T. Boyle - World's End

In his wisdom, in his clemency and forbearance, the first lord of the manor waived the capital charges against Wouter Van Brunt. Van Brunt was lashed, branded for a criminal on the right side of his throat and banished forever from Van Wart lands. After wandering for some years he returned to live in Pieterse’s Kill with his mother, where he took up the trade of fisherman, eventually married and had three sons. He died, after a long illness, at the age of seventy-three.

As for Jeremy Mohonk and Cadwallader Crane, they were convicted of high treason and armed rebellion against the authority of the Crown (the brick constituting, for Stephanus’ purposes, a potentially lethal weapon — lethal, in any case, to manorial windows). Their sentence read as follows: “We decree that the Prisoners shall be drawn on a Hurdle to the Place for Execution, and then shall be hanged by the Neck, and then shall be cut down alive, and their Entrails and Privy members shall be cut from their Bodies, and shall be burned in their Sight, and their Heads shall be cut off, and their Bodies shall be divided into four Parts, and shall be disposed of at the King’s Pleasure.”

Whether or not it was fully complied with is not recorded.

When the old man had finished, the sky was growing light beyond the windows for the second time since Walter had arrived in Barrow. Mad — certainly, definitively and inarguably mad — Truman had dwelt obsessively on each smallest detail of his story, puffing and fulminating as if he were trying the case himself. Cadwallader Crane, Jeremy Mohonk. Walter knew it all now. Finally, he knew it all.

“You know what ‘Wouter’ translates to in English?” Truman asked him with a leer.

Walter shrugged. He was beaten. Down for the count and out.

“ ‘Walter’ that’s what,” the old man snarled as if it were a curse. “I named my own son after one of the biggest scumbags that ever lived — my ancestor, Walter, your ancestor — and I didn’t even know it till I was a grown man in college, till I went to Professor Aaronson and told him I wanted to write about Van Wartville and the illustrious Van Brunts.” He was on his feet now. Pacing. “Fate!” he shouted suddenly. “Doom! History! Don’t you see?”

Walter didn’t see, didn’t want to see. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “You mean this is the big secret, this is why you screwed us all over — because of some forgotten shit that went down hundreds of years ago?” He was incredulous. He was enraged. He was frightened. “You’re crazy,” he murmured, trembling as he said it, the marker looming up on his right — Cadwallader Crane, Jeremy Mohonk — the pale green walls of the hospital closing in on him, Huysterkark with the plastic foot in his lap. …

Suddenly Walter was out of the chair, stuffing things into his suitcase, the door, the door, thinking only to run, to get away, fight himself out of the nightmare and start again, back in Peterskill, in Manhattan, Fiji, anywhere but here, anything but this. …

“What’s the hurry?” Truman asked with a laugh. “You’re not leaving already? All this way to see your dear old dad and you stay what, two days?”

“You’re crazy!” Walter shouted. “Nuts. Apeshit.” He was spitting out the words, out of control, the suitcase clutched tight in his hand. “I hate you,” he said. “Die,” he said.

He jerked open the door and the wind caught him by the throat. The sick pale light played off the torn ribs on the roof next door. His father stood there in the shadows of his box at the end of the world. He wasn’t grinning, he wasn’t jeering. He seemed small suddenly, tiny, shrunken, wasted, no bigger than a dwarf. “No use fighting it,” he said.

The wind came up, the dogs went mad.

“It’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones.”

She was one hundred and six feet long, from her taffrail to the tip of her carved bowsprit, and her mainmast — of Douglas fir, a towering single tree — rose one hundred and eight glorious feet above the deck. When the mainsail was raised, the jib flying and the topsail fluttering against the sky, she carried more sail than any other ship on the East Coast, better than four thousand square feet of it, and she plied the Sound or glided across the Hudson like a great silent vision out of the past.

Tom Crane loved her. Loved her unreservedly. Loved her right down to the burnished cleats on the caprail and the discolored frying pans that hung above the woodstove in the galley. He even somehow managed to love the cracked plastic buckets stationed beneath the wooden seats of the head. He swabbed the decks as they swayed beneath his feet, and loved them; he split wood for the stove and loved the cloven pieces, loved the hatchet, loved the hoary oak block with its ancient grid of gouges and scars. The sound of the wind in the sails made him rhapsodic, dizzy, as drunk with the pulse of the universe as Walt Whitman himself, and when he took hold of the smooth varnished grip of the tiller and the river tugged back at him like something alive, he felt a power he’d never known. And there was more, much more — he loved the cramped bunks, the dampness of his clothes when he slipped into them in the morning, the feel of the cold decks beneath his bare feet. And the smells too — of woodsmoke, salt air, rotting fish, the good rich human macrobiotic smell of the head, the incense of the new raw wood of the cabin, garlic frying in the galley, someone’s open beer, clean laundry, dirty laundry, the funky sachet of life at sea.

It amazed him afresh every time he thought of it, but he was saint of the forest no longer. He was a seaman, a tar, a swab, Holy Man of the Hudson, no hermit but a communer with his mates, admired and appreciated for his clowning, his beard, the soft and soulful Blues harp he mouthed in his bunk at night, Jessica curled beside him. The Arcadia. It was a boon. A miracle. As amazing to Tom as the first Land Rover must have been to the aborigines of the Outback. Just think: a floating shack! A floating shack christened in and dedicated to all the great hippie ideals — to long hair and vegetarianism, astrology, the snail darter, Peace Now, satori, folk music and goat turd mulching. And, surreptitiously, to pot, hash and acid too. The original month aboard — September — had turned to two, and then Halloween came and went and it was November, and Tom Crane had risen through the ranks to the office of full-time second mate. Holy Man of the Hudson. He liked it. Liked the ring of it.

And the shack? The summer’s crop? The goat? The bees? Well, he’d get back to them someday. For now, the exigencies of the seafaring life made it impossible to keep the place up, and so he’d padlocked the door, sold the goat, abandoned his late squash and pumpkins to the frost and left the bees to fend for themselves. Since the funeral, he and Jessica had quietly moved their things into his grandfather’s roomy, gloomy, eighteenth-century farmhouse with all its gleaming appurtenances of modernity, with its dishwasher, its toaster, its TV, its paved driveway and carpeted halls. It all seemed a bit too — well, bourgeois — for him, but Jessica, with her frantic schedule, liked the convenience of it. She’d been accepted at N.Y.U. in marine biology, and what with the commute and her part-time job at Con Ed, she was running around like a madwoman. After the shack, she suddenly realized how much she liked running water, frost-free refrigerators, reading lamps and thermostats.

He knew he was being selfish, deserting her like that. But they’d discussed it, and she’d given him her blessing — everybody’s got to do their own thing, after all. And it wasn’t as if they didn’t see each other — she joined him whenever she could, even if it was just to study a couple of hours in the main cabin or lie beside him and close her eyes as the river gently rocked the bunk. Besides, she’d soon have him back full-time — for the winter at least. It was mid-November, and this was the Arcadia’s last sail of the year. From now till April he’d be home every day, shuffling around in his grandfather’s fur-lined slippers in the morning and whipping her up a batch of tofu-carrot delight in the electric skillet when she came in at night. Of course, Tom would gladly have stayed out all winter, breaking ice on the water barrel and beating his hands on the tiller to keep them from stiffening up — hell, he’d even hang an albatross around his neck if he thought it’d do any good — but the business of the Arcadia was to educate people about the river, and it was kind of hard to get their attention when the temperature dipped to nineteen degrees and the icy gray dishwater of the spume swatted them in the face with every dip of the bow. And so, they were on their way upriver to put into port at Poughkeepsie for the winter; two days hence, the ex-saint of the forest would bum a ride back to Van Wartville and drydock himself till spring in his grandfather’s snug, oil-heated den.