T. Boyle - World's End

He was already cold when they found him. He’d gone for the pigs first, but apparently they’d been too quick for him. Rumor, the old sow, had two long gashes in her side and one of the shoats was dragging a leg half-severed at the hock. The milch cows, confined in their stalls, were less fortunate. Two of the yearlings had been eviscerated — one partially butchered and gnawed as it lay dying — and Patience had had her throat cut. The boys found her like that, the black stain of her blood like a blanket thrown over the earthen floor, and Jeremias, his teeth locked in her hide, pinned beneath her. It was the fifteenth of the month, rent day. But Jeremias Van Brunt, former rebel, longtime ghost, spiritual brother to Wolf Nysen and sad inheritor of his father’s strange affliction, would pay rent no more. They buried him the next day beneath the white oak, and thought they’d seen the end of it.

It was only the beginning.

Next to go was old vader van der Muelen, who went rigid with the stroke as he was splitting wood, and from whose hands the axe had to be pried before the Dominie could commit him to the frozen earth. He was followed shortly by his stalwart wife, that merciful and strong-willed woman who’d been a second mother to Jeremias Van Brunt and whose apple beignet and cherry tarts were small tastes of heaven. The cause of death was unknown, but the gossips, stirred up like a nest of snakes, attributed it variously to witchcraft, toads under the house and tuberous roots taken with wine. Then, in a single horrific week in January, the two Robideau girls broke through the ice while skating on Van Wart’s Pond and vanished into the black waters below, Goody Sturdivant choked to death on a wad of turkey breast big as a fist and old Reinier Oothouse got away from his wife, drank half a gallon of Barbados rum, saw the devil and tried to climb Anthony’s Nose in his underwear. They found him clinging frozen to a rock high above the river, pressed to the unyielding stone like a monstrous blotch of lichen.

The community was still reeling from the grip of catastrophe when the Indians came down with the French disease and brought it to the settlements. All the children under five died in their beds and word came from Croton that old vader Cats had succumbed and that a whole host of people who didn’t even know they were alive had passed on too. It was blackest February and just after Cadwallader Crane’s Geesje had expired in childbirth that the goodmen and goodwives of Van Wartwyck, led by the stooped and aged Dominie Van Schaik, marched up to Nysen’s Roost and hacked open the grave of the monster who’d lurked through their dreams and now threatened to destroy their waking lives too. The Swede was unchanged, frozen hard, the black earth clinging to him like a second skin. Huddied in his cloak and shouting prayers in three languages, the Dominie ordered a pyre built and they set fire to the corpse and let it burn, warming their hands over the leaping flames and standing watch till the faggots were coals and the coals ashes.

Spring came late that year, but when it came the community breathed a sigh of relief. It’s over, the gossips said, whispering among themselves for fear of jinxing it, for fear of goblins, imps and evil geniuses, and it seemed they were right. Staats van der Meulen’s middle son, Barent, took up his father’s plow and worked the family farm with all the vigor and determination of youth, and Wouter Van Brunt, twenty-five years old and for better than a decade now the real soul of Nysen’s Roost, filled his father’s shoes as if they’d been made for him. The weather turned mild in mid-March, the breezes wafting up from Virginia with just the right measure of sweetness and humidity. Tulips bloomed. Trees budded. Douw van der Meulen’s wife bore him triplets the first of May, the cattle bred and increased and there wasn’t a single two-headed calf born the length and breadth of the valley, so far as anyone knew, and the pigs had litters of twelve and fourteen (but never thirteen, no) and to a one the piglets emerged with three comely twists to their tails. It looked as if finally the world had slipped back into its groove.

But there was one more jolt yet to come, and it was beyond the scope or reckoning of any of the humble farmers and honest bumpkins of Van Wartwyck or Croton It had to do with letters patent, with William III, that distant and august monarch, and with Stephanus Van Wart, no mere patroon any longer, but Lord of the newly chartered Van Wart Manor. It looked forward to the near future when the power of the Van Warts would encompass the whole of northern Westchester. And it looked back to the day when Oloffe Van Wart had brought a disgruntled herring fisherman to the New World to clear land and farm for him, working its inscrutable way through Jeremias’ rebellion, Wouter’s disillusionment and the death of Wolf Nysen. Though no one yet knew it, the final cataclysm was at hand, the last dance between Van Warts and Van Brunts, the moment that would ignite the tongue waggers like no other and then pull the blankets over Van Wartwyck for a snooze that would last two and a half centuries.

On the one side, there was Stephanus Van Wart, now one of the two or three wealthiest men in the Colony, First Lord of the Manor, confidant of the governor, and his minions, van den Post and the impenetrable dwarf. On the other, there was Cadwallader Crane, lover of humble worm and soaring butterfly, bereaved widower, unscholarly scholar, a boy caught in a man’s jerky body. And there was Jeremy Mohonk, savage and speechless, the feral half-breed with the Dutchman’s eyes. And finally, inevitably, borne down under the grudging weight of history and circumstance, there was Wouter Van Brunt.

Walter might as well have flown on to Tokyo or Yakutsk — it couldn’t have taken any longer, what with fog delays, connecting flights that ran every third day and the sleepless night he spent in the Fairbanks airport waiting for the red-eyed maniac who would fly him, an oil company engineer and a case of Stroh’s Iron City Beer to Fort Yukon, Prudhoe Bay and Barrow in a four-seat Cessna that had been stripped right down to the bare metal by weather he didn’t want to think about. The oil company man — bearded, in huge green boots that looked like waders and a parka that could have fit the Michelin Man — took the rear seat and Walter sat next to the pilot. It was November third, nine-thirty in the morning, and it was just barely light. By two, the oil man assured him, it would be deepest night again. Walter looked down. He saw ice, snow, the desolation of hills and valleys without roads, without houses, without people. Dead ahead, pink with the reflection of the low sun at their backs, was the jagged dentition of the Brooks Range, the northernmost mountain range on earth.

The Cessna dipped and trembled. The blast of the engine was like a bombardment that never ended. It was cold to the point of death. Walter gazed out on emptiness until exhaustion began to catch up with him. Half-dozing, he focused on the disconcerting little notice taped to the grimy plastic glovebox: THIS AIRCRAFT FOR SALE, it read in shaky upper-case letters, $10,500, TALK TO RAY. Talk to Ray, he thought, and then he was asleep.

He woke with a jolt as they set down in Fort Yukon, where the case of beer was deplaning. Ray grinned like a deviate and shouted something Walter didn’t catch as they taxied up to a grim-looking little shack to refuel; the oil man got out to stretch his legs, though it was something like twenty-seven below with a good wind, and Walter nodded off again. From Fort Yukon it was up over the Brooks Range and into darkness. The oil man got off at a place called Deadhorse, where, he assured Walter, there was enough oil to float Saudi Arabia out to sea. And then it was Ray and Walter, hurtling through endless night, on the way to Barrow, three hundred and thirty miles above the Arctic Circle, the northernmost city in America, the end of the line.