The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  “You know what this means, Luddy,” Martyn said.

  “Whut?” Ludwig Smits said.

  Hendrickson tugged the blindfold from Bo’s head. “It means I’m the Deadman.” He slipped the rag over his eyes. Ludwig and Pim howled with laughter.

  As soon as the blind dark descended, an old childhood rhyme came back to Martyn, one his mother used to sing to him as a baby. When he was a child, Martyn lost his eyesight to fever for a week. During that time, his mother perished of the same fever.

  Kiss-kiss, kiss-kiss

  Don’t my fishy-fish go like this?

  Tick-tock, tick-tock

  Time it is for the crowing cock

  For the next few minutes, as the yelling children scattered, a sightless Martyn did the Deadman. He tripped and tumbled funnily against gravestones, chasing his prey. He had to leave off once to vomit, but manfully returned to the game. The drunken man lunged, knocking over laughing children like bowling pins, grabbing at them, missing.

  Finally the blindfolded Martyn managed to tackle nine-year-old Greetje Breit. The girl giggled uncontrollably, thinking it was fun.

  “Moeder, moeder, moeder,” Martyn babbled. Mother, mother, mother. Beneath the dirty rag tied around his eyes, Martyn shed tears. He collapsed upon Greetje, suffocating her until she screamed. Pim and Ludwig peeled him off her.

  The contagious shrieks of the children passed to the adults, who joined in the merriment.

  18

  Kees Bayard had myriad things on his mind. For one, he wished to slip away from the fair and nuzzle with Blandine. The rules were relaxed for kermis time, and Kees meant to take advantage.

  But at the same time, he needed to stay right where he was, at the carnival. Criers had just announced the commencement of Kees’s primary reason for being there, his main event, the goose-pulling challenge. His uncle had in fact outlawed goose-pulling several years ago. But the edict had not stopped the practice, merely thinned out the ranks of Kees’s competition.

  To the north of the market square, in the parade concourse across from the large, fine dwelling-houses of Stone Street, the games were about to begin. The test: to gallop a mount full-speed from one end of the course to the other end, where a live goose hung upside down, dangling ten feet in the air. Grab at the angry, squawking bird’s head.

  The colony declared whoever pulled the bird down to be king of kermis fair. There were other contests at the festival—”kitten in a casket” was a favorite—but goose-pulling reigned supreme. At times the bird’s legs snapped off at the halter tied around its feet, other times a contestant would pull its head off its body in a great spray of blood and feathers.

  Festival organizers made the snatch more difficult—devilishly hard, in fact—by liberally greasing the animal with bear fat. Onlookers and contestants alike had to be drunk enough to appreciate the spectacle.

  “I drink the bottle of fire,” repeated a beered-up farmer, staggering in circles beneath the suspended goose. “Bring me the bottle of fire!”

  Kees found it delightfully easy to meet the game’s challenge. Without bragging about it, he was made to pull the goose. Kittens! Pah. He had left off killing cats as a young boy.

  “Wish me luck,” he said, grinning at Blandine as he prepared to organize his mount. He would ride Fantome, a coal-black charger of which he was inordinately proud, a horse he swore had Spanish (other times, Moorish) blood. For the fair, he dressed Fantome in colors and braided its mane with ribbons.

  “Your good luck is very bad luck for the goose,” Blandine said. She had watched Kees at this ritual many times before.

  Edward Drummond appeared at her side. “Mister Drummond,” she said, surprised. The Red Lion innkeeper stood with him.

  “Raeger,” Kees said, shaking hands.

  “My friend and compatriot, Edward Drummond,” Ross Raeger said. Drummond bowed to the director general’s nephew. Of course, he thought, the girl would have some bright boy by her side. They probably thought of marriage.

  Kees looked curiously at Blandine. “I met Mister Drummond at the Lion,” she said, stammering.

  “We share an interest in astronomy,” Drummond said.

  “Are you a horseman, Drummond?” Kees asked. “You should take a run at the goose.” The Englisher stared most insolently at Blandine, Kees thought, and he had an urge to best the man at mounted combat.

  “Goose-pulling,” Raeger explained.

  “Oh, I know goose-pulling well,” Drummond said. “I spent a long while in the Low Countries, where there are quite a lot of geese.”

  “So, then, you wish to ride? I will lend you a mount,” Kees said.

  “I prefer other prey,” the Englishman said, still gazing at Blandine.

  She raised her eyes to him. In truth, Drummond had so wearied of killing and death on the battlefield that he no longer enjoyed even butchering small game. Geese—and kittens—were safe with him. Blandine van Couvering, on the other hand, might not be.

  On closer inspection, the woman’s costume looked much less outlandish, even charming. A crimson petticoat peeked out beneath a looped-up violet apron, raised to display the tease of red silk. Above a vivid green and blue waistcoat, her fine, full breasts showed amid a burst of white lace. Fat curls fell around her face.

  Drummond noticed that although she still grasped Kees’s arm, Blandine’s eyes strayed again and again to his.

  “I’ll lay a wager on your win,” Raeger said to Blandine’s fidgety suitor, who was evidently anxious to leave her side and climb onto his waiting steed.

  “I’ll bet the goose,” Drummond said.

  Kees judged the Englisher an insolent rounder. “I’ve been king of the fair three years in a row,” he said, hating to have to spell it out, then realizing the claim meant nothing to the man.

  “Good-bye, Mister Drummond,” Blandine said, extending her hand. They shook. Seen side by side with Kees, the Englisher did not measure up. He appeared old. What had she been thinking?

  Kees disliked his girl’s recently adopted habit of public handshaking. He performed a curt bow and stalked off with Blandine trailing behind him.

  “Very pretty, as we said,” Raeger remarked to Drummond, watching them go. “And if one had the bad luck to fall in love with her, she’d be downright beautiful.”

  “Fall in love with any woman, and suddenly she’s irresistible,” Drummond said. “Your luck doesn’t even have to be bad.”

  “Oh-ho, Mister Drummond is already far gone,” Raeger said, shaking his head in mock sadness.

  Kees located Fantome, the stallion trembling with eagerness, knowing what was about to happen. “What I should have done,” Kees said to Blandine, “was to take the man’s stinking wager.”

  Blandine buttoned his waistcoat, preparing him for battle. “Don’t think on it now,” she said soothingly. “In a moment you will be king of the fair again, and nothing will matter.”

  “I do adore you, Blandina,” Kees said. “In spite of all.”

  He left her without a word of farewell, and rode to goose.

  Blandine assumed her place in the gallery of spectators, on the parade ground in front of Pieter Laurensen’s majestic stone dwelling-house.

  “Boom,” came a voice from behind her, and Blandine felt a swat to her backside.

  “Just me,” said Pim as she turned around.

  Pim Jensen attended school with Blandine before leaving at the age of fourteen for work at his father’s tannery. He had by then proved himself a great fighter, but no scholar. He stood smirking at her, a long-stemmed pipe tucked through his jaunty yellow hatband.

  “You’re looking fine today,” he said. Blandine had dressed with an eye not for the leering likes of Pim, but for Kees (and Drummond, too?). She remembered all the times Pim had tried to force a kiss in the schoolroom. The boy was a menace.

  “Blandine,” Pim said, “let me sing a little song into your ear.”

  She didn’t want to answer him.

  “A lot of peopl
e,” Pim said, his words sounding rehearsed, “a whole lot of people have a problem with you having a problem.”

  Blandine had no patience for this. There were times when the settlement was just too small. “For heaven’s sake, what are you talking about?” she said.

  She saw Mally and Lace across the square. They watched over cages made of bent willow branches, selling robins they had captured. Robins were always in demand, they brightened one’s groot kamer so with their cheerlup-cheerlup song and orange-red breasts.

  Kees had given Blandine a bird once, years ago, when he noticed her again after their childhood together, seeing his former playmate as a woman for the first time. His gift was not a live bird but a preserved specimen. He had smothered a hummingbird and carefully pressed it between sheets of clean white parchment, as though preserving a flower.

  She recalled extracting the paper-thin pressing from its wrapping, a luminescent, almost transparent figure of a trapped animal, arrested in mid-flight. Its wings shone green like those of a dragonfly. Kees professed himself unable to decide if the thing was insect or bird.

  Pim noticed Blandine looking toward Lace and Mally. “You know, you know,” he chattered. “Too much time. You spend too much with them.”

  “Why could it be any of your business?” Blandine said.

  “Let the blackamoors take care of their own.”

  “Stick it,” Blandine said, a school-yard taunt.

  “You ask too many questions about them African children,” Pim said. “Leave off or you’ll be hurt.”

  He slapped her butt once more. She retaliated by giving him a sharp crack across the cheek. “Don’t touch me again,” she said.

  He laughed a harsh laugh and disappeared into the crowd.

  Angry at the assault, Blandine turned from the concourse back toward the market square.

  She did not see Drummond, but at the waffle booth was the orphanmaster, crouched on the ground holding a thick, steaming waffle and breaking off chunks to hand to a group of boys and girls crowded around him. By Visser’s side, mingling with the children, was Lightning.

  “May I get a piece of waffle?” Blandine said, smiling at Visser.

  “You can take over for me,” said Visser, half-rising, staggering, being saved from a fall by Lightning. He was drunk.

  “Aet, I see your dinner coming by,” Lightning said.

  Theo Michaelis, the town’s most popular butcher, led a fattened beeve along by a leather strop. He had painted lines on the beast’s hide, marking off the cuts he would make at slaughtering time. His kermis customers need merely point out which part of the animal that they wished to buy. Visser made haste over to Michaelis so as to reserve the rump cut he favored.

  Blandine found herself left alone in a crowd of children with Lightning. They had nothing to say to each other. The man wore his customary felt hat, greened with age, covering his scar. He stared languidly at Blandine.

  “I think you might be frightening the little ones,” she said. The children had, in fact, sidled away from the half-indian to cluster around her.

  Lightning smirked and stepped back into the flow of fairgoers, again taking his place at Visser’s side.

  Blandine approached Mally and Lace. She leaned down and made kissy sounds at their caged robins. Mally stared at her. She was taller and thinner than Lace, and had a stern streak running through her right alongside her good parts.

  “Two others now,” Mally said.

  Blandine straightened up. “Oh, Mally, no,” she said.

  “The slave Steven, up at Stuyvesant’s farm, he tell a tale about a Dutch boy coming in from the wilderness. Say the boy saw two of our kids being flayed alive by an indian demon. Didn’t say who they were, but Small Bill Gessie and his sister, Jenny, they gone.”

  “Why were they alone?” Blandine asked. “We said no child should be north of the wall without an adult.”

  “They don’t have parents to watch out for them,” Mally said.

  “Orphans,” Blandine said.

  “Uh-huh,” Mally said. “Who knows what happened? We put out the word, yes, nobody go out alone. God may mark the fall of every sparrow, but we ain’t him.”

  “Our people are crying,” Lace said.

  “Did you send for the schout?”

  Mally and Lace stared blankly at Blandine. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  She knew as well as they did that the officials of New Amsterdam, from the schout up to the director general, would not trouble themselves about the disappearance of an African child. They had never done so in the past, so why would they do so now?

  It was impossible to overstate how death-inflected New Amsterdam was, all of the new world, all of the globe, really. There were celebrants present at this kermis festival, and not just one or two, either, who would be dead within the month.

  Children died. Especially children. Love failed to save them. Prayer failed. Influence failed. They were born dead, of course, or died in infancy. But other times the parents were allowed to get to know them, to love them for a few years before they were taken. Children died from contagion, from marasmus, from a cut finger that became infected.

  The enemies of the young were legion. The triple-threat killers, typhoid, dysentery and cholera. Yellow fever, a.k.a. dock fever, a.k.a. “King Death in his yellow robe.” An onslaught of other fevers: winter, spotted, camp, puking, putrid, congestive, diary, ship, remitting, black, blackwater, brain. The small pox, a great victimizer of native Americans.

  Nothing to be done against any of it. Get them abed, cram them with ineffectual potions, bleed them. Pray. Sit at bedside through the night.

  Nothing helped.

  What did it mean to love a human child, a creature with such a tentative hold on life? Who might at any moment vanish into the long deep dark? Does a parent’s love become more guarded, more careful, perhaps a little withholding? Or does it become more fierce in the face of constant, imminent threat?

  Piteous Gullee. With all this death, did it matter that one child more had disappeared? And a child who was from “outside the wall” at that? Her death had taken place almost a month before. Old news.

  Now two more. It was happening again.

  Inside Blandine’s head, a small chirping robin’s song repeated, “There’s nothing I can do! There’s nothing I can do!” Over and over, rising to a panicked shriek. She beat the voice back.

  “I’ll go to the schout,” she said.

  “You do that, Miss Blandina,” Mally said. She turned away.

  They were disgusted over her lack of action on Piddy, as Blandine was disgusted with herself.

  A roar rose from the parade ground. Blandine guessed that she had missed Kees’s triumph at the goose-pulling.

  The carnival turned nasty on her. She reeled through the market toward her home on Pearl Street, confused and ashamed. The red faces of the fairgoers appeared crass and wolfish. The crowd seemed to teeter on the edge of violence.

  A bare-chested bald man passed Blandine hoisting a green-skinned, long-fanged effigy strung up on a pole: the witika. Children and a few adults coursed after him, pelting the goblin figure with clods of dirt.

  Blandine saw Tommy van Elsant, the son of the funeral caller, hunkered down with some of his friends at the edge of the marketplace, behind a stall that was not in use. He held a glass jar in his hands, and the youngsters around him leaned in, openmouthed, to gaze at its contents.

  They each had paid a small token—a jaw harp, a knuckle-buckle, a string of seawan the length of a finger—for the opportunity to peer at a tiny fetus, adrift in its small bath of saltwater, cast off the last time Cara Reynoutsen miscarried.

  As drink took the populace, the Dutch country dances on the parade ground became more and more frantic. Cross-dressing ran rampant. In the aisles of the drinking booths, brandy-boiled fairgoers lay where they fell. The recently harvested fields of the Company near the Doden Acker turned into crowded rutting grounds.

  Blandine fled. Away fr
om kermis, away from her countrymen, away from sickly sweet waffles and fat-smeared geese and her guilt over missing children. Lost in her thoughts, she made her solitary way down Pearl Street toward her dwelling-house.

  “How-do, Miss Blandina,” the street urchin Gypsy Davey said to her, appearing suddenly at her side.

  “Hello, Davey, you little imp,” Blandine said. The sight of the renegade orphan always cheered her. “Come with me, I’ll treat you to a pickle.”

  “You best watch yourself,” the red-kerchiefed boy said. “Walk the straight and narrow line.”

  Blandine laughed. Gypsy Davey wouldn’t recognize the straight and narrow if it came up and bit him. She was going to tell him so, but when she looked again, Davey had vanished.

  19

  “Remember that the Devil is chained up, and wholly at the will and beck of God,” preached Johannes Megapolensis from the pulpit at the Dutch Reformed Church.

  As soon as the fair was over, to counter its sinful excesses, the director general had declared a settlement-wide day of prayer, fasting and contrition.

  Visser sat in his pew, his brain bursting with the headache that had been waiting for him at the end of kermis. There was nothing like a good sermon after a spree. It settled the gut and righted the soul.

  “Remember that Christ hath conquered the Devil in his temptations, on the cross, by his resurrection and ascension. The prince of this world is conquered and cast out by Our Lord, the prince of the next. Wilt thou fear a conquered foe?”

  Through the fog on his senses Visser perceived the thrust of the sermon. It really concerned the witika, the only subject anyone in the whole settlement seemed to be talking about.

  Witika fever swept through town quicker than the plague. The schout enforced a curfew for children. Parents locked their sons and daughters inside, day and night. Sponsors of Adolph Roeletsen’s school had a debate whether to close temporarily, for safety’s sake.