T. Boyle - World's End

But in the morning he seemed his old self. He was up at dawn, joking with the boys. Meintje van der Meulen, hearing of their plight, had sent over half a dozen little round loaves, and Harmanus selected the smallest of them, tucked it into his pouch, shouldered his axe and headed off across the fields. At noon, he returned and took a bit of pease pottage—“Have just a spoonful more, won’t you, Harmanus?” Agatha pleaded, but to no avail — and in the evening he ate a rockfish fillet, a bit of lettuce and two ears of Indian corn before drifting off into a contented sleep. Agatha felt as if an immeasurable burden had been lifted from her shoulders; she felt relieved and thankful. Yes, the garden was decimated and the smokehouse empty, and old Van Wart wanted seventy-five guilders in reparation for his boar, but at least she had her husband back, at least the family was whole once again. That night she said a prayer to Saint Nicholas.

The prayer fell on deaf ears. Or perhaps it was intercepted by Knecht Ruprecht, the saint’s malicious servant. Or perhaps, given the mysteries of the New World and its multifarious and competing divinities, the notion of prayer as Agatha had known it in Twistzoekeren didn’t hold much water. In any case, the tempo of disintegration began to accelerate: on the very day following Harmanus’ return to the realm of moderation, an accident befell Jeremias.

Picture the day: hot, cloudless, the air so thick you couldn’t fall down in a swoon if you wanted to. Jeremias was helping his father clear brush on a bristling hillock that abutted Van Wart Pond, a.k.a. Wapatoosik Water, working mechanically, oblivious alike to nip of mosquito and bite of deerfly. He must have humped past the duncolored pond twenty times — arms laden, eyes stung with sweat — before it occurred to him to shuck his clothes and refresh himself. Naked, he waded into the muck at the pond’s edge. He was feeling his way gingerly, the mud tugging at him as if it were alive, when suddenly the bottom of the pond fell away and something seized his right ankle with a grip as fiery and indomitable as Death. It wasn’t Death. It was a snapping turtle, Chelydra serpentina, big as a wagonwheel. By the time Harmanus got there with his axe, the water had gone red with blood and he had to wade in up to his knees to locate the creature’s evil, horny, antediluvian head and cleave it off at the carapace. The head stayed put. The rest of the thing, claws still churning, slid back into the murk.

At home, Harmanus pried open the locked jaws with a blacksmith’s tongs, and Agatha dressed the wound as best she could. Of course, it would be some two hundred years before the agents of sepsis were identified (invisible little animalcules indeed — any fool knew that night vapors turned a wound black and that either the presence or absence of comets made it draw), and so Jeremias’ ankle was bound in dirty rags and left to itself. Five days later the boy’s lower leg was the color of rotten summer squash and oozing a pale wheylike fluid from beneath the bandages. Fever set in. Mohonk prescribed beaver water fresh from the bladder, but each beaver he shot perversely loosed its bowels before it could be drawn ashore. The fever worsened. On the seventh day, Harmanus appeared in the doorway with the crosscut saw from the woodpile. Half a mile away, perched on the lip of the Blue Rock with Jan Pieterse and a cask of Barbados rum, Mohonk, Katrinchee and little Wouter tried to shut their ears to the maddening, startled, breathless screams that silenced the birds like the coming of night.

Miraculously, Jeremias survived. Harmanus didn’t. When bone separated from bone and his son’s pallet became a froth of flesh and churning fluids, he threw down the saw and bolted headlong for the woods, moaning like a gutshot horse. He ran for nearly two miles and then flung himself face down in the bushes, where he lay in shock till after sundown. The next day his skin began to itch, and then finally to erupt in pustules; by the end of the week he lay stretched out supine on the pallet next to his son’s, eyes swollen closed, his face like something out of a leper’s nightmare. Again, Mohonk was called in, this time to lay poultices of sassafras over the sores; when these proved ineffective, Agatha appealed to the patroon, begging him to send downriver for Huysterkarkus. Van Wart was sorry, but he couldn’t help her.

It wasn’t Katrinchee’s fault. All right, perhaps she was dreaming of Mohonk and the way he’d touched her the week before as they emerged from a frolic in the icy waters of Acquasinnick Creek, and perhaps she had sprained her wrist hoeing up a new cabbage patch, but it could have happened to anyone. The stewed haunch of venison, that is. She was moving toward the table with it, the place cramped anyway, tiny, unlivable, the size of the outhouse they’d had in Zeeland, when she banged up against the milkpail, skated across the floor in her wooden shoes and dumped the whole mess — hot enough to repel invaders at the castle wall — down her father’s shirt.

It was the end of Harmanus. He rose from the straw pallet in one astonishing leap that left him hanging in the air like a puppet for a full five seconds before he burst through the new shutters without so much as a whimper and ran off into the trees, flailing blindly from one trunk to another as the family gave chase. They found him amongst the jagged stones at the base of Van Wart Ridge, a sheer drop of some one hundred fifty feet. Jeremias had trouble with the chronology of events that year, but as near as he could recall, it was about a month later that lightning struck the house and burned it to the ground, taking his mother and Wouter with it. The next day, Katrinchee consigned herself to the fires of hell by running off to Indian Point with the heathen Mohonk.

When November came around and the rents fell due, Van Wart’s agent rode up from the lower manor house in Croton, a saddle pouch crammed with accounts ledgers flapping at his rear. He’d expected trouble at the Van Brunt farm — they were delinquent both with regard to firewood and produce delivery — but when he found himself at the end of the cart track that gave onto the property, he was stupefied. Where the cabin had once stood, there were only ashes. The grain had parched in the field, and then, beaten down by the first winter storm, it had frozen to the ground in scattered clumps. As for the livestock, it had disappeared altogether: the far-flung heaps of feathers gave testimony to the fate of the poultry, but the ox and milch cows were nowhere to be seen. Now the agent was a practical man, a scrupulous man, big of bottom and gut. Though he would have liked nothing better than to hie himself to Jan Pieterse’s trading post and sit before the fire with a mug of lager, he nonetheless chucked the cold flanks of his mount and trundled forward to pursue the matter further.

He circumnavigated the white oak that stood in the front yard, turned up a rusted plow by the half-finished fence, peered down the well. Just as he was about to give it up, he spotted a wisp of smoke rising from the bristle of woods before him. Pausing only to relight his pipe and shift his buttocks in the icy saddle, Van Wart’s agent traversed the clearing and plunged into the winter-stripped undergrowth on the far side. The first thing he saw was the ox, or rather what was left of it, hide frozen to bone, eyes, ears and lips picked away to nothing by woodland scavengers. Beyond it, a crude lean-to. “Hallo!” he called. There was no response.

Then he saw the boy. Swathed in rags and depilitated furs, crouched atop a cowhide in the shadow of the lean-to. Watching him.

The agent maneuvered the horse forward and cleared his throat. “Van Brunt?” he asked.

Jeremias nodded. The temperature was in the teens, the wind from the northwest, out of Canada. He shifted his good leg beneath him. The other one, the one that ended in a wooden peg like the pugnacious Pieter Stuyvesant’s, lay exposed, insensitive to the cold. He watched in silence as the fat man above him twisted in the saddle to reach behind him and produce a big leather-bound book. The fat man thumbed through this book, marked the place with the stem of his pipe and looked down at him. “For the use and increase of this land under the patroonship of Oloffe Stephanus Van Wart in the Van Wartwyck Patent, you now stand in arrears of two fathoms of firewood, two bushels of wheat, two pair of fowl, twenty-five pounds of butter and five hundred guilders annual rent. Plus a special assessment of seventy-five guilders in the case of one misappropriated boar.”