T. Boyle: World's End

The land was fat, and the Van Brunts tumbled into the expansive embrace of it like orphans into a mother’s lap. If sugar was dear, honey was theirs for the taking. So too blueberries, crab apples, chickory and dandelion greens. And game! It practically fell from the heavens. A blast of the blunderbuss brought down a rain of gobblers or scattered coneys like grain, deer peered in at the open windows, geese and canvasbacks tangled themselves in the wash as it hung out to dry. No sooner would Jeremias shove off onto the Hudson — or North River, as it was called then — than a sturgeon or rockfish would leap into the canoe.

Even the house was beginning to shape up under the rigorous regime of Vrouw Van Brunt. She expanded the cellar, scoured the floors with sand, fashioned furniture from wicker and wood, put up shutters to keep out deerflies and the fierce sudden thunderstorms that emanated like afterthoughts from the crown of Dunderberg on a muggy afternoon. She even planted tulips out front — in two rows so straight they could have been laid out by a surveyor.

Then, in mid-August, things began to go sour. Outwardly, life had never been better: trees were falling, the woodpile growing, the fields knee-high with wheat and the smokehouse full. Katrinchee was turning into a woman, the boys were tanned and hard and healthy as frogs, Agatha hummed over her dustmop and broom. And Harmanus, liberated from the patrimonial nets, worked like five men. But slowly, imperceptibly, like the first whispering nibble of the first termite at the floor joists, suffering and privation crept into their lives.

It began with Harmanus. He came in from the fields one night and sat down at the table with an appetite so keen it cut at him like a sword. While Agatha busied herself with a hutspot of turnips, onions and venison, she set out a five-pound wheel of milk cheese and a loaf of day-old bruinbrod, hard as stone. Flies and mosquitoes hung in the air; the children, playing at tag, shouted from the yard. When she turned around, bread and cheese were gone and her husband sat contemplating the crumbs with a strange vacant gaze, the hard muscles working in his jaw. “My God, Harmanus,” she laughed, “save something for the children.”

It wasn’t till supper that she became alarmed. Besides the stew — it was enough for the next three days, at least — there was a game pie, another loaf, two pounds of butter, garden salad and a stone jar of creamed fish. The children barely had time to fill their plates. Harmanus lashed into the eatables as if he were sitting down to the annual Pinkster eating contest at the Schobbejacken tavern. Jeremias and Wouter ran off to kick a ball in the fading light, but Katrinchee, who’d stayed behind to clear up, watched in awe as her father attacked the pie, shoveled up the creamed fish with a wedge of bread, scraped the stewpot clean. He sat at the table for nearly two hours, and in all that time not a word escaped his lips but for the occasional mumbled request for water, cider or bread.

In the morning it was no different. He was up at first light, as usual, but instead of taking a loaf from the table and heading out with axe or plow, he lingered in the kitchen. “What is it, Harmanus?” Agatha asked, a trace of apprehension creeping into her voice.

He sat at the crude table, big hands folded before him, and looked up at her, and she thought for a moment she was looking into the eyes of a stranger. “I’m hungry,” he said.

She was sweeping the floorboards, her elbows jumping like mice. “Shall I make some eggs?”

He nodded. “And meat.”

Just then Katrinchee stepped through the door with a pail of fresh milk. Harmanus nearly kicked the table over. “Milk,” he said, as if associating word and object for the first time; his voice was flat, dead, without intonation, the voice of a phantom. He snatched the pail from her hands, lifted it to his lips and drank without pause till it was empty. Then he threw it to the floor, belched, and looked around the room as if he’d never seen it before. “Eggs,” he repeated. “Meat.”

By this point, the whole family was frightened. Jeremias looked on with a pale face as his father ate his way through the larder, wrestled sturgeon from the smokehouse, plucked a pair of hens for the pot. Katrinchee and Agatha flew around the kitchen, chopping, kneading, frying and baking. Wouter was sent for wood, steam rose from the kettle. There was no work in the fields that day. Harmanus ate till early afternoon, ate till he’d ravaged the garden, emptied the cellar, threatened the livestock. His shirt was a patchwork of grease, egg yolk, sauce and cider. He looked drunk, like one of the geneversoaked beggars on the Heerengracht in Amsterdam. Then all at once he staggered up from the table as if he’d been wounded and fell on a pallet in the corner: he was asleep before he hit the straw.

The kitchen was devastated, the pots blackened; spatters of food maculated the floorboards, the table, the fieldstone of the hearth. The smokehouse was empty — no venison, no sturgeon, no rabbit or turkey — and the grain and condiments they’d bartered from the van der Meulens were gone too. Agatha could as well have been cooking for the whole village of Schobbejacken, for a wedding feast that had gone on for days. Exhausted, she sank into a chair and held her head in her hands.

“What’s wrong with vader?” Wouter asked. Jeremias stood at his side. They both looked scared.

Agatha stared at them in bewilderment. She’d barely had time to puzzle over it herself. What had come over him? She remembered something like it when she was a child in Twistzoekeren. One day, Dries Herpertz, the village baker, had declared that cherry tarts were the perfect food and that he would eat nothing else till the day he died. Soup, at least, you must have soup, people said. Milk. Cabbage. Meat. He turned his nose to the air, disdaining them as if they were a coven of sinners, devils set out to tempt him. For a year he ate nothing but cherry tarts. He became fat, enormous, soft as raw dough. He lost his hair, his teeth fell out. A bit of fish, his wife pleaded. Some nice braadwurst. Cheese? Grapes? Waffles? Salmon? He waved her off. She spent all day preparing fabulous meals, combed the markets for exotic fruits, dishes from Araby and the Orient, snails, truffles, the swollen livers of force-fed geese, but nothing would tempt him. Finally, after five years of trying, she dropped dead of exhaustion, face down in a filosoof casserole. Dries was unmoved. Toothless, fat as a sow, he lived on into his eighties, sitting out in front of his bakeshop and sucking the sweet red goo from thumbs the size of spatulas. But this, this was something different. “I don’t know,” she said, and her voice was a whisper.

Around nightfall, Harmanus began to toss on his pallet. He cried out in his sleep, moaning something over and over. Agatha gently shook him. “Harmanus,” she whispered. “It’s all right. Wake up.”

Suddenly his eyes snapped open. His lips began to move.

“Yes?” she said, leaning over him. “Yes, what is it?”

He was trying to say something — a single word — but couldn’t get it out.

Agatha turned to her daughter. “Quick, a glass of water.”

He sat up, drank off the water in a gulp. His lips began to quiver.

“Harmanus, what is it?”

“Pie,” he croaked.

“Pie? You want pie?”

“Pie.”

It was then that she felt herself slipping. In all their years of marriage, through all the time he’d sat helpless over his torn nets or had to be coaxed from bed to take his dory out on the windswept Scheldt, through all the tension and uncertainty of the move to the New World and the hardships they’d faced, she’d barely raised her voice to him. But now, suddenly, she felt something give way. “Pie?” she echoed. “Pie?” And then she was clawing at the shelf beside the hearth, tearing open sacks and boxes, flinging kettles, wooden bowls, porringers and spoons to the floor as if they were dross. “Pie!” she shrieked, turning on him, the cast-iron pan shielding her breast. “And what am I supposed to make it out of — nimbleweed and river sand? You’ve eaten everything else — shortening, flour, fatback, eggs, cheese, even the dried marigolds I brought with me all the way from Twistzoekeren.” She was breathing hard. “Pie! Pie! Pie!” she suddenly cried, and it was like the call of a great hysterical bird flushed from its roost; a second later she collapsed in the corner, heaving with sobs.