T. Boyle - World's End

“Aren’t you pleased?”

Pleased? To have his face slashed and his hands shackled, to be hauled off in ignominy and shut up in this hole while his sister and the boy were left to fend for themselves? Pleased? “Ja,” he said finally.

“I’ve got to go,” she said, glancing at the door.

All at once the night was charged with the chirring of insects, with doleful cries and the faint whisper of birds on the wing. Jeremias set down the bowl, edged closer to her. Just as he reached out to her, just as he took hold of her hand to pull her to him, she shook free and rose to her feet. Her eyes had narrowed suddenly and she stood cocked on one leg. “Who was that woman,” she said, watching his eyes. “The one at the farm.”

Woman? Farm? What was she talking about?

“She’s your wife, isn’t she?”

Jeremias came before the patroon the following morning. He was awakened at first light by the black woman with the strange swirling scars about her lips and nostrils. She handed him a bucket of water and a bowl of tepid corn mush, and informed him in a Dutch so crude it was like the dialogue of the beasts that he had better make himself presentable for Mijnheer Van Wart. When she’d gone, Jeremias slipped the crude woolen shirt over his head and gingerly laid the side of his face in the water; he held it there until the mud plaster began to dissolve. The water went cloudy, then turned the color of beef broth in a swirl of fragmented leaves, twisted stems and strange dried petals.

After a time, Jeremias sat up and tentatively explored the wound with his fingertips: a crude split ridge ran from his right eyebrow to his chin, rough ground, a topography of scab, pus and wet puddled blood. He explored it, this new grain of his metamorphosing self, ran his fingers over it again and again, till the spots of fresh blood had dried. Then he washed his hands.

It must have been around nine when the schout came for him. The door flung back, light surged into the room like the flood tide running up against the rocks, and there he stood, bowed over like a great black question mark against the blank page of the day. “Come younker,” he said, “the patroon will see you now,” but there was something odd in the way he said it, something hollow and uncertain. For a moment, Jeremias was puzzled — this wasn’t the schout he knew — but then he understood: it was the wound. The man had gone too far, and he knew it. He’d raised his hand against an unarmed and crippled boy, and here was the evidence of it etched in his victim’s face. Jeremias rose from the straw and strode out of the cell, wearing the mark of the schout’s disgrace like a badge.

Cats escorted him around the corner to the kitchen/dairy room, where milk, butter, cheese and other foodstuffs were stored, and where the patroon’s servants did most of the cooking for the household. As soon as they stepped in the door, the black woman materialized from the shadows to flay Jeremias’ broad back, his shoulders and arms and the seat of his baggy pantaloons with a birch broom so stiff and unyielding it might have been cut yesterday. Then a second black — this one a slight, stoop-shouldered male with a kinked cube of hair that stood up off his head like a toque — led them up the stairs and into the family kitchen above.

This room was dominated by a big round oak-plank table, in the center of which stood a cone of sugar and a blue vase of cut flowers. A painted cupboard stood in the corner beside a heavy mahogany sideboard that must have been shipped over from the old country, and the fireplace was decorated with blue ceramic tiles depicting biblical themes like the salification of Lot’s wife and the beheading of John the Baptist. Jeremias took it all in as he stood at attention just inside the basement door. The schout, plumed hat in hand, slumped beside him while the black knocked respectfully at the door to the parlor. A voice answered from within, and the slave silently pulled open the door and turned to them with a grin that showed off the sharp, filed points of his glistening teeth. “De patroon he see you now,” he said, stepping aside with a sweep of his arm.

Jeremias glimpsed walls hung with portraits, massive blocks of dark oiled furniture, real tallow candles in silver sconces, a carpet of woven colors. As he limped forward, the schout at his side, a high rectangular table came into view, and he saw that it was laid out for tea, with silver service and cups of painted porcelain that might have graced the slim, smooth hands of Chinese emperors. The beauty of it, the elegance and refinement, overwhelmed him, choked him with a nostalgia as fierce and cleansing as a spoonful of horseradish. For a moment — just a moment — he was a young boy in the bosom of his parents, sitting down to Martinmas tea in the parlor of the burgomaster of Schobbejacken.

All at once he became conscious of the harsh rap of his pegleg on the floor, of his filthy shirt and pantaloons and the torn stocking that hung in tatters from his calf: he was passing through the patroon’s kitchen, entering the patroon’s parlor, and he began to feel very small indeed. Compared with the van der Meulens’ modest little farmhouse or Jan Pieterse’s dark and drafty store, the place seemed inexpressibly grand, a sultan’s palace sprung up in the wilds of the new world. In truth, the house comprised but six moderate-sized rooms in its two squat stories, and it was a far cry from the burghers’ houses of Amsterdam and Haarlem, let alone the great estates of the gentry, but to one who lived in a dirt-floor hovel with a thatched roof and split-log walls that dripped sap, to one who drank from wooden mugs, plucked bits of stringy rabbit from the pot with his fingers and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve, it was opulence itself. For all his desperation, for all his anger and resentment, Jeremias was awed by it, humbled; he felt weak and insignificant — he felt guilty; yes, guilty — and he slouched into Van Wart’s parlor like a sinner slouching into the Sistine Chapel.

The patroon, a pale fleshy little man whose features seemed lost in various excrescences, was sunk deep in a settee lined with pillows, his gouty foot propped above the level of his eyes on a makeshift buttress composed of two beaver pelts, a feather duster, the family Bible and a copy of Grotius’ Inleidinge tot de Hollandsche Rechtsgeleerdheid, all piled atop a sagging corner chair. Beside him, looking as bloated and pontifical as the next-to-biggest bullfrog in the pond, was the commis; in the commis’ lap, like the Book of Doom itself, sat the accounts ledger. The moment Jeremias laid eyes on them, his humility evaporated; in its place, he felt an intoxicating rush of hatred surge through him. He didn’t want to farm, care for his sister, make his fortune or wrest Neeltje away from her father — all he wanted at that moment was to snatch the schout’s sword from him and run it through the pasty grublike bodies of commis and patroon, and then lay waste to the place, gouging the furniture, shattering the crockery, dropping his pants to defecate in the silver teapot… but the impulse died before it could take hold of him, died stillborn, supplanted by a breathless gasp of surprise. For Jeremias suddenly realized that patroon and commis were not alone in the room. Seated in the corner, silent and motionless as a snake, was a man Jeremias had never seen before.

He was young, this stranger — no more than five or six years Jeremias’ senior — and he was tricked out in velvet and satin like one of Their High Mightinesses Themselves. With one silk-clad leg crossed casually over the other and a smirk of invincible superiority on his face, the stranger shot Jeremias a glance of cold appraisal that ate through him like acid. For one astonished instant Jeremias locked eyes with him, and then stared down at the floor, humbled all over again. The scar seared his face, no badge now, but the mark of Cain, the brand of a criminal. He didn’t look up again.