World's End (18 page)

Before long they'd reached the top of the rise and emerged on a clearing dominated by a single high-crowned tree. On the left was a tumbledown wall and to the right a crude cabin of notched green logs. There was no barn, no pond, no orchard and no animals but for a sickly cow tethered beneath the tree. The place seemed deserted. “Stay here,” her father said, and he straightened up in his saddle and jogged forward into the dooryard. “Hello!” he called. “Anybody home?”

Not a sound.

Her father called out again, and the cow gave him a baleful look before dropping its head to crop a tuft of grass at the perimeter of its tether. It was then that a woman appeared from around the corner of the house, a bucket in her hand. The first thing Neeltje noticed was her feet. They were shoeless and filthy, gleaming with fresh muck as
if she'd just waded out of a bog or something. And her dress—it was an obvious hand-me-down, patched, faded and stained, and so worn the flesh showed through. But that wasn't the worst of it. As the woman drew closer to her father, Neeltje saw with a jolt that what she'd taken to be a cap was no cap at all—this wasn't linen, but flesh. The woman was bald! Scalped, plucked, denuded, her head as smooth and pale and barren as Dominie Van Schaik's. Neeltje felt something tighten in her stomach. How could a woman do that to herself? she wondered. It was so … so ugly. Was it lice, was that it? Was she a harlot cast out of Connecticut? A Roman nun? Had the Indians got hold of her and … and
violated
her?

“I'm the sheriff here,” she heard her father say, “Joost Cats. I've been sent by the lawful owner and proprietor of these lands to inquire as to your presence here.”

The woman looked bewildered, lost, as if it were she who'd arrived at this place for the first time in her life and not Neeltje. Did she speak Dutch even?

“You have no right here,” Joost said. “Who are you and where have you come from?”

“Katrinchee,” the woman said finally, setting down the bucket. “I'm Katrinchee.”

But then two more figures appeared around the corner of the house—a child, pale eyes in a dark face—and a man swaying awkwardly over a muddy wooden peg. It took her a moment—everything so different, the place so strange—before she recognized him.
Jeremias.
The name had been on her lips before. In the spring. For a month or so after the last trip it had been with her at the oddest moments—in the early hours of the morning, at prayers, as she sat at the loom or butterchurn.
Jeremias.
But what was he doing here?

She was no more surprised than her father. The
schout
jerked his head back as if he'd been snatched by the collar, springing up out of his customary slouch like a jack-in-the-box. “Van Brunt?” he gasped, his voice breaking with incredulity. “Jeremias Van Brunt?”

Jeremias crossed the yard to where the
schout
perched atop the one-eyed nag. He stopped directly in front of him, no more than a yard away, measuring him with a steady gaze. “That's right,” he said. “I've come back home.”

“But you can't. … These are private lands.”

“Private lands, my ass,” Jeremias said, and he bent to pluck a stick of firewood from the ground. The woman drew back and pressed the child to her.

Joost snatched angrily at the reins and the nag shivered and showed its teeth in protest. The boy was impossible. A renegade. A loser. He had no respect for authority, no knowledge of the world and nothing to sustain him but his self-righteous smirk. Joost remembered the defiant little face in the van der Meulens' doorway, the cocky thrust of the shoulders at Jan Pieterse's, his daughter's laughter and the gift of sugar candy that was like a violation of his fatherhood. He was beside himself. “You owe the patroon,” he snarled.

“Screw the patroon,” Jeremias said, and it was more than Joost could bear. Before he could think, he was on him, the sword of office jerked from its scabbard like a sudden slashing beam of light, the woman clutching the child and Jeremias falling back before the stagger of the horse. “No!” Neeltje screamed, and Jeremias, holding up the stick to defend himself, glanced at her—she saw him, he glanced at her—at the moment the sword fell. The woman screamed too. Then there was silence.

So Walter sought out the twelfth heir to Van Wart Manor, as the smoke-wreathed figure of his adoptive mother had challenged him to, and then, six weeks later, he married Jessica beneath the ancient twisted white oak that loomed over Tom Crane's cabin like a great cupped hand.

Actually, he didn't so much seek out Depeyster Van Wart as blunder across him, as if their meeting had somehow been preordained. He got up from the table that morning in the kitchen that still reeked of potato pancakes, groped for his crutches and told Lola that that was exactly what he intended to do: ask Depeyster Van Wart. He borrowed her beat-up Volvo—was he sure? Shouldn't he rest, just out of the hospital and all?—and backed down the narrow gravel drive, past the trees lit with birds, past the chin-high cornstalks, staked tomatoes and random swelling pumpkins of Hesh's garden, and out onto the molten blacktop of Baron de Hirsch Road.

If he'd been asleep all these years, unconscious of the impact of history and the myths that shaped him, he still wasn't fully awake. Thus, he had never connected this Depeyster Van Wart with the eponym of the infernal tool-and-die company that had employed him at minimum wage for the past two months, never connected this figure of dim legend with the dinning caliginous hole where he'd learned to dread the keen of the lathe as he might have dreaded the screech of some carrion bird come each day to tear out his liver anew. No: Depeyster Manufacturing was just a name, that was all. Like Kitchawank Colony, Otis Elevator, Fleischmann's Yeast. Like Peterskill or Poughkeepsie. It meant nothing to him.

He shifted into first and lurched off down the road, the new foot dead on the gas pedal, and he'd actually reached the first intersection before he realized he had no idea where he was going. Van Wart. Where would he find Van Wart? There were probably thirty Van Warts in Peterskill alone. Leaning on the brake and casting around him for inspiration, he suddenly focused on Skip's Texaco, with its twin pumps and phone booth, sitting directly across the road from him. He pulled in, lifted himself from the car, and consulted the white pages.

VAN WART, he read, DEPEYSTER R. 18 VAN WART RD., VAN WARTVILLE.

He'd lost a foot, been haunted by ghosts of the past, listened in silence to the story of his father's perfidy and desertion: he was numb. Van Wartville. It meant nothing to him. Just an address.

He took the Mohican Parkway to the upper end of Van Wart Road, uncertain which way the numbers ran, and discovered to his irritation that here they were in the five-thousand range. The first mailbox he came across told him that much. Rusted, battered, the victim of innumerable scrapes and vehicular miscues, it read, in a script that might have been adapted from the Aztec: FAGNQLI, 5120. Swinging southwest, toward Peterskill, Walter looked neither right nor left, the roadside scenery so familiar he hadn't given it a second glance since he was an eighth-grader on his way to music lessons. He was in no hurry—it had taken him all these years to begin pursuing the specter of his father, so what was the rush?—and yet before he knew it he was speeding, the alien foot dead on the accelerator, hydrants and mailboxes flashing by like pages in a leafing book. He shot past banks of elm, oak and sycamore, past junked cars, startled pedestrians and scratching dogs. He took the warning light at Cats' Corners at sixty, downshifted for the
S
curve beyond it and came out of the chute doing seventy-five. It wasn't until he blew past Tom Crane's place, with its hubcap on the tree and the fateful pasture below, that he began to locate the brake.

The houses were clustered more thickly now, falling back from both sides of the road on lawns that were like coves and inlets of green; there was a church, a cemetery, another blinking yellow light. He saw a station wagon backing out of a driveway on his right, and
up ahead on the opposite side, like the residue of a nightmare, the cryptic marker that had set the whole thing in motion. Jeremy Mohonk, he muttered to himself. Cadwallader Crane. For one inspired instant he envisioned himself swerving wide, out across the opposite lane and onto the shoulder, bearing down on that insidious road sign in a cloud of dust and obliterating it with a ton and a half of vengeful Swedish steel. But then he was dodging the station wagon—downshifting, stabbing at the brake pedal—and the sign, still canted heavenward, still mocking, was behind him. A moment later, just before he reached the Peterskill town line, he found what he was looking for, Number 18, the numerals cut into the stone pillar outside the gates to the old manor house on the hill. Van Wart Manor. Van Wartville. Van Wart Road. He began to understand.

The woman who answered the door was middle-aged, black, in a cotton shift and apron, and she looked so familiar he thought he'd begun to hallucinate again. “Ye—ess?” she said, drawing it out to two rich clarion syllables, almost yodeling it. “Can I help you?”

Walter was standing on a porch the size of the quarterdeck of. one of the ghost ships anchored off Dunderberg. The house to which it was attached rose over him, fell away beneath him, stretched out on both sides of him like some great living presence, some diluvian monster arisen from the deep to devour him. He saw naked rock, black with age and dug from the earth in some distant epoch; he saw beams of oak that had stood as trees in centuries past; he saw scalloped shingles, wooden shutters, gables, chimneys, a slate roof the color of the morning sky in winter. How many times had he passed by on the road and glanced up at the place without a glimmer of recognition? Now he was here, on the porch, at the door, and he felt as he had on the morning of the potato pancakes. “Uh, yeah,” he said. “I'd like to speak to Mr. Van Wart?”

He'd rehearsed the scene all the way over in the car. There he would be, son of the father, hunched forward on his crutches. Van Wart would open the door, Van Wart himself. The monster, the bogey, the unenlightened Nazi Bircher fiend who'd fomented the riots that shamed his father and broke his mother's heart. Van Wart. The man who could once and for all damn or vindicate the name of Truman Van Brunt.
Hi,
Walter would say,
I'm Truman Van Brunt's
son.
Or no.
Hello, my name's Walter Van Brunt. I think you knew my father?
But now he was on the steps of a mansion, a great big gingerbread thing that might have been drawn from the pages of Hawthorne or Poe, talking with a maid who looked like … like … like Herbert Pompey, and he'd begun to feel dislocated and unsure of himself.

“I'm sorry,” she said, looking hard at his crutches, the hair gone long down his neck and creeping over his ears, the twenty-seven black specks above his upper lip that might have been a mustache and then again might not have been, “he's not in right now.” The maid had stopped yodeling, and her face was set with suspicion. “What you want with him?”

“Nothing,” Walter mumbled, and he was about to mumble further and in an even lower and less audible tone that he'd be back later, already thinking about the Peterskill library and the handprinted card catalogue he'd used for high school reports on the state of Alaska, John Steinbeck and the B.&O. Railroad, wondering if there would be any reference to Mohonk or Crane, when a voice called out from deep inside the house: “Lula? Lula, who is it?”

Through the open door Walter could see heavy dark pieces of furniture, a worn strip of Oriental carpet and a gloomy portrait on the wall. “Nobody,” the maid called over her shoulder, and then she turned back to Walter. He could have taken this as his dismissal, he could have swung around on his crutches and thumped down the stairs, across the drive and into his car, but he didn't. Instead he just stood there, propped up under the armpits, and waited until the footsteps stopped at the door and he was looking up into the tanned inquisitive face of a woman who looked so familiar she might have come to him in a dream.

The woman seemed to be about Lola's age—or no, younger. Forty or so. She was wearing corduroy pants and moccasins, and some sort of Indian headband encrusted with plastic beads. She gave him a puzzled look, shot a glance at the maid and then turned back to him. “May I help you?” she said.

He was hallucinating, no doubt about it. If the maid had Pompey's bridgeless nose and bulging eyes, then this woman, with her icy violet stare, her high cheekbones and strong jaw, reminded him uncannily
of someone too. But who? He had a sense of déjà vu, felt the flesh tearing as he went down on the hard cold pavement, heard the derisive laughter of the bums ranged along the deck of the U.S.S.
Anima.
He was almost there—he'd almost got it, that face—when her voice came back at him again, softened now, alarmed even. “Are you all right?”

“I'm Truman Van Brunt's son,” he said.

“Whose son?”

“Truman Van Brunt's. My name's Walter. I wanted to maybe talk with Mr. Van Wart … about my father.”

She didn't flinch at the name, didn't raise a hand up to mask her face or fall dead away in a faint. But her eyes, which had begun ever so slightly to defrost, went gelid again. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I can't help you.”

So much for the seeking.

Next day, after spending a futile hour in the library (he found references to Mo-ho, Mohole, Moholy-Nagy, the Mohr Diagram and Mohsin-ul Mulk, but no Mohonk, while the Cranes were represented by the juridical reminiscences, circa 1800, of one I. C. Crane), he drove down to Depeyster Manufacturing to pick up his check and tell Doug, the foreman, that he'd be coming back to work in a week or so but couldn't stand at the lathe anymore on account of his foot. The factory was housed in an ancient brick building on Water Street in Peterskill, amid the derelict warehouses and the tottering ruins of the stove works, wire, hat and oilcloth factories that harkened back to Peterskill's boom days at the end of the last century. The industries had grown up here along the river's edge to take advantage of both the fresh water for cooling and waste disposal and easy access to shipping and railways. But the semi-truck had come to supersede barge and boxcar, oilcloth had given way to Formica, pot-bellied stoves to gas and electric ranges, the demand for hoopskirt wire wasn't what it was and no one wore hats anymore. To Walter, of course, the ruins along Water Street were as incomprehensible as Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid at Giza. Someone had made something there once. What it was or who made it or for what purpose couldn't have interested him less.