World's End (44 page)

And for his part, Stephanus, who'd succeeded his father as patroon after the pestilence of '68 carried the old man off in a fit of wheezing, was too busy maneuvering his way around the Governor's Council of Ten (of which he was the guiding light), managing the shipping business he'd inherited from his father and raising his own family to worry about an ignorant dirt clod on a distant and negligible plot of land. It was enough that said dirt clod paid his annual rent—a fact duly registered in the
commis'
accounts ledger for the given year. Beyond that, Jeremias could go to the devil and back for all Stephanus Van Wart cared.

All well and good. For twelve years Van Warts and Van Brunts went their own way, and slowly, gradually, the wounds began to heal and a truce settled over the valley.

But scratch a scab, however feebly, and it will bleed.

So it was that in the summer of 1679, just after Jeremias' thirtieth birthday, Neeltje's father, the redoubtable
schout,
paid a visit to the farm at Nysen's Roost with a message from the patroon. Joost arrived late in the afternoon, having spent the better part of the day making the rounds of the neighboring farms. At fifty, he was more bowed than ever, so badly contorted he looked as if he were balancing his head on his breastbone, and the nag he rode was as bony, sway-backed and ill-tempered as its predecessor, the little-lamented
Donder.
He'd long since reconciled himself to his fiery son-in-law (though every time he glanced at the pogamoggan on its hook beside the hearth his left temple throbbed and his ears began to sing), and when Neeltje begged him to spend the night, he agreed.

It was at dinner—or rather, after dinner, when Neeltje served seed cakes and a fragrant steaming caudle of cinnamon and wine—that Joost gave them the news. The whole family was gathered around the big rustic table, which Neeltje had set with the veiny china and Zutphen glassware she'd inherited on the death of her mother. Jeremias—shaggy, mustachioed, huge and hatless—pushed back his chair with a sigh and lighted his pipe. Beside him, in a long tapering row on the bench that grew shorter every year, sat the boys: nephew Jeremy, with his wild look and tarry hair, now nearly fifteen and so tight-lipped he would have exasperated the stones themselves; Wouter, eleven and a half and a dead ringer for his father; and then Harmanus and Staats, eight and six respectively. The girls—each as slight and dark-eyed and pretty as her mother—sat on the far side of the table, ranged beside their grandfather. Geesje, who was nine, got up to help her mother. Agatha and Gertruyd were four and two. They were waiting for seed cake.

“You know,
younker,”
Joost said, tamping tobacco in the bowl of a clay pipe half as long as his arm, “I'm up here on the patroon's business.”

“Oh?” said Jeremias, as indifferent as he might have been to news of the emperor of China, “and what might that be?”

“Not much,” Joost managed, between great lip-smacking sucks at the stem of the pipe, “not much. Road building, is all.”

Jeremias said nothing. Geesje cleared away the children's pewter bowls and the remains of the milk soup. Erect and unfathomable, Jeremy Mohonk exchanged a look with Wouter. “Road building?” Neeltje echoed, setting down the bowl of spiced wine.

“Hm-hm,” returned her father, sucking and puffing as vigorously as if he'd been plunged into the icy waters of Acquasinnick Creek. “He's going to be here at the upper house for the rest of the summer. With a carpenter from New York. He's planning to fix up the house where it's got run-down and I guess he couldn't persuade his brother to come out from Haarlem and take it over, but he's got Lubbertus' boy of an age now to move in and start a family. …”

“And what's it to me?” Jeremias asked, puffing now himself and sending up a bitter black cloud of smoke.

“Well, that's just it, you see—that's what I've been going around to the tenants for. The patroon wants—”

Jeremias cut him off. “There is no patroon—this is an English colony now.”

Puffing, waving his hand impatiently to concede the point, Joost lifted his head up off his breastbone and went on: “Patroon, landlord—what's the difference? Anyway, he's calling on all the tenants to give him five days' work with their teams—he wants to widen the road from Jan Pieterse's to the upper house and then on out to the new farms at Crom's Pond. There's a post road to go through here one day, and
Mijnheer
wants to be sure it won't pass him by.”

Jeremias set down his pipe and dipped a cup of wine. “I won't do it,” he said.

“Won't do it?” Joost's eyes hardened. He watched the angry scar on his son-in-law's cheek as it flushed with blood and then went dead white again. “You've got no choice,” he said. “It's in your contract.”

“Screw the contract.”

Here it was, all over again. Jeremias would never learn, never accept it, not if you locked him up in that cell for a hundred years. But this time, Joost wouldn't rise to the bait. This time things were different. This time the renegade sat there across the table from him, husband to his daughter, father to his grandchildren. “But the patroon—” Joost began, controlling himself, trying to reason with him.

He was wasting his breath.

Jeremias' fist hit the table with a shock that set the china jumping and so startled little Gertruyd that she burst into tears. “Screw the patroon,” he snarled.

Wouter sat silently through his father's outburst, his head bowed, his eyes on the platter of seed cakes in the middle of the table. “Jeremias,” his mother reproved in the soft, chastening voice Wouter knew so well, “you know it's your duty. Why fight it?”

The words were barely out of her mouth before his father turned on her, as Wouter knew he would, the stubborn disputatious tones of the old man's voice riding up the scale to explode in a thunderous tirade against the patroon, the lord governor, rents, taxes, stony soil,
wood rot, white ants, earwigs and anything else that came to mind. As his father cocked himself toward her and his mother took an involuntary step away from the table, Wouter made a quick snatch at the seed cakes, secreted a fistful in his shirt and nodded at Jeremy. “Wouter took all the cakes!” howled little Harmanus, but in the heat of the moment, no one noticed. As the two accomplices ducked away from the table and slipped out the door, grandfather Cats was raising his voice too, urging everyone to calm down, to please calm down!

Neither Wouter nor Jeremy uttered a word as they felt their way down the path to Acquasinnick Creek in the gloom of dusk. They'd been up and down the trail so many times the figure approached infinitude, and though it was barely light enough to see, they knew every dip, drop-off, pothole and rib of stone as if they'd carved them themselves. In less than five minutes they were sitting on the high undercut bank of the creek, listening to the suck and pop of rising trout and the flatulent complaint of the bullfrog. Wouter had made off with six cakes. He handed three to his cousin.

For a long while they merely chewed, the water dodging the rocks at their feet in rhythmic wash, mosquitoes cutting the air, crickets chirruping. Wouter broke the silence. “Damned if I'm going to bust my back for the patroon,” he said in a sort of ruminative, octave-shattering yelp. He was at that stage in his life when his father was a small deity, reverenced and wise, incapable of error, the very oracle of truth and decision. If Jeremias told him that geese knew algebra and the creek flowed backward, he'd never doubt it, all appearances to the contrary.

Jeremy said nothing. Which wasn't unusual, since he rarely spoke, even if directly addressed. He was tall, dark, with the spidery limbs and prominent Adam's apple of his late progenitor, and though he knew Dutch and English both, he declined to use either, communicating in gurgles, grunts and belches, or in an elaborate sign language of his own device.

“You know
vader
won't do it,” Wouter said, reaching out to snatch a firefly from the air and smear its phosphorescence in a greenish streak across his forearm. “He's no slave.”

Night was deepening around them. There was a splash downstream, from the direction of the bridge. Jeremy said nothing.

“It'll be us, you know,” Wouter said.
“Vader
won't do it, and
then
moeder
and
grootvader
Cats'll make us do it. Just like the wood. Remember?”

The wood. Yes. Jeremy remembered. When the rent came due last November and Jeremias retreated, muttering, to the back room, it wasn't just the pounds and pence, the butter, wheat and pullets the patroon demanded, but two fathoms of firewood to boot. No
son of mine,
Jeremias had blustered, or
nephew either
… but his voice had trailed off, and he'd taken a pull at the bottle and staggered out into the yard to be alone with his indignation and his rage. Neeltje,
moeder
Neeltje, had seen to it that Wouter, Harmanus and Jeremy cut and split the patroon's wood for him. The three of them—Harmanus was only eight and not much good—worked through two bitterly cold afternoons, and then had to hitch up the oxcart and drive out to the upper manor house with the firewood to warm the patroon's crazy skeletal old mother, who'd been living there ever since the old patroon kicked off. That was in November, when the wood needed cutting. Now it was July, and the road needed widening.

“Well I'm not going to do it,” Wouter growled. “No matter what
moeder
says.”

Though he heartily concurred, still Jeremy said nothing.

A long moment passed, the night sounds of the forest crepitating around them, the water spilling ever louder over the stones at their feet. Wouter tossed a handful of pebbles into the black swirling water, then pushed himself up. “What are we going to do?” he said. “I mean, if the patroon comes.”

Jeremy's reply was so guttural, so strangled, so full of clicks and grunts and pauses, that no one but Wouter, his bosom companion and bedmate, would have known what he said. But Wouter heard him as clearly as if he'd spoken the purest King's English—or stadtholder's Dutch—and in the darkness he smiled with the comfort of it. What his cousin had said, in his arcane and contorted way, was this: “The patroon come, we fix him.”

Inevitably, like frost in its season, like corn blight or bread mold, like the crow that arrives to feast on the dead ox or the fly that hovers over the pan of rising dough, the patroon came. He came by sloop, to the landing at Jan Pieterse's Kill, and he brought with him his wife,
Hester Lovelace (who was, by happy coincidence, niece to the most powerful man in New York, his honor the lord governor), his four children, three rooms of furniture, two crates of crockery, a spinet and several somber family portraits meant to enliven the dreary atmosphere of the upper house. Pompey II, now eighteen and the only male issue of the union between the late patroon's domestic slaves, Ismailia and Pompey the First, rode shotgun over the crates, stores and furniture. His sister Calpurnia, a light-skinned girl with something of the old patroon in the crook of her nose and the odd, almost spastic skew of her limbs, kept
Mijnheer's
three young boys from drowning themselves and saw to the tonsorial needs of Saskia, the patroon's ethereal ten-year-old daughter.

Stephanus was met at the Blue Rock by a fatter, older and considerably richer Jan Pieterse, and by a delegation of slow-moving, baggy-breeched farmers with chaff in their hair and clay pipes in their pockets. His factotum, an unctuous, incessantly twitching whipsnake of a man by the name of Aelbregt van den Post, took charge of the unloading of the sloop and the concurrent loading of the two wagons that stood ready to receive the patroon and his effects. Summoning all his sinewy energy, van den Post, who was said to have survived a shipwreck off Cape Ann by clinging to a spar and eating jellyfish for three weeks, flung himself into the task like a desperate man. He skittered up and down the big slab of rock, shouting orders to the sloop's torpid crew, handing
Mijnheer's
wife down from the gangplank and up into the wagon, steadying the horses, cuffing the hapless carpenter for lagging behind with his tools, castigating Pompey, chiding the children and managing, in the intervals, to bow and scrape at
Mijnheer's
heels like a fawning spaniel. When all was ready, the patroon and his family went ahead in the light wagon, Pompey at the reins. Van den Post and the carpenter, hunched over a pair of evil-smelling oxen on the rough plank seat of the overladen farm wagon, brought up the rear.

The patroon was anxious to get to the house. He'd paid a visit during the spring and was shocked by the general decline of the place, the millstones ground to dust, the farms run down, the house itself sagging into the earth like a ship listing at sea. Mismanagement was what it was. That, and his own preoccupation elsewhere. How could
he expect his tenants to advance at more than a crawl if there was no one to crack the whip over them?

Well, all that was about to change.

He planned to live at the upper house himself till the weather turned, tightening the reins on his tenants and putting things in order so he could install his dunderhead of a cousin in the place without having to worry about its falling to wrack and ruin. In a decade's time he'd want the house for Rombout, his eldest boy, and when he passed on himself, the lower house—and the Cats farm—would go to Oloffe, his middle son, and Pieter, the youngest. But for now he was here with his family to live beneath the roof of the fine old stone house his father and uncle had raised not thirty years ago, and he meant to put all his energy into it. Old Ter Dingas Bosyn, the
commis,
would look after the lower house and the goods due in from Rotterdam at the end of the month, and he had Cats to see to things in Croton as well. And then, of course, it wasn't as if he were going into exile on a desert isle or anything—the lower house was no more than half a day's ride, if something should come up.