T. Boyle - World's End

Then they both fell silent and Jeremias became aware of a new voice outside the door — a voice he’d heard before, cadences summoned from some deep recess of memory. He heard Farmer Ten Haer blustering about Wolf Nysen, heard Jan Pieterse’s scoffing retort, and then that other voice, and it made him go cold.

“And you?” she said finally.

Jan Pieterse’s dog changed his position among the furs with a sybaritic grunt. Jeremias found himself staring into a pair of eyes that were like the blueware of the rich, a sheen of glaze and a color as deep as the Scheldt. “Me?” he said. “I live up on the van der Meulen farm, but I’m a Van Brunt. Jeremias Van Brunt. I’ll be seventeen this summer.”

“I’m Neeltje Cats,” she said. “I just turned fifteen.” And then, with pride: “My father’s the schout.”

Yes. Of course. The schout. Jeremias’ eyes went hard and he gritted his teeth.

“What—?” she began, and then faltered. She was staring at the loose cuff of his pantaloons. “What happened to you?”

He looked down at his wooden leg as if he were seeing it for the first time. Suddenly the atmosphere had changed. He couldn’t see the pelts for the claws that dully glinted in the light filtering through the open door. “I had an accident,” he said. “When I was fourteen.”

She nodded as if to say yes, it doesn’t matter, the world’s a harsh place — or so her parents had told her. “My father says Pieter Stuyvesant was a great man.”

“He was,” Jeremias said. “He is.” And then all at once he felt something go loose in him, some cord that had been wound too tight, and suddenly he was playing the fool, skating across the floor on his wooden strut, hair in his eyes and his face frozen in a scowl, leveling an imaginary sword at the Englishers like the great man himself.

Neeltje laughed. Pure, untroubled, as marvelous a thing as the music of the spheres, that laugh was what hooked him. No, he didn’t prick his finger on one of the barbs or fall face forward into the barrel of soused pig’s feet, but he was hooked all the same. That laugh was a revelation. He looked at her, laughing himself now, studied her as she stood there grinning with a piece of ribbon in her hand, and saw his future.

The first thing he did when he got back to the farm was ask Staats about her. His stepfather was around the side of the house, standing on a chair and painting the wall with a whitewash made of pulverized oyster shells. “Cats?” he said, pausing to shove back his wide-brimmed hat and rub a palm over his bare skull. “I knew a Cats once back in Volendam. Nasty beggar. Full of piss and vinegar.”

Jeremias stood in the gathering dusk and listened politely as his stepfather gave a detailed account of the petty crimes and scandals fomented by this nefarious Cats — Staats couldn’t recall the duyvil’s first name — some twenty years earlier in the town of Volendam, halfway around the world. When Staats paused for breath, Jeremias gently steered him back to the here and now. “But what about the schout— Joost Cats?”

Staats paused again. “Joost?” he said, groping for the connection. “Ja, Ja, Joost. He doesn’t have a daughter, does he?”

Meintje was no more helpful. A militant look came into her eyes at the mention of the schout and she advised Jeremias to let bygones be bygones. “If I was you,” she said, “I woudn’t go near him or his daughter either.”

A month dragged by. Jeremias cleared land, burned stumps, built walls of fieldstone, milked and fed the cows, weeded the barley field and shoveled shit. He ate fish, fowl and game, ate corn cakes, porridge and bruinbrod, drank cider and ’Sopus ale. He slept on a cornhusk mattress with Douw van der Meulen, pinched tobacco and tried it behind the barn, swam naked in Van Wart Creek. And there were long hot afternoons when all he did was wander over to the old farm and stare at the ashes. Through it all though, he never shook the image of Neeltje Cats.

Then came the day when a pock-marked Kitchawank in a pair of expansive pantaloons knocked at the door. It was mid-June, the light like a fine wash, and Jeremias had just sat down with the family to the evening meal. Meintje opened the door partway, as she might have opened it on a peddler back in Volendam. “Yes?” she said.

But Staats was already on his feet, Jeremias, Douw and the three younger children staring up at him in surprise. “Why, it’s old Jan,” he said, and Meintje pulled back the door.

The Kitchawank was shirtless, his torso a topography of scars, abrasions and infected insect bites, his moccasins torn and mudspattered. He was known as old Jan in the neighborhood and he made his living doing odd jobs and drifting from village to village, carrying messages for a doit or a stein of beer. He’d survived the smallpox that had ravaged his tribe some thirty years earlier, only to find that the fever had coddled his brain. Staats knew him from Jan Pieterse’s. Meintje had never laid eyes on him before.

“What is it, Jan?” Staats said. “Have you got a message for us?”

The Indian stood there in the doorway, impassive, his face as blasted and worn as bedrock. “Ja, I have a message,” he said in his halting, rudimentary Dutch. “For him,” and he pointed to Jeremias.

“Me?” Jeremias rose from the table in confusion. Who would send him a message? He didn’t know a soul in the great wide world but for the boys of the neighborhood and the people gathered around the table.

Old Jan nodded. Then he turned to point at a gap in the trees beyond the barn, and Jeremias, standing at the door now with Staats and Meintje, with Douw and Barent, Klaes and little Jannetje, saw a gaunt figure wrapped in a raccoon coat emerge from the shadows. “Your sister,” old Jan began, turning back to him, and all at once Jeremias could feel the blood beating in his ears. Katrinchee. He hadn’t given her a thought in ages. For all he knew she might have been dead, so completely had she vanished from the community. “Your sister,” the Indian repeated, but his voice trailed off. He looked at Jeremias and his eyes were asleep.

“Yes? What about her?” Staats said.

From across the field came the sound of Mohonk’s voice, urgent and nagging, and old Jan’s head jerked up as if he’d been caught napping. “She thinks,” he murmured, “you are burned up and dead. “She’s—” and his voice gave out.

“Jan, Jan — snap out of it,” Staats growled, taking the Indian by the arm, but it was the sound of Mohonk’s voice that brought him around again. Mohonk cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted a second time, and old Jan’s eyes cleared momentarily. He swept their faces with a distant gaze and said, “A glass of beer.”

“Yes, yes, beer,” Staats said. “But first the message.”

He looked at them as if he’d just come into the world. “Your sister,” he repeated for the third time, “she’s a Weckquaesgeek whore.”

Staats van der Meulen was a compassionate man. There was no room for her in the house, but he fixed up a pallet in the barrack of the barn and Katrinchee crept into the straw with her child like some shorn and abandoned madonna. Oxen snorted, cows lowed, swallows flitted among the shadows. Meintje bit her lip and sent a basket of day-old bread and a bit of milk cheese out to her. “This is only temporary,” she warned Staats, leveling her wooden spoon at him. “Tomorrow — and here she might have been talking of a matricide or leper—“she goes.”

Tomorrow became the next day and then the next. “We can’t just turn her out to go back to the savages,” Staats argued, but Meintje was adamant. The girl was fallen, she was subversive and unrepentant, a miscegenator, and they couldn’t have her around the children. “I give you to the end of the week,” she warned.