Quinn's Book

by William Kennedy

  Jacobus, as he grew into ascetic adolescence, loathed his father’s mercantile life; loathed also the town’s wandering pigs, which he saw as an image of fattable Dutch desire. And so he apprenticed himself to his grandfather Johannes, with whom he sat for long hours, listening while the old man curled pipe smoke around his balding pate and recollected his days with canoe, blade, and rifle, abroad in the land of the red maple, the redwing, and the redskin.

  Jacobus married Catrina Wessels, the wall-eyed niece of the Patroon, that absentee landlord who by the fourth decade of our own nineteenth century had held for two hundred years, along with successive heirs, an estate of seven hundred thousand acres, an entity so all-encompassing that arguments prevailed as to whether the Patroon’s demesne was within the bounds of Fort Orange, or whether Fort Orange trespassed upon the Patroon, and on which some one hundred thousand tenant farmers and lesser vassals paid rent and servitude in perpetuum; and while this colonizing was doubtless the great expansionist stroke that created our present world, it was also the cruelest injustice American white men of the New World had ever known, and would precipitate warfare that itself would continue for decades.

  The marriage of the wall-eyed Catrina to Jacobus, who remained cross-eyed into adulthood, was a matter of considerable discussion in Albany, and it was speculated they would give birth to children who could look both left and right at the same time they were looking straight ahead. Social conversation with Catrina and Jacobus together was also said to be a nerve-racking experience since one never knew to which of the four eyes one should properly send one’s gaze. But the union was blissful, and the Patroon, mindful of the boon to the family in Catrina’s marriage to even a mal-orbed primitive, bestowed a wedding gift of land on the couple, whereupon Jacobus immediately moved out from the town, taking with him the hybrid image of himself and Jesus in stained glass, installing it in the cabin he built in his new and personally owned wilderness three miles to the north in the midst of a primeval forest, and leaving his father to fill the hole in the church wall and to make moral amends for his son’s profane deed. On his land Jacobus felled timber, burned it in an ashery, extracted lye from the ashes, boiled the lye into black salts, and then sold the salts to the town’s only soapmaker for melting into potash.

  He built then (this being the mid-i730s) a sawmill alongside the erratic creek that took his name, the Staatskill, a stream with wellsprings in the western plateau beyond the town, and which, at normal flow, coursed placidly eastward toward the river. But the creek was given to flooding after heavy rain, which Jacobus discovered as the water rose over its banks and diluted into uselessness his large holding of black salts. Jacobus thereafter focused his salvation on his sawmill, which he built on the edge of the stream’s lone cataract, Staats Falls, where the waters collapsed with great aesthetic gush and spume into an effervescing pool and then ran for an arrogant mile down the slope of Staats Hill to meet the river at a point by the Patroon’s Manor House, near where a handful of Irish immigrants in the employ of the Manor were throwing up one humble dwelling after another in what would eventually be called The Colonie.

  Catrina bore Jacobus two sons: the elder called Volckert, a pleasant, boring child of surprisingly normal eye structure; the younger an infant boy whose birth brought about Catrina’s sudden demise, but who was himself baptized in time to join his sinless mother in the Dutch Reformed parlors of heaven. With the help of Volckert, Jacobus spent the next decade building the earliest frame building of the mansion in which we fugitives of the wild river would find refuge a century later; and he lived there with Volckert in celibate isolation, an irascible, pointy-headed, and spindly terror to the Irish children who spooked his footsteps on his daily walks through the slowly vanishing wilderness on the mansion’s periphery.

  Then, in his dotage, the old dog Jacobus kicked up his fleas, traded a pint of gin for an Indian squaw named Moonlight of the Evening, who had been a house servant of the Patroon in her adolescence, installed her as mistress of the Staats ur-mansion without the benefit or liability of wedlock, and with that single act translated his own eccentricity into public depravity and his mansion into a house of miscegenational vice. The affront was not only to white purity but also to the red nations of the New World, for Moonlight’s eldest brother had been halved by an ax wielded by a white woman he had sought to rape while drunk on white man’s rum. The killing of his favorite son undid Taw Ga Saga, the father of Moonlight and a sachem of one of the five Indian Nations; and yet Taw Ga Saga tempered his hatred of white with an eloquent plea to the Governor of New York, pointing out that when Indians brought beaver skins and other peltry to Albany for sale, the white men first gave the Indians a cup of rum. They did the same when the Indians sat down to sign a bill of sale for a piece of land. And in the end, said Taw Ga Saga, the peltry and the land always went for more rum: “For it is true, O our father, that our people crave rum after they get one taste of it, and so long as Christians sell it, our people will drink it. We ask our father to order tap on rum barrel to be shut.”

  But it was never shut and Taw Ga Saga, ousted from power because of his son’s act, took to drink himself, lost all pelts and all land, and finally died in abject disgrace after selling Moonlight of the Evening to Jacobus for the infamous pint of gin.

  Jacobus’s son Volckert was thirty when Moonlight of the Evening became his unlawful stepmother and he left home the same day, becoming peerlessly Godful in mortification for the family shame and earning the sobriquet Venerable Volckert. The year after she moved in, Moonlight of the Evening bore Jacobus a son, called Amos after the rustic Hebrew prophet. Amos became the first chronicler of the Staats family, keeping voluminous journal notes of his father’s and his mother’s memories, from the time he entered adolescence. But Amos lived only to the age of sixteen, dying a young hero, the first soldier of the Continental Army to bring the glorious news to Albany that Burgoyne had surrendered and was no longer a threat to the city. Amos’s valiant thirty-mile ride was accomplished with a wound that proved fatal, but he was made an immediate legend. The switch with which he had whipped his horse was salvaged by a woman after he dropped it when toppling from his saddle, and she planted it in her front yard on Pearl Street, where it grew into an enormous tree that for several generations was known as Amos’s Oak. Jacobus buried the boy under the floorboards of the cabin he himself had built when he settled the land, and placed a marble sacrophagus in the middle of the main room, which had been long empty but was still of sound construction, and into which the sun beamed at morning through the crossed eyes of the Jacobus-Jesus window.

  Thrown into despair at the loss of his son, Jacobus brooded for three years, suffered an apoplectic fit in 1780 while chasing a family of brazen Irish squatters off his land, and died of splenetic outrage. Volckert immediately began proceedings to oust Moonlight of the Evening from the Staats mansion, which Jacobus had left to her alone in his will. But the will was flawed and easily tumbled, and Moonlight of the Evening spent her last year of life in the sepulchral Staats cabin, using her son’s sarcophagus as a dining table. Volckert had buried Jacobus with as much restraint as was seemly in the Dutch church, and while maneuvering to take over the land and house from Moonlight of the Evening, he also saw to it that the name of Jacobus became anathema in any society that coveted the presence and probity of Venerable Volckert. Within a month Jacobus’s name was only on the tongues of cads and vulgarians, and within a year in the most proper social groupings, Jacobus had faded into a shadow figure of doubtful legend, one who, like the silver-tailed shoat and seven-titted cow, may or may never have existed.

  Volckert’s wife, Joanna, a woman of mindless piety, bore twin daughters, Trynitie and Femmitie, and they, raised in cloying righteousness, wed men of means from the outlands as soon as it was in their power to do so, and moved to New York and Boston, well out of probity’s clutch. Volckert’s wife also bore him a son, Petrus, who, as we have said, saw fit to wed and woo the bounteous and bawdy Hi
llegond in yet another reversal of the moral order in the Staats family, which, in matters of sensual predilection, exhibited all the stability of a Bach cadenza.

  Petrus, inspired by the mercantile success of his great-grandfather Dolph, whose early investment in an overland stagecoach line had been passed on to Petrus as a legacy, proved to have economic genius in his makeup. He octupled the Staats fortune, becoming Albany’s richest man as the new century began. He also proved the most benevolent of all Staatses, and was loved by his contemporaries, who honored him by naming both a short street and a public water pump after him. He branched into hardware, joining the Yankee Lyman Fitzgibbon in an ironworks and foundry, and was also an investor in several canals (including the Erie), which his peers found quixotic, since canals offered stagecoach traffic its principal competition. But Petrus found such thinking benighted, was in time hailed as a pioneer of transport, and was buried beneath a tombstone bearing a carving of a canalboat.

  Petrus died in 1835 at age seventy-two, a nobleman of the spirit and the purse, having built a marble mausoleum around the grave of his uncle Amos, the half-breed (who was only two years his elder), and having also transformed the Staats house into a Federal mansion of such vast dimension that travelers came to Albany expressly to see it. His wife, Hillegond, bore him a stillborn daughter and a son, Dirck, who was destined to play a most significant role in my life, and who, at the time of our arrival at the mansion, was in disgrace with his mother, who had turned Dirck’s two full-length portraits, painted when he was twelve and nineteen, to the wall. In the years after the death of Petrus, Hillegond had refused all offers of marriage, certain that her knowledge of men, despite her uncountable intimate encounters with them, was seriously bescrewed. Further, she grew certain from a recurring nightmare that should she ever consider a man as a second spouse, he would strangle her in her bed with a ligature. And so, when she imposed her bosom on Maud and me and welcomed us into her life, she was also keeping one wary but wavering eye clearly fixed on the most virile man to have crossed her doorstep in years, my master, John the Brawn.

  How virile he, how wavering she, is the matter next at hand, for when I felt myself fully cooked by the fire in Hillegond’s kitchen I stood up and found myself (still wrapped in the blanket) face-to-face with Maud, who was dressed most curiously in clothes that had belonged to Hillegond when she was Maud’s size. The dress was drabness itself, but Maud was glad of the gift, and I was exuberant, both from the warmth the fire had kindled in my blood vessels and from being reunited with this magical child.

  “What do we do now?” she asked me.

  “I couldn’t say. Perhaps we should find the mistress.”

  “She’s ever so frightful-looking, but I am fond of her,” said Maud.

  Matty, the Negro woman, breezed by and waved us in the direction of the front end of the house, then went about her business in the kitchen. Maud and I stepped gingerly toward the main salon but were caught by the sight of Hillegond’s full-body profile standing just inside the door of the Dood Kamer, which gave off the foyer. Hillegond was rigid, both her hands gripping the insides of her thighs. We looked past her and saw my master attending to the corpse of Magdalena, which lay supine on the room’s catafalquish bed, to which one ascended by climbing two steps. John the Brawn, in shirtsleeves and trousers, was, with notable delicacy, raising the chemise of the dead woman from her knees to her thighs, having already raised and carefully folded her skirt above her waist.

  “What is he doing?” Maud asked me in a whisper.

  “I can’t be sure,” I said, though that was a canard. I knew very well what he was doing, as did Hillegond, who stood wide-eyed as John exposed Magdalena’s nether regions and then undid the cincture at his own waist.

  “You mustn’t look at this,” I said to Maud, and I interposed myself between her and the brazen necrophile. But she shoved me aside rudely and barked in a whisper, “Get out of my way, you ninny, I’ve never seen anyone do this before,” which I came to know as Maud’s battle cry in her witnessing of this life. And so we squatted in the doorway, unnoticed by the principals in the vivid scene unfolding before us.

  John the Brawn climbed aboard Magdalena Colón and began doing to her gelid blossom what I had heard him boast of doing to many dozens of other more warm-blooded specimens. The sight of his gyrations aroused Hillegond to such a degree that she began certain gyrations of her own, uttering soft, guttural noises I associate solely with rut, and which grew louder as her passion intensified. Magdalena looked vapidly toward us as John gave her the fullness of his weight, her one eye still open and staring, her hair fanned out in handsome peacock show on the pillow.

  Hillegond’s moans came forth with such uncontrolled resonance that when John turned and discovered her pelvic frenzy he pushed himself away from the inert Magdalena and bobbed brazenly toward our hostess, who swooned into a bundle; whereupon my master did to her skirts precisely what he had done to Magdalena’s and, with what seemed to me magnified elevation (proving the truth of the adage: fresh comfort, fresh courage), crawled aboard the supine Hillegond and renewed his roostering. This taking of her infernal temperature restored Hillegond to consciousness and she threw her arms around John and yielded herself with a long crescendoing moan that concluded when our lady of the catafalque opened both her eyes and said aloud from the frigid beyond she had been inhabiting, “Why did you stop doing me?” raising her arms and stupefying us all, not least my master, who backed outward from Hillegond and, with undiminished extension, walked to the unfinished Magdalena, inspected her center (whose visibility she heightened at his approach), and then clambered once again aboard this abused flower, now resurrected from wilt by the sunny friction of joy. The spent Hillegond rose to one elbow and studied the sight as she might the resurrection of Lazarus, her sensual zealousness giving way to a vision of the miraculous. She covered herself and bore witness while my master, having quickly moved beyond amazement, resumed the thumping of his newly sanguinolent slut with vile laughter and swollen vigor, creating a triadic climax, not only in his own member and its hostel, but also in the bite wound of La Última’s face, which, as she bent herself upward to John in consummation, began to ooze the blood of her life, demonstrating that she was again at corpuscular flood in every vein and vessel of her being.

  When the orgiasts ceased to move they looked pensively into the glut in their own psychic interiors, Maud and myself perfectly invisible to their eyes. But I sensed they would see us soon enough and know by our expressions what we had seen, and I could not be sure what they might do to us for such knowledge. I pulled Maud away and led her to the front parlor, where we sat upon a green velvet sofa very like the color of Maud’s eyes in subdued light. I did not know what to say to her about what I felt, but she, never at a loss for comment, announced:

  “He is a low beast, and they are both fools for a man. Would you want to do that to me?”

  “I think so,” I said, though I had not considered it in such an individualized context.

  “I’m not at that stage yet,” said Maud.

  “I guess I am,” I said.

  “It seems to be very affecting, what happens to one.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard.”

  “I should have thought you’d have already tested it.”

  “I’ve not had the opportunity,” I said.

  “When I’m ready to do it,” Maud said, “I shall seek you out.”

  “I look forward to that,” I said.

  We were both utterly calm—a great lie, of course, for the agitation we felt was not only beyond words but would take decades to be sifted of significance. An image recurred for years in Maud’s mind of a voluptuous woman giving birth to an infant skeleton; and I, for years, dreamed of a woman who owned bilateral pudenda. We sat on that vernal sofa staring at a primitively painted portrait of a child wearing a white dress with a lace collar, holding a hoop in one hand while her other hand rested on the neck of a gander two-thirds her size.<
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  “I never want to be old,” said Maud. “I want to be young forever and ever, and then, when I’m of a certain age, I want to be very suddenly dead.”

  “You can’t be young forever and ever,” I said.

  “Yes I can.”

  “No you can’t.”

  “Yes I can.”

  “Not anymore,” I said; for ignorant as I was, I knew.

  I HAD NEVER SEEN anyone return from the dead before Magdalena Colón was resuscitated by love, the same commodity used by the Christ to effect a similar end. I draw no blasphemous parallels between John the Brawn, the amatory instrument, and Jesus; or between Jesus and Magdalena, especially in light of what she reported to us about her deathy interlude. But the power of love is more various and peculiar than we know.

  Once out of the orgiastic moment, Magdalena became the cynosure of our curiosity, for what usually follows the enactment of human improbability is the quest for proof it has really occurred. And, indeed, we all craved the gossip of her soul. And so after Magdalena had dressed herself in dry clothing, after John’s tucking of cincture, after the smoothing of all skirts and with the dissembling smiles that follow satiety, the adults gathered in the east parlor, where Maud and I were sitting, I amid a personal rapture that intensified with every moment spent in her presence, awash in desire for I knew not what; not, certainly, the simple raising of her skirts in emulation of John the Brawn. Such vulgarity (though I have since learned not to demean it) was insufficient response to my yearnings, which were destined to intensify even further during this singular evening.