World's End (64 page)

By noon the following day, Stephanus himself was in Van Wartville, accompanied by his
schout,
the bellicose dwarf and a posse comitatus composed of eight baggy-breeched, pipe-puffing, weather-beaten farmers from Croton. To a man, the farmers were mounted on ponderous, thick-limbed plow horses and they were armed with scythes and mathooks, as if they were going haying rather than pursuing a dangerous and degraded lot of seditionists and barn burners. Most of them, owing to the season, had runny noses, and they all wore great floppy-brimmed elephantine hats that hid their faces, banished their heads and drooped down over their shoulders like parasols.

Stephanus posted a reward of one hundred English pounds for the capture of any of the malefactors, and instructed his carpenter to erect a gallows at the top of the ridge behind the house, a place ever after known as Gallows Hill. Within the hour, he had Tommy Sturdivant, John Robideau and Staats Van Brunt lined up in front of him and pleading their innocence. He gave them each five minutes to defend themselves, and then, with respect to the ancient rights of court baron and court leet invested in him by His Royal Majesty, King William III, he administered justice as he saw fit. Each was stripped to the waist and given twenty lashes and then ordered to sit in the stocks for three days, the foul weather notwithstanding. The gallows he reserved for the ringleaders: Crane, Mohonk and Wouter Van Brunt.

Unfortunately, that infamous trio was nowhere to be found. Though he searched the farms of both the elder and young Cranes, though he personally razed the half-breed's shack at Nysen's Roost and oversaw the eviction of Neeltje and her daughters, though he scoured the miserable stinking huts of the Weckquaesgeeks at Suycker Broodt and the Kitchawanks at Indian Point, Stephanus could discover no trace of them. After three days of boarding his troops at the upper house (true Dutch and Yankee trenchermen, for whom a side of
venison was little more than an hors d'oeuvre), the first lord of the manor retired to Croton, leaving van den Post and the dwarf behind to pursue the search and see to the completion of the gallows and the construction of a new barn. The reward was raised to two hundred fifty pounds sterling, a sum for which half the farmers in the valley would have given up their own mothers.

The fugitives held out for nearly six weeks. Once the barn caught fire, they understood, drunk as they were, that things had gotten out of hand and that Van Wart and the jellyfish eater would pursue them to the ends of the earth. Staats, John Robideau and Tommy Sturdivant were guilty of nothing more than stamping their feet and shouting, but the others—Wouter, Jeremy and Cadwallader—were in deep. Wouter had started it all, Cadwallader had broken windows in full sight of everyone present and Jeremy had assaulted the eldest son of the lord of the manor. And then there was the more serious question of the fire. It wasn't Jeremy, it wasn't Cadwallader, it wasn't any of the three lesser offenders who'd carried the flaming brand into the barn: it was Wouter. Seized suddenly with the fury of his father, he'd snatched up the torch and raced across the yard like an Olympian to toss it high into the rafters of the barn. When it caught and the barn went up, when Wouter felt the madness rise to a crescendo in his chest and then fall again to nothing, he'd taken his brother by the sleeve and admonished him to go home and look after
moeder.
Then he rounded up Jeremy and Cadwallader and fled.

They hid themselves in a cave not half a mile from the scene of the crime, and there they lived like cavemen. They were cold. Hungry. Snowed in. They built meager fires for fear of detection, they ate acorns, chewed roots, trapped the occasional skunk or squirrel. They might have gone to Neeltje for help, but the dwarf kept a perpetual watch on the cramped hovel in Pieterse's Kill into which she'd moved with Staats and her daughters and Jeremy's wife and children. And then too there was van den Post to contend with. He was indefatigable—and mad with a thirst for revenge against Jeremy Mohonk, who'd escaped him once before. He'd found himself an Indian tracker to sniff them out, a fierce and mercenary Mohawk who wore a belt of scalps and would as soon cut a throat as squat down and relieve himself or skin a hare for supper. They had no choice but to lie low.

Jeremy brooded. Cadwallader hunched himself up like a praying mantis and sobbed for days on end. And Wouter—Wouter began to feel as he had on that terrible afternoon when he sat himself down in the stocks and dropped the crossbar on his own feet.

One night, when the others were asleep, he slipped out of the cave and made his way through the nagging branches and crusted snow to the upper house. He was wasted, his lungs ached with the cold and the clothes hung from him in tatters. The house was dark, the yard deserted. He saw that the windows had been replaced and that a crude unpainted and unroofed structure stood where the old barn had been. It was too dark to see the gallows on the hill.

He was thinking of his father as he knocked at the door, thinking of the fallen hero, the coward who'd been a traitor to his son and to himself too. He knocked again. Heard voices and movement from within and saw his father, mad and broken, lying beneath the cow in the barn. Rombout answered the door with a candle in one hand, a cocked pistol in the other.

“I want to turn myself in,” Wouter said. He dropped to his knees. “I beg for your mercy.”

Rombout shouted something over his shoulder. Wouter could detect movement in the background, a hurry and scuffle of feet, and then the pale face of the unattainable Saskia floated into view amidst the shadows. He dropped his eyes. “It was the half-breed,” he said. “He set fire to the barn, he was the one. And Cadwallader too. They made me go along with them.”

“On your feet,” Rombout gargled, backing away from him with the gun. “Inside.”

Wouter lifted his hands to show that they were empty. A gust of air fluttered his rags as he rose to his feet. “Spare me,” he whispered, “and I'll lead you to them.”

The execution took place on the first of January. The half-breed, Jeremy Mohonk, offered no defense when he came before the first lord of the manor to meet his accusers, and his co-defendant, Cadwallader Crane, was thought to be wandering in his mind. No one contradicted the testimony of Wouter Van Brunt.

In his wisdom, in his clemency and forbearance, the first lord of
the manor waived the capital charges against Wouter Van Brunt. Van Brunt was lashed, branded for a criminal on the right side of his throat and banished forever from Van Wart lands. After wandering for some years he returned to live in Pieterse's Kill with his mother, where he took up the trade of fisherman, eventually married and had three sons. He died, after a long illness, at the age of seventy-three.

As for Jeremy Mohonk and Cadwallader Crane, they were convicted of high treason and armed rebellion against the authority of the Crown (the brick constituting, for Stephanus' purposes, a potentially lethal weapon—lethal, in any case, to manorial windows). Their sentence read as follows: “We decree that the Prisoners shall be drawn on a Hurdle to the Place for Execution, and then shall be hanged by the Neck, and then shall be cut down alive, and their Entrails and Privy members shall be cut from their Bodies, and shall be burned in their Sight, and their Heads shall be cut off, and their Bodies shall be divided into four Parts, and shall be disposed of at the King's Pleasure.”

Whether or not it was fully complied with is not recorded.

When the old man had finished, the sky was growing light beyond the windows for the second time since Walter had arrived in Barrow. Mad—certainly, definitively and inarguably mad—Truman had dwelt obsessively on each smallest detail of his story, puffing and fulminating as if he were trying the case himself. Cadwallader Crane, Jeremy Mohonk. Walter knew it all now. Finally, he knew it all.

“You know what ‘Wouter' translates to in English?” Truman asked him with a leer.

Walter shrugged. He was beaten. Down for the count and out.

“ ‘Walter' that's what,” the old man snarled as if it were a curse. “I named my own son after one of the biggest scumbags that ever lived—my ancestor, Walter, your ancestor—and I didn't even know it till I was a grown man in college, till I went to Professor Aaronson and told him I wanted to write about Van Wartville and the illustrious Van Brunts.” He was on his feet now. Pacing. “Fate!” he shouted suddenly. “Doom! History! Don't you see?”

Walter didn't see, didn't want to see. “You can't be serious,” he said. “You mean this is the big secret, this is why you screwed us all
over—because of some forgotten shit that went down hundreds of years ago?” He was incredulous. He was enraged. He was frightened. “You're crazy,” he murmured, trembling as he said it, the marker looming up on his right—Cadwallader Crane, Jeremy Mohonk—the pale green walls of the hospital closing in on him, Huysterkark with the plastic foot in his lap. …

Suddenly Walter was out of the chair, stuffing things into his suitcase, the door, the door, thinking only to run, to get away, fight himself out of the nightmare and start again, back in Peterskill, in Manhattan, Fiji, anywhere but here, anything but this. …

“What's the hurry?” Truman asked with a laugh. “You're not leaving already? All this way to see your dear old dad and you stay what, two days?”

“You're crazy!” Walter shouted. “Nuts. Apeshit.” He was spitting out the words, out of control, the suitcase clutched tight in his hand. “I hate you,” he said. “Die,” he said.

He jerked open the door and the wind caught him by the throat. The sick pale light played off the torn ribs on the roof next door. His father stood there in the shadows of his box at the end of the world. He wasn't grinning, he wasn't jeering. He seemed small suddenly, tiny, shrunken, wasted, no bigger than a dwarf. “No use fighting it,” he said.

The wind came up, the dogs went mad.

“It's in the blood, Walter. It's in the bones.”

She was one hundred and six feet long, from her taffrail to the tip of her carved bowsprit, and her mainmast—of Douglas fir, a towering single tree—rose one hundred and eight glorious feet above the deck. When the mainsail was raised, the jib flying and the topsail fluttering against the sky, she carried more sail than any other ship on the East Coast, better than four thousand square feet of it, and she plied the Sound or glided across the Hudson like a great silent vision out of the past.

Tom Crane loved her. Loved her unreservedly. Loved her right down to the burnished cleats on the caprail and the discolored frying pans that hung above the woodstove in the galley. He even somehow managed to love the cracked plastic buckets stationed beneath the wooden seats of the head. He swabbed the decks as they swayed beneath his feet, and loved them; he split wood for the stove and loved the cloven pieces, loved the hatchet, loved the hoary oak block with its ancient grid of gouges and scars. The sound of the wind in the sails made him rhapsodic, dizzy, as drunk with the pulse of the universe as Walt Whitman himself, and when he took hold of the smooth varnished grip of the tiller and the river tugged back at him like something alive, he felt a power he'd never known. And there was more, much more—he loved the cramped bunks, the dampness of his clothes when he slipped into them in the morning, the feel of the cold decks beneath his bare feet. And the smells too—of woodsmoke, salt air, rotting fish, the good rich human macrobiotic smell of the head, the incense of the new raw wood of the cabin, garlic frying in the
galley, someone's open beer, clean laundry, dirty laundry, the funky sachet of life at sea.

It amazed him afresh every time he thought of it, but he was saint of the forest no longer. He was a seaman, a tar, a swab, Holy Man of the Hudson, no hermit but a communer with his mates, admired and appreciated for his clowning, his beard, the soft and soulful Blues harp he mouthed in his bunk at night, Jessica curled beside him. The
Arcadia.
It was a boon. A miracle. As amazing to Tom as the first Land Rover must have been to the aborigines of the Outback. Just think: a floating shack! A floating shack christened in and dedicated to all the great hippie ideals—to long hair and vegetarianism, astrology, the snail darter, Peace Now, satori, folk music and goat turd mulching. And, surreptitiously, to pot, hash and acid too. The original month aboard—September—had turned to two, and then Halloween came and went and it was November, and Tom Crane had risen through the ranks to the office of full-time second mate. Holy Man of the Hudson. He liked it. Liked the ring of it.

And the shack? The summer's crop? The goat? The bees? Well, he'd get back to them someday. For now, the exigencies of the seafaring life made it impossible to keep the place up, and so he'd padlocked the door, sold the goat, abandoned his late squash and pumpkins to the frost and left the bees to fend for themselves. Since the funeral, he and Jessica had quietly moved their things into his grandfather's roomy, gloomy, eighteenth-century farmhouse with all its gleaming appurtenances of modernity, with its dishwasher, its toaster, its TV, its paved driveway and carpeted halls. It all seemed a bit too—well, bourgeois—for him, but Jessica, with her frantic schedule, liked the convenience of it. She'd been accepted at N.Y.U. in marine biology, and what with the commute and her part-time job at Con Ed, she was running around like a madwoman. After the shack, she suddenly realized how much she liked running water, frost-free refrigerators, reading lamps and thermostats.

He knew he was being selfish, deserting her like that. But they'd discussed it, and she'd given him her blessing—everybody's got to do their own thing, after all. And it wasn't as if they didn't see each other—she joined him whenever she could, even if it was just to study a couple of hours in the main cabin or lie beside him and close her
eyes as the river gently rocked the bunk. Besides, she'd soon have him back full-time—for the winter at least. It was mid-November, and this was the
Arcadia's
last sail of the year. From now till April he'd be home every day, shuffling around in his grandfather's fur-lined slippers in the morning and whipping her up a batch of tofu-carrot delight in the electric skillet when she came in at night. Of course, Tom would gladly have stayed out all winter, breaking ice on the water barrel and beating his hands on the tiller to keep them from stiffening up—hell, he'd even hang an albatross around his neck if he thought it'd do any good—but the business of the
Arcadia
was to educate people about the river, and it was kind of hard to get their attention when the temperature dipped to nineteen degrees and the icy gray dishwater of the spume swatted them in the face with every dip of the bow. And so, they were on their way upriver to put into port at Poughkeepsie for the winter; two days hence, the ex-saint of the forest would bum a ride back to Van Wartville and drydock himself till spring in his grandfather's snug, oil-heated den.