T. Boyle - World's End

When Mohonk, son of Sachoes, appeared on the doorstep of the little farmhouse at Nysen’s Roost some three months later, Jeremias was a changed man. Gone was the wild-eyed glare of the rebel, the underdog, the unsoothable beast, and in its place was a look that could only be described as one of contentment. Indeed, Jeremias had never known a happier time. The crops were flourishing, the deer were back, the shack had been elevated to the status of domicile through the addition of a second room, furniture both functional and pleasing to the eye and that hallmark of civilized living, a clean, planed and sanded plank floor that soared a full foot and a half above the cold dun earth below. And then there was Neeltje. She was a voice in his head, a presence that never left him even when he was adrift in the canoe or roaming the scoured hilltops with a musket borrowed from Staats; she clove to him like a second skin, each moment a melioration and a healing. She mothered Jeremy, managed the house, spun and sewed and cooked, rubbed the tightness from his shoulders, sat with him by the river while fish stirred in the shallows and the blue shadows closed over the mountains. She made peace with her father, baked as fine a beignet as moeder Meintje, arranged and rearranged the front room till it looked like a burgher’s parlor in Schobbejacken. She was everything that was possible, and more. Far more: she was carrying his child.

All this the Indian saw in Jeremias’ face as the door swung open. Just as quickly, he saw it fade. “You,” Jeremias choked. “What do you want?”

Mohonk was gaunter than ever, his face rucked and seamed with abuse. He was a nose, an Adam’s apple, a pair of black unblinking deep-buried eyes. “Alstublieft,” he said, “dank u, niet te danken.”

“Who is it?” Neeltje called from the back of the house. They’d finished supper — pea soup, bread, cheese and beer — and she was getting Jeremy ready for bed. The house had fallen dark in the gathering dusk.

Jeremias didn’t answer. He stood there, letting his mood go sour. This was the man, the shit-smeared skulking savage heathen, who’d ruined his sister and then deserted her. And here he was, filthy and ragged, angular as a wading bird, standing on the doorstep with no more Dutch than he’d had four years ago. “I have nothing for you,” Jeremias said, enunciating the words in the way of the pedagogue, each syllable bitten off clean and distinct. “Get out of here.” It was then that he felt a movement at his side and glanced down to see Jeremy standing beside him. The boy was rapt, gazing up in wonder at this apparition in the raccoon skin coat.

“Alstublieft,” Mohonk repeated, then turned his head to call out something in the Kitchawank dialect, the words like stones in his mouth.

At this, two Indians stepped out of the shadows at the corner of the house. One of them was old Jan, grinning broadly and trailing flaps of greasy deerskin and a smell of the swamp. The other was a young buck Jeremias recognized from Jan Pieterse’s. The buck’s face was painted, and a tomahawk decorated with the crest feathers of tanager and bunting dangled like a toy from the fingertips of his right hand. Instinctively, Jeremias reached down and pushed his nephew back into the room. “You have a message for me?” Jeremias asked, glancing from the buck to Jan.

They stopped at the front step. The buck was expressionless. Jan grinned. Mohonk hugged the coat to him as if he were cold. “Yes,” old Jan said finally, “I have a message.”

Neeltje had come up behind her husband now, and was pressing Jeremy to her skirts, rocking him gently back and forth. The light drained away in the west.

Jan was grinning still, as if he’d reached a height beyond the gravitational pull of simple drunkenness and passed into a realm of giddiness and light. “From him,” he said, indicating Mohonk with an abrupt laugh. “From Mohonk, son of Sachoes.”

The son of Sachoes never blinked. Jeremias studied him a second, then turned back to Jan. “Well?” he demanded.

Suddenly the old Kitchawank dropped his head and began to shuffle his feet. “Ay-yah, neh-neh,” he chanted, “Ay-yah, neh-neh,” but Mohonk cut him off. He said something in a voice as harsh and rapid as gunfire, and old Jan looked up, blinking. “He wants his son back.”

If the three of them weren’t so crapulous, if old Jan weren’t wasted by the years, the smallpox and the curse of the burning water, if Mohonk weren’t degenerate and weak and if the buck had had his senses about him, the outcome might have been different. As it was, they made a critical mistake. Jeremias, enraged by the very suggestion, drew one hand flat across the other, said “Nee” for emphasis and stepped back to shut the door on them; it was at that very moment that the young buck chose to let fly with the tomahawk. The weapon rocketed through the air with a deadly whoosh, only to be deflected by the edge of the door and drop harmlessly to the floor in the middle of the room. There was a moment — fleeting, the fraction of a fraction of a second — during which the Indians looked remorseful and deeply ashamed, and then they surged toward the door.

Or rather, the buck did. Mohonk insinuated his long flat-arched foot, clad in a dirty moccasin, between door and frame, while old Jan lost his balance and sat down heavily in the dirt with a grunt of surprise.

Reacting to the threat, Jeremias slammed the door on the foot of his erstwhile brother-in-law, and when it sprang back from contact with that bony appendage, he found that he was gripping the venerable pogamoggan in his right hand (Neeltje, remembering her father, had snatched it up from the inglenook and pressed it on him). The first to blunder through the door was the buck, his warpaint smeared to reveal the uncertain face of a fifteen-year-old peering out from beneath it; he caught the full force of the granite ball in the abdomen and fell gasping to the floor, where he writhed about for several minutes in imitation of an eel in a pot. Next was Mohonk, hopping on one foot while cradling the throbbing other one in both hands. Jeremias took a half-hearted swing at him, but missed, striking the wall in a storm of splinters.

It was then that things turned nasty. For Mohonk, his dignity wounded, gritted his teeth, set down the palpitating foot and drew a bone knife from the blameless folds of his raccoon skin coat. And then this same Mohonk — lover and abettor of meisje and squaw alike, sire of Jeremias’ nephew and husband to his dear dead beloved sister — came at Jeremias with murder in his heart.

Thinking back on it, Jeremias would remember the feel of that primitive weapon in his hand, the spring of the fruitwood shaft as the ball whipped forward as if under its own volition, the deadly wet final thump that collapsed the Indian’s skull like a rotten pumpkin. He remembered too the look in his nephew’s eye — the boy too young to know who this gaunt toppling giant was and yet somehow connected to the moment with a look that would endure a lifetime — and then the crablike retreat of the humiliated buck and old Jan’s interminable, wheezing, marrow-chilling dirge.

Mohonk, last fruit of Sachoes’ loins, had been laid low.

Jeremias was sorry for it. Heartily sorry. But he’d done what any other man would have done under the circumstances: his home and family had been threatened, and he’d defended them. Afterward, shaken and penitential, he laid the body out on the table and sent for the schout. Hours later, old Jan, wearied by the sad drone of his own whiskey-cracked voice, set off for the Kitchawank village at Indian Point, bringer of sad tidings.

Next morning, so early the color had yet to return to the earth, Wahwahtaysee the Firefly, bent double and older by what seemed like another century, came to claim the body. Locally, from Croton all the way up to Suycker Broodt, the Indians would suffer for this attack on the white men — the schout would see to that, and Wahwahtaysee knew it. Her people had lived with the Mohawk, with the Dutch, with the English. Anger was futile. Reprisal meant counter reprisal, reprisal meant extermination. That was the way of the people of the wolf. Betrayal. Deceit. The open smile and the stab in the back. She wasn’t bitter, only confused.