T. Boyle - World's End

It snowed for two days and two nights. On the morning of the third day, Jeremias fed the livestock, closed up the house and struggled through the drifts to the van der Meulens’, his nephew on his back. Staats alerted the Cranes, Reinier Oothouse and the people at the upper manor house, then rode in to Jan Pieterse’s to see if she’d turned up there, and if she hadn’t, to locate an Indian tracker.

A party of Kitchawanks went out that afternoon, but came back empty-handed: the snow had obliterated any sign of her. If a twig had caught in her dress or a stone squirted out underfoot, the evidence was buried under three feet of snow. Jeremias despaired, but he wouldn’t give up. Next morning he borrowed Staats’ cart horse, and while Meintje looked after Jeremy, he and Douw poked through copses and thickets, searched and re-searched the valleys and streambeds, knocked on doors at outlying farms. They roamed as far afield as the Kitchawank village at Indian Point to the south, and the Weckquaesgeek camp at Suycker Broodt to the north. There was no trace of her.

It was Jan Pieterse who finally found her, and he wasn’t looking. He was out behind the trading post one morning toward the end of the month, hauling a bucket of slops down to the Blue Rock so he could pitch them into the river, as he did every morning, the peglegged Van Brunt kid and his mad wandering shorn-headed miscegenating sister the farthest things from his mind, when something just off the path up ahead caught his eye. A swatch of blue. In a snowbank at the base of the Blue Rock, no more than a hundred feet from the store. He wondered at that swatch of blue, and set down the bucket to slash through the crusted snow and investigate. The weather had turned warmer the past few days, and his eyes had gradually gotten used to the appearance of color in what had been for some months now a world as blank as an untouched canvas. Scabs of mud had begun to break through the path he’d carved, the sky that hung low overhead like a dirty sheet had given way to the fine cerulean of a midsummer’s day, pussy willows were in bloom along the Van Wartwyck road and tiny tight-wound buds graced box elder and sycamore. But this, this was something else. Something man-made. Something blue.

In a moment, he was standing over the spot, braced uneasily against the yielding snow on the one side and the great smooth slab of rock on the other. He was staring down at a piece of cloth projecting from the snow as if it were just the tip of something larger. He was a shopkeeper and he knew that cloth. It was blue kersey. He’d sold bolts of it to the Indians and to the farmers’ wives. The Indians fashioned blankets from it. The farmers’ wives liked it for aprons. And nightdresses.

Jeremias buried her beneath the white oak. Dominie Van Schaik turned up to say a few words over the grave, while the six van der Meulens, draped in black like a flock of maes dieven, comprised the mourners. Jeremias knelt by the grave, his lips moving as if in prayer. But he wasn’t praying. He was cursing God in his heaven and all his angels, cursing St. Nicholas and the patroon and the dismal alien place that rose up around him in a Gehenna of trees, valleys and bristling hilltops. If only they’d stayed in Schobbejacken, he kept telling himself, none of this would have happened. He knelt there, feeling sorry for Katrinchee, for his father and mother and little Wouter, feeling sorry for himself, but when finally he stood and took his place among the mourners, there was a hard cold look in his eye, the look of intransigence and invincibility he’d leveled on the schout time and again: he was down, but not defeated. No, never defeated.

As for Jeremy, two and a half years old, he didn’t know what defeat was — or triumph either. He held back while first his uncle, then grootvader van der Meulen and the rest knelt at the grave. He didn’t cry, didn’t really comprehend the loss. What was this before him but a mound of naked dirt, no different from the furrows Jeremias turned up with the plow? Moles lived in the ground, beetles, earthworms, slugs. His mother didn’t live in the ground.

Afterward, as they sat over the cider and meat pies Meintje had brought along for the funeral supper, Staats lit his pipe, let out a long sigh, and said, in an unnaturally high voice: “It’s been a trying year, younker.”

Jeremias barely heard him.

“You know, you’re always welcome to come back to us.”

Barent, eleven now, and with the square head and cornsilk hair of his mother, sucked noisily at a cube of venison. The younger children — Jannetje, Klaes and little Jeremy — sat hunched over their plates, silent as stones. Meintje smiled. “I’ve got a contract with the patroon,” Jeremias said.

Staats dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. “You can’t go on without a woman,” he yodeled. “You’ve got a boy here not three years old and nobody to look after him.”

Jeremias knew his adoptive father was right, of course. There was no way he could go on farming without someone to share the work — especially with Jeremy underfoot. Jeremias may have been mulish, pertinacious, headstrong and tough, but he was no fool. The day Katrinchee disappeared, as the hopeless hours wound down and he searched the woods till his leg gave out, the germ of an idea took hold of him. There it was, in his head. A plan. Practical and romantic both: a contingency plan. “I’ll get one,” he said.

Staats snorted. Meintje glanced up from her plate, and even Douw, who’d been focusing every particle of his attention on the meat pie and pickled cabbage before him, paused to shoot him a questioning glance. There was a moment of silence, during which the children stopped eating to look around them as if a ghost had entered the room. Meintje was the first to catch on. “You don’t mean—?”

“That’s right,” Jeremias said. “Neeltje Cats.”

“I forget, did you say you like tofu or not?”

“Sure,” she said, “anything.” She was huddled in a ball in the corner of Tom Crane’s bed, fully clothed, in gloves, maxicoat and knit hat, sipping sour wine from a Smucker’s jar. Once, maybe twice in her life, she’d been colder. She pulled the musty frigid blankets and down comforters up over her head and tried to keep her shoulders from quaking.

“Green onions?”

“Sure,” came the muffled reply.

“Garlic? Soy grits? Squash? Brewer’s yeast?”

Jessica’s head emerged from beneath the blankets. “You ever know me to complain?” She was six feet off the ground, which was where Tom Crane had located his bed — on high, and giving onto bare rafters strewn with cobwebs, the dangling husks of dead insects, streaks of bird or bat shit, and worse. The first time she’d ever visited the cabin — summer before last, and in the company of Walter — she’d asked Tom about that. He’d been sitting by the greasy back window in his greasy Salvation Army armchair, his hair down past his shoulders even then, drinking an evil-looking concoction of powdered milk, egg yolk, lecithin, protein powder and wheat germ out of a pint glass borrowed from an Irish pub in the City. “Stop by sometime in the winter,” he said, “and you won’t have to ask.”

Now she understood. Up here, aloft in the place of honor, she began to feel the first faint emanations from the woodstove. She held out her glass. “You mean it never warms up down there?”

Beneath her, in his tattered aviator’s coat, sweat-stained thermal undershirt and zip-up boots with the jammed zippers, Tom was flinging himself around the one-room shack like the chef at Fagnoli’s Pizza after a high school basketball game. Simultaneously feeding the fire, chopping onions, celery and chives, measuring out eight cups of brown rice from a grime-filled pickle jar and stirring hot oil in the bottom of a five-gallon pot so blackened it might have been a relic of the Dresden firebombing, he never missed a beat. “Down here?” he echoed, sweeping the vegetables into the depths of the cauldron with one hand while reaching up gallantly to fill her glass with the other. “On a good day — and I’m talking maybe like just twenty or twenty-five out — if I really stoke the stove, I can get the floor temp up to around fifteen.” He looked thoughtful as he poured himself a second jar of the sour, viscid wine, momentarily absorbed in the question of caloric variables while the oil hissed in the pot behind him and the hole at the juncture of the stovepipe spewed smoke into the room. “Up there, I’d say it might even get up to forty or fifty on a good night.”