by T. C. Boyle
“Walter,” Lola was whispering as if from a great distance. “Walter—are you all right?”
He tried to pin it down, put it all together again. Mardi. Hector. Pompey. The ghost ships. Had he climbed the anchor chain? Had he actually done that? He remembered the car, Pompey’s wasted face, the way Mardi’s paper dress had begun to dissolve from contact with her wet skin. He had his hands on her breasts and Hector’s were moving between her legs. She was giggling. And then it was dawn. Birds going at it. The parking lot out back of the Elbow. “Yeah,” he croaked, opening his eyes again, “I’m all right.”
Lola was biting her lip. Hesh wouldn’t look him in the eye. And Jessica—soft, powdered, sweet-smelling Jessica—looked as if she’d just run back-to-back marathons and finished last. Both times.
“What happened?” Walter asked, stirring his legs.
“It’s okay,” Hesh said.
“It’s okay,” Lola said. “It’s okay.”
It was then that he looked down at the base of the bed, looked down at the sheet where his left foot poked up like the centerpole of a tent, and at the sad collapsed puddle of linen where his right foot should have been.
O Pioneers!
Some three hundred years before Walter dodged a shadow and made his mark on the cutting edge of history, the first of the Peterskill Van Brunts set foot in the Hudson Valley. Harmanus Jochem Van Brunt, a novice farmer from Zeeland, was a descendant of herring fishermen in whose hands the nets had gone rotten. He arrived in New Amsterdam on the schooner De Vergulde Bever in March of 1663, seeking to place as great a distance as possible between himself and the ancestral nets, which he left in the care of his younger brother. His passage had been underwritten by the son of a Haarlem brewer, one Oloffe Stephanus Van Wart, who, under the authority of Their High Mightinesses of the States General of Holland, had been granted a patroonship in what is now northern Westchester. Van Wart’s agent in Rotterdam had paid out the princely sum of two hundred fifty guilders to cover the transoceanic fare for Harmanus and his family. In return, Harmanus, his wife (the goude vrouw Agatha, née Hooghboom) and their kinderen, Katrinchee, Jeremias and Wouter, would be indentured servants to the Van Warts for all their days on earth.
The family was settled on a five-morgen farm a mile or so beyond Jan Pieterse’s trading post at the mouth of Acquasinnick Creek, on land that had lately been the tribal legacy of the Kitchawanks. A crude timber-and-thatch hut awaited them. The patroon, old Van Wart, provided them with an axe, a plow, half a dozen scabious fowl, a cachexic ox, and two milch cows, both within a dribble of running dry, as well as a selection of staved-in, battered and cast-off kitchen implements. As a return on his investment, he would expect five hundred guilders in rent, two fathoms of firewood (split, delivered and reverently stacked in the cavernous woodshed at the upper manor house), two bushels of wheat, two pair of fowl, and twenty-five pounds of butter. Due and payable in six months’ time.
A lesser soul might have been discouraged. But Harmanus, known in his native village of Schobbejacken as Ham Bones, in deference to his strength, agility and gustatory prowess, was no man to give in easily. With his two young sons at his side (Jeremias was thirteen, Wouter nine), he was able to clear and sow two and a half acres of rich but stony soil by the end of May. Katrinchee, a fifteen-year-old with blooming breasts and expanding bottom, dreamed of cabbages. By midsummer, she and her mother had established a flourishing kitchen garden of peas, haricots verts, carrots, cabbages, turnips and cauliflower, as well as a double row of Indian corn and pumpkin squash, the seeds of which she’d obtained from the late Sachoes’ degenerate son, Mohonk.1 Under Katrinchee’s patient tutelage, the ancient, long-faced cows—Kaas and Boter, as they were hopefully christened by little Wouter—gradually came to take on the silky svelteness of adolescence. Each morning she tugged at their shrunken teats; each evening she fed them a mash of hackberry and snakewort, serenading them in a wavering contralto that drifted out over the fields like something snatched from a dream. The turning point came when, with Mohonk’s contrivance, she obtained the newly tanned hides of a pair of calves, which she stuffed with straw and propped up on sticks in the cows’ pen—within a week the old bossies were nuzzling the forgeries in maternal bliss and filling the milk pails as fast as Katrinchee could empty them. And as if that weren’t enough, the hens too seemed rejuvenated. Inspired by their bovine counterparts, they began to lay like blue-ribbon winners, and the tattered cock sprouted a magnificent new spray of tail feathers.
The land was fat, and the Van Brunts tumbled into the expansive embrace of it like orphans into a mother’s lap. If sugar was dear, honey was theirs for the taking. So too blueberries, crab apples, chickory and dandelion greens. And game! It practically fell from the heavens. A blast of the blunderbuss brought down a rain of gobblers or scattered coneys like grain, deer peered in at the open windows, geese and canvasbacks tangled themselves in the wash as it hung out to dry. No sooner would Jeremias shove off onto the Hudson—or North River, as it was called then—than a sturgeon or rockfish would leap into the canoe.
Even the house was beginning to shape up under the rigorous regime of Vrouw Van Brunt. She expanded the cellar, scoured the floors with sand, fashioned furniture from wicker and wood, put up shutters to keep out deerflies and the fierce sudden thunderstorms that emanated like afterthoughts from the crown of Dunderberg on a muggy afternoon. She even planted tulips out front—in two rows so straight they could have been laid out by a surveyor.
Then, in mid-August, things began to go sour. Outwardly, life had never been better: trees were falling, the woodpile growing, the fields knee-high with wheat and the smokehouse full. Katrinchee was turning into a woman, the boys were tanned and hard and healthy as frogs, Agatha hummed over her dustmop and broom. And Harmanus, liberated from the patrimonial nets, worked like five men. But slowly, imperceptibly, like the first whispering nibble of the first termite at the floor joists, suffering and privation crept into their lives.
It began with Harmanus. He came in from the fields one night and sat down at the table with an appetite so keen it cut at him like a sword. While Agatha busied herself with a hutspot of turnips, onions and venison, she set out a five-pound wheel of milk cheese and a loaf of day-old bruinbrod, hard as stone. Flies and mosquitoes hung in the air; the children, playing at tag, shouted from the yard. When she turned around, bread and cheese were gone and her husband sat contemplating the crumbs with a strange vacant gaze, the hard muscles working in his jaw. “My God, Harmanus,” she laughed, “save something for the children.”
It wasn’t till supper that she became alarmed. Besides the stew—it was enough for the next three days, at least—there was a game pie, another loaf, two pounds of butter, garden salad and a stone jar of creamed fish. The children barely had time to fill their plates. Harmanus lashed into the eatables as if he were sitting down to the annual Pinkster eating contest at the Schobbejacken tavern. Jeremias and Wouter ran off to kick a ball in the fading light, but Katrinchee, who’d stayed behind to clear up, watched in awe as her father attacked the pie, shoveled up the creamed fish with a wedge of bread, scraped the stewpot clean. He sat at the table for nearly two hours, and in all that time not a word escaped his lips but for the occasional mumbled request for water, cider or bread.
In the morning it was no different. He was up at first light, as usual, but instead of taking a loaf from the table and heading out with axe or plow, he lingered in the kitchen. “What is it, Harmanus?” Agatha asked, a trace of apprehension creeping into her voice.
He sat at the crude table, big hands folded before him, and looked up at her, and she thought for a moment she was looking into the eyes of a stranger. “I’m hungry,” he said.
She was sweeping the floorboards, her elbows jumping like mice. “Shall I make some eggs?”
He nodded. “And meat.”
Just then Katrinchee stepped through the door with a pail of fresh milk. Harmanus nearly kicked the table over. “Milk,�
� he said, as if associating word and object for the first time; his voice was flat, dead, without intonation, the voice of a phantom. He snatched the pail from her hands, lifted it to his lips and drank without pause till it was empty. Then he threw it to the floor, belched, and looked around the room as if he’d never seen it before. “Eggs,” he repeated. “Meat.”
By this point, the whole family was frightened. Jeremias looked on with a pale face as his father ate his way through the larder, wrestled sturgeon from the smokehouse, plucked a pair of hens for the pot. Katrinchee and Agatha flew around the kitchen, chopping, kneading, frying and baking. Wouter was sent for wood, steam rose from the kettle. There was no work in the fields that day. Harmanus ate till early afternoon, ate till he’d ravaged the garden, emptied the cellar, threatened the livestock. His shirt was a patchwork of grease, egg yolk, sauce and cider. He looked drunk, like one of the geneversoaked beggars on the Heerengracht in Amsterdam. Then all at once he staggered up from the table as if he’d been wounded and fell on a pallet in the corner: he was asleep before he hit the straw.
The kitchen was devastated, the pots blackened; spatters of food maculated the floorboards, the table, the fieldstone of the hearth. The smokehouse was empty—no venison, no sturgeon, no rabbit or turkey—and the grain and condiments they’d bartered from the van der Meulens were gone too. Agatha could as well have been cooking for the whole village of Schobbejacken, for a wedding feast that had gone on for days. Exhausted, she sank into a chair and held her head in her hands.
“What’s wrong with vader?” Wouter asked. Jeremias stood at his side. They both looked scared.
Agatha stared at them in bewilderment. She’d barely had time to puzzle over it herself. What had come over him? She remembered something like it when she was a child in Twistzoekeren. One day, Dries Herpertz, the village baker, had declared that cherry tarts were the perfect food and that he would eat nothing else till the day he died. Soup, at least, you must have soup, people said. Milk. Cabbage. Meat. He turned his nose to the air, disdaining them as if they were a coven of sinners, devils set out to tempt him. For a year he ate nothing but cherry tarts. He became fat, enormous, soft as raw dough. He lost his hair, his teeth fell out. A bit of fish, his wife pleaded. Some nice braadwurst. Cheese? Grapes? Waffles? Salmon? He waved her off. She spent all day preparing fabulous meals, combed the markets for exotic fruits, dishes from Araby and the Orient, snails, truffles, the swollen livers of force-fed geese, but nothing would tempt him. Finally, after five years of trying, she dropped dead of exhaustion, face down in a filosoof casserole. Dries was unmoved. Toothless, fat as a sow, he lived on into his eighties, sitting out in front of his bakeshop and sucking the sweet red goo from thumbs the size of spatulas. But this, this was something different. “I don’t know,” she said, and her voice was a whisper.
Around nightfall, Harmanus began to toss on his pallet. He cried out in his sleep, moaning something over and over. Agatha gently shook him. “Harmanus,” she whispered. “It’s all right. Wake up.”
Suddenly his eyes snapped open. His lips began to move.
“Yes?” she said, leaning over him. “Yes, what is it?”
He was trying to say something—a single word—but couldn’t get it out.
Agatha turned to her daughter. “Quick, a glass of water.”
He sat up, drank off the water in a gulp. His lips began to quiver.
“Harmanus, what is it?”
“Pie,” he croaked.
“Pie? You want pie?”
“Pie.”
It was then that she felt herself slipping. In all their years of marriage, through all the time he’d sat helpless over his torn nets or had to be coaxed from bed to take his dory out on the windswept Scheldt, through all the tension and uncertainty of the move to the New World and the hardships they’d faced, she’d barely raised her voice to him. But now, suddenly, she felt something give way. “Pie?” she echoed. “Pie?” And then she was clawing at the shelf beside the hearth, tearing open sacks and boxes, flinging kettles, wooden bowls, porringers and spoons to the floor as if they were dross. “Pie!” she shrieked, turning on him, the cast-iron pan shielding her breast. “And what am I supposed to make it out of—nimbleweed and river sand? You’ve eaten everything else—shortening, flour, fatback, eggs, cheese, even the dried marigolds I brought with me all the way from Twistzoekeren.” She was breathing hard. “Pie! Pie! Pie!” she suddenly cried, and it was like the call of a great hysterical bird flushed from its roost; a second later she collapsed in the corner, heaving with sobs.
Katrinchee and her brothers were pressed flat against the wall, their faces small and white. Harmanus didn’t seem to notice them. He shoved himself up from the bed and began rummaging around the room for something to eat. After a moment, he came up with a bag of acorns Katrinchee had collected to make paste; crunching them between his teeth, shells and all, he wandered out into the night and disappeared.
It was past four in the morning by the time they found him. Guided by a faint glow from Van Wart Ridge, Agatha and her daughter forded Acquasinnick Creek, stumbled up the sheer bank that rose on the far side, and fought their way through a morass of briars, nettles and branches hung with nightdrift. They were terrified. Not only for husband and father, but for themselves. Lowlanders, accustomed to polder and dike and a prospect that went on and on until it faded into the indefinite blue reaches of the sea, here they were in a barbaric new world that teemed with demons and imps, with strange creatures and half-naked savages, hemmed in by the trees. They fought back panic, bit their lips and pressed on. Finally, exhausted, they found themselves in a clearing lit by the unsteady flicker of a campfire.
There he was. Harmanus. His big head and torso throwing macabre shadows against the ghostly twisted trunks of the white birches behind him, a joint the size of a thighbone pressed to his face. They stepped closer. His shirt was torn, stained with blood and grease; gobs of meat—flesh as pink and fat-ribbed as a baby’s—crackled above the flames on a crude spit. And then they saw it, lying there at his feet: the head and shoulders, the very eyes and ears, the face with its squint of death. No baby. A pig. A very particular pig. Old Volckert Varken, Van Wart’s prize boar.
Harmanus was docile, a babe himself, as Agatha drew his wrists behind him and cinched the hemp cords she’d stuffed into her apron half an hour earlier amid the wreckage of the kitchen. Then she looped a halter around his neck and guided him home like a stray calf. It was nearly dawn when they reached the cabin. Agatha led her husband through the door while the hushed boys looked on, and laid him out on the pallet like a corpse. Then she bound his feet. “Katrinchee,” she choked, her voice wound tight as the knotted cords. “Go fetch Mohonk.”
Since she was at so great a remove from the centers of learning and quackery, and since the only physician in New Amsterdam at the time was a one-eyed Walloon named Huysterkarkus who lived on the isle of the Manhattoes, some six hours away by sloop, Agatha had no recourse to the accepted modes of diagnosis and treatment. Indeed, had the great physicians of Utrecht or Padua been present, they wouldn’t have been able to do much more than cut and pray or prescribe plucked axillary hairs in a glass of cinchona wine or the menses of the dormouse packed in cow dung. But the great physicians weren’t present—it would be some five or six years before Nipperhausen himself would draw his first breath, and that in the Palatine—and so the colonists had come to rely in extreme cases on the arts and exorcisms of the Kitchawanks, Canarsees and Wappingers. Hence, Mohonk.
Half an hour later, Katrinchee stepped through the doorway, shadowed by Sachoes’ youngest son. Mohonk was twenty-two, addicted to sangarees, genever and tobacco, tall as the roof and thin as a stork. Hunched there in the doorway, the raccoon coat bristling around him, he looked like a dandelion gone to seed. “Ah,” he said, and then ran through his entire Dutch vocabulary: “Alstublieft, dank u, niet te danken.” He shuffled forward, the heavy musk of raccoon around him, and hung over the patient.
Harmanus gazed up at him like a chastened child, utterly docile and contrite. His voice was barely audible. “Pie,” he moaned.
Mohonk looked at Agatha. “Too much eat,” she said, pantomiming the act. “Eten. Te veel.”
For a moment, the Kitchawank seemed puzzled. “Eten?” he repeated. But when Agatha snatched up a wooden spoon and began furiously jabbing it at her mouth, a look first of enlightenment, then of horror, invaded the Indian’s features. He jumped back from Harmanus as if he’d been stung, his long coppery hands fumbling vaguely with the belt of his coat.
Agatha let out a gasp, little Wouter began to snuffle, Jeremias studied his feet. The Indian was backing out the door when Katrinchee stepped forward and took hold of his arm. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s the matter?” She spoke in the language of his ancestors, the language he’d taught her over the backs of the cows. But he wouldn’t answer—he just licked at his lips and tightened the belt of his coat, though it was ninety degrees already and getting hotter. “My mother,” he said finally. “I’ve got to get my mother.”
The birds had settled in the trees and the mosquitoes risen from the swamps in all their powers and dominions when he returned with a withered old squaw in dirty leggings and apron. Dried up like an ear of seed corn, stooped and palsied, her face a sinkhole, she looked as if she’d been unearthed in a peat bog or hoisted down from a hook in the Catacombs. When she was six years old and smooth as a salamander, she’d stood waist-deep in the river with the rest of the tribe and watched as the Half Moon silently beat its way up against the current. The ship was a wonder, a vision, a token from the reclusive gods who’d buckled up the mountains to preserve their doings from the eyes of mortal men. Some said it was a gift from Manitou, a great white bird come to sanctify their lives; others, less sanguine, identified it as a devilfish, come to annihilate them. Since that time she’d seen her husband hoodwinked by Jan Pieterse and Oloffe Van Wart, her daughter cannibalized, her youngest son besotted by drink and the third part of her tribe wiped out by smallpox, green sickness and various genital disorders attributed by the Walloons to the Dutch, the Dutch to the English and the English to the French. Her name was Wahwahtaysee.
