T. Boyle - World's End

“I’m right here,” she said, appending his name in a startled whisper, “—Jeremias.”

And then there was the other voice, the voice that stirred him with a thrill of hate even as he lay there flat on his back. “I’m sorry it’s come to this,” the schout said, and Jeremias could see him now too, gargantuan, all nose and broad-rimmed hat, as tall as any tree and broad enough to blot out the sun, “and I’m sorry I’ve struck you down. But you’ve got to learn respect for authority, you’ve got to know your place.”

“Oh, vader, please. Can’t you see he’s hurt?”

The schout went on as if he hadn’t heard her, as if she were made of air or paper. “Under the authority vested in me by the lord and proprietor of these lands, Oloffe Stephanus Van Wart, patroon,” he said, his voice gone nasal in official pronouncement, “I hereby inform you, Jeremias Van Brunt, that you are now in custody of the law.”

Jeremias walked the eight miles to Croton. In his filthy blood-stained clothes, with bits of grass and leaves in his hair, and the side of his face swollen to twice its size with the poultice of mud and medicinal herbs Katrinchee had applied, after the Weckquaesgeek fashion, to his open wound. His hands were bound behind his back, as if he were a thief or axe murderer, and a cord cinched around his waist connected him to the pommel of the schout’s saddle. It was tough going. The nag would quicken its pace unexpectedly and jerk him forward or suddenly slow to a virtual stop, causing him to stagger out to his right to avoid it, the strut digging like a goad at the stump of his leg. Another man would have complained, but not Jeremias. Though horseflies and mosquitoes made him dance with their stings, though he felt light-headed from loss of blood and sick from thirst, though the gash that leapt across his right eye, exposed the bone beneath it and opened up the flesh all the way to the hinge of his jaw felt as if it were being probed with hot needles, he never said a word. No: he just concentrated on the slow, working shift of the nag’s flanks and stepped aside when the animal relieved itself.

Neeltje was up front, on her mare. Her father, in a metallic voice, had commanded her to keep as great a distance as circumstances permitted between herself and the prisoner. She’d begun to protest—“He’s just a boy, vader: he’s hurt and suffering”—but that hard cold voice clamped down on her like a steel trap. Resigned, she’d gone on ahead — ten yards or so out in front of her father — but every so often she glanced over her shoulder and gave Jeremias a look of such concentrated tenderness he felt he would collapse on the spot. Either that or go on till he’d circled the globe six times and dug a rut you could drive a wagon through.

As it turned out, he went on. Past the turnoff for Verplanck’s Landing and along the river, where it was no cooler, past fields and forests he’d never before laid eyes on, through the late afternoon and into the quiet of evening. He was fixating on the mesmeric rise and fall of the nag’s hooves, no longer alert enough to bother dodging the piles of dung it dropped in his path, when they rounded a bend in the road and they were there. He looked up dully. The lower manor house rose out of the fields before him, high-crowned and commanding, with a rambling long porch out front and a stone cellar beneath it that was itself half again as big as the Van Wartwyck house. The schout dismounted, freed Jeremias’s hands with a rough tug at the cords that bound them, jerked open a door in the basement wall and thrust him into a cell the size of a wagon bed. The door closed on darkness.

He woke to a light rapping from the outer world, the rattle of key in lock, and then the sudden effulgence of morning as the door pulled back on its rusted hinges. A black woman, who still bore the facial cicatrices of her lorn and distant tribe, stood in the doorway. She was wearing a homespun dress, the lappet cap favored by country vrouwen from Gelderland to Beverwyck, and an immaculate pair of wooden clogs. “Brekkfass,” she said, handing him a mug of water, a wedge of cheese and a small loaf, still warm from the oven. He saw that he was in a toolshed, the rough walls hung with wooden rakes, shovels, a moldering harness, a flail with a splintered swiple. Then the door slammed shut once more and he lay back in the straw that covered the earthen floor, chewed his breakfast and watched the sun slice through the crevice between the crude door and its stone frame.

The sun was gone by the time the door swung open again, the darkness of the cell so absolute he had to shield his eyes against the lit taper that was suddenly thrust in his face. He’d been alone with his thoughts through the interminable day, dozing fitfully and jerking awake with a start to sit up and hesitantly examine his swollen cheek or rub the butt of his leg, and over the course of so many dead hours the shock of his confrontation with the schout had seeped out of him. In the darkness, in the damp, in the impenetrable solitude of that strange prison, he could feel the rage gnawing at him once again. In their eyes, he was a criminal. But what had he done, really? Lay claim to a piece of land? Try to work it and survive? By what right did the schout claim his neat little bouwerie —or the patroon his estates, for that matter? The more he thought about it, the more incensed he grew. If anyone was a criminal, if anyone should be locked up, it was Joost Cats, it was Oloffe Van Wart and his fat-assed commis with the leather-bound accounts ledgers. They were the real criminals — the patroon and his henchmen, Their High Mightinesses of the States General, the English king himself. They were leeches, chiggers, toads; they’d got under his skin and wouldn’t leave him alone till they’d sucked him dry.

When the door opened this time, he was ready. He’d actually sprung up from the ground, a rake in his hand, actually raised it above his head like a tomahawk and kicked the taper to the floor, before she called out his name in a gasp and he felt foolish all over again. “Hush,” she hissed. “It’s me. I bribed Ismailia and brought you this.” Neeltje handed him a wooden bowl and pulled the door shut behind her. The bowl was warm and it gave off a smell of cabbage. Jeremias watched her numbly as she bent for the rush candle and held it up to illuminate her face, which was like something newly created from the void. “I hate my father,” she said.

Jeremias clung to the bowl as if it were a stone at the edge of a precipice. He appreciated the sentiment, but held his peace.

“He’s so, so” her voice trailed off. “Are you all right?”

He was studying the lock of pale fine hair that had worked its way out from under her cap to cling familiarly to her eyebrow. He wanted to say something significant, passionate, something like Now that you’re here, I am, but he couldn’t find the words. When he spoke, his voice sounded strange in his ears. “I’ll live,” he said.

She motioned him to sit and then squatted beside him as he settled back down in the straw and sipped tentatively from the bowl. “I heard them talking,” she said. “My father and the patroon. They’re going to leave you down here for another night to teach you a lesson, then the patroon’s going to offer you tenancy on your farm.”

Jeremias barely heard her. He didn’t give a damn for the patroon, for the farm, for anything — anything but her. The way she talked, biting off each word like a little girl, the pout of her lips, the way her hips swelled out against the seams of her dress as she squatted there: each movement, each gesture, was a revelation. “Ja,” he said, to say something. “Ja.”