World's End (57 page)

They played cards through those long winter evenings—Cadwallader hunched over his knees like a singing cricket, Wouter with a ferocious zeal to win that sometimes astounded even him, and Geesje, her legs drawn up beneath her, the cards masking her sly child's face, playing with an insouciance that belied a will to win every bit as ferocious as her brother's. They skated on the pond where Jeremias had long ago lost his foot to the swamp turtle. They played at big ball, I spy, flick-fingers, hunt-the-slipper and quoits, the gangling, awkward scholar's son as eager and excited as the children he was playing with. By the time the second winter came around, the winter of Adriaen Van Wart's ascension and Jeremy's return, Wouter began to understand that it was no longer for him that Cadwallader Crane came to the house.

If Wouter felt betrayed, he didn't show it. He played just as hard, followed his long-legged companion just as often through copse and bower, bog and bramble, lingered as usual in the Crane woodshed to
marvel over a set of fossilized horse's teeth or a pipefish preserved in pickling brine. But inwardly he felt as if he'd been knocked off balance again, shoved from behind just as he'd begun to regain his footing. Disoriented, uneasy, thirteen years old and set adrift once again, he went to the door one raw February night and found his cousin standing there in a blanket of sleet, and in the grace of a single moment he felt redeemed: Jeremy was back.

But redemption doesn't come so easily.

Even as he embraced him, even as he shouted out his cousin's name in triumph and heard the household rouse behind him, he knew something was wrong. It wasn't the Indian getup—the ragged bearskin, the string of
seawant,
the notochord cinched around his cousin's brow—or the fierce primordial reek of him either. Nor was it the strategic emplacement of bone, sinew and flesh that had transformed him from boy to man. It wasn't that at all. It was ice. His cousin was made of ice. Wouter embraced him and felt nothing. Cried out his name and saw that his eyes were glazed and impenetrable, hard as the surface of the pond. In confusion he let go of him as the doorway filled with jostling children, with
moeder's
smile and
vader's
lifted eyebrows and fallen lip. Jeremy merely stood there, rigid as stone, and for a terrible moment Wouter thought he was hurt—he'd been gouged, stabbed, they'd cut out his tongue and he'd come home to die, that's what it was. But then Jeremy stepped back into the shadows and there, in his place, stood a squaw.

A girl, that is. A female. Calves, thighs, bosom. Wrapped up in deerskin, otter and mink, her hair greased and queued, mouth set in a pout. And in her arms, an infant. Wouter was stunned. He looked up into the shadowy features of his cousin and saw nothing. He looked at the girl and saw the quiet triumph of her eyes. And then he looked at the infant, its face as smooth and serene as the Christ child's. “In, in,”
moeder
was piping, “it's no night for visiting on the
stoep,”
and all at once Wouter became conscious of the sleet pelting his face, of the dank subterranean breath of the wind and the restlessness of the night. Then the squaw brushed past him and the infant, dark as cherrywood and not half the size of a suckling pig, opened its eyes. Its eyes were green.

A moment later Jeremy was sitting in the inglenook, mechanically
spooning porridge into the dark slot of his mouth, while the girl crouched on the floor beside him, the baby at her breast. Where had he been? the children asked. Why was he dressed like that? Was he an Indian now?
Moeder's
voice was tender. She hoped he was home to stay, and his wife too—was this his wife? She was welcome, more than welcome, and what was her name?
Vader
wanted to know the obvious: was this his child? Wouter said nothing. He felt as if the floor were buckling under him, he felt jealous and betrayed. He looked from Jeremy to the girl and tried to imagine what it was between them, what it meant and why his cousin wouldn't look him in the eye.

For his part, Jeremy couldn't begin to fathom their questions, though he felt for them and loved them and was glad in his heart to be back. Their voices came at him like the rumble of the foraging bear, like the soliloquies of the jays and the clatter of the brook outside the door, rising and falling on an emotional tide, a song without words. Dutch words, English, the markers and signifiers of the Weckquaesgeek and Kitchawank dialects he'd once known—all was confusion. He knew things now as Adam must have known them that first day, as presences, as truths and facts, tangible to touch, sight, smell, taste and hearing. Words had no meaning.

His wife had no name—or no name that he knew. Nor his son either. He looked shyly at Wouter and he knew him, and he knew Jeremias, Neeltje, Geesje and the other children. But to summon their names was beyond him. He knew, in an immediate and concrete way, in the way of enzymes churning in the gut or blood surging through the veins, that Jeremias had killed his father, that the jellyfish eater had wanted to lock him up in his infernal machine, that the people of the wolf were ravening unchecked over the face of the earth. He knew too that Jeremias had raised him as his own and that Wouter was his brother and that his place was both here and among the Weckquaesgeeks at the same time. He knew that he was grateful for the food and for the fire. But he couldn't tell them. Not even with his eyes.

In the morning, Jeremy went out beyond the last deadened tufts of the farthest, stoniest pasture and built himself a wigwam. By late afternoon, he'd covered the ground with a mat of sticks, on which he meticulously arranged an assortment of moldering furs. Then he got a cookfire going and moved in the girl and the baby. Over the years
to come, as he fell into the old ways with Wouter, as he bearded the patroon and lived off his land without once breaking the ground, as he watched the pestilence take two of his daughters and scar his son, he rebuilt, remodeled and expanded the crude bark domicile he'd erected that morning, but he never left it. Never again. Not until they came for him, that is.

As for Wouter, his cousin's return devastated him. Here was yet another stab in the back, another wedge driven between him and the savior he so desperately needed. First it was Cadwallader and Geesje, now Jeremy and this moon-faced girl with the pendulous teats and the green-eyed little monkey who clung to them. He was hurt and confused. What was it about his spindly-legged little sister that could so captivate Cadwallader? What did Jeremy see in an evil-smelling little squaw? Wouter didn't know. Though he was awash with hormones and driven by indefinable urges, though he ducked away from the fields to spy on Saskia Van Wart as she romped with her brothers on the lawn at the upper house, though he ached in the groin to think about her and woke from tangled dreams to a bed mysteriously wet, he still didn't know. All he knew was that he was hurt. And angry.

In time, as he began to reforge his relationship with Jeremy, as he worked around the inescapable conclusion that Cadwallader Crane cared more for his little sister than he did for him, he recovered. Or at least outwardly he did. He was fourteen and thought he was in love with a girl from Jan Pieterse's Kill by the name of Salvation Brown; he was fifteen and followed Saskia Van Wart around like a tomcat with the scent on him; he was sixteen and stood best man when Cadwallader Crane took his sister's hand in marriage. It all passed—the death of his father's spirit, the renunciation of Cadwallader Crane, the blow he'd received from his cousin on that sleet-struck night when the squaw stepped between them. He grew into his manhood, and to look at him you'd never know the depth of his hurt, never guess that he was as crippled in his way as his father before him.

Van Wartwyck slumbered again. The decade of the eighties, which had begun so promisingly, petered out in the unimpeachable dullness of the quotidian. Nothing happened. Or at least nothing scandalous or violent or shocking. No one died even. Each spring the crops came
up, the weather held—not too wet, not too dry—and the harvests got better by the year. On a still night you could hear the gossips snoring.

It was Jeremias Van Brunt, so long the catalyst for ferment and upheaval, who woke them up again. He didn't know it at the time, nor would he live to see it, but he unwittingly set in motion a series of events that would plunge the community into darkness, rouse the tongue waggers as if their very sheets and counterpanes had been set ablaze, and culminate finally in the last tragic issue of his youthful rebellion.

It began on a day of unforgiving wind and flagging temperature, a blustery afternoon at the very end of October 1692, some three years after that crafty Dutchman, William of Orange, had been proclaimed king of England and all her colonies. Shouldering a battered matchlock that had once belonged to his father and with a crude flax bag cinched at his waist, Jeremias left the cabin just after the noon meal and slouched off into the woods to commune with his favorite chestnut tree. Though this was to be a nutting expedition and nothing more, he carried the gun because one never knew what one might encounter in those haunted woods.

He worked his way arduously down the path from the cabin, snatching at trees and bushes to brake his descent, driving his pegleg into the compacted earth like a piton into rock, the wind hissing in his face and threatening in gusts to take his hat. Thumping across the bridge and wading into the marshy hollow that lay between Acquasinnick Creek and Van Wart's Road, he startled a pair of ravens from their perch in a crippled elm. Up they rose, like tatters from the Dominie's funereal gown, bickering and complaining in their graceless tones. Jeremias went on, a little more circumspectly than usual—the sight of a raven never brought anyone an excess of good luck, so far as he knew—until he was halfway across the marsh and the crown of the chestnut came into view in the near distance, shouldering its way above the lesser trees that surrounded it. It was then that he flushed the unlucky birds again, this time from the ground—or rather from a weedy hummock choked with vines and a blaze of blood-red sumac that seemed to float up out of the puddled expanse of the marsh like some sort of strange haunted craft.

Jeremias was curious. He tugged at his boot, straightened the
brim of his hat, and slogged off to investigate, thinking he might find the buck he'd wounded two days back, holed up and breathing its last. Or maybe the remains of the pig that had mysteriously disappeared just after the leaves turned. The birds were on to something, that much was sure, and he meant to find out what.

He parted the vines, hacked at the sumac with the butt of the gun, paused twice to disentangle the sack from the scrub that seized it like fingers. And then he spotted something in the tangle ahead, a glint of iron in the pale cold sunlight. Puzzled, he bent for it, and then caught himself. The smell—it hit him suddenly, pitilessly—and it should have warned him off. Too late. He was stooping for an axehead, and the axehead was attached to a crude oaken handle. And the handle was caught, with all the rigor of mortis, in the grip of a hand, a human hand, a hand that was attached to a wrist, an arm, a shoulder. There before him, laid out in the sumac like the giant fallen from the clouds in a fairy tale, was the man who'd given Blood Creek its name. The eyes were sunk into the face, raw where the birds had been at them, the beard was a nest for field mice, the arms idle, the hair touched with the frost of age. He'd looked into that face once before, so long ago he could barely remember it, but the terror, the humiliation, the mockery, these he remembered as if they were imprinted on his soul.

It took all five of them—Jeremias, his three sons and his nephew Jeremy—to haul the body, massive and preternaturally heavy even in death, out of the marsh and up to the road, where with a concerted effort they were able to load it into the wagon. Jeremias laid out the body himself, helped by the cold snap, which mercifully kept the odor down. If he'd thought to charge admission to the wake, he would have been a rich man. For the news of Wolf Nysen's death—the death that confirmed his life—spread through the community like the flu. Within an hour after Jeremias had stretched the fallen giant out on his bier, the curious, the incredulous, the vindicated and the faithful had gathered to stand hushed over this legend in the flesh, this rumor made concrete. They came to marvel over him, to measure him from crown to toe, to count the hairs of his beard, examine his teeth, to reach out a trembling finger and touch him, just once, as they might have touched the forsaken Christ pulled down from the cross or the
Wild Boy of Saardam, who'd cooked and eaten his own mother and then hung himself from the spire outside the drapers' guild.

They came from Crom's Pond, from Croton, from Tarry Town and Rondout, from the island of the Manhattoes and the distant Puritan fastnesses of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Ter Dingas Bosyn showed up, Adriaen Van Wart, a wizened old cooper from Pavonia who claimed to have known Nysen in his youth. On the second day, Stephanus himself rode up from Croton, with van den Post and the dwarf, and a delegation of somber, black-cloaked advisors to Colonel Benjamin Fletcher, the new governor of the Colony and His Majesty William Ill's loftiest representative on the continent. By the third day, the Indians had begun to pour in—maimed Weckquaesgeeks, painted Nochpeems, even a Huron, before whom all the others gave way as if to the devil himself—and after them, the oddballs and cranks from outlying farms and forgotten villages, women who claimed they could transform themselves into beasts and had the beards and talons to prove it, men who boasted that they'd eaten dog and lived as outlaws all their lives, a boy from Neversink whose tongue had been cut out by the Mohawk and who said a prayer over the body that consisted entirely of three syllables, “ab-ab-ab,” repeated endlessly. It was on the evening of the third day that Jeremias put an end to the circus and laid the giant to rest. Beneath the white oak. Just as if he'd been a member of the family.