T. Boyle - World's End

All right? She’d been dreaming of this moment for months, lying on the rough mattress between her sprawled sisters in the dead black night, struggling to summon the image of him before she drifted off (Jeremias, the prince who would ascend the ladder of her tresses and free her from the hag’s tower, who would slay dragons and crush villains for her, Jeremias of the stonemason’s build and sea-green eyes). She never doubted he would come for her. She’d seen it in his eyes, seen it in the slump of his shoulders as he limped past her in his humiliation and slouched up the Peterskill road, felt it in his touch, heard it in his voice. When old Jan took her aside after delivering missives to the patroon and singing a three-note greeting to her mother from a cousin at Crom’s Pond, she knew before the words had passed his lips that Jeremias Van Brunt sent his good opinion and best wishes. And she knew too when he pressed a slip of paper into her hand that it was from Jeremias and that it would open her life up for her.

Heart pounding, she’d ducked away from the family gathered around the tottering Indian and hurried out the door in the direction of the privy. When she was out of sight, when she was sure she was beyond the prying eyes of her father, her mother, her sisters, she tore open the slip of paper. Inside, she found a laboriously worked copy of Jacob Cats’ paean to matrimonial ethics. She skimmed the lines, but it wasn’t the poem that stirred her, it was the valediction. In the crude block letters of an unpracticed hand, Jeremias had written Eye wll cum for u, and then scrawled his signature across the bottom of the page in a deluge of loops and slashes. And now, as Neeltje stood there in her muddy clogs and uncombed hair, the basket of eggs clutched to her chest and the dust of sleep barely wiped from her eyes, she saw that he was as good as his word. All right? It was perfect.

“Your father doesn’t think much of me,” he said.

She reached up to trace the scar along the length of his cheek. “No matter,” she whispered. “I do.”

It took him a minute — a minute punctuated by the lowing of the cattle and suffused with the fishy reek of the river — before he moved into her arms. There was the fog, the tsk-tsking of the hens, the rank wild odor of the awakening season. When he spoke finally, his voice was thick. “Put down the basket,” he said.

The basket was still lying there in the mud at four that afternoon when Joost Cats climbed down from the bony back of Donder, his purblind nag, and smoothed the seat of his sweat-soaked and tumultuous pantaloons. He’d spent the morning in Van Wartville, mediating yet another dispute between Hackaliah Crane and Reinier Oothouse — this time over the disposition of a lean, slack-bellied sow the Yankee had caught rooting up his seed onions — after which he’d hurried home with a pair of Jan Pieterse’s best Ferose stockings for Neeltje on her birthday. As he led the wheezing nag into the barn, thinking of how Reinier Oothouse, in his cups, had gone down on his knees before the Yankee and pleaded for the sow’s life like a father pleading for his child (“Don’t kill her, don’t hurt my little Speelgoed, she didn’t mean it, never been naughty before, anything, I’ll pay anything you ask”), his two youngest burst from the house, arms and legs churning, faces lit with the joy of disaster. “Vader! Vader!” they cried in breathless piping unison, “Neeltje’s gone!”

Gone? What were they talking about? Gone? But in the next instant he saw his wife at the door, saw the look on her face and knew it was true.

Together, led by the fluttering Trijintje and intoxicated Ans, they rounded the corner of the barn to hover over the spilled basket, the tracked and muddy earth, the shattered eggs. “Was it Indians?” Ans shouted. “Did they kidnap her and make her their white squaw?”

Bent like a sickle and stroking his puff of chin hair, Joost tried to picture it — naked red devils slipping from the weeds to bludgeon his defenseless little Neeltje, a rough hand cuffed over her mouth, the stinking hut and moldering furs, the queue of greasy randy braves jostling at the door. … “When?” he murmured, turning to his wife.

Geesje Cats was a dour woman, hipless, fleshless, wasted, a woman who bore only daughters and wore her troubles at the corners of her mouth. “This morning,” she said, her eyes stung with dread. “It was Trijintje — she found it, the basket. We called and called.”

The mud was puckered in dumb mouths that told the schout nothing. Staring down at the sad upended basket and the spill of egg yolk that seemed to claw at the earth like the fingers of a grasping hand, he relived the scenes of violence and depravity he’d encountered in his seven years as schout, drowned men and stabbed men floating before his eyes, women abused, bereft, violated, bones that poked through the flesh and eyes that would see no more. When he looked up he was shouting. “You searched the orchard?” he demanded. “The river? The pond? Did you inquire at the patroon’s?”

Startled, shamefaced, his wife and daughters lowered their eyes. They had. Yes, vader, yes, echtgenoot, they had.

Well, then, had they gone to the de Groodts, the Coopers, the van Dincklagens? To the inn? The ferry? The pasture, the stable, van der Donk’s Hill?

A light rain had begun to fall. Ans, ten years old, began to sniffle. “All right!” he shouted, “all right: I’ll go to the patroon.”

The patroon was supping, bent low over a plate of pickled beets, hard cheese and a shad in cream sauce he was glumly forking up as if to remark the disparity between this and Zuider Zee herring, when Joost was shown into the room. The patroon’s unburdened hand was bandaged against the knife thrusts of his gout, and his face was flushed the color of a rare wine. Vrouw Van Wart, a woman given to the denial of the flesh, sat stiffly beside him, a single dry crust before her, while his brother’s widow and her daughter Mariken perched on the hard bench opposite her. The Jongheer, in a lace collar the size of a wheel of Gouda, occupied the place of honor at the foot of the table. “My Savior in Heaven!” cried the patroon. “What is it, Cats, that couldn’t keep?”

“It’s my daughter, Mijnheer: she’s disappeared.”

“How’s that?”

“Neeltje. My eldest. She went out for chores this morning and there’s been no trace of her since.”

The patroon set down his fork, plucked a loaf from the pewter dish before him, and turned it over in his hand as if it were the single telling bit of evidence left behind at the scene of the crime. Joost waited patiently as the florid little man split the loaf and slathered it with butter. “You’ve, er, contacted the, er, other tenants?” the patroon gasped in his dry, windless voice.

Joost was beside himself with frustration — this was no time for the niceties of leisurely inquiry. They had his daughter, the heart and soul and central joy of his existence, and he had to get her back. “It’s the Kitchawanks,” he blurted, “I’m sure of it. They snatched her”—here his voice broke with a sob—“snatched her as she, she—”

At the mention of Indians, the Jongheer was on his feet. “I told you so,” he roared at his father. “Beggars in their blankets. Aborigines, criminals, vermin, filth. We should have driven them into the river twenty years ago.” He crossed the room in two great strides and lifted the harquebus down from the wall.

The patroon had risen now to his gouty feet, and the ladies pressed powdered hands to their mouths. “But, er, what’s this, mijnzoon?” the patroon wheezed in some alarm. “What are you thinking?”