T. Boyle - World's End

He lifted the lid of the trunk, and there they were: strewn cans, wilted lettuce, fractured eggs, deliquescing meat. It was too much for him. The smell of corruption rose up out of the hot enclosure to stagger him, ram one fist into his belly and another down his throat. He lost his balance and fell to his knees, mercifully, before the Old Inver House, the coffee and peach cobbler and whatever it was he’d had for breakfast began to come up. For the longest time he knelt there, bent over this acrid little puddle of spew. From a distance, you might have thought he was praying.

In that distant and humid summer of 1679, when the patroon came to Van Wartville to widen roads and improve his property, and Jeremias Van Brunt brazenly defied him, the Jongheer saw that defiance for what it was: yet another insolent blow struck against the very system of civilized government itself. Not half a mile from the cow pasture in which the Peterskill riots would one day unfold, and not much farther than that to where Walter knelt cathartically in the driveway of his rented cottage, Stephanus took his stand. If this ignorant, unwashed, violent, one-legged clod could challenge him, what would prevent a reprobate like Robideau or a subtle snake like Crane from doing the same? There were no two ways about it: if he were to give an inch, if he showed the slightest hint of indecision or trace of flexibility, the whole edifice of the manor would come crashing down around his ears. And how would that sit with his plans to build an estate that would make Versailles look like a cabbage patch?

And so, in high dudgeon, the patroon demoted Joost Cats, incarcerated Van Brunt’s half-breed nephew and incontinent son, and sent word to the shirker that his tenancy was terminated come November. Then he ordered the carpenter to cease work on the roof and begin constructing a set of public stocks. Abuzz with gossip, scandalized and not a little afraid for themselves, the common folk — the Cranes and Sturdivants and van der Meulens and all the rest — took up their tools and went back to work. Scythes rose and dropped, trees fell, dust rose and deerflies hovered over redolent paltroks and sweaty brows. But they worked with one eye only, the other fixed firmly on the road ahead of them — the road that branched off to Nysen’s Roost.

It was late in the afternoon — past four, by Staats’ reckoning — when two figures appeared in the distance. Van den Post was one of them, unmistakable in his new, high-crowned, silver-plumed hat and with the gleam of the rapier electric at his side, but the other — well, it wasn’t Jeremias. No way. This figure was smaller, far smaller, and slighter too. And there was no trace either of the wide-slung, irregular gait peculiar to the man who’d lost a leg in early youth and communicated with the ground through a length of oak ever since. To a man — and woman — the workers paused to lean on the hafts of their rakes and shovels, steady their teams or lower their scythes. And then all at once, as the figures drew closer, a whisper raced through the crowd. “It’s Neeltje!” someone exclaimed, and the rest took it up.

They had to send a boy to fetch Stephanus, who’d retired to the house for refreshment. In the meantime, Neeltje, pale and trembling, fell into her father’s arms, while Staats and Douw kept the others back to give them room. Van den Post, with a triumphant leer, swaggered through the crowd to prop one dusty boot up on a log and help himself to a cup of cider from the keg the patroon had provided for the enjoyment of his tenants. He took a long drink, spat the dregs in the dirt and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve, and then, with studied insolence, pulled out his pipe and had himself a smoke.

Neeltje’s face was wet. “Vader,” she cried, “what are we going to do? He’s … he’s evicted us and taken the boys and still Jeremias won’t come.”

Bent over double, looking twice his already considerable age, the former schout had no ready answer. Silently cursing the day Jeremias Van Brunt had come into their lives, he pressed his daughter to him, clinging to her as if he were caught in a torrent and about to go under.

“He can’t just … he’s got no right … after all these years, to just—” Staats sputtered. “We’ll fight it, that’s what we’ll do.”

But now Robideau was there, insinuating his hard, leathery face between them. “What do you mean, he’s got no right?” he rasped. “The patroon’s word is law, and every one of us knows it. There’s nobody here that didn’t sign his lease with his wits about him, and I’ll be damned to know why Mijnheer shouldn’t evict the son of a bitch when I’ve got to break my back out here in the sun while Mr. High-and-Mighty sits home with a bowl of punch.”

There was a rumble of assent from the crowd, but Staats, loyal as a bulldog, turned on Robideau and warned him to stay out of it.

That was all the Frenchman needed. He took a step forward and gave Staats a shove that sent him reeling back into Neeltje and her father. “Fuck off, cheese-eater,” he hissed.

The obscenity was too much for the virginal ears of Goody Sturdivant, and for the second time that day she let out a doleful whoop and fainted, pitching face forward into the dust with a cyclonic rush of air. In the same instant, Douw and Cadwallader Crane stepped between the antagonists. “Calm down, vader,” Douw pleaded, “this isn’t doing anyone any good,” while on his end, the scrawny loose-limbed young Crane held fast to the bucking Frenchman with a pair of arms so long and attenuated they might have been hemp ropes wound twice around him. “Let me go!” Robideau grunted, dancing in place and uttering a string of oaths that might have embarrassed a sailor. “Let me go, damn you!”

Thus it was that faces were hot, the crowd bunched and Mistress Sturdivant stretched out in the dirt like a sick cow when the patroon drew up on his pacer, a look of the severest condemnation quivering in his fine nostrils. “What in the name of God is going on here?” he demanded, and instantly the scuffling stopped. Neeltje looked up out of her tear-stained face, Meintje van der Meulen bent to assist poor Mistress Sturdivant, Robideau backed away from Cadwallader Crane and glared angrily about him. No one said a word.

The patroon scanned the crowd from on high, his eyes finally coming to rest on van den Post. “Aelbregt,” he snapped, “can you tell me what’s going on?”

Stepping forward with a bow, a wide malicious grin flapping the wings of his beard, van den Post said, “With pleasure, Mijnheer. It seems that Van Brunt’s criminality has infected his neighbors. Farmer van der Meulen, for instance—”

“Enough!” Stephanus cast a withering glance out over the lowered heads of the farmers and their wives and progeny, then turned back to van den Post. “I want to know one thing only: where is he?”

“With all respect, Mijnheer, he would not come,” van den Post replied. “Had you given the order to employ force,” he continued, grinning the grin of a man who could survive indefinitely on jellyfish and saltwater, “I assure you he would be standing before you now.”

It was then that Neeltje came forward, desperately pushing her way through the ranks of her neighbors, her face spread open like a book. “Mijnheer, please,” she begged, “the farm is all we have, we’ve been good tenants and we’ve improved the place ten times over for you — just this year we cleared a full morgen along Blood Creek and put in rye for fodder and a crop of peas on top of it. …”

Stephanus was in no mood to hear appeals to sympathy or reason. He was a powerful man, an educated man, a man of taste and refinement. He looked at Neeltje in her humble clothes, still pretty after all these years, and saw her as she was in that filthy bed with her sluttish mouth and the hair in her eyes, a picture no gentleman should have to carry around with him, and he gritted his teeth. When finally he spoke, he had to struggle to contain his voice; he drew himself up, staring down like a centaur over the powerful sculpted shoulder of the mount that was one with him. “The half-breed and the other one, the loudmouthed boy, are in our custody,” he said, barely moving his lips. “Tomorrow, when my man has completed work on the stocks, they will commence their punishment.” Here he paused to let his words build toward the final pronouncement. “And, I assure you, huis vrouw, they will sit in those stocks until such time as your husband comes to this house and goes down at my feet to beg — yes, beg — for the privilege of serving me.”