T. Boyle - World's End

Pieter Stuyvesant didn’t like it. He was a rough, tough, bellicose, fighting Frisian who’d lost a leg to the Portuguese and would yield to no man. He hurled defiance in Nicolls’ teeth: come what may, he would fight the Englishers to the death. Unfortunately, the good burghers of New Amsterdam, who resented the West India Company’s monopoly, eschewed taxation without representation and hated the despotic governor as if he were the devil himself, refused to back him. And so, on September 9, 1664, after fifty-five years of Dutch rule, New Amsterdam became New York — after Charles’ brother, James the duke of York — and the great, green, roiled, broad-backed North River became the Hudson, after the true-blue Englishman who’d discovered it.

Yes, the changes were dramatic — suddenly there was new currency to handle, a new language to learn, suddenly there were Connecticut Yankees swarming into the Valley like gnats — but none of these changes had much effect on life in Van Wartwyck. If Oloffe Stephanus throve under Dutch rule, he throve and multiplied and throve again under the English. The new rulers, hardly known as a nation for an affinity to radical change, preserved the status quo — i.e., the landlord on top and the yeoman on bottom. Oloffe’s wealth and political power grew. His eldest son and heir, Stephanus, who was twenty-one when Stuyvesant capitulated, would see the original 10,000-acre Dutch patent expanded more than eightfold when William and Mary chartered Van Wart Manor in the declining years of the century.

As for Joost, he performed his duties as before, answerable to no one but old Van Wart, who continued to exercise feudal dominion over his lands. The schout worked his little farm on the Croton River that lay within hollering distance of the lower manor house, harvested in season, went a-hunting, a-fishing and a-crabbing according to the calendar, raised his three daughters to be mindful of the laws of God and man, and satisfied his employer with the promptness and efficiency with which he settled disputes among the tenants, tracked down malefactors and collected past-due rents. For the most part, things were pretty quiet in the period following the English takeover. A few Yankees threw up shacks in the vicinity of Jan Pieterse’s place, where they would later draw up a charter for the town of Peterskill, and Reinier Oothouse got drunk and burned down his own barn, but aside from that nothing out of the ordinary cropped up. Lulled by the tranquillity of those years, Joost had nearly forgotten Jeremias, when one afternoon, in the company of his eldest, little Neeltje, he ran into him at the Blue Rock.

It was late May, the planting was done and the mornings were as gentle as a kiss on the cheek. Joost had left the lower manor house at dawn with a bundle of things for the patroon’s wife, Gertruyd, who was in the midst of a religious retreat at the upper manor house, and with instructions from the patroon to arbitrate a dispute between Hackaliah Crane, the new Yankee tenant, and Reinier Oothouse. Neeltje, who’d turned fifteen the month before, had begged to come along, ostensibly to keep her father company, but in truth to buy a bit of ribbon or hard candy at Pieterse’s with the stivers she’d earned dipping sacramental candles for Vrouw Van Wart.

The weather was clear and fair, and the sun had dried up the bogs and quagmires that had made the road practically impassable a month before. They covered the eight miles from Croton to the upper manor house in good time, and were able to meet with both Crane and Oothouse before noon. (Reinier, who was drunk as usual, claimed that the long-nosed Yankee had called him an “old dog” after he, Reinier, had boxed the ears of the Yankee’s youngest boy, one Cadwallader, for chasing a brood of setting hens off their nests. Reinier had responded to the insult by “twisting the Yankee’s great flapping ears and giving him a flathand across the bridge of his broomstick nose,” immediately following which the Yankee had “treacherously thrown [him] to the ground and kicked [him] in a tender spot.” Crane, a learned scion of the Connecticut Cranes, a family destined to furnish the Colonies with a limitless supply of itinerant pedants, potmakers and nostrum peddlers, denied everything. The schout, attesting Reinier’s drunkenness and perhaps a bit cowed by the Yankee’s learning, found for Crane and fined Oothouse five guilders, payable in fresh eggs, to be delivered to Vrouw Van Wart at the upper manor house — raw eggs being the only foodstuff she would consume while suffering the throes of religious abnegation — at the rate of four per day.) Afterward, father and daughter dined on eels, shad roe and perch with pickled cabbage in the great cool thick-walled kitchen at the upper manor house. Then they stopped at Jan Pieterse’s.

The trading post comprised a rude corral, a haphazardly fenced chicken coop and a long dark hut illuminated only by a pair of slit windows at front and back and the light from the door, which stood open from May to September. Jan Pieterse, who was said to be among the richest men in the valley, slept on a corn husk mattress in back. His principal trade had originally been with the Indians— wam-pumpeak, knives, axes and iron cookpots in exchange for furs — but as beaver and Indian alike had been on the decline and Boers and Yankees on the upswing, he’d begun to stock bits of imported cloth, farm implements, fish hooks, pipes of wine and kegs of soused pigs’ feet to appeal to his changing clientele. But there was more to the place than trade alone — along with the mill Van Wart had erected up the creek, the trading post was a great gathering spot for the community. There you might see half a dozen skulking Kitchawanks or Nochpeems (it was strictly verboden to sell rum to the Indians, but they wanted nothing more, and with a nod to necessity and a wink for the law, Jan Pieterse provided it), or Dominie Van Schaik taking up a collection for the construction of a yellow-brick church on the Verplanck road. Then too there might be any number of farmers in homespun paltroks, steeple hats and wooden shoes accompanied by their vrouwen and grimly linking arms with their ripe young daughters who made the fashions of the previous century seem au courant, and, of course, the horny-handed, red-faced, grinning young country louts who stood off in a corner thumping one another in the chest.

On this particular day, as Joost helped his daughter down from her mount, he saw only Jan Pieterse and Heyndrick Ten Haer sharing a pipe on the porch while a Wappinger brave lay spread-eagled in a patch of poison ivy up the lane, drunk as a lord and with his genitals exposed for all the world to see. Beyond the Indian, the river was as flat and still as hammered pewter, and Dunderberg rose up, a deep shadowed blue, to tilt at the horizon.

“Vader,” Neeltje said before she’d touched ground, “please, may I go right in?” She’d spoken of nothing but ribbon, broadcloth and velvet since they’d left Croton that morning. Mariken Van Wart had the prettiest silk petticoats and blue satin skirt, and she was only thirteen, even if she was the patroon’s niece. And armozine ribbon — you should have seen it!

Joost handed her down, straightened up briefly and then fell again into his habitual slump. “Yes,” he whispered, “yes, of course, go ahead,” and then he ambled up to shoot the breeze with Jan Pieterse and Farmer Ten Haer.

He’d been slouching there on the stoep some ten minutes or so, puffing fraternally at his clay pipe and relishing the rich westering sun in those few moments before he would ask Jan Pieterse to join him in a pint of ale, when he became aware that his daughter was talking to someone inside the store. He remarked it only because he’d assumed the store was empty. There were only two horses in the lot — his own sorry, one-eyed nag and the sleek tawny mare he’d conscripted from the Van Wart stable for his daughter — and Farmer Ten Haer’s wagon stood alone beneath the chestnut tree. Whoever could she be talking to? he wondered, but Heyndrick Ten Haer was in the middle of a story about Wolf Nysen — whether or not he was even alive still, the renegade Swede had become the bogey of the neighborhood, blamed for everything from a missing hen to some huis vrouw’s shin splints — and Joost momentarily forgot about it.