T. Boyle - World's End

“You were dreaming, that’s all.” Her hand was on his brow, her breast in his face. He reached up, still groggy, and as if it were the most natural thing in the world under the circumstances, began to fumble with the buttons of her blouse. She didn’t seem to mind. He fumbled some more, his brain numb, fingers like breadsticks, and then he had her breasts in his hands, weighing and kneading them, pulling them to his lips as if he were an infant in the cradle. But no, wait: he was an infant, his mother leaning over him with her depthless eyes, the world as pure and uncomplicated as a dapple of mid-morning sun on the nursery walls. …

Jessica pressed her lips to his forehead, whispered his name. In that instant, the whole great busy chattering institution fell silent — the TVs were dead, the intercom mute, the hallways under a spell. Every doctor, every nurse, orderly, newborn babe and jittery blood donor held his breath. No hypodermic slid into arm or buttock, no dog-bitten child cried out. There were no footsteps in the corridor, no birds in the trees, no recalcitrant engines in the parking lot. Only silence. And at the very hub and center of that silence that was like an ocean deep lay Walter, with his abridged leg, and Jessica. In his fear, his solitude, his abandonment to grief and despair, he clutched gratefully at her, fastening himself to her like something half-drowned clinging to a rock in the midst of a torrent. Had he been crazy that night? To be hard, soulless and free was one thing, to be cut adrift from comfort and the community of man was another. He was a cripple, a pariah. And here she was, Joan of Arc, Calypso and Florence Nightingale all rolled into one. What more could he want?

“Jessica,” he whispered as she swayed above him, the gently undulating blond arras of her hair shielding him from the oppressive walls, the intolerable flowers, the bedside table with its tattered copies of Argosy and Reader’s Digest, the sickness and the hurt, “Jessica, I think … I mean … do you think we ought to get married?”

The silence held. A fairy silence, oneiric, magical, the moment suspended and refined out of all proportion to the myriad moments that comprise a life. It held until she broke it — with a murmur of assent.

Lucky, lucky, lucky.

Jeremias was not so lucky. He withdrew into himself, gathered the meager skins about him and sat rigid as an ice sculpture while Van Wart’s agent fidgeted in the saddle, blustered, cajoled and threatened. The agent tried to reason with him, tried to beat him down and strike fear into his heart — he even tried appealing to the boy’s better nature, singing “Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me” in a high reedy tenor that belied his bulk. The wind howled down out of the mountains. Jeremias wouldn’t even look at him. Finally the agent swung his horse around and thundered off to fetch the law.

By the time he returned with the schout, the weather had worsened. For one thing, it was snowing — big feathery flakes torn from the breast of the sky and mounting against the downed trees and bracken like the sign of some cumulate cosmic wrath; for another, the temperature had dropped to six degrees above zero. The schout, whose duty it was to enforce the law for the patroon, of the patroon and by the patroon, was a lean ferrety fellow by the name of Joost Cats. He came armed with an eviction notice bearing the mark of his employer (a V wedded to a W, VW, the logo utilized by Oloffe Stephanus to authenticate his edicts, identify his goods and chattels and decorate his undergarments), and the rapier, baldric and silver-plumed hat that were the perquisites of his office.

“Young layabout,” the agent was saying as the snow played around his jowls. “Slaughtered the livestock and let the place fall to wrack and ruin. I’d as soon see him hung as evicted.”

Joost didn’t answer, his black staring eyes masked by the brim of his hat, the sharp little beard clinging like a stain to his chin. Erratic posture bowed his back like a sickle and he sat so low in the saddle you wouldn’t know he was coming but for the exuberant plume jogging between his horse’s ears. He didn’t answer because he was in a vicious mood. Here he was out in the hind end of nowhere, the sky like a cracked pitcher and snow powdering his black cloak till he looked like an olykoek dusted with sugar, and for what? To listen to the yabbering of the fat, red-faced, pompous ass beside him and bully a one-legged boy out into the maw of the great barren uncivilized world. He cleared his throat noisily and spat in disgust.

By the time they reached the naked white oak that in better times had shaded the Van Brunt household, the snow had begun to taper off and the temperature had dropped another five degrees. To their left, against the fastness of the trees, was the half-finished fieldstone wall begun by Wolf Nysen before he went mad, butchered his family and took to the hills. He’d cut their throats as they lay sleeping — sister, wife and two teenaged daughters — and left them to rot. When Joost’s predecessor, old Hoogstraten, had finally found them, they were so far gone they might have been molded of porridge. People said that the Swede was still up there somewhere, living like a red Indian, swathing himself in skins and killing rabbits with his bare hands. Joost glanced uneasily about him. Dead ahead lay the charred bones of the cabin poking through the skin of snow like a compound fracture.

“Here,” puffed the agent, “see what they’ve done to the place.”

Joost gave it a minute, his horse picking through the drifted snow like an old man stepping into a bath, before he responded. “Looks like the patroon ought to give up on this place. It’s nothing but bad luck.”

The agent ignored him. “Over there,” he said, pointing a thick finger in the direction of Jeremias’ lean-to. Joost dropped the reins and thrust his numbed hands into his pockets while his horse — a one-eyed nag with an overactive appetite and dropsical mien — bobbed stupidly after the agent’s mare.

“Van Brunt!” the agent called as they hovered over the empty lean-to and the snowy hummock that represented the corpse of the unhappy ox. “Show yourself this instant!”

There was no response.

The agent was blowing up a regular hurricane of exasperated breath, summoning up terms like brass, effrontery and cheek, when Joost pointed to a half-filled track in the snow at the rear of the lean-to. Beyond it was a similar print, and beyond that another. Upon closer examination, and after a full sixty seconds given over to reasoning in the deductive mode, the agent determined that these were young Van Brunt’s footprints; viz., the mark of one shoe — the left — roughly paralleled by a shallow trough connecting a pair of pegholes.

Though the snow had stopped, the wind had begun to kick up and the sky was darkening toward evening. Joost was of the opinion that they should leave well enough alone — the boy was gone, that’s all that mattered. But the agent, scrupulous as he was, felt obliged to make sure. After an exchange of opinion on the subject — Where do you expect him to go, Joost asked at one point, back to Zeeland? — the two set off at a slow plod to track the boy down and evict him properly.

The trail wound like a tattered ribbon through the forest and into a dense copse where grouse chuckled and turkeys roosted in the lower branches of the trees. Beyond the copse were hills uncountable, balled up like hedgehogs and bristling with timber, home to heath hen, pigeon, deer, pheasant, moose, and the lynx, catamount and wolf that preyed on them. And beyond the hills were the violent shadowy mountains — Dunderberg, Suycker Broodt, Klinkersberg — that swallowed up the river and gave rise to the Kaaterskill range and the unnamed territories that stretched out behind it all the way to the sun’s furthest decline. Looking into all that wild territory with its unknown terrors, with darkness coming on and his toes gone numb in his boots, Joost spurred his horse forward and prayed the trail would take them toward the glowing lights and commodious hearth of the upper house.