T. Boyle - World's End

Despair? Walter asked. What’s that?

Soon enough, growled his hairy grandfather, looking up from his torn drift net, you’ll find out. Soon enough.

Walter’s grandmother gave her husband an impatient look, etched a triad of scales under the gill plate of the middle carp, and turned to Walter. He was sad, Walter, she said. He’d lost hope. Fizzled out. Given up. He sat there in the longhouse with Wahwahtaysee, with Matekanis and Witapanoxwe, his elder sons, and Mohonk, the lanky, flat-footed boy who was to disappoint his mother so, and poked at the embers of tobacco and red dogwood bark in the bowl of his pipe. When morning came, Jan Pieterse would be at the door, bearing gifts. A pair of yellow-eyed dogs, kettles harder than stone, knives, scissors, axes, blankets, nuggets of colored glass that made even the most highly polished disk of wampumpeak look like just another pebble. Gifts, yes: but no gift comes without a price.

When Jan Pieterse came amongst them some six years before, the Kitchawanks were amazed not only by the limitless supply of wellmade and bewitching objects he brought with him for trade, but also by the persistence and subtlety of his haggling, by the stream of graceless and mangled Mohican words that never stopped dribbling from his lips. “Composed of Mouth” is what they called him, and they came to him in all their strength and dignity to trade skins for these fine wares with which he’d loaded his little sloop to the gunwales. But it wasn’t just beaver pelts he wanted, no — it was the land itself. It was the Blue Rock and the land that lay around it. Sachoes, as chief and elder statesman, came forward to negotiate with him.

And what did Sachoes get for his people in exchange for the land on which Composed of Mouth set up the boxy inhospitable fortress of his trading post? Things. Possessions. Objects of envy and covetousness. Axes whose handles broke and whose blades went dull, jars that shattered, scissors that locked at the joint with rust and the gleaming insuperable coins that introduced theft and murder to the village of bark huts on Acquasinnick Bay. And where were these things now? All gone their own careless way — even the blankets eaten up by some mysterious corruption from within — while the beaver that helped buy them were as scarce as hairs on a Mohawk’s head. Composed of Mouth was no fool. He had the land. Incorruptible and eternal.

In the early days, Jan Pieterse came to them. But now they came to Jan Pieterse. Wasted by the English pox, sick with drink, starved with a winter severe beyond the recall of old Gaindowana, eldest man of the tribe, they’d crept like dogs in the humiliation of their need to the big barred door of Composed of Mouth’s trading post and begged him to remember the land they’d given him. They wanted cloth, food, things of iron, things of beauty — to their everlasting shame, they wanted rum. Sure, Composed of Mouth told them, certainly, of course and why not? Credit, he said, in his barker’s patois, a Dutch term festering deep in a felicitous Mohican sentence, Credit for all, and especially for you, my reverend friend, my dear, dear, dear Sachoes.

Nothing for nothing, Walter’s grandmother said, giving the far carp a round and staring eye with a swirl of her little finger. The old chief owed that canny Dutchman, and he knew it.

Well, Jan Pieterse, so the story goes, had a friend. Two friends. They were the Van Wart brothers, Oloffe and Lubbertus. Oloffe, who had influence in the Company, was granted a patroonship by Their High Mightinesses that encompassed not only all the Kitchawanks’ tribal lands, but those of the Sint Sinks and Weckquaesgeeks as well. It was already carved up and mapped out, plenty for him and his brother and half the population of the Netherlands too. All he had to do was satisfy the original owners, who, as everybody in Haarlem knew, were a bunch of naked, illiterate, drink-besotted and disease-ridden beggars who couldn’t add up their fingers and toes, let alone survey the land and read the fine print of your basic, binding, inviolate and ironclad contract. Jan Pieterse, an adept in Indian ways, was to be his go-between. For a fee, of course.

Now Sachoes didn’t know anything of this — couldn’t begin to imagine the polders and dikes and cobbled streets, the factories, breweries and cozy pristine parlors of that distant and legendary Dutch homeland — but he did know that come morning, with its pale streaks of Arctic light, Composed of Mouth would be on his hut step, with the great mustachioed and bloat-bellied patroon-chief in tow, and that the patroon-chief was hungry to own what no man had a right to own: the imperishable land beneath his feet. But what could the old chief do? Deer were dropping dead in the woods, their stomachs stuffed with bark; snowdrifts buried the village; Mother Corn was comatose till spring; and the people wanted everything the trader put up for sale. If he didn’t deal with Jan Pieterse, then Wasamapah, his bitterest rival for control of the tribe, a man who understood credit, spoke with the wind and leaped tall trees in a single bound, would. And Manitou help the old chief if he let Composed of Mouth and the patroon-chief cheat him.

But cheat him they did, Walter’s grandmother said, rising with a groan to rinse her hands at the sink in the kitchen. And do you know how they managed it? she asked over her shoulder.

Walter was nine years old. Or maybe ten. He didn’t know much. Uh-uh, he said.

She shuffled back into the room, a big gray-haired woman in a print dress, rubbing her thumb over the tips of her first two fingers. Vigorish, she said, that’s how.

When Sachoes sat down in his hut the following morning with Composed of Mouth and the patroon-chief and his brother, Wasamapah sat down beside him. And rightfully so. For Wasamapah was the memory of the tribe. As each term of a treaty was struck, he would carefully select a polished fragment of clam, mussel or oyster shell from the pile spread out in the dirt before him, and string it on a piece of rawhide. Each article, each proviso, amendment and codicil had its own distinctive signifier; afterward, when the dust had settled over the mountain of exchanged gifts, when the kinnikinnick had been smoked and the yokeag and doe’s tongue eaten, Wasamapah would convene the council of elders and repeat for them, over and over, the significance of each buffed and rounded shell.

And so it was this time. Sachoes put on his most inflexible face, the patroon-chief tugged uneasily at the joints of his puffed-up fingers, Composed of Mouth talked till he was hoarse, Wasamapah strung shells. With dignity, with stateliness and a serenity that belied his unease, Sachoes accepted the gifts, made his demands on behalf of the tribe and grudgingly gave ground in the face of Composed of Mouth’s verbal onslaught. Then they passed a pipe and feasted, the patroon-chief eating sparingly of the cornmeal and tongue and plentifully of the Dutch stuffs — stinking cheeses, rock-hard loaves, salted this and pickled that — that he’d brought along. The new dogs took care of the scraps.

As he smoked, as he gnawed at the foul-smelling cheeses and chewed the tongue, Sachoes felt elated. In addition to the heap of gifts piled up outside the longhouse and distributed throughout the tribe, he’d bargained for barrels of meal, for blankets and bolts of cloth, for beads by the hundredweight and sturdy iron plows and adzes and cookpots. Even better, the patroon-chief’s brother had been persuaded to give up the gold ring that encircled his little finger, Jan Pieterse threw in a gilt-edged mirror and a keg of black powder, and in the crowning moment of the negotiations, the patroon-chief himself presented Sachoes with a great floppy-brimmed sugarloaf hat that trailed a plume half as long as his arm. And best of all, Sachoes had given up practically nothing in return — a little plot of land that ran north from the Blue Rock to the Twice Gnarled Tree, south only as far as Deer Run and east to the Brook That Speaks. Nothing! He could walk the length and breadth of it three times over in an afternoon. Finally, finally he’d bested them. Yes, he thought, pulling at the ceremonial pipe and inwardly gloating, what a deal!