World's End

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Neeltje was up front, on her mare. Her father, in a metallic voice, had commanded her to keep as great a distance as circumstances permitted between herself and the prisoner. She’d begun to protest—“He’s just a boy, vader: he’s hurt and suffering”—but that hard cold voice clamped down on her like a steel trap. Resigned, she’d gone on ahead—ten yards or so out in front of her father—but every so often she glanced over her shoulder and gave Jeremias a look of such concentrated tenderness he felt he would collapse on the spot. Either that or go on till he’d circled the globe six times and dug a rut you could drive a wagon through.

  As it turned out, he went on. Past the turnoff for Verplanck’s Landing and along the river, where it was no cooler, past fields and forests he’d never before laid eyes on, through the late afternoon and into the quiet of evening. He was fixating on the mesmeric rise and fall of the nag’s hooves, no longer alert enough to bother dodging the piles of dung it dropped in his path, when they rounded a bend in the road and they were there. He looked up dully. The lower manor house rose out of the fields before him, high-crowned and commanding, with a rambling long porch out front and a stone cellar beneath it that was itself half again as big as the Van Wartwyck house. The schout dismounted, freed Jeremias’s hands with a rough tug at the cords that bound them, jerked open a door in the basement wall and thrust him into a cell the size of a wagon bed. The door closed on darkness.

  He woke to a light rapping from the outer world, the rattle of key in lock, and then the sudden effulgence of morning as the door pulled back on its rusted hinges. A black woman, who still bore the facial cicatrices of her lorn and distant tribe, stood in the doorway. She was wearing a homespun dress, the lappet cap favored by country vrouwen from Gelderland to Beverwyck, and an immaculate pair of wooden clogs. “Brekkfass,” she said, handing him a mug of water, a wedge of cheese and a small loaf, still warm from the oven. He saw that he was in a toolshed, the rough walls hung with wooden rakes, shovels, a moldering harness, a flail with a splintered swiple. Then the door slammed shut once more and he lay back in the straw that covered the earthen floor, chewed his breakfast and watched the sun slice through the crevice between the crude door and its stone frame.

  The sun was gone by the time the door swung open again, the darkness of the cell so absolute he had to shield his eyes against the lit taper that was suddenly thrust in his face. He’d been alone with his thoughts through the interminable day, dozing fitfully and jerking awake with a start to sit up and hesitantly examine his swollen cheek or rub the butt of his leg, and over the course of so many dead hours the shock of his confrontation with the schout had seeped out of him. In the darkness, in the damp, in the impenetrable solitude of that strange prison, he could feel the rage gnawing at him once again. In their eyes, he was a criminal. But what had he done, really? Lay claim to a piece of land? Try to work it and survive? By what right did the schout claim his neat little bouwerie—or the patroon his estates, for that matter? The more he thought about it, the more incensed he grew. If anyone was a criminal, if anyone should be locked up, it was Joost Cats, it was Oloffe Van Wart and his fat-assed commis with the leather-bound accounts ledgers. They were the real criminals—the patroon and his henchmen, Their High Mightinesses of the States General, the English king himself. They were leeches, chiggers, toads; they’d got under his skin and wouldn’t leave him alone till they’d sucked him dry.

  When the door opened this time, he was ready. He’d actually sprung up from the ground, a rake in his hand, actually raised it above his head like a tomahawk and kicked the taper to the floor, before she called out his name in a gasp and he felt foolish all over again. “Hush,” she hissed. “It’s me. I bribed Ismailia and brought you this.” Neeltje handed him a wooden bowl and pulled the door shut behind her. The bowl was warm and it gave off a smell of cabbage. Jeremias watched her numbly as she bent for the rush candle and held it up to illuminate her face, which was like something newly created from the void. “I hate my father,” she said.

  Jeremias clung to the bowl as if it were a stone at the edge of a precipice. He appreciated the sentiment, but held his peace.

  “He’s so, so” her voice trailed off. “Are you all right?”

  He was studying the lock of pale fine hair that had worked its way out from under her cap to cling familiarly to her eyebrow. He wanted to say something significant, passionate, something like Now that you’re here, I am, but he couldn’t find the words. When he spoke, his voice sounded strange in his ears. “I’ll live,” he said.

  She motioned him to sit and then squatted beside him as he settled back down in the straw and sipped tentatively from the bowl. “I heard them talking,” she said. “My father and the patroon. They’re going to leave you down here for another night to teach you a lesson, then the patroon’s going to offer you tenancy on your farm.”

  Jeremias barely heard her. He didn’t give a damn for the patroon, for the farm, for anything—anything but her. The way she talked, biting off each word like a little girl, the pout of her lips, the way her hips swelled out against the seams of her dress as she squatted there: each movement, each gesture, was a revelation. “Ja,” he said, to say something. “Ja.”

  “Aren’t you pleased?”

  Pleased? To have his face slashed and his hands shackled, to be hauled off in ignominy and shut up in this hole while his sister and the boy were left to fend for themselves? Pleased? “Ja,” he said finally.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said, glancing at the door.

  All at once the night was charged with the chirring of insects, with doleful cries and the faint whisper of birds on the wing. Jeremias set down the bowl, edged closer to her. Just as he reached out to her, just as he took hold of her hand to pull her to him, she shook free and rose to her feet. Her eyes had narrowed suddenly and she stood cocked on one leg. “Who was that woman,” she said, watching his eyes. “The one at the farm.”

  Woman? Farm? What was she talking about?

  “She’s your wife, isn’t she?”

  Jeremias came before the patroon the following morning. He was awakened at first light by the black woman with the strange swirling scars about her lips and nostrils. She handed him a bucket of water and a bowl of tepid corn mush, and informed him in a Dutch so crude it was like the dialogue of the beasts that he had better make himself presentable for Mijnheer Van Wart. When she’d gone, Jeremias slipped the crude woolen shirt over his head and gingerly laid the side of his face in the water; he held it there until the mud plaster began to dissolve. The water went cloudy, then turned the color of beef broth in a swirl of fragmented leaves, twisted stems and strange dried petals.

  After a time, Jeremias sat up and tentatively explored the wound with his fingertips: a crude split ridge ran from his right eyebrow to his chin, rough ground, a topography of scab, pus and wet puddled blood. He explored it, this new grain of his metamorphosing self, ran his fingers over it again and again, till the spots of fresh blood had dried. Then he washed his hands.

  It must have been around nine when the schout came for him. The door flung back, light surged into the room like the flood tide running up against the rocks, and there he stood, bowed over like a great black question mark against the blank page of the day. “Come younker,” he said, “the patroon will see you now,” but there was something odd in the way he said it, something hollow and uncertain. For a moment, Jeremias was puzzled—this wasn’t the schout he knew—but then he understood: it was the wound. The man had gone too far, and he knew it. He’d raised his hand against an unarmed and crippled boy, and here was the evidence of it etched in his victim’s face. Jeremias rose from the straw and strode out of the cell, wearing the mark of the schout’s disgrace like a badge.

  Cats escorted him around the corner to the kitchen/dairy room, where milk, butter, cheese and other foodstuffs were stored, and where the patroon’s servants did most of the cooking for the household. As soon as they stepped in the door, the black woman materialized
from the shadows to flay Jeremias’ broad back, his shoulders and arms and the seat of his baggy pantaloons with a birch broom so stiff and unyielding it might have been cut yesterday. Then a second black—this one a slight, stoop-shouldered male with a kinked cube of hair that stood up off his head like a toque—led them up the stairs and into the family kitchen above.

  This room was dominated by a big round oak-plank table, in the center of which stood a cone of sugar and a blue vase of cut flowers. A painted cupboard stood in the corner beside a heavy mahogany sideboard that must have been shipped over from the old country, and the fireplace was decorated with blue ceramic tiles depicting biblical themes like the salification of Lot’s wife and the beheading of John the Baptist. Jeremias took it all in as he stood at attention just inside the basement door. The schout, plumed hat in hand, slumped beside him while the black knocked respectfully at the door to the parlor. A voice answered from within, and the slave silently pulled open the door and turned to them with a grin that showed off the sharp, filed points of his glistening teeth. “De patroon he see you now,” he said, stepping aside with a sweep of his arm.

  Jeremias glimpsed walls hung with portraits, massive blocks of dark oiled furniture, real tallow candles in silver sconces, a carpet of woven colors. As he limped forward, the schout at his side, a high rectangular table came into view, and he saw that it was laid out for tea, with silver service and cups of painted porcelain that might have graced the slim, smooth hands of Chinese emperors. The beauty of it, the elegance and refinement, overwhelmed him, choked him with a nostalgia as fierce and cleansing as a spoonful of horseradish. For a moment—just a moment—he was a young boy in the bosom of his parents, sitting down to Martinmas tea in the parlor of the burgomaster of Schobbejacken.

  All at once he became conscious of the harsh rap of his pegleg on the floor, of his filthy shirt and pantaloons and the torn stocking that hung in tatters from his calf: he was passing through the patroon’s kitchen, entering the patroon’s parlor, and he began to feel very small indeed. Compared with the van der Meulens’ modest little farmhouse or Jan Pieterse’s dark and drafty store, the place seemed inexpressibly grand, a sultan’s palace sprung up in the wilds of the new world. In truth, the house comprised but six moderate-sized rooms in its two squat stories, and it was a far cry from the burghers’ houses of Amsterdam and Haarlem, let alone the great estates of the gentry, but to one who lived in a dirt-floor hovel with a thatched roof and split-log walls that dripped sap, to one who drank from wooden mugs, plucked bits of stringy rabbit from the pot with his fingers and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve, it was opulence itself. For all his desperation, for all his anger and resentment, Jeremias was awed by it, humbled; he felt weak and insignificant—he felt guilty; yes, guilty—and he slouched into Van Wart’s parlor like a sinner slouching into the Sistine Chapel.

  The patroon, a pale fleshy little man whose features seemed lost in various excrescences, was sunk deep in a settee lined with pillows, his gouty foot propped above the level of his eyes on a makeshift buttress composed of two beaver pelts, a feather duster, the family Bible and a copy of Grotius’ Inleidinge tot de Hollandsche Rechtsgeleerdheid, all piled atop a sagging corner chair. Beside him, looking as bloated and pontifical as the next-to-biggest bullfrog in the pond, was the commis; in the commis’ lap, like the Book of Doom itself, sat the accounts ledger. The moment Jeremias laid eyes on them, his humility evaporated; in its place, he felt an intoxicating rush of hatred surge through him. He didn’t want to farm, care for his sister, make his fortune or wrest Neeltje away from her father—all he wanted at that moment was to snatch the schout’s sword from him and run it through the pasty grublike bodies of commis and patroon, and then lay waste to the place, gouging the furniture, shattering the crockery, dropping his pants to defecate in the silver teapot… but the impulse died before it could take hold of him, died stillborn, supplanted by a breathless gasp of surprise. For Jeremias suddenly realized that patroon and commis were not alone in the room. Seated in the corner, silent and motionless as a snake, was a man Jeremias had never seen before.

  He was young, this stranger—no more than five or six years Jeremias’ senior—and he was tricked out in velvet and satin like one of Their High Mightinesses Themselves. With one silk-clad leg crossed casually over the other and a smirk of invincible superiority on his face, the stranger shot Jeremias a glance of cold appraisal that ate through him like acid. For one astonished instant Jeremias locked eyes with him, and then stared down at the floor, humbled all over again. The scar seared his face, no badge now, but the mark of Cain, the brand of a criminal. He didn’t look up again.

  Through all that followed—through the patroon’s interminable speech of admonition and reconciliation, through the commis’ pointless pontifications and the schout’s terse and hushed testimony, Jeremias never uttered a word but for ja and nee. The man in the corner (who, as it turned out, was Oloffe’s only son and heir, Jongheer Stephanus Oloffe Rombout Van Wart, newly arrived from the University of Leyden to look after his interests in the face of his father’s declining health) helped himself to a clay pipe of Virginia tobacco and a glass of Portuguese wine, surveying the proceedings with the air of a man watching a pair of dung beetles struggle over a kernel of manure. He merely sat there, an ironic grin compressing his thin haughty lips, holding himself aloof from the whole business—until the moment his father spelled out the terms of Jeremias’ tenancy, that is. Then he came to life like a stalking beast.

  “We will, in our, er, magnanimity,” the patroon intoned in a wheezy voice that bespoke ruined health and mismanaged appetites, “absorb unto ourselves the rents and damages accruing to your late, er, father’s tenancy in the unfortunate year of 1663. We, er, refer of course to rent in arrears, the pilferage and wanton slaughter of one, er, rutting boar and the careless usage of our livestock, which resulted in the untimely, er, demise of two milch cows and one piebald ox.”

  The agent made as if to protest, but the patroon waved him silent with an impatient hand and continued. “We consider that the physical”—here he paused to suck in a great wheezing breath—“er, blemish that you’ve, er, received at the, er, hands of Joost Cats, is punishment enough for your trespass and willful, er, disregard for established law, and we will forego the levying of fines or remanding you to the, er, stocks, of which we have, er, none in any case.” Here the patroon’s voice had gone so hoarse as to carry no farther than the rasp of quill on parchment, and Jeremias had to lean forward to hear him. Coughing into his fist, the old man took a glass of port the commis held out to him and stared up at Jeremias out of bleary eyes. “Your rent shall be the same as your, er, father’s before you, payable in stuffs and in English pounds or seawant, as you prefer, and it will be, er, due—”

  “Vader,” interjected a voice from the corner of the room, and all eyes turned toward the Jongheer, “I beg you to reconsider your judgment.”

  The old man’s mouth groped at the air, and Jeremias thought of a tench flung up on the cobblestones in Schobbejacken so many years before. “Your rent,” the patroon began again, but faltered as his voice faded to a timbreless wheeze.

  Young Van Wart was on his feet now, his hands spread wide in remonstrance. Jeremias stole a glance at him, then went back to studying the floorboards. The Jongheer had at some point placed atop his head an enormous, floppy-brimmed beaver hat with a two-foot plume, and it magnified his presence till he seemed to fill the entire corner of the room. “I respect your goodheartedness, vader,” he said, “and I agree that it will be to our benefit to settle a tenant at Nysen’s Roost, but is this the man—or boy, rather—to entrust with it? Hasn’t he already proven himself a criminal without respect for the law, the degenerate issue of a degenerate father?”

  “Well, well, yes—” the patroon began, but his son cut him off. Regarding Jeremias with a look he might have reserved for the unhappy slug that had crawled one damp night into his glistening leathern shoe, Stephanus held up
his palm and continued. “And is he capable of paying rent, this one-legged cripple in his filthy rags? Do you really think this, this … beggar can pay his debts, let alone feed himself and the tribe of naked half-breed savages he’s sired up there in the muck?”

  Jeremias was beaten. He couldn’t respond, couldn’t even look young Van Wart in the eye. The gulf between them—he was well-built and youthful, this Jongheer, handsome as the portrait of the Savior hanging in the nave of the Schobbejacken church, powerful, wealthy, educated—was unbridgeable. What commis, schout and the beast of the pond couldn’t take from him with their accounts ledgers, rapiers and unforgiving jaws, the Jongheer had taken with a sneer and half a dozen stinging phrases. Jeremias hung his head. The utter contempt in the man’s voice—he might have been speaking of hogs or cattle—was a thing that would be with him for life.

  In the end, though, commis and patroon prevailed, and Jeremias was taken on as tenant with a year’s grace so far as rent was concerned (and a warning that he would be driven off the property at the point of a sword if he was even a stiver short in his accounts at the end of that time), but for Jeremias it was no victory. No: he left the manor house in shame, his stomach rumbling, clothes filthy, the schout’s mark burning on his face and the Jongheer’s words charred into his heart. He didn’t look back. Not even when Neeltje came to the door of her father’s cottage to stand mute with her wet and glowing eyes and watch him as he limped up the road. Not even when at last she called out his name in a voice stung with hurt and incomprehension—not even then could he find it in himself to lift his eyes from the rutted road before him.