by T. C. Boyle
Mohonk said something in his language that Agatha didn’t catch, and his mother, Wahwahtaysee the Firefly, stepped cautiously into the room. She brought with her a string bag of devil-driving appurtenances (the canine teeth of opossum and she-wolf, the notochord of the sturgeon, various feathers, dried leaves and several discolored lumps of organic matter so esoteric that even she had forgotten their use or origin) and a rank wild odor that reminded Agatha of low tide at Twistzoekeren. Barely glancing at Harmanus, who had begun to thrash on his pallet and call out for pie once again, she shuffled to the table and unceremoniously dumped out the contents of the string bag. Then she called to her son in short angry syllables that shot from her lips like wasps swarming from the hive. Mohonk, in turn, said something to Katrinchee, who swung around on Jeremias and Wouter. “She wants the fire built up—a real blaze. Now run quick to the woodpile!”
Soon the room was infernally hot—hot as a Finnish sauna—and the old squaw, her sweat tinged with the rancid mink oil with which she smeared herself for health and vigor, began tossing her amulets into the flames one by one. All the while, she kept up a rasping singsong chant effective against pukwidjinnies, the ghost spirit Jeebi and devils of all stripes. As Katrinchee was later to learn from Mohonk, she was attempting to exorcise the noxious spirits that had gathered around the place and somehow infected Harmanus. For the cabin, built some six years before by Wolf Nysen, a Swede from Pavonia, had been erected at precisely the spot where the hunting party had found Minewa.
After an hour or so, the old woman thrust her hand into the fire—and held it there until Agatha thought she could smell the flesh roasting. Flames licked up through the spread fingers, played over the swollen veins that stood out on the back of her hand, yet Wahwahtaysee never flinched. The seconds bled by, Harmanus lay quiet, the children watched in horror. When finally the squaw withdrew her hand from the flames, it was unscathed. She held it up and examined it for a long while, as if she’d never before seen flesh and blood, sinew and bone; then she heaved herself up, shambled across the room and laid her palm flat against Harmanus’ brow. There was no reaction; he just lay there looking up at her without interest or animation, precisely as he had when she’d walked in the door an hour earlier. About the only difference was that he didn’t ask for pie.
But in the morning he seemed his old self. He was up at dawn, joking with the boys. Meintje van der Meulen, hearing of their plight, had sent over half a dozen little round loaves, and Harmanus selected the smallest of them, tucked it into his pouch, shouldered his axe and headed off across the fields. At noon, he returned and took a bit of pease pottage—“Have just a spoonful more, won’t you, Harmanus?” Agatha pleaded, but to no avail—and in the evening he ate a rockfish fillet, a bit of lettuce and two ears of Indian corn before drifting off into a contented sleep. Agatha felt as if an immeasurable burden had been lifted from her shoulders; she felt relieved and thankful. Yes, the garden was decimated and the smokehouse empty, and old Van Wart wanted seventy-five guilders in reparation for his boar, but at least she had her husband back, at least the family was whole once again. That night she said a prayer to Saint Nicholas.
The prayer fell on deaf ears. Or perhaps it was intercepted by Knecht Ruprecht, the saint’s malicious servant. Or perhaps, given the mysteries of the New World and its multifarious and competing divinities, the notion of prayer as Agatha had known it in Twistzoekeren didn’t hold much water. In any case, the tempo of disintegration began to accelerate: on the very day following Harmanus’ return to the realm of moderation, an accident befell Jeremias.
Picture the day: hot, cloudless, the air so thick you couldn’t fall down in a swoon if you wanted to. Jeremias was helping his father clear brush on a bristling hillock that abutted Van Wart Pond, a.k.a. Wapatoosik Water, working mechanically, oblivious alike to nip of mosquito and bite of deerfly. He must have humped past the duncolored pond twenty times—arms laden, eyes stung with sweat—before it occurred to him to shuck his clothes and refresh himself. Naked, he waded into the muck at the pond’s edge. He was feeling his way gingerly, the mud tugging at him as if it were alive, when suddenly the bottom of the pond fell away and something seized his right ankle with a grip as fiery and indomitable as Death. It wasn’t Death. It was a snapping turtle, Chelydra serpentina, big as a wagonwheel. By the time Harmanus got there with his axe, the water had gone red with blood and he had to wade in up to his knees to locate the creature’s evil, horny, antediluvian head and cleave it off at the carapace. The head stayed put. The rest of the thing, claws still churning, slid back into the murk.
At home, Harmanus pried open the locked jaws with a blacksmith’s tongs, and Agatha dressed the wound as best she could. Of course, it would be some two hundred years before the agents of sepsis were identified (invisible little animalcules indeed—any fool knew that night vapors turned a wound black and that either the presence or absence of comets made it draw), and so Jeremias’ ankle was bound in dirty rags and left to itself. Five days later the boy’s lower leg was the color of rotten summer squash and oozing a pale wheylike fluid from beneath the bandages. Fever set in. Mohonk prescribed beaver water fresh from the bladder, but each beaver he shot perversely loosed its bowels before it could be drawn ashore. The fever worsened. On the seventh day, Harmanus appeared in the doorway with the crosscut saw from the woodpile. Half a mile away, perched on the lip of the Blue Rock with Jan Pieterse and a cask of Barbados rum, Mohonk, Katrinchee and little Wouter tried to shut their ears to the maddening, startled, breathless screams that silenced the birds like the coming of night.
Miraculously, Jeremias survived. Harmanus didn’t. When bone separated from bone and his son’s pallet became a froth of flesh and churning fluids, he threw down the saw and bolted headlong for the woods, moaning like a gutshot horse. He ran for nearly two miles and then flung himself face down in the bushes, where he lay in shock till after sundown. The next day his skin began to itch, and then finally to erupt in pustules; by the end of the week he lay stretched out supine on the pallet next to his son’s, eyes swollen closed, his face like something out of a leper’s nightmare. Again, Mohonk was called in, this time to lay poultices of sassafras over the sores; when these proved ineffective, Agatha appealed to the patroon, begging him to send downriver for Huysterkarkus. Van Wart was sorry, but he couldn’t help her.
It wasn’t Katrinchee’s fault. All right, perhaps she was dreaming of Mohonk and the way he’d touched her the week before as they emerged from a frolic in the icy waters of Acquasinnick Creek, and perhaps she had sprained her wrist hoeing up a new cabbage patch, but it could have happened to anyone. The stewed haunch of venison, that is. She was moving toward the table with it, the place cramped anyway, tiny, unlivable, the size of the outhouse they’d had in Zeeland, when she banged up against the milkpail, skated across the floor in her wooden shoes and dumped the whole mess—hot enough to repel invaders at the castle wall—down her father’s shirt.
It was the end of Harmanus. He rose from the straw pallet in one astonishing leap that left him hanging in the air like a puppet for a full five seconds before he burst through the new shutters without so much as a whimper and ran off into the trees, flailing blindly from one trunk to another as the family gave chase. They found him amongst the jagged stones at the base of Van Wart Ridge, a sheer drop of some one hundred fifty feet. Jeremias had trouble with the chronology of events that year, but as near as he could recall, it was about a month later that lightning struck the house and burned it to the ground, taking his mother and Wouter with it. The next day, Katrinchee consigned herself to the fires of hell by running off to Indian Point with the heathen Mohonk.
When November came around and the rents fell due, Van Wart’s agent rode up from the lower manor house in Croton, a saddle pouch crammed with accounts ledgers flapping at his rear. He’d expected trouble at the Van Brunt farm—they were delinquent both with regard to firewood and produce delivery—but when he found himself at the end of the cart track
that gave onto the property, he was stupefied. Where the cabin had once stood, there were only ashes. The grain had parched in the field, and then, beaten down by the first winter storm, it had frozen to the ground in scattered clumps. As for the livestock, it had disappeared altogether: the far-flung heaps of feathers gave testimony to the fate of the poultry, but the ox and milch cows were nowhere to be seen. Now the agent was a practical man, a scrupulous man, big of bottom and gut. Though he would have liked nothing better than to hie himself to Jan Pieterse’s trading post and sit before the fire with a mug of lager, he nonetheless chucked the cold flanks of his mount and trundled forward to pursue the matter further.
He circumnavigated the white oak that stood in the front yard, turned up a rusted plow by the half-finished fence, peered down the well. Just as he was about to give it up, he spotted a wisp of smoke rising from the bristle of woods before him. Pausing only to relight his pipe and shift his buttocks in the icy saddle, Van Wart’s agent traversed the clearing and plunged into the winter-stripped undergrowth on the far side. The first thing he saw was the ox, or rather what was left of it, hide frozen to bone, eyes, ears and lips picked away to nothing by woodland scavengers. Beyond it, a crude lean-to. “Hallo!” he called. There was no response.
Then he saw the boy. Swathed in rags and depilitated furs, crouched atop a cowhide in the shadow of the lean-to. Watching him.
The agent maneuvered the horse forward and cleared his throat. “Van Brunt?” he asked.
Jeremias nodded. The temperature was in the teens, the wind from the northwest, out of Canada. He shifted his good leg beneath him. The other one, the one that ended in a wooden peg like the pugnacious Pieter Stuyvesant’s, lay exposed, insensitive to the cold. He watched in silence as the fat man above him twisted in the saddle to reach behind him and produce a big leather-bound book. The fat man thumbed through this book, marked the place with the stem of his pipe and looked down at him. “For the use and increase of this land under the patroonship of Oloffe Stephanus Van Wart in the Van Wartwyck Patent, you now stand in arrears of two fathoms of firewood, two bushels of wheat, two pair of fowl, twenty-five pounds of butter and five hundred guilders annual rent. Plus a special assessment of seventy-five guilders in the case of one misappropriated boar.”
Jeremias said nothing. He leaned forward to rake up the coals of the fire, the smoke stinging his eyes. The fat man was wearing shoes with silver buckles, flannel hose, a fur cloak and rabbit-skin earmuffs beneath his high-peaked hat. “I say, Van Brunt: have you heard me?” the agent asked.
A long moment ticked by, the winter woods as silent as a tomb. “I’m just a boy,” Jeremias said finally, his voice choked with the weight of all he’d been through. “Vader and moeder are dead, and everybody else too.”
The agent shifted in his saddle, cleared his throat a second time, then drew on his pipe. A gust tore the smoke from his lips. “You mean you haven’t got it, then?”
Jeremias looked away.
“Well, sir,” the agent said after a moment, “I must inform you that you are in default of the conditions of your agreement with the patroon. I’m afraid you’ll have to vacate the premises.”
Ancestral Dirt
Depeyster Van Wart, twelfth heir to Van Wart Manor, the late seventeenth-century country house that lay just outside Peterskill on Van Wart Ridge where it commanded a sweeping view of the town dump and the rushing, refuse-clogged waters of Van Wart Creek, was a terraphage. That is, he ate dirt. Nothing so common as leaf mold or carpet dust, but a very particular species of dirt, bone-dry and smelling faintly of the deaths of the trillions of microscopic creatures that gave it body and substance, dirt that hadn’t seen the light of day in three hundred years and sifted cool and sterile through the fingers, as rarefied in its way as the stuff trapped beneath the temple at Angkor Wat or moldering in Grant’s Tomb. No, what he ate was ancestral dirt, scooped with a garden digger from the cool weatherless caverns beneath the house. Even now, as he sat idly at his ceremonial desk behind the frosted glass door at Depeyster Manufacturing, thinking of lunch, the afternoon paper and the acquisition of property, the business envelope in his breast pocket was half-filled with it. From time to time, ruminative, he would wet the tip of his forefinger and dip it furtively into the envelope before bringing it to his lips.
Some smoked; others drank, cheated at cards or abused their wives. But Depeyster indulged only this one harmless eccentricity, his sole vice. He was a toddler, no more than two, when he first wandered away from his nurse (an ancient black woman named Ismailia Pompey who’d been with the family so long she was able to overlook the fact that Lincoln had freed the slaves), found the bleached and paint-stripped door ajar and pushed his way into the comforting cool depths of the cellar. Silently, he pulled the door to and sat down to his first repast. While he squatted there in the dark, grinding dirt between his milk teeth, shaping it with his tongue, relishing the faint fecal taste of it, a search that became part of the family legend raged on above him. Edging back into that nurturing ancestral darkness, he must have heard his name called a thousand times while he listened to the beat of frantic footsteps overhead, his mother’s voice on the telephone, his father, summoned home from the office, raging, angrily clacking decanter and glass. How many times had the door to his sanctuary been flung back so that he could see framed in a rectangle of light the face of one worry-worn adult after another? How many times had they propelled his name into that consuming darkness before finally, when the sun had set and they were dragging the pond, he had emerged, lips smeared with his secret? His mother had pressed him to her bosom in a nimbus of body heat and perfume, and his father, that humorless and profligate man, dissolved in tears: the wayward child had come home.
He was no child now. Fifty years old—fifty-one come October—smooth and handsome and with an accent rich with the patrician emphases of the Roosevelts, Schuylers, Depeysters and Van Rensselaers who’d preceded him, scion of the Van Wart dynasty and nominal head of Depeyster Manufacturing, he was a man in the prime of life, tanned, graceful and athletic, the cynosure of the community. He was also a man who carried his sorrow around with him like that hidden envelope of dust. That sorrow was an ache in the loins, a stutter-shot to the heart—to think of it was to think of extinction, the black and uncaring universe, the futility of human existence and endeavor: he was the last of the Van Warts.
Married twenty-three years to a woman who had given him one child—a daughter—and then redirected her sexual energies toward shopping, facials, ethnic cooking and Indian relief, he had tried everything conceivable to produce a legitimate heir. In the early days, when they were still conjugal, he tried ointments, unguents and evil-smelling concoctions he’d purchased from sideways-glancing clerks in Chinatown. He dressed in costume, read his wife lubricious passages from Lolita, The Carpetbaggers and the Old Testament, consulted therapists, counselors, physicians, technicians, quacks and horse breeders, but all to no avail. Not only did Joanna fail to become pregnant again, she began dodging him at bedtime, in the morning, at lunch and in the immediate vicinity of any of the six bathrooms. He was putting too much pressure on her, she said. Sex had become an obligation, a duty, alternately clinical and perverse, like being in a laboratory one day and a witchdoctor’s hut the next. What did he think she was, a prize bitch or something? It was not long after that she’d discovered the Indians.
Anyone else might have petitioned for divorce, but not Depeyster. No Van Wart had ever divorced, and he wasn’t about to set a precedent. He loved her, too, in his way. She was a striking woman, with her startled eyes, her fine bones and the way she carried herself like a gift on a tray, and sometimes he found himself longing for her as she used to be. There were times, though, when he let his mind wander and pictured her fatally injured in an auto accident or the victim of a malignant virus. There would be a funeral. He would grieve. Wear a black armband. And then go out and find himself a strong-legged fecund young equestrian or acrobat. Or one of the barefoo
ted, brassiereless, vacant-eyed college girls who slipped in and out of the house under his daughter’s tutelage. Fertile ground. That’s what he needed. And if the time should come when he himself was at fault, when the mechanism failed to respond as it should, well, there was always the subzero vault at Trilby, Inc., where a dozen packets of his seed lay sequestered in perpetual readiness.
Depeyster sighed, and had another pinch of dirt. It was too hot for golf—ninety-five already and with the humidity up around the breaking point—and the thought of rigging up the Catherine Depeyster was enough to prostrate him. He glanced at his watch: 1:15. Too early to go home yet, but then who was he fooling? Every last worker at the plant, right on down to the pimply fat girl they’d taken on in the packing room two days ago, knew that he couldn’t tell a muffin from an aximax and couldn’t have cared less. So to hell with them. What he would do, he thought, standing and meditatively stroking the envelope in his breast pocket, was go home for a bite of lunch, an iced tea and the afternoon edition of the Peterskill Post Dispatch Herald Star Reporter, have a nap and then, if it cooled off later in the day, drive by the Crane property and dream that old man Crane had sold it to him.
At home, in the kitchen, slicing a tomato on the mahogany sideboard presented to Pierre Van Wart by the Marquis de Lafayette in 1778 as an expression of heartfelt gratitude for nursing him through a six-week illness, Depeyster glanced down at the headlines of the paper, which lay, still folded, beside him. SCHOOL BOARD MEETS, he read. MURIEL MOTT BACK FROM TANZANIA TREK. The tomato was still warm from the garden. He cut it in thick slabs, peeled a Bermuda onion and dug into the refrigerator for the ham, white cheddar and mayonnaise. RUSSIANS INVADE CZECHOSLOVAKIA. The ancient planks groaned beneath his feet, Virginia ham and pungent white cheese mounted on a piece of corn rye; he sliced the onion, spread mayonnaise and carried plate and newspaper to the cherrywood table that had been in the family for better than two hundred years, DOGS ALLOWED TO RUN WILD. FAGNOLI GARBAGE HIT BY STRIKE. There were salt and pepper on the table in Delft shakers molded in the shape of wooden clogs. He sprinkled the tomato faces with both, and then, glancing over his shoulder, he slipped a hand into his breast pocket for a pinch of dirt. When dusted on the sandwich, it was barely distinguishable from the other condiments.
