T. Boyle - World's End

Jeremias said nothing. He leaned forward to rake up the coals of the fire, the smoke stinging his eyes. The fat man was wearing shoes with silver buckles, flannel hose, a fur cloak and rabbit-skin earmuffs beneath his high-peaked hat. “I say, Van Brunt: have you heard me?” the agent asked.

A long moment ticked by, the winter woods as silent as a tomb. “I’m just a boy,” Jeremias said finally, his voice choked with the weight of all he’d been through. “Vader and moeder are dead, and everybody else too.”

The agent shifted in his saddle, cleared his throat a second time, then drew on his pipe. A gust tore the smoke from his lips. “You mean you haven’t got it, then?”

Jeremias looked away.

“Well, sir,” the agent said after a moment, “I must inform you that you are in default of the conditions of your agreement with the patroon. I’m afraid you’ll have to vacate the premises.”

Depeyster Van Wart, twelfth heir to Van Wart Manor, the late seventeenth-century country house that lay just outside Peterskill on Van Wart Ridge where it commanded a sweeping view of the town dump and the rushing, refuse-clogged waters of Van Wart Creek, was a terraphage. That is, he ate dirt. Nothing so common as leaf mold or carpet dust, but a very particular species of dirt, bone-dry and smelling faintly of the deaths of the trillions of microscopic creatures that gave it body and substance, dirt that hadn’t seen the light of day in three hundred years and sifted cool and sterile through the fingers, as rarefied in its way as the stuff trapped beneath the temple at Angkor Wat or moldering in Grant’s Tomb. No, what he ate was ancestral dirt, scooped with a garden digger from the cool weatherless caverns beneath the house. Even now, as he sat idly at his ceremonial desk behind the frosted glass door at Depeyster Manufacturing, thinking of lunch, the afternoon paper and the acquisition of property, the business envelope in his breast pocket was half-filled with it. From time to time, ruminative, he would wet the tip of his forefinger and dip it furtively into the envelope before bringing it to his lips.

Some smoked; others drank, cheated at cards or abused their wives. But Depeyster indulged only this one harmless eccentricity, his sole vice. He was a toddler, no more than two, when he first wandered away from his nurse (an ancient black woman named Ismailia Pompey who’d been with the family so long she was able to overlook the fact that Lincoln had freed the slaves), found the bleached and paint-stripped door ajar and pushed his way into the comforting cool depths of the cellar. Silently, he pulled the door to and sat down to his first repast. While he squatted there in the dark, grinding dirt between his milk teeth, shaping it with his tongue, relishing the faint fecal taste of it, a search that became part of the family legend raged on above him. Edging back into that nurturing ancestral darkness, he must have heard his name called a thousand times while he listened to the beat of frantic footsteps overhead, his mother’s voice on the telephone, his father, summoned home from the office, raging, angrily clacking decanter and glass. How many times had the door to his sanctuary been flung back so that he could see framed in a rectangle of light the face of one worry-worn adult after another? How many times had they propelled his name into that consuming darkness before finally, when the sun had set and they were dragging the pond, he had emerged, lips smeared with his secret? His mother had pressed him to her bosom in a nimbus of body heat and perfume, and his father, that humorless and profligate man, dissolved in tears: the wayward child had come home.

He was no child now. Fifty years old — fifty-one come October — smooth and handsome and with an accent rich with the patrician emphases of the Roosevelts, Schuylers, Depeysters and Van Rensselaers who’d preceded him, scion of the Van Wart dynasty and nominal head of Depeyster Manufacturing, he was a man in the prime of life, tanned, graceful and athletic, the cynosure of the community. He was also a man who carried his sorrow around with him like that hidden envelope of dust. That sorrow was an ache in the loins, a stutter-shot to the heart — to think of it was to think of extinction, the black and uncaring universe, the futility of human existence and endeavor: he was the last of the Van Warts.

Married twenty-three years to a woman who had given him one child — a daughter — and then redirected her sexual energies toward shopping, facials, ethnic cooking and Indian relief, he had tried everything conceivable to produce a legitimate heir. In the early days, when they were still conjugal, he tried ointments, unguents and evil-smelling concoctions he’d purchased from sideways-glancing clerks in Chinatown. He dressed in costume, read his wife lubricious passages from Lolita, The Carpetbaggers and the Old Testament, consulted therapists, counselors, physicians, technicians, quacks and horse breeders, but all to no avail. Not only did Joanna fail to become pregnant again, she began dodging him at bedtime, in the morning, at lunch and in the immediate vicinity of any of the six bathrooms. He was putting too much pressure on her, she said. Sex had become an obligation, a duty, alternately clinical and perverse, like being in a laboratory one day and a witchdoctor’s hut the next. What did he think she was, a prize bitch or something? It was not long after that she’d discovered the Indians.

Anyone else might have petitioned for divorce, but not Depeyster. No Van Wart had ever divorced, and he wasn’t about to set a precedent. He loved her, too, in his way. She was a striking woman, with her startled eyes, her fine bones and the way she carried herself like a gift on a tray, and sometimes he found himself longing for her as she used to be. There were times, though, when he let his mind wander and pictured her fatally injured in an auto accident or the victim of a malignant virus. There would be a funeral. He would grieve. Wear a black armband. And then go out and find himself a strong-legged fecund young equestrian or acrobat. Or one of the barefooted, brassiereless, vacant-eyed college girls who slipped in and out of the house under his daughter’s tutelage. Fertile ground. That’s what he needed. And if the time should come when he himself was at fault, when the mechanism failed to respond as it should, well, there was always the subzero vault at Trilby, Inc., where a dozen packets of his seed lay sequestered in perpetual readiness.

Depeyster sighed, and had another pinch of dirt. It was too hot for golf — ninety-five already and with the humidity up around the breaking point — and the thought of rigging up the Catherine Depeyster was enough to prostrate him. He glanced at his watch: 1:15. Too early to go home yet, but then who was he fooling? Every last worker at the plant, right on down to the pimply fat girl they’d taken on in the packing room two days ago, knew that he couldn’t tell a muffin from an aximax and couldn’t have cared less. So to hell with them. What he would do, he thought, standing and meditatively stroking the envelope in his breast pocket, was go home for a bite of lunch, an iced tea and the afternoon edition of the Peterskill Post Dispatch Herald Star Reporter, have a nap and then, if it cooled off later in the day, drive by the Crane property and dream that old man Crane had sold it to him.

At home, in the kitchen, slicing a tomato on the mahogany sideboard presented to Pierre Van Wart by the Marquis de Lafayette in 1778 as an expression of heartfelt gratitude for nursing him through a six-week illness, Depeyster glanced down at the headlines of the paper, which lay, still folded, beside him. SCHOOL BOARD MEETS, he read. MURIEL MOTT BACK FROM TANZANIA TREK. The tomato was still warm from the garden. He cut it in thick slabs, peeled a Bermuda onion and dug into the refrigerator for the ham, white cheddar and mayonnaise. RUSSIANS INVADE CZECHOSLOVAKIA. The ancient planks groaned beneath his feet, Virginia ham and pungent white cheese mounted on a piece of corn rye; he sliced the onion, spread mayonnaise and carried plate and newspaper to the cherrywood table that had been in the family for better than two hundred years, DOGS ALLOWED TO RUN WILD. FAGNOLI GARBAGE HIT BY STRIKE. There were salt and pepper on the table in Delft shakers molded in the shape of wooden clogs. He sprinkled the tomato faces with both, and then, glancing over his shoulder, he slipped a hand into his breast pocket for a pinch of dirt. When dusted on the sandwich, it was barely distinguishable from the other condiments.