World's End (45 page)

It took him a week to get settled. His mother, who'd been living there alone, was cold and irascible, and he spent the first several days trying to disabuse her of the notion that he'd come to turn her out to her martyrdom among the beasts of the wilderness. Then there was Vrouw van Bilevelt, the housekeeper, who took every suggestion as a personal affront, regarded Pompey and Calpurnia as cannibals in Dutch clothing, and fought bitterly over every cup, saucer and stick of furniture Hester brought into the house. And finally, there was the sticky question of the de Vries. It was they—Gerrit Jacobzoon de Vries, his wife and two cretinous sons—who'd managed the farm all these years—and managed it badly. On the very first night, after a dinner of stewed eel and cabbage charred into the pan out of spite by a murderous-looking Vrouw van Bilevelt, Stephanus summoned Gerrit de Vries to the front parlor. He began by saying how much he appreciated the long and honorable service Gerrit had given him and his father before him, sketched in his plans for the upper house and mill, and ended by offering him a new farm out beyond the van der Meulens' place, on the same terms he'd offer any prospective tenant—a stake in building materials, livestock and farm machinery, all improvements descending to the patroon, quitrent due in November.

De Vries was struck dumb. His face flushed; he turned his hat over in his rough hands. Finally, in his peasant's Dutch, he managed to stammer, “You—you mean, start all over again?”

Mijnheer
nodded.

The rest was simple. De Vries spat at his feet and the patroon had van den Post show him to the door. The following morning, after thirteen years at the upper house, the de Vries were gone.

Once all that had been settled, the patroon set van den Post to work on the farm and ordered the carpenter to begin reroofing the house and hauling stone to frame the two-story addition that would more than double the size of the place. Then he turned his thoughts to road building. And widening.

It was on a fine hot August morning, while the blackberries ripened in the woods, the corn grew sweet in the fields and the crabs crawled right up out of the bay and into the pot, that the patroon called on his tenants to give him the labor that was his due. By eight o'clock they were there, gathered in front of the house with their carts and teams, their axes and shovels and harrows. The patroon, dressed in flowing rhinegrave breeches and a sleeveless silk jerkin, and mounted on the sleek Narragansett pacer the
schout
had brought up from Croton for him, acknowledged each of them with a lordly nod of his head—first the van der Meulens, old Staats and his son, Douw, who leased his own farm now; next the Cranes and Ten Haers and Reinier Oothouse's boy, who'd taken over after the delirium tremens softened his father's brain; and finally, the Lents, the Robideaus, the Mussers and Sturdivants.

All told, there were nearly two hundred people living on the Van Wart estate, upper and lower manors combined, but the majority of these were gathered along the Hudson in Croton and sprinkled inland along the Croton River. Up here, on the northern verge of Stephanus' estate, there were only ten farms under cultivation, and a total, at last count, of fifty-nine souls—excluding, of course, the ragged band of Kitchawanks at Indian Point and the twenty-six free subjects of the Crown who lived at Pieterse's Kill, on plots the trader had sold them for fifty times what he'd paid for them. Ten farms. That was four more than there'd been in his father's time, but in the
Jongheer's
eyes it was nothing. Not even a start.

He'd been buying up land to the east from a degenerate tribe of
the Connecticuts, and to the south from the Sint Sinks. And by skillful recruitment among the dazed and seasick immigrants who staggered ashore at the Battery with little more than the wind at their backs and stuffed-up noses, he'd managed to find tenants for nearly all the choice Croton plots—and he would find more, a hundred more, to domesticate the wild lands up here. What he wanted was nothing less than to amass the biggest estate in the Colony, a manor that would make the great estates of Europe look like so many vegetable patches. It had become his obsession, his overmastering desire, the one thing that made him forget the paved streets, the quiet taverns, the music, art and society of Leyden and Amsterdam. He looked out over the sun-burnished faces of the farmers who'd come to build him a road—a road that would bring swarms of beholden peasants up from the river to fell the trees, fire the stumps and plow up the ground—and for the briefest moment he saw it all as it would one day be, the hills rolling with wheat, onions sprouting from the marshes, pumpkins and cabbages and crookneck squash piled up like riches, like gold. …

But then one of the farmers cleared his throat and spoke up, and the picture was gone. It was Robideau, a bitter, leathery Frenchman who'd lost an ear in a calamitous brawl outside the Ramapo tavern, which mysteriously burnt to the ground a week later. Robideau sat high up on the hard plank seat of his wagon, his close-set eyes gleaming, the whip lazily flicking at the flies that settled on the blistered rumps of his oxen. “And what about Van Brunt,” he said. “The pegleg. Where's he?”

Van Brunt? For a moment the patroon was confused, having so successfully suppressed the memory of that ancient and unseemly confrontation that he'd forgotten Jeremias existed. But in the next moment he was back in that miserable hovel, the
schout
laid out on the hard dirt floor, Jeremias Van Brunt defying him, challenging him with a crude aboriginal weapon, and slim pretty dark-eyed little Neeltje regarding him from her bed of sin.
You don't own Neeltje,
Jeremias said.
And you don't own me.

“It is because he's married to the
schout's
daughter—is that why he gets special treatment?”

Van Brunt. Yes: where in hell was he? Stephanus turned to the
schout,
who'd come up from Croton the previous evening to oversee the road work. “Well?” he said.

Cats was bowed nearly to the ground as he shuffled forward to make his excuses. “I don't know where he is,
Mijnheer,”
he said in a voice so halting and reluctant he seemed to gag on each word. “I've informed him, and—and he said he would come.”

“Oh, he did, did he?” The patroon leaned forward in his saddle, the great billowing folds of his breeches engulfing his stockings, his buckled pumps and the stirrups too. “That's very generous of him.” And then, straightening up again so that he towered over the
schout
like an equestrian monument come to life, he cursed so vilely and emphatically that young Johannes Musser snatched a hand to his mouth and Mistress Sturdivant, the stoutest woman in Van Wartwyck, fainted dead away. “I want him here within the hour,” he said, speaking through clenched teeth. “Understand?”

The day was half gone, and the patroon in a rage approaching apoplectic closure, when finally the Van Wart wagon, drawn by a pair of gaunt, toothless and half-lame oxen, appeared around the bend and made for the work crew at a somnolent pace. Joost Cats, leading his nag and listing so far forward it looked as if he were about to plunge face down in the dirt, limped beside it. The patroon glanced up angrily, then turned to the first farmer at hand—young Oothouse—and began an earnest chat about manure or dried shad or some such nonsense; he wasn't about to give Van Brunt the satisfaction of thinking that he, Stephanus Oloffe Rombout Van Wart, landowner, patroon, shipping magnate and member of the Governor's Council, could experience even the slightest anxiety over the whereabouts of so insignificant a creature as he.

The crew—men and women both, including a revived Mistress Sturdivant—had cleared and graded the outside lane in front of the patroon's house, and were now taking their
de noen
break. They lounged in the shade, appropriating a round from one of the felled trees for a table, chewing hard black bread, cold bacon and cheese. One of them—Robideau, from the look of his stockings and shoes—was snoring blissfully beneath a blackberry bush, a soiled white handkerchief spread over his face. As the patroon listened to young Oothouse apotheosize dung, he was aware of every creaking revolution
of the wagon wheels behind him, of every snort and wheeze of the winded old oxen. Finally, with an excruciating shriek of the axles, the wagon ground to a halt at his back.

Lifting his nose, and turning around with all the imperious dignity he could muster, the patroon was prepared to be mollified, Van Brunt's very presence—however reluctant, however tardy—proof positive that yes, he did own him, just as he owned all the rest of these sorry soil grubbers, his word the law, eviction and banishment his prerogatives. He turned, but what he saw wasn't at all what he expected. This wasn't Van Brunt hunched over the reins—this was a boy, a half-breed, with the soupy staring eyes of the mentally deficient. And beside him another boy, younger, weaker, thinner, the sort of boy you'd send out to gather nuts, not build roads.

“I'm—I'm—” Cats was trying to say something. The patroon speared him with a savage glance. “—I'm sorry, but my son-in-law, I mean, Farmer Van Brunt, is, uh, indisposed, and he, uh, sent, his, uh—”

“Silence!” the patroon exploded. “I ordered you,” he roared, advancing on the shrinking
schout
in the great boatlike mules he wore over his pumps to protect them from the dirt of the road, “to bring him here, did I not!?”

“Yes,
Mijnheer,”
the
schout
said, whipping off his hat and working it in his hands. He was staring at his feet. “But instead because he, he was ill—”

It was then that the boy spoke up—the smaller one, the white boy. His voice was as high and shrill and discordant as a badly played piccolo. “That's not it at all,
grootvader,”
he said, working himself up. He turned to face the patroon, as bold as a thief. “He won't come, that's all. Said he's busy. Said he's paid his rent. Said he's as good a man as you.”

The patroon said nothing. He turned his back on them, shuffled over to the pacer, kicked off the mules and swung himself into the saddle. Then he motioned to young Oothouse. “You,” he growled, “go fetch
Heer
van den Post.” Everyone—even Mistress Sturdivant, who'd been addressing herself to a shepherd's pie the size of a football—turned to watch him go. No one moved, and no one said a word, till he returned.

Young Oothouse, an indolent young man given to fat and a
measured pace, jogged all the way, and he was red-faced and running with sweat when he appeared around the bend in the road, van den Post loping easily at his side. In the next moment, van den Post stood before the patroon, gazing up steadily at him from beneath the brim of his steeple hat. “Yes,
Mijnheer?”
he said, barely winded.

From his eminence atop the horse, the patroon spoke, his voice cold and brittle. “Aelbregt, you will remove from
Heer
Cats the plumed hat and silver-plated rapier that are the perquisites of his office—they now belong to you.” And then, addressing Joost, who stood there in a daze as van den Post took the rapier from him,
“Heer
Cats, you will oversee the roadwork this afternoon, and then return to your farm.”

Still, no one said a word, but shock was written on every face. Why, Joost Cats had been
schout
as long as anyone could remember, and to have him removed just like that—it was unheard of, impossible.

A moment later, grinning like a shark, van den Post stood before his patroon in silver-plumed hat and rapier, awaiting his further instructions.

“Heer schout,”
Stephanus said, raising his voice so that all could hear him, “you will take these two young renegades,” indicating Wouter and Jeremy Mohonk, “and confine them in the root cellar at the house on a charge of impertinence and sedition.”

This brought a murmur of protest from the farmers, particularly from Staats van der Meulen, who stood up angrily amidst the crumbs of his lunch. Someone sneezed and one of the oxen broke wind. Robideau's snores sawed away at the motionless air. No one dared to speak up.

“And when that's done, I want you to ride out to Nysen's Roost and inform the tenant there, one Jeremias Van Brunt”—here the patroon paused to look menacingly on the faces gathered beneath the trees—“that his lease is hereby terminated. You understand?”

Van den Post practically writhed with delight. “Ja,” he said, licking his lips. “Do we evict him tonight?”

In his anger, in his wrath and resentment, Stephanus very nearly said yes. But then his pragmatic side spoke to him and he relented, thinking of the crops in the field. “November,” he said finally. “After he's paid his rent.”

Half an inch taller, ten pounds gaunter, his sunken cheeks buried beneath the weedy untamed beard of the prophet or madman, Tom Crane, self-proclaimed hero of the people and saint of the forest, made his way down the cool umbrageous aisles of the Peterskill Grand Union, blithely pushing a shopping cart before him. It was high summer, and he was dressed for the season in huaraches, a pair of striped bell-bottoms big enough to picnic on, a tie-dyed T-shirt that featured a series of dilating archery targets in three shades of magenta, and various scarves and headbands and dangling superfluous strips of leather, the whole of it overlaid with a gypsy jangle of beads, rings, Cocopah god's eyes, pewter peace signs, Black Power buttons and feathers. In contrast, the cart itself appeared almost spartan. It was wonderfully free of the specious glittering boxes of the newest improved wonder product shoved down the throat of the consumer by those running dogs of the profit mongers, the ad execs of Madison Avenue. The saint of the forest wasn't about to be taken in by frills and false promises; he went only for the basics—the unrefrigerated, plain-wrapped, vegetarian basics, that is.