T. Boyle - World's End

Well, yes, here were a Van Wart and a Van Brunt fornicating in historic surroundings, but it had taken them centuries to arrive at so democratic a juncture. At one time, such a thing would have been unthinkable. Unspeakable. As absurd as the coupling of lions and toads or pigs and fishes. In the early days, when Jeremias Van Brunt was chafing under the terms of his indenture, when the patroon’s authority went uncontested and those that worked his land were little higher on the social scale than Russian serfs, the closest a Van Brunt had come to a Van Wart was the pogamoggan incident, in which the aforementioned Jeremias had threatened to open up the side of the Jongheer’s head for him.

At that time, the incident seemed a serious challenge to manorial prerogatives — almost an insurrectionary act — but over the years, all that had been forgotten. Or at least covered over with a shovel or two of dirt, like a corpse hastily buried. Absorbed in looking after his burgeoning family and staving off the anarchic forces of nature that threatened at any moment to overwhelm the farm and thrust him back into the desperate penury he’d known after the death of his parents, Jeremias barely gave a passing thought to his landlord. In fact, the only time he called to mind the man who held sway over him and by whose sufferance he earned his daily bread and raised the roof over his head was in November of each year, when the annual quitrent was due.

For weeks in advance of the date he would storm and rage and fulminate about the inequity of it all, and the old contumacious fire-breathing spirit arose like a phoenix from the ashes of his contentment. “I’ll move!” he’d shout. “Rather than pay that parasitic fat-assed son of a bitch a single penny I’ll pack up every last stick of furniture, every last cup and saucer and plate, and go back to Schobbejacken.” And every year Neeltje and the children would plead and beg and remonstrate with him, and on the fifteenth, when Ter Dingas Bosyn wheeled up in the patroon’s wagon, Jeremias would lock himself in the back room with a bottle of rum and let his wife count out the coins, the pots of butter, the pecks of wheat and the four fat pullets the patroon demanded as his yearly due. When he emerged the following day, red-eyed and subdued, he’d limp wordlessly out into the yard to repair the barn door or put a new wall in the henhouse where the porcupines had chewed their way through it.

And for his part, Stephanus, who’d succeeded his father as patroon after the pestilence of ’68 carried the old man off in a fit of wheezing, was too busy maneuvering his way around the Governor’s Council of Ten (of which he was the guiding light), managing the shipping business he’d inherited from his father and raising his own family to worry about an ignorant dirt clod on a distant and negligible plot of land. It was enough that said dirt clod paid his annual rent — a fact duly registered in the commis’ accounts ledger for the given year. Beyond that, Jeremias could go to the devil and back for all Stephanus Van Wart cared.

All well and good. For twelve years Van Warts and Van Brunts went their own way, and slowly, gradually, the wounds began to heal and a truce settled over the valley.

But scratch a scab, however feebly, and it will bleed.

So it was that in the summer of 1679, just after Jeremias’ thirtieth birthday, Neeltje’s father, the redoubtable schout, paid a visit to the farm at Nysen’s Roost with a message from the patroon. Joost arrived late in the afternoon, having spent the better part of the day making the rounds of the neighboring farms. At fifty, he was more bowed than ever, so badly contorted he looked as if he were balancing his head on his breastbone, and the nag he rode was as bony, sway-backed and ill-tempered as its predecessor, the little-lamented Donder. He’d long since reconciled himself to his fiery son-in-law (though every time he glanced at the pogamoggan on its hook beside the hearth his left temple throbbed and his ears began to sing), and when Neeltje begged him to spend the night, he agreed.

It was at dinner — or rather, after dinner, when Neeltje served seed cakes and a fragrant steaming caudle of cinnamon and wine — that Joost gave them the news. The whole family was gathered around the big rustic table, which Neeltje had set with the veiny china and Zutphen glassware she’d inherited on the death of her mother. Jeremias — shaggy, mustachioed, huge and hatless — pushed back his chair with a sigh and lighted his pipe. Beside him, in a long tapering row on the bench that grew shorter every year, sat the boys: nephew Jeremy, with his wild look and tarry hair, now nearly fifteen and so tight-lipped he would have exasperated the stones themselves; Wouter, eleven and a half and a dead ringer for his father; and then Harmanus and Staats, eight and six respectively. The girls — each as slight and dark-eyed and pretty as her mother — sat on the far side of the table, ranged beside their grandfather. Geesje, who was nine, got up to help her mother. Agatha and Gertruyd were four and two. They were waiting for seed cake.

“You know, younker,” Joost said, tamping tobacco in the bowl of a clay pipe half as long as his arm, “I’m up here on the patroon’s business.”

“Oh?” said Jeremias, as indifferent as he might have been to news of the emperor of China, “and what might that be?”

“Not much,” Joost managed, between great lip-smacking sucks at the stem of the pipe, “not much. Road building, is all.”

Jeremias said nothing. Geesje cleared away the children’s pewter bowls and the remains of the milk soup. Erect and unfathomable, Jeremy Mohonk exchanged a look with Wouter. “Road building?” Neeltje echoed, setting down the bowl of spiced wine.

“Hm-hm,” returned her father, sucking and puffing as vigorously as if he’d been plunged into the icy waters of Acquasinnick Creek. “He’s going to be here at the upper house for the rest of the summer. With a carpenter from New York. He’s planning to fix up the house where it’s got run-down and I guess he couldn’t persuade his brother to come out from Haarlem and take it over, but he’s got Lubbertus’ boy of an age now to move in and start a family. …”

“And what’s it to me?” Jeremias asked, puffing now himself and sending up a bitter black cloud of smoke.

“Well, that’s just it, you see — that’s what I’ve been going around to the tenants for. The patroon wants—”

Jeremias cut him off. “There is no patroon — this is an English colony now.”

Puffing, waving his hand impatiently to concede the point, Joost lifted his head up off his breastbone and went on: “Patroon, landlord — what’s the difference? Anyway, he’s calling on all the tenants to give him five days’ work with their teams — he wants to widen the road from Jan Pieterse’s to the upper house and then on out to the new farms at Crom’s Pond. There’s a post road to go through here one day, and Mijnheer wants to be sure it won’t pass him by.”

Jeremias set down his pipe and dipped a cup of wine. “I won’t do it,” he said.

“Won’t do it?” Joost’s eyes hardened. He watched the angry scar on his son-in-law’s cheek as it flushed with blood and then went dead white again. “You’ve got no choice,” he said. “It’s in your contract.”

“Screw the contract.”

Here it was, all over again. Jeremias would never learn, never accept it, not if you locked him up in that cell for a hundred years. But this time, Joost wouldn’t rise to the bait. This time things were different. This time the renegade sat there across the table from him, husband to his daughter, father to his grandchildren. “But the patroon—” Joost began, controlling himself, trying to reason with him.