World's End (16 page)

Her son Squagganeek
²
was born a year later. His eyes were green, like Agatha's, and this peculiarity caused a good deal of consternation among the Kitchawanks. They were the eyes of greed, argued one faction, the eyes of a devil, a sorcerer, a white man, and the infant should be cast out to wander the waste places of the earth. But another faction, Wahwahtaysee among them, argued that he was the son of the son of a chief and that he had his place in the tribe. As things turned out, none of it really mattered. It was Mohonk, and Mohonk alone, who would decide the fate of his son.

But Mohonk had turned strange. Ever since she'd cut her hair, Katrinchee had noticed the change in him. He was testy. He was morose. He launched interminable thick-tongued diatribes against the least offensive objects—stones, dirt clods, fallen leaves. He drank gin and it made him crazy. Snow owl, he called her and pointed derisively to her cropped head. Her hair had been the color of the hawk's underbelly, copper red, sacred and unattainable. Now, with her smooth white skull that looked like the bulb of an onion and the eyes that stared out of her face in their huge riveting grief, she looked like the snow owl. One night, three days drunk on the Hollands he'd filched from Jan Pieterse, he rose shakily to his feet and stood over her as she suckled the infant. “Snow owl,” he said, the light of the fire elongating his cheekbones and masking his eyes in shadow, “go catch a mouse.” Then he pulled the raccoon coat tight around him and lurched off into the night on spindle legs. She never saw him again.

To the Weckquaesgeeks, she was a holy fool, one of the mad wandering ones to whom visions are granted. (And she did have her visions. Shivering in the hut, Squagganeek at her breast, she saw Harmanus, his limbs twisted from the fall, dancing a macabre shuffle; she saw Agatha with her broom raised in anger; she saw Jeremias and the terrible annealed scar that terminated his leg.) The day after Mohonk walked out on her she'd gathered up her things, strapped Squagganeek to her back and followed the river north; two days later she stumbled across the Weckquaesgeek camp on a miserable wind-swept
beach below Suycker Broodt mountain. With her shorn head, tattered dress and the trembling lips that never ceased their muttering, she came on them like an apparition, a pale ghost, and they gathered around to stare at her and the freak of an infant she held in her arms. Exhausted, she fell back against a tree and slumped to the ground; within minutes, she was asleep.

In the morning she woke to find that someone had thrown a bearskin over her legs and set a bowl of corn mush on the stump beside her. The Weckquaesgeeks—an unlucky tribe, losers of fingers, toes and eyes, disease-ridden and unkempt—watched her at a respectful distance. Slowly, with trembling hands and wild eyes, she brought the bowl to her lips and ate. Then, after making gestures of thanksgiving and suckling Squagganeek at her breast, she got up and built herself a crude hut against the base of a tree. From then on, each morning, she found a bowl of squash or sturgeon or acorn meal on her doorstep, or perhaps a pigeon or rabbit (but no venison—no, never venison). The seasons changed. Squagganeek grew. She squatted in the hut and chewed hides till they were soft, wore moccasins and a leather apron like a squaw and shaved her head to the quick whenever she happened to reach up and feel the bristle sprouting there. Cramped, dirty, a breeding ground for ticks, chiggers, gnats and no-see-ums, the hut was no better than an animal's den. But what could she expect? This was her due.

At one point, for her son's sake, she thought of returning to Van Wartwyck, of throwing herself on the mercy of the patroon and begging for shelter and employment, but she knew there would be no mercy for her. She was a miscegenator, a renegade, a whore: there were penalties for what she'd done. The Dutch laws, now superseded by as yet undefined English ones, called for a fine of twenty-five guilders for cohabiting with a squaw, escalating to fifty if she conceived and to a hundred if she gave birth; the concept of a white woman fornicating with a greasy musk-smeared savage was so utterly unthinkable that the good burghers and Boers hadn't bothered with a law—bodily mutilation and banishment would suffice in a pinch.

And so it was—life like a succession of wounds, no joy but for the child, the seasons giving way in null repetition—until one day in early summer a waking vision took on flesh and came to redeem her.
She was crouched in the hut, chewing hides, Squagganeek's cries drifting faintly to her as the Weckquaesgeek boys tormented him for his green eyes and mad white mother, when a face appeared in the doorway. It was a face she'd seen a thousand times in her sleep or in the embers of the fire, but now it was changed somehow, no longer the face of a boy—no, it was fuller, harder, better defined. She squeezed her eyes shut and murmured an incantation. Nothing happened. The face hung there in that doorway so low even a dog would have to stoop to enter, hung there as if disembodied, the features that were so familiar and yet so alien to her creased with shock and bewilderment. She was about to cry out, shriek his name—anything to break the spell—but Jeremias spoke first. He uttered a single word, his voice quavering with shock and disbelief: “Katrinchee?”

They'd taken him to their bosom, Staats and Meintje, fed and clothed him and treated him as one of their own. He worked in the fields alongside Staats and his eldest boy Douw, wielding scythe and mathook like a full-grown man, though he was just sixteen and laboring under his handicap. When they sat down to table, Meintje always managed to find him a choice cut of meat or a lump of sugar for his hot chocolate, and she was always urging more on him, as if to make up for his time of affliction and want when there was no hand to feed him. They gave him affection and they gave him hope, and Jeremias never forgot it. But when he thought of Van Wart, growing fat off the labor of others, when he thought of the bow-backed
schout
and that lard-ass of an agent who'd driven him from the farm where his father had died, he felt the resentment seethe in him like pus in a wound.

He'd lived at peace with himself for two and a half years, thinking neither of past nor future, whittling a new strut for his leg every few months as he grew up and away from the old one, picking at the acne that sprouted like bread mold on his face and neck, hunting the woods and fishing the river. But then one afternoon he walked down to Jan Pieterse's—for some fish hooks, he told himself, but in truth because he was feeling restless, stifled, dissatisfied in a new and indefinable way, and he just wanted to get away from the farm for a bit—and all that suddenly changed. He was in the back of the store,
savoring the smells, the quiet, the rich immovable shadows that were like the background of a painting he'd seen once in the nave of a church in Schobbejacken, lingering amongst the furs that whispered of secret wild places, the hogsheads of ale and salt herring, the sacks of spices, the bolts of cloth and kegs of spirits. From outside, beyond the open door, the voices of Jan Pieterse and Farmer Ten Haer drifted lazily across the sunstruck afternoon. Jeremias leaned back against a shelf of furs, the fish hooks gone warm in his hand, and closed his eyes.

When he opened them, a girl was standing there, her back against the wall, looking as if she'd just discovered a toad in the butter dish. “Oh,” she said, glancing away, catching his eye and then glancing away again, “I didn't know anyone was back here.” She was holding a length of ribbon in her hand, and she was dressed in homespun skirts, linen cap and a white blouse that pinched her arms just above the elbow.

“I'm back here, I guess,” Jeremias said. He felt stupid; there were cobwebs in his brain. “Um, I mean, I was just buying some hooks.” He opened his palm and held out his hand to show her.

“Ja,” she said, “and I was buying ribbon.” She dangled a length of black armozine and smiled.

He smiled back and said he'd never seen her here before.

She shrugged as if to say so much the worse for you, and then found it necessary to balance on one foot and twist a finger in her hair while she told him she lived in Croton, near the Van Wart house. As an afterthought, she added, “Sometime
vader
brings me up this way when he has business.”

Then they both fell silent and Jeremias became aware of a new voice outside the door—a voice he'd heard before, cadences summoned from some deep recess of memory. He heard Farmer Ten Haer blustering about Wolf Nysen, heard Jan Pieterse's scoffing retort, and then that other voice, and it made him go cold.

“And you?” she said finally.

Jan Pieterse's dog changed his position among the furs with a sybaritic grunt. Jeremias found himself staring into a pair of eyes that were like the blueware of the rich, a sheen of glaze and a color as deep as the Scheldt. “Me?” he said. “I live up on the van der Meulen farm,
but I'm a Van Brunt. Jeremias Van Brunt. I'll be seventeen this summer.”

“I'm Neeltje Cats,” she said. “I just turned fifteen.” And then, with pride: “My father's the
schout.”

Yes. Of course. The
schout.
Jeremias' eyes went hard and he gritted his teeth.

“What—?” she began, and then faltered. She was staring at the loose cuff of his pantaloons. “What happened to you?”

He looked down at his wooden leg as if he were seeing it for the first time. Suddenly the atmosphere had changed. He couldn't see the pelts for the claws that dully glinted in the light filtering through the open door. “I had an accident,” he said. “When I was fourteen.”

She nodded as if to say yes, it doesn't matter, the world's a harsh place—or so her parents had told her. “My father says Pieter Stuyvesant was a great man.”

“He was,” Jeremias said. “He is.” And then all at once he felt something go loose in him, some cord that had been wound too tight, and suddenly he was playing the fool, skating across the floor on his wooden strut, hair in his eyes and his face frozen in a scowl, leveling an imaginary sword at the Englishers like the great man himself.

Neeltje laughed. Pure, untroubled, as marvelous a thing as the music of the spheres, that laugh was what hooked him. No, he didn't prick his finger on one of the barbs or fall face forward into the barrel of soused pig's feet, but he was hooked all the same. That laugh was a revelation. He looked at her, laughing himself now, studied her as she stood there grinning with a piece of ribbon in her hand, and saw his future.

The first thing he did when he got back to the farm was ask Staats about her. His stepfather was around the side of the house, standing on a chair and painting the wall with a whitewash made of pulverized oyster shells. “Cats?” he said, pausing to shove back his wide-brimmed hat and rub a palm over his bare skull. “I knew a Cats once back in Volendam. Nasty beggar. Full of piss and vinegar.”

Jeremias stood in the gathering dusk and listened politely as his stepfather gave a detailed account of the petty crimes and scandals fomented by this nefarious Cats—Staats couldn't recall the
duyvil's
first name—some twenty years earlier in the town of Volendam, halfway
around the world. When Staats paused for breath, Jeremias gently steered him back to the here and now. “But what about the
schout—
Joost Cats?”

Staats paused again. “Joost?” he said, groping for the connection. “Ja, Ja, Joost. He doesn't have a daughter, does he?”

Meintje was no more helpful. A militant look came into her eyes at the mention of the
schout
and she advised Jeremias to let bygones be bygones. “If I was you,” she said, “I woudn't go near him or his daughter either.”

A month dragged by. Jeremias cleared land, burned stumps, built walls of fieldstone, milked and fed the cows, weeded the barley field and shoveled shit. He ate fish, fowl and game, ate corn cakes, porridge and
bruinbrod,
drank cider and 'Sopus ale. He slept on a cornhusk mattress with Douw van der Meulen, pinched tobacco and tried it behind the barn, swam naked in Van Wart Creek. And there were long hot afternoons when all he did was wander over to the old farm and stare at the ashes. Through it all though, he never shook the image of Neeltje Cats.

Then came the day when a pock-marked Kitchawank in a pair of expansive pantaloons knocked at the door. It was mid-June, the light like a fine wash, and Jeremias had just sat down with the family to the evening meal. Meintje opened the door partway, as she might have opened it on a peddler back in Volendam. “Yes?” she said.

But Staats was already on his feet, Jeremias, Douw and the three younger children staring up at him in surprise. “Why, it's old Jan,” he said, and Meintje pulled back the door.

The Kitchawank was shirtless, his torso a topography of scars, abrasions and infected insect bites, his moccasins torn and mudspattered. He was known as old Jan in the neighborhood and he made his living doing odd jobs and drifting from village to village, carrying messages for a doit or a stein of beer. He'd survived the smallpox that had ravaged his tribe some thirty years earlier, only to find that the fever had coddled his brain. Staats knew him from Jan Pieterse's. Meintje had never laid eyes on him before.

“What is it, Jan?” Staats said. “Have you got a message for us?”

The Indian stood there in the doorway, impassive, his face as blasted and worn as bedrock. “Ja, I have a message,” he said in his
halting, rudimentary Dutch. “For him,” and he pointed to Jeremias.

“Me?” Jeremias rose from the table in confusion. Who would send him a message? He didn't know a soul in the great wide world but for the boys of the neighborhood and the people gathered around the table.

Old Jan nodded. Then he turned to point at a gap in the trees beyond the barn, and Jeremias, standing at the door now with Staats and Meintje, with Douw and Barent, Klaes and little Jannetje, saw a gaunt figure wrapped in a raccoon coat emerge from the shadows. “Your sister,” old Jan began, turning back to him, and all at once Jeremias could feel the blood beating in his ears. Katrinchee. He hadn't given her a thought in ages. For all he knew she might have been dead, so completely had she vanished from the community. “Your sister,” the Indian repeated, but his voice trailed off. He looked at Jeremias and his eyes were asleep.