by T. C. Boyle
Though they were now well-furnished (in addition to what the van der Meulens and the others had donated, the patroon, on coming to terms with his newest tenants, had sent them a wagonload of farm and household implements—on loan, of course—as well as a yoke of sway-backed oxen, a yearling calf to go with the manorial cow Oom Egthuysen had lent them, and three Hampshire shoats), nonetheless Jeremias had planted late and harvested little. The wheat, which was customarily sown in the autumn rather than the spring, had done poorly, as had his crops of rye and peas, which he’d hoped to use for winter fodder. He’d done well with Indian corn, largely because of Katrinchee’s expertise, and their kitchen garden—cabbages, turnips, pumpkins and herbs—had flourished for the same reason. Still, with little grain for bread or porridge and the lion’s share of the corn reserved for the stock, the menage at Nysen’s Roost would be almost wholly dependent on game during the coming winter.
Problem was, the game was gone.
In the days and weeks following Wolf Nysen’s visit, wildlife became increasingly scarce, almost as if the madman, like some insatiable Pied Piper, had taken the birds and beasts with him. Where Jeremias might have shot a dozen pigeons in the past, he now came back with one. Where he might have swatted gobblers from the trees and tucked them in a sack that bulged so he could barely carry it, he now found none. Ducks and geese eschewed the marshes, the deer had vanished, and bears, which tasted like pine gum and tallow anyway, had gone early to their dens. Even the squirrels and rabbits seemed to have disappeared. Of necessity, Jeremias took to the river, and for a while the river sustained them. Through November and the grim crowded days of early December, as the sun faded from the sky and the breath of the Arctic stretched a sheet of ice across Acquasinnick Bay, Katrinchee made fish balls, fish pie, fish in blankets, fried fish, boiled fish, fish with turnips and pine nuts, fish with fish. But then winter settled in in earnest, the ice stretched to the foot of Dunderberg and back and there were no more fish.
Day by day it grew colder. The well crusted over. Wolves sniffed at the door. In the woods, jays and sparrows froze to their perches, as lifeless and hard as ceramic ornaments on a Christmas tree. There was an ice storm at the New Year, followed by dropping temperatures and snow that accumulated like the sands of Egypt. When the wolves made off with one of the shoats, Jeremias moved the animals indoors.
In spite of it all, Katrinchee seemed to grow stronger by the day. She took the fish regimen in stride, put on weight, grew her hair out. For the first time in years she slept through the night. When Jeremias inventoried the corn and cut their daily ration by half, she became a genius of conservation. When the snow mounted and Jeremy took cold, when the winds blew through the house with such force as to snuff the taper on the mantelpiece, when it was dark as night though half past one by the clock, she never uttered a complaint. Not even the uncomfortable proximity of the animals could discourage her, though the shoats capered underfoot, the old cow moaned in the dark like one of the unburied dead and the oxen drooled, stank, chewed their cuds, dropped their dung and breathed their hot foul breath in her face. No, it was a small thing that undid her finally, a serendipitous discovery Jeremias made out on the front stoep one icebound morning toward the end of January.
What he discovered there on the porch, come to them like an answered prayer, was meat. Rich, red, life-sustaining meat. He pulled open the door to step outside and relieve himself, and blundered into the stripped and freshly dressed carcass of a doe, hanging by its hind legs from the roof of the porch. He couldn’t believe it. A doe. Hanging there. And already butchered. Jeremias let out two hungry hoots of joy—Staats, it must have been Staats—and in the time it takes to draw a knife he had one haunch on the spit and the other in the pot. He was so excited his hands were trembling. He didn’t notice the look on his sister’s face.
When finally he did notice, the aroma of roasting venison filled the room and Katrinchee was backed up in the corner, shrunk in on herself like a spider starved in its web. “Get it out of here,” she said. “Take it away.”
Already the flames licked up to sear the meat; fat gilded the joint and dripped hissing into the coals. Little Jeremy stood transfixed before the fire, hands in his pants and a rhapsodic smile on his face, while Jeremias hustled around the room, hunting up the odd vegetable for the pot. The tone of his sister’s voice stopped Jeremias cold. “What? What did you say?”
She was twisting the hem of her dress in both hands as if she were throttling a doll. Her hair was in her face. And her face—drawn and blanched, the eyes big with terror—was the face of a madwoman clinging to the bars in the asylum at Schobbejacken. “The smell,” she murmured, her voice trailing off. In the next moment she was shrieking: “Get it out! Get it out of here!”
Jeremias could barely speak for the saliva foaming in his mouth, barely think for the knife and fork sawing away in his head, barely focus on her for the vision of the golden dripping haunch on the spit and the pretty little hoof projecting from the lip of the pot. But then he looked hard at her, and all at once he understood: it was the meat. The venison. She wanted to take it away from him. When he spoke, the words came in a rush. It was all in the past, he told her—she had to be reasonable. What were they going to eat? They were into the seed corn already. Should they kill the livestock and starve next year? “It’s venison, Katrinchee. Fresh meat. Nothing more. Eat it to keep up your strength—or don’t eat it if you really can’t. But surely you couldn’t … you wouldn’t prevent me, your own brother … and what about your son?”
She just shook her head, back and forth, implacable, inconsolable, shaken with regret. She was sobbing. Biting her finger. Jeremy buried himself in her skirts; Jeremias rose from the hearth to hold her, comfort her, remonstrate with her. “No,” she said, “no, no, a thousand times no,” and shook her head late into the night while her brother and son sat down at the table and picked clean the least bones of the butchered doe and then cracked them with a mallet to get at the grainy rich marrow. By then, Katrinchee was beyond caring. For the second time in her short life she’d found the edge and slipped over it.
It was February. The snow fell steadily, relentlessly, mountains of it lying over the countryside in frozen blue ripples that were like the folds of a shroud. They were down to quarter rations of corn now, and even so they were decimating next year’s seed. “Half a bushel of this,” Jeremias would say, pounding the hard kernels to meal, “would yield a hundred next summer. But what can you do?” Katrinchee could barely lift the spoon to her mouth for guilt. She was having trouble sleeping too, the images of her father, mother, little Wouter haunting her the minute she closed her eyes. The deer hadn’t come from Staats—he was having a terrible time finding meat himself, he told them a week after the second one, gutted, skinned and butchered, had appeared mysteriously on the porch. She’d known all along. Not from Staats, not from God in his heaven. It was her father, poor scalded man, who brought them … to punish her.
One night Jeremias woke from a dreamless sleep and felt a draft of cold air on his face. When he looked up, he saw that the door stood open, and that the hills and trees and naked snowfields had come to bed with him. Cursing, he pushed himself up and crossed the room to slam shut the door, but at the last moment something arrested him. Tracks. There were tracks—footprints—in the fresh dusting of snow on the stoep. Jeremias puzzled over them a moment, then eased the door shut and called to his sister in an urgent whisper. She didn’t answer. When he lit the taper, he saw with a start that little Jeremy was sleeping alone. Katrinchee was gone.
This time—the first time—he found her huddled beneath the white oak. She was in her nightdress, and she’d taken a knife to her hair; strands of it lay about her in the snow like the remains of a night-blooming plant. Inside, he tried to comfort her. “It’s all right,” he soothed, pressing her to him. “What was it—a bad dream?”
There they were, in tableau: the animals of the manger, the sleeping child, the mutilated brother an
d mad sister. “A dream,” she echoed, and her voice was distant, vague. Behind them, the calf bleated forlornly and the hogs grunted in their sleep. “I feel so … so …” (she meant to say “guilty,” but that’s not how it came out) “… so hungry.”
Jeremias put her to bed, fed the fire and boiled up some milk for porridge. She lay motionless on the husk mattress, staring at the ceiling. When he brought the spoon to her lips, she pushed it away. And so the next day, and the next. He made her a stew of turnip and dried fish, baked some heavy hard bread (full of weevils, unfortunately) and gave it to her with a slab of cheese, cut the ears off one of the shoats to make her a meat broth, but she wouldn’t eat. She just lay there, staring, the white parchment of her skull gleaming through the stubble of hair, her cheeks sunk in on themselves.
It was in early March, on a night that dripped from the eaves with the promise of warmth, that she wandered off again. This time she pulled the door shut behind her, and Jeremias didn’t notice she was gone till first light. By then the snow had started. A wet warm drizzling snow that changed twice to rain, hovered a while on the brink of freezing, and finally, propelled by gusts blown in off the river, became a whirlwind of hard stinging pellets. By the time Jeremias had dressed the boy and started off after her, the wind was steady and the visibility no more than twenty feet.
This time there were no tracks. With the boy on his back and the pegleg skidding out from under him, Jeremias traced an ever-widening circle around the house, shouting her name into the wind. Nothing came back to him. The trees were mute, the wind threw its voice in a hundred artful ways, beads of snow rattled off his coat, his hat, his muffler. Struggling, stumbling, afraid of losing his way in the snow, afraid for Jeremy’s life as well as his own, he finally turned around and hobbled back to the cabin. He tried again, early in the afternoon, getting as far as the cornfield where he’d encountered Wolf Nysen. For a moment he thought he heard her, way off in the distance, her voice raised in a doleful bone-chilling wail, but then the wind took it over from him and he couldn’t be sure. He called her name, over and over, till his foot went numb and the wind drove the strength from his body. Just before dark, he put Jeremy to bed and went out again, but the snow had drifted so high he was exhausted before he reached the cornfield. “Katrinchee!” he shouted till his voice went hoarse. “Katrinchee!” But the only answer was the strange mournful cry of a great white owl beating through the storm like a lost soul.
It snowed for two days and two nights. On the morning of the third day, Jeremias fed the livestock, closed up the house and struggled through the drifts to the van der Meulens’, his nephew on his back. Staats alerted the Cranes, Reinier Oothouse and the people at the upper manor house, then rode in to Jan Pieterse’s to see if she’d turned up there, and if she hadn’t, to locate an Indian tracker.
A party of Kitchawanks went out that afternoon, but came back empty-handed: the snow had obliterated any sign of her. If a twig had caught in her dress or a stone squirted out underfoot, the evidence was buried under three feet of snow. Jeremias despaired, but he wouldn’t give up. Next morning he borrowed Staats’ cart horse, and while Meintje looked after Jeremy, he and Douw poked through copses and thickets, searched and re-searched the valleys and streambeds, knocked on doors at outlying farms. They roamed as far afield as the Kitchawank village at Indian Point to the south, and the Weckquaesgeek camp at Suycker Broodt to the north. There was no trace of her.
It was Jan Pieterse who finally found her, and he wasn’t looking. He was out behind the trading post one morning toward the end of the month, hauling a bucket of slops down to the Blue Rock so he could pitch them into the river, as he did every morning, the peglegged Van Brunt kid and his mad wandering shorn-headed miscegenating sister the farthest things from his mind, when something just off the path up ahead caught his eye. A swatch of blue. In a snowbank at the base of the Blue Rock, no more than a hundred feet from the store. He wondered at that swatch of blue, and set down the bucket to slash through the crusted snow and investigate. The weather had turned warmer the past few days, and his eyes had gradually gotten used to the appearance of color in what had been for some months now a world as blank as an untouched canvas. Scabs of mud had begun to break through the path he’d carved, the sky that hung low overhead like a dirty sheet had given way to the fine cerulean of a midsummer’s day, pussy willows were in bloom along the Van Wartwyck road and tiny tight-wound buds graced box elder and sycamore. But this, this was something else. Something man-made. Something blue.
In a moment, he was standing over the spot, braced uneasily against the yielding snow on the one side and the great smooth slab of rock on the other. He was staring down at a piece of cloth projecting from the snow as if it were just the tip of something larger. He was a shopkeeper and he knew that cloth. It was blue kersey. He’d sold bolts of it to the Indians and to the farmers’ wives. The Indians fashioned blankets from it. The farmers’ wives liked it for aprons. And nightdresses.
Jeremias buried her beneath the white oak. Dominie Van Schaik turned up to say a few words over the grave, while the six van der Meulens, draped in black like a flock of maes dieven, comprised the mourners. Jeremias knelt by the grave, his lips moving as if in prayer. But he wasn’t praying. He was cursing God in his heaven and all his angels, cursing St. Nicholas and the patroon and the dismal alien place that rose up around him in a Gehenna of trees, valleys and bristling hilltops. If only they’d stayed in Schobbejacken, he kept telling himself, none of this would have happened. He knelt there, feeling sorry for Katrinchee, for his father and mother and little Wouter, feeling sorry for himself, but when finally he stood and took his place among the mourners, there was a hard cold look in his eye, the look of intransigence and invincibility he’d leveled on the schout time and again: he was down, but not defeated. No, never defeated.
As for Jeremy, two and a half years old, he didn’t know what defeat was—or triumph either. He held back while first his uncle, then grootvader van der Meulen and the rest knelt at the grave. He didn’t cry, didn’t really comprehend the loss. What was this before him but a mound of naked dirt, no different from the furrows Jeremias turned up with the plow? Moles lived in the ground, beetles, earthworms, slugs. His mother didn’t live in the ground.
Afterward, as they sat over the cider and meat pies Meintje had brought along for the funeral supper, Staats lit his pipe, let out a long sigh, and said, in an unnaturally high voice: “It’s been a trying year, younker.”
Jeremias barely heard him.
“You know, you’re always welcome to come back to us.”
Barent, eleven now, and with the square head and cornsilk hair of his mother, sucked noisily at a cube of venison. The younger children—Jannetje, Klaes and little Jeremy—sat hunched over their plates, silent as stones. Meintje smiled. “I’ve got a contract with the patroon,” Jeremias said.
Staats dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. “You can’t go on without a woman,” he yodeled. “You’ve got a boy here not three years old and nobody to look after him.”
Jeremias knew his adoptive father was right, of course. There was no way he could go on farming without someone to share the work—especially with Jeremy underfoot. Jeremias may have been mulish, pertinacious, headstrong and tough, but he was no fool. The day Katrinchee disappeared, as the hopeless hours wound down and he searched the woods till his leg gave out, the germ of an idea took hold of him. There it was, in his head. A plan. Practical and romantic both: a contingency plan. “I’ll get one,” he said.
Staats snorted. Meintje glanced up from her plate, and even Douw, who’d been focusing every particle of his attention on the meat pie and pickled cabbage before him, paused to shoot him a questioning glance. There was a moment of silence, during which the children stopped eating to look around them as if a ghost had entered the room. Meintje was the first to catch on. “You don’t mean—?”
“That’s right,” Jeremias said. “Neeltje Cats.”
T
ofu
“I forget, did you say you like tofu or not?”
“Sure,” she said, “anything.” She was huddled in a ball in the corner of Tom Crane’s bed, fully clothed, in gloves, maxicoat and knit hat, sipping sour wine from a Smucker’s jar. Once, maybe twice in her life, she’d been colder. She pulled the musty frigid blankets and down comforters up over her head and tried to keep her shoulders from quaking.
“Green onions?”
“Sure,” came the muffled reply.
“Garlic? Soy grits? Squash? Brewer’s yeast?”
Jessica’s head emerged from beneath the blankets. “You ever know me to complain?” She was six feet off the ground, which was where Tom Crane had located his bed—on high, and giving onto bare rafters strewn with cobwebs, the dangling husks of dead insects, streaks of bird or bat shit, and worse. The first time she’d ever visited the cabin—summer before last, and in the company of Walter—she’d asked Tom about that. He’d been sitting by the greasy back window in his greasy Salvation Army armchair, his hair down past his shoulders even then, drinking an evil-looking concoction of powdered milk, egg yolk, lecithin, protein powder and wheat germ out of a pint glass borrowed from an Irish pub in the City. “Stop by sometime in the winter,” he said, “and you won’t have to ask.”
Now she understood. Up here, aloft in the place of honor, she began to feel the first faint emanations from the woodstove. She held out her glass. “You mean it never warms up down there?”
