T. Boyle - World's End

For his part, Jeremias knew nothing of the conflict broiling around him. He was spending most of his time out in the barn with Katrinchee and Squagganeek, relearning the past, and he was too elated to notice much of anything. A week before he’d been fatherless, motherless, bereft of siblings, his nearest blood relation an uncle in Schobbejacken he hardly knew. And now, not only had his sister been restored to him, but wonder of wonders, he’d become an uncle himself. He sat for hours with Squagganeek, playing at cards or Trock, staring into the child’s eyes and seeing his father, his mother, seeing little Wouter. There was never any doubt in his mind: of course Staats and Meintje would take them in. Of course they would.

But when the week was up, Meintje took matters into her own hands. There were no tears, no fits, no raised voices or recriminations. When Staats and the children awoke at first light to the bleating of unmilked goats and the petulant squabbling of unfed chickens, they found the hearth cold, and Meintje, still in her nightgown, seated in her rocker on the far side of the room. What’s more, her hands were clasped together, as if in prayer, and she was facing the wall. “Meintje — what is it?” Staats cried, rushing to her. “Are you all right? Is it the grippe?” She said nothing. He took hold of her hands. They were lifeless, they were dead. She was staring at the wall.

Within minutes, the house was in an uproar. Meintje, who’d never before sat down in her life except to shuck peas or darn stockings and whose hands had never been idle, had been stricken by some terrible and enervating affliction — she’d become one of the living dead, unhearing, unseeing, unmoving. “Moeder!” cried little Jannetje, flinging herself at her mother’s feet, while the baby, little Klaes, howled as if all the world’s dole had suddenly been revealed to him. Meintje never even turned her head. Jeremias hovered uneasily in the background, exchanging looks with Douw. Then he went out to see to his sister.

Meintje sat there for six days. No one saw her move, not even to get up and relieve herself. Sometimes her eyes were closed; sometimes they were fixed on the wall in an unblinking stare. Talking to her — asking if she wanted to eat, sleep, see a doctor, send back to Volendam for her aged mother — was like talking to a stone. Meanwhile, the family managed as best it could. Douw and Barent tried their hands at cooking, Staats did the wash, and once, in desperation, Jeremias attempted a batch of corn cakes that looked and tasted like the residue of a chimney fire. Before long, Meintje’s kitchen — the envy of the neighborhood, refulgent as an ice pond and scoured right on down to the cracks of the floorboards — was a festering quagmire of food scraps, barnyard muck and shattered crockery. Finally, on the eve of the seventh day, she spoke.

The family was startled. They’d got so used to her silence and immobility they’d forgotten she was there at all. This was not the wife and mother they’d known a week ago, this was a piece of furniture, a footstool, a coatrack. Odds and ends had begun to accumulate around her like detritus: socks, vegetable peels, a half-chewed carrot. Jannetje’s doll lay nose down in her lap, Klaes’ cap was flung over the back of the chair and the Trock board had somehow become wedged between her shoulder and the chair arm. Now, as she spoke, the entire family started up in fright, as if the floorboards had shouted “You’re trampling me!” or the kettle had shrieked as the kindling caught fire beneath it. For all that, her message was pretty straightforward. Staats slapped his forehead, Jeremias went cold. Meintje spoke to the wall, four words only, each one bitten off as if it cost a thousand guilders: “Is she gone yet?”

For Jeremias, the choice was clear. He wheeled around, thumped through the door, stalked across the yard and into the barn. Five minutes later he emerged with Squagganeek on his back and the shorn and wild-eyed Katrinchee at his side. He took nothing with him: no clothes, no tools, no food. He didn’t look back.

It took Staats nearly a week to find him. He traveled as far south as the Sint Sink village, went north to Cold Spring and east to Crom’s Pond. He knocked at farmhouse doors, poked his head into shanties, wigwams and taverns, and got the same answer everywhere he went: no one had seen a one-legged boy, nor a shorn meisje or half-breed toddler either — it was almost as if they’d vanished from the face of the earth. But Staats persisted. He had to find them, had to tell Jeremias how he felt, had to explain and absolve himself. It was Meintje — he couldn’t do anything with her. If it was up to him he would have found room under his roof for Katrinchee and her bastard too. He would have. Jeremias knew that. It was just that Meintje was a strong-willed woman, that’s all, a woman who stuck to her principles. …

Staats wasn’t a man for words, but he rehearsed his speech like a practiced orator as he plodded through the woods or walked his horse along the glittering mud banks of the river. If it weren’t for Douw, though, he might never have had the chance to deliver it. Jeremias wasn’t in Croton or Crom’s Pond or Beverwyck or Poughkeepsie either. Douw could have told him that. After all, they’d slept in the same bed for two and a half years, they’d roamed the hills together, sat over hornbooks in the Crane parlor, filched pumpkins and crept up side by side on nesting quail and dozing frogs — Douw knew him as well as he knew himself. When finally his father thought to ask, and Douw let him know where Jeremias would almost certainly have gone, Staats stared at him dumbfounded for a moment, then cursed himself. Of course: the old farm.

That evening Staats ate a hurried supper of bread and porridge, and then made his way on foot out to the Van Brunt place. It was dusk when he got there, fireflies cutting holes in the shadows, the boles of the trees slipping in and out of rank, cicadas chattering, mosquitoes on the wing. At first he saw nothing — or rather, he saw leaves and trees, the ruins of the cabin, the white oak in its full vigor — but then, as he edged closer, he saw that Jeremias’ rotting lean-to, the lean-to of his exile and abandonment, was freshly covered with sheets of elm bark. And there was a sound he picked up now too, a scraping or rasping that could have come from no animal he knew.

He found Jeremias crouched over the carcass of a rabbit, skinning it with a sharpened stone. Katrinchee and Squagganeek, who’d been gathering kindling, looked up with startled faces. “Jeremias,” Staats said, and when the boy shot him a glance over his shoulder, his eyes were feral and cold.

Staats repeated the name twice more, then delivered his halting speech. He’d brought along an axe and a knife, and he held them out now to Jeremias, along with the basket of food — bread, smoked shad and cabbage — Meintje had packed for him. Jeremias said nothing. “Won’t you come home?” Staats asked him, and it was almost a whisper.

“This is my home,” Jeremias said.

It was crazy. Hopeless. Irresponsible. June already, and the crops in the ground, and Jeremias wanted to make a go of it. A cripple with a half-mad sister and her little shit-pants bastard, and he wanted to rebuild the cabin, reclaim the fields, put in a tardy crop and harvest for winter. Meintje clucked her tongue over it, Douw stared down into his cup of cider. But the following morning, Staats, Douw and ten-year-old Barent were there with their tools and a hamper of food that could have provisioned the English fleet. Jeremias embraced them solemnly, one by one. Then they started plowing.

Over the weeks, the entire community pitched in. Reinier Oothouse lent a hand with the carpentry, Hackaliah Crane stopped by with his team, Oom Egthuysen pledged a milk cow that properly belonged to the patroon and Meintje took up a collection among the huts vrouwen for the odd cup and saucer, bedding and cookware. Even Jan Pieterse got into the act, donating two barrels of ’Sopus ale, a sack of seed onions and a new plowshare and moldboard. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to get them on their feet. By early July, Jeremias had wheat and corn in the ground and a patch of pumpkin, calabash and turnip sprouting outside the door, and Katrinchee, now nearly nineteen, was presiding over her own kitchen for the first time in her young life. The cabin had gone up in two weeks, right over the charred remnants of the old one, and though it was crude, musty, close and dank, it would keep them alive through the winter. Things were looking up.