World's End (36 page)

He'd let go of her hand in the rush of his eloquence on the subject of the eggs, and now he stood there, looking awkward, his arms hanging like empty sleeves. Frustrated, impatient, suffering, the cows bellowed. “It's all right, then?” Jeremias said finally, addressing a tree trunk twenty feet behind her.

All right? She'd been dreaming of this moment for months, lying on the rough mattress between her sprawled sisters in the dead black night, struggling to summon the image of him before she drifted off (Jeremias, the prince who would ascend the ladder of her tresses and free her from the hag's tower, who would slay dragons and crush villains for her, Jeremias of the stonemason's build and sea-green eyes). She never doubted he would come for her. She'd seen it in his eyes, seen it in the slump of his shoulders as he limped past her in his humiliation and slouched up the Peterskill road, felt it in his touch, heard it in his voice. When old Jan took her aside after delivering missives to the patroon and singing a three-note greeting to her mother from a cousin at Crom's Pond, she knew before the words had passed his lips that Jeremias Van Brunt sent his good opinion and best wishes. And she knew too when he pressed a slip of paper into her hand that it was from Jeremias and that it would open her life up for her.

Heart pounding, she'd ducked away from the family gathered around the tottering Indian and hurried out the door in the direction of the privy. When she was out of sight, when she was sure she was beyond the prying eyes of her father, her mother, her sisters, she tore open the slip of paper. Inside, she found a laboriously worked copy of Jacob Cats' paean to matrimonial ethics. She skimmed the lines, but it wasn't the poem that stirred her, it was the valediction. In the crude block letters of an unpracticed hand, Jeremias had written
Eye wll cum for u,
and then scrawled his signature across the bottom of the page in a deluge of loops and slashes. And now, as Neeltje stood there in her muddy clogs and uncombed hair, the basket of eggs clutched to her chest and the dust of sleep barely wiped from her eyes, she saw that he was as good as his word. All right? It was perfect.

“Your father doesn't think much of me,” he said.

She reached up to trace the scar along the length of his cheek. “No matter,” she whispered. “I do.”

It took him a minute—a minute punctuated by the lowing of the
cattle and suffused with the fishy reek of the river—before he moved into her arms. There was the fog, the tsk-tsking of the hens, the rank wild odor of the awakening season. When he spoke finally, his voice was thick. “Put down the basket,” he said.

The basket was still lying there in the mud at four that afternoon when Joost Cats climbed down from the bony back of Donder, his purblind nag, and smoothed the seat of his sweat-soaked and tumultuous pantaloons. He'd spent the morning in Van Wartville, mediating yet another dispute between Hackaliah Crane and Reinier Oothouse—this time over the disposition of a lean, slack-bellied sow the Yankee had caught rooting up his seed onions—after which he'd hurried home with a pair of Jan Pieterse's best Ferose stockings for Neeltje on her birthday. As he led the wheezing nag into the barn, thinking of how Reinier Oothouse, in his cups, had gone down on his knees before the Yankee and pleaded for the sow's life like a father pleading for his child (“Don't kill her, don't hurt my little
Speelgoed,
she didn't mean it, never been naughty before, anything, I'll pay anything you ask”), his two youngest burst from the house, arms and legs churning, faces lit with the joy of disaster.
“Vader! Vader!”
they cried in breathless piping unison, “Neeltje's gone!”

Gone? What were they talking about? Gone? But in the next instant he saw his wife at the door, saw the look on her face and knew it was true.

Together, led by the fluttering Trijintje and intoxicated Ans, they rounded the corner of the barn to hover over the spilled basket, the tracked and muddy earth, the shattered eggs. “Was it
Indians?”
Ans shouted. “Did they kidnap her and make her their white squaw?”

Bent like a sickle and stroking his puff of chin hair, Joost tried to picture it—naked red devils slipping from the weeds to bludgeon his defenseless little Neeltje, a rough hand cuffed over her mouth, the stinking hut and moldering furs, the queue of greasy randy braves jostling at the door. … “When?” he murmured, turning to his wife.

Geesje Cats was a dour woman, hipless, fleshless, wasted, a woman who bore only daughters and wore her troubles at the corners of her mouth. “This morning,” she said, her eyes stung with dread. “It was Trijintje—she found it, the basket. We called and called.”

The mud was puckered in dumb mouths that told the
schout
nothing. Staring down at the sad upended basket and the spill of egg yolk that seemed to claw at the earth like the fingers of a grasping hand, he relived the scenes of violence and depravity he'd encountered in his seven years as
schout,
drowned men and stabbed men floating before his eyes, women abused, bereft, violated, bones that poked through the flesh and eyes that would see no more. When he looked up he was shouting. “You searched the orchard?” he demanded. “The river? The pond? Did you inquire at the patroon's?”

Startled, shamefaced, his wife and daughters lowered their eyes. They had. Yes,
vader,
yes,
echtgenoot,
they had.

Well, then, had they gone to the de Groodts, the Coopers, the van Dincklagens? To the inn? The ferry? The pasture, the stable, van der Donk's Hill?

A light rain had begun to fall. Ans, ten years old, began to sniffle. “All right!” he shouted, “all right: I'll go to the patroon.”

The patroon was supping, bent low over a plate of pickled beets, hard cheese and a shad in cream sauce he was glumly forking up as if to remark the disparity between this and Zuider Zee herring, when Joost was shown into the room. The patroon's unburdened hand was bandaged against the knife thrusts of his gout, and his face was flushed the color of a rare wine. Vrouw Van Wart, a woman given to the denial of the flesh, sat stiffly beside him, a single dry crust before her, while his brother's widow and her daughter Mariken perched on the hard bench opposite her. The
Jongheer,
in a lace collar the size of a wheel of Gouda, occupied the place of honor at the foot of the table. “My Savior in Heaven!” cried the patroon. “What is it, Cats, that couldn't keep?”

“It's my daughter,
Mijnheer:
she's disappeared.”

“How's that?”

“Neeltje. My eldest. She went out for chores this morning and there's been no trace of her since.”

The patroon set down his fork, plucked a loaf from the pewter dish before him, and turned it over in his hand as if it were the single telling bit of evidence left behind at the scene of the crime. Joost waited patiently as the florid little man split the loaf and slathered it with butter. “You've, er, contacted the, er, other tenants?” the patroon gasped in his dry, windless voice.

Joost was beside himself with frustration—this was no time for
the niceties of leisurely inquiry. They had his daughter, the heart and soul and central joy of his existence, and he had to get her back. “It's the Kitchawanks,” he blurted, “I'm sure of it. They snatched her”—here his voice broke with a sob—“snatched her as she, she—”

At the mention of Indians, the
Jongheer
was on his feet. “I told you so,” he roared at his father. “Beggars in their blankets. Aborigines, criminals, vermin, filth. We should have driven them into the river twenty years ago.” He crossed the room in two great strides and lifted the harquebus down from the wall.

The patroon had risen now to his gouty feet, and the ladies pressed powdered hands to their mouths. “But, er, what's this,
mijnzoon?”
the patroon wheezed in some alarm. “What are you thinking?”

“What am I thinking?” the
Jongheer
shrieked, the blood rushing to his face. “They've raped an honest man's daughter,
vader!”
The harquebus was about as wieldy as a blacksmith's anvil, and twice as heavy. He raised it over his head in a single clenched fist. “I mean to exterminate them, annihilate them, pot them like foxes, like rats, like, like—”

It was then that a knock came at the door.

The deferential head of the tattooed slave appeared between the oak door and the whitewashed wall that framed it. “A red man,
Mijnheer,”
he said in his garbled Dutch. “Says he's got a message for the
schout.”

Before either patroon or
Jongheer
could give the command, the door flew back and old Jan stumbled into the room to exclamations of excitement from the ladies. Jan was wearing a tattered cassock, out at elbows and shoulders, and an ancient crushed caubeen with half the brim missing. His loincloth hung from his hips like a tongue, his legs were spattered with mud and his moccasins were as black as the muck in the oyster beds of the Tappan Zee. For a long moment he just stood there, swaying slightly, and blinking in the light of the candles hung around the room.

“Well, Jan,” the patroon wheezed, “what is it?”

“Beer,” the Indian said.

“Pompey!” Vrouw Van Wart called, and the black reappeared. “Beer for old Jan.”

Pompey poured, Jan drank. The patroon looked befuddled, the
schout
anxious, the
Jongheer
enraged. Mariken, who'd been Neeltje's playmate, looked on with a face as pale and drawn as a mime's.

The old Indian set down the cup, composed himself a moment and began a slow shuffling dance around the table, all the while chanting
Ay-yah, neh-neh, Ay-yah, neh-neh.
After half a dozen repetitions, he sang his message—in three tones, and to the same beat:

Daugh-ter, sends you,
Her greet-ings, neh-neh.

And then he stopped. Stopped singing, stopped dancing. He was frozen, like a figure in a clocktower after the hour's been struck. “Spirits,” he said. “Genever.”

But this time, Pompey didn't have a chance to respond. Before he could so much as glance at the patroon for his approval, let alone lift the stone bottle and pour, the
Jongheer
had slammed the Indian into the wall. “Where is she?” he demanded. “Is it ransom, is that what you want? Is it?”

“Let him go,” Joost said, taking Stephanus by the arm and pushing his way between them. “Jan,” he said, his voice faltering, “who is it? Who's got her? Mohonk? Wappus? Wennicktanon?”

The Indian stared at his feet. There was a smear of dirt on his cheek. He was pouting like a hurt child. “No more message,” he said.

“No more? You mean that's it?”

“Listen, you son of a bitch,” Stephanus began, making another charge at him, but Joost held him off.

“But—but who gave you the message?”

The Indian looked around the room as if he were trying to remember. In the background, Joost could hear Vrouw Van Wart berating her husband in a terse rasping voice. “Herself,” Jan said finally.

“Neeltje?”

The Indian nodded.

“Where is she? Where did she give it to you?”

This was more difficult. Joost poured Jan a pewter cup of genever while the
Jongheer
breathed fumes and the patroon and his wife and sister-in-law and niece sat in silence, as if they were at the theater.
Suddenly the Indian made a slash in the air with the flat of his hand; then he made the sign of two fingers walking.

“What?” Stephanus asked.

“Speak up, man,” the patroon croaked.

It was only Joost who understood, and he held on to the knowledge for a stunned moment, as a knifed man might have held on to the haft of the blade in his belly. The Indian had made the sign of the cripple, the one with half a leg—the sign for Jeremias Van Brunt.

Next morning, before the dogs had lifted their muzzles from the nests of their forepaws or the cock had had a chance to stretch the sleep from his wings, Joost saddled a sore and reluctant Donder and set out for Nysen's Roost. He was accompanied by the
Jongheer,
who suddenly, it seemed, had taken a passionate interest in his daughter's welfare, and he carried a brace of dueling pistols the patroon had ceremoniously retrieved from a chest in the seignorial bedroom (in addition, of course, to the silver-plated rapier that had already wrought such havoc on young Van Brunt's physiognomy). The
Jongheer,
in silk doublet, French cuffs and midnight-blue cassock with matching knee breeches, had given over the unwieldy harquebus in favor of a fowling piece loaded with pigeon shot and a Florentine dirk that looked like a surgical instrument. To complete the ensemble, he wore a jeweled rapier at his side, a floppy hat surmounted by a three-foot yellow plume, and so many silver and brass buckles he actually jingled like a sack of coins as his mount picked its way up the road.

The day was typical of April in the vale of the Hudson—raw and drizzling, the earth exhaling vapor as if it were breathing its last—and they made slow progress on the slick river road. It was late in the morning when they passed the cluster of buildings that would one day become Peterskill and turned east on Van Wart's Road. The
schout,
hunched in the saddle, had little to say. As he bobbed and swayed to the nag's erratic rhythm, he focused on the image of Jeremias Van Brunt with such intensity the world was swallowed up in it. He saw the watchful cat's eyes squinted against the onslaught of the summer sun, saw the squared jaw and defiant sneer, saw the blade come down and the blood flow. And he saw Neeltje, kneeling over the fallen renegade and glaring up at him, her father, as if he were the criminal,
the trespasser, the scoffer at the laws of God and man. Had she gone with him voluntarily, then? Was that it? The thought made him feel dead inside.

If Joost was uncommunicative, the
Jongheer
never noticed. He kept up a steady stream of chatter from the time they left Croton to the moment they forded the rain-swollen Van Wart Creek and Joost hushed him with a peremptory finger tapped against his lips. Stephanus, who'd expatiated on everything from the Indian problem to the poetry of van den Vondel, and who, despite the inclemency of the weather and the dead earnestness of their mission had been humming a popular ditty not five minutes before, now slipped from his mount with a stealthy look. Joost followed suit, dismounting and leading the nag behind him up the steep slick hill to Nysen's Roost. Wet branches slapped at their faces, the
Jongheer
lost his footing and rose from the ground with a stripe of mud painted the length of him, armies of gnats invaded their mouths and nostrils and darted for their eyes. They were halfway up when the drizzle changed to rain.