T. Boyle - World's End

And then it was Wouter’s turn.

Just as he was getting set to leave, lifting his mother and sisters into the now-empty wagon, his belly full and head light with cider and beer, he felt Pompey’s deferential hand at his elbow. “Old Misser Bosyn, sir, he want a word with you.”

Puzzled, wondering if somehow the old geezer had miscounted his produce or shortchanged him at the mill, he followed the slave into the warm and redolent kitchen. “I’m on my way out, Bosyn, got moeder and the girls waiting in the wagon,” he said in Dutch. “What’s the problem?”

The problem was that the lord of the manor was reviewing his leases with an eye to more profitable management. Wouter’s farm, along with one other, had been reassigned.

“Reassigned?” Wouter echoed in astonishment.

The old man grunted. “The lease was in your father’s name, not yours.”

Wouter began to protest, but the words stuck in his throat.

“Two days,” the commis croaked. “Take the increase of the stock over what Mijnheer allowed your father, pack up your personal belongings, if there be any such, and vacate the premises for the new tenants.” He paused, drew a watch from his waistcoat pocket and consulted it, as if it could plot the course of those honest, hopeful, industrious newcomers. “They’ll be here Tuesday noon. On the sloop up from New York.

“And oh yes,” he added, “the Indian, or half-breed or whatever he is, he goes too.”

Wouter was too thunderstruck to reply. He merely turned his back, ducked through the open door and climbed into the wagon. His mother and sisters were chattering about the party, about who danced with whom and did you see so-and-so in that ridiculous getup, but he didn’t hear them. He was eleven years old, the boy who sat himself in the stocks, the boy who’d seen his father broken and humiliated and felt the shame of it beating like poison through his veins. The horses lifted their feet and set them down again, the wagon swayed and creaked, trees melted into darkness. “Is there anything the matter?” his mother asked. He shook his head.

He unhitched the wagon and stabled the horses in a state of shock. He hadn’t said a word to his mother — or sisters — and his brother had stayed on at the party with John Robideau and some of the other young bucks. For all they knew, the world was still in its track, they’d acquitted themselves of their obligations to the landlord for another year and the farm at Nysen’s Roost would go down through the generations from father to son. It was a joke, a bad joke. He was rubbing down the horses, barely able to control his hands for the rage building in them, when he heard the doorlatch behind him.

It was Cadwallader Crane. The widower, the naturalist, his sad and sorry brother-in-law. Cadwallader’s coat and hat were dusted with the fine pellets of snow that had begun to sift down out of the pale night sky. His eyes were red. “I’ve been evicted,” he said, his voice quavering. “From the farm my father … helped me … set up for, for”—he began to blubber—“for Geesje.”

“I’ll be damned,” Wouter said, and he never guessed how prophetic the expression might prove.

Five minutes later they were in cousin Jeremy’s hut, warming themselves over the fire and passing a bottle of Dutch courage. Wouter pressed the bottle to his lips, handed it to his brother-in-law and leaned forward to give Jeremy the bad news. Gesturing, pantomiming, running through a stock of facial expressions that would have made a thespian proud, he told him what the commis had said and what it meant for all of them. Jeremy’s wife looked on solemnly, the baby in her arms. Young Jeremy, twelve years old now and with the eyes of a Van Brunt, quietly ran his fingers over the teeth of the bear his father had killed that morning. Jeremy said nothing. But then he hadn’t said anything in fourteen years.

“I say we go back up there,” Wouter took the bottle back and waved it like a weapon, “and let the scum know how we feel.”

Cadwallader’s eyes were muddy, his voice lost somewhere in the pit of his stomach. “Yeah,” he wheezed, “yeah, let ’em know how we feel.”

Wouter turned to his cousin. “Jeremy?”

Jeremy gave him a look that needed no interpretation.

Next thing they knew, they were standing on the lawn outside the upper house, gazing up at the parade of bright, candle-lit windows. The snow was falling harder now and they were thoroughly drunk — drunk beyond reason or responsibility. The party had long since broken up, but three hardy souls were still hunkered over the open fire, gnawing bones and making doubly sure the cider and beer kegs were properly drained. Wouter recognized his brother and John Robideau. Coming closer, he saw that the third member of the group was Tommy Sturdivant.

The three conspirators, who hadn’t as yet decided what they were conspiring to do, joined the others around the fire. Someone threw on a few extra logs from the mountain of wood stacked around the patroon’s woodshed, and their faces flared diabolically — or perhaps only drunkenly. The news — the shocking, heartless, arbitrary news — went around the little circle in the time it took the gin to make a single pass. Tommy Sturdivant said it was a damn shame. The flames leapt. John Robideau agreed. Staats, who was more directly affected, cursed the patroon and his mealy-mouthed son in a voice loud enough to be heard in the house. Wouter seconded his brother with an enraged whoop, the like of which hadn’t been heard in the valley since the Indian hostilities of ’45, and then — no one knew quite how it happened, least of all Wouter — the bottle left his hand, described a graceful parabola through the drift of the falling snow, and took out the leaded glass window in the parlor. This was immediately succeeded by a shriek from inside the house, and then a general uproar punctuated by cries of terror and confusion.

Pompey was the first out the door, followed closely by young Rombout and the English fop who’d been making love to Saskia. The fop lost his footing on the slick doorstep and went down on his overbite, and Pompey, recognizing the glitter of abandonment in the eyes of the little group around the fire, pulled up short. But Rombout, in his leather pumps and silk hose, came on. “Drunkards!” he screeched, slowing to what might have been a dignified, if hurried, walk if it weren’t for the outrage jerking at his limbs. “I knew it, I knew it!” he exploded, stalking up to Wouter. “Nothing’s good enough for you … you rabble. Now this, eh? Well, you’ll pay, damn your hide, you’ll pay!”

Rombout Van Wart was twenty-one years old and he wore his hair in ringlets. He wasn’t old enough to grow a beard, and his voice had a hollow gargling catch to it, as if he were trying to speak and swallow a glass of water at the same time.

“We’ve already paid,” Wouter said, gesturing with a sweep of his arm at the woodshed, the cellar, the henhouse.

“Yeah,” Cadwallader jeered, suddenly interposing his long sallow face between them, “and we’ve come”—here he was interrupted by a fit of hiccoughs and had to pound his breastbone before he could recover himself—“we’ve come,” he repeated, “to tell you and your father to go fuck yourselves.” And then he stooped down, as calmly as if he were picking wildflowers or assaying the sinuous path of the earthworm, and plucked a fist-sized fragment of brick from the gathering snow. Straightening up, he let his gangling arm drop behind him, paused to give Rombout a look of drunken bravado and then heaved the brick through the upper bedroom window.

The English fop was just getting to his feet. Pompey had vanished in the shadows. A howl of outrage arose from the upper bedroom (with some satisfaction, Wouter recognized the bristling voice of old Ter Dingas Bosyn) and the faces of the women could be seen at the door.