T. Boyle - World's End

Joanna coasted right on by the big house on the ridge, past the historical marker that had his name on it — Jeremy Mohonk, the woeful, the ancient, cut down for his trespasses against the almighty patroon — and pulled off on the shoulder across from the path that ran down into the pasture below. “Later,” he told her, and he slipped like a ghost into the ranks of the trees, invisible the moment he turned away from her.

She came to him in that cheerless shack, and she brought him food, books, magazines, she brought him blankets, kerosene for his lamp, cooking utensils, dishes, fine linen napkins that bore the Van Wart monogram. Life was good suddenly and he embraced it like a man risen from the dead. He trapped and hunted, he visited with Peletiah Crane and his gangling grandson, he sat by the stove on a cold afternoon and turned the pages of a book. And he waited, patient as a mogul, for Joanna.

A year went by, and then another. In the spring of the third year, things began to change. As winter let go and the sap began to flow in the trees, as he sat mesmerized by the trill of the toads or watched the May flies swarm to the surface of the creek, the old ache came back to him, the ache that could never be salved. What was he doing? What was he thinking? She was a good-looking woman, Joanna Van Wart, but he was the last of the Kitchawanks and she was mother to everything he despised.

“Throw it away,” he told her when she came to the door of the cabin that afternoon, beautiful in shorts and halter top and with her hair the color of all the leaves in the fall.

“Throw what away?”

“Your diaphragm,” he said. “The pill. Whatever it is that comes between us.”

“You mean—?”

“That’s right,” he said.

He wanted a son. Not the son One Bird could never give him, nor the infinitude of sons he’d spilled in his hand in the dark hole of Sing Sing — that was impossible. He would settle for another sort of son, a son who had less of the Kitchawank in him and more of the people of the wolf. This son would be no blessing, no purveyor of grace or redemption. This son would be his revenge.

At first she thought she’d leave Depeyster for him, that’s how strongly she felt. She really did. Jeremy was a kind of god to her. He made love to her, rough and tender at the same time, and it was as if the earth itself had become flesh and entered her, as if Zeus — or no, some dark Indian god, some brooding son of Manitou — had come down from his mountaintop to take a mortal woman. He was nearly twenty years older than she, and his life was a legend. He was her mentor, her father, her lover. He was all and everything. She wanted him inside her. She wanted to celebrate him, worship him, she wanted to lie against him and listen to his ragged voice become the pulse of her heart as he sifted through the old stories as if fingering jewels.

Was she obsessed? Besotted? Swept away? Was she a sex-starved middle-aged charity lady in a string of pearls who went wet in the crotch at the thought of him, who wanted to hump like a dog, like a squaw, like an Indian princess with an itch that wouldn’t go away?

Yes. Oh, yes.

She sat at the dinner table with her passionless husband and her vacant daughter while a black woman bent over the hereditary Delft-ware with a medallion of veal or a morsel of lobster and she wanted to touch herself, wanted to get up from the table and take to the woods howling like a bitch in heat. Lady Chatterley? She was a nun compared to Joanna Van Wart.

Of course, all things have their season, and all things must come to an end.

Looking back, she saw now that the beginning of the end was as clearly delineated as a chapter in a book. It came on that spring afternoon two and a half years back, just before he left the cabin for good, the afternoon he told her to throw away her diaphragm and give him a child. That was life. That was nature. That was how it was supposed to be.

The only problem was that he’d turned strange on her. They came together, flesh to flesh, invigorated by a new sense of purpose and hope of fulfillment, ecstatic once again, and it lasted a week. If that. Next thing she knew, he was gone. She came to the cabin early, to surprise him, and he wasn’t there. He’s fishing, she thought, he’s checking his traps and he’s lost track of the time, and she settled in to wait for him. It was a long wait. For he’d gone back to Jamestown, back to One Bird.

After a week — an interminable week, an eternal week, a week during which she neither slept nor ate and haunted the cabin like one of the unappeased spirits that were said to brood over the place in never-ending torment — she loaded up the station wagon with eighteen cartons of Happy Face potholders and came looking for him. She found him on One Bird’s porch, shirtless, a necklace of polished bone dangling from his throat, the terrible freight of his years caught in the saraband of his scars, in the sullen slump of his shoulders, in the reptilian gaze of his eyes. He was cleaning fish and his hands were wet with blood. He looked as savage in that moment as any of his savage ancestors. But no more so than One Bird, all two hundred fifty pounds of her, who sat glaring at his side.

Joanna was unimpressed. She jerked the station wagon to a halt out front, flung open the door and tore up the path like an avenging demon. She was wearing the leggings, the jacket, the rawhide shift, and she’d darkened her skin with bloodroot till it was the color of a penny scooped from the gutter. Half a dozen strides and she was on him, her nails sunk like talons in the meat of his arm, and then she was leading him down the steps and around the corner of the house, oblivious to the unbroken skein of One Bird’s threats and insults. When she got him out back, out behind the drooping clothesline hung with One Bird’s gently undulating sheets and massive underdrawers, she flogged him with the sharp edge of her tongue. She began with the bloodcurdling philippic she’d rehearsed all the lonely way up Route 17, and ended with a rhetorical question delivered in a shriek so keen it would have driven eagles from their kill: “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing? Huh?”

He was twice her size, and he looked down on her out of the green slits of his eyes. “Cleaning perch,” he said.

She gave it a minute, rocking back on the balls of her feet, and then she lashed out and slapped him. Hard. So hard the tips of her fingers went numb.

Just as quickly, and with twice the force, he slapped her back.

“You bastard,” she hissed, her stony eyes wet with the sting of his blow. “You’re leaving me, is that it? To live up here with that — that fat old woman?”

He said nothing, but he was wearing a little smile now. One Bird’s great innocent bloomers floated on the breeze.

“You’re not sleeping with her,” she said. “Don’t tell me that.”

He didn’t tell her anything. The smile spread.

“Because if you are …” she trailed off. “Jeremy,” she whispered, so softly, so passionately she might have been praying. “Jeremy.”

He took her hands. “I want to fuck you,” he said, “so bad.”

Later, after he’d led her away from the dumb show of those billowing bloomers and they’d wound up making love in a clump of milkweed behind Dick Fourtrier’s place, he answered her question. “I’m thinking things over, that’s what I’m doing,” he said.

“What things?”

“Boats.”

“Boats?” she echoed, as bewildered as if he’d said “pomeranians,” “sputniks” or “saxophones.”

Boats. He was giving up the cabin — at least until their son was born, and by the way, was she, uh—? No? Well, they’d keep trying. Anyway, what he wanted was a change of scene. All of this ancestral soil business was beginning to wear on him — he could feel the spirits of Sachoes and the first doomed Jeremy Mohonk pressing in on him, and he needed a break, something different, did she know what he meant? He thought he’d like to live on a boat — off his feet, off the land that was draining him day by day of the little strength he had left. He’d seen a ketch for sale at the Peterskill marina. He needed fifteen hundred dollars.