World's End (5 page)

“Harmanus, what is it?”

“Pie,” he croaked.

“Pie? You want pie?”

“Pie.”

It was then that she felt herself slipping. In all their years of marriage, through all the time he'd sat helpless over his torn nets or had to be coaxed from bed to take his dory out on the windswept Scheldt, through all the tension and uncertainty of the move to the New World and the hardships they'd faced, she'd barely raised her voice to him. But now, suddenly, she felt something give way. “Pie?” she echoed. “Pie?” And then she was clawing at the shelf beside the hearth, tearing open sacks and boxes, flinging kettles, wooden bowls, porringers and spoons to the floor as if they were dross. “Pie!” she shrieked, turning on him, the cast-iron pan shielding her breast. “And what am I supposed to make it out of—nimbleweed and river sand? You've eaten everything else—shortening, flour, fatback, eggs, cheese, even the dried marigolds I brought with me all the way from Twistzoekeren.” She was breathing hard. “Pie! Pie! Pie!” she suddenly cried, and it was like the call of a great hysterical bird flushed from its roost; a second later she collapsed in the corner, heaving with sobs.

Katrinchee and her brothers were pressed flat against the wall, their faces small and white. Harmanus didn't seem to notice them. He shoved himself up from the bed and began rummaging around the room for something to eat. After a moment, he came up with a bag of acorns Katrinchee had collected to make paste; crunching them between his teeth, shells and all, he wandered out into the night and disappeared.

It was past four in the morning by the time they found him. Guided by a faint glow from Van Wart Ridge, Agatha and her daughter forded Acquasinnick Creek, stumbled up the sheer bank that rose on the far side, and fought their way through a morass of briars, nettles and branches hung with nightdrift. They were terrified. Not only for husband and father, but for themselves. Lowlanders, accustomed to polder and dike and a prospect that went on and on until it
faded into the indefinite blue reaches of the sea, here they were in a barbaric new world that teemed with demons and imps, with strange creatures and half-naked savages, hemmed in by the trees. They fought back panic, bit their lips and pressed on. Finally, exhausted, they found themselves in a clearing lit by the unsteady flicker of a campfire.

There he was. Harmanus. His big head and torso throwing macabre shadows against the ghostly twisted trunks of the white birches behind him, a joint the size of a thighbone pressed to his face. They stepped closer. His shirt was torn, stained with blood and grease; gobs of meat—flesh as pink and fat-ribbed as a baby's—crackled above the flames on a crude spit. And then they saw it, lying there at his feet: the head and shoulders, the very eyes and ears, the face with its squint of death. No baby. A pig. A very particular pig. Old Volckert Varken, Van Wart's prize boar.

Harmanus was docile, a babe himself, as Agatha drew his wrists behind him and cinched the hemp cords she'd stuffed into her apron half an hour earlier amid the wreckage of the kitchen. Then she looped a halter around his neck and guided him home like a stray calf. It was nearly dawn when they reached the cabin. Agatha led her husband through the door while the hushed boys looked on, and laid him out on the pallet like a corpse. Then she bound his feet. “Katrinchee,” she choked, her voice wound tight as the knotted cords. “Go fetch Mohonk.”

Since she was at so great a remove from the centers of learning and quackery, and since the only physician in New Amsterdam at the time was a one-eyed Walloon named Huysterkarkus who lived on the isle of the Manhattoes, some six hours away by sloop, Agatha had no recourse to the accepted modes of diagnosis and treatment. Indeed, had the great physicians of Utrecht or Padua been present, they wouldn't have been able to do much more than cut and pray or prescribe plucked axillary hairs in a glass of cinchona wine or the menses of the dormouse packed in cow dung. But the great physicians weren't present—it would be some five or six years before Nipperhausen himself would draw his first breath, and that in the Palatine—and so the colonists had come to rely in extreme cases on the arts and exorcisms of the Kitchawanks, Canarsees and Wappingers. Hence, Mohonk.

Half an hour later, Katrinchee stepped through the doorway, shadowed by Sachoes' youngest son. Mohonk was twenty-two, addicted to sangarees, genever and tobacco, tall as the roof and thin as a stork. Hunched there in the doorway, the raccoon coat bristling around him, he looked like a dandelion gone to seed. “Ah,” he said, and then ran through his entire Dutch vocabulary:
“Alstublieft, dank u, niet te danken.”
He shuffled forward, the heavy musk of raccoon around him, and hung over the patient.

Harmanus gazed up at him like a chastened child, utterly docile and contrite. His voice was barely audible. “Pie,” he moaned.

Mohonk looked at Agatha. “Too much eat,” she said, pantomiming the act.
“Eten. Te veel.”

For a moment, the Kitchawank seemed puzzled.
“Eten?”
he repeated. But when Agatha snatched up a wooden spoon and began furiously jabbing it at her mouth, a look first of enlightenment, then of horror, invaded the Indian's features. He jumped back from Harmanus as if he'd been stung, his long coppery hands fumbling vaguely with the belt of his coat.

Agatha let out a gasp, little Wouter began to snuffle, Jeremias studied his feet. The Indian was backing out the door when Katrinchee stepped forward and took hold of his arm. “What is it?” she asked. “What's the matter?” She spoke in the language of his ancestors, the language he'd taught her over the backs of the cows. But he wouldn't answer—he just licked at his lips and tightened the belt of his coat, though it was ninety degrees already and getting hotter. “My mother,” he said finally. “I've got to get my mother.”

The birds had settled in the trees and the mosquitoes risen from the swamps in all their powers and dominions when he returned with a withered old squaw in dirty leggings and apron. Dried up like an ear of seed corn, stooped and palsied, her face a sinkhole, she looked as if she'd been unearthed in a peat bog or hoisted down from a hook in the Catacombs. When she was six years old and smooth as a salamander, she'd stood waist-deep in the river with the rest of the tribe and watched as the
Half Moon
silently beat its way up against the current. The ship was a wonder, a vision, a token from the reclusive gods who'd buckled up the mountains to preserve their doings from the eyes of mortal men. Some said it was a gift from Manitou,
a great white bird come to sanctify their lives; others, less sanguine, identified it as a devilfish, come to annihilate them. Since that time she'd seen her husband hoodwinked by Jan Pieterse and Oloffe Van Wart, her daughter cannibalized, her youngest son besotted by drink and the third part of her tribe wiped out by smallpox, green sickness and various genital disorders attributed by the Walloons to the Dutch, the Dutch to the English and the English to the French. Her name was Wahwahtaysee.

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.