T. Boyle - World's End

One forbidding January afternoon, when Wouter lingered after lessons were over, Cadwallader took him around back of the house to the woodshed and produced, from a hidden corner, a board on which he’d tacked a brilliant spangle of moths and butterflies caught in hovering flight. Wouter was dumbstruck. Chocolate and gold, chrome blue, yellow, orange and red: there, in the dim confines of the winterbound shed, the breath of summer touched him.

Astonished, Wouter turned to look at his friend and saw something in Cadwallader’s eyes he’d never recognized before. The habitual glaze of stupefaction was gone, replaced by a look at once alert, wise, confident, proud, the look of the patriarch showing off his progeny, the artist his canvases, the hunter his string of ducks. And then, miracle of miracles, Cadwallader, the lesser Crane, the hopeless scholar, the beardless boy-man who couldn’t get out of the way of his own feet, began to discourse on the life and habits of these same moths and butterflies, speaking with what almost approached animation of worms and caterpillars and the metamorphosis of one thing into another. “This one, do you see this one?” he asked, pointing to a butterfly the color of tropical fruit, with regular spots of white set in a sepia band. Wouter nodded. “He was a milkweed worm, with horns and a hundred ugly feet, just last summer. I kept him in a stone jar till he changed.” Wouter felt the wonder open up like a flower inside of him, and he lingered in that comfortless shed till he couldn’t feel his feet and the light finally failed.

In the coming weeks, the awkward enthusiast — now bounding over a precipice to pluck a wisp of moss from between two ice-bound boulders, now shimmying up a decayed trunk to retrieve a two-year-old woodpecker’s nest — opened up the visible world in a way Wouter had never dreamed possible. Oh, Wouter knew the woods well enough, but he knew them as any white man knew them, as a place to pick berries, hunt quail, bring down squirrels with a sling. But Cadwallader knew them as a naturalist, as a genius, a spirit, a revealer of mysteries. And so Wouter followed him through the stripped bleak woods to gaze on a slit of barren earth in the midst of a snowbank where Cadwallader assured him a black bear was sleeping out the winter, or to listen as he pulled apart a handful of wolf droppings to speculate on the beast’s recent diet (rabbit, principally, judging from the lean withered turds bound up in cream-colored hair and flecked with tiny fragments of bone).

“See that?” Cadwallader asked him one day, indicating the frozen hindquarters of a porcupine wedged in the crotch of a tree. “When the sun warms it in spring, that meat will give rise to new life.” “Life?” Wouter questioned. And there, on the lesser Crane’s thin lips and hairless cheeks, crouched a smile all ready to pounce. “Blowflies,” he said.

Though there was eight years difference in their ages, the friendship was not so one-sided as one might imagine. For his part, Cadwallader, long an object of contempt and denigration, was happy to have anyone take him seriously, particularly someone who could share in his private enthusiasm for the underpinnings of nature, for worms, caterpillars, slugs and the humble nuggets of excrement he so patiently scrutinized. Wouter suited him perfectly. No rock of maturity himself — any other man of twenty would have had his own farm and family already — he found the Van Brunt boy his equal in so many ways, a natural leader, really, persuasive, agile, curious, but not so much his equal as to challenge him seriously. As for Wouter, his fascination with the scholar’s son was a distraction from the emptiness he felt, and he knew it. Cadwallader, absorbing though he may have been in his own skewed way, made a poor substitute for Jeremy — and for the lapsed father who worked the farm like an encumbered spirit, an old man at thirty. Thus, like all incidental friends, they came together out of mutual need and because each propped up the other in some unspoken way. Cadwallader sought out Wouter, and Wouter sought out Cadwallader. And before long, the scholar’s unscholarly son became a regular guest at Nysen’s Roost, staying to supper and taking Jeremy’s spot at the table, occasionally even spending the night when the weather was rough or the company too stimulating.

The company, yes. Though Jeremias faded into the background as if he were fashioned from the stuff of clouds, Neeltje was busy with her spinning or sweeping or washing up and the younger children, confined to the house throughout the endless winter, hissed, squabbled and caterwauled like aborigines, the young long-nosed Yankee nature lover found the company irresistible. Ah, but it wasn’t Wouter, either, who moved him, though he liked him well enough and would claim him as his closest friend till nearly the time of his death — no, it was Geesje. Little Geesje. Named after her grandmother, inheritor of her mother’s fathomless eyes and rebellious ways, ten years old the day he first stepped through the door.

They played cards through those long winter evenings — Cadwallader hunched over his knees like a singing cricket, Wouter with a ferocious zeal to win that sometimes astounded even him, and Geesje, her legs drawn up beneath her, the cards masking her sly child’s face, playing with an insouciance that belied a will to win every bit as ferocious as her brother’s. They skated on the pond where Jeremias had long ago lost his foot to the swamp turtle. They played at big ball, I spy, flick-fingers, hunt-the-slipper and quoits, the gangling, awkward scholar’s son as eager and excited as the children he was playing with. By the time the second winter came around, the winter of Adriaen Van Wart’s ascension and Jeremy’s return, Wouter began to understand that it was no longer for him that Cadwallader Crane came to the house.

If Wouter felt betrayed, he didn’t show it. He played just as hard, followed his long-legged companion just as often through copse and bower, bog and bramble, lingered as usual in the Crane woodshed to marvel over a set of fossilized horse’s teeth or a pipefish preserved in pickling brine. But inwardly he felt as if he’d been knocked off balance again, shoved from behind just as he’d begun to regain his footing. Disoriented, uneasy, thirteen years old and set adrift once again, he went to the door one raw February night and found his cousin standing there in a blanket of sleet, and in the grace of a single moment he felt redeemed: Jeremy was back.

But redemption doesn’t come so easily.

Even as he embraced him, even as he shouted out his cousin’s name in triumph and heard the household rouse behind him, he knew something was wrong. It wasn’t the Indian getup — the ragged bearskin, the string of seawant, the notochord cinched around his cousin’s brow — or the fierce primordial reek of him either. Nor was it the strategic emplacement of bone, sinew and flesh that had transformed him from boy to man. It wasn’t that at all. It was ice. His cousin was made of ice. Wouter embraced him and felt nothing. Cried out his name and saw that his eyes were glazed and impenetrable, hard as the surface of the pond. In confusion he let go of him as the doorway filled with jostling children, with moeder’s smile and vader’s lifted eyebrows and fallen lip. Jeremy merely stood there, rigid as stone, and for a terrible moment Wouter thought he was hurt — he’d been gouged, stabbed, they’d cut out his tongue and he’d come home to die, that’s what it was. But then Jeremy stepped back into the shadows and there, in his place, stood a squaw.

A girl, that is. A female. Calves, thighs, bosom. Wrapped up in deerskin, otter and mink, her hair greased and queued, mouth set in a pout. And in her arms, an infant. Wouter was stunned. He looked up into the shadowy features of his cousin and saw nothing. He looked at the girl and saw the quiet triumph of her eyes. And then he looked at the infant, its face as smooth and serene as the Christ child’s. “In, in,” moeder was piping, “it’s no night for visiting on the stoep,” and all at once Wouter became conscious of the sleet pelting his face, of the dank subterranean breath of the wind and the restlessness of the night. Then the squaw brushed past him and the infant, dark as cherrywood and not half the size of a suckling pig, opened its eyes. Its eyes were green.