World's End (32 page)

This time there were no tracks. With the boy on his back and the pegleg skidding out from under him, Jeremias traced an ever-widening circle around the house, shouting her name into the wind. Nothing came back to him. The trees were mute, the wind threw its voice in a hundred artful ways, beads of snow rattled off his coat, his hat, his muffler. Struggling, stumbling, afraid of losing his way in the snow, afraid for Jeremy's life as well as his own, he finally turned around and hobbled back to the cabin. He tried again, early in the afternoon, getting as far as the cornfield where he'd encountered Wolf Nysen. For a moment he thought he heard her, way off in the distance, her voice raised in a doleful bone-chilling wail, but then the wind took it over from him and he couldn't be sure. He called her name, over and over, till his foot went numb and the wind drove the strength from his body. Just before dark, he put Jeremy to bed and went out again, but the snow had drifted so high he was exhausted before he reached the cornfield. “Katrinchee!” he shouted till his voice went hoarse. “Katrinchee!” But the only answer was the strange mournful cry of a great white owl beating through the storm like a lost soul.

It snowed for two days and two nights. On the morning of the third day, Jeremias fed the livestock, closed up the house and struggled through the drifts to the van der Meulens', his nephew on his back. Staats alerted the Cranes, Reinier Oothouse and the people at the upper manor house, then rode in to Jan Pieterse's to see if she'd turned up there, and if she hadn't, to locate an Indian tracker.

A party of Kitchawanks went out that afternoon, but came back empty-handed: the snow had obliterated any sign of her. If a twig had caught in her dress or a stone squirted out underfoot, the evidence was buried under three feet of snow. Jeremias despaired, but he wouldn't give up. Next morning he borrowed Staats' cart horse, and while Meintje looked after Jeremy, he and Douw poked through copses and thickets, searched and re-searched the valleys and
streambeds, knocked on doors at outlying farms. They roamed as far afield as the Kitchawank village at Indian Point to the south, and the Weckquaesgeek camp at Suycker Broodt to the north. There was no trace of her.

It was Jan Pieterse who finally found her, and he wasn't looking. He was out behind the trading post one morning toward the end of the month, hauling a bucket of slops down to the Blue Rock so he could pitch them into the river, as he did every morning, the peglegged Van Brunt kid and his mad wandering shorn-headed miscegenating sister the farthest things from his mind, when something just off the path up ahead caught his eye. A swatch of blue. In a snowbank at the base of the Blue Rock, no more than a hundred feet from the store. He wondered at that swatch of blue, and set down the bucket to slash through the crusted snow and investigate. The weather had turned warmer the past few days, and his eyes had gradually gotten used to the appearance of color in what had been for some months now a world as blank as an untouched canvas. Scabs of mud had begun to break through the path he'd carved, the sky that hung low overhead like a dirty sheet had given way to the fine cerulean of a midsummer's day, pussy willows were in bloom along the Van Wartwyck road and tiny tight-wound buds graced box elder and sycamore. But this, this was something else. Something man-made. Something blue.

In a moment, he was standing over the spot, braced uneasily against the yielding snow on the one side and the great smooth slab of rock on the other. He was staring down at a piece of cloth projecting from the snow as if it were just the tip of something larger. He was a shopkeeper and he knew that cloth. It was blue kersey. He'd sold bolts of it to the Indians and to the farmers' wives. The Indians fashioned blankets from it. The farmers' wives liked it for aprons. And nightdresses.

Jeremias buried her beneath the white oak. Dominie Van Schaik turned up to say a few words over the grave, while the six van der Meulens, draped in black like a flock of
maes dieven,
comprised the mourners. Jeremias knelt by the grave, his lips moving as if in prayer. But he wasn't praying. He was cursing God in his heaven and all his angels, cursing St. Nicholas and the patroon and the dismal alien place that
rose up around him in a Gehenna of trees, valleys and bristling hilltops. If only they'd stayed in Schobbejacken, he kept telling himself, none of this would have happened. He knelt there, feeling sorry for Katrinchee, for his father and mother and little Wouter, feeling sorry for himself, but when finally he stood and took his place among the mourners, there was a hard cold look in his eye, the look of intransigence and invincibility he'd leveled on the
schout
time and again: he was down, but not defeated. No, never defeated.

As for Jeremy, two and a half years old, he didn't know what defeat was—or triumph either. He held back while first his uncle, then
grootvader
van der Meulen and the rest knelt at the grave. He didn't cry, didn't really comprehend the loss. What was this before him but a mound of naked dirt, no different from the furrows Jeremias turned up with the plow? Moles lived in the ground, beetles, earthworms, slugs. His mother didn't live in the ground.

Afterward, as they sat over the cider and meat pies Meintje had brought along for the funeral supper, Staats lit his pipe, let out a long sigh, and said, in an unnaturally high voice: “It's been a trying year,
younker.”

Jeremias barely heard him.

“You know, you're always welcome to come back to us.”

Barent, eleven now, and with the square head and cornsilk hair of his mother, sucked noisily at a cube of venison. The younger children—Jannetje, Klaes and little Jeremy—sat hunched over their plates, silent as stones. Meintje smiled. “I've got a contract with the patroon,” Jeremias said.

Staats dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. “You can't go on without a woman,” he yodeled. “You've got a boy here not three years old and nobody to look after him.”

Jeremias knew his adoptive father was right, of course. There was no way he could go on farming without someone to share the work—especially with Jeremy underfoot. Jeremias may have been mulish, pertinacious, headstrong and tough, but he was no fool. The day Katrinchee disappeared, as the hopeless hours wound down and he searched the woods till his leg gave out, the germ of an idea took hold of him. There it was, in his head. A plan. Practical and romantic both: a contingency plan. “I'll get one,” he said.

Staats snorted. Meintje glanced up from her plate, and even Douw, who'd been focusing every particle of his attention on the meat pie and pickled cabbage before him, paused to shoot him a questioning glance. There was a moment of silence, during which the children stopped eating to look around them as if a ghost had entered the room. Meintje was the first to catch on. “You don't mean—?”

“That's right,” Jeremias said. “Neeltje Cats.”

“I forget, did you say you like tofu or not?”

“Sure,” she said, “anything.” She was huddled in a ball in the corner of Tom Crane's bed, fully clothed, in gloves, maxicoat and knit hat, sipping sour wine from a Smucker's jar. Once, maybe twice in her life, she'd been colder. She pulled the musty frigid blankets and down comforters up over her head and tried to keep her shoulders from quaking.

“Green onions?”

“Sure,” came the muffled reply.

“Garlic? Soy grits? Squash? Brewer's yeast?”

Jessica's head emerged from beneath the blankets. “You ever know me to complain?” She was six feet off the ground, which was where Tom Crane had located his bed—on high, and giving onto bare rafters strewn with cobwebs, the dangling husks of dead insects, streaks of bird or bat shit, and worse. The first time she'd ever visited the cabin—summer before last, and in the company of Walter—she'd asked Tom about that. He'd been sitting by the greasy back window in his greasy Salvation Army armchair, his hair down past his shoulders even then, drinking an evil-looking concoction of powdered milk, egg yolk, lecithin, protein powder and wheat germ out of a pint glass borrowed from an Irish pub in the City. “Stop by sometime in the winter,” he said, “and you won't have to ask.”

Now she understood. Up here, aloft in the place of honor, she began to feel the first faint emanations from the woodstove. She held out her glass. “You mean it never warms up down there?”

Beneath her, in his tattered aviator's coat, sweat-stained thermal undershirt and zip-up boots with the jammed zippers, Tom was flinging himself around the one-room shack like the chef at Fagnoli's Pizza after a high school basketball game. Simultaneously feeding the fire, chopping onions, celery and chives, measuring out eight cups of brown rice from a grime-filled pickle jar and stirring hot oil in the bottom of a five-gallon pot so blackened it might have been a relic of the Dresden firebombing, he never missed a beat. “Down here?” he echoed, sweeping the vegetables into the depths of the cauldron with one hand while reaching up gallantly to fill her glass with the other. “On a good day—and I'm talking maybe like just twenty or twenty-five out—if I really stoke the stove, I can get the floor temp up to around fifteen.” He looked thoughtful as he poured himself a second jar of the sour, viscid wine, momentarily absorbed in the question of caloric variables while the oil hissed in the pot behind him and the hole at the juncture of the stovepipe spewed smoke into the room. “Up there, I'd say it might even get up to forty or fifty on a good night.”

It didn't look to be a good night. Half-past six, and already the mercury in the rusted thermometer outside the window was dipping toward the flat red hashmark that indicated no degree of temperature at all. To Tom's credit, he had managed to get the fire going seconds after stepping through the door, hurling himself at the tinder box with all the urgency of the desperate doomed
chechaquo
in the Jack London story, but as he explained between strokes of the knife on the cutting board, the place took a while to warm up. Jessica was thinking that this was an understatement in the master class, when Tom suddenly snatched up a galvanized pail and darted for the door. “You're not going back out there?” she asked in genuine horror.

The answer came in the form of a duosyllabic yelp as he fumbled with the buttons of his aviator's coat and inadvertently clanked the pail against a footlocker piled high with yellowing laundry. “Water!” he cried, hustling past her, and then the door slammed shut behind him.

Earlier that day—in the pale light of dawn, to be precise—Jessica, who'd been married for all of twelve weeks now, had complained to her husband that the car wouldn't start, and that because the car
wouldn't start, she was late for work. Walter wasn't very helpful. Unemployed, unshaven, hung over from yet another late night at the Elbow, he lay inert in the center of the bed, mummy-wrapped in the quilt Grandmother Wing had given them on their wedding day. She watched the slits of his eyes crack open. The lids were about six inches thick. “Call Tom,” he croaked.

Tom didn't have electricity. Tom didn't have running water. He didn't have an electric toothbrush, hair dryer or waffle iron. He didn't have a phone, either. And even if he did have one, there were no phone lines running through the woods, across Van Wart Creek and up the hill to his shack, so it wouldn't be of much use to him. Stalking back and forth in her herringbone maxicoat, gulping cold coffee and running a nervous brush through her fine blond hair, she attempted to point this out to her supine husband.

The quilt was motionless, the life presumably held in its grip, silent. After a moment she heard his breathing ease into the gentle autonomous rhythm of sleep. “Walter?” She prodded him. “Walter?”

Muffled, slurred, his words might have come from the brink of an unbridgeable gulf: “Call in sick,” he murmured.

It was a temptation. The day was cold enough to exfoliate flesh, and the thought of eight hours beneath the fluorescent lights sniffing formalin was enough to make her long for the term papers, final exams and lab reports of the year before. The job had turned grim in the past few weeks, nothing but larva counts and record keeping, nothing but sitting and watching the clock—it would be March before they got out on the water again. Even Tom, who'd been hired to run the dredge on the big boat, had lately found himself hunched over a glass dish swimming with bits of weed and insect and fish larvae, breathing fumes. No: she didn't want to go to work. Especially if she had to fight Arctic blasts and a sapped battery to get there.

“You know I can't do that,” she pleaded, the dregs of the coffee gone sour in her mouth. She was hoping he'd argue with her, tell her to stuff the job and come back to bed, but he was already snoring. She started up the kettle for another cup of instant, padded across the cold linoleum in her slippers and was fumbling through the cupboard for the Sanka, when she was suddenly seized with spasms of guilt. She
had
to go to work, of course she did. There was her career to think
about—she knew just how good this job would look on her record when she applied to grad school again in the fall—and then, on a more prosaic level, they needed the money. Walter hadn't worked since his accident. He claimed he was weighing his options, feeling things out. Trying to deal with the trauma. He was going into teaching, sales, insurance, banking, law, he was going to go back to school, start a motorcycle repair shop, open a restaurant. Any day now. Jessica cut the flame beneath the kettle and slipped into the other room to call her father. If she was lucky, she'd catch him before he left for the train. …

She was lucky. As it turned out, she was only twenty minutes late, and she got to breathe formalin all through the long gray morning and the dim, slow, Hyperborean afternoon.

Tom had given her a ride home. In the dark. On the back of his ratcheting, rusty, mufflerless Suzuki 50, in wind-chill conditions that must have approximated those at Ice Station Zebra. Dancing high up off her toes, thrashing herself with clonic arms and dabbing wildly at her runny nose, she'd dashed up the steps of the cozy little Kitchawank Colony bungalow (rent: $90 a month, plus utilities) that she and Walter had chosen from among a hundred identically cozy little Kitchawank Colony bungalows, only to find that Walter was gone. Tom stood behind her, helmet in hand, the yellow scarf wrapped around the lower part of his face like a camel driver's
kaffiyeh.
“He's not here,” she said, turning to him.