T. Boyle - World's End

Everything hung in the balance.

Worlds. Generations.

“You, you—” Rombout sputtered. Struck dumb by rage, he raised his hand as if to box the transgressor’s impertinent ears, and Cadwallader shrank bank from the anticipated blow. The blow never came. For Jeremy Mohonk, his lank ancestral frame fleshed out with the solid Dutch brawn of the Van Brunts, struck him a stunning warrior’s thump just over the left temple and laid him out cold. From then on, no one was quite sure what happened or how, though certain moments did tend to stand out.

There was Saskia’s scream (or somebody’s, some female’s, that is. It might have come from Vrouw van Bilevelt or Rombout’s young wife, or even, for that matter, from that aged and decrepit relic, Vrouw Van Wart. Somehow, though, Wouter liked to think of it as Saskia’s scream). And under cover of that scream, there was the fop’s judicious retreat, followed by the icy crash of the third and fourth windows. Then, too, there was the fire. Somehow it got away from the safe and cheery confines of the roasting pit and into the hayloft of the barn, a distance of perhaps two hundred feet. And, of course, given the hour and the meteorological conditions, there was the ensuing conflagration that climaxed with a roar of shattering timber. And finally, there was the long, cold night spent by a bitter and headachy Rombout, who gathered his family about him in the cellar of the windowless and snowswept house while the plaint of singed ungulates echoed in his throbbing ears.

By noon the following day, Stephanus himself was in Van Wartville, accompanied by his schout, the bellicose dwarf and a posse comitatus composed of eight baggy-breeched, pipe-puffing, weather-beaten farmers from Croton. To a man, the farmers were mounted on ponderous, thick-limbed plow horses and they were armed with scythes and mathooks, as if they were going haying rather than pursuing a dangerous and degraded lot of seditionists and barn burners. Most of them, owing to the season, had runny noses, and they all wore great floppy-brimmed elephantine hats that hid their faces, banished their heads and drooped down over their shoulders like parasols.

Stephanus posted a reward of one hundred English pounds for the capture of any of the malefactors, and instructed his carpenter to erect a gallows at the top of the ridge behind the house, a place ever after known as Gallows Hill. Within the hour, he had Tommy Sturdivant, John Robideau and Staats Van Brunt lined up in front of him and pleading their innocence. He gave them each five minutes to defend themselves, and then, with respect to the ancient rights of court baron and court leet invested in him by His Royal Majesty, King William III, he administered justice as he saw fit. Each was stripped to the waist and given twenty lashes and then ordered to sit in the stocks for three days, the foul weather notwithstanding. The gallows he reserved for the ringleaders: Crane, Mohonk and Wouter Van Brunt.

Unfortunately, that infamous trio was nowhere to be found. Though he searched the farms of both the elder and young Cranes, though he personally razed the half-breed’s shack at Nysen’s Roost and oversaw the eviction of Neeltje and her daughters, though he scoured the miserable stinking huts of the Weckquaesgeeks at Suycker Broodt and the Kitchawanks at Indian Point, Stephanus could discover no trace of them. After three days of boarding his troops at the upper house (true Dutch and Yankee trenchermen, for whom a side of venison was little more than an hors d’oeuvre), the first lord of the manor retired to Croton, leaving van den Post and the dwarf behind to pursue the search and see to the completion of the gallows and the construction of a new barn. The reward was raised to two hundred fifty pounds sterling, a sum for which half the farmers in the valley would have given up their own mothers.

The fugitives held out for nearly six weeks. Once the barn caught fire, they understood, drunk as they were, that things had gotten out of hand and that Van Wart and the jellyfish eater would pursue them to the ends of the earth. Staats, John Robideau and Tommy Sturdivant were guilty of nothing more than stamping their feet and shouting, but the others — Wouter, Jeremy and Cadwallader — were in deep. Wouter had started it all, Cadwallader had broken windows in full sight of everyone present and Jeremy had assaulted the eldest son of the lord of the manor. And then there was the more serious question of the fire. It wasn’t Jeremy, it wasn’t Cadwallader, it wasn’t any of the three lesser offenders who’d carried the flaming brand into the barn: it was Wouter. Seized suddenly with the fury of his father, he’d snatched up the torch and raced across the yard like an Olympian to toss it high into the rafters of the barn. When it caught and the barn went up, when Wouter felt the madness rise to a crescendo in his chest and then fall again to nothing, he’d taken his brother by the sleeve and admonished him to go home and look after moeder. Then he rounded up Jeremy and Cadwallader and fled.

They hid themselves in a cave not half a mile from the scene of the crime, and there they lived like cavemen. They were cold. Hungry. Snowed in. They built meager fires for fear of detection, they ate acorns, chewed roots, trapped the occasional skunk or squirrel. They might have gone to Neeltje for help, but the dwarf kept a perpetual watch on the cramped hovel in Pieterse’s Kill into which she’d moved with Staats and her daughters and Jeremy’s wife and children. And then too there was van den Post to contend with. He was indefatigable — and mad with a thirst for revenge against Jeremy Mohonk, who’d escaped him once before. He’d found himself an Indian tracker to sniff them out, a fierce and mercenary Mohawk who wore a belt of scalps and would as soon cut a throat as squat down and relieve himself or skin a hare for supper. They had no choice but to lie low.

Jeremy brooded. Cadwallader hunched himself up like a praying mantis and sobbed for days on end. And Wouter — Wouter began to feel as he had on that terrible afternoon when he sat himself down in the stocks and dropped the crossbar on his own feet.

One night, when the others were asleep, he slipped out of the cave and made his way through the nagging branches and crusted snow to the upper house. He was wasted, his lungs ached with the cold and the clothes hung from him in tatters. The house was dark, the yard deserted. He saw that the windows had been replaced and that a crude unpainted and unroofed structure stood where the old barn had been. It was too dark to see the gallows on the hill.

He was thinking of his father as he knocked at the door, thinking of the fallen hero, the coward who’d been a traitor to his son and to himself too. He knocked again. Heard voices and movement from within and saw his father, mad and broken, lying beneath the cow in the barn. Rombout answered the door with a candle in one hand, a cocked pistol in the other.

“I want to turn myself in,” Wouter said. He dropped to his knees. “I beg for your mercy.”

Rombout shouted something over his shoulder. Wouter could detect movement in the background, a hurry and scuffle of feet, and then the pale face of the unattainable Saskia floated into view amidst the shadows. He dropped his eyes. “It was the half-breed,” he said. “He set fire to the barn, he was the one. And Cadwallader too. They made me go along with them.”

“On your feet,” Rombout gargled, backing away from him with the gun. “Inside.”

Wouter lifted his hands to show that they were empty. A gust of air fluttered his rags as he rose to his feet. “Spare me,” he whispered, “and I’ll lead you to them.”

The execution took place on the first of January. The half-breed, Jeremy Mohonk, offered no defense when he came before the first lord of the manor to meet his accusers, and his co-defendant, Cadwallader Crane, was thought to be wandering in his mind. No one contradicted the testimony of Wouter Van Brunt.