T. Boyle - World's End

Jeremy left the next morning for Van Wartville and the tumbledown shack he’d deserted three years earlier. Save for the structure itself, there wasn’t much left. The elements had taken their toll on the place, birds and rodents had used it as a dormitory and midden both, and vandals had smashed everything they couldn’t carry. No matter. The Indian lived in the old way, silent and secretive, snaring rabbit and opossum, liberating what he lacked from the homes and garages and toolsheds of the wage slaves who pressed in on the property from all sides. Over the course of the ensuing years, he drifted back and forth between Peterskill and Jamestown, drawn on the one hand to his ancestral soil, and on the other to his people. One Bird always welcomed him, no matter how long he’d been gone, and he was grateful to her. Driven by natural urges, he even came to her bed now and again, but it was an exercise without hope or meaning.

The last of the Kitchawanks grew older, and as he did so, he grew increasingly embittered. The world seemed a bleak place, dominion of the people of the wolf, the bosses ascendant, the workers crushed. He was doomed. His people were doomed. Nothing mattered — not the sun in the sky, not the great Blue Rock on the verge of the Hudson or the mystic hill above Acquasinnick Creek. A decade came and went. He was in his mid-fifties — still vigorous, still powerful, still young — and he wanted to die.

Yes. And then he met Joanna Van Wart.

The first of the Jeremy Mohonks, son of Mohonk son of Sachoes, distant ancestor of that sad radicalized jailbird whose tribe seemed destined to die with him some three centuries later, was two and a half years old and uttering his first halting words of Dutch when the shadow of Wolf Nysen fell over his world like a month of starless nights. It was October 1666, late in the afternoon of a dark graceless day that promised a premature sunset and heavy frost. Jeremy was under the kitchen table playing with sticks and dirt clods and rehearsing the words he liked best— suycker and pannekoeken —while his mother stoked the fire and stirred things into the soup. He was also watching his mother’s feet as she stood at the table chopping cabbage or crossed the room to poke the fire and adjust the blackened cauldron on its armature. When he saw those feet slip into their clogs and head out the door in the direction of the woodshed, he crawled out from under the table. In the next moment he was on the stoep, and in the moment after that, he was gazing up at the great swirling columns of smoke that blotted the sky at the far end of the cornfield. Though he couldn’t yet put it into words, he had an intuitive grasp of the situation: Uncle Jeremias was burning stumps.

Jeremy was two and a half years old, and he knew several things. He knew, for instance, that until recently his name had been Squagganeek and that he’d lived in a smoky wet hut in a smoky wet Indian village. He knew too that the wood brooding over him was home to wolves, giants, imps, ogres and witches and that he was never to leave the immediate vicinity of the house except in the company of his mother or uncle. And he knew the penalty for transgression. (No suycker. No pannekoeken. Three clean swats across the bottom and bed without supper.) Still, the shapes those columns of smoke made against the sky as they fanned out — there a butterfly, here the face of a cow — were not to be denied. Before he could think twice, he was gone. Down the steps, across the yard and out into the field with its weathered furrows and sheaves bound up like corpses.

He ran like a shorebird, stiff-kneed and quick-legged, tottering from one furrow to the next, splashing through puddles, falling flat on his face and as quickly scrambling to his feet again. When he reached the nether end of the field, he saw the stumps, a whole army of them like decapitated little men spouting smoke from their headless trunks. His uncle was nowhere to be seen. But there before him was a family of scuttling grouse, and to these he gave chase with a shout of joy. Round and round he chased them, through a funnel of smoke and a half-cleared thicket, right on up to the verge of the wood. And then he stopped. There was Jeremias, right in front of him. And another man too. A big man. A giant.

“You know who I am?” the giant roared.

His uncle knew, but he spoke so softly the boy could barely hear him. “Wolf,” he said, and that was when Jeremy called out his name.

As it happened, Wolf Nysen didn’t cleave Jeremias in two. Nor did he set fire to the hogpen, rape Katrinchee or devour the livestock. In fact, he merely gave Jeremias a lopsided grin, tipped the brim of his deerskin cap and slipped back into the woods. No matter: the damage was done. Just as Jeremias had taken up the yoke, just as he’d bowed his head and accepted the imprimatur of the patroon, here came this renegade to mock him and inflame all his old hate and rancor. Who gives you the right? The Swede’s words echoed in his ears as he bent to his soup that evening, as he laid his head on the pillow that night, and when he pulled on his underwear in the morning. But that wasn’t the worst of it, not by a long shot. The sequel was a steady downward slide in the fortunes of the little family at Nysen’s Roost, as if the madman were indeed the evil genius of the place and they the victims of his curse.

Though they were now well-furnished (in addition to what the van der Meulens and the others had donated, the patroon, on coming to terms with his newest tenants, had sent them a wagonload of farm and household implements — on loan, of course — as well as a yoke of sway-backed oxen, a yearling calf to go with the manorial cow Oom Egthuysen had lent them, and three Hampshire shoats), nonetheless Jeremias had planted late and harvested little. The wheat, which was customarily sown in the autumn rather than the spring, had done poorly, as had his crops of rye and peas, which he’d hoped to use for winter fodder. He’d done well with Indian corn, largely because of Katrinchee’s expertise, and their kitchen garden — cabbages, turnips, pumpkins and herbs — had flourished for the same reason. Still, with little grain for bread or porridge and the lion’s share of the corn reserved for the stock, the menage at Nysen’s Roost would be almost wholly dependent on game during the coming winter.

Problem was, the game was gone.

In the days and weeks following Wolf Nysen’s visit, wildlife became increasingly scarce, almost as if the madman, like some insatiable Pied Piper, had taken the birds and beasts with him. Where Jeremias might have shot a dozen pigeons in the past, he now came back with one. Where he might have swatted gobblers from the trees and tucked them in a sack that bulged so he could barely carry it, he now found none. Ducks and geese eschewed the marshes, the deer had vanished, and bears, which tasted like pine gum and tallow anyway, had gone early to their dens. Even the squirrels and rabbits seemed to have disappeared. Of necessity, Jeremias took to the river, and for a while the river sustained them. Through November and the grim crowded days of early December, as the sun faded from the sky and the breath of the Arctic stretched a sheet of ice across Acquasinnick Bay, Katrinchee made fish balls, fish pie, fish in blankets, fried fish, boiled fish, fish with turnips and pine nuts, fish with fish. But then winter settled in in earnest, the ice stretched to the foot of Dunderberg and back and there were no more fish.

Day by day it grew colder. The well crusted over. Wolves sniffed at the door. In the woods, jays and sparrows froze to their perches, as lifeless and hard as ceramic ornaments on a Christmas tree. There was an ice storm at the New Year, followed by dropping temperatures and snow that accumulated like the sands of Egypt. When the wolves made off with one of the shoats, Jeremias moved the animals indoors.