T. Boyle - World's End

She was thinking of Walter. On the first of October, while her mother was out, she met with a lawyer from Yorktown and drew up the papers giving legal guardianship to his godparents in the event of her death. As for her mother’s injunctions, they were meaningless. Eat? She might as well have urged her to fly. One ate to replenish oneself, to renew cells, to build bone and muscle and fat, to live. She didn’t want to live. She wasn’t hungry. Meat sickened her, the smell of cooking was an anathema, fruits were vile and vegetables hateful. Milk, cereal, bread, rice, even potato latkes — they were all poison to her. Her mother would make her pudding, doughnuts, eggs Benedict, she’d appear in her room with a tray of soda crackers and broth and sit there chiding, holding the spoon to her lips as if she were a child still, but it did no good. Christina would force herself to take a swallow, if only to smooth the lines in that kind and solicitous face that hung over her, but the broth was like acid on her stomach and within the hour she’d be hunched over the toilet, gagging till the tears stood out in her eyes.

Dr. Braun, the family practitioner who’d assuaged her childhood fevers, dabbed at her chicken pox and stitched up her knee when she’d fallen from the precipitous step of the schoolbus, prescribed a sedative and felt it might do her some good to chat with Dr. Arkawy, a colleague who practiced psychiatric medicine. She didn’t want to chat. She spat out the sedatives, clutched Walter and his bright hopeful books to her chest and saw faces, rabid hateful faces, Truman’s the most hateful of all. By the first of November she was down to eightyeight pounds.

They fed her intravenously at Peterskill Community Hospital but she jerked the IV from her arm whenever they left the room. She was dreaming when they moved her to the other hospital, but she smelled the river strong in her nostrils in that little space between the ambulance and the great heavy fortress door. When they pinned her arms down and started that drip of life, she could feel the water rising around her. Gray, lapping waves, nothing severe, a ripple fanning out across the broad flat surface, rocking the boat as gently as the breeze rocked the cradle of that baby high in the treetops. She was with Truman suddenly, long ago, long before Walter, the bungalow, long before the papers and the books and the party meetings that found his hand entwined in hers. Long before. They were out on the river in his father’s boat, the boat that stank of fish and that was gouged across the gunwales by the friction of a thousand ropes hauling up secrets from the bottom. He’d spread a blanket for her in the bow, there was that peculiar sick-sweet smell of exhaust, the sun was high, the wind had fallen to nothing. What’s that, she asked, over there? That point across the river? He sat at the tiller, grinning. Kidd’s Point, he said, after the pirate. That’s Dunderberg behind it, and straight ahead is what they call the Horse Race.

She felt the water swell beneath her. She looked up the river to where the mountains fell away in continents of shadow and seagulls hung in oceans of filtered light. Above that, and around the bend, he told her, it’s a clear channel up to West Point. Then we hit Martyr’s Reach. He knew an island there, in the middle of the river, beautiful spot, Storm King on the one side, Breakneck on the other. He was thinking maybe they’d land and have lunch there.

Lunch. Yes, lunch.

Pity was, she just wasn’t hungry.

It was the morning of Neeltje’s sixteenth birthday, a morning like any other: damp, dismal, curdled with the monotony of routine. There were eggs to be gathered, ducks, geese and chickens to be fed. The fire needed stoking, the porridge thickening, she could feel her fingers go stiff with the thought of the spinning, churning and milling to come. Her father was gone, off somewhere on the patroon’s business and not due back till nightfall, and though it was barely light yet, her mother already sat stiffly at the flax wheel, her right arm rising and falling mechanically, her eyes fixed on the spindle. Her sisters, girls still, warmed themselves at the fire and gazed expectantly into the pot. No one so much as glanced at her as she lifted her cloak down from the hook and slipped into her clogs.

Feeling hurt and angry — she might as well have been one of the patroon’s black nigger slaves for all the notice anybody took of her — Neeltje slammed out the door, crossed the yard and stopped to poke through the grass for the morning’s eggs. She didn’t ask much — a smile maybe, best wishes on her birthday, a hug from her mother-but what did she get? Nothing. It was her birthday, and no one cared. And why should they? She was just a pair of hands that chopped and milked and scrubbed, a back that lifted, legs that hauled. She was sixteen today, a full-grown woman, an adult, and no one knew the difference.

Absorbed in bitter reflections, she bent for eggs, her skirts already heavy with dew. Unmilked, the cows mooed emphatically from the barn, while a troop of ragged hens pecked at her heels and cocked their heads to rebuke her with their bright censorious eyes. A pall of mist breathed in off the river with a smell of sludgy bottoms, the dead and drowned, and she shivered, pulling the cloak tight around her throat. In the next moment she plucked an egg from the new grass along the fence, found two more beneath the canopy of the woodshed, and rose to dry her hands on her apron. It was then — as she straightened up, the basket caught in the crook of her arm, hands bunched in the folds of her apron — that she became aware of a movement off to her left, where the outline of the barn sank into mist. She turned her head instinctively, and there he was, cocked back on his leg, smiling faintly, watching her.

“Jeremias?” She made a question of it, her voice riding up in surprise, conscious all at once of her uncovered head, the utter plainness of her cloak and skirts, the mud that spattered her yellow peasant’s clogs.

“Shhhhhh!” He held a finger to his lips and motioned her forward, before receding into the fog at the nether end of the barn. She glanced around her twice — the cows protesting, chickens squabbling, ducks and geese raising an unholy racket down by the pond — and turned to follow him.

Behind the barn, in the spill of briars and weeds and with the smell of cow dung wafting up around them, he took her hand and wished her a happy birthday (gefeliciteerd met je verjaardag), then dropped his voice and told her to forget the eggs.

“Forget the eggs? What do you mean?”

The mist steamed around him. The smile was gone. “I mean you won’t be needing them. Not now.” He opened his mouth to expand on this abrupt and rather cryptic proposition, but seemed to think better of it. He looked down at the ground. “Don’t you know why I’ve come?”

Neeltje Cats was sixteen years old that day, as short and slight as a child, but ancient with the sagacity of her entrepreneurial and poetical ancestors, the bards and shopkeepers of Amsterdam. She knew why he’d come — would have known even if he hadn’t sent old Jan the Kitchawank to tell her three separate times in the past eight months. “I know,” she whispered, feeling as if, for form’s sake at least, she should fall down at his feet in a swoon or something.

He’d let go of her hand in the rush of his eloquence on the subject of the eggs, and now he stood there, looking awkward, his arms hanging like empty sleeves. Frustrated, impatient, suffering, the cows bellowed. “It’s all right, then?” Jeremias said finally, addressing a tree trunk twenty feet behind her.