T. Boyle - World's End

He was wasting his breath.

Jeremias’ fist hit the table with a shock that set the china jumping and so startled little Gertruyd that she burst into tears. “Screw the patroon,” he snarled.

Wouter sat silently through his father’s outburst, his head bowed, his eyes on the platter of seed cakes in the middle of the table. “Jeremias,” his mother reproved in the soft, chastening voice Wouter knew so well, “you know it’s your duty. Why fight it?”

The words were barely out of her mouth before his father turned on her, as Wouter knew he would, the stubborn disputatious tones of the old man’s voice riding up the scale to explode in a thunderous tirade against the patroon, the lord governor, rents, taxes, stony soil, wood rot, white ants, earwigs and anything else that came to mind. As his father cocked himself toward her and his mother took an involuntary step away from the table, Wouter made a quick snatch at the seed cakes, secreted a fistful in his shirt and nodded at Jeremy. “Wouter took all the cakes!” howled little Harmanus, but in the heat of the moment, no one noticed. As the two accomplices ducked away from the table and slipped out the door, grandfather Cats was raising his voice too, urging everyone to calm down, to please calm down!

Neither Wouter nor Jeremy uttered a word as they felt their way down the path to Acquasinnick Creek in the gloom of dusk. They’d been up and down the trail so many times the figure approached infinitude, and though it was barely light enough to see, they knew every dip, drop-off, pothole and rib of stone as if they’d carved them themselves. In less than five minutes they were sitting on the high undercut bank of the creek, listening to the suck and pop of rising trout and the flatulent complaint of the bullfrog. Wouter had made off with six cakes. He handed three to his cousin.

For a long while they merely chewed, the water dodging the rocks at their feet in rhythmic wash, mosquitoes cutting the air, crickets chirruping. Wouter broke the silence. “Damned if I’m going to bust my back for the patroon,” he said in a sort of ruminative, octave-shattering yelp. He was at that stage in his life when his father was a small deity, reverenced and wise, incapable of error, the very oracle of truth and decision. If Jeremias told him that geese knew algebra and the creek flowed backward, he’d never doubt it, all appearances to the contrary.

Jeremy said nothing. Which wasn’t unusual, since he rarely spoke, even if directly addressed. He was tall, dark, with the spidery limbs and prominent Adam’s apple of his late progenitor, and though he knew Dutch and English both, he declined to use either, communicating in gurgles, grunts and belches, or in an elaborate sign language of his own device.

“You know vader won’t do it,” Wouter said, reaching out to snatch a firefly from the air and smear its phosphorescence in a greenish streak across his forearm. “He’s no slave.”

Night was deepening around them. There was a splash downstream, from the direction of the bridge. Jeremy said nothing.

“It’ll be us, you know,” Wouter said. “Vader won’t do it, and then moeder and grootvader Cats’ll make us do it. Just like the wood. Remember?”

The wood. Yes. Jeremy remembered. When the rent came due last November and Jeremias retreated, muttering, to the back room, it wasn’t just the pounds and pence, the butter, wheat and pullets the patroon demanded, but two fathoms of firewood to boot. No son of mine, Jeremias had blustered, or nephew either … but his voice had trailed off, and he’d taken a pull at the bottle and staggered out into the yard to be alone with his indignation and his rage. Neeltje, moeder Neeltje, had seen to it that Wouter, Harmanus and Jeremy cut and split the patroon’s wood for him. The three of them — Harmanus was only eight and not much good — worked through two bitterly cold afternoons, and then had to hitch up the oxcart and drive out to the upper manor house with the firewood to warm the patroon’s crazy skeletal old mother, who’d been living there ever since the old patroon kicked off. That was in November, when the wood needed cutting. Now it was July, and the road needed widening.

“Well I’m not going to do it,” Wouter growled. “No matter what moeder says.”

Though he heartily concurred, still Jeremy said nothing.

A long moment passed, the night sounds of the forest crepitating around them, the water spilling ever louder over the stones at their feet. Wouter tossed a handful of pebbles into the black swirling water, then pushed himself up. “What are we going to do?” he said. “I mean, if the patroon comes.”

Jeremy’s reply was so guttural, so strangled, so full of clicks and grunts and pauses, that no one but Wouter, his bosom companion and bedmate, would have known what he said. But Wouter heard him as clearly as if he’d spoken the purest King’s English — or stadtholder’s Dutch — and in the darkness he smiled with the comfort of it. What his cousin had said, in his arcane and contorted way, was this: “The patroon come, we fix him.”

Inevitably, like frost in its season, like corn blight or bread mold, like the crow that arrives to feast on the dead ox or the fly that hovers over the pan of rising dough, the patroon came. He came by sloop, to the landing at Jan Pieterse’s Kill, and he brought with him his wife, Hester Lovelace (who was, by happy coincidence, niece to the most powerful man in New York, his honor the lord governor), his four children, three rooms of furniture, two crates of crockery, a spinet and several somber family portraits meant to enliven the dreary atmosphere of the upper house. Pompey II, now eighteen and the only male issue of the union between the late patroon’s domestic slaves, Ismailia and Pompey the First, rode shotgun over the crates, stores and furniture. His sister Calpurnia, a light-skinned girl with something of the old patroon in the crook of her nose and the odd, almost spastic skew of her limbs, kept Mijnheer’s three young boys from drowning themselves and saw to the tonsorial needs of Saskia, the patroon’s ethereal ten-year-old daughter.

Stephanus was met at the Blue Rock by a fatter, older and considerably richer Jan Pieterse, and by a delegation of slow-moving, baggy-breeched farmers with chaff in their hair and clay pipes in their pockets. His factotum, an unctuous, incessantly twitching whipsnake of a man by the name of Aelbregt van den Post, took charge of the unloading of the sloop and the concurrent loading of the two wagons that stood ready to receive the patroon and his effects. Summoning all his sinewy energy, van den Post, who was said to have survived a shipwreck off Cape Ann by clinging to a spar and eating jellyfish for three weeks, flung himself into the task like a desperate man. He skittered up and down the big slab of rock, shouting orders to the sloop’s torpid crew, handing Mijnheer’s wife down from the gangplank and up into the wagon, steadying the horses, cuffing the hapless carpenter for lagging behind with his tools, castigating Pompey, chiding the children and managing, in the intervals, to bow and scrape at Mijnheer’s heels like a fawning spaniel. When all was ready, the patroon and his family went ahead in the light wagon, Pompey at the reins. Van den Post and the carpenter, hunched over a pair of evil-smelling oxen on the rough plank seat of the overladen farm wagon, brought up the rear.

The patroon was anxious to get to the house. He’d paid a visit during the spring and was shocked by the general decline of the place, the millstones ground to dust, the farms run down, the house itself sagging into the earth like a ship listing at sea. Mismanagement was what it was. That, and his own preoccupation elsewhere. How could he expect his tenants to advance at more than a crawl if there was no one to crack the whip over them?