World's End (4 page)

And then all at once, as if a switch had been thrown inside his head, he was slowing down—whatever it was that had got him up to a hundred and ten had suddenly left him. He let off on the throttle, took it down—ninety, eighty, seventy—only mortal after all. Up ahead on the right (he barely noticed it, had been by it a thousand times, ten thousand) was a historical marker, blue and yellow, a rectangle cut out of the gloom. What was it—iron? Raised letters, yellow—or gold—against the blue background. Poor suckers probably made them down at Sing Sing or something. There was a lot of history in the area, he supposed, George Washington and Benedict Arnold and all of that, but history really didn't do much for him. Fact is, he'd never even read the inscription on the thing.

Never even read it. For all he knew, it could have commemorated one of Lafayette's bowel movements or the discovery of the onion; it was nothing to him. Something along the side of the road, that's all: Slow Down, Bad Curve, oak tree, billboard, historical marker, driveway. Even now he wouldn't have given it a second glance if it weren't for the shadow that suddenly shot across the road in front of him. That shadow (it was nothing recognizable—no rabbit, opossum, coon or skunk—just a shadow) caused him to jerk the handlebars. And that jerk caused him to lose control. Yes. And that loss of control put him down for an instant on the right side, down on the new Dingo boot with the imitation spur strap, put him down before he could straighten up and made him hit that blue-and-yellow sign with a jolt that was worthy of a major god.

Next afternoon, when he woke to the avocado walls, crackling intercom and astringent reek of the Peterskill Hospital's East Wing,
he was feeling no pain. It was a puzzle: he should have been. He examined his forearms, wrapped in gauze, felt something tugging at his ribs. For a moment he panicked—Hesh and Lola were there, murmuring blandishments and words of amelioration, and Jessica too, tears in her eyes. Was he dead? Was that it? But then the drugs took over and his eyelids fell to of their own accord.

“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.

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.