raw oyster at Delmonico's some ten years later—but he might as well have been. He never stirred. For three hours he lay there, bleeding and clotting, clotting and bleeding.'
He came to briefly once or twice, saw a world that looked as if it were ten fathoms beneath the ocean, tasted his own blood and descended again into the penumbral depths of unconsciousness. In all that time the Indian did nothing—he didn't renew his attack, didn't attempt to aid his victim, lift his wallet or abscond with Pierre, the magnificent bay gelding. He merely sat there at the doorway of his shanty, rolling and smoking cigarettes, a self-righteous look on his face.

It was Herbert Pompey—chauffeur, stable hand, gardener, factotum, jack-of-all-trades, major domo and son of Ismailia the nurse—who ultimately rescued the lord of the manor. When after several hours Rombout hadn't returned, Herbert went to his mother to ask her advice. “He drunk is what he is,” she opined. “Pass out against some tree, or maybe he just fell off that animal and broke his head.” Then she told him to put one foot in front of the other and go have a look for him.

Pompey tried the dairy farm first. Rombout would sometimes ride out there to drink black coffee and grappa with Enzo Fagnoli, whose family had been milking cows for the Van Warts for eighty years. (The Fagnolis had taken over for the van der Mules or Meulens, tenants at Van Wart Manor since the world began. Apprised that the state legislature was about to put an end to the manorial system in the Hudson Valley, giving leaseholders title to the farms they'd worked for generations, Rombout's great grandfather, Oloffe III, had evicted the Dutchmen in favor of the intrepid Italians, who converted the farm to dairy production and worked for an annual wage. It was hard on Oloffe, having to adjust to paying his tenants rather than vice versa, but the unquenchable hordes of New York City clamored for his milk, butter and cheese, his herds multiplied till they darkened the hills and in time he was able to admit that it was all for the best.) Enzo, in overalls and porkpie hat, greeted Pompey with enthusiasm and offered him a swig of apple wine from a green jug, but regretted to say that he hadn't seen Rombout in nearly a week.

Next it was the Blue Rock Inn, where the lord of the manor was wont to take a hiatus from the rigors of equestrian exercise in order to share a cup of bootleg bourbon with the proprietor, Charlie Outhouse, who more typically regaled his guests with soda water and orange pekoe tea. Pompey retraced his steps, passing within hailing
distance of the manor house—still no Rombout—and hiked down to where the inn perched over Van Wart Creek as it debouched in the Hudson. Charlie was out back, plucking hens for dinner. He hadn't seen Rombout either. Pompey kept walking, skirting Acquasinnick Ridge and following the bank of the creek until finally he swung north for Nysen's Roost.

He struck the stony path that traversed Blood Creek (so named because Wolf Nysen had incarnadined its waters in trying to wash the blood of his daughters from his hands), his legs heavy with fatigue as he pumped up the steep hill. His mother, a gossipy, superstitious woman, repository of local legend and guardian of the Van Wart family history, had told him tales of Wolf Nysen, the mad murdering Swede. And of the loup-garou, the
pukwidjinnies
and the wailing woman of the Blue Rock, who'd perished in a snowstorm and whose voice could still be heard on nights when the snow fell thick. The woods were dense here—never lumbered—and the shadows gathered in clots around the bones of fallen trees. It was an unlucky place, strangely silent even in summer, and as boy and man, Pompey had avoided it. But now, though the leaves were ankle deep on the trail, he could see that a horse had passed this way recently, and he felt nothing but relief.