T. Boyle - World's End

“What am I thinking?” the Jongheer shrieked, the blood rushing to his face. “They’ve raped an honest man’s daughter, vader!” The harquebus was about as wieldy as a blacksmith’s anvil, and twice as heavy. He raised it over his head in a single clenched fist. “I mean to exterminate them, annihilate them, pot them like foxes, like rats, like, like—”

It was then that a knock came at the door.

The deferential head of the tattooed slave appeared between the oak door and the whitewashed wall that framed it. “A red man, Mijnheer,” he said in his garbled Dutch. “Says he’s got a message for the schout.”

Before either patroon or Jongheer could give the command, the door flew back and old Jan stumbled into the room to exclamations of excitement from the ladies. Jan was wearing a tattered cassock, out at elbows and shoulders, and an ancient crushed caubeen with half the brim missing. His loincloth hung from his hips like a tongue, his legs were spattered with mud and his moccasins were as black as the muck in the oyster beds of the Tappan Zee. For a long moment he just stood there, swaying slightly, and blinking in the light of the candles hung around the room.

“Well, Jan,” the patroon wheezed, “what is it?”

“Beer,” the Indian said.

“Pompey!” Vrouw Van Wart called, and the black reappeared. “Beer for old Jan.”

Pompey poured, Jan drank. The patroon looked befuddled, the schout anxious, the Jongheer enraged. Mariken, who’d been Neeltje’s playmate, looked on with a face as pale and drawn as a mime’s.

The old Indian set down the cup, composed himself a moment and began a slow shuffling dance around the table, all the while chanting Ay-yah, neh-neh, Ay-yah, neh-neh. After half a dozen repetitions, he sang his message — in three tones, and to the same beat:

Daugh-ter, sends you,

Her greet-ings, neh-neh.

And then he stopped. Stopped singing, stopped dancing. He was frozen, like a figure in a clocktower after the hour’s been struck. “Spirits,” he said. “Genever.”

But this time, Pompey didn’t have a chance to respond. Before he could so much as glance at the patroon for his approval, let alone lift the stone bottle and pour, the Jongheer had slammed the Indian into the wall. “Where is she?” he demanded. “Is it ransom, is that what you want? Is it?”

“Let him go,” Joost said, taking Stephanus by the arm and pushing his way between them. “Jan,” he said, his voice faltering, “who is it? Who’s got her? Mohonk? Wappus? Wennicktanon?”

The Indian stared at his feet. There was a smear of dirt on his cheek. He was pouting like a hurt child. “No more message,” he said.

“No more? You mean that’s it?”

“Listen, you son of a bitch,” Stephanus began, making another charge at him, but Joost held him off.

“But — but who gave you the message?”

The Indian looked around the room as if he were trying to remember. In the background, Joost could hear Vrouw Van Wart berating her husband in a terse rasping voice. “Herself,” Jan said finally.

“Neeltje?”

The Indian nodded.

“Where is she? Where did she give it to you?”

This was more difficult. Joost poured Jan a pewter cup of genever while the Jongheer breathed fumes and the patroon and his wife and sister-in-law and niece sat in silence, as if they were at the theater. Suddenly the Indian made a slash in the air with the flat of his hand; then he made the sign of two fingers walking.

“What?” Stephanus asked.

“Speak up, man,” the patroon croaked.

It was only Joost who understood, and he held on to the knowledge for a stunned moment, as a knifed man might have held on to the haft of the blade in his belly. The Indian had made the sign of the cripple, the one with half a leg — the sign for Jeremias Van Brunt.

Next morning, before the dogs had lifted their muzzles from the nests of their forepaws or the cock had had a chance to stretch the sleep from his wings, Joost saddled a sore and reluctant Donder and set out for Nysen’s Roost. He was accompanied by the Jongheer, who suddenly, it seemed, had taken a passionate interest in his daughter’s welfare, and he carried a brace of dueling pistols the patroon had ceremoniously retrieved from a chest in the seignorial bedroom (in addition, of course, to the silver-plated rapier that had already wrought such havoc on young Van Brunt’s physiognomy). The Jongheer, in silk doublet, French cuffs and midnight-blue cassock with matching knee breeches, had given over the unwieldy harquebus in favor of a fowling piece loaded with pigeon shot and a Florentine dirk that looked like a surgical instrument. To complete the ensemble, he wore a jeweled rapier at his side, a floppy hat surmounted by a three-foot yellow plume, and so many silver and brass buckles he actually jingled like a sack of coins as his mount picked its way up the road.

The day was typical of April in the vale of the Hudson — raw and drizzling, the earth exhaling vapor as if it were breathing its last — and they made slow progress on the slick river road. It was late in the morning when they passed the cluster of buildings that would one day become Peterskill and turned east on Van Wart’s Road. The schout, hunched in the saddle, had little to say. As he bobbed and swayed to the nag’s erratic rhythm, he focused on the image of Jeremias Van Brunt with such intensity the world was swallowed up in it. He saw the watchful cat’s eyes squinted against the onslaught of the summer sun, saw the squared jaw and defiant sneer, saw the blade come down and the blood flow. And he saw Neeltje, kneeling over the fallen renegade and glaring up at him, her father, as if he were the criminal, the trespasser, the scoffer at the laws of God and man. Had she gone with him voluntarily, then? Was that it? The thought made him feel dead inside.

If Joost was uncommunicative, the Jongheer never noticed. He kept up a steady stream of chatter from the time they left Croton to the moment they forded the rain-swollen Van Wart Creek and Joost hushed him with a peremptory finger tapped against his lips. Stephanus, who’d expatiated on everything from the Indian problem to the poetry of van den Vondel, and who, despite the inclemency of the weather and the dead earnestness of their mission had been humming a popular ditty not five minutes before, now slipped from his mount with a stealthy look. Joost followed suit, dismounting and leading the nag behind him up the steep slick hill to Nysen’s Roost. Wet branches slapped at their faces, the Jongheer lost his footing and rose from the ground with a stripe of mud painted the length of him, armies of gnats invaded their mouths and nostrils and darted for their eyes. They were halfway up when the drizzle changed to rain.

The house was silent. No smoke rose from the chimney, no animals chased around the yard. The rain drove down in sheets of pewter. “What do you think?” the Jongheer whispered. He was hunched in his cassock, water streaming from the brim of his hat.

Joost shrugged. His daughter was in there, he knew it. Defying him, betraying him, lying in the arms of that recreant, that nose thumber, that uncrackable nut. “He’s taken her by force,” Joost whispered. “Give him no quarter.”

They approached the house warily. Joost could feel the mud tugging at his boots; the plume hung limp in his face and he flicked it back with a swipe of his dripping hand. Then he drew his rapier. He glanced over at the Jongheer, who did likewise, the firearms rendered useless by the damp. Water dripped from the tip of the Jongheer’s well-formed nose, the yellow plume clung to the back of his neck like something fished out of the river, and he wore a strangely excited look, as if he were off to a fox hunt or pigeon shoot. They were twenty feet from the door when a sudden burst of sound froze them in mid-step. Someone was inside, all right, and whoever it was was singing, the lyric as familiar as a bedtime song in old Volendam: