World's End (37 page)

The house was silent. No smoke rose from the chimney, no animals chased around the yard. The rain drove down in sheets of pewter. “What do you think?” the
Jongheer
whispered. He was hunched in his cassock, water streaming from the brim of his hat.

Joost shrugged. His daughter was in there, he knew it. Defying him, betraying him, lying in the arms of that recreant, that nose thumber, that uncrackable nut. “He's taken her by force,” Joost whispered. “Give him no quarter.”

They approached the house warily. Joost could feel the mud tugging at his boots; the plume hung limp in his face and he flicked it back with a swipe of his dripping hand. Then he drew his rapier. He glanced over at the
Jongheer,
who did likewise, the firearms rendered useless by the damp. Water dripped from the tip of the
Jongheer's
well-formed nose, the yellow plume clung to the back of his neck like something fished out of the river, and he wore a strangely excited look, as if he were off to a fox hunt or pigeon shoot. They were twenty feet from the door when a sudden burst of sound froze them in mid-step. Someone was inside, all right, and whoever it was was singing, the lyric as familiar as a bedtime song in old Volendam:

Good evening, Joosje,
My little box of sweetmeats,
Kiss me, we are alone …
… I call you my heart, my consolation, my treasure.
Oh! oh! how I've tricked you!

There was a giggle, and then Neeltje's husky contralto (unmistakable, no doubt about it, the
schout
knew that voice as well as he knew his own) rose up out of the patter of rain to reprise the final line—“Oh! oh! how I've tricked
you!”
—to a spanking of applause.

That was it, the breaking point, the moment that confirmed his worst fears and gravest suspicions. The
schout
was across the yard and slamming through the door before he could think, brandishing the rapier like an archangel's sword and sputtering “Sin! Sin and damnation!”

The room was dark, cold, damp as a cave; it reeked like a hog pen and the water dripped almost as persistently inside as out. Joost saw a crude table, a wall hung with kitchen implements, the cold hearth, and there, across the room, the bed. They were in it. Together. In their nightshirts still and with a mound of stinking furs piled atop them. He saw his daughter's face as a spot of white in the gloom, her mouth open to scream, eyes twisted back in her head. “Slut!” he roared. “Filth, whore, woman of Babylon! Get up out of your harlot's bed!”

The next moment was a crowded one. Everything happened at once: the half-breed child sprang up from the shadows like a cat and scurried across the room to cower behind his uncle; the smirking
Jongheer
appeared in the doorway, sword at the ready; a cookpot fell from the wall; Neeltje cried out. And Jeremias, surprised without the strut that supported him, rose up out of the bed and came at the
schout
with a prejudicial look in his eye.

No slash this time, but a thrust meant to kill: the
schout
squared himself and shot his arm forward, and so would have skewered Jeremias like a sausage and left his daughter sans husband and honor both, but for this: Jeremias slipped. Slipped and fell heavily to the floor while the tip of the rapier danced over his head like an angry hornet.

Now Joost Cats was a reasonable man, prone neither to fits of temper nor acts of violence, happier far with the role of mediator than enforcer. He'd pitied the Van Brunt boy on that chill November day
when the officious and soft-bottomed ass of a
commis
had dragged him, the
schout,
out into the naked wild to evict the half-starved lad from a worthless and unlucky plot of land, had felt foolish and ashamed standing before Meintje van der Meulen's hearth with his plumed hat in hand, regretted with all his heart the brand he'd struck on the boy's face. But for all that, he wanted to kill him. He looked into his daughter's eyes and then down at this human garbage that had stolen her away, and he wanted to cut him, perforate him, pierce his heart, his liver, his lights and bladder and spleen.

If the first thrust was instinctive, the second was a liberation. Guilt, anger, fear, resentment and jealousy broke loose in him and he jabbed the hilt forward with all the punch of his uncoiled arm. Jeremias dodged it. He rolled to his right, Neeltje flashing up off the bed with her hands outspread, the
Jongheer
lunging into the room, the child howling, the rain rising to a crescendo on the roof.
“Spuyten duyvil!”
Joost cursed, and struck a third time, but again the tip of the sword betrayed him, wagging wide of the mark and burying itself in the beaten wet earth of the floor.

He was drawing himself up for the fourth and fatal thrust, when Neeltje, entering the fray, flung herself down atop Jeremias, shrieking “Kill me! Kill me!” Stooped over double, his back murdering him, reason and restraint flung to the winds, he paused only long enough to reach down his free hand and fling her roughly aside. She hated him, his own daughter, a mouthful of teeth, claws tearing at his sleeve, but no matter. The blade flashed in his hand and he thought only of the next thrust and the next and the next one after that—he'd make a pincushion of the son-of-a-bitch, a sieve, a colander!

If Joost was deranged, he was also deluded: there would be no more thrusts of the rapier. For in the confusion Jeremias had clawed his way to his feet (or rather, foot) and snatched a crude weapon from the inglenook. The weapon, known as a curiosity in those parts, was a Weckquaesgeek pogamoggan. It consisted of a flexible length of fruitwood, to the nether end of which a jagged five-pound ball of granite had been affixed by means of leather ligatures. Jeremias swung it once, catching the
schout
just behind the ear and plunging him into the rushing interstitial darkness of a dreamless sleep, and then braced himself to face the
Jongheer.

For his part, the heir to the Van Wart patent looked like a man
who's nodded off in his box at the opera only to wake and find himself at a bear baiting. In the instant the
schout
pitched forward, the smirk died on the
Jongheer's
face. This was more than he'd bargained for. This was sordid, primitive, beastly—not at all the sort of thing a lettered man should hope to experience. He tried to draw himself up and project the authority of his father, the patroon, whose rights, privileges and responsibilities would one day devolve upon himself. “Put up your weapon this instant,” he demanded in a voice that sounded like someone else's, “and submit to the legally constituted authority of the patroon.” His voice dropped. “You are now in my custody.”

Neeltje was bent over her father now, pressing a handkerchief to his head. The child had stopped his unearthly howling and Jeremias had propped himself against the back of a chair. The club, with its freight of human hair and blood, swung idly in his hand and the scar stood out on his face. He made no answer. He turned his head and spat.

“Vader, vader,”
Neeltje cried. “Don't you know where you are? It's little Neeltje. It's me.” The
schout
moaned. Rain drummed at the roof. “With all due respect,
Mijnheer,”
Jeremias said in a voice reined in with the effort to control it, “you may own the milch cow, the land under my feet, the house I've built with my own hands, but you don't own Neeltje. And you don't own me.”

The
Jongheer
held the blade out before him as if it were a fishing pole or divining rod, as if he didn't know what to do with it. He was soaked to the skin, his clothes were filthy, ruined, the plume of authority hung limp over the brim of his hat. For all that, though, the smirk had returned to his face. “Oh yes,” he said, so softly he was nearly inaudible, “oh yes, I do.”

At that, Jeremias idly swung the war club to his shoulder, where the weight of the ball bowed it like the arm of a catapult. The door stood open still and the elemental scent of the land rose to his nostrils, a scent of vitality and decay, of birth and death. He looked the
Jongheer
full in the face. “Come and get me,” he said.

Two weeks later, on an afternoon in May as soft and celestial as the one on which they'd first met amongst the furs and hogsheads of Jan Pieterse's trading post, Neeltje Cats and Jeremias Van Brunt were
married by a subdued and solemn Dominie Van Schaik, not thirty feet from where Katrinchee lay buried. By all accounts, the feast that followed was a rousing success. Meintje van der Meulen baked for three days straight, and her husband Staats set up a pair of temporary tables big enough to accommodate every tippler and trencherman from Sint Sink to Rondout. Reinier Oothouse and Hackaliah Crane buried the hatchet for the day and drank the bride's health side by side. There was game and fish and cheese and cabbage, there were pies and puddings and stews. Drink, too: 'Sopus ale, cider and Hollands out of a stone jug. And music. What would a wedding be without it? Here came young Cadwallader Crane with a penny whistle, there Vrouw Oothouse with her prodigious bottom and a
bombas
that made use of a pig's bladder for a sound box; someone else had a lute and another a pair of varnished sticks and an overturned kettle. Mariken Van Wart came up from Croton and danced the whole afternoon with Douw van der Meulen, Staats led Meintje through half a dozen frenetic turns of “Jimmy-be-still” and old Jan the Kitchawank danced with a jug till the sun fell into the trees. Neeltje's sisters were dressed like dolls, her mother cried—whether for joy or sorrow no one could be sure—and the patroon sent Ter Dingas Bosyn, the
commis,
as his official representative. But the crowning moment of the day, as everyone agreed, was when the
schout,
dressed in funereal black and standing as tall as his affliction would allow, his head bound in a snowy bandage and with good leather boots on his feet, strode resolutely across the front yard and gave away the bride.

When Mohonk, son of Sachoes, appeared on the doorstep of the little farmhouse at Nysen's Roost some three months later, Jeremias was a changed man. Gone was the wild-eyed glare of the rebel, the underdog, the unsoothable beast, and in its place was a look that could only be described as one of contentment. Indeed, Jeremias had never known a happier time. The crops were flourishing, the deer were back, the shack had been elevated to the status of domicile through the addition of a second room, furniture both functional and pleasing to the eye and that hallmark of civilized living, a clean, planed and sanded plank floor that soared a full foot and a half above the cold dun earth below. And then there was Neeltje. She was a voice in his head, a presence
that never left him even when he was adrift in the canoe or roaming the scoured hilltops with a musket borrowed from Staats; she clove to him like a second skin, each moment a melioration and a healing. She mothered Jeremy, managed the house, spun and sewed and cooked, rubbed the tightness from his shoulders, sat with him by the river while fish stirred in the shallows and the blue shadows closed over the mountains. She made peace with her father, baked as fine a
beignet
as
moeder
Meintje, arranged and rearranged the front room till it looked like a burgher's parlor in Schobbejacken. She was everything that was possible, and more. Far more: she was carrying his child.

All this the Indian saw in Jeremias' face as the door swung open. Just as quickly, he saw it fade.
“You,”
Jeremias choked. “What do
you
want?”

Mohonk was gaunter than ever, his face rucked and seamed with abuse. He was a nose, an Adam's apple, a pair of black unblinking deep-buried eyes.
“Alstublieft,”
he said,
“dank u, niet te danken.”

“Who is it?” Neeltje called from the back of the house. They'd finished supper—pea soup, bread, cheese and beer—and she was getting Jeremy ready for bed. The house had fallen dark in the gathering dusk.

Jeremias didn't answer. He stood there, letting his mood go sour. This was the man, the shit-smeared skulking savage heathen, who'd ruined his sister and then deserted her. And here he was, filthy and ragged, angular as a wading bird, standing on the doorstep with no more Dutch than he'd had four years ago. “I have nothing for you,” Jeremias said, enunciating the words in the way of the pedagogue, each syllable bitten off clean and distinct. “Get out of here.” It was then that he felt a movement at his side and glanced down to see Jeremy standing beside him. The boy was rapt, gazing up in wonder at this apparition in the raccoon skin coat.

“Alstublieft,”
Mohonk repeated, then turned his head to call out something in the Kitchawank dialect, the words like stones in his mouth.

At this, two Indians stepped out of the shadows at the corner of the house. One of them was old Jan, grinning broadly and trailing flaps of greasy deerskin and a smell of the swamp. The other was a young buck Jeremias recognized from Jan Pieterse's. The buck's face was painted, and a tomahawk decorated with the crest feathers of tanager and bunting dangled like a toy from the fingertips of his right
hand. Instinctively, Jeremias reached down and pushed his nephew back into the room. “You have a message for me?” Jeremias asked, glancing from the buck to Jan.

They stopped at the front step. The buck was expressionless. Jan grinned. Mohonk hugged the coat to him as if he were cold. “Yes,” old Jan said finally, “I have a message.”

Neeltje had come up behind her husband now, and was pressing Jeremy to her skirts, rocking him gently back and forth. The light drained away in the west.

Jan was grinning still, as if he'd reached a height beyond the gravitational pull of simple drunkenness and passed into a realm of giddiness and light. “From him,” he said, indicating Mohonk with an abrupt laugh. “From Mohonk, son of Sachoes.”

The son of Sachoes never blinked. Jeremias studied him a second, then turned back to Jan. “Well?” he demanded.