T. Boyle - World's End

And so things went, on through the fall and the days that slid ever more rapidly toward night, through the harvest that was less than bountiful but more than meager, through the lulling warmth of Indian summer and the cold sting of the first blighting frost. Then one afternoon, late in October, Jeremias was out on the far verge of the cornfield, burning stumps and thinking of the way the blouse clung to Neeltje’s upper arms, when all at once he felt himself gripped by nameless fears and vague apprehensions. His pulse quickened, smoke stung his eyes, he could feel the scar come alive on his face. Not two days earlier, a half-plucked gobbler in his lap, his hands glutinous with feathers and his mind wandering all the way down to Croton, he’d glanced up and seen the figure of his father, clear as day, tearing across the field in his steaming nightshirt. But now, though the blood was beating in his temples and his scalp felt as if it were being manipulated by invisible fingers, though he looked over both shoulders and stared down his nose at the four corners of the field, he saw nothing.

No sooner had he gone back to his work, however, than he was startled by a voice that seemed to leap up out of the blaze before him, as if the very fire itself were speaking. “You. Who gives you the right to farm here?” rumbled the voice in very bad Dutch. Jeremias rubbed the smoke from his eyes. And saw that a man — a giant, red-bearded, dressed in skins and with a woodsman’s axe flung over his shoulder — stood to the right of the burning stump. The smoke shifted, and the man took a step forward.

Jeremias could see him more clearly now. His face was as soiled as a coal miner’s, he wore leggings after the Indian fashion, and the eyes stared out of his head with the exophthalmic vehemence of the eyes of the mad. A pair of coneys, still wet with blood, dangled from his belt. “Who gives you the right?” he repeated.

Backing up a step, wondering how, with his bad leg, he could possibly hope to outrun this madman, Jeremias found himself murmuring the name of his landlord and master as if it were an incantation. “Oloffe Stephanus Van Wart,” he said, “… the patroon.”

“The patroon, is it?” the madman returned, mincing his words in mockery. “And who gives him the right?”

Jeremias tried to hold the stranger’s eyes while casting about for something he could use to defend himself — a stone, a root, the jawbone of an ass, anything. “Their … Their High Mightinesses,” he stammered. “Originally, I mean. Now it’s the duke of York and King Charles of the Englishers.”

The madman was grinning. A flat, toneless laugh escaped his lips. “You’ve learned your lesson well,” he said. “And what are you, then — a man to forge his own destiny or somebody’s nigger slave?”

All at once the world rose up to scream in his ears, the harsh caterwauling of the hollow withered dead: all at once Jeremias understood who it was standing there before him. In desperation he snatched up a stone and crouched low, David in the shadow of Goliath. He understood that he was about to die.

“You,” the madman said, laughing again. “You know who I am?”

Jeremias could barely choke out a response. His legs felt weak and his throat had gone dry. “Yes,” he whispered. “You’re Wolf Nysen.”

Marguerite Mott, elder sister of Muriel, edged closer to Depeyster, scuffing the ancient peg-and-groove floor with the feet of the William and Mary side chair. Like her sister, she was a big moon-faced blonde in her mid-fifties who favored false eyelashes and cocktail dresses in colors like champagne and chartreuse. Unlike her sister, however, she worked for a living. Selling real estate. “He’s rejected the bid,” she said, looking up from the sheaf of papers in her lap.

“Son of a bitch.” Depeyster Van Wart rose from his chair, and when he spoke again, his voice was pinched to a yelp. “You kept this strictly confidential, right? He had no idea it was me?”

Marguerite pressed her lashes together in a coy little blink and gave him a look of wide-eyed rectitude. “Like you told me,” she said, “I’m bidding on behalf of a client from Connecticut.”

Depeyster turned away from her in exasperation. He had an urge to pluck something up off the sideboard — an antique inkwell, a china bibelot — and fling it through the window. He was a great flinger. He’d flung Lionel trains, music boxes and croquet mallets as a boy, squash rackets, golf clubs and highball glasses as he grew older. There was actually something in his hand, some damnable piece of Indian bric-a-brac — what was it, a calumet? a tomahawk? — before he got hold of himself. He set the thing down and reached into his breast pocket for a tranquillizing pinch of cellar dust.

“So, what are you saying,” he said, swinging around on her, “the place isn’t for sale then — to anybody? You mean to tell me the old fart isn’t hard up for cash?”

“No, he wants to sell. Word is he’s trying to raise money to leave his grandson something.” Marguerite paused to snap open a compact, peer into it as into a bottomless well, and dab something on the flanges of her nose. “He thinks twenty-five hundred’s too low, that’s all.”

Of course. The son of a bitch. The hypocrite. To each according to his need, share and share alike, the crime of property and all the rest of it. Slogans, and nothing more. When it came down to it, Peletiah Crane was as venal as the next man. Twenty-five hundred an acre for a piece of property that had been worthless since the time of the red Indians, twenty-five hundred an acre for land he’d practically stolen from Depeyster’s father for something like a hundredth of that. And still it wasn’t enough for him. “What’s he want then?”

Marguerite gave him another demure little blink and dropped her voice to soften the blow: “He did mention a figure.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t get excited now. Remember, we are bargaining with him.”

“Yeah, yeah: what’s he want?”

Her voice was nothing, tiny, a voice speaking from the depths of a cavern: “Thirty-five hundred.”

“Thirty-five!” he echoed. “Thirty-five?” He had to turn away from her again, his hands trembling, and take another quick hit of dust. The unfairness of it all! The cheat and deception! He was no megalomaniac, no cattle baron, no land-greedy parvenu: all he wanted was a little piece of his own back.

“We could bargain him down, I’m sure of it.” Marguerite’s voice rose up in lusty crescendo, rich and strong, invigorated by the prospect of the deal. “All’s I need is your go-ahead.”

Depeyster wasn’t listening. He was reflecting sadly on how far the Van Warts had fallen. His ancestors — powerful, indomitable, hawk-eyed men who tamed the land, shot bears, skinned beavers and brought industry and agronomy to the valley, men who made a profit, for Christ’s sake — had owned half of Westchester. They’d built something unique, something glorious, and now it was finished. Eaten away, piece by piece, by blind legislators and land-hungry immigrants, by swindlers and bums and Communists. First they started carving it up into towns, then they built their roads and turnpikes, and before anyone could stop them they’d voted away the rights of the property owners and deeded the land to the tenants. Democracy: it was a farce. Another brand of communism. Rob the rich, screw the movers and shakers, the pioneers and risk takers and captains of industry, and let all the no-accounts vote themselves a share of somebody else’s pie.

And if the politicians weren’t bad enough, the crooks and confidence men were right there behind them. His great-grandfather was fleeced in the Quedah Merchant scheme, his grandfather lost half his fortune to touts and tipsters and the other half to thespian ladies in bustles and black stockings, and then his own father, a man with developed tastes, fell like a gored toreador among the trampling hoofs of the stockbrokers. Sure, there were ten acres left, there was the house and the business and the other interests too, but it was nothing. A mockery. The smallest shard of what had been. Landless, heirless, Depeyster Van Wart stood there in that venerable parlor, the last offshoot of a family that had ruled all the way to the Connecticut border, frustrated over a matter of fifty acres. Fifty acres. His forefathers wouldn’t have pissed on fifty acres.