T. Boyle - World's End

It took all five of them — Jeremias, his three sons and his nephew Jeremy — to haul the body, massive and preternaturally heavy even in death, out of the marsh and up to the road, where with a concerted effort they were able to load it into the wagon. Jeremias laid out the body himself, helped by the cold snap, which mercifully kept the odor down. If he’d thought to charge admission to the wake, he would have been a rich man. For the news of Wolf Nysen’s death — the death that confirmed his life — spread through the community like the flu. Within an hour after Jeremias had stretched the fallen giant out on his bier, the curious, the incredulous, the vindicated and the faithful had gathered to stand hushed over this legend in the flesh, this rumor made concrete. They came to marvel over him, to measure him from crown to toe, to count the hairs of his beard, examine his teeth, to reach out a trembling finger and touch him, just once, as they might have touched the forsaken Christ pulled down from the cross or the Wild Boy of Saardam, who’d cooked and eaten his own mother and then hung himself from the spire outside the drapers’ guild.

They came from Crom’s Pond, from Croton, from Tarry Town and Rondout, from the island of the Manhattoes and the distant Puritan fastnesses of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Ter Dingas Bosyn showed up, Adriaen Van Wart, a wizened old cooper from Pavonia who claimed to have known Nysen in his youth. On the second day, Stephanus himself rode up from Croton, with van den Post and the dwarf, and a delegation of somber, black-cloaked advisors to Colonel Benjamin Fletcher, the new governor of the Colony and His Majesty William Ill’s loftiest representative on the continent. By the third day, the Indians had begun to pour in — maimed Weckquaesgeeks, painted Nochpeems, even a Huron, before whom all the others gave way as if to the devil himself — and after them, the oddballs and cranks from outlying farms and forgotten villages, women who claimed they could transform themselves into beasts and had the beards and talons to prove it, men who boasted that they’d eaten dog and lived as outlaws all their lives, a boy from Neversink whose tongue had been cut out by the Mohawk and who said a prayer over the body that consisted entirely of three syllables, “ab-ab-ab,” repeated endlessly. It was on the evening of the third day that Jeremias put an end to the circus and laid the giant to rest. Beneath the white oak. Just as if he’d been a member of the family.

Well, this stirred the gossips up, sure enough. I told you, I told you a thousand times that mad murthering Swede was a fact, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you he nearly scared the life out of Maria Ten Haer that time down by the creek and can you believe this unholy fool burying the devil right there in the ground where he put his own sister and father too?

Worse, far worse, was the sequel. For the death of Wolf Nysen — bogey, renegade, scapegoat, the monster who’d taken on all the sins of the community and worn them in his solitude like a hairshirt — was the death of peace itself. In the months that followed, the accumulated miseries of a decade rained down upon the heads of Van Wartwyck’s humble farmers, and the grave opened its maw like some awakening beast at the end of a long season’s fast.

Under the circumstances, perhaps it was only appropriate that Jeremias was the first to go. What happened to him, so they said, was the Lord’s retribution for his unholy alliance with the outlaw Nysen and for his early sins against the patroon and the constituted authorities, against the king himself, if you came down to it. What happened to him was by way of just deserts.

Two weeks after he’d laid Nysen to rest, Jeremias was dead, a victim of his father’s affliction. No sooner had the shovel tamped the Swede’s grave and the mourners and curiosity seekers gone on their way, than Jeremias felt the first preternatural pangs of hunger. It was a hunger like nothing he’d ever felt, a hunger that snatched him up and dominated him, made him its creature, its slave, its victim. He wasn’t merely hungry — he was ravenous, starved, voracious, as empty as a well that went down to China without giving up a drop of water. He came in after the funeral, and though for so long now he’d been invisible in his own house, he shoved in between his hulking sons and lashed into the olipotrigo Neeltje had made for the funeral supper as if he hadn’t eaten in a week. When it was gone, he scraped the pot.

In the morning, before the family was up, he managed to devour the six loaves his good wife had baked for the week, a pot of cheese, a string of thirty-six smoked trout the boys had caught in the course of three days’ fishing, half a dozen eggs — raw, shells and all — and an enormous trencher of hashed venison with prunes, grapes and treacle. When Neeltje awoke at first light, she found him passed out in the larder, his face an oleaginous smear of egg, grease and molasses, a half-eaten turnip clutched like a weapon in his hand. She didn’t know what was wrong, but she knew it was bad.

Staats van der Meulen knew, and Meintje too. Though Wouter scoffed and Neeltje protested, Staats made them pin Jeremias to the bed and bind him ankle and wrist. Unfortunately, by the time Staats had got there, the damage was already done. The family’s winter provisions were half-exhausted, three of the animals — including an ox and her calf — were gone, and Jeremias was bloated like a cow that’s got into a field of mustard. “Soup!” he cried from his pallet. “Meat! Bread! Fish!” For the first few days his voice was a roar, as savage as any beast’s, then it softened to a bray and finally, near the end, to a piteous bleat of entreaty. “Food,” he whimpered, and outside the wind stood still in the trees. “I’m, I’m”—his voice a croak now, fading, falling away to nothing—“starrrr-ving.”

Neeltje sat by his side the whole time, sponging his brow, spoonfeeding him broth and porridge, but it was no use. Though she begged grain from the van der Meulens, though she plucked hens she would need for eggs, though she fed him two, three, four times what any man could hold, the flesh seemed to fall from his bones. By the end of the first week his jowls were gone, his stomach had shrunk to a layer of skin thin as parchment and the bones of his wrists rattled like dice in a cup. Then his hair began to fall out, his chest collapsed, his legs withered and his good foot shrank into itself till she couldn’t tell it from the stump of the other. Midway through the second week she could stand it no longer, and when her sons left to hunt meat, she slipped in and cut his bonds.

Slowly, painfully, like one waking from the dead, Jeremias — or what was left of him — rose to a sitting position, threw back the blankets and swung his legs to the floor. Then he stood, shakily, and made for the kitchen. Neeltje watched in horrified silence. He ignored the decimated larder, bypassed the dried fruits, the strings of onions, cucumbers and peppers suspended from the rafters, and staggered out the door. “Jeremias!” she called, “Jeremias, where are you going?” He didn’t answer. It was only after he’d crossed the yard and swung back the door of the barn that she saw the butcher’s knife in his hand.

There was nothing she could do. The boys were God knew where, desperately beating the bushes for grouse, coney, squirrel, anything to replace the meat their wild-eyed father had squandered; her own father was all the way down in Croton and so enfeebled by age he barely responded to his own name any more; Geesje was with her husband; and she’d sent Agatha and Gertruyd to the van der Meulens, so as to spare them the sight of their father’s decline. “Jeremias!” she cried as the door blew shut behind him. The sky was dead. The wind spat in her face. She hesitated a moment, then turned back to the house, bolted the door behind her and knelt down to pray.