T. Boyle - World's End

Wouter wanted to turn away, but he couldn’t. The shot had missed, his father was all right, a moment earlier he’d been flooded with redemptive joy. Now that joy turned to disbelief, to shock, to a deep and abiding shame. Everything his father had told him, every word, was a lie.

“I beg you,” Jeremias sobbed, broken at long last, broken like a horse or mule, “I beg you to let me …” and his voice faded away to nothing, “to let me serve you.”

The patroon’s face was impassive. He looked down at the smoking pistols as if they’d appeared spontaneously, through some act of bewitchment. It took him a moment, but then he dropped them to the ground and swung down from his mount. Behind him, the dwarf cocked his musket and van den Post glared at the subdued mob as if daring them to make a move.

“And to stay, to please let us stay,” Jeremias went on, the thunder of his voice reduced to a whine, a snivel. “We’ve worked the farm all our lives, it’s the only thing we have, and you must, I beg you, I’m sorry, I didn’t think. …”

Stephanus didn’t answer. He took a step forward, his face recovered now, the magnificent nostrils alive with disdain, and held out his foot, as if expecting the ultimate obeisance. “Who owns you?” he asked, his balance perfect, voice inflexible.

“You,” Jeremias croaked, staring at the gleaming shoe as if transfixed.

“And who owns your wife, your son, your half-breed bastard?”

To a soul, the tenants leaned forward to hear the reply. Jeremias Van Brunt, the wild-eyed, the proud, the vain, heir to mad Harmanus and madder Nysen, was about to deny his manhood. His voice was a whisper. “You,” he said.

“Good.” The patroon straightened up, and in the same instant he dropped his foot to the ground and drove it up again into Jeremias’ face. The force of the blow snapped back the petitioner’s head and sent him sprawling, his mouth bright with blood. “I don’t want your service,” the patroon hissed. And then, motioning to van den Post, who had dismounted and stood beside him now with drawn rapier, he completed the thought: “I want your blood.”

As it turned out, no further blood was drawn that afternoon, but Jeremias was made to exchange places with his son, and sat there in the stocks, day and night, for the better part of a week. It was a painful week. His back was on fire, his legs numb, his wrists and ankle rubbed raw where his exhausted frame tugged them into the pine, mosquitoes bloated his face, agues settled in his joints. Staats and Douw stood watch over him, lest any enemy — man or beast — take advantage of him, and both Neeltje and moeder Meintje brought him food and drink. The other neighbors, even Robideau, stayed away. In the old country, when a man sat in the stocks, his enemies would gather to jeer and pelt him with stones, offal, dead cats, rats and spoiled fish. But here, the neighbors were indifferent. They held no grudge against Jeremias, and though most felt he’d got what he deserved—“Too proud is what he is,” Goody Sturdivant was heard to observe, “too proud by half”—there was also a current of sympathy for him, though it may have been weak and intermittent. Somewhere, deep within them, they too resented the young patroon in his fancy clothes, and for a moment, trampling his garden, gathered behind their one-legged champion, it had come, like an embarrassment, to the surface.

Jeremias suffered, yes, the merciless sun in his face, the chill morning dew poking at his bones, but his inward suffering was worse by far. He was nothing, he knew that now. He was a peasant, a slave, a servant like his father and mother before him. All he’d worked for, all he’d built, all his dignity and toughness, were nothing. The patroon had showed him that. And here he’d preached to his sons, played the big man, the boaster — and for what? To crawl on his knees to Van Wart? For the rest of his miserable life he would be the mere husk of a man, no better than Oothouse or Robideau or any of them — and he knew it.

Wouter knew it too.

When they released him, when van den Post sauntered up to throw back the bars that pinioned him, he didn’t fall into grandfather van der Meulen’s arms or run home to where his mother sat stricken over a mound of flax and grandfather Cats anxiously paced the stoep— no, he took off like a sprinter, like a dog with a pair of sticks tied to its tail, streaking across the field and through the standing corn, hightailing it for the gap in the trees where his cousin had disappeared in the shock of dawn. He didn’t look back. When he reached the tree line he kept going — a hundred yards, two — and then collapsed in the bushes, wishing only that he might die on the spot, that the earth would open up and swallow him or the sky turn to stone. Distraught, betrayed — how could his father have sunk so low? how could he have done this to him? — he looked blindly around him for some weapon, some stone he could swallow or stick that would poke out his sorry eyes.

How long he lay there, he didn’t know. When he regained his senses, all was quiet in those terrible fields behind him, and the pall of evening had fallen over the woods. Somewhere a woodpecker knocked at a decimated tree, a lonely random tapping that haunted him with its persistence. He got up slowly, shakily, as if the ground had shifted beneath his feet, and looked around him in bewilderment. There were no leaves, no trees, no hills, rocks, glades or streams, there was only the image of his father kneeling before the icon of the patroon. He heard the beggar’s whine of his father’s voice, saw the blood on his lips. Why? he asked himself. Why hadn’t vader risen up to choke the life out of that self-important dandy in the fancy pumps and silk doublet? Why hadn’t he burned his barn, scattered his livestock and run howling for the woods like Wolf Nysen? Why hadn’t he packed up and started over in New York, Connecticut, Long Island or Pavonia? Why, when all was said and done, hadn’t he gone out to work on the road crew in the first place?

Because he was a coward, that’s why. Because he was a fool.

Suddenly, with the night creeping around him, Wouter was seized with a fearful urgency: he had to find Jeremy. Jeremy was the one. Jeremy was his hope and salvation. It was Jeremy who’d stood up to them, Jeremy alone — you didn’t see him sitting in the patroon’s stocks, you didn’t see him working the patroon’s road. An hour after their race for the woods, the jellyfish eater had come back empty-handed, his face and forearms scored from the embrace of briar and bramble, his breeches muddied to the crotch, shirt torn and stockings down around his ankles. And Jeremy? He was out there somewhere among the trees, no man’s prisoner, no man’s servant.

“Jeremy!” Wouter called, slashing through a sea of mountain laurel, nearly choked with excitement, “Jeremy!” He’d find him — any minute now, at the cave or down by the creek — and then they’d run off together. Just the two of them. Across the river, to a place where they could live alone, hunting and fishing, far from patroons, schouts, rents, stocks and all the rest — far from vader. “Jeremy!” he called, as the owl took wing and night drove down the day, “Jeremy!”

What he couldn’t know was that his dark and elusive cousin was so far out of earshot even a salvo from one of His Majesty’s men o’ war wouldn’t have reached him. Van den Post — indefatigable, unshakable, crazed, intransigent, his limbs oiled and fluid, curses spewing from his lips — had chased his quarry up hill and down dale, through brake and briar, swamp, creek and esker. But Jeremy had seen those cuffs of pine, those gaps cut in the unyielding wood to receive him, and he was desperate. Taking the air in measured breaths, churning his legs and beating his arms, he flew through the woods like a sprite, leading van den Post under fallen trees, along ankle-turning streambeds and up slopes that would have prostrated a mountain goat. But he wasn’t fleeing blindly: all along he had a plan.