World's End (62 page)

“You tell me, Walter,” the old man said, leaning into him, “who the bad guys were.”

Walter had no answer. He looked away from his father's eyes, and then back again.

Truman was fingering his right ear. The lobe was deformed, shriveled back on itself like the inner fold of a sun-dried apricot. Walter knew that ear well. Shrapnel, the old man had said when he took Walter down to the trestle to catch crabs, Walter eight, nine, ten years old. “That's how this happened,” Truman said suddenly, no act of contrition if not entire, if not heartfelt and complete.

“You always told me it was the war.”

The old man shook his head. “That night. It's my Judas mark. The weirdest thing, too.” His eyes were squinted against the smoke of his fiftieth Camel, his face struck with something like wonder. Or puzzlement. “It was over and we were gone, Piet and me, out of the mob and up one of those back roads to where we'd left the car, when this maniac comes flying out of the bushes and takes me down from behind. I'm pretty strong in those days, pretty big. This guy is bigger. He doesn't say a word, just starts beating the shit out of me—trying to kill me. And I mean kill. Weirdest thing …”

“Yeah?” Walter prompted.

“He was an Indian. Like you see on TV—or out in New Mexico.” Pause. “Or out the window here. Stank like a septic tank, greased up, feathers in his hair, the whole schmeer. He would have killed me, Walter—and maybe he should of—except for Piet. Piet got him off me. Stabbed him with his penknife. Then a bunch of guys jumped on him, five or six or more, I don't know. But the guy wanted me—just me—and I'll never know why. They had his hands, so he bit me. Like
an animal. He went down, Walter, and he took a piece of me with him.”

Walter leaned back in the chair. He knew it all now, the fight was over, and where had it got him? His father was nothing, neither hero nor criminal, he was just a man, weak, venal, confused, impaled on the past, wounded beyond any hope of recovery. But so what? What did it mean? The imp. Piet. The waking nightmares and the hallucinations, a life lived out on feet that were dead, the marker, Tom Crane, Jessica.
You're already halfway there,
the old man had said. Was that it? Following in his father's footsteps? History come home to roost?

“Crazy, huh?” the old man said.

“What?”

“My ear. The Indian.”

Walter nodded absently. And then, as if correcting for that nod, he snarled, “Tell you the truth, who cares? I don't want to know about some crazy Indian biting your ear, I want to know why, why you did it.” Walter pushed himself up from the chair and he could feel his face twisting toward some explosive show of emotion, tears or rage or desperation. “The whole thing—Piet, Depeyster, you were confused—it's all just excuses. Words. Facts.” He found to his surprise that he was shouting. “I want to know why, why in your heart, why. You hear me: why?”

The old man's face was cold, implacable, hard as stone. Suddenly Walter felt frightened, felt he'd gone too far—over the edge and into the abyss. He took a step back as his father, exuding gin from his very pores and with the savage skin hat raked down over eyes that shone with malice, rose from his chair to deliver one final blow, the knockout punch.

No, Walter thought, it isn't over yet.

“You're a real masochist, kid,” Truman hissed. “You want it all, don't you? And you push till you get it. Okay,” he said, turning his back on him and lumbering toward the big oak desk that dominated the room.

“This is it,” he said, looking over his shoulder and hefting a manuscript, and in that moment he looked just as Walter had pictured him in his waking dreams; in that moment he was the ghost on
the ship, the joker in the hospital room, the annihilator on the motorcycle. Walter felt something seize him then, something that would never let go. It was tightening its grip, yes, he could feel it, terrible and familiar, when the old man turned on him again. “Walter,” he said, “you listening?”

He couldn't speak. There were pine needles in his throat, wads of fur. He was mute, he was gagging.

“So you're into Colonial history, huh? Done a little reading, huh? About Peterskill?” The words dangled like a hangman's noose. “What I want to ask you is this: you ever run across a reference to Cadwallader Crane?”

He was dead. He knew it.

“Or maybe Jeremy Mohonk?”

The manuscript lay in his lap, dead weight. It was massive, ponderous, like the Sunday
Times
on Labor Day weekend, like a Russian novel, like the Bible. Six inches high, typed space and a half on legalsized sheets, better than a thousand pages. Walter glanced at the title page in stupefaction:
Colonial Shame: Betrayal and Death in Van Wartville, the First Revolt,
by Truman H. Van Brunt. Was this it? Was this why he'd destroyed his wife, deserted his son and hid himself so far out on the frozen tip of the continent even the polar bears couldn't find him?

Betrayal and death. Colonial shame. He was crazy as a loon.

Fighting back his dread, Walter thumbed through the pages, read over the title again with a slow studied movement of his lips. It was only words, only history. What was he afraid of? Cadwallader Crane. Jeremy Mohonk. A marker along the side of the road—passed it by a thousand times. He'd never even bothered to read it.

But Truman had.

At the moment Truman was in the kitchenette, his back to Walter, spreading butter and Gulden's mustard on slices of white bread. He had about him an air of unconcern, as if showing his alienated son the work of his mad wasted life was an everyday occurrence, but Walter could see from the way he too briskly lathered the bread and then clumsily poured himself a tall gin and lemonade that he was wrought up. The old man suddenly darted a glance over his shoulder. “Hungry?” he asked.

“No,” Walter answered, his stomach still clenched in anticipation
of some terrible withering revelation, his father the phantom come to life, the book of the dead spread open in his lap. “No, I don't think so.”

“Sure? I'm making sandwiches—spam and onions.” He held up an onion as if it were a jar of beluga caviar or pickled truffles. “You're going to need something on your stomach.”

Was this a threat? A warning?

“No,” Walter said, “thank you, no,” and he flipped back the page and began to read:

Feudalism in the U.S.A., land of the free, home of the brave, the few over the many, lords and ladies set up over the common people, English corruption (and Dutch before it) throttling American innocence. Hard to believe? Think back to a time before the Revolution (the bourgeois revolution of 1777, that is), when patroons and manor lords reared their ugly heads over Negro slaves, indentured servants and tenant farmers who could not even be sure of passing on the fruit of their labors to their own children. …

This was the introduction—thirty-five, forty, fifty pages of it. Van Wartville. 1693. An uprising. A revolt against Stephanus Rombout Van Wart, First Lord of the Manor. Walter tried to scan it, plowing through, looking for the meat, the essence, the key, but there was too much of it, the whole mad tome nothing more than a sustained rant. He flipped to the last page of the introduction:

… and it looked forward to a time not so long ago when an unchecked populace ran amok on that very same hallowed ground and those who would undermine our precious democracy nearly held sway. We refer, of course, to the Peterskill (more properly, Van Wartville) Riots of 1949, the treatment of which, in their fatal connection to that first doomed revolt, will occupy the later chapters of this work. …

Was that it? The old man manipulating history to justify himself? He skipped to the bottom of the page:

We purpose here to examine a truth that resides in the blood, a shame that leaps over generations, an ignominy and infamy that lives on in spirit, though no text dares to present it. We, in this history, are the first to—

“Pretty fascinating, huh?” The old man was hovering over him, drink in one hand, an indented sandwich in the other.

Walter looked up warily. “Jeremy Mohonk. Cadwallader Crane. Where are they?”

“They're in there,” Truman said, waving his sandwich at the mountain of paper, “they get hung. But you knew that already. What you want to know is how. And why.” He paused to address the sandwich, and then, easing himself back down on the chair, he said, in a kind of sigh, “First public execution on the Van Wartville books.”

Walter was indignant. “You mean you expect me to read this—all of it?” The weight of it alone was putting him through the floor. He couldn't read ten pages of it, not if it promised eternal life, revealed the secret names of God and gave him his feet back. Suddenly he felt tired, immeasurably weary. The sky was black. How long had he been here? What time was it?

“No,” Truman said after a while, “I don't expect you to read it. Not now, anyway.” He paused to lick a smear of mustard from the corner of his mouth. “But you wanted answers and I'm going to give them to you. Twenty years I been working on this book,” and he leaned over to tap the manuscript with a thick proprietary finger, “and you can sit home in Peterskill and read it when it's published. But now, since you asked—since you especially asked—I'm going to tell you what it's about. All of it. No stone unturned.” There was a grin on his face, but it wasn't a comforting grin—more like the smirk of the torturer as he applies the hot iron. “And I'm going to tell you what it means to both of us, Walter, you and me both.

“Hey,” he said, reaching out that same hand to take Walter by the arm, the affectionate squeeze, first bodily contact between them, “we are father and son, right?”

The old man had edged the chair closer. His voice was the only thing in the room, and the room was the only place in the universe. There
was no longer any sound of dogs—not so much as a whimper. The snow machines had fallen silent. Even the wind seemed to have lost its breath. Uneasy, wishing he'd let it go, Walter sat rigid in his chair, submitting himself to his father's harsh rasping voice as to a dose of bitter medicine.

It was the fall of 1693. A time before historical markers, Norton Commandos, Nehru shirts and supermarkets, a time so distant only the reach of history could touch it. Wouter Van Brunt, ancestor of a legion of Van Brunts to come, was getting ready to take his wagon down to the upper house to settle his quitrent and enjoy a day of dancing and feasting. He was twenty-five years old and he'd buried his father a year ago to the day. In the back of the wagon there were two fathoms of split firewood, two bushels of hulled wheat, four fat pullets and twenty-five pounds of butter in clay crocks. The five hundred guilders—or rather, its equivalent in English pounds—had already been paid out at Van Wart's mill in value of wheat, barley, rye and peas for sale downriver. Wouter's mother would ride beside him in the wagon. His brother Staats, who worked the farm with him, would walk, as would his sisters Agatha and Gertruyd, now eighteen and sixteen respectively; and as pretty-footed and nubile as any girls in the county. Brother Harmanus was no longer living at home, having left one morning before light to seek his fortune in the great burgeoning metropolis of New York, a city of some 10,000 souls. Sister Geesje was dead.

Cadwallader Crane was also planning to attend the festivities, though he wouldn't be paying his rent. Things had gone sour on him since Geesje's death, and he just didn't have it. The butter he was able to churn had turned rancid (and in any case it was closer to five pounds than twenty-five), some mysterious agent of the wild had got into his henhouse and carried off the lot of his poultry, and his fields, broken by his doleful plow and seeded by his lugubrious hand, hadn't yielded enough to bother taking to the mill. Of cash, he had none. But firewood! Firewood he'd cut and delivered with a vengeance. Six, eight, ten fathoms, he'd filled the young lord's woodshed to the top of its canted ceiling and then built a tower of wood beside it that could have warmed all the hearths of Van Wartville right on through the winter and into the blaze of July.

What he was hoping, as he loped down the road from his farm on the birdlike sticks of his legs, was that the plethora of his firewood might make up for his dearth of coin and the inadequacy of his produce. His heart was like a stone, of course, and he wore a suit of black clothes, as befits a widower in mourning, and he was determined not to enjoy himself. He wouldn't lift his eyes to admire the way the petticoats peeked out from beneath the skirts of Salvation Oothouse (née Brown), nor gaze on the resplendent face and figure of Saskia Van Wart either, if she was there. No, he would just take his long face up to the refreshment table—keeping an eye out for old Ter Dingas Bosyn and his damnable accounts ledger—and drink up Van Wart's wine and gorge on Van Wart's food till he swelled up like a garter snake with a whole family of frogs inside.

As for Jeremy Mohonk, the third principal player in the mortal drama about to unfold, he didn't pay rent, hadn't ever paid rent and never would. He lived on a seedy corner of his late uncle's farm amid a tangle of pumpkin vines and corn stalks, in the bark hut he'd erected on a cold winter's day back in '81, and he claimed that corner as ancestral land. He was a Kitchawank, after all, or half a one, and he was married to a Weckquaesgeek woman. A woman who'd borne him three sons and three daughters, of whom, unfortunately, only the first son and last daughter had survived infancy. On this particular day—November 15, 1693, the day of Van Wart's first annual harvest feast—he was sitting before the fire in his hut, smoking
kinnikinnick
and carefully stripping the skin from his winter bear, a great fat sow he'd shot practically on the doorstep when he went out to make his morning water. He smoked and plied his quick sharp knife. His wife, whatever her name was, busied herself over a pot of corn mush, the smell of which touched the pit of his belly with tiny fingers of anticipation. He was content. For the Van Warts and their party, he had about as much use as he had for words.