T. Boyle - World's End

She was turning away, already falling back into the depths, when he surprised her. Awakened her. Crossed the room to resuscitate her, to lift her, fathom by fathom, from the depths. It began with the percussive release of a cork, and the touch of a cold long-stemmed glass. “A toast,” he proposed, and he was right there at her side, his voice as clear as if it were only air that separated them after all.

She looked up at him, numb, stiff as a corpse, all the weight of all those tons of water pressing down on her, and fought to lift her glass. “A toast,” she repeated.

He was beaming, grinning, crossing his eyes and licking his lips with the sheer crazy joy of it, and he bent to take her free hand and hold it till he had her full and undivided attention. When he spoke, he dropped his voice to parody the deep unctuous tones of Wendell Abercrombie, the Episcopalian minister. “To the memory of Peletiah Crane,” he said, holding his glass aloft as if it were a chalice.

So deep down was she, it took her a moment before she understood. “You mean, he’s … he’s dead?”

“Yes, yes, yes!” he crowed, and she thought he was going to kick up his heels and caper around the room like a goat. “Tonight. This afternoon. Just after dark.”

She couldn’t help herself. She looked at his face, his costume, the empty glass in his hand, and felt herself coming up for air. She didn’t stop to think about the propriety of it — this sudden joy at the news of the death of a fellow creature — because something was happening to her face, something that hadn’t happened in so long it was a novelty: she was smiling. There she was, giving back the joy and triumph on her husband’s face, her dimples showing, the light rising in her eyes.

“Marguerite just called,” he added, and then, in his excitement, he was down on his knees before her, sweeping off the antique hat and pressing his cheek to the bulge of her stomach. “Joanna, Joanna,” he murmured, “I can’t tell you how much this means to me, the baby, the property, the whole beautiful thing that’s happening to us. …” Under the circumstances, it was the most natural thing in the world to do, and she wasn’t even aware she was doing it: she took his face in her hands, held him to her, and bent to touch her lips to the crown of his head.

They finished the champagne. He sat at her feet, rocking back and forth over his glass, all the while chattering on about breeds and temperaments, about saddles, riding clothes and whether she thought they’d be able to find a good part-time groom and maybe a riding teacher too — for the boy, he meant. He was so ebullient, so full of the moment, not even Mardi could dampen his mood. She paraded down the hallway in her kitten costume (half a dozen mascara whiskers, a tail of twisted pipe cleaners and a leather corset so low-cut in front and pinched in the rear she couldn’t have worn it to the beach), and Joanna watched her pause at the front door, begging for a confrontation, but Dipe wouldn’t have it. He turned away as if he didn’t recognize her and went on with what he was saying even as the door slammed behind him. “Listen, Joanna,” he said, “I know this isn’t really your cup of tea and I know you’ve passed on it the last couple of years, but do you think you might want to come with me tonight?” And before she could answer, before she could think, he was running on, as if to forestall her objections: “You don’t even have to change if you don’t want to — you can go like this, like Pocahontas, like an Indian princess, and to hell with them. Your outfit’ll go great with this,” he laughed, plucking at the collar of the museum piece he was wearing.

It was then that she finally caught her breath, then that she felt herself shaking it off once and for all, coming up, up, till she broke free and filled her lungs to surfeit with the sweet, light, superabundant air. “No,” she said, her voice soft, yet steady, “I think I’ll change.”

Following the events of that tumultuous summer of 1679, the summer that saw Joost Cats demoted, the adolescent Mohonk driven over the edge of the known world and Jeremias Van Brunt put once and forever in his place, the drowsy backwater of Van Wartwyck fell into a deep and profound slumber. Leaves turned color, just as they were supposed to, and fell from the trees; ponds froze over and the snow came, as usual, and then receded again. Cows calved and goats kidded, the earth spread its legs to receive the annual offering of seed, crops grew tall through the mellow months of summer and fell to scythe and mathook in the fall. Old Cobus Musser passed quietly out of this world and into the next one cold winter’s eve as he sat smoking before the fire, but no one outside the immediate family heard of it till spring, and by then it didn’t seem to matter all that much; Mistress Sturdivant found herself pregnant, but to her everlasting sorrow gave birth to a stillborn girl with a birthmark in the shape of a bat over the left breast, a tragedy she ascribed to the fright she’d taken on that terrible day at the patroon’s the previous summer; and Douw van der Meulen netted a one-eyed sturgeon longer than a Kitchawank canoe and so heavy it took three men to carry it. Still, discounting the carcass of the big fish itself, that was about it for the gossips to chew on through the long somnolent year that followed on the heels of that tantalizing summer.

It wasn’t until the winter of the following year, the winter of ’80-’81, that the community had occasion to rouse itself, if ever so briefly, from its torpor. That occasion was the arrival of the new patroon (i.e., the patroon’s cousin, Lubbertus’ boy Adriaen, with his napiform head and fat wet lips) and the coincident return of the green-eyed half-breed with his blushing Weckquaesgeek bride and quarter-breed son. Now, while Adriaen Van Wart wasn’t exactly patroon — Stephanus had long since bought out his cousin’s share of the estate — he wasn’t simply a caretaker either, as Gerrit de Vries had been before him. What he was, apparently, was a place marker, a pawn or knight or rook occupying a strategic square until the grand master chose either to sacrifice him or put him into play. What he was, beyond that, was a corpulent, slow-moving, baggy-breeched scion of the lesser Van Warts, born in the year of his father’s death and raised by his nervous, repatriated aunt in Haarlem (where his mother thought he would get a superior education and aspire to the directorship of the family brewery, but where in fact he became an adept only in the quaffing rather than malting of beer), who had now, enticed by his influential cousin, returned to the New World to make his fortune. What he was, was fat, eighteen, unmarried and stupid. His mother was dead, his sister Mariken living with her husband in Hoboken. Cousin Stephanus was all he had to hold onto, God and St. Nicholas preserve him.

And Jeremy?

Not yet seventeen, he was a married man, according to the rites and customs of the Weckquaesgeeks, and the father of a nine-month-old boy. He was healthy too, clean of limb and sharp of eye, and the native cuisine seemed to have agreed with him — he’d filled out through the chest and shoulders, and where before the sticks of his legs had merely melted into his torso, there was now the rounded definition of an unmistakable pair of buttocks. It seemed, however, that in his absence he’d totally lost the power of speech. What had begun as a predilection for taciturnity, or rather a disinclination toward noun, verb, conjunction, modifier or preposition, had developed into something aberrant during his sojourn among the Weckquaesgeeks. Perhaps it was tiggered by some particularly caustic memory of his earliest days among that star-crossed tribe, days that suffered his mother’s dereliction and his own unending torment at the hands of his uniformly dark-eyed playmates. Or perhaps the cause was physical, something linked to the pathology of the brain, a failure of the speech centers, an aphasia. Who could say? Certainly not the good squaws and shamans of the Weckquaesgeeks, who had all they could do to stanch the flow of blood from the deluge of accidents that daily befell their clumsy constituency and barely noticed that the rehabilitated Squagganeek didn’t have much to say for himself. And most certainly not a physician such as the learned Huysterkarkus, who, if he’d been consulted, would no doubt have prescribed bleeding, cautery, emetics, purgatives and fen leeches, applied in random order.