T. Boyle - World's End

Good evening, Joosje,

My little box of sweetmeats,

Kiss me, we are alone …

… I call you my heart, my consolation, my treasure.

Oh! oh! how I’ve tricked you!

There was a giggle, and then Neeltje’s husky contralto (unmistakable, no doubt about it, the schout knew that voice as well as he knew his own) rose up out of the patter of rain to reprise the final line—“Oh! oh! how I’ve tricked you!” —to a spanking of applause.

That was it, the breaking point, the moment that confirmed his worst fears and gravest suspicions. The schout was across the yard and slamming through the door before he could think, brandishing the rapier like an archangel’s sword and sputtering “Sin! Sin and damnation!”

The room was dark, cold, damp as a cave; it reeked like a hog pen and the water dripped almost as persistently inside as out. Joost saw a crude table, a wall hung with kitchen implements, the cold hearth, and there, across the room, the bed. They were in it. Together. In their nightshirts still and with a mound of stinking furs piled atop them. He saw his daughter’s face as a spot of white in the gloom, her mouth open to scream, eyes twisted back in her head. “Slut!” he roared. “Filth, whore, woman of Babylon! Get up out of your harlot’s bed!”

The next moment was a crowded one. Everything happened at once: the half-breed child sprang up from the shadows like a cat and scurried across the room to cower behind his uncle; the smirking Jongheer appeared in the doorway, sword at the ready; a cookpot fell from the wall; Neeltje cried out. And Jeremias, surprised without the strut that supported him, rose up out of the bed and came at the schout with a prejudicial look in his eye.

No slash this time, but a thrust meant to kill: the schout squared himself and shot his arm forward, and so would have skewered Jeremias like a sausage and left his daughter sans husband and honor both, but for this: Jeremias slipped. Slipped and fell heavily to the floor while the tip of the rapier danced over his head like an angry hornet.

Now Joost Cats was a reasonable man, prone neither to fits of temper nor acts of violence, happier far with the role of mediator than enforcer. He’d pitied the Van Brunt boy on that chill November day when the officious and soft-bottomed ass of a commis had dragged him, the schout, out into the naked wild to evict the half-starved lad from a worthless and unlucky plot of land, had felt foolish and ashamed standing before Meintje van der Meulen’s hearth with his plumed hat in hand, regretted with all his heart the brand he’d struck on the boy’s face. But for all that, he wanted to kill him. He looked into his daughter’s eyes and then down at this human garbage that had stolen her away, and he wanted to cut him, perforate him, pierce his heart, his liver, his lights and bladder and spleen.

If the first thrust was instinctive, the second was a liberation. Guilt, anger, fear, resentment and jealousy broke loose in him and he jabbed the hilt forward with all the punch of his uncoiled arm. Jeremias dodged it. He rolled to his right, Neeltje flashing up off the bed with her hands outspread, the Jongheer lunging into the room, the child howling, the rain rising to a crescendo on the roof. “Spuyten duyvil!” Joost cursed, and struck a third time, but again the tip of the sword betrayed him, wagging wide of the mark and burying itself in the beaten wet earth of the floor.

He was drawing himself up for the fourth and fatal thrust, when Neeltje, entering the fray, flung herself down atop Jeremias, shrieking “Kill me! Kill me!” Stooped over double, his back murdering him, reason and restraint flung to the winds, he paused only long enough to reach down his free hand and fling her roughly aside. She hated him, his own daughter, a mouthful of teeth, claws tearing at his sleeve, but no matter. The blade flashed in his hand and he thought only of the next thrust and the next and the next one after that — he’d make a pincushion of the son-of-a-bitch, a sieve, a colander!

If Joost was deranged, he was also deluded: there would be no more thrusts of the rapier. For in the confusion Jeremias had clawed his way to his feet (or rather, foot) and snatched a crude weapon from the inglenook. The weapon, known as a curiosity in those parts, was a Weckquaesgeek pogamoggan. It consisted of a flexible length of fruitwood, to the nether end of which a jagged five-pound ball of granite had been affixed by means of leather ligatures. Jeremias swung it once, catching the schout just behind the ear and plunging him into the rushing interstitial darkness of a dreamless sleep, and then braced himself to face the Jongheer.

For his part, the heir to the Van Wart patent looked like a man who’s nodded off in his box at the opera only to wake and find himself at a bear baiting. In the instant the schout pitched forward, the smirk died on the Jongheer’s face. This was more than he’d bargained for. This was sordid, primitive, beastly — not at all the sort of thing a lettered man should hope to experience. He tried to draw himself up and project the authority of his father, the patroon, whose rights, privileges and responsibilities would one day devolve upon himself. “Put up your weapon this instant,” he demanded in a voice that sounded like someone else’s, “and submit to the legally constituted authority of the patroon.” His voice dropped. “You are now in my custody.”

Neeltje was bent over her father now, pressing a handkerchief to his head. The child had stopped his unearthly howling and Jeremias had propped himself against the back of a chair. The club, with its freight of human hair and blood, swung idly in his hand and the scar stood out on his face. He made no answer. He turned his head and spat.

“Vader, vader,” Neeltje cried. “Don’t you know where you are? It’s little Neeltje. It’s me.” The schout moaned. Rain drummed at the roof. “With all due respect, Mijnheer,” Jeremias said in a voice reined in with the effort to control it, “you may own the milch cow, the land under my feet, the house I’ve built with my own hands, but you don’t own Neeltje. And you don’t own me.”

The Jongheer held the blade out before him as if it were a fishing pole or divining rod, as if he didn’t know what to do with it. He was soaked to the skin, his clothes were filthy, ruined, the plume of authority hung limp over the brim of his hat. For all that, though, the smirk had returned to his face. “Oh yes,” he said, so softly he was nearly inaudible, “oh yes, I do.”

At that, Jeremias idly swung the war club to his shoulder, where the weight of the ball bowed it like the arm of a catapult. The door stood open still and the elemental scent of the land rose to his nostrils, a scent of vitality and decay, of birth and death. He looked the Jongheer full in the face. “Come and get me,” he said.

Two weeks later, on an afternoon in May as soft and celestial as the one on which they’d first met amongst the furs and hogsheads of Jan Pieterse’s trading post, Neeltje Cats and Jeremias Van Brunt were married by a subdued and solemn Dominie Van Schaik, not thirty feet from where Katrinchee lay buried. By all accounts, the feast that followed was a rousing success. Meintje van der Meulen baked for three days straight, and her husband Staats set up a pair of temporary tables big enough to accommodate every tippler and trencherman from Sint Sink to Rondout. Reinier Oothouse and Hackaliah Crane buried the hatchet for the day and drank the bride’s health side by side. There was game and fish and cheese and cabbage, there were pies and puddings and stews. Drink, too: ’Sopus ale, cider and Hollands out of a stone jug. And music. What would a wedding be without it? Here came young Cadwallader Crane with a penny whistle, there Vrouw Oothouse with her prodigious bottom and a bombas that made use of a pig’s bladder for a sound box; someone else had a lute and another a pair of varnished sticks and an overturned kettle. Mariken Van Wart came up from Croton and danced the whole afternoon with Douw van der Meulen, Staats led Meintje through half a dozen frenetic turns of “Jimmy-be-still” and old Jan the Kitchawank danced with a jug till the sun fell into the trees. Neeltje’s sisters were dressed like dolls, her mother cried — whether for joy or sorrow no one could be sure — and the patroon sent Ter Dingas Bosyn, the commis, as his official representative. But the crowning moment of the day, as everyone agreed, was when the schout, dressed in funereal black and standing as tall as his affliction would allow, his head bound in a snowy bandage and with good leather boots on his feet, strode resolutely across the front yard and gave away the bride.