T. Boyle - World's End

It was late September, overcast but warm — oppressively warm — and by the time he was halfway up the hill he found he had to sit a moment and refresh himself beside the stream that chattered along the path in a ribbon of fern and skunk cabbage. The local farmers, he recalled, referred to the runlet as Blood Creek for some superstitious reason, something about a filicide who supposedly stalked these woods. Rustic superstitions had little effect on the Dominie, a man who followed Gomarus and walked the path of righteousness, but still he had to admit that these woods were particularly gloomy and ominous. What was it? The trees were thicker here, he supposed, the light more tenuous. And there seemed to be a disproportionate number of rotting trunks among the healthy trees, big Cretaceous giants that leaned precariously against their still vital neighbors or stretched out prone — their bark gone in patches and covered all over with earlike growths of fungus — until they were swallowed up in the shadows of the forest floor.

The Dominie had just cupped his hands and bent forward to drink from a limpid stony pool, when he glanced up and spotted the figure of a man poised amidst the scrub oak and mountain laurel. It was a shock, and for all his certainty, for all his contempt for the bogeys that haunt the primitive mind, he felt his heart turn over in him. But the shock was momentary: this was no red-bearded Swede with a dripping axe, this was … nothing. The figure, if it had been there at all, had faded into the undergrowth like a phantom. Had his eyes been playing tricks on him? No. He’d seen it clear as day. A man of flesh and blood, gaunt, tall, with the facial features of an aborigine and wrapped in a coat of animal fur. Shaken, the Dominie rose cautiously to his feet. “Hello?” he called. “Is anyone there?”

Not a leaf stirred. From an invisible perch, high above him, a crow called out in its harsh mocking tones. All at once the Dominie was angry with himself — he’d fallen prey to superstition, if only for an instant. But then anger gave way to fear: rational, cold, self-serving fear. If what he’d seen out there wasn’t an apparition, it occurred to him that a painted savage was even then lurking amidst the bushes, stalking him — the Dominie — as he might have stalked a turkey or quail. Recollections of the Indian massacres of the forties succeeded this revelation, and the Dominie, picturing splayed limbs and tomahawked scalps, gathered himself up and hurried on his way.

He was winded by the time he reached the crest of the hill, and he took a moment to catch his breath and survey the untidy little farm that lay before him. The place was even worse than he’d imagined. A recent thunderstorm had made a quagmire of the yard out front of the house (if you could call it a house), the stone fences were in disrepair and there was a pervasive reek of human slops about the place. The woman, with her shaved head and dumb-staring eyes, came out to greet him. She was wearing a dress that might have been scavenged from a corpse, and the half-breed child — he looked to be about two or so — trailed behind her, naked as the day he was born. The Dominie made his greetings and sat out front on the chopping block, drinking more water — didn’t anyone serve ale any more? — and nibbling at a sourish corn cake while the child ran to fetch his uncle, and a Canada goose with clipped wings looked on expectantly.

Young Van Brunt came in from the fields and extended a callused hand. “Pleased to see you again, Dominie,” he said. “We’re thankful you could make it.”

The pastor had meant to be severe, to give the boy a piece of his mind with regard to raising half-breed bastards, defying the patroon’s authority and running afoul of the schout, but Jeremias’ humble greeting softened him. He took the proferred hand, looked past the angry reddened welt the schout’s sword had left like a surveyor’s plumb line on the boy’s face, and into the shifting deeps of his eyes. “It’s more than God’s duty,” he murmured. “It’s a pleasure too.”

The ceremony was nothing — a saying of words and a sprinkling of water the woman fetched from the creek — a ceremony he’d performed a hundred times and more, but what gave him trouble was the name. He actually stumbled over it, twice, before Jeremias’ soft assured tones corrected him. Jeremy — the Englishers’ version of Jeremias — was no problem; it was the patronym that made his tongue cleave to his palate like a half-baked honeycake. “Mohonk?” he said. “Is that right?”

Two months before, on that stifling July afternoon when Jan Pieterse left his store to dip crabs on Acquasinnick Bay and Joost Cats rode out to Nysen’s Roost on the patroon’s business, Jeremias was hoeing up the weeds between the high sweet burgeoning rows of corn in the stand behind the house. It was a messy proposition. The ground was wet as a sponge with the runoff from the previous night’s storm, and it tugged at the hoe with a whistling suck and plop and clung to his pegleg like the grip of a dirty hand. He swatted insects, sweat dripped from his nose, there were yellow smears of mud on his face and clothing, on his pegleg and the wooden clog he wore on his left foot. It was only because it was so hot and still — even the birds were at rest till the cool of evening — that he was able to hear the shudder and whinny of the horses, and then the voices — one of them was Katrinchee’s — that came to him over the fields in a sunstruck rhapsody. Staats, he thought. Or Douw.

On his way in from the field he found Squagganeek bent over an anthill with a stick, and took him by the hand. “It’s grootvader van der Meulen,” he told the boy. “Come to visit on his horse. And Uncle Douw too, I’ll bet.” But when he rounded the corner of the house, the boy at his side, he saw how wrong he’d been — how bitterly, painfully wrong. He’d expected an embrace from Staats, a walk with Douw, something from moeder Meintje’s oven, and the sight of the schout, with his flugelhorn nose, bowed back and ugly black dab of a beard, stopped him cold. For a moment. A moment only. Then the anger took over. Trembling with it, his heart hammering and his throat gone dry, he crossed the yard, heard what the ass had to say and bent to pluck a stick of firewood from the ground.

He was so enraged— again, the son-of-a-bitch had come to evict him again —that he barely glanced at the second rider hovering at the edge of the trees. Until she called out, that is. Until her father unsheathed his sword and raised it above his head and she cried out in shock and horror and the keenest pitch of lamentation. Jeremias shot her a glance, her name on his lips even as the stick splintered in his hands and the force of the schout’s blow drove him to his knees, feeling somehow awkward and embarrassed, ashamed of his clothes and his uncombed hair, regretful of his rage, his station, his life, wanting only to hold her but holding nothing. Then there was blood in his eyes and he was on the ground.

If the sun stirred in the sky and the shadows lengthened, he was unaware of it. When he opened his eyes he could barely see for the blood that filmed them, but he knew she was there, bent over him, pressing something that smelled of her most intimate self to the side of his face, while Katrinchee sobbed somewhere in the background and Squagganeek, closer at hand, howled like a wild beast. Then it came to him: her skirts. He was bleeding, he was hurt, and she was stanching the blood with her skirts. He could see her now, the light trembling around her in an otherworldy nimbus, the coils of her hair fallen loose, her face gone dead white and her dress steeped in his wet black blood. “Neeltje?” he said, trying to shake it off and sit up.