World's End

A Collision with History

On the day he lost his right foot, Walter Van Brunt had been haunted, however haphazardly, by ghosts of the past. It began in the morning, when he woke to the smell of potato pancakes, a smell that reminded him of his mother, dead of sorrow after the Peterskill riots of 1949, and it carried through the miserable lunch break he divided between nostalgic recollections of his paternal grandmother and a liverwurst sandwich that tasted of dead flesh and chemicals. Over the whine of the lathe that afternoon he was surprised by a waking dream of his grandfather, a morose, big-bellied man so covered with hair he could have been an ogre out of a children’s tale, and then, just before five, he had a vague rippling vision of a leering Dutchman in sugarloaf hat and pantaloons.

The first ghost, the ghost of the pancakes, was conjured by the deft culinary hand of Lola Solovay, his adoptive mother. Though Walter was only midway through his fourth year when his natural mother succumbed to the forces of bigotry and misguided patriotism, he remembered her chiefly for her eyes, which were like souls made flesh, and her potato pancakes, which were light, toothsome, and drowned in sour cream and homemade applesauce. Lying abed, waiting in the limbo between dreaming and consciousness for the alarm to summon him to his hellish job at Depeyster Manufacturing, he caught the scent of those ethereal pancakes, and for just a moment his mother was there with him.

The ghost of his grandmother, Elsa Van Brunt, was also mixed up with the scent of food. He unwrapped the liverwurst on white Lola had concocted for him in the penumbral dawn, and suddenly he was ten years old, spending the summer on the river with his grandparents, the day as dark as December with the storm sitting atop Dunderberg Mountain. His grandmother had got up from her potter’s wheel to fix his lunch and tell him the story of Sachoes’ daughter. Sachoes, as Walter knew from previous episodes, was chief of the Kitchawanks, the tribe that was flimflammed out of its land by the founders of Peterskill-on-the-Hudson back in the days of the Colony. At that time, the Kitchawanks, who were, generally speaking, a lethargic, peace-loving, oyster-eating clan of layabouts and bark-hut builders, owed fealty to the fierce Mohawk to the north. Indeed, so fierce, so savage, so warlike and predatory were these Mohawk that a single brave could be sent down to collect tribute, and Manitou have mercy on the tribe that failed to feast him like a god and laden him with wampumpeak and seawant. Kanyengahaga, the Mohawk called themselves, people of the place of flint; the Kitchawanks and their Mohican cousins called them Mohawk, people who eat people, a reference to their propensity for roasting and devouring those who failed to please them.

Well. White bread was laid out on the plate, tomatoes were sliced, a cellophane-wrapped tube of liverwurst produced from the refrigerator. He had a daughter, Walter’s grandmother said, and her name was Minewa, after the goddess of the river who hurled thunderbolts. She pointed out the window and across the broad back of the Hudson to where lightning sprang like nerve endings from the crown of Dunderberg. Like those.

One lazy August afternoon, a Mohawk brave strode into the village, naked but for his breechclout and painted like death and the devil. Tribute, he demanded, in a tongue that sounded like the thrashing of adders, and then he fell down in a swoon, blood pouring from his mouth and ears, and the pockmarks standing out on his face. Minewa nursed him. If he died, there would be no more oyster eating, no fooling around in bark canoes and plucking the sweet white meat from the cavities of blueclaw crabs: there would be no more Kitchawanks. The Mohawk would see to that.

For a month he lay prostrate in Sachoes’ hut, his head cradled in Minewa’s lap while she assuaged his fever with otter musk and fed him herbs and wild onion. Gradually he began to regain his strength, until one day he was able to stand without support and repeat his demand for tribute. But this time it wasn’t beaverskins or wampumpeak he wanted: it was Minewa. Sachoes was reluctant, but the Mohawk blustered and threatened and cut open his chest in three places to show his sincerity. He would take her to the north country and make her a queen. Of course, if Sachoes preferred, the brave would go home empty-handed and then return one starless night with a raiding party and cut up the Kitchawanks like dogs. Sachoes, who was shortly thereafter to be hoodwinked by the Dutch trader who founded Peterskill on the sacred rock where the chief’s forefathers had watched Manitou’s big woman descend to earth, said “Sure, take her.”

Two weeks later a party of Kitchawanks was combing the adjoining valley for acorns, chestnuts and rose hips when they came across the smoke of a cooking fire. With stealth, with courage and curiosity and not a little audacity — Manitou knows, it could have been the devil himself cooking up a plague — they approached the clearing from which the smoke rose into the sky like a capnomancer’s dream. What they saw, Walter’s grandmother said, spreading mayonnaise, was betrayal. What they saw was the Mohawk and Minewa, what was left of her. She was nothing from the waist down, his grandmother said, setting the sandwich before him — liverwurst, the texture and color, the very smell of flesh — nothing but bone.

If the images of mother and grandmother had been summoned by a tickle of the olfactory lobe, the ghost of his grandfather was more problematic. Perhaps it was a matter of association: once the pattern is established, one thing gives rise to another and the mind plays out memories like beads on a string. At any rate, in the heat of the afternoon, old Harmanus Van Brunt had materialized just to the left of the lathe, big-boned, big-bellied, and big-headed, hairy as a hog, with cutting oil and aluminum shavings caught in the hair of his forearms and a clay pipe clenched between his teeth. All his life he’d been a fisherman, hauling nets with the strength of his shoulders and the counterbalance of his belly, and he’d died as he’d been born: on the river. Walter had been twelve or thirteen at the time. His grandfather, too old at that point to handle the big gill nets weighted down with stripers or sturgeon, had kept his hand in by netting killifish and keeping them in pens for sale as bait. One afternoon — and for Walter the recollection was like a hot cautery — the old man’s face went numb and the stroke folded him up like a jackknife and pitched him into the bait pen, where the mass of killifish closed over him. By the time Walter could get help, the old man had drowned.

The Dutchman was something else. Something Walter had seen in a gallery in Amsterdam when the Solovays had taken him to Europe. Or maybe on a cigar box. He puzzled over it a minute, then chalked it up to genetic memory and indigestion, in equal parts. When the five o’clock whistle blew, he shook his head twice, as if to clear it, and then ran his bike down to the Throbbing Elbow to drain a sad pitcher of beer in honor of his twenty-second birthday.

But even here in the shrine of the present, with its neon glare, its thumping woofers and black lights, he suffered an attack of history. Clumping through the door in his new Dingo boots with the imitation spur straps, he could have sworn he saw his father standing at the bar with a girl whose dress was so short as to expose the nether curve of her buttocks. He was wrong. About his father, that is; for their part, the girl’s buttocks were incontrovertible. She was wearing a paper miniskirt hand-dyed by the Shawangunk Indians on their reservation south of Jamestown, with matching panties. The man beside her turned out to be Hector Mantequilla, with ragged wild hair and eight-inch collar points. “Van,” he said, swinging around, “what’s happening?” The girl turned around now too, hair in her eyes, a pout of makeup, nothing wrong and nothing right. Walter hadn’t seen his father in eleven years.

Walter shrugged. He was feeling sorry for himself, feeling orphaned and martyred and strung out, full of the merde of human existence and sick with the idea of decay: feeling old. It was 1968. Sartre was front-page news, Saturday Review was asking “Can We Survive Nihilism?” and Life had photographed Jack Gelber adrift on an ice flow. Walter knew all about it. He was an alienated hero himself, he was a Meursault, a Rocquentin, a man of iron and tears facing the world in unhope and as riddled with the nausea as a Jarlsberg is with holes. There was no way, for instance, he was going home to the chicken cordon bleu, asparagus vinaigrette, and glittering chocolate mousse his adoptive mother had prepared for him. No way he was going to thankfully tear open his sweetheart Jessica’s gift — a new helmet, bronze like the sun and decorated with daisy decals that spelled out his name — and then tenderly undress her beneath the azalea bush out back with the night like a sleeper’s breath whispering in his ear. No way. At least for a while yet.

“What you drinking, man?” Hector said, leaning into the bar for support. His shirt, which seemed to be fashioned from a synthetic fabric composed of Handi-Wrap and styrofoam, featured a pair of bleeding eyeballs and a slick pink tongue that plunged into the depths of his waistband.

Walter didn’t answer right away, and when he did it was with a non sequitur. “It’s my birthday,” he said. Though he was looking at the girl, he was seeing his grandmother again, the flesh of her heavy arms trembling over a mound of turnip peels, the look on her face when she told him she’d had the phone disconnected because her neighbor — a notorious witch — was sending witch lice over the wire. Superstitious in a way that connected her to the past as firmly as the gravestones rooted in the cemetery on the hill, she’d spent the last twenty years of her life making ceramic ashtrays in the shape of the trash fish her husband extracted from his nets and tossed on the riverbank to rot. They’re the dispossessed, she used to say, glaring at Walter’s hairy grandfather. God’s creatures. I can see them in my sleep. Fish, fish, fish.

“Yes, yes!” Hector shouted. “Your birthday, man!” And then roared for Benny Settembre, the bartender, to set them up. Hector was a native of Muchas Vacas, P.R., the son of slaves and Indians who became slaves. The son of something else too: his eyes were as green as the Statue of Liberty. “I got something for you, man — something special,” he said, taking Walter’s arm. “In the men’s room, you know?”

Walter nodded. The jukebox started up with the sound of shattering glass and rocks against the flanks of buses. Hector took hold of his arm and started toward the bathroom, then stopped cold. “Oh yeah,” he said, indicating the girl. “This is Mardi.”

Six hours later, Walter found himself thinking about water sports. But only fleetingly and because the occasion suggested it. He was on the far side of the river from Peterskill, a mile and a half from home as the fish swims, eleven or twelve by car, and up to his neck in the greasy Stygian drift of the nighttime Hudson. Swimming. Or about to swim. At the moment he was feeling his way through the bottom muck, planted firmly against the current, the rich organic scent of the river in his nostrils, a perfume that managed to combine the essences of aquatic devolution, orange peels, diesel fuel and, yes, merde. Ahead of him, in the dark, he could hear Mardi’s laughter and the soft gentle swirl of her scissor kick. “Come on,” she whispered. “It’s nice, really.” And then she giggled, a sound so natural it could have come from one of the lovelorn insects in the trees that rose up from the shore in a black unfathomable wall.

“Shit!” Hector cursed softly behind them, and there was a terrific splash — the sound of disporting porpoises, depth charges, beer kegs dropped from a pier — and then his high wild laugh.

“Shhhh!” Walter hissed. He didn’t like this, didn’t like it at all. But he was drunk — worse, he was stoned off his feet on the pills Hector had been feeding him all night — and past the point of caring. He felt the buoyancy of the water like the hands of the river nymphs as he lifted off and dug into the surface in a stealthy breaststroke.

They’d left the Elbow at ten to sit out back in Hector’s bumper-blasted ’55 Pontiac and pass a pipe. Walter hadn’t called home — hadn’t done much of anything for that matter except pin beer bottles to his lips — and he thought of Jessica, of Hesh and Lola and his aunt Katrina, with a sort of perverse pleasure. They were missing him now, that was for sure. The chicken Cordon Bleu had dried up in the oven, the asparagus gone limp, the mousse fallen. He pictured them huddled glumly around the redwood picnic table, cocktails going weak with melted ice, toothpicks congealing in a puddle of grease on the platter long since denuded of Swedish meatballs. He pictured them — his family, his girlfriend — waiting for him, Walter Truman Van Brunt, creature of his own destiny, soulless, hard, free from convention and the twin burdens of love and duty, and took the pipe from the hand of a stranger. They were missing him now, oh yes indeed.

But then he felt a stab of guilt, the curse of the apostate, and saw his father again. This time the old man was crossing the parking lot alone, hands thrust deep in the pockets of his striped bell-bottoms, a mauve scarf trailing down his chest. He stopped even with the car window, bent from the waist, and peered in with that mad, tortured look he’d brought with him when he appeared out of nowhere for Walter’s eleventh birthday.

Out of nowhere. Like an apparition. Huge, his head cropped to a reddish stubble, pants torn and greasy, jacket too small, he’d looked like a cross between the Wandering Jew and the Ghost of Christmas Past, he’d looked like an ecstatic who’s lost the ecstasy, a man with no future, a bum. So insubstantial Walter would have missed him altogether if it weren’t for the shouting. Eleven years old, glutted on pink-frosted cake, root beer, chocolate marshmallow supreme and Mars Bars, Walter was up in his room knocking around with his new set of Presidents, Regents and Ministers of the World when he heard a tumult of voices from the front of the house. Hesh’s voice. Lola’s. And another, a voice that sounded as if it were inside his head, as if it were thinking for him, strange, magnetic and familiar all at once.

The front door was open. Hesh stood in the doorway like a colossus, Lola at his side. Beyond them, on the front lawn, was a man with a head like a pumpkin and colorless, rinsed-out eyes. He was wrought up, this man, nearly amuck, dancing on one foot with anger and chanting like a shaman, the litany of his hurts pouring out of him like vinegar. “Flesh of my flesh!” the man yelled, over and over.

Hesh, big Hesh, with his bald honest head and his forearms that were like hammers, was shouting at this man who looked like a bum — at Walter’s father — as if he wanted to kill him. “Son of a bitch!” Hesh raged in a high agitated voice, each word cut clear and distinct. “Liar, thief, murderer! Get out. Get out of here!”

“Kidnappers!” the man bawled back at him, bending to pound the earth in his rage. But then all of a sudden Walter edged into view, puzzled and frightened, and the man fell silent. A change came over his face — it had been ugly and vehement and now suddenly it was as composed as a priest’s — and he went down on one knee and spread his arms. “Walter,” he said, and the tone of it was the most seductive thing the boy had ever heard. “Don’t you know who I am?”

“Truman,” Hesh said, and it was both a plea and a warning.

Walter knew.

And then he saw it. Behind his father, behind the pale, shorn, washed-out man in the bum’s suit of clothes, stood a motorcycle. A little pony Parilla, 98cc, red paint and chrome, gleaming like a puddle in the desert. “Come here, Walter,” his father said. “Come to your father.”

Walter glanced up at the man he knew as his daddy, the man who’d fed and clothed him, who’d stood by him through his traumas, there to throw the ball and catch it, to cow his teachers and subdue his enemies with a glance, to anchor and protect him. And then he looked out at the man on the lawn, the father he barely knew, and the motorcycle that stood behind him. “Come on, I won’t bite.”

Walter went.

And now here he was again, come back after eleven years, come back the second time that day. Only now he was black, a solid presence, with a pair of red-rimmed eyes and a nose that looked as if it had been stepped on. Now he was leaning through the window of the Pontiac and lighting a cigarette off Hector’s joint and reaching out to take Walter’s hand in a soul clasp and inquire as to how the fuck he was doing, man. Now he was Herbert Pompey, denizen of South Street bars, poet, player of the cornet and nose flute, part-time Man of La Mancha hoofer, weekend doper.

Sick with history, the past coming at him like a succession of screaming fire trucks, Walter could only tug weakly at Pompey’s hand and murmur something to the effect that he was doing okay but that he had a headache, he was feeling pretty stoned and thought he might be having a little trouble with his eyes. And his ears. And come to think of it, maybe his brain too.

There followed an interval during which Pompey joined them in the big airship of the Pontiac’s interior — Hector, Mardi and Walter in front, Pompey stretched out across the back seat with a pint of Spañada that had appeared in his hand as if through the intercession of spirits — an interval during which they communed with the tinny rattle of the radio, the texture of the night, a greenish blur in the sky that might have been a UFO but was probably a weather balloon and the great starry firmament that stretched out over the hood of the Pontiac like a sea of felt. Gravity tugged at Walter’s lower lip. The neck of the Spañada bottle loomed up on his right, the joint on his left. He was numb as a corpse. The attack of history was over.

It was Mardi who came up with the idea of swimming out to the ghost ships. An idea that had sounded far better in the conception than the execution. “It’s fantastic,” she insisted, “no, no, it’s really fantastic,” as if someone were contradicting her. And so they were, Walter, Mardi and Hector (Pompey had wisely chosen to stay with the car), swimming out to the black silent shapes that lay anchored in thirty feet of water off Dunderberg Mountain.

Stroke, kick, stroke, kick, Walter chanted under his breath, trying to remember if he was supposed to breathe with his head above the surface or beneath it. He was thinking about water sports. Scuba. Water polo. Jackknife. Dead man’s float. He was no slouch: he’d done them all at one time or another, had dunked heads and hammered goals with the best of them, swum rivers, lakes, inlets, murky primeval ponds and chloraseptic pools, a marvel of windmilling arms and slashing feet. But this, this was different. He was too far gone for this. The water was like heavy cream, his arms like spars. Where was she?

She was nowhere. The night fell on him from the recesses of space, shearing past the immemorial mountains, the oaks and tamaracks and hickories, melding finally in a black pool with the chill, imp-haunted river that tugged at him from below. Stroke, kick: he could see nothing. Might as well have his eyes closed. But wait — there, against the flat black keel of the near ship, wasn’t that her? That spot of white? Yes, there she was, the little tease, the bulb of her face like a night-blooming flower, a beacon, a flag of truce or capitulation. The keel rose behind her like a precipice, bats skittered over the water’s surface, insects chirred and somewhere, lost in obscurity, Hector floundered like a fish in a net, his soft curses softened by the night until they fell away into infinity.

Walter was thinking of how Mardi had shucked the paper dress in the gloom of the shore as casually as if she were undressing in her own bedroom, thinking of the thrill that had lit his groin as she steadied herself against him to perch first on one leg and then the other as she slipped off the paper panties and dropped them in the mud. Ghostly, a pale presence against the backdrop of the night, she’d disappeared into the grip of the water before he’d had a chance to yank his shirt off. Now he concentrated on the milky blur of her face and paddled toward her.

“Hector?” she called as he glided up to her. She was trying to shimmy up the anchor chain, gripping the cold pitted steel with naked flesh, hugging it to her, swaying above the surface like the carved figurehead that comes to life in legends.

“No,” he whispered, “it’s me, Walter.”

She seemed to find this funny, and giggled yet again. Then she dropped back into the water with a splash that could have alerted all the specter sailors of all the ships of the fleet — or, at the very least, the watchman she’d been jabbering about all the way over in the car. Walter clutched the anchor chain and peered up at the ship that loomed above him. It was a merchantman from the Second World War like the others beyond it, ships of the mothball fleet that had risen and fallen with the tide twice a day since Walter was born. Their holds were full of the grain the government bought up to keep free enterprise from strangling the farmers of Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. Below them, somewhere in a pocket off Jones Point, lay the wreck of the Quedah Merchant, scuttled there by William Kidd’s men in 1699. Legend had it that you could still see her when the river cleared, full-rigged and ready to sail, still laden with treasure from Hispaniola and the Barbary Coast.

But Walter wasn’t after treasure. Or rotting wheat germ strewn with rat turds, or even some good clean healthy exercise. In fact, until he brushed against Mardi in the water beneath the taut and rusted anchor chain, he wasn’t sure what he was after. “Surprise,” she gushed, bobbing up beside him, one arm on the chain, the other flung around his neck. And then, pressing her body to him — no, rubbing against him as if she’d suddenly developed some sort of subaqueous itch — she murmured, “Is it really your birthday?”

He’d almost forgotten. The sad censorious faces of Jessica, Lola and Hesh passed in quick review, a sudden manifestation of a larger affliction, and then he was grabbing for her, seeking orifices, trying to kiss, nuzzle, grip the anchor chain, tread water and copulate all at once. He got a mouthful of river and came up coughing.

Mardi made a soft, moaning, lip-smacking noise, as if she were tasting soup or sherbet. Wavelets lapped around them. Walter was still coughing.

“Listen, birthday boy,” she whispered, breaking away and then pulling close again, “I could be real nice to you if you’d do something for me.”

Walter was electrified. Hot, eager, bereft of judgment. The chill, fishy current was as warm suddenly as a palm-fringed Jacuzzi. “Huh?” he said.

What she wanted, bobbing there like a naiad in the turbid ancient Hudson in the late hours of the night and with the great high monumental V-shaped prow of the ship hanging over her, was derring-do. Heroics. Feats of strength and agility. What she wanted was to see Walter hoist himself up the anchor chain like a naked buccaneer and vanish into the fastness of the mystery ship, there to unravel the skein of its secrets, absorb the feel of its artifacts and memorize the lay of its decks. Or something like that. “My arms are too weak,” she said. “I can’t do it myself.”

A tug moved by in the distance, towing a barge. Beyond it, Walter could make out the dim lights of Peterskill, hazy with distance and the pall of mist that hung over the river’s middle reaches.

“Come on,” she prodded. “Just take a peek.”

Walter thought about the presumptive watchman, the penalties for trespassing on federal property, his fear of heights, the crapulous, narcotized, soporific state of his mind and body that made every movement a risk, and said, “Why not?”

Hand over hand, foot over foot, he ascended the chain like a true nihilist and existential hero. What did danger matter? Life had neither meaning nor value, one lived only for personal extinction, for the void, for nothingness. It was dangerous to sit on a sofa, lift a fork to your mouth, brush your teeth. Danger. Walter laughed in the face of it. Of course, for all that, he was terrified.

Two-thirds of the way up he lost his grip and snatched at the chain like a madman, twelve pints of blood suddenly pounding in his ears. Below, blackness; above, the shadowy outline of the ship’s rail. Walter caught his breath, and then continued upward, dangling high above the water like a big pale spider. When finally he reached the top, when finally he could snake out a tentative hand and touch skin to the great cold fastness of the ship’s hull, he found that the anchor chain plunged into an evil-looking porthole sort of thing that might have been the monstrous, staved-in, piratical eye of the entire ghostly fleet. He leaned back to take in the huge block letters that identified the old hulk — U.S.S. Anima—hesitated a moment, then twisted his way through the porthole.

He was inside now, in an undefined space of utter, impossible, unalloyed darkness. Bare feet gripped bare steel, his fingers played along the walls. There was a smell of metal in decay, of oil sludge and dead paint. He worked his way forward, inch by inch, until shadows began to emerge from the obscurity and he found himself on the main deck. A covered hatch stood before him; above rose the mainmast and cargo booms. The rest of the ship — cabins, boats, masts and cranes — fell off into darkness. He had the feeling of perching on a great height, of flying, as if he were strolling the aisles of a jetliner high above the clouds. There was nothing here but shadows. And the thousand creaks and groans of the inanimate in faint, rhythmic motion.

But something was wrong. Something about the place seemed to rekindle the flames of nostalgia that had licked at him throughout the day. He stood stock-still. He drew in his breath. When he turned around he was only mildly surprised to see his grandmother perched on the rail behind him. “Walter,” she said, and her voice crackled with static as if she were talking on a bad long-distance connection. “Walter, you’ve got no clothes on.”

“But Gram,” he said, “I’ve been swimming.”

She was wearing a big sack dress and she was as fat as she’d been in life. “No matter,” she said, waving a dimpled wrist in dismissal, “I wanted to tell you about your father, I wanted to explain. … I—”

“I don’t need any explanation,” a voice growled behind him.

Walter whirled around. It had been going on all day — yes, from the moment he’d opened his eyes — and he was sick of it. “You,” he said.

His father grunted. “Me,” he said.

The eleven years had wrought their changes. The old man seemed even bigger now, his head swollen like something you’d find carved into the cornice of a building or standing watch over an ancient tomb. And his hair had grown out, greasy dark fangs of it jabbing at his face and trailing down his neck. The suit — it seemed to be the same one he’d been wearing on Walter’s eleventh birthday — hung in tatters, blasted by the years. There was something else too. A crutch. Hacked like a witching stick from some roadside tree, still mottled with bark, it propped him up as if he were damaged goods. Walter glanced down, expecting a gouty toe or a foot bound in rags, but could see nothing in the puddle of shadow that swallowed up the lower half of his father’s body like a shroud.

“But Truman,” Walter’s grandmother said, “I was just trying to explain to the boy what I told him all my life. … I was trying to tell him it wasn’t your fault, it was the circumstances and what you believed in your heart. God knows—”

“Quiet down, Mama. I tell you, I don’t need any explanations. I’d do it again tomorrow.”

It was at this point that Walter realized his father was not alone. There were others behind him — a whole audience. He could hear them snuffling and groaning, and now — all of a sudden — he could see them. Bums. There must have been thirty of them, ragged, red-eyed, drooling and stinking. Oh yes: he could smell them now too, a smell of stockyards, foot fungus, piss-stained underwear. “America for Americans!” Walter’s father shouted, and the phantom crowd took it up with a gibber and wheeze that wound down finally to a crazed muttering in the dark.

“You’re drunk!” Walter said, and he didn’t know why he’d said it. Perhaps it was some recollection of the early years, after his mother died and before his father disappeared for good, of the summers at his grandparents’ when his father would be around for weeks at a time. Always — whether the old man was asleep on the couch, helping his own father with the nets, taking Walter out to the Acquasinnick trestle for crabs or to the Polo Grounds for a ballgame — there had been the smell of alcohol. Maybe that’s what had done it tonight, at the Elbow. The smell of alcohol. It was the cipher to his father as surely as the potato pancakes and liverwurst were ciphers to his sadeyed mother and the big-armed, superstitious woman who’d tried to fill the gap she left.

“What of it,” his father said.

Just then a little man with a gargoyle’s face stepped out of the shadows. He wasn’t wearing the sugarloaf hat or pantaloons — no, he was dressed in a blue work shirt and baggy pleated trousers with side pockets — but Walter recognized him. “No drunker than you,” the man said.

Walter ignored him. “You deserted me,” he said, turning on his father.

“The boy’s right, Truman,” his grandmother crackled, her voice frying like grease in a skillet.

The old man seemed to break down then, and the words caught in his throat. “You think I’ve had it easy?” he asked. “I mean, living with these bums and all?” He paused a moment, as if to collect himself. “You know what we eat, Walter? Shit, that’s what. A handful of this spoiled wheat, maybe a mud carp somebody catches over the side or a rat they got lucky and skewered. Christ, if it wasn’t for the still Piet set up—” He never finished the thought, just spread his hand and let it fall like a severed head. “A long absurd drop,” he muttered, “from the womb to the tomb.”

And then the little man — Walter saw with a jolt that he reached no higher than his father’s waist — was tugging at the old man’s elbow; Truman bent low to hold a whispered colloquy with him. “Got to go, Walter,” the old man said, turning to leave.

“Wait!” Walter gasped, desperate all of a sudden. There was unfinished business here, something he had to ask, had to know. “Dad!” It was then that it happened: the atmosphere brightened just perceptibly, and only for an instant. Perhaps it was the effect of the moon, tumbled out from behind the clouds, or maybe it was swampfire, or the entire population of the Bronx staggering from their beds to switch on their bathroom lights in unison — but whatever it was, it gave Walter a single evanescent glimpse of his father’s left leg as the old man swayed off into the darkness. Walter went cold: the cuff was empty.

Before he could react, the shadows closed up again like a fist, and the little man was at his side, leering up at him like something twisted and unclean, like the imp that prods the ogre. “Now don’t you go following in your father’s footsteps, hear?”

Next thing Walter knew he was on his bike (bike: it was a horse, a fire-breathing, shit-kicking terror, a big top-of-the-line Norton Commando that could jerk the fillings out of your molars), the washedout, bird-bedeviled dawn flashing by on either side of him like the picture on a black-and-white portable with a bad horizontal hold. He was invincible, immortal, impervious to the hurts and surprises of the universe, coming out of Peterskill at ninety-five. The road cut left, and he cut with it; there was a dip, a rise — he clung to the machine like a new coat of paint. One hundred. One-oh-five. One-ten. He was heading home, the night a blur — had he passed out in the back of Hector’s car on the way back from Dunderberg? — heading home to the bed of an existential hero above the kitchen in his adoptive parents’ clapboard bungalow. There was dew on the road. It wasn’t quite light yet.

And then all at once, as if a switch had been thrown inside his head, he was slowing down — whatever it was that had got him up to a hundred and ten had suddenly left him. He let off on the throttle, took it down — ninety, eighty, seventy — only mortal after all. Up ahead on the right (he barely noticed it, had been by it a thousand times, ten thousand) was a historical marker, blue and yellow, a rectangle cut out of the gloom. What was it — iron? Raised letters, yellow — or gold — against the blue background. Poor suckers probably made them down at Sing Sing or something. There was a lot of history in the area, he supposed, George Washington and Benedict Arnold and all of that, but history really didn’t do much for him. Fact is, he’d never even read the inscription on the thing.

Never even read it. For all he knew, it could have commemorated one of Lafayette’s bowel movements or the discovery of the onion; it was nothing to him. Something along the side of the road, that’s all: Slow Down, Bad Curve, oak tree, billboard, historical marker, driveway. Even now he wouldn’t have given it a second glance if it weren’t for the shadow that suddenly shot across the road in front of him. That shadow (it was nothing recognizable — no rabbit, opossum, coon or skunk — just a shadow) caused him to jerk the handlebars. And that jerk caused him to lose control. Yes. And that loss of control put him down for an instant on the right side, down on the new Dingo boot with the imitation spur strap, put him down before he could straighten up and made him hit that blue-and-yellow sign with a jolt that was worthy of a major god.

Next afternoon, when he woke to the avocado walls, crackling intercom and astringent reek of the Peterskill Hospital’s East Wing, he was feeling no pain. It was a puzzle: he should have been. He examined his forearms, wrapped in gauze, felt something tugging at his ribs. For a moment he panicked — Hesh and Lola were there, murmuring blandishments and words of amelioration, and Jessica too, tears in her eyes. Was he dead? Was that it? But then the drugs took over and his eyelids fell to of their own accord.

“Walter,” Lola was whispering as if from a great distance. “Walter — are you all right?”

He tried to pin it down, put it all together again. Mardi. Hector. Pompey. The ghost ships. Had he climbed the anchor chain? Had he actually done that? He remembered the car, Pompey’s wasted face, the way Mardi’s paper dress had begun to dissolve from contact with her wet skin. He had his hands on her breasts and Hector’s were moving between her legs. She was giggling. And then it was dawn. Birds going at it. The parking lot out back of the Elbow. “Yeah,” he croaked, opening his eyes again, “I’m all right.”

Lola was biting her lip. Hesh wouldn’t look him in the eye. And Jessica — soft, powdered, sweet-smelling Jessica — looked as if she’d just run back-to-back marathons and finished last. Both times.

“What happened?” Walter asked, stirring his legs.

“It’s okay,” Hesh said.

“It’s okay,” Lola said. “It’s okay.”

It was then that he looked down at the base of the bed, looked down at the sheet where his left foot poked up like the centerpole of a tent, and at the sad collapsed puddle of linen where his right foot should have been.

O Pioneers!

Some three hundred years before Walter dodged a shadow and made his mark on the cutting edge of history, the first of the Peterskill Van Brunts set foot in the Hudson Valley. Harmanus Jochem Van Brunt, a novice farmer from Zeeland, was a descendant of herring fishermen in whose hands the nets had gone rotten. He arrived in New Amsterdam on the schooner De Vergulde Bever in March of 1663, seeking to place as great a distance as possible between himself and the ancestral nets, which he left in the care of his younger brother. His passage had been underwritten by the son of a Haarlem brewer, one Oloffe Stephanus Van Wart, who, under the authority of Their High Mightinesses of the States General of Holland, had been granted a patroonship in what is now northern Westchester. Van Wart’s agent in Rotterdam had paid out the princely sum of two hundred fifty guilders to cover the transoceanic fare for Harmanus and his family. In return, Harmanus, his wife (the goude vrouw Agatha, née Hooghboom) and their kinderen, Katrinchee, Jeremias and Wouter, would be indentured servants to the Van Warts for all their days on earth.

The family was settled on a five-morgen farm a mile or so beyond Jan Pieterse’s trading post at the mouth of Acquasinnick Creek, on land that had lately been the tribal legacy of the Kitchawanks. A crude timber-and-thatch hut awaited them. The patroon, old Van Wart, provided them with an axe, a plow, half a dozen scabious fowl, a cachexic ox, and two milch cows, both within a dribble of running dry, as well as a selection of staved-in, battered and cast-off kitchen implements. As a return on his investment, he would expect five hundred guilders in rent, two fathoms of firewood (split, delivered and reverently stacked in the cavernous woodshed at the upper manor house), two bushels of wheat, two pair of fowl, and twenty-five pounds of butter. Due and payable in six months’ time.

A lesser soul might have been discouraged. But Harmanus, known in his native village of Schobbejacken as Ham Bones, in deference to his strength, agility and gustatory prowess, was no man to give in easily. With his two young sons at his side (Jeremias was thirteen, Wouter nine), he was able to clear and sow two and a half acres of rich but stony soil by the end of May. Katrinchee, a fifteen-year-old with blooming breasts and expanding bottom, dreamed of cabbages. By midsummer, she and her mother had established a flourishing kitchen garden of peas, haricots verts, carrots, cabbages, turnips and cauliflower, as well as a double row of Indian corn and pumpkin squash, the seeds of which she’d obtained from the late Sachoes’ degenerate son, Mohonk.¹ Under Katrinchee’s patient tutelage, the ancient, long-faced cows—Kaas and Boter, as they were hopefully christened by little Wouter — gradually came to take on the silky svelteness of adolescence. Each morning she tugged at their shrunken teats; each evening she fed them a mash of hackberry and snakewort, serenading them in a wavering contralto that drifted out over the fields like something snatched from a dream. The turning point came when, with Mohonk’s contrivance, she obtained the newly tanned hides of a pair of calves, which she stuffed with straw and propped up on sticks in the cows’ pen — within a week the old bossies were nuzzling the forgeries in maternal bliss and filling the milk pails as fast as Katrinchee could empty them. And as if that weren’t enough, the hens too seemed rejuvenated. Inspired by their bovine counterparts, they began to lay like blue-ribbon winners, and the tattered cock sprouted a magnificent new spray of tail feathers.

The land was fat, and the Van Brunts tumbled into the expansive embrace of it like orphans into a mother’s lap. If sugar was dear, honey was theirs for the taking. So too blueberries, crab apples, chickory and dandelion greens. And game! It practically fell from the heavens. A blast of the blunderbuss brought down a rain of gobblers or scattered coneys like grain, deer peered in at the open windows, geese and canvasbacks tangled themselves in the wash as it hung out to dry. No sooner would Jeremias shove off onto the Hudson — or North River, as it was called then — than a sturgeon or rockfish would leap into the canoe.

Even the house was beginning to shape up under the rigorous regime of Vrouw Van Brunt. She expanded the cellar, scoured the floors with sand, fashioned furniture from wicker and wood, put up shutters to keep out deerflies and the fierce sudden thunderstorms that emanated like afterthoughts from the crown of Dunderberg on a muggy afternoon. She even planted tulips out front — in two rows so straight they could have been laid out by a surveyor.

Then, in mid-August, things began to go sour. Outwardly, life had never been better: trees were falling, the woodpile growing, the fields knee-high with wheat and the smokehouse full. Katrinchee was turning into a woman, the boys were tanned and hard and healthy as frogs, Agatha hummed over her dustmop and broom. And Harmanus, liberated from the patrimonial nets, worked like five men. But slowly, imperceptibly, like the first whispering nibble of the first termite at the floor joists, suffering and privation crept into their lives.

It began with Harmanus. He came in from the fields one night and sat down at the table with an appetite so keen it cut at him like a sword. While Agatha busied herself with a hutspot of turnips, onions and venison, she set out a five-pound wheel of milk cheese and a loaf of day-old bruinbrod, hard as stone. Flies and mosquitoes hung in the air; the children, playing at tag, shouted from the yard. When she turned around, bread and cheese were gone and her husband sat contemplating the crumbs with a strange vacant gaze, the hard muscles working in his jaw. “My God, Harmanus,” she laughed, “save something for the children.”

It wasn’t till supper that she became alarmed. Besides the stew — it was enough for the next three days, at least — there was a game pie, another loaf, two pounds of butter, garden salad and a stone jar of creamed fish. The children barely had time to fill their plates. Harmanus lashed into the eatables as if he were sitting down to the annual Pinkster eating contest at the Schobbejacken tavern. Jeremias and Wouter ran off to kick a ball in the fading light, but Katrinchee, who’d stayed behind to clear up, watched in awe as her father attacked the pie, shoveled up the creamed fish with a wedge of bread, scraped the stewpot clean. He sat at the table for nearly two hours, and in all that time not a word escaped his lips but for the occasional mumbled request for water, cider or bread.

In the morning it was no different. He was up at first light, as usual, but instead of taking a loaf from the table and heading out with axe or plow, he lingered in the kitchen. “What is it, Harmanus?” Agatha asked, a trace of apprehension creeping into her voice.

He sat at the crude table, big hands folded before him, and looked up at her, and she thought for a moment she was looking into the eyes of a stranger. “I’m hungry,” he said.

She was sweeping the floorboards, her elbows jumping like mice. “Shall I make some eggs?”

He nodded. “And meat.”

Just then Katrinchee stepped through the door with a pail of fresh milk. Harmanus nearly kicked the table over. “Milk,” he said, as if associating word and object for the first time; his voice was flat, dead, without intonation, the voice of a phantom. He snatched the pail from her hands, lifted it to his lips and drank without pause till it was empty. Then he threw it to the floor, belched, and looked around the room as if he’d never seen it before. “Eggs,” he repeated. “Meat.”

By this point, the whole family was frightened. Jeremias looked on with a pale face as his father ate his way through the larder, wrestled sturgeon from the smokehouse, plucked a pair of hens for the pot. Katrinchee and Agatha flew around the kitchen, chopping, kneading, frying and baking. Wouter was sent for wood, steam rose from the kettle. There was no work in the fields that day. Harmanus ate till early afternoon, ate till he’d ravaged the garden, emptied the cellar, threatened the livestock. His shirt was a patchwork of grease, egg yolk, sauce and cider. He looked drunk, like one of the geneversoaked beggars on the Heerengracht in Amsterdam. Then all at once he staggered up from the table as if he’d been wounded and fell on a pallet in the corner: he was asleep before he hit the straw.

The kitchen was devastated, the pots blackened; spatters of food maculated the floorboards, the table, the fieldstone of the hearth. The smokehouse was empty — no venison, no sturgeon, no rabbit or turkey — and the grain and condiments they’d bartered from the van der Meulens were gone too. Agatha could as well have been cooking for the whole village of Schobbejacken, for a wedding feast that had gone on for days. Exhausted, she sank into a chair and held her head in her hands.

“What’s wrong with vader?” Wouter asked. Jeremias stood at his side. They both looked scared.

Agatha stared at them in bewilderment. She’d barely had time to puzzle over it herself. What had come over him? She remembered something like it when she was a child in Twistzoekeren. One day, Dries Herpertz, the village baker, had declared that cherry tarts were the perfect food and that he would eat nothing else till the day he died. Soup, at least, you must have soup, people said. Milk. Cabbage. Meat. He turned his nose to the air, disdaining them as if they were a coven of sinners, devils set out to tempt him. For a year he ate nothing but cherry tarts. He became fat, enormous, soft as raw dough. He lost his hair, his teeth fell out. A bit of fish, his wife pleaded. Some nice braadwurst. Cheese? Grapes? Waffles? Salmon? He waved her off. She spent all day preparing fabulous meals, combed the markets for exotic fruits, dishes from Araby and the Orient, snails, truffles, the swollen livers of force-fed geese, but nothing would tempt him. Finally, after five years of trying, she dropped dead of exhaustion, face down in a filosoof casserole. Dries was unmoved. Toothless, fat as a sow, he lived on into his eighties, sitting out in front of his bakeshop and sucking the sweet red goo from thumbs the size of spatulas. But this, this was something different. “I don’t know,” she said, and her voice was a whisper.

Around nightfall, Harmanus began to toss on his pallet. He cried out in his sleep, moaning something over and over. Agatha gently shook him. “Harmanus,” she whispered. “It’s all right. Wake up.”

Suddenly his eyes snapped open. His lips began to move.

“Yes?” she said, leaning over him. “Yes, what is it?”

He was trying to say something — a single word — but couldn’t get it out.

Agatha turned to her daughter. “Quick, a glass of water.”

He sat up, drank off the water in a gulp. His lips began to quiver.

“Harmanus, what is it?”

“Pie,” he croaked.

“Pie? You want pie?”

“Pie.”

It was then that she felt herself slipping. In all their years of marriage, through all the time he’d sat helpless over his torn nets or had to be coaxed from bed to take his dory out on the windswept Scheldt, through all the tension and uncertainty of the move to the New World and the hardships they’d faced, she’d barely raised her voice to him. But now, suddenly, she felt something give way. “Pie?” she echoed. “Pie?” And then she was clawing at the shelf beside the hearth, tearing open sacks and boxes, flinging kettles, wooden bowls, porringers and spoons to the floor as if they were dross. “Pie!” she shrieked, turning on him, the cast-iron pan shielding her breast. “And what am I supposed to make it out of — nimbleweed and river sand? You’ve eaten everything else — shortening, flour, fatback, eggs, cheese, even the dried marigolds I brought with me all the way from Twistzoekeren.” She was breathing hard. “Pie! Pie! Pie!” she suddenly cried, and it was like the call of a great hysterical bird flushed from its roost; a second later she collapsed in the corner, heaving with sobs.

Katrinchee and her brothers were pressed flat against the wall, their faces small and white. Harmanus didn’t seem to notice them. He shoved himself up from the bed and began rummaging around the room for something to eat. After a moment, he came up with a bag of acorns Katrinchee had collected to make paste; crunching them between his teeth, shells and all, he wandered out into the night and disappeared.

It was past four in the morning by the time they found him. Guided by a faint glow from Van Wart Ridge, Agatha and her daughter forded Acquasinnick Creek, stumbled up the sheer bank that rose on the far side, and fought their way through a morass of briars, nettles and branches hung with nightdrift. They were terrified. Not only for husband and father, but for themselves. Lowlanders, accustomed to polder and dike and a prospect that went on and on until it faded into the indefinite blue reaches of the sea, here they were in a barbaric new world that teemed with demons and imps, with strange creatures and half-naked savages, hemmed in by the trees. They fought back panic, bit their lips and pressed on. Finally, exhausted, they found themselves in a clearing lit by the unsteady flicker of a campfire.

There he was. Harmanus. His big head and torso throwing macabre shadows against the ghostly twisted trunks of the white birches behind him, a joint the size of a thighbone pressed to his face. They stepped closer. His shirt was torn, stained with blood and grease; gobs of meat — flesh as pink and fat-ribbed as a baby’s — crackled above the flames on a crude spit. And then they saw it, lying there at his feet: the head and shoulders, the very eyes and ears, the face with its squint of death. No baby. A pig. A very particular pig. Old Volckert Varken, Van Wart’s prize boar.

Harmanus was docile, a babe himself, as Agatha drew his wrists behind him and cinched the hemp cords she’d stuffed into her apron half an hour earlier amid the wreckage of the kitchen. Then she looped a halter around his neck and guided him home like a stray calf. It was nearly dawn when they reached the cabin. Agatha led her husband through the door while the hushed boys looked on, and laid him out on the pallet like a corpse. Then she bound his feet. “Katrinchee,” she choked, her voice wound tight as the knotted cords. “Go fetch Mohonk.”

Since she was at so great a remove from the centers of learning and quackery, and since the only physician in New Amsterdam at the time was a one-eyed Walloon named Huysterkarkus who lived on the isle of the Manhattoes, some six hours away by sloop, Agatha had no recourse to the accepted modes of diagnosis and treatment. Indeed, had the great physicians of Utrecht or Padua been present, they wouldn’t have been able to do much more than cut and pray or prescribe plucked axillary hairs in a glass of cinchona wine or the menses of the dormouse packed in cow dung. But the great physicians weren’t present — it would be some five or six years before Nipperhausen himself would draw his first breath, and that in the Palatine — and so the colonists had come to rely in extreme cases on the arts and exorcisms of the Kitchawanks, Canarsees and Wappingers. Hence, Mohonk.

Half an hour later, Katrinchee stepped through the doorway, shadowed by Sachoes’ youngest son. Mohonk was twenty-two, addicted to sangarees, genever and tobacco, tall as the roof and thin as a stork. Hunched there in the doorway, the raccoon coat bristling around him, he looked like a dandelion gone to seed. “Ah,” he said, and then ran through his entire Dutch vocabulary: “Alstublieft, dank u, niet te danken.” He shuffled forward, the heavy musk of raccoon around him, and hung over the patient.

Harmanus gazed up at him like a chastened child, utterly docile and contrite. His voice was barely audible. “Pie,” he moaned.

Mohonk looked at Agatha. “Too much eat,” she said, pantomiming the act. “Eten. Te veel.”

For a moment, the Kitchawank seemed puzzled. “Eten?” he repeated. But when Agatha snatched up a wooden spoon and began furiously jabbing it at her mouth, a look first of enlightenment, then of horror, invaded the Indian’s features. He jumped back from Harmanus as if he’d been stung, his long coppery hands fumbling vaguely with the belt of his coat.

Agatha let out a gasp, little Wouter began to snuffle, Jeremias studied his feet. The Indian was backing out the door when Katrinchee stepped forward and took hold of his arm. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s the matter?” She spoke in the language of his ancestors, the language he’d taught her over the backs of the cows. But he wouldn’t answer — he just licked at his lips and tightened the belt of his coat, though it was ninety degrees already and getting hotter. “My mother,” he said finally. “I’ve got to get my mother.”

The birds had settled in the trees and the mosquitoes risen from the swamps in all their powers and dominions when he returned with a withered old squaw in dirty leggings and apron. Dried up like an ear of seed corn, stooped and palsied, her face a sinkhole, she looked as if she’d been unearthed in a peat bog or hoisted down from a hook in the Catacombs. When she was six years old and smooth as a salamander, she’d stood waist-deep in the river with the rest of the tribe and watched as the Half Moon silently beat its way up against the current. The ship was a wonder, a vision, a token from the reclusive gods who’d buckled up the mountains to preserve their doings from the eyes of mortal men. Some said it was a gift from Manitou, a great white bird come to sanctify their lives; others, less sanguine, identified it as a devilfish, come to annihilate them. Since that time she’d seen her husband hoodwinked by Jan Pieterse and Oloffe Van Wart, her daughter cannibalized, her youngest son besotted by drink and the third part of her tribe wiped out by smallpox, green sickness and various genital disorders attributed by the Walloons to the Dutch, the Dutch to the English and the English to the French. Her name was Wahwahtaysee.

Mohonk said something in his language that Agatha didn’t catch, and his mother, Wahwahtaysee the Firefly, stepped cautiously into the room. She brought with her a string bag of devil-driving appurtenances (the canine teeth of opossum and she-wolf, the notochord of the sturgeon, various feathers, dried leaves and several discolored lumps of organic matter so esoteric that even she had forgotten their use or origin) and a rank wild odor that reminded Agatha of low tide at Twistzoekeren. Barely glancing at Harmanus, who had begun to thrash on his pallet and call out for pie once again, she shuffled to the table and unceremoniously dumped out the contents of the string bag. Then she called to her son in short angry syllables that shot from her lips like wasps swarming from the hive. Mohonk, in turn, said something to Katrinchee, who swung around on Jeremias and Wouter. “She wants the fire built up — a real blaze. Now run quick to the woodpile!”

Soon the room was infernally hot — hot as a Finnish sauna — and the old squaw, her sweat tinged with the rancid mink oil with which she smeared herself for health and vigor, began tossing her amulets into the flames one by one. All the while, she kept up a rasping singsong chant effective against pukwidjinnies, the ghost spirit Jeebi and devils of all stripes. As Katrinchee was later to learn from Mohonk, she was attempting to exorcise the noxious spirits that had gathered around the place and somehow infected Harmanus. For the cabin, built some six years before by Wolf Nysen, a Swede from Pavonia, had been erected at precisely the spot where the hunting party had found Minewa.

After an hour or so, the old woman thrust her hand into the fire — and held it there until Agatha thought she could smell the flesh roasting. Flames licked up through the spread fingers, played over the swollen veins that stood out on the back of her hand, yet Wahwahtaysee never flinched. The seconds bled by, Harmanus lay quiet, the children watched in horror. When finally the squaw withdrew her hand from the flames, it was unscathed. She held it up and examined it for a long while, as if she’d never before seen flesh and blood, sinew and bone; then she heaved herself up, shambled across the room and laid her palm flat against Harmanus’ brow. There was no reaction; he just lay there looking up at her without interest or animation, precisely as he had when she’d walked in the door an hour earlier. About the only difference was that he didn’t ask for pie.

But in the morning he seemed his old self. He was up at dawn, joking with the boys. Meintje van der Meulen, hearing of their plight, had sent over half a dozen little round loaves, and Harmanus selected the smallest of them, tucked it into his pouch, shouldered his axe and headed off across the fields. At noon, he returned and took a bit of pease pottage—“Have just a spoonful more, won’t you, Harmanus?” Agatha pleaded, but to no avail — and in the evening he ate a rockfish fillet, a bit of lettuce and two ears of Indian corn before drifting off into a contented sleep. Agatha felt as if an immeasurable burden had been lifted from her shoulders; she felt relieved and thankful. Yes, the garden was decimated and the smokehouse empty, and old Van Wart wanted seventy-five guilders in reparation for his boar, but at least she had her husband back, at least the family was whole once again. That night she said a prayer to Saint Nicholas.

The prayer fell on deaf ears. Or perhaps it was intercepted by Knecht Ruprecht, the saint’s malicious servant. Or perhaps, given the mysteries of the New World and its multifarious and competing divinities, the notion of prayer as Agatha had known it in Twistzoekeren didn’t hold much water. In any case, the tempo of disintegration began to accelerate: on the very day following Harmanus’ return to the realm of moderation, an accident befell Jeremias.

Picture the day: hot, cloudless, the air so thick you couldn’t fall down in a swoon if you wanted to. Jeremias was helping his father clear brush on a bristling hillock that abutted Van Wart Pond, a.k.a. Wapatoosik Water, working mechanically, oblivious alike to nip of mosquito and bite of deerfly. He must have humped past the duncolored pond twenty times — arms laden, eyes stung with sweat — before it occurred to him to shuck his clothes and refresh himself. Naked, he waded into the muck at the pond’s edge. He was feeling his way gingerly, the mud tugging at him as if it were alive, when suddenly the bottom of the pond fell away and something seized his right ankle with a grip as fiery and indomitable as Death. It wasn’t Death. It was a snapping turtle, Chelydra serpentina, big as a wagonwheel. By the time Harmanus got there with his axe, the water had gone red with blood and he had to wade in up to his knees to locate the creature’s evil, horny, antediluvian head and cleave it off at the carapace. The head stayed put. The rest of the thing, claws still churning, slid back into the murk.

At home, Harmanus pried open the locked jaws with a blacksmith’s tongs, and Agatha dressed the wound as best she could. Of course, it would be some two hundred years before the agents of sepsis were identified (invisible little animalcules indeed — any fool knew that night vapors turned a wound black and that either the presence or absence of comets made it draw), and so Jeremias’ ankle was bound in dirty rags and left to itself. Five days later the boy’s lower leg was the color of rotten summer squash and oozing a pale wheylike fluid from beneath the bandages. Fever set in. Mohonk prescribed beaver water fresh from the bladder, but each beaver he shot perversely loosed its bowels before it could be drawn ashore. The fever worsened. On the seventh day, Harmanus appeared in the doorway with the crosscut saw from the woodpile. Half a mile away, perched on the lip of the Blue Rock with Jan Pieterse and a cask of Barbados rum, Mohonk, Katrinchee and little Wouter tried to shut their ears to the maddening, startled, breathless screams that silenced the birds like the coming of night.

Miraculously, Jeremias survived. Harmanus didn’t. When bone separated from bone and his son’s pallet became a froth of flesh and churning fluids, he threw down the saw and bolted headlong for the woods, moaning like a gutshot horse. He ran for nearly two miles and then flung himself face down in the bushes, where he lay in shock till after sundown. The next day his skin began to itch, and then finally to erupt in pustules; by the end of the week he lay stretched out supine on the pallet next to his son’s, eyes swollen closed, his face like something out of a leper’s nightmare. Again, Mohonk was called in, this time to lay poultices of sassafras over the sores; when these proved ineffective, Agatha appealed to the patroon, begging him to send downriver for Huysterkarkus. Van Wart was sorry, but he couldn’t help her.

It wasn’t Katrinchee’s fault. All right, perhaps she was dreaming of Mohonk and the way he’d touched her the week before as they emerged from a frolic in the icy waters of Acquasinnick Creek, and perhaps she had sprained her wrist hoeing up a new cabbage patch, but it could have happened to anyone. The stewed haunch of venison, that is. She was moving toward the table with it, the place cramped anyway, tiny, unlivable, the size of the outhouse they’d had in Zeeland, when she banged up against the milkpail, skated across the floor in her wooden shoes and dumped the whole mess — hot enough to repel invaders at the castle wall — down her father’s shirt.

It was the end of Harmanus. He rose from the straw pallet in one astonishing leap that left him hanging in the air like a puppet for a full five seconds before he burst through the new shutters without so much as a whimper and ran off into the trees, flailing blindly from one trunk to another as the family gave chase. They found him amongst the jagged stones at the base of Van Wart Ridge, a sheer drop of some one hundred fifty feet. Jeremias had trouble with the chronology of events that year, but as near as he could recall, it was about a month later that lightning struck the house and burned it to the ground, taking his mother and Wouter with it. The next day, Katrinchee consigned herself to the fires of hell by running off to Indian Point with the heathen Mohonk.

When November came around and the rents fell due, Van Wart’s agent rode up from the lower manor house in Croton, a saddle pouch crammed with accounts ledgers flapping at his rear. He’d expected trouble at the Van Brunt farm — they were delinquent both with regard to firewood and produce delivery — but when he found himself at the end of the cart track that gave onto the property, he was stupefied. Where the cabin had once stood, there were only ashes. The grain had parched in the field, and then, beaten down by the first winter storm, it had frozen to the ground in scattered clumps. As for the livestock, it had disappeared altogether: the far-flung heaps of feathers gave testimony to the fate of the poultry, but the ox and milch cows were nowhere to be seen. Now the agent was a practical man, a scrupulous man, big of bottom and gut. Though he would have liked nothing better than to hie himself to Jan Pieterse’s trading post and sit before the fire with a mug of lager, he nonetheless chucked the cold flanks of his mount and trundled forward to pursue the matter further.

He circumnavigated the white oak that stood in the front yard, turned up a rusted plow by the half-finished fence, peered down the well. Just as he was about to give it up, he spotted a wisp of smoke rising from the bristle of woods before him. Pausing only to relight his pipe and shift his buttocks in the icy saddle, Van Wart’s agent traversed the clearing and plunged into the winter-stripped undergrowth on the far side. The first thing he saw was the ox, or rather what was left of it, hide frozen to bone, eyes, ears and lips picked away to nothing by woodland scavengers. Beyond it, a crude lean-to. “Hallo!” he called. There was no response.

Then he saw the boy. Swathed in rags and depilitated furs, crouched atop a cowhide in the shadow of the lean-to. Watching him.

The agent maneuvered the horse forward and cleared his throat. “Van Brunt?” he asked.

Jeremias nodded. The temperature was in the teens, the wind from the northwest, out of Canada. He shifted his good leg beneath him. The other one, the one that ended in a wooden peg like the pugnacious Pieter Stuyvesant’s, lay exposed, insensitive to the cold. He watched in silence as the fat man above him twisted in the saddle to reach behind him and produce a big leather-bound book. The fat man thumbed through this book, marked the place with the stem of his pipe and looked down at him. “For the use and increase of this land under the patroonship of Oloffe Stephanus Van Wart in the Van Wartwyck Patent, you now stand in arrears of two fathoms of firewood, two bushels of wheat, two pair of fowl, twenty-five pounds of butter and five hundred guilders annual rent. Plus a special assessment of seventy-five guilders in the case of one misappropriated boar.”

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.”

Ancestral Dirt

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.

He unfolded the paper with a snort of contempt. The school board was a joke, he’d always detested Muriel Mott and in fact had hoped she’d be torn to pieces by hyenas at some remote blistering outpost, Fagnoli didn’t affect him and he routinely shot any dog he encountered on the property. As for the Russians, he’d always sided with his old commander, General George S. Patton, on that issue. But down toward the bottom of the page, a lesser headline caught his eye:

LOCAL MAN INJURED IN DAWN ACCIDENT

Walter Truman Van Brunt, 22, of 1777 Baron de Hirsch Road, Kitchawank Colony, was injured early this morning when he lost con trol of his motorcycle on Van Wart Road, just east of Peterskill. Van Brunt suffered a fractured rib and facial confusions in adition the to loss of his right foot. Burleigh Strang, of Strang Ferilizer, came upon the scene of the accident moments after blood all over the place,” Strang said, “and it was so foggy I darn near run him over myself.” Strang is crdited with saving Van Brunt’s life, who doctors at Peterskill Community Hospital say would have bled to

twelve people present. Dr. Rausch, Superintendent of Schools, addressed the problem of individual lockers for members of the girls’ field hockey

quick-thinking and laying him in the bed of his pickup truck and also remembering to bring the detached foot along in the hope that doc tors could save it. Van Brunt is listed in guarded condition.

Van Brunt. Truman Van Brunt. It had been years since he’d heard that name. Years. What was it, fifteen? Twenty? He looked up from the paper, and there in the kitchen, over the onion, the ham and the pinch of tribal dirt, Truman’s face suddenly materialized, just as it had been in 1949, on the night of the riot. The reddish dark hair freighted with sweat and clinging to his brow like a crown of thorns, blood dried at the corner of his mouth, his pale washed-out eyes — eyes the color of river ice — numb with shock. I’ve come for my thirty pieces of silver, he said, and then Joanna was there too, at the door, her smile wilting like a cut flower. She was young, her legs smooth and firm, the kimono clasped across her breast; she didn’t need any makeup. I beg your pardon? she said, and Depeyster was already rising from his chair. Ask him, Truman said, stepping through the doorway to point a finger stained with blood, and then he was gone.

Depeyster shook his head as if to clear it, and then, lifting the sandwich to his lips, fastened on the article again. Truman Van Brunt, he thought. Bad luck and trouble, nothing but. And now here was his son — just a kid — mutilated for life.

He read the article through a second time, then set the sandwich down and peeled back the top slice of bread. Bits of onion clung to the mayonnaise, which had begun to take on a pinkish cast through contact with the tomato. He peppered the whole thing with a talismanic sprinkle of cellar dust, glancing up just as his daughter, Mardi, sauntered into the room.

If she’d seen anything, she gave no indication of it — just slouched toward the refrigerator in a dirty housecoat, last night’s makeup ringing her eyes like greasepaint. She looked haggard, looked like a Harpie, a dope user, a wino. He supposed she’d been out all night again. He had an urge to say something, something sharp and wounding, critical, bitter. But he softened, remembering the little girl, and then, as she bent to peer into the bright depths of the refrigerator, marveling at this creature, with her bare feet and ropes of dark frizzed hippie hair, this bewildering adult, this woman, only fruit of his loins.

“Morning,” he said finally, giving it an ironic lift.

“You seen the orange juice?”

He considered this a moment, taking a judicious bite of his sandwich and patting his lips with a paper napkin. For a moment he caught the shrewd eyes and faintly bemused smile of General Philip Van Wart (1749–1831), whose portrait, by Ezra Ames, had hung beside the kitchen window since his death. “What about in the freezer?”

Mardi swung back the plastic door to the freezer compartment without comment. As he watched her snatch the garish container from the shelf and fumble with the electric can opener, he was suddenly seized with the desire to shake her, shake her till she woke up, cut her hair, stuffed her miniskirts and fishnet stockings in the trash can where they belonged and rejoined the community of man. So far as he could see, all she ever did was chase after a bunch of characters who looked as if they’d crawled out of some cave in New Guinea, espouse sexual liberation and freedom for the oppressed peoples of Asia at the dinner table and sleep till noon. She’d graduated from Bard in June and the closest she’d come to a career move since was an offhand comment about some bar in Peterskill: in the fall, when so-and-so left for Maui, she might be able to get a gig tending bar two nights a week. Nothing definite yet, of course.

Shake her! a voice raged in his head. Shake the piss out of her!

“You seen mom?” she murmured, overfilling the English scratched-ware pitcher. A vaguely yellowish liquid seeped from pitcher to counter, from counter to floor: drip — drip — drip.

“What?” he asked, though he’d heard her perfectly clearly.

“Mom.”

“What about her?”

“You seen her?”

He’d seen her all right. At dawn. Backing the station wagon out of the driveway for the trip up to Jamestown and the Indian reservation. The wagon was so overloaded with old shirts, rags, staved-in hats and odd-sized, out-of-fashion shoes that it had listed dangerously, like a foreign-registered freighter coming into port with a load of ball bearings. Joanna, her hair in curlers, had given a stiff, humorless wave and indicated that she’d be home the following day, as usual. He waved back, numbly. Anyone who’d seen them — he in his grandfather’s silk Jakarta dressing gown, standing there in the birdy hush of dawn; she, grim, makeupless and bland, wheeling out of the driveway atop her mound of trash — might have thought he’d just fired the maid or struck up a nefarious bargain with the Salvation Army. He glanced up at his daughter. “No,” he said. “I haven’t seen her.”

This information didn’t seem to have much effect on Mardi one way or the other. She drained a glass of juice, poured another and lurched toward the table, where she collapsed in the chair, glass clutched desperately in her hand, and made a peremptive snatch for the paper. “Christ,” she muttered, “I feel like shit.” It was the most communicative she’d been in recent memory.

He was about to inquire as to the cause and root of this feeling, as a way perhaps of drawing closer to her, commiserating with her, bridging the gap between the generations, when she lit a cigarette, and exhaling in his face, said: “Anything in this rag today?”

Suddenly he felt humbled, weary, a lip-speller in the presence of the Great Enigma. In his most inoffensive tone, generally reserved for fellow members of the Van Wartville Historical Society, he said, “As a matter of fact, there is. Down at the bottom there. A thing about the son of a man I used to know — a real hard-luck case — who had an accident last night. Funny, because—”

“Oh, who cares?” she snarled, pushing herself up from the table and crumpling the paper in her free hand. “Who gives a good goddamn about you and your old cronies — they’re just a bunch of Birchers and rednecks anyway.”

Now she’d done it. That urge to shake her, to slap some awareness into those smug lifeless eyes, seized him like a set of claws. He jumped to his feet. “Don’t you talk to me like that, you, you. … Look at yourself,” he sputtered, flying into a denunciatory harangue that savaged every aspect of her hippie credo, behavior and habits, from her grinding moronic music to her unwashed, unshorn tribal cohorts, and ending with a philippic on one of those cohorts in particular, the Crane kid. “Skinniest, dirtiest, unhealthiest-looking—”

“You’re just mad because his grandfather won’t sell you the precious property, aren’t you?” She sliced the air with the edge of her hand, as absolute and immovable as a hanging judge. “Is that all you can think about, huh? History and money?”

“Hippie,” he hissed. “Tramp.”

“Snob. Dirt-eater.”

“Christ!” he roared. “I was only trying to make conversation, be nice for a change. That’s all. I used to know his father, this Van Brunt kid, that’s all. We’re two human beings, right? Father and daughter. Communicating, right? Well, I used to know this man, that’s all. And I thought it was ironic, interesting in a kind of morbid way, when I saw that his son had lost his foot.”

Mardi’s expression had changed. “What’d you say his name was?” she asked, bending for the paper.

“Van Brunt. Truman. Or, no, the son’s named something else. William or Walter or something.”

She was on her knees, smoothing out the newspaper on the threehundred-year-old planks of the kitchen floor. “Walter,” she murmured, reading aloud. “Walter Truman Van Brunt.”

“You know him?”

The look she gave him was like a sword thrust. “Not in the biblical sense,” she said. “Not yet, anyway.”

Prosthesis

Walter was lucky.

Two weeks after his collision with history, he left Peterskill Community Hospital with a new plastic flesh-colored foot, courtesy of Drs. Ziss and Huysterkark, the Insurance Underwriters of Pensacola Corporation, and Hesh and Lola. Dr. Ziss, after three vigorous sets of early-morning tennis, had been called in to the emergency room to ensure safe closure of the wound. He debrided the damaged tissue, recessed tibia and fibula, brought down two flaps of skin and muscle for cushioning and sutured them together over the bone in a fishmouth closure. Dr. Huysterkark had appeared the following afternoon to provide hope and demonstrate the prosthesis. The Insurance Underwriters, in collaboration with Hesh and Lola, footed the bill.

Walter had been dozing when Huysterkark turned up; he woke to find the doctor perched on the edge of the visitor’s chair, the plastic foot in his lap. Walter’s eyes went instantly from the doctor’s patchy hair and fixed smile to the prosthesis, with its bulge of ankle and indentations meant to delineate toes. It looked like something wrenched from a department store mannequin.

“You’re awake,” the doctor said, barely moving his thin, salmon lips. He wore a scrub coat and two-tone shoes, and he had the air of a man who could sell ice to the Eskimos. “Sleep well?”

Walter nodded automatically. In fact, he’d slept like a prisoner awaiting execution, beset by irrational fears and the demons of the unconscious.

“I’ve brought along the prosthesis,” Huysterkark said, “and some”—he’d begun to fumble through a manila folder—“supporting materials.”

Though Walter had graduated from the state university, where he’d studied the liberal arts (a patchy overview of world literature, a seminar on circumcision rites in the Trobriand Islands and courses in the history of agriculture, medieval lute-making and contemporary philosophy with emphasis on death obsession and existentialist thought, to mention a few of the highlights), he was unfamiliar with the term. “Prosthesis?” he echoed, his eyes fixed on the plastic foot. All at once he was seized with panic. This obscene lump of plastic, this doll’s foot, was going to be grafted in some unspeakable way to his own torn and wanting self. He thought of Ahab, Long John Silver, old Joe Crudwell up the block who’d lost both legs and his right forearm to a German grenade in Belleau Wood.

Intent on the folder, Huysterkark barely glanced up. “A replacement part. From the Greek: a putting to, an addition.”

“Is that it?”

Huysterkark ignored the question, but he lifted his eyes to pin Walter with a look of shrewd appraisal. “Think of it this way,” he said after a moment. “What if your body was a machine, Walter — an automobile, let’s say? What if you were a Cutlass convertible? Hm? Shiny, sleek, right off the showroom floor?” Walter didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to talk about cars — he wanted to talk about feet, about mobility, he wanted to talk about the rest of his life. “Chances are you’d run trouble-free for years, Walter, but as you accumulate mileage something’s bound to give out sooner or later, you follow me?” Huysterkark leaned forward. “In your case, let’s say one of the wheels goes bad.”

Walter tried to hold the doctor’s gaze, but he couldn’t. He studied his hands, the sleeves of his hospital gown, the crease of the sheets.

“Well, what do you do? Hm?” Huysterkark paused. The foot sat like a stone in his lap. “You go down to the parts store and get yourself a new one, that’s what.” The doctor looked pleased with himself, looked as if he’d just announced a single cure for cancer, heart disease and yaws. “We’ve got it all here, Walter,” he said with a sweep of his arm that took in the whole hospital. “Eyes, legs, kneecaps, plastic heart valves and steel vertebrae. We’ve got mechanical hands that can peel a grape, Walter. In a few years we’ll have artificial kidneys, livers, hearts. Maybe someday we’ll even be able to replace faulty circuits in the brain.”

There was no breath in Walter’s body. He could barely form the question and he felt almost reprehensible for asking it, but really, he had to know. “Can I–I mean, will I — will I ever be able to walk again?”

The doctor found this hilarious. His head shot back and his smile widened to expose a triad of stained teeth and gums the color of mayonnaise. “Walk?” he hooted. “Before you know it you’ll be dancing.” Then he dropped his head, crossed his legs and began reshuffling the papers; in the process, the foot slid from the lap, fell to the floor with a dull thump and skittered under the chair. He didn’t seem to notice. “Ah, here,” he said, holding up a photograph of a man in gym shorts and sneakers jogging along a macadam road. The man’s leg was abbreviated some six inches below the knee, and a steel post descended from that point to a plastic, flesh-colored ankle. The whole business was held in place by means of straps attached to the upper thigh. “The la Drang Valley,” the doctor said. “An unfortunate encounter with one of the enemy’s, uh, antipersonnel mines, I believe they call them. I fitted him myself.”

Walter didn’t know whether to feel relieved or sickened. His first impulse was to leap from the bed, hop howling down the corridor and throw himself from the window. His second impulse was to lean forward and slap the therapeutic smile from the doctor’s face. His third impulse, the one he ultimately obeyed, was to sit rigid and clench his teeth like a catatonic.

The doctor was oblivious. He was busy fishing under the chair for Walter’s foot, all the while lecturing him on the use and care of the thing as if it were a hothouse plant instead of an inert lump of plastic manufactured in Weehawken, New Jersey. “Of course,” he said, as he straightened up, the recovered foot in hand, “it’s no use fooling yourself. You are now deficient”—he paused—“and will experience some loss of mobility. Still, as things stand, I believe you’ll find yourself capable of just about the full range of your previous activities.”

Walter wasn’t listening. He was staring at the foot in Huysterkark’s lap (the doctor unconsciously juggled it from one hand to the other as he spoke), a sense of hopelessness and irremediable doom working its way through his veins like some sort of infection, feeling judged and condemned and at the same time revolting against the unfairness of it all. Old Joe had the Huns to excoriate, Ahab the whale. Walter had a shadow, and the image of his father.

Why me? he kept thinking as the doctor played with the alien foot as if it were a curio or paperweight. Why me?

“No, no, Walter,” Huysterkark was saying, “in point of fact you’re actually very lucky. Very lucky indeed. Had you hit that sign a bit higher and lost the leg above the knee, well—” His hands finished the thought.

The sun was sitting in the treetops beyond the window. Out there, along the highway, people were going off to play tennis, shop for groceries, swim, golf, rig up sailboats at the Peterskill Marina or stop in for a cold one at the Elbow. Walter lay amidst the stiff white sheets, frozen with self-pity, beyond repair. But lucky. Oh, yes indeed. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

The night before, after Hesh and Lola and Jessica had left and the anesthesia had begun to let go of him, Walter had a dream. The pale glow of the corridor faded into mist, the whisper of the intercom was translated to the lap of dirty water at the pilings, the tide running out, the smell as keen as everything that has ever lived and died upon the earth. He was crabbing. With his father. With Truman. Up at dawn, traps flung in the trunk of the Studebaker, bait wrapped in newspaper, walking out along the Acquasinnick trestle where the river opens up at high tide to flow all the way up Van Wart Creek. Stay off the tracks, his father warned him, and Walter stared into the mist, half-expecting the 6:20 from Albany to break free of the morning and tear him in two. But that would have been too easy. This dream was subtler, the payoff more sinister.

The bait? What was it? Fish gone high, covered with flies. Bones. Marrow. Chicken backs so rotten your hand would stink for a week if you touched them. When people drowned in the river, when they lay pale and bloated in the muck, pinned beneath a downed tree or the skeleton of a car, when they began to go soft, the crabs got them. His father never talked of it. But the neighborhood kids did, the river rats did, the bums who lived in the waterfront shanties you could see from here — they did. Anyway, maybe the 6:20 went by with an apocalyptic roar that felt as if it would rip the trestle from the pilings, maybe it didn’t. But Walter pulled at the line and the net was stuck, wouldn’t budge. His father, smelling of alcohol, a cigarette clenched between his lips and eyes squinted against the smoke, set down his beer to help him. Work it easy, he grunted. Don’t want to snap the line. Then it was free, rising toward him, as heavy as if it were filled with bricks.

There were no bricks. There was no trap. Just Walter’s mother, she of the soulful eyes, her hair in a cloud and the crabs all over her, nothing from the waist down. Nothing but bone.

Next thing he knew the nurse was there. A big woman, middleaged, with something extra stuffed into her uniform about the hips and thighs, she took the room by storm, hitting the overhead light, the blinds, flourishing bedpan and syringe, plying the rectal thermometer like a saber. Sunlight screamed through the windows, she was whistling some martial tune — was that Sousa or the “Marine Corps Hymn”?—and he felt a brief fluctuation in the calculus of pain as the IV was jerked from his arm and clumsily reinserted.

The dream — horrible enough — was letting go its grip and Walter was waking to an insupportable reality. Everything came on him in a rush, the voice of waking rationality hissing in his ear like a bulletin from the front: You’re in the hospital, your ribs on fire, your arm a scab. And what about this: you’ve got no foot. None. Nothing at all. You’re a cripple. A freak. A freak for life.

Next came breakfast. Reconstituted orange juice, powdered eggs, simulated bacon. Brought by a nurse so incommunicative she might have taken a vow of silence, and a lush sixteen-year-old candy striper who discovered a bird on the far windowsill and cooed to it the entire time she was in the room: “Oooh, the wittle widgeon, oooh the wittle wittle.” Walter wasn’t hungry.

When they left, he sat up and tentatively examined his leg. There was a dull throb in his kneecap, a slice of pain where he’d taken twenty stitches in his calf. His fingers roamed lower, creeping down his shin, reluctant, skirting disclosure. He felt bandages — gauze and tape — and then, touching it as he might have touched a hot iron, the flat hewn stump of his leg. He threw back the sheets. There it was. His leg. Or no, this was somebody else’s leg, truncated and ravaged, obscene, alien, inert as a log. He thought of bread, French bread, hacked across the beam. He thought of liverwurst.

Then he was asleep again. Out cold. Tugged down by the morphia and Demerol, he substituted one nightmare for another. Sleeping, he relived the accident. There was the shadow, the marker, the feeling of helplessness and predestination. And then he was an old man, stooped, white-haired, beslobbered with his own spittle, selling pencils on a street corner in the Bowery or stretched out on a pallet in some charity ward with a hundred other cripples and half-wits. Sleeping, he saw his grandfather’s corpse and the cloud of killifish closing over it. Sleeping, he saw his father.

The old man was sitting in a chair beside the bed. His hair was cut, parted and freshly combed; he was wearing a mohair suit and silk tie, and his eyes were serene. But here was the odd part: he wasn’t wearing any shoes. Or socks. And as Walter turned his head to gaze at him, Truman made a point of lifting first one foot, then the other, and depositing them on the edge of the bed as if they were on exhibit. Then he wriggled his bare toes and held Walter’s gaze.

“But, but I thought—” Walter sputtered.

“Thought what?” the old man said. “That I was a cripple too?” He flexed his toes, then dropped both feet to the floor. “But I am, Walter, I am,” he said, shutting his eyes and rubbing the bridge of his nose, “—you just can’t see it, that’s all.”

“On the boat, the ship—” Walter began.

Truman waved his hand as if he were deflecting smoke. “An illusion,” he said. “A warning.” He leaned forward, elbows pressed to his knees. “Watch your step, Walter.”

It was then that Walter was seized with inspiration, then that he understood what it was he’d meant to ask on the ghost ship. All his life he’d bought the story handed down by Hesh and Lola as if it were chiseled in granite on Anthony’s Nose — his father was a traitor, a conscienceless fiend who’d betrayed them, sold them out, and his mother had died because of it. And yet no one, not even Hesh, knew for sure. “Nineteen forty-nine,” Walter said. “The riots. Tell me, what did you do to her? What was it?”

Truman said nothing.

“It killed her, didn’t it?”

His father’s eyes had hardened, the look of the mad prophet come to dwell there once again. After a moment, he said: “Yeah, I guess it did.”

“Hesh says you’re no better than a murderer—”

“Hesh.” Truman spat out the name as if he’d bitten into something rotten. “You want to know?” He paused. “Go back and take a look at that sign.”

“Sign? What sign?”

The old man was standing now, an odd composite of what he’d been eleven years earlier and the man who’d made his way in the world since. He almost looked dapper. “You tell me,” he said, glancing down at Walter’s leg, and then he swung around and strode out the door.

It was the ghost ship all over again. “Come back here!” Walter shouted. “Come back, you son of a bitch!”

“I’m right here, Walter.”

He opened his eyes. At first he didn’t know where he was, couldn’t focus on the pale white field hanging over him, but then the smell of her — creme rinse, My Sin, tutti-frutti gum — brought him back. “Jessica,” he murmured.

“You were dreaming, that’s all.” Her hand was on his brow, her breast in his face. He reached up, still groggy, and as if it were the most natural thing in the world under the circumstances, began to fumble with the buttons of her blouse. She didn’t seem to mind. He fumbled some more, his brain numb, fingers like breadsticks, and then he had her breasts in his hands, weighing and kneading them, pulling them to his lips as if he were an infant in the cradle. But no, wait: he was an infant, his mother leaning over him with her depthless eyes, the world as pure and uncomplicated as a dapple of mid-morning sun on the nursery walls. …

Jessica pressed her lips to his forehead, whispered his name. In that instant, the whole great busy chattering institution fell silent — the TVs were dead, the intercom mute, the hallways under a spell. Every doctor, every nurse, orderly, newborn babe and jittery blood donor held his breath. No hypodermic slid into arm or buttock, no dog-bitten child cried out. There were no footsteps in the corridor, no birds in the trees, no recalcitrant engines in the parking lot. Only silence. And at the very hub and center of that silence that was like an ocean deep lay Walter, with his abridged leg, and Jessica. In his fear, his solitude, his abandonment to grief and despair, he clutched gratefully at her, fastening himself to her like something half-drowned clinging to a rock in the midst of a torrent. Had he been crazy that night? To be hard, soulless and free was one thing, to be cut adrift from comfort and the community of man was another. He was a cripple, a pariah. And here she was, Joan of Arc, Calypso and Florence Nightingale all rolled into one. What more could he want?

“Jessica,” he whispered as she swayed above him, the gently undulating blond arras of her hair shielding him from the oppressive walls, the intolerable flowers, the bedside table with its tattered copies of Argosy and Reader’s Digest, the sickness and the hurt, “Jessica, I think … I mean … do you think we ought to get married?”

The silence held. A fairy silence, oneiric, magical, the moment suspended and refined out of all proportion to the myriad moments that comprise a life. It held until she broke it — with a murmur of assent.

Lucky, lucky, lucky.

Neeltje Waved Back

Jeremias was not so lucky. He withdrew into himself, gathered the meager skins about him and sat rigid as an ice sculpture while Van Wart’s agent fidgeted in the saddle, blustered, cajoled and threatened. The agent tried to reason with him, tried to beat him down and strike fear into his heart — he even tried appealing to the boy’s better nature, singing “Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me” in a high reedy tenor that belied his bulk. The wind howled down out of the mountains. Jeremias wouldn’t even look at him. Finally the agent swung his horse around and thundered off to fetch the law.

By the time he returned with the schout, the weather had worsened. For one thing, it was snowing — big feathery flakes torn from the breast of the sky and mounting against the downed trees and bracken like the sign of some cumulate cosmic wrath; for another, the temperature had dropped to six degrees above zero. The schout, whose duty it was to enforce the law for the patroon, of the patroon and by the patroon, was a lean ferrety fellow by the name of Joost Cats. He came armed with an eviction notice bearing the mark of his employer (a V wedded to a W, VW, the logo utilized by Oloffe Stephanus to authenticate his edicts, identify his goods and chattels and decorate his undergarments), and the rapier, baldric and silver-plumed hat that were the perquisites of his office.

“Young layabout,” the agent was saying as the snow played around his jowls. “Slaughtered the livestock and let the place fall to wrack and ruin. I’d as soon see him hung as evicted.”

Joost didn’t answer, his black staring eyes masked by the brim of his hat, the sharp little beard clinging like a stain to his chin. Erratic posture bowed his back like a sickle and he sat so low in the saddle you wouldn’t know he was coming but for the exuberant plume jogging between his horse’s ears. He didn’t answer because he was in a vicious mood. Here he was out in the hind end of nowhere, the sky like a cracked pitcher and snow powdering his black cloak till he looked like an olykoek dusted with sugar, and for what? To listen to the yabbering of the fat, red-faced, pompous ass beside him and bully a one-legged boy out into the maw of the great barren uncivilized world. He cleared his throat noisily and spat in disgust.

By the time they reached the naked white oak that in better times had shaded the Van Brunt household, the snow had begun to taper off and the temperature had dropped another five degrees. To their left, against the fastness of the trees, was the half-finished fieldstone wall begun by Wolf Nysen before he went mad, butchered his family and took to the hills. He’d cut their throats as they lay sleeping — sister, wife and two teenaged daughters — and left them to rot. When Joost’s predecessor, old Hoogstraten, had finally found them, they were so far gone they might have been molded of porridge. People said that the Swede was still up there somewhere, living like a red Indian, swathing himself in skins and killing rabbits with his bare hands. Joost glanced uneasily about him. Dead ahead lay the charred bones of the cabin poking through the skin of snow like a compound fracture.

“Here,” puffed the agent, “see what they’ve done to the place.”

Joost gave it a minute, his horse picking through the drifted snow like an old man stepping into a bath, before he responded. “Looks like the patroon ought to give up on this place. It’s nothing but bad luck.”

The agent ignored him. “Over there,” he said, pointing a thick finger in the direction of Jeremias’ lean-to. Joost dropped the reins and thrust his numbed hands into his pockets while his horse — a one-eyed nag with an overactive appetite and dropsical mien — bobbed stupidly after the agent’s mare.

“Van Brunt!” the agent called as they hovered over the empty lean-to and the snowy hummock that represented the corpse of the unhappy ox. “Show yourself this instant!”

There was no response.

The agent was blowing up a regular hurricane of exasperated breath, summoning up terms like brass, effrontery and cheek, when Joost pointed to a half-filled track in the snow at the rear of the lean-to. Beyond it was a similar print, and beyond that another. Upon closer examination, and after a full sixty seconds given over to reasoning in the deductive mode, the agent determined that these were young Van Brunt’s footprints; viz., the mark of one shoe — the left — roughly paralleled by a shallow trough connecting a pair of pegholes.

Though the snow had stopped, the wind had begun to kick up and the sky was darkening toward evening. Joost was of the opinion that they should leave well enough alone — the boy was gone, that’s all that mattered. But the agent, scrupulous as he was, felt obliged to make sure. After an exchange of opinion on the subject — Where do you expect him to go, Joost asked at one point, back to Zeeland? — the two set off at a slow plod to track the boy down and evict him properly.

The trail wound like a tattered ribbon through the forest and into a dense copse where grouse chuckled and turkeys roosted in the lower branches of the trees. Beyond the copse were hills uncountable, balled up like hedgehogs and bristling with timber, home to heath hen, pigeon, deer, pheasant, moose, and the lynx, catamount and wolf that preyed on them. And beyond the hills were the violent shadowy mountains — Dunderberg, Suycker Broodt, Klinkersberg — that swallowed up the river and gave rise to the Kaaterskill range and the unnamed territories that stretched out behind it all the way to the sun’s furthest decline. Looking into all that wild territory with its unknown terrors, with darkness coming on and his toes gone numb in his boots, Joost spurred his horse forward and prayed the trail would take them toward the glowing lights and commodious hearth of the upper house.

It didn’t. Jeremias had headed south and east, skirting the big house and making instead toward the van der Meulen farm. Joost and the agent saw where he’d stopped to make water in the snow or nibble a few last withered berries and chew a bit of bark; they saw how the pegleg had grown heavier and dug deeper into the snow. And finally, to their everlasting relief, they saw that the tracks would indeed lead them across the Meulen Brook, past the great plank doors of Staats van der Meulen’s barn and into the warm, taper-lit, bread-smelling kitchen of Vrouw van der Meulen herself, a woman renowned all the way to Croton for her honingkoek and appelbeignet.

If they expected hospitality, if they sought the warmth of Meintje van der Meulen’s kitchen and smile too, they were disappointed. She greeted them at the door with an expression every bit as cold as the night at their backs. “Goedenavend,” said the agent, doffing his hat with a flourish.

Vrouw van der Meulen’s eyes shot suspiciously from agent to schout and then back again. Behind them they could hear the muffled lowing of the van der Meulen cattle as Staats forked down hay from the barn’s rafters. Meintje didn’t return the agent’s greeting, but merely stepped back and pulled the door open for them to enter.

Inside, it was heaven. The front room, which ran the length of the house and occupied the lion’s share of its space — there were smaller sleeping quarters in back — was warm as a featherbed with a good wife and two dogs in it. Flickering coals glowed in the huge hearth and the big blackened pot that hung over them gave off the most intoxicating aroma of meat broth. There were loaves in the beehive oven — Joost could smell them, ambrosia and manna — and a little spider pot of corn mush crouched over a handful of coals on the hearthstone. The kas doors were open and the table half set. In the far corner, an old water dog wearily lifted its head and two white-haired van der Meulen children gazed up at them with the look of cherubim.

“Well,” Meintje said finally, closing the door behind them, “whatever could bring the honorable commis and his colleague the schout to our lonely farm on such a night?”

Joost’s back was not nearly so bowed as when he was mounted, yet he still slumped badly. Working the plumed hat in his hands, he slouched against the doorframe and attempted an explanation. “Van Brunt,” he began, but was cut off by the officious agent, who laid out the patroon’s case against Harmanus’ sad and solitary heir as if he were pleading before a court of the accused’s peers (though of course there was neither need nor precedent for such a court, as the patroon was judge, jury and prosecutor on his own lands, and paid the schout and hangman to take care of the rest). He ended, having in the process managed to edge closer to the hearth and its paradisaic aromas, by attesting that they’d followed the malefactor’s trail right on up to the goude vrouw’s doorstep.

Meintje waited until he’d finished and then she plucked a wooden spoon from the cupboard and began to curse him — curse them—Joost, to his horror, equally indicted in her wrath. They were the criminals — no, worse, they were fiends, cloven-hoofed duyvils, followers of Beelzebub and his unholy tribe. How could they even think to hound the poor orphaned child from the only home he knew? How could they? Were they Christians? Were they men? Human beings even? For a full five minutes Meintje excoriated them, all the while brandishing the wooden spoon like the sword of righteousness. With each emphatic gesture she backed the agent up till he’d given over his hard-won place at the hearth and found himself pressing his buttocks to the cold unyielding planks of the door as if he would melt into them, while Joost slumped so low in shame and mortification he could have unbuckled his boots with his teeth.

It was at this juncture that Staats, bringing with him a stale whiff of the barn and a jacket of cold, slammed through the door. In doing so, he relocated the agent’s center of gravity and sent him reeling halfway across the room, where he fetched up against the birch rocker with a look of wounded dignity. Staats was a powerful, big-nosed, raw-skinned man with eyes so intense they were like twin slaps in the face. He seemed utterly bewildered by the presence of commis and schout, though he must have seen their blanketed horses tied outside the door. “Holy Moeder in heaven,” he rumbled. “What’s this?”

“Staats,” Meintje cried, rushing to him and repeating his name twice more in a plaintive wail, “they’ve come for the boy.”

“Boy?” he repeated, as if the word were new to him. His eyes roved about the room, searching for a clue, and he lifted his mink cap to scratch a head as hard and hairless as a chestnut.

“Little Jeremias,” his wife whispered in clarification.

Joost watched them uneasily. As he would later learn, the boy had turned up some two hours earlier begging for shelter and a bit to eat. Vrouw van der Meulen had at first shut the door on him in horror — a haunt had appeared on her stoep, withered and mutilated, one of the undead — but when she took a second look, she saw only the half-starved child, motherless in the snow. She’d held him to her, bundled him up in front of the fire, fed him soup, hot chocolate and honey cake while her own curious brood pressed around. Why hadn’t he come sooner? she asked. Where had he been all this time? Didn’t he know that she and Staats and the Oothouses too thought he’d perished in the blaze that took his poor moeder?

No, he’d said, shaking his head, no, and she’d wondered whether he was responding to her question or denying some horror she couldn’t know. The fire, he murmured, and his voice was slow and halting, the voice of the hermit, the pariah, the anchorite who spoke only to trees and birds. They’d all been out in the fields that fateful afternoon, hoeing up weeds and clattering pans to keep the maes dieven out of the corn and wheat — all except for Katrinchee, that is, who was off somewhere with Mohonk the Kitchawank. Jeremias had regained his strength by then and was able to get around pretty well on the strut he’d carved from a piece of cherrywood, but his solicitous mother had sent him off to drive away the birds while she and Wouter did the heavier work. When the storm broke, he lost sight of them; next thing he knew the cabin was in flames. When Staats and the Oothouse man had come around he’d hidden in the woods with his cattle, hidden in shock and fear and shame. But now he could hide no longer.

“Jeremias?” Staats repeated, comprehension trickling into his features like water dripping through a hole in the roof. “I’ll kill them first,” he said, glaring at Joost and the agent.

It was then that the subject of the controversy appeared in the doorway to the back room — a thin boy, but big-boned and tall for his age. He was wearing a woolen shirt, knee breeches and a single heavy stocking borrowed from the van der Meulen’s eldest boy, and he stood wide-legged, cocked defiantly on his wooden peg. The look on his face was something Joost would never forget. It was a look of hatred, a look of defiance, of contempt for authority, for rapiers, baldrics, silver plumes and accounts ledgers alike, a look that would have challenged the patroon himself had he been there to confront it. His voice was low, soft, the voice of a child, but the scorn in it was unmistakable. “You looking for me?” he asked.

The following summer, a dramatic and sweeping change was to come to New Amsterdam and the sleepy settlements along the North River. It was a hot still morning in late August when Klaes Swits, a Breucklyn clam-digger, looked up from his rake to see five British men-o’-war bobbing at anchor in the very neck of the Narrows. In his haste to apprise the governor and his council of this extraordinary discovery, he unhappily lost his anchor, splintered both his oars and his rake in the bargain, and was finally reduced to paddling Indian-style all the way from the South Breucklyn Bight to the Battery. As it turned out, the clamdigger’s mission was superfluous — as all of New Amsterdam would know three hours later, the ships were commanded by Colonel Richard Nicolls of the Royal Navy, who was demanding immediate capitulation and surrender of the entire province to Charles II, king of England. Charles laid claim to all territory on the coast of North America from Cape Fear River in the south to the Bay of Fundy in the north, on the basis of English exploration that antedated the Dutch cozening of the Manhattoes Indians. John Smith had been there before any cheese-eating Dutchmen, Charles insisted, and Sebastian Cabot too. And as if that weren’t enough, the very isle of the Manhattoes and the river that washed it had been discovered by an Englishman, even if he was sailing for the Nederlanders.

Pieter Stuyvesant didn’t like it. He was a rough, tough, bellicose, fighting Frisian who’d lost a leg to the Portuguese and would yield to no man. He hurled defiance in Nicolls’ teeth: come what may, he would fight the Englishers to the death. Unfortunately, the good burghers of New Amsterdam, who resented the West India Company’s monopoly, eschewed taxation without representation and hated the despotic governor as if he were the devil himself, refused to back him. And so, on September 9, 1664, after fifty-five years of Dutch rule, New Amsterdam became New York — after Charles’ brother, James the duke of York — and the great, green, roiled, broad-backed North River became the Hudson, after the true-blue Englishman who’d discovered it.

Yes, the changes were dramatic — suddenly there was new currency to handle, a new language to learn, suddenly there were Connecticut Yankees swarming into the Valley like gnats — but none of these changes had much effect on life in Van Wartwyck. If Oloffe Stephanus throve under Dutch rule, he throve and multiplied and throve again under the English. The new rulers, hardly known as a nation for an affinity to radical change, preserved the status quo — i.e., the landlord on top and the yeoman on bottom. Oloffe’s wealth and political power grew. His eldest son and heir, Stephanus, who was twenty-one when Stuyvesant capitulated, would see the original 10,000-acre Dutch patent expanded more than eightfold when William and Mary chartered Van Wart Manor in the declining years of the century.

As for Joost, he performed his duties as before, answerable to no one but old Van Wart, who continued to exercise feudal dominion over his lands. The schout worked his little farm on the Croton River that lay within hollering distance of the lower manor house, harvested in season, went a-hunting, a-fishing and a-crabbing according to the calendar, raised his three daughters to be mindful of the laws of God and man, and satisfied his employer with the promptness and efficiency with which he settled disputes among the tenants, tracked down malefactors and collected past-due rents. For the most part, things were pretty quiet in the period following the English takeover. A few Yankees threw up shacks in the vicinity of Jan Pieterse’s place, where they would later draw up a charter for the town of Peterskill, and Reinier Oothouse got drunk and burned down his own barn, but aside from that nothing out of the ordinary cropped up. Lulled by the tranquillity of those years, Joost had nearly forgotten Jeremias, when one afternoon, in the company of his eldest, little Neeltje, he ran into him at the Blue Rock.

It was late May, the planting was done and the mornings were as gentle as a kiss on the cheek. Joost had left the lower manor house at dawn with a bundle of things for the patroon’s wife, Gertruyd, who was in the midst of a religious retreat at the upper manor house, and with instructions from the patroon to arbitrate a dispute between Hackaliah Crane, the new Yankee tenant, and Reinier Oothouse. Neeltje, who’d turned fifteen the month before, had begged to come along, ostensibly to keep her father company, but in truth to buy a bit of ribbon or hard candy at Pieterse’s with the stivers she’d earned dipping sacramental candles for Vrouw Van Wart.

The weather was clear and fair, and the sun had dried up the bogs and quagmires that had made the road practically impassable a month before. They covered the eight miles from Croton to the upper manor house in good time, and were able to meet with both Crane and Oothouse before noon. (Reinier, who was drunk as usual, claimed that the long-nosed Yankee had called him an “old dog” after he, Reinier, had boxed the ears of the Yankee’s youngest boy, one Cadwallader, for chasing a brood of setting hens off their nests. Reinier had responded to the insult by “twisting the Yankee’s great flapping ears and giving him a flathand across the bridge of his broomstick nose,” immediately following which the Yankee had “treacherously thrown [him] to the ground and kicked [him] in a tender spot.” Crane, a learned scion of the Connecticut Cranes, a family destined to furnish the Colonies with a limitless supply of itinerant pedants, potmakers and nostrum peddlers, denied everything. The schout, attesting Reinier’s drunkenness and perhaps a bit cowed by the Yankee’s learning, found for Crane and fined Oothouse five guilders, payable in fresh eggs, to be delivered to Vrouw Van Wart at the upper manor house — raw eggs being the only foodstuff she would consume while suffering the throes of religious abnegation — at the rate of four per day.) Afterward, father and daughter dined on eels, shad roe and perch with pickled cabbage in the great cool thick-walled kitchen at the upper manor house. Then they stopped at Jan Pieterse’s.

The trading post comprised a rude corral, a haphazardly fenced chicken coop and a long dark hut illuminated only by a pair of slit windows at front and back and the light from the door, which stood open from May to September. Jan Pieterse, who was said to be among the richest men in the valley, slept on a corn husk mattress in back. His principal trade had originally been with the Indians—wam-pumpeak, knives, axes and iron cookpots in exchange for furs — but as beaver and Indian alike had been on the decline and Boers and Yankees on the upswing, he’d begun to stock bits of imported cloth, farm implements, fish hooks, pipes of wine and kegs of soused pigs’ feet to appeal to his changing clientele. But there was more to the place than trade alone — along with the mill Van Wart had erected up the creek, the trading post was a great gathering spot for the community. There you might see half a dozen skulking Kitchawanks or Nochpeems (it was strictly verboden to sell rum to the Indians, but they wanted nothing more, and with a nod to necessity and a wink for the law, Jan Pieterse provided it), or Dominie Van Schaik taking up a collection for the construction of a yellow-brick church on the Verplanck road. Then too there might be any number of farmers in homespun paltroks, steeple hats and wooden shoes accompanied by their vrouwen and grimly linking arms with their ripe young daughters who made the fashions of the previous century seem au courant, and, of course, the horny-handed, red-faced, grinning young country louts who stood off in a corner thumping one another in the chest.

On this particular day, as Joost helped his daughter down from her mount, he saw only Jan Pieterse and Heyndrick Ten Haer sharing a pipe on the porch while a Wappinger brave lay spread-eagled in a patch of poison ivy up the lane, drunk as a lord and with his genitals exposed for all the world to see. Beyond the Indian, the river was as flat and still as hammered pewter, and Dunderberg rose up, a deep shadowed blue, to tilt at the horizon.

“Vader,” Neeltje said before she’d touched ground, “please, may I go right in?” She’d spoken of nothing but ribbon, broadcloth and velvet since they’d left Croton that morning. Mariken Van Wart had the prettiest silk petticoats and blue satin skirt, and she was only thirteen, even if she was the patroon’s niece. And armozine ribbon — you should have seen it!

Joost handed her down, straightened up briefly and then fell again into his habitual slump. “Yes,” he whispered, “yes, of course, go ahead,” and then he ambled up to shoot the breeze with Jan Pieterse and Farmer Ten Haer.

He’d been slouching there on the stoep some ten minutes or so, puffing fraternally at his clay pipe and relishing the rich westering sun in those few moments before he would ask Jan Pieterse to join him in a pint of ale, when he became aware that his daughter was talking to someone inside the store. He remarked it only because he’d assumed the store was empty. There were only two horses in the lot — his own sorry, one-eyed nag and the sleek tawny mare he’d conscripted from the Van Wart stable for his daughter — and Farmer Ten Haer’s wagon stood alone beneath the chestnut tree. Whoever could she be talking to? he wondered, but Heyndrick Ten Haer was in the middle of a story about Wolf Nysen — whether or not he was even alive still, the renegade Swede had become the bogey of the neighborhood, blamed for everything from a missing hen to some huis vrouw’s shin splints — and Joost momentarily forgot about it.

“Oh, ja, ja,” Farmer Ten Haer said, nodding vigorously. “He come up out of the swamp near that turtle pond where his farm used to be, black as the devil, not a stitch on him and covered head to toe with mud, and he had this terrific big axe with him, the blade all crusted over with blood—”

Joost was picturing this monster, this Nysen, when he quite distinctly heard his daughter giggle from inside the dim storehouse. He craned his neck to peer through the gloomy doorway, but could see nothing aside from the pile of ragged furs and the gray-whiskered snout of Jan Pieterse’s retriever, asleep in their midst. “Is someone in there?” he asked, turning to the trader.

“She was gathering mushrooms out there, my Maria was, when he come for her without warning, howling like a beast—”

“Yes, and I suppose his hoofs were cloven and he smelled of brimstone too,” Jan said, and then, leaning toward Joost and lowering his voice: “Oh, ja — the pegleg, you know, the Van Brunt boy.”

It came back to him in a rush — the night at the van der Meulen farm, the look of unquenchable hatred on the boy’s face, his own shame and uneasiness — and his first reaction was fear for his daughter. He’d actually turned away from the others and squared his shoulders for action when he checked himself. This was only a boy, an orphan, one of the afflicted and downtrodden of the earth — not some sort of ogre. He’d been overwrought that night, that was all.

“It’s the God’s honest truth,” Farmer Ten Haer declared, clamping his arms across his chest.

It was then that Neeltje appeared in the doorway, a pretty girl in petticoats and tight-waisted skirt, smiling still, as if at some private joke. Behind her, dwarfing her, was a man six feet tall at least, with shoulders that had burst the seams of his woolen hemdrok. He guided her through the doorway and then stepped out into the sunlight himself, the pegleg knocking at the floorboards like a fist at the door. Joost saw the same unyielding expression, the same arrogance, he’d seen in the boy. If Jeremias recognized him, he gave no sign of it.

“Well, younker,” Jan Pieterse said, drawing the pipe from his mouth, “have you decided on anything?”

Jeremias nodded and replied that yes, sir, he had. He held out a big work-hardened palm in which there were five fish hooks and two glossy cubes of rock candy, and paid with a coin that looked as if it had been buried and dug up six times already. And then, ignoring Joost, he pressed a cube of candy into Neeltje’s palm as if it were a jewel from Africa, tucked the other inside his cheek, and thumped off, the wooden strut stabbing rhythmically at the earth with each thrust of his leg.

They watched in silence — Joost, Neeltje, Farmer Ten Haer and Jan Pieterse — as he swayed off across the lot, awkward and graceful at the same time. His right arm swung out like a baton, his shoulders were thrust back and the dark long blades of his hair cut at the collar of his shirt. They watched as he skirted a rotten stump and passed between a pair of lichen-encrusted boulders, watched as he entered the shadows at the edge of the wood and turned to wave.

Joost’s hands were in his pockets. Farmer Ten Haer and Jan Pieterse lifted their arms half-heartedly, as if afraid to break the spell. Neeltje — only Neeltje — waved back.

The Last of the Kitchawanks

When the market crashed in the fall of 1929, Rombout Van Wart, sire of Depeyster, husband to Catherine Depeyster and eleventh heir to Van Wart Manor, did not jump from the roof of the Stock Exchange or hang himself beneath the stately gables of the upper manor house. He did take a beating, though — in both the literal and figurative senses. Figuratively speaking, he lost a fortune. The family timber business went under; the foundry — which at that time produced iron cookware, but had, during the war, turned out breeches for artillery guns — fell on hard times; he lost an unspecified sum in stock holdings purchased on margin and dropped two thousand dollars in one grim afternoon at Belmont Park. The other beating, the literal one, was administered by a transient with a hawk’s nose and burnt-umber complexion who called himself Jeremy Mohonk and claimed to be the last of the Kitchawanks, a tribe no one in the Peterskill/Van Wartville area had ever heard of. Asserting his right to tribal lands, he threw up a tar-paper shack at Nysen’s Roost, an untenanted sector of the Van Wart estate on which Rombout had recently reintroduced the wild turkey after an attack of feudal nostalgia.

It was Rombout himself who discovered the squatter’s presence. Mounted on Pierre, a bay gelding with blood lines nearly as rich as his own, the lord of the manor was taking his exercise in the bracing autumn air (and at the same time attempting to exorcise the demon of his financial woes with the aid of a silver flask inscribed with the time-honored logo of the Van Wart clan) when he came upon the interloper’s shack. He was appalled. Beneath the venerable white oak in which his great grandfather, Oloffe III, had carved his initials, there now stood a sort of gypsy outhouse, a peeling, unsightly, tumbledown shanty such as one might expect to see at the far end of a hog pen in Alabama or Mississippi. Drawing closer, he spotted a ragged figure crouched over a cookfire, and then, galloping into the miserable, garbage-strewn yard, he recognized the plucked and decapitated carcass of a turkey sizzling on the spit.

It was too much. He sprang down from his horse, the riding crop clenched in his fist, as the tattered beggar lurched to his feet in alarm. “What in hell do you think you’re doing here?” Rombout raged, shaking the whip in the trespasser’s face.

The Indian — for Indian he was — backpedaled, watching for sudden movement.

“This … this is trespassing!” Rombout shouted. “Vandalism. Poaching, for God’s sake. These are private lands!”

The Indian had stopped backpedaling. He was dressed in a cheap flannel shirt, torn working pants and a crushed bowler hat he might have fished out of a public urinal; he was barefoot despite the incipient cold. “Private lands, my ass,” he said, folding his arms across his chest and fixing the lord of the manor with a cold, challenging, greeneyed glare. (Indian? Rombout would later snort in disbelief. Whoever heard of an Indian with green eyes?)

Rombout was beside himself with rage. It should be said too that he was fairly well inebriated, having consumed cognac in proportion to the magnitude of the anxiety it was meant to soothe — and that anxiety, pecuniary in nature, was monumental, blocklike and impervious as marble. In fact, two days earlier he’d confided to a fellow member of the Yale Club that financially speaking he was going to hell in a handbasket. Now he suddenly roared at the Indian, “Do you know who I am?” punctuating each stentorian syllable with a flourish of the whip.

Unutterably calm, as if he were the property owner and Rombout the trespasser, the Indian nodded his head gravely. “A criminal,” he said.

Rombout was struck dumb. No man had insulted him to his face in twenty-five years — not since a brash upperclassman at college had called him “a starched-up ass” and taken a concussive blow to the right ear in swift retribution. And here was this trespasser, this swarthy hook-nosed bum in a ragpicker’s suit of clothes, bearding him on his own property.

“A criminal and an expropriator,” the Indian continued. “A pauperizer of the working classes, a pander to the twin whores of privilege and capital, and a polluter of the land my ancestors lived in harmony with for seven thousand years.” The Indian paused. “You want to hear more? Huh?” He was pointing his index finger now. “You’re the trespasser, friend, not me. I’ve come to reclaim my birthright.”

It was then that Rombout struck him — once only — a vicious swipe of the riding crop aimed at those chilly, hateful, incongruous green eyes. The sound of it, like a single burst of brutal applause, faded quickly on the antiseptic air, till in an instant only the memory of it remained.

For his part, the Indian seemed almost to welcome the blow. He barely flinched, though Rombout had put everything he had into it. Which admittedly wasn’t much, considering the fact that he was in his mid-forties and given to a sedentary life relieved only by the occasional round of golf or canter across the property. By contrast, the Indian appeared to be in his early twenties; he was tall and fine-whittled, hardened by work and indigence. Dew drops of blood began to appear in a band that rimmed his eyes and traced the bridge of his nose like the blueprint for a pair of spectacles.

“Damn you,” Rombout cursed, trembling with the chemical emissions his anger had released in his blood. He didn’t have a chance to say more, because the Indian bent to snatch up a stick of firewood the length and breadth of a baseball bat and laid into the side of his head like the immortal Bambino going for the stands. It later came out — at the Indian’s trial — that the attacker landed several other blows as well, including kicks, punches and knee drops, but Rombout was aware only of the first and of the blackness that followed precipitately on its heels.

He wasn’t dead — no, he would live to recover his health and vigor, only to fatally inhale a raw oyster at Delmonico’s some ten years later — but he might as well have been. He never stirred. For three hours he lay there, bleeding and clotting, clotting and bleeding.’ He came to briefly once or twice, saw a world that looked as if it were ten fathoms beneath the ocean, tasted his own blood and descended again into the penumbral depths of unconsciousness. In all that time the Indian did nothing — he didn’t renew his attack, didn’t attempt to aid his victim, lift his wallet or abscond with Pierre, the magnificent bay gelding. He merely sat there at the doorway of his shanty, rolling and smoking cigarettes, a self-righteous look on his face.

It was Herbert Pompey — chauffeur, stable hand, gardener, factotum, jack-of-all-trades, major domo and son of Ismailia the nurse — who ultimately rescued the lord of the manor. When after several hours Rombout hadn’t returned, Herbert went to his mother to ask her advice. “He drunk is what he is,” she opined. “Pass out against some tree, or maybe he just fell off that animal and broke his head.” Then she told him to put one foot in front of the other and go have a look for him.

Pompey tried the dairy farm first. Rombout would sometimes ride out there to drink black coffee and grappa with Enzo Fagnoli, whose family had been milking cows for the Van Warts for eighty years. (The Fagnolis had taken over for the van der Mules or Meulens, tenants at Van Wart Manor since the world began. Apprised that the state legislature was about to put an end to the manorial system in the Hudson Valley, giving leaseholders title to the farms they’d worked for generations, Rombout’s great grandfather, Oloffe III, had evicted the Dutchmen in favor of the intrepid Italians, who converted the farm to dairy production and worked for an annual wage. It was hard on Oloffe, having to adjust to paying his tenants rather than vice versa, but the unquenchable hordes of New York City clamored for his milk, butter and cheese, his herds multiplied till they darkened the hills and in time he was able to admit that it was all for the best.) Enzo, in overalls and porkpie hat, greeted Pompey with enthusiasm and offered him a swig of apple wine from a green jug, but regretted to say that he hadn’t seen Rombout in nearly a week.

Next it was the Blue Rock Inn, where the lord of the manor was wont to take a hiatus from the rigors of equestrian exercise in order to share a cup of bootleg bourbon with the proprietor, Charlie Outhouse, who more typically regaled his guests with soda water and orange pekoe tea. Pompey retraced his steps, passing within hailing distance of the manor house — still no Rombout — and hiked down to where the inn perched over Van Wart Creek as it debouched in the Hudson. Charlie was out back, plucking hens for dinner. He hadn’t seen Rombout either. Pompey kept walking, skirting Acquasinnick Ridge and following the bank of the creek until finally he swung north for Nysen’s Roost.

He struck the stony path that traversed Blood Creek (so named because Wolf Nysen had incarnadined its waters in trying to wash the blood of his daughters from his hands), his legs heavy with fatigue as he pumped up the steep hill. His mother, a gossipy, superstitious woman, repository of local legend and guardian of the Van Wart family history, had told him tales of Wolf Nysen, the mad murdering Swede. And of the loup-garou, the pukwidjinnies and the wailing woman of the Blue Rock, who’d perished in a snowstorm and whose voice could still be heard on nights when the snow fell thick. The woods were dense here — never lumbered — and the shadows gathered in clots around the bones of fallen trees. It was an unlucky place, strangely silent even in summer, and as boy and man, Pompey had avoided it. But now, though the leaves were ankle deep on the trail, he could see that a horse had passed this way recently, and he felt nothing but relief.

When he emerged from the woods at the top of the rise, he was as surprised as his employer had been to find a crude habitation of notched saplings and tar paper huddled beneath the big old white oak that stood sentinel over the place. The next thing he noticed was Pierre, still saddled, grazing quietly beneath the tree. Then, as he drew closer, he became aware of a stranger sitting in the doorway of the shack — a bum, from the look of him — and beyond him, something like a heap of rags cast off in the stiff high grass. But where was Rombout?

Never hesitating, though his gut was clenched with foreboding, Pompey strode right on up to the shack to confront this stranger. He halted five feet from him, hands on hips. Who the devil are you? — the words were on his lips when he glanced down at that heap of rags. Rombout looked as if he were sleeping, but there was blood on the side of his head. His riding boots — Pompey had put a shine on them that very morning — glinted in the pale autumn light.

“What happen here?” Pompey demanded of the Indian, who’d barely raised his head to watch him stride up to the shack. A great lowering ancestral fear gripped Pompey as he looked down at the white man sprawled in the grass.

The Indian said nothing.

“You do this?” Pompey was scared. Scared and angry. “Huh?”

Still the Indian held his silence.

“Who you, anyway? What you want?” Pompey was glancing distractedly from the Indian to the horse and from the horse to the terrible inert bundle of clothing on the ground.

“Me?” the Indian said finally, raising his head slowly to pin him with those fanatic’s eyes. “I’m the last of the Kitchawanks.”

The trial didn’t last an hour. The Indian was accused of criminal trespass, assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder. His attorney, appointed by the court, had gone to school with Rombout. The sheriff, the court recorder, the district attorney and the district attorney’s assistant had also gone to school with Rombout. The judge had gone to school with Rombout’s father.

“Clearly, your honor,” the Indian’s attorney pleaded, “my client is not in possession of his faculties.”

“Yes?” returned the judge, who was a big, harsh, reactionary man, known for his impatience with hoboes, panhandlers, gypsies and the like. “And just how is that?”

“He claims to be an Indian, your honor.”

“An Indian?” The judge lifted his eyebrows while everyone in the courtroom stole a glance at the Kitchawank, who sat erect as a pillar in the witness box.

The judge now turned to him. “Jeremy Mohonk,” he began, and then glanced at the court recorder. “Mohonk? Is that right?” The recorder nodded, and the judge turned back to the accused. “Do you understand the nature of the charges against you?”

“I was defending my person and my property,” the Indian growled, his eyes sweeping the room. Rombout, his head still bandaged and the left side of his face swollen and discolored, looked away.

“Your property?” the judge asked.

The Indian’s attorney was on his feet. “Your honor,” he began, but the judge waved him off.

“Are you aware, sir, that the property you claim as your own has been in the Van Wart family since before this country, as we know it, even came into existence?”

“And before that?” the Indian countered. His eyes were like claws, tearing at every face in the courtroom. “Before that it belonged to my family — until we were cheated out of it. And if you want to know something, so did the land this courtroom stands on.”

“You do then claim to be an Indian?”

“Part Indian. My blood has been polluted.”

The judge gazed at him for a long moment, smacking his lips from time to time and twice removing his glasses to wipe them on the sleeve of his robe. Finally he spoke. “Nonsense. There are Indians in Montana, Oklahoma, the Black Hills. There are no Indians here.” Then he dismissed the defense attorney and asked the D.A. if he had any further questions to put to the accused.

The jury, eight of whom had gone to school with Rombout, was out for five minutes. Their verdict: guilty as charged. The judge sentenced Jeremy Mohonk to twenty years at Sing Sing, a place named, ironically enough, for the Sint Sinks, a long extinct tribe that had been second cousin to the Kitchawanks.

Rombout had seen justice done, and yet that piece of property — disputed by a madman and never much good for anything anyway — proved too great a burden to bear. Six months after Jeremy Mohonk had been shunted off to prison and his shack razed, Rombout was forced to put the place up for sale. Over the years, through legislation, population pressure, division among heirs and other forms of attrition, the original Van Wart estate had shrunk from 86,000 acres to fewer than two hundred. Now it would be deprived of fifty more.

Times were hard all over. For two years the plot remained on the market and not a single bid was forthcoming, until finally Rombout put an ad in the Peterskill Post Dispatch (soon to merge with both the Herald and the Star Reporter). The day after the ad appeared, a gleaming late-model Packard sedan made its slow, flatulent way up the drive to the manor house. Inside was Peletiah Crane, principal of the Van Wartville school and descendant of the legendary pedagogue-legislator. He was dressed in his principal’s pinstripes, replete with bow tie, celluloid collar and straw boater, and he carried with him a black satchel similar to those employed by doctors making their rounds.

Pompey led the educator into the brightly lit back parlor, where Rombout and his thirteen-year-old son, Depeyster, sat over a game of chess. “Peletiah?” Rombout exclaimed in surprise, rising and extending his hand.

The principal was smiling — no, grinning — till he looked like a walnut about to split open. Depeyster ducked his head. He knew that grin. It was a variant of the one Old Stone Beak, as they called him, employed just prior to lifting his cane down from the wall and applying it to some miscreant’s backside. Wider, gummier and more compressed about the lips than the caning grin, this one was reserved for special occasions of triumph, as when Dr. Crane had assembled the student body to announce that his own son had won the essay contest commemorating the founding of Peterskill, or when he’d curtailed athletics for a month because Anthony Fagnoli had desecrated the shower stall with an anatomical diagram. Thirteen years old and mortified in the face of that smile, Depeyster felt like slipping down to the cellar for a pinch of dirt. Instead, he concentrated on the chessboard.

The principal pumped his father’s hand joyously and then took a seat. “Mr. Van Wart,” he said, “Rombout,” and he was tapping the black bag in his lap with a knowing and proprietary air, as if it contained the philosopher’s stone or the first draft of Roosevelt’s New Deal speech, “I’ve come to make an offer on the property.”

The Finger

It was February, grim and cold and gray. Walter, a young man with two feet like anyone else, was still in school, sitting down to his desk with a jar of wheat germ and a carton of prune-whip yogurt, trying to make sense of Heidegger. His motorcycle was in the garage out back of the rooming house in which he ate, slept, shat and ruminated over questions pertaining to man’s fate in an indifferent universe, where it stood forlornly amidst a clutter of three-legged tables, disemboweled armchairs and lamps with mismatched shades. He wouldn’t be needing it for a while. The outside temperature was twenty below, he was three hundred fifty miles and a whole universe away from the clapboard bungalow in Kitchawank Colony and the hissing inferno of Depeyster Manufacturing and he had three more interminable months to endure before he could accept his diploma from the liver-spotted hands of President Crumley and tear the pages from Heidegger with the same slow malicious pleasure with which he’d torn the wings from flies as a child.

Jessica was at school too. In Albany. She hadn’t seen Walter since Christmas break and had written him three times without reply in the past week. She’d also written to graduate schools. Scripps, Miami, N.Y.U., Mayaguez. What she wanted from Walter was love, fidelity and an enduring relationship; what she wanted from Scripps, Miami, N.Y.U. and Mayaguez was a chance to study marine biology. At the moment, she was contemplating the typescript of her senior thesis, which lay on the desk beside yet another letter to Walter. Her legs were crossed, and a furry slipper, shaped like a rabbit but made of cotton, dangled from her pink-frosted toes. The title gave her a little thrill of pleasure: The Effect of Temperature Fluctuation on Vanadium Concentration in Tunicates of the Intertidal Zone, by Jessica Conklin Wing. She weathered the thrill, turned the page and began to read.

Tom Crane, grandson to Peletiah, friend and father confessor to Jessica and lifelong boon companion to Walter, was not in school. Not as of two weeks ago, anyway. Nope. Not he. He was a dropout, and proud of it. Cornell, as far as he was concerned, was strictly a bourgeois institution, repressive, reactionary and stultifyingly dull. He’d dissected his last frog, tortured his last rat and struggled for the last time to heft twenty-five-pound textbooks crammed with illustrations, diagrams and appendices. He’d cleaned up his room and sold the whole business — desk, chair, tensor lamp, slide rule, texts, dictionaries, his fieldbook of natural history and a two-year-old calendar featuring the wildflowers of the Northeast as displayed against the wet vulvae of naked, black-nippled Puerto Rican girls — for twenty-six dollars, stuffed his underwear in a rucksack and hitchhiked home.

“What are you going to do now?” his grandfather asked him when he got there.

Hunched and dirty, the eight-foot canary-yellow scarf wrapped around his neck like an anaconda and his World War I German aviator’s coat hanging open to the waist, he merely shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said. “Might get a job, I guess.”

His grandfather, former guiding light of the Van Wartville and Peterskill schools and a firm believer in the dignity of work and the principles of John Dewey, gave a snort of contempt. He was seventyseven years old and his eyebrows rose and fell again like great white swooping owls.

“I wanted to ask you if I could live in the shack.”

For a moment the old man was speechless. “The Indian’s shack?” he said finally, a fine trembling crusty incredulity oscillating his voice. “Way out there in the hind end of nowhere? Good Christ, you’ll freeze to death.”

Oh no, he wouldn’t freeze. Last summer he’d equipped the place with a new wood stove, replaced the windows and patched the chinks in the walls with scrap lumber and wood putty. And the summer before he’d put up a porch, installed a chemical toilet and dragged enough crapped-over discarded furniture up there to make the place habitable. Besides, he had a good down bag and fifty acres of firewood.

His grandfather, he of the sharp Crane beak and devouring Crane eyes, had doted on him since he lay kicking in the cradle, and now that his own son was gone, the old man clung to him with a fierceness that had all the desperate love of dying blood in it. That is, he was a pushover. “If that’s what you want,” he said at last, heaving a sigh that might have raised the curtains.

And so here he was, living like a hermit, a man of the mountains, a saint of the forest and hero of the people, free of the petty pecuniary worries that nag shop owner and working stiff alike. Sure it was nippy, and yes, necessity forced him to trudge out to Van Wart Road and hitch the two miles to his grandfather’s for a hot meal and the occasional ritual peeling of the long johns and immersion in a steaming tub, but he was doing it. Independence was his! Self-direction! The joy of sloth! He lay in bed all morning, wrapped in his sleeping bag, his arms pinned beneath the weight of Indian blankets uncountable and an old reeking raccoon coat he’d found in his grandmother’s closet, watching his breath hang in the air. Sometimes he’d get up to open a can of creamed corn and set it on the kerosene stove or maybe make himself a cup of herb tea or hot chocolate, but mostly he just lay there, listening to his beard grow and relishing his freedom. About ten or eleven — he couldn’t tell which, didn’t have a clock or watch — he’d begin reading. Typically, he’d start out light, with some elfin fantasy or sci fi, with Tolkien or Vonnegut or Salmón. After lunch — chick peas mashed into brown rice with lentil gravy, out of the five-gallon pot — he’d get into the heavy stuff. Lenin, Trotsky, Bakunin, cheap pamphlets with gray or green covers, the paper no better than newsprint. What did he care for leather bindings and rag content? — he was studying for the revolution.

But now, on this grim winter’s night, while Walter lucubrated and Jessica turned her thoughts to Holothurians, Tom Crane was pulling on his pink suede lace-up boots (with the unfortunate smirches of motor oil he’d tried to remove by applying a solution of carbon tetrachloride and high-test gasoline) and slipping into the houndstooth bellbottoms that hugged his bony knees and made racing chocks of his feet. He was grabbing for the aviator’s coat and mummy-wrapping the scarf around his neck, heading out the door, suffused with an excitement that made his long bony feet tap across the porch as if they’d come loose: he was going to a concert. A rock concert. A wild, joyous, jungle-thumping celebration of nubility, rebelliousness, draft resistance, drug indulgence, sexual liberation and libidinous release. He’d been waiting three whole days for it.

The sky was low, black, rippled with cloud, and the warming trend of the past few days had pushed the mercury all the way up to fifteen above. He had to feel his way out to the road, the thin jerky beam of the flashlight so weak it could do little more than satisfy his curiosity as to which quivering, low-hanging branch had poked him in the eye or grabbed hold of the frayed tail of his scarf. It was half a mile down the stony, concave path to Van Wart Creek and the wooden footbridge erected by some altruist in times gone by, and then another quarter mile or so across a marshy pasture that was home to grazing cows and dotted like a minefield with their skillet-sized puddles of excrement. The path then wound through a copse of naked beech and thick-clustered fir, ascended a short rise and finally emerged on the motionless black river of macadam that was Van Wart Road.

(So what if it was a regular and tedious trek out to or in from the road, made all the more tedious when the trekker was laden with bursting sacks of lentil flakes, pinto beans or bran pellets? The remoteness of the place had its advantages. A hero of the people and saint of the forest could expect few visitors, for example, or representatives of the duly constituted authorities of the county and township, like the assessor, inspectors from the Department of Building and Safety or the sheriff and his minions. Nor would he be much bothered by drummers, panhandlers, Avon ladies and Jehovah’s Witnesses, as these, passing by on the road, would see only an infinity of trees, each one adumbrating the next. For the initiated, however, for his privileged guests, Tom Crane had provided the Packard hubcap. If you slowed in the vicinity of a certain diseased-looking elm that was one-tenth of a mile beyond a certain breached guardrail, and you recognized the hubcap depending from a nail driven into the trunk of that certain elm, you would park and walk in: Tom was at home. If the hubcap was on the ground, you needn’t bother.)

Out on the road, Tom removed his deerskin gloves — one of sixteen pairs his father had inadvertently bequeathed him. He’d found them, some still wrapped in gift paper that featured snowmen and candy canes, while poking around in his father’s bureau the week after his parents’ first vacation in twenty years had been terminated by pilot error somewhere over San Juan. He stuffed the gloves inside the belt loop of his aviator’s coat, slipped the all-but-useless flashlight in the back pocket of his bellbottoms, and removed the Packard hubcup from the tree. Then he blew on his hands and turned to address the long black shadow that stretched along the side of the road like the mouth of an unfathomable cave.

This was the Packard itself, a relic of the distant past, painted the color of sleep and forgetfulness and pitted with rust. Its windows were jammed open, the brakes were a memory and the floorboards had dissolved in a delicate tracery that left the pedals floating in space while the road moved beneath them like a conveyor belt. A genuine artifact, as revealing in its way of previous civilization as the arrowhead or potsherd, the old hulk had been unearthed the previous year in the shed out back of his grandfather’s place. The elder Crane had owned a succession of Packards, and this, dating from the late forties, was the last of them. (“They went bad after the War,” the old man insisted, real vehemence inflating the flanges of his magnificent nose. “Junk. Nothing but junk.”) Now it was Tom’s.

Working by rote, he struggled to lift and brace the hood and then remove the air filter. He was in the act of spraying ether into what he took in the darkness to be the carburetor when he first spotted the flying saucer. Trembling and luminous, it jerked violently across the sky, coming to an abrupt halt directly above him, where it hovered tentatively, as if looking for a place to land. Tom froze. He watched the thing without apprehension and with a keen sciential eye (it was saucer-shaped, all right, and emitting a pale, rinsed-out light), surprised, but only mildly. He believed in clairvoyance, reincarnation, astrology and the economic theories of Karl Marx, and as he stood there, he could feel his belief system opening up to include an unshakable faith in the existence of extraterrestrial life as well. Still, after ten minutes or so his neck began to go stiff, and he found himself wishing that this marvelous apparition would do something — spit flames, open up like an eye, turn to mud or jelly — anything but hover interminably over his head. It was then that he reached surreptitiously for the flashlight he’d tucked in his back pocket, thinking in a vague way of signaling to the aliens in Morse code or something.

No sooner did he touch the flashlight, however, than the shadow of a great hand obliterated the alien spacecraft; when he released it, the wily aliens returned, hovering as before. He began to feel a little foolish. He stood there playing with the flashlight a minute more, then sent the saucer hurtling to its doom in the inky black reaches of space and turned back to the car. The old hulk started up with a volcanic roar and a brilliant explosion of blue flame from the carburetor; the saint of the forest hustled out to replace the air filter and slam the hood shut. And then he was off with a shriek of the steering wheel and a groan of the tires, off to pour his soul into the Dionysian frenzy of the concert.

The concert, which featured a well-known underground band whose members invested every nickel of their take in preferred stock, was held in Poughkeepsie, in the Vassar College gymnasium. Tom presented his ticket and shuffled through the doors with the rest of the sloe-eyed, hirsute, bead-rattling crowd, glad to get in out of the cold. He was unaware that Poughkeepsie was an Algonquin term meaning “safe harbor,” but then no one else in the crowd was aware of it either. In fact, there were few who had any grasp at all of the notion that history had preceded them. They knew, in an abstract way, about Thanksgiving and the pilgrims, about Washington, Lincoln, Hitler and John F. Kennedy, about the Depression — could their parents ever let them forget it? — and they dimly recalled the construction of the local shopping center in some distant formative epoch of their lives. But it was all disconnected, trivial, the sort of knowledge useful in the sixth grade for multiple-choice tests or for scoring the odd answer on a TV quiz show. What was real, what mattered, was the present. And in the present, they and they alone were ascendant — they’d invented sex, hair, marijuana and the electric guitar, and civilization began and ended with them.

Be that as it may, the saint of the forest entered the auditorium that night like a sloop coming in off a choppy sea. The cold wind at his back blew the scarf up around his ears like a luffing sail and a full-body shiver shook him to the gunwales. He stamped and shuddered and quaked, his elbows flying out like quivering booms, as he inched forward, boxed in by shoulders and heads, by greatcoats, army jackets and fringed vests. There was the scent of cold air on upturned collars, trailing from scarves, caught in the vegetal explosion of hair, but it faded quickly, absorbed in the warmth of the crowd. A moment later he was in, the mob dispersing, the big electric heaters wafting tropical breezes, soft lights overhead, a murmur of voices rippling about him like wavelets lapping the pier.

All at once he felt it welling up in him, a sense of exhilaration, of love as pure as Himalayan snow, of brotherhood and communal joy akin to what Gandhi must have felt among the unwashed hordes of Delhi or Lahore. He’d been a hermit too long (it was almost two weeks now), too long out of contact with the energy of the people and the élan vital of the age. Besides, he hadn’t been within two feet of a girl since September, when Amy Clutterbuck had let him hold her hand in a darkened movie house in Ithaca. And now he was surrounded by them.

Here a blonde, there a blonde, everywhere a blonde, blonde, he clucked to himself as he made his way to the bleachers and mounted the levels with big, pumping, awkward strides. God, this was great! The smells alone! Perfume, incense, pot, tobacco, Sen-Sen! He was nearly dizzy with excitement as he appropriated a seat midway up the near bleacher, flung himself onto the cold hard plank and coincidentally thrust his knees into the back of the girl in front of him. But it wasn’t merely a thrust — the long shanks of his legs may as well have been spring-coiled, the fierce whittled bones of his kneecaps could have been knives — no, it was a savage piercing stab to the victim’s kidneys that made her jerk upright in shock and swing around on him like a Harpy.

He saw a small white face devoured by hair, eyes like violets under glass, a crease of rage between a pair of perfect unplucked eyebrows. “What the fuck’s the idea?” she spat, the force of the fricative stirring the very roots of his beard.

“I–I—I—” he began, as if he were about to sneeze. But then he got hold of himself and launched into an apology so profound, so heartfelt, fawning and all-reaching that it might have mollified Ho Chi Minh himself. He concluded by offering a stick of gum. Which she accepted.

“Long legs, huh?” she said, showing her teeth in a rich little smile.

He nodded, the sharp Crane beak stabbing at the air and the ratty braid of his hair flapping at his collar. Was he from around here? she. wanted to know. No, he was from Peterskill, just quit school at Cornell — it was a real drag, did she know what he meant? — and had his own place now, really cool, out in the woods.

“Peterskill?” she yelped. “No kidding?” She was from Van Wartville herself. Yup, born and raised. Went to private school. She was at Bard now. Did he have a car?

He did.

She wouldn’t mind going home for the weekend, maybe blowing off her Monday classes and getting her father to drive her back up. Would that be okay with him — a ride maybe?

He nodded till his neck began to ache, grinned so hard the corners of his mouth went numb. Sure, of course, no problem, any time. “I’m Tom Crane,” he said, holding out his hand.

She shook, and her hand was as cold as one of the innumerable, dumb-staring perch he’d cut open in Bio lab. “I’m Mardi,” she said.

He was about to say something inane, just to keep the conversation going, something like “I’m a Libra,” but just then the lights went down and the emcee announced the band. That was when things began to get peculiar. Because instead of the band, with their ragged hair and sneers, suddenly there was another character at the microphone — a dean or something, in suit and tie-announcing in a voice that was almost a yelp that there’d been an accident and asking for the crowd’s cooperation. People began to look around them. A murmur went up. It seemed that someone — a gatecrasher — had attempted to slip in through one of the great long windows that ran the length of each wall and stood about twenty feet above the floor. The gatecrasher had climbed in, hung for a moment from the ledge and then dropped down into the crowd. Or so the dean explained.

The murmur became louder. Was he — a representative of the warmongering elite — asking them, the audience, the people, to turn in one of their own? To fink, rat, betray? Tom was thunderstruck. He studied the crown of Mardi’s head, the part of her hair, the slope of her shoulders, in growing outrage. But no. That wasn’t it at all. The gatecrasher had been hurt. His ring had hung up on the window catch when he dropped to the floor: the ring, along with the finger it had encircled, had been torn from his hand. Would the audience take a minute to search for the finger so that it might be saved?

The murmur rose to a shout. They were on their feet now, and a great sound of shuffling and groaning pervaded the place, as of a vast herd in migratory movement; panic was writ on their faces. Somewhere out there, in a lap or handbag or ground beneath somebody’s heel, was a bleeding finger, still-living flesh: it was enough to make you get down on all fours and bay like a hound. Tom felt sick, all the joy and exhilaration gone out of him like wind from a balloon. There was a general moaning and gnashing of teeth. “There’s no cause for panic!” the dean was shouting through the microphone, but no one seemed to hear him.

Mardi had stood fixedly through all of this, one step down from the saint of the forest, her eyes scanning the crowd. Now she turned to him, fanning out her hair with a reflexive jerk of her neck, and there it was, the finger. It fell, like a pale grub, from the snarled web of her hair and dropped to the seat beside her. “There!” Tom shouted, pointing at the seat in horror and fascination. “There it is!” She glanced down. And up at him. The expression on her face — she wasn’t appalled, disgusted, panicked, didn’t scream or dance on her toes — was like nothing Tom had ever seen. Or no: it was feral. She was a cat and this bit of flesh was something she’d prized from a nest or a hole in a tree. A smile began to make its slow way across her lips, until amidst the confusion, the howls and the uneasy fits and starts of laughter with which the place reverberated like some chamber of doom, she was beaming at him. “We cannot start the concert,” the dean was shouting, but Mardi paid no attention. Still beaming, still holding Tom’s eyes, she bent ever so slightly from the waist and flicked the finger into the shadowy maw of the bleacher.

Patrimony

It was as if Walter had awakened from a long sleep, as if the past twenty-odd years were the illusion, and this — the dreams and visions, history and its pertinacity — the reality. He couldn’t be sure of anything any more. All the empirical underpinnings of the world — Boyle’s Law, Newtonian physics, doctrines of evolution and genetic inheritence, TV, gravity, the social contract, merde — had suddenly become suspect. His grandmother had been right all along. His grandmother — the fisherman’s wife, with the stockings fallen down around her ankles and her faintly mustachioed upper lip rising and falling in ceaseless incantation — had perceived the world more keenly than philosophers and presidents, pharmacists and ad men. She’d seen through the veil of Maya — seen the world for what it was — a haunted place, where anything could happen and nothing was as it seemed, where shadows had fangs and doom festered in the blood. Walter felt he might float off into space, explode like a sweet potato left too long in the oven, grow hair on his palms or turn to grape jelly. Why not? If there were apparitions, shadows on dark roadways, voices speaking in the rootless night, why not imps and goblins, God, St. Nick, UFOs and pukwidjinnies too?

He left the hospital on a sunstruck morning in August, and the first thing he did — before he had a beer or monster burger with pickle, relish, mayonnaise, mustard and three-star chili sauce, before he hustled Jessica up to his room above the kitchen to finish what he’d begun on the hard flat institutional bed in the East Wing — was this: he went back and read the inscription on the road sign, as the bare-foot specter of his father had advised him. Jessica drove. She wore a shift that was made of the filmy stuff of lingerie, she wore sandals, jewelry, makeup, perfume. Walter watched the trees flit by the window, one after another, in endless unbroken succession, a green so intense he had to shield his eyes; Jessica hummed along with the radio. She was effusive, lighthearted, gay and unconstrained; he was subdued and withdrawn. She prattled on about wedding plans, told jokes, fumbled with the gilt foil on the neck of the bottle of Móet et Chandon clenched between her thighs and filled him in on people they knew — Hector, Tom Crane, Susie Cats — as if he’d been gone a year. He didn’t have much to say.

The sign — the historical marker, that is — had barely been damaged by Walter’s assault on it. The stanchion was gouged where the footpeg had hit it and the whole thing was tilted back a degree or two so that the legend could most comfortably be perused from the lower branches of the maple across the street, but basically Walter was much more the worse for wear than the instrument of his mutilation. That much he could see from the car window as they pulled up on the shoulder. Emerging from the passenger side of Jessica’s VW like a crab shrugging off its shell, he braced himself on his crutches — every time he put his weight on the still-tender stump of his right leg it felt as if it were on fire — and hobbled up to decipher the sign that had become for him as momentous and mysterious as the Sinai tablets must have been for the tribes of Israel. He could have asked Jessica or Lola or Tom Crane to go have a look at it while he lay helpless in bed, tormented by the image of his father and the brutal commingling of dream and reality, but he preferred it this way. After all, he hadn’t hit a tree, mailbox, fireplug or lamppost, but a sign — symbol, token and signifier — yes, a sign, and it might as well have been inscribed with hieroglyphs for all the attention he’d paid it in the past. There was a message here. He yearned for enlightenment.

It was hot. The end of summer. Cars shot past with a suck of air. There was no blood, no oil slick on the road — just the sign, with its gouge. He read:

On this spot in 1693, Cadwallader Crane, leader of an armed uprising on Van Wart Manor, surrendered to authorities. He was hanged, along with co-conspirator Jeremy Mohonk, at Gallows Hill, Van Wartville, in 1694.

He read, but he was not enlightened. He stood there like a man of stone, conning it over, word by word. And then, after a long moment during which he cursed his dreams, his father and the state historical society, he swung around on his crutches and stumped back to the car.

At home — the world had shifted beneath his feet, changed as surely and irrevocably as if it had been hit by a comet or visited by a delegation of three-headed aliens from Alpha Centauri, and yet here all was the same, right down to the muted bands of sunlight that fell across the Turkish carpet like a benediction and the twin lamps with shades the color and texture of ancient parchment — Walter stood awkwardly in the middle of the cluttered den and gave himself up to Lola’s sinewy embrace. The paneled walls were still hung with the dim sepia photos of Lola’s parents in their Moldavian overcoats, galoshes and fur hats; the black-and-whites of Walter in his Little League uniform; the overexposed snapshot of Lola and Walter’s mother as high school girls, their hair long, arms entwined; and the turgid official portrait of Lenin that occupied the place of honor over the mantelpiece. The cane plant in the corner was still dead and the empty aquarium still crusted with a jagged layer of petrified sludge. On the bookshelves, amidst the faded spines and crumbling dust jackets of books that hadn’t been moved for as long as Walter could remember, crouched the ceramic tigers and elephants, the ivory rooks and knights and pawns he’d played with as a boy, all exactly as he’d left them on that distant morning of the potato pancakes. He’d been gone two weeks to the day. Everything was the same, and everything was changed. “Well,” Lola said. “Well. You’re back.”

Jessica stood beside him, fidgeting with her purse. She was wearing an embarrassed smile. Lola was smiling too, but her smile was worn and rueful. Walter, despite himself, found that he was smiling back at her. His wasn’t a comforting smile, though. He was too disoriented, too crushed by the ghost of the familiar that screamed like something choked in the bushes each time he glanced down at his right foot, to smile like an unconstrained and doting son. No, his smile was more a baring of the teeth.

Did he want something to eat? Lola wanted to know. A little borscht maybe? With some rye bread? Tea? Cookies? Did he want to sit down? Was it too warm? Should she turn on the fan? Hesh would be thrilled when he got home from work.

Walter didn’t want any borscht. Nor rye bread, tea or cookies either. It wasn’t too warm. The fan could rest. He looked forward to seeing Hesh. But for now — and here he gave Jessica a significant look — he just wanted to go up to bed. To rest, that is. He would not drink the champagne, he would not have a beer or monster burger and he would not engage in an act of love and affirmation with his fiancée. Instead, he would mount the stairs to his boyhood room like a soldier returned from battle, like a martyr, and he would draw the shades, stretch out on the bed and watch the shadows deepen toward night.

Next morning he awoke to the smell of potato pancakes, a smell that roused him like a slap in the face. He sat up in bed, seized with fear and loathing. The cycle was beginning again. Already his mother’s sorrowful eyes had begun to detach themselves from the gloom in the corner behind the bureau. A minute more and his grandmother would be looking over his shoulder and his father poking fun at him or delivering yet another cryptic message. It was intolerable. How many pounds of flesh did he have to sacrifice? How many limbs? He fumbled with the straps of the prosthesis, jerked on his clothes, seized the crutches and flung himself down the stairs like a hunted man.

It was 7:00 A.M. Hesh and Lola were in the kitchen, their voices soft and murmurous. The house ticked with the small comfortable sounds he’d missed in the hospital — water trickling through the pipes, the hum of dishwasher and refrigerator. Outside, the sun slanted through elms and maples and spilled across the lawn and into the garden. Walter stood at the window a moment to collect himself. He saw corn. Tomatoes. Pumpkins, cucumbers, squash. Hesh had planted them. In May. Before Walter had gone to work at Depeyster Manufacturing, before he’d reconditioned the Norton and discovered a ghost in the scent of a pancake. And now here they were, rooted in the ground.

In the kitchen, he braced his crutches against the wall and sat down at the table across from Hesh. Lola stood at the gas range, flipping pancakes. “I made your favorite, Walter,” she said.

The smell was intolerable. It was death. He’d rather have snuffed the fumes of burning plastic, nerve gas, blood and offal and shit. A glass of milk stood beside his plate. He took a sip. It was warm. “I’m not hungry,” he said.

“Not hungry?” Hesh echoed. He was perched over his muffin like an eagle masking its kill. His forearms swelled against the edge of the table. “Come on, kid, snap out of it. You lost your foot. Okay. It’s not the end of the world.”

Walter set down the glass of milk. “Please, Lola,” he said, craning his neck to look over his shoulder, “not now. I just can’t eat.” And then, turning back to Hesh, who was licking butter from the tips of his fingers and chewing with a rhythmic roll of his great, clean-shaven jaws, he said, “It’s not that. Really. It’s”—he didn’t know how to tell him—“I’ve been thinking about my father lately.”

Hesh had stopped chewing. “Your father?” he repeated, as if he hadn’t heard properly. He picked up the butter knife and laid it down again. “You know how I feel about your father.”

Walter knew. But whatever had gone wrong with him had its roots here — in the riots, on the ghost ships, in the conundrum of the marker and the burden of heredity. “Yeah, I know. But things are different now and I have a right to know what he did to you and Lola and my mother that was so awful, and I have a right to know where he is now. I have a right to ask him myself.”

Hesh’s eyes had changed. They were open — fixed on Walter’s — but they might as well have been shut fast. He’d begun chewing again, but more slowly, and, it seemed, without relish. “Sure,” he said finally, while Lola rattled pans at the stove. “You’ve got all the right in the world. But your mother made us your legal guardians, not him. He deserted you, Walter. And even after he came back, those summers, you think he was about to take on the responsibility of raising a kid even though he caused a big stink all the time? Huh? Do you?”

Walter shrugged. The pancakes were killing him. He felt as if he were about to cry.

“Look him up, go ahead. Where you’ll look, God only knows. But as far as I’m concerned, he’s a bum. A Judas. Persona non grata. As far as I’m concerned, the book is closed.”

But the book is never closed.

Hesh went off to his glazier’s shop on Houston Street and Lola sat at the table and told Walter the story of the riots for the thousandth time. He knew every nuance, anticipated her every pause and change of inflection as if he were speaking himself, but he listened now as if he’d never heard the story before, listened as he had the day after his eleventh birthday when Lola sat him down and tried to explain why Hesh and his father had nearly come to blows over so marvelous and inoffensive a thing as an Italian motorbike with red fenders and chrome-plated handlebars. He listened.

She hadn’t been able to get near the place — the concert grounds, that is. But Hesh had. And Walter’s father and mother too. The organizing committee had asked them to come early to set up the chairs and see to the lights and loudspeakers. After that, Christina would be in charge of programs and literature, and Hesh and Truman were supposed to mingle with the crowd and keep an eye out for trouble. It was going to be quite a night: the warmth of the summer evening like a big communal blanket, the stars overhead, a thousand voices joined in song. They’d talked about nothing else for weeks.

Will Connell was going to be there, to strum his guitar and sing his songs about the working people of America (later, when the whole country had caught the sickness of the riots, he would be blacklisted by every record company, every music publisher, booking agent and theater owner from Maine to California). A woman from the New York stage was going to sing too. And there were two speakers, one from the Garment Workers’ Union, the other a party member who’d fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The big attraction, though — the man everyone was coming to see — was Paul Robeson. Paul Robeson was a Negro and a Communist, he was an actor and a civil libertarian, he was a great huge lion of a man who could sing the old spirituals till you could feel them in the marrow of your bones.

Lola had seen him at the pavilion in Kitchawank Colony just the year before. Two hundred or so had turned out to hear him that time, local people from the Colony mostly, the graying Anarchists and Socialists who’d founded the community back in the twenties because they wanted to free themselves from the diseases of city life and give their children a libertarian education, and the party-line Communists who’d begun to supplant them. People brought sandwiches and sat on the grass — old couples, children, pregnant women. There was no trouble. Just a nice time for everyone. A little culture in the hinterlands.

But the following year — in August, late August — it was a different story. Lola was working then, a half-day shift at the counter in the old van der Meulen bakeshop in Peterskill, and so she couldn’t go in early with Hesh and Truman. Walter’s mother went, though. Christina made up some sandwiches and a thermos of iced tea, dropped Walter at his grandmother’s — he’d just turned three, did he remember? — and then climbed into Hesh’s 1940 Plymouth with her husband and his buddy Piet.

Lola tilted her head back and glanced around the room. A cup of black coffee sat before her on the table, going cold. She lit a cigarette, shook out the match and exhaled. “He was quite a character, Piet,” she said. “Short little guy, no higher than my chin. And always playing practical jokes — you know, your father was a great one for jokes.” She took a sip of cold coffee. “The two of them were always at it. Silly stuff. Palm buzzers and squirting carnations and whatnot. I wonder what ever became of him? — Piet, I mean. Your father thought he was really something else.”

There were no jokes that night. Hesh drove. Christina sat up front, with the thermos and sandwiches and the box of programs and party literature; Truman and Piet were in back, boxed in by sound equipment. Lola was planning to join them later, as soon as she got out of work. There’d be plenty of time — she got off at seven and the concert wasn’t scheduled to start until seven-thirty. She hoped they’d save her a seat.

Anyway, they were going to hold the concert down near the river, just off Van Wart Road, on some property owned by Peletiah Crane, who was then superintendent of the Peterskill schools. (Yes, that’s right, Lola had said when she’d first told him the story, Tom’s grandpa.) Peletiah wasn’t a party member himself, but he was sympathetic to the cause and he’d been a supporter of cultural events in the Colony for years. When it became apparent that the concert and rally would be much bigger than the last — a show of solidarity for progressives that would attract perhaps two and a half thousand from the City — the Kitchawank Colony Association realized it wouldn’t have the space or facilities to handle such a crowd and dropped its sponsorship of the event. That’s when Peletiah stepped in. He offered the Robeson people the use of his property for nothing, and this encouraged one of the trade unions to put up the money to rent chairs, sound equipment and floodlights. Sasha Freeman, the novelist, and Morton Blum, the builder, were the chief organizers. They didn’t expect any trouble, but you never knew. They asked Hesh and Truman, both of them party members and big men, toughened by war and adversity, to be in charge of security.

Hesh had his hair then, and for all his gruffness he was a teddy bear inside. Truman was the best-looking man in Peterskill, wild, a daredevil who rented a plane and flew it under the Bear Mountain Bridge — upside down, yet — and had his license taken away by the C.A.A. He and Hesh were best friends (Yes, she’d told him that first time, like you and Tom)—they were all friends. Lola and Christina had gone through school together, first at the Colony Free School and then later at Peterskill High. After the war, when Christina brought Walter’s father around, everybody fell for him. (Almost a local boy, but not quite, he’d grown up in Verplanck and gone to school at Hendrick Hudson. Hesh had played opposite him in football, and Lola recognized him at once as the vanquisher of Peterskill’s best, the triple threat who’d so many times made her heart sink as he poked a baseball over the fence, dribbled downcourt in his silken shorts or burst through a gap in the line with his muddied calves and the angry black slashes of greasepaint masking his eyes.) He was working in the old Van Wart iron foundry, which had gone out of business during the Depression and been revived and retooled by a one-armed war veteran from Brooklyn, and he was going to night school at City College to earn a B.A. degree in American history. “History,” Lola said, lingering over the syllables, “that was his passion.

“Your mother’s father — he was a president of the Colony Association and a party member — he gave Truman some literature and talked to him about the dignity of the worker, surplus value and the fetishism of commodities — we all did, we all talked to him — and before long, he’d joined us. Of course, it was your mother who really won him over, but that’s another story. That fall they were married, and they rented a little two-room bungalow out back of the Rosenberg place — you remember it, don’t you?”

Lola paused to snub out her cigarette. “In the summer, Walter, summer of forty-six, you were born.”

Walter knew when he was born. He’d learned the date when he was three or four, and if it should ever happen to slip his mind, he could always consult his driver’s license. He knew that bungalow too, his home through the first dim years of his life, just as he knew what was coming next. He leaned forward all the same.

So Truman joined the party. Truman got married. Truman spent two nights a week at City College, studying the American Revolution, and five nights a week at the card table in Hesh and Lola’s front room. One night Christina would make up a pan of stuffed cabbage or a hutspot stew she’d learned from her mother, or her crisp potato pancakes; the next night, Lola would bake a cheese-and-noodle kugel. That was the way it was. Lola couldn’t have children of her own. But when Walter was born, Truman came to her and asked if she and Hesh would consent to be the boy’s godparents, and the evenings went on as before, only now little Walter’s crib stood in the corner.

And then it was 1949. August. And the party wanted Paul Robeson to give a concert in Peterskill, and Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum came to Hesh and to Truman. For security. There wouldn’t be any violence. No, they didn’t think so. It was going to be a peaceful affair, Negroes and whites together, working people, women and children and old folks, enjoying a concert and maybe a couple of political speeches, exercising their right to assemble and to express unpopular ideas. But Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum came to Hesh and Truman. Just in case.

Hesh swung off a dirt lane onto Van Wart Road, not a mile from the concert grounds, and the first thing he noticed was the number of people gathered along the road. Some were headed in the direction of the Crane property, in groups of four and five, ambling and desultory, beer bottles in hand; others just stood at the side of the road, waiting, as if for a parade. A moment later he encountered the cars. Scores of them, parked alongside the road, drawn up on the shoulders on both sides, so that only a narrow one-way lane remained between them. It was only half past six.

Hesh was mystified. Peletiah had set aside a pasture the size of three football fields expressly for parking, and here they were lined up along the road like cabbies at the airport, practically choking off access to the place. Buses had to get through here, buses from the City, and camp trucks and more buses from the summer colonies in Rockland County and the Catskills. Not to mention hundreds upon hundreds of private cars. What was going on here? Why hadn’t they parked on the concert grounds?

He got his answer soon enough.

No one had even glanced at them until they reached the gauntlet of parked cars, but now, once they’d entered the single lane heading for the entrance to the concert grounds, heads began to turn. A man in an overseas cap shouted an obscenity and then something glanced off the side of the car. These people hadn’t come to see the concert — they’d come to prevent it.

Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum didn’t think there would be any violence — though the Peterskill paper had seethed with anti-Communist, anti-Jew and anti-Negro invective for the past month, though the local chapter of the VFW had threatened to hold a “loyalty rally” to protest against the concert, though flags had been waving aggressively from every porch in town and placards reviling Robeson had begun to appear in shop windows — but here it was. At the entrance, Hesh was confronted with a larger and denser crowd — two hundred or more — that erupted in jeers and insults when it became clear that he and his passengers were concertgoers rather than kindred spirits. They rolled up the windows, though it was eighty-five degrees outside, and Hesh shifted down as he approached the mouth of the narrow dirt road that gave onto Peletiah’s property.

“Nigger lovers!” someone shouted.

“Kikes!”

“Commie Jew bastards!”

A teenager with slicked-back hair and a face red with hate loomed out of the crowd to spit across the windshield, and suddenly Hesh had had enough and put his foot to the floor. The Plymouth leapt forward and the crowd parted with a shout, there was the thump-thump-thump of angry fists and feet against fenders and doors, and then they were in and the crowd was receding in the rearview mirror.

Shaken, Hesh pulled into the lot beside a rented bus. Three other buses, a truck bearing the legend “Camp Wahwahtaysee” and perhaps twelve or fifteen cars were already there. Christina’s face was white. Truman and Piet were silent. “Trouble,” Hesh muttered, “son of a bitch. We’re in for it now.”

Seven o’clock came and went. There was no Robeson, no Freeman, no Blum. Out on the road, nothing moved. The access routes were either blocked or jammed with the cars and buses of frustrated concertgoers, and no one could get in or out. Except for the patriots, that is, who fingered brass knuckles and tire irons or tore up fence posts and tried the heft of them, ambling along the blacktop road as if they owned it. Which they did, for some four hours that night. The unlucky few who did actually make it to Van Wart Road, thinking to sit on a blanket, sip a Coke or beer and enjoy a concert, were routed past the blockaded concert grounds, pulled from their cars and beaten. No one, from Peterskill to Kitchawank Colony and back again, saw a single policeman.

There were maybe a hundred and fifty people gathered in front of the stage when Hesh and the others arrived. Most were women and children who’d turned out early to enjoy an evening in the sylvan glades of northern Westchester. Besides Hesh, Truman and Piet, there were about forty men among them; up above, beyond the line of trees that marked the boundary of Peletiah’s property, five hundred patriots stormed up and down the road, looking for Communists.

Hesh took charge. He sent five teenagers — three boys and two girls who’d come up from Staten Island to serve as ushers — to keep an eye on the crowd at the entrance. “If they set foot on the property, you let me know,” he said. “Right away. Understand?” He asked Truman and Piet to take six of the men, arm themselves with anything they could find and fan out across the field to make sure none of the zealots came at them from the rear. Then he organized the rest of the men in ranks, eight across, their arms linked, and marched them up the road. The women and children — Walter’s mother amongst them — gathered around the empty stage. In the distance, they could hear the sound of shattering glass, truncated cries, the roar of the mob.

Walter knew the old road into the Crane place, didn’t he? It was no more than a footpath now, walled off since the riots, but in those days it was a pretty well-worn dirt road with a hummock of grass in the middle. Narrow though, and with steep shoulders and impenetrable brush — sticker bushes and poison ivy and whatnot — on either side. The road wound down into the meadow and then turned into a path when it crossed the stream on the far side and climbed up the ridge. People would drive down there for a little privacy — to play their car radios, neck and drink beer. Some nights there’d be ten cars parked in the meadow. Anyway, there was but one other way in and that was by foot only — at the far end of the meadow, where Van Wart Road swung back on it half a mile up. Hesh figured if he could hold the road, they’d be all right. If real trouble started, that is. He hoped the police would show up before then.

They didn’t.

The first fracas broke out about seven-thirty. Hesh and his men had stationed themselves just out of sight of the mob, at the road’s narrowest point, and they’d backed the camp truck up against their flank to further obstruct the way. If the patriots got worked up enough to attack — with odds something like fifteen to one — they had to be held here; if they reached the stage, and the women and children, anything could happen. And so they stood there, arms linked, waiting. Thirty-two strangers. A black stevedore in sweatshirt and jeans, a handful of men in merchant marine uniform, pot-bellied car dealers and liquor store owners and shipping clerks, an encyclopedia salesman from Yonkers and three scared black seminary students, who, like the kids at the gate, had come early to serve as ushers. They stood there and listened to the howls and curses of the mob and waited for the police to come and break it up. No one wanted a concert any more, no one wanted speeches or even the inalienable rights guaranteed under the Constitution: all they wanted, to a man, was to be out of there.

And then it started. There was a roar from the crowd, succeeded by a prolonged hiss and clatter that might have been the blast of a tropical storm thrashing the trees, and then the five ushers suddenly appeared around the bend — the three boys and two girls — running for their lives in a hail of rocks and bottles. The look in their eyes was something Hesh had seen before — at Omaha Beach, at Isigny, St. Lo and Nantes. Both girls were sobbing and one of the boys — he couldn’t have been more than fifteen — was bleeding from a gash over his right eye. They passed through the lines and then Hesh and his recruits locked arms once again.

A moment later the mob was on them. Five hundred or more strong now, but funneled into the narrow road like cattle in a chute, they burst against the defenders in a frenzied, stick-wielding rush. Hesh was struck across the face, slashed just behind the ear and battered on both forearms. “Kill the commies!” the mob chanted. “Lynch the niggers!”

It lasted no more than two or three minutes. Hesh’s men were bruised and bleeding, but they’d repulsed the first wave. Rabid, shrieking insults and flinging sticks and stones and whatever else they could lay their hands on, the mob withdrew a hundred feet to regroup. The better part of them were drunk, whipped to a frenzy by irrational hates and prejudices that were like open wounds, but others — there was a knot of them, the ones in dress shirts and ties and Legionnaire’s caps — were as cool as field marshals. Depeyster Van Wart was among this latter group, stiff and formal, his face composed, but with a pair of eyes that could have eaten holes in the camp truck. He was conferring with his brother — the one who was killed in Korea — and LeClerc Outhouse, who’d made all that money in the restaurant business. Did Walter remember him?

Walter nodded.

“Go back to Russia!” a man screamed, shaking his fist, and the whole crowd took it up. They were about to break ranks and charge again when the three policemen showed up. These were local cops, not state police, and the patriots knew them by name.

“Now boys,” Hesh could hear one of them saying, “we don’t like this any better than you do, but let’s keep it legal, huh?” And then, while his partners placated the mob with more of the same—“If it was up to me I’d shoot ’em down like dogs, right here and now, but you know we can’t do that; not in America, anyways”—the one who’d spoken first hitched up his trousers, squared his crotch and sauntered down to where Hesh and his battered recruits stood with folded arms and lacerated flesh.

“Who’s in charge here?” he demanded.

Hesh recognized him in that instant: Anthony Fagnoli. They’d gone to school together. Fagnoli had been two years younger, a criminal type with greased hair who was forever being suspended for smoking in the boys’ room or coming to class drunk. He’d dropped out of school as a sophomore to drive one of his uncle’s garbage trucks. Now he was a cop.

Hesh glanced around. Sasha Freeman hadn’t made it. Nor Morton Blum either. “I guess I am,” he said.

“You are, huh?” Fagnoli gave no sign of recognition.

“Kike!” screamed a patriot. “Hitler didn’t get you, but we will!”

“So just what in the fuck do you think you’re trying to do here, Mister?” Fagnoli said.

“You know damn well what we’re doing.” Hesh looked him hard in the eye. “We’re exercising our right of peaceful assembly — on private property, I might add.”

“Peaceful?” Fagnoli practically howled the word. “Peaceful?” he repeated, and then jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the crowd. “You call that peaceful?”

Hesh gave it up. “Look,” he said, “we don’t want any part of this. The concert is done. Off. It’s over. All we want is out.”

Fagnoli was smirking now. “Out?” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “You made this mess, clean it up yourself.” And then he turned his back and started to walk off.

“Officer. Please. If you tell them to disperse, they’ll listen.”

Fagnoli swung around as if he’d been hit from behind. His face was like a clenched fist. “Up yours,” he hissed.

Hesh watched him swagger back up the road and push his way into the mob, where he stopped a moment to confer with Van Wart and Outhouse and the other ringleaders. Then he turned to his two compatriots and said, in a voice that carried all the way back to Hesh and his men, “They want out, boys. What do you think of that?”

A man in an overseas cap suddenly bawled, “Out! You never get out! Every nigger bastard dies here tonight! Every Jew bastard dies here tonight!” And the crowd began to roar. Fagnoli and the two other cops had disappeared.

The second charge came a moment later. The patriots screamed down the narrow roadway, swinging fence posts and tire irons, flinging rocks and bottles, slamming with all the weight and fury of those behind them into Hesh’s lines. Hesh stood firm, grappled with a man swinging a fence post and ground his fist into the center of the man’s face till he felt something give. Again, the melee lasted no more than three or four minutes, and the attackers fell back. But Hesh was hurt. And so were his men. Hurt and scared. They had to get word out to the world at large, had to phone the police, the governor, The New York Times—they had to have help. And quick. If it didn’t come soon, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that some of them would die there on the road before the night was out.

It was at that point that Truman came into the picture. Like Hesh, he’d been out of the service for nearly four years now — but unlike Hesh and most other veterans, he’d never abandoned the habit of regular physical exercise. He kept himself in trim with the daily regimen of calisthenics, cross-country running and weight-lifting he’d begun when he was with Army Intelligence in England. At thirty-one, he’d barely lost a step on the eighteen-year-old dynamo who’d led Hendrick Hudson to the county championship in two sports. When Hesh realized that someone had to get out, he knew Truman was his man.

Instructing his troops to hold out at all costs, he doubled back down the road to the meadow, passing the forlorn cars and buses of the concertgoers and skirting the stage where a thousand folding chairs stood unoccupied. Hurrying, he caught a glimpse of Christina, white-faced and glum, sitting at the table with her pamphlets, and of the other women gathered in clusters before the empty stage. Here and there children were playing, but in hushed voices and with movements that might have been choreographed for an underwater ballet. One of the unlucky ushers — a girl of sixteen — sat alone beneath the stage, a bright carnation of blood flowering at the neck of her blouse.

He found Truman leaning against a tree that commanded a view of the meadow all the way out to the road at the far end of the property. Piet was with him, and they were conferring in low tones like a pair of military strategists surveying a battlefield — which wasn’t far from the truth of the matter. Their squad had caught two of the patriots out in the open and driven them back, but otherwise things were quiet. Hesh explained the situation and asked Truman if he would try to slip out and get to a phone. It would be dangerous, and he’d have to leave Christina behind, but if he didn’t get through it looked as if the worst was going to happen.

Truman shrugged. Sure, he’d give it a try.

“Good,” Hesh said. “Good. If the troopers know we’ve called out, if they know we’ve got to the papers, they’ll have no excuse — they’ll have to bail us out.”

Truman was staring down at his feet. He glanced up at Hesh and then away again. In the distance, they could hear the mob roaring. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll go. But I want to take Piet with me.”

Hesh glanced at Piet. His face was expressionless and pale, and his ears seemed unnaturally large in proportion to the rest of him. He couldn’t have been taller than four-eight or — nine, and if he weighed eighty-five pounds, half of it must have been in the funny old-fashioned buckled boots he always wore. “What the hell,” Hesh murmured. “Take him.” Piet wasn’t in this anyway — he’d come on a lark — and he probably couldn’t have held back one of the rednecks’ grandmothers if he’d wanted to. “You sure he won’t slow you down?”

Truman replied that Piet could take care of himself, and then he turned and started off across the field, the little man jogging to keep up with him, all but lost in the high stiff grass. It was the last Hesh — or anyone else — would see of them that night.

Lola paused. She’d lit another cigarette and let it burn itself out. The coffee cup was empty. The first time Walter had heard the story he’d interrupted here to ask what had happened to them; now he wanted to hear it again. “So what happened?”

No one knew for sure. It was as if he and Piet had simply vanished. There was no record of any call to the police or newspapers, Hesh’s knock sounded hollowly on the Dutch door of Piet’s furnished room in Peterskill next morning, and none of the injured at the local hospitals answered to their descriptions. Hesh was afraid they’d been killed, beaten to death by the mob and dumped in a gully along the road. Though he had a headache that was like a mallet inside his skull, though he’d taken ten stitches in his forearms and half a dozen over his right ear, and though he was haggard from stress and lack of sleep, he was up at first light on the morning following the riot, beating the bushes on either side of Van Wart Road. He found nothing. Little did he realize it at the time, but it would be nearly fifteen months before either he or Lola would lay eyes on Truman again. And Piet — Piet was gone for good.

Two days after the riot, Truman turned up at the bungalow out back of the Rosenberg place. By that point, Christina was in shock. Walter was three. He clung to his father’s knees, chanting “Daddy, Daddy,” but Truman ignored him. Truman gave Christina a weak grin and began to pack his things. “We thought you were dead,” she said. “What happened? What are you doing?” He wouldn’t answer her. Just kept packing. Sweaters, underwear, books — his precious books. Walter was crying. “Did they hurt you, is that it?” Christina screamed. “Truman, answer me!”

A car stood in the driveway. It was a Buick, and they say it belonged to Depeyster Van Wart. Piet, barely visible over the dash, was sitting in the passenger seat. “I’m sorry,” Truman said, and then he was gone.

It was nearly a year after the funeral when he turned up again. Unshaven, drunk, sorrowful-looking, in clothes that hung from him like a beggar’s rags, he showed up at Lola’s door, demanding to see his son. “He was abusive, Walter,” Lola said. “A changed man. He called me names.” This wasn’t the man she knew — this was some crazy on a street corner in Times Square, some bum. When Hesh came up from the basement to see what the commotion was about, Truman tried to shove past him and Hesh hit him, hit him in the face and then in the gut. Truman went down on his hands and knees on the front porch, gasping till the tears came to his eyes. Hesh shut the door.

By then, people were certain that Truman had betrayed them, that his sympathies had always been with the “patriots” and that he’d turned his back on family and friends in the most calculating and callous way. Rose Pollack, who hadn’t been able to get into the concert grounds that night, had seen him on the road with Depeyster Van Wart and LeClerc Outhouse just before a criminal put a brick through her windshield, and the day he turned up in the Colony to break the heart of Walter’s mother and pack up his books and underwear, Lorelee Shapiro had seen him driving Van Wart’s car. Or so she said. Lola didn’t know what to think — or Hesh either. They’d loved him, this jubilant and quick-smiling man, their comrade and friend, husband of Christina Alving, father of their godson. After the riots people were hysterical — they were looking for scapegoats. Lola — and Hesh too, Hesh too — had wanted to believe in him, but the evidence was against him. There was the way he’d disappeared, for one thing. And then there was that terrible fateful night of the riot itself.

Truman never called the state police; he never called the Times. And twenty minutes after he started off across the field, a hundred patriots swarmed in from the same direction — unchecked, and shouting filth. “Was it a coincidence, Walter? Was it?” Lola was asking the questions now. Walter said nothing.

It was getting dark, and out on the road the mob had begun to pelt Hesh and his defenders with rocks — fist-sized and bigger, hundreds upon hundreds of them, thudding against the flank of the camp truck, striking men in the face, in the chest and legs and groin. One of the seminary students was knocked flat, his nose smashed to pulp; the stevedore, a huge black man who made a conspicuous target, was already bleeding from a scalp wound when a barrage of stones brought him to his knees.

The patriots were thirty feet away now and closing. Their arms whipped forward, stones boomed off the truck, skittered across the road, hit home with a dull wet thump. Hesh heard that sound, the sound of the butcher’s mallet on a slab of meat — thump, thump, thump — and knew they were finished. He saw the stevedore go down, and then felt himself hit in both legs; in the same instant a stone glanced off his cheek, and when he raised an arm to shield his face, a beer bottle caught him in the ribs. This was ridiculous. Useless. Suicidal. He was no martyr. “Break!” he suddenly roared. “Break and run!” Bleeding, battered, their suits and sportshirts torn to rags, the defenders dropped back, skirted the truck and flung themselves headlong down the darkened road. Behind them, the patriots surged forward with a shout.

At first, Hesh and the others retreated in panic, without direction, every man for himself. All that changed when they came upon the arena. The field was brightly lit — one of the women had started up the generator and flashed on the stage lights as night fell — and Hesh and his dazed comrades were suddenly confronted by the spectacle of a hundred wild-eyed men running amuck amidst their wives and children. It was unendurable. Without hesitation — without even breaking stride — they came together again, charging into the melee in a wedge, swinging sticks and fists, sick and maddened and ready to die. The patriots fell back under the fury of the assault, and the women and children who’d been caught out in the open made for the stage as if it were a life raft in a churning sea. Hesh and his men grappled with their adversaries for a moment and then broke for the stage themselves as the patriots from above roared down on them. It was then that an unknown hand let loose the bottle that laid Hesh low. One moment he was handing a child up to the stage, and the next he was stretched out on the ground.

Hesh never knew how long he was out — half an hour? Forty-five minutes? But when he woke, the night was black, lit only by a bonfire in front of the stage, and the patriots were gone. They’d spent their rage on the folding chairs, on the pamphlets and tables and sound equipment. One of them had cut the lights and then they’d rampaged through the field, smashing chairs, burning books and pamphlets, putting stones through the windows of the buses and cars in the lot. They were like Indians in a movie, Christina said later. Savages. Whooping, screaming like animals. They destroyed everything they could get their hands on, and then, as if by a prearranged signal, they vanished. A few of the women had been hurt in the scuffle, a dozen others were hysterical (Christina included, who couldn’t locate either Truman or Hesh and feared the worst), and several of the men had broken bones and gashes that required stitches, but no one had been lynched, no one died.

Just after Hesh regained his senses, six pairs of headlights appeared on the dirt road above them, which the patriots had obligingly cleared by overturning the camp truck in the weeds and opening a path through the barrier at Van Wart Road. Frozen, expecting some new treachery, the concertgoers huddled on the stage and watched the cold beams approach. Then, suddenly, the red lights began to flash and a woman cried out, “Thank God, they’re finally here!”

Walter didn’t want to hear the rest. Didn’t want to hear how Lorelee Shapiro had got through to the state police, who’d known about the situation all along but took their own sweet time getting there, or how his mother was in a state of shock, or how Lola had helped organize the second concert, held a week later on the same bloodied ground, a concert at which Paul Robeson and Will Connell actually did sing and which was attended by 20,000 people and went off without a hitch — until the concertgoers tried to get out. He didn’t want to hear about the second riot, about the cars and buses stoned all the way out Van Wart Road to the parkway, didn’t want to hear about police collusion and the redneck veterans of the first riot sporting armbands that read WAKE UP, AMERICA: PETERSKILL DID! It was history. All he wanted to hear was that his father wasn’t a traitor, a turncoat, a backstabber and a fink.

“Next week it was worse, Walter,” Lola was saying, caught up in her own story now, a freshly lighted cigarette in the ashtray before her, but Walter was no longer listening. He remembered that scene in the kitchen of the bungalow as he might have remembered a distant nightmare, remembered clinging to his father’s legs while his mother raged, remembered the smell of him, the sweat like a tomcat’s musk, the sweet corrupt odor of alcohol. No! his mother shrieked. No! No! No!

“But we had to do it, Walter — we couldn’t let them get away with it. We had to show them that this was America, that we could say and think and do what we wanted. Twenty thousand turned out, Walter. Twenty thousand.”

Scum. His father was scum. A man who’d sold out his friends and deserted his wife and son. Why fight it? That’s what Walter was thinking when he looked up from the table and saw his father standing there by the stove, framed between Lola’s head and the rigid declamatory index finger of her right hand. He looked as he had in the hospital — neat, in suit and tie and with his hair cut and combed, but barefoot still. Don’t you believe it, Truman growled.

Lola didn’t see him, didn’t hear him. “Animals, Walter. They were animals. Filth. Nazis.”

Two sides, Walter, his father said. Two sides to every story.

Suddenly Walter cut her off. “Lola, okay. Thanks. I’ve heard enough.” He pushed himself up from the table and grappled with his crutches. Outside, birds sat motionless in the trees and pale yellow moths tumbled like confetti through cathedrals of sunlight. Truman was gone. “He had to have a reason,” Walter said. “My father, I mean. Nobody knows what really happened, right? You weren’t even there, and my mother’s dead. I mean, nobody knows for sure.”

Lola took a long slow drag at her cigarette before she answered. Her eyes were distant and strange, her features masked in smoke. “Go ask Van Wart,” she said.

Among the Savages

She was living in a bark hut on the outskirts of a Weckquaesgeek village, ostracized by Boer and redman alike, and she’d shaved her head with an oyster shell as a token of abnegation and penance. On that fateful day three years back when God’s wrath had spared the oak tree only to strike at her home and abolish her family, Katrinchee, who should have been out in the fields with them, should have been huddled with them in the cabin when the thunderbolt struck, was instead sequestered in a shady bower with Mohonk, son of Sachoes, and a stone bottle of gin. She stroked his chest, his thighs and his groin, as he stroked her, and she sipped gin to assuage the guilt she felt over her father’s death. (Oh yes: that guilt haunted her night and day. She couldn’t look at a stewpot without seeing her father, and the thought of venison in any of its incarnations was so inadmissible that even the sight of a startled doe on some woodland path was enough to make her go dizzy and feel the nausea creeping up her throat.) When a Kitchawank boy came to them in the wigwam where they’d gone to seek shelter from the storm, breathless, his eyes wild, a tale of destruction rained from the heavens on his lips, the guilt rose up to suffocate her. Moeder, she choked, and then collapsed as if her legs had been shot out from under her. Sitting there in a daze, staring numbly at Mohonk, at Wahwahtaysee and the faces of the savage painted strangers hovering over her, she felt a new and insupportable knowledge festering in her veins: she’d killed them all. Yes. Killed them as surely as if she’d lined them up and shot them. First her father and now this: she’d lain with a heathen, and here was God’s vengeance. In grief, in despair, she took a honed shell to her scalp and buried herself in Mohonk.

Her son Squagganeek² was born a year later. His eyes were green, like Agatha’s, and this peculiarity caused a good deal of consternation among the Kitchawanks. They were the eyes of greed, argued one faction, the eyes of a devil, a sorcerer, a white man, and the infant should be cast out to wander the waste places of the earth. But another faction, Wahwahtaysee among them, argued that he was the son of the son of a chief and that he had his place in the tribe. As things turned out, none of it really mattered. It was Mohonk, and Mohonk alone, who would decide the fate of his son.

But Mohonk had turned strange. Ever since she’d cut her hair, Katrinchee had noticed the change in him. He was testy. He was morose. He launched interminable thick-tongued diatribes against the least offensive objects — stones, dirt clods, fallen leaves. He drank gin and it made him crazy. Snow owl, he called her and pointed derisively to her cropped head. Her hair had been the color of the hawk’s underbelly, copper red, sacred and unattainable. Now, with her smooth white skull that looked like the bulb of an onion and the eyes that stared out of her face in their huge riveting grief, she looked like the snow owl. One night, three days drunk on the Hollands he’d filched from Jan Pieterse, he rose shakily to his feet and stood over her as she suckled the infant. “Snow owl,” he said, the light of the fire elongating his cheekbones and masking his eyes in shadow, “go catch a mouse.” Then he pulled the raccoon coat tight around him and lurched off into the night on spindle legs. She never saw him again.

To the Weckquaesgeeks, she was a holy fool, one of the mad wandering ones to whom visions are granted. (And she did have her visions. Shivering in the hut, Squagganeek at her breast, she saw Harmanus, his limbs twisted from the fall, dancing a macabre shuffle; she saw Agatha with her broom raised in anger; she saw Jeremias and the terrible annealed scar that terminated his leg.) The day after Mohonk walked out on her she’d gathered up her things, strapped Squagganeek to her back and followed the river north; two days later she stumbled across the Weckquaesgeek camp on a miserable wind-swept beach below Suycker Broodt mountain. With her shorn head, tattered dress and the trembling lips that never ceased their muttering, she came on them like an apparition, a pale ghost, and they gathered around to stare at her and the freak of an infant she held in her arms. Exhausted, she fell back against a tree and slumped to the ground; within minutes, she was asleep.

In the morning she woke to find that someone had thrown a bearskin over her legs and set a bowl of corn mush on the stump beside her. The Weckquaesgeeks — an unlucky tribe, losers of fingers, toes and eyes, disease-ridden and unkempt — watched her at a respectful distance. Slowly, with trembling hands and wild eyes, she brought the bowl to her lips and ate. Then, after making gestures of thanksgiving and suckling Squagganeek at her breast, she got up and built herself a crude hut against the base of a tree. From then on, each morning, she found a bowl of squash or sturgeon or acorn meal on her doorstep, or perhaps a pigeon or rabbit (but no venison — no, never venison). The seasons changed. Squagganeek grew. She squatted in the hut and chewed hides till they were soft, wore moccasins and a leather apron like a squaw and shaved her head to the quick whenever she happened to reach up and feel the bristle sprouting there. Cramped, dirty, a breeding ground for ticks, chiggers, gnats and no-see-ums, the hut was no better than an animal’s den. But what could she expect? This was her due.

At one point, for her son’s sake, she thought of returning to Van Wartwyck, of throwing herself on the mercy of the patroon and begging for shelter and employment, but she knew there would be no mercy for her. She was a miscegenator, a renegade, a whore: there were penalties for what she’d done. The Dutch laws, now superseded by as yet undefined English ones, called for a fine of twenty-five guilders for cohabiting with a squaw, escalating to fifty if she conceived and to a hundred if she gave birth; the concept of a white woman fornicating with a greasy musk-smeared savage was so utterly unthinkable that the good burghers and Boers hadn’t bothered with a law — bodily mutilation and banishment would suffice in a pinch.

And so it was — life like a succession of wounds, no joy but for the child, the seasons giving way in null repetition — until one day in early summer a waking vision took on flesh and came to redeem her. She was crouched in the hut, chewing hides, Squagganeek’s cries drifting faintly to her as the Weckquaesgeek boys tormented him for his green eyes and mad white mother, when a face appeared in the doorway. It was a face she’d seen a thousand times in her sleep or in the embers of the fire, but now it was changed somehow, no longer the face of a boy — no, it was fuller, harder, better defined. She squeezed her eyes shut and murmured an incantation. Nothing happened. The face hung there in that doorway so low even a dog would have to stoop to enter, hung there as if disembodied, the features that were so familiar and yet so alien to her creased with shock and bewilderment. She was about to cry out, shriek his name — anything to break the spell — but Jeremias spoke first. He uttered a single word, his voice quavering with shock and disbelief: “Katrinchee?”

They’d taken him to their bosom, Staats and Meintje, fed and clothed him and treated him as one of their own. He worked in the fields alongside Staats and his eldest boy Douw, wielding scythe and mathook like a full-grown man, though he was just sixteen and laboring under his handicap. When they sat down to table, Meintje always managed to find him a choice cut of meat or a lump of sugar for his hot chocolate, and she was always urging more on him, as if to make up for his time of affliction and want when there was no hand to feed him. They gave him affection and they gave him hope, and Jeremias never forgot it. But when he thought of Van Wart, growing fat off the labor of others, when he thought of the bow-backed schout and that lard-ass of an agent who’d driven him from the farm where his father had died, he felt the resentment seethe in him like pus in a wound.

He’d lived at peace with himself for two and a half years, thinking neither of past nor future, whittling a new strut for his leg every few months as he grew up and away from the old one, picking at the acne that sprouted like bread mold on his face and neck, hunting the woods and fishing the river. But then one afternoon he walked down to Jan Pieterse’s — for some fish hooks, he told himself, but in truth because he was feeling restless, stifled, dissatisfied in a new and indefinable way, and he just wanted to get away from the farm for a bit — and all that suddenly changed. He was in the back of the store, savoring the smells, the quiet, the rich immovable shadows that were like the background of a painting he’d seen once in the nave of a church in Schobbejacken, lingering amongst the furs that whispered of secret wild places, the hogsheads of ale and salt herring, the sacks of spices, the bolts of cloth and kegs of spirits. From outside, beyond the open door, the voices of Jan Pieterse and Farmer Ten Haer drifted lazily across the sunstruck afternoon. Jeremias leaned back against a shelf of furs, the fish hooks gone warm in his hand, and closed his eyes.

When he opened them, a girl was standing there, her back against the wall, looking as if she’d just discovered a toad in the butter dish. “Oh,” she said, glancing away, catching his eye and then glancing away again, “I didn’t know anyone was back here.” She was holding a length of ribbon in her hand, and she was dressed in homespun skirts, linen cap and a white blouse that pinched her arms just above the elbow.

“I’m back here, I guess,” Jeremias said. He felt stupid; there were cobwebs in his brain. “Um, I mean, I was just buying some hooks.” He opened his palm and held out his hand to show her.

“Ja,” she said, “and I was buying ribbon.” She dangled a length of black armozine and smiled.

He smiled back and said he’d never seen her here before.

She shrugged as if to say so much the worse for you, and then found it necessary to balance on one foot and twist a finger in her hair while she told him she lived in Croton, near the Van Wart house. As an afterthought, she added, “Sometime vader brings me up this way when he has business.”

Then they both fell silent and Jeremias became aware of a new voice outside the door — a voice he’d heard before, cadences summoned from some deep recess of memory. He heard Farmer Ten Haer blustering about Wolf Nysen, heard Jan Pieterse’s scoffing retort, and then that other voice, and it made him go cold.

“And you?” she said finally.

Jan Pieterse’s dog changed his position among the furs with a sybaritic grunt. Jeremias found himself staring into a pair of eyes that were like the blueware of the rich, a sheen of glaze and a color as deep as the Scheldt. “Me?” he said. “I live up on the van der Meulen farm, but I’m a Van Brunt. Jeremias Van Brunt. I’ll be seventeen this summer.”

“I’m Neeltje Cats,” she said. “I just turned fifteen.” And then, with pride: “My father’s the schout.”

Yes. Of course. The schout. Jeremias’ eyes went hard and he gritted his teeth.

“What—?” she began, and then faltered. She was staring at the loose cuff of his pantaloons. “What happened to you?”

He looked down at his wooden leg as if he were seeing it for the first time. Suddenly the atmosphere had changed. He couldn’t see the pelts for the claws that dully glinted in the light filtering through the open door. “I had an accident,” he said. “When I was fourteen.”

She nodded as if to say yes, it doesn’t matter, the world’s a harsh place — or so her parents had told her. “My father says Pieter Stuyvesant was a great man.”

“He was,” Jeremias said. “He is.” And then all at once he felt something go loose in him, some cord that had been wound too tight, and suddenly he was playing the fool, skating across the floor on his wooden strut, hair in his eyes and his face frozen in a scowl, leveling an imaginary sword at the Englishers like the great man himself.

Neeltje laughed. Pure, untroubled, as marvelous a thing as the music of the spheres, that laugh was what hooked him. No, he didn’t prick his finger on one of the barbs or fall face forward into the barrel of soused pig’s feet, but he was hooked all the same. That laugh was a revelation. He looked at her, laughing himself now, studied her as she stood there grinning with a piece of ribbon in her hand, and saw his future.

The first thing he did when he got back to the farm was ask Staats about her. His stepfather was around the side of the house, standing on a chair and painting the wall with a whitewash made of pulverized oyster shells. “Cats?” he said, pausing to shove back his wide-brimmed hat and rub a palm over his bare skull. “I knew a Cats once back in Volendam. Nasty beggar. Full of piss and vinegar.”

Jeremias stood in the gathering dusk and listened politely as his stepfather gave a detailed account of the petty crimes and scandals fomented by this nefarious Cats — Staats couldn’t recall the duyvil’s first name — some twenty years earlier in the town of Volendam, halfway around the world. When Staats paused for breath, Jeremias gently steered him back to the here and now. “But what about the schout— Joost Cats?”

Staats paused again. “Joost?” he said, groping for the connection. “Ja, Ja, Joost. He doesn’t have a daughter, does he?”

Meintje was no more helpful. A militant look came into her eyes at the mention of the schout and she advised Jeremias to let bygones be bygones. “If I was you,” she said, “I woudn’t go near him or his daughter either.”

A month dragged by. Jeremias cleared land, burned stumps, built walls of fieldstone, milked and fed the cows, weeded the barley field and shoveled shit. He ate fish, fowl and game, ate corn cakes, porridge and bruinbrod, drank cider and ’Sopus ale. He slept on a cornhusk mattress with Douw van der Meulen, pinched tobacco and tried it behind the barn, swam naked in Van Wart Creek. And there were long hot afternoons when all he did was wander over to the old farm and stare at the ashes. Through it all though, he never shook the image of Neeltje Cats.

Then came the day when a pock-marked Kitchawank in a pair of expansive pantaloons knocked at the door. It was mid-June, the light like a fine wash, and Jeremias had just sat down with the family to the evening meal. Meintje opened the door partway, as she might have opened it on a peddler back in Volendam. “Yes?” she said.

But Staats was already on his feet, Jeremias, Douw and the three younger children staring up at him in surprise. “Why, it’s old Jan,” he said, and Meintje pulled back the door.

The Kitchawank was shirtless, his torso a topography of scars, abrasions and infected insect bites, his moccasins torn and mudspattered. He was known as old Jan in the neighborhood and he made his living doing odd jobs and drifting from village to village, carrying messages for a doit or a stein of beer. He’d survived the smallpox that had ravaged his tribe some thirty years earlier, only to find that the fever had coddled his brain. Staats knew him from Jan Pieterse’s. Meintje had never laid eyes on him before.

“What is it, Jan?” Staats said. “Have you got a message for us?”

The Indian stood there in the doorway, impassive, his face as blasted and worn as bedrock. “Ja, I have a message,” he said in his halting, rudimentary Dutch. “For him,” and he pointed to Jeremias.

“Me?” Jeremias rose from the table in confusion. Who would send him a message? He didn’t know a soul in the great wide world but for the boys of the neighborhood and the people gathered around the table.

Old Jan nodded. Then he turned to point at a gap in the trees beyond the barn, and Jeremias, standing at the door now with Staats and Meintje, with Douw and Barent, Klaes and little Jannetje, saw a gaunt figure wrapped in a raccoon coat emerge from the shadows. “Your sister,” old Jan began, turning back to him, and all at once Jeremias could feel the blood beating in his ears. Katrinchee. He hadn’t given her a thought in ages. For all he knew she might have been dead, so completely had she vanished from the community. “Your sister,” the Indian repeated, but his voice trailed off. He looked at Jeremias and his eyes were asleep.

“Yes? What about her?” Staats said.

From across the field came the sound of Mohonk’s voice, urgent and nagging, and old Jan’s head jerked up as if he’d been caught napping. “She thinks,” he murmured, “you are burned up and dead. “She’s—” and his voice gave out.

“Jan, Jan — snap out of it,” Staats growled, taking the Indian by the arm, but it was the sound of Mohonk’s voice that brought him around again. Mohonk cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted a second time, and old Jan’s eyes cleared momentarily. He swept their faces with a distant gaze and said, “A glass of beer.”

“Yes, yes, beer,” Staats said. “But first the message.”

He looked at them as if he’d just come into the world. “Your sister,” he repeated for the third time, “she’s a Weckquaesgeek whore.”

Staats van der Meulen was a compassionate man. There was no room for her in the house, but he fixed up a pallet in the barrack of the barn and Katrinchee crept into the straw with her child like some shorn and abandoned madonna. Oxen snorted, cows lowed, swallows flitted among the shadows. Meintje bit her lip and sent a basket of day-old bread and a bit of milk cheese out to her. “This is only temporary,” she warned Staats, leveling her wooden spoon at him. “Tomorrow — and here she might have been talking of a matricide or leper—“she goes.”

Tomorrow became the next day and then the next. “We can’t just turn her out to go back to the savages,” Staats argued, but Meintje was adamant. The girl was fallen, she was subversive and unrepentant, a miscegenator, and they couldn’t have her around the children. “I give you to the end of the week,” she warned.

For his part, Jeremias knew nothing of the conflict broiling around him. He was spending most of his time out in the barn with Katrinchee and Squagganeek, relearning the past, and he was too elated to notice much of anything. A week before he’d been fatherless, motherless, bereft of siblings, his nearest blood relation an uncle in Schobbejacken he hardly knew. And now, not only had his sister been restored to him, but wonder of wonders, he’d become an uncle himself. He sat for hours with Squagganeek, playing at cards or Trock, staring into the child’s eyes and seeing his father, his mother, seeing little Wouter. There was never any doubt in his mind: of course Staats and Meintje would take them in. Of course they would.

But when the week was up, Meintje took matters into her own hands. There were no tears, no fits, no raised voices or recriminations. When Staats and the children awoke at first light to the bleating of unmilked goats and the petulant squabbling of unfed chickens, they found the hearth cold, and Meintje, still in her nightgown, seated in her rocker on the far side of the room. What’s more, her hands were clasped together, as if in prayer, and she was facing the wall. “Meintje — what is it?” Staats cried, rushing to her. “Are you all right? Is it the grippe?” She said nothing. He took hold of her hands. They were lifeless, they were dead. She was staring at the wall.

Within minutes, the house was in an uproar. Meintje, who’d never before sat down in her life except to shuck peas or darn stockings and whose hands had never been idle, had been stricken by some terrible and enervating affliction — she’d become one of the living dead, unhearing, unseeing, unmoving. “Moeder!” cried little Jannetje, flinging herself at her mother’s feet, while the baby, little Klaes, howled as if all the world’s dole had suddenly been revealed to him. Meintje never even turned her head. Jeremias hovered uneasily in the background, exchanging looks with Douw. Then he went out to see to his sister.

Meintje sat there for six days. No one saw her move, not even to get up and relieve herself. Sometimes her eyes were closed; sometimes they were fixed on the wall in an unblinking stare. Talking to her — asking if she wanted to eat, sleep, see a doctor, send back to Volendam for her aged mother — was like talking to a stone. Meanwhile, the family managed as best it could. Douw and Barent tried their hands at cooking, Staats did the wash, and once, in desperation, Jeremias attempted a batch of corn cakes that looked and tasted like the residue of a chimney fire. Before long, Meintje’s kitchen — the envy of the neighborhood, refulgent as an ice pond and scoured right on down to the cracks of the floorboards — was a festering quagmire of food scraps, barnyard muck and shattered crockery. Finally, on the eve of the seventh day, she spoke.

The family was startled. They’d got so used to her silence and immobility they’d forgotten she was there at all. This was not the wife and mother they’d known a week ago, this was a piece of furniture, a footstool, a coatrack. Odds and ends had begun to accumulate around her like detritus: socks, vegetable peels, a half-chewed carrot. Jannetje’s doll lay nose down in her lap, Klaes’ cap was flung over the back of the chair and the Trock board had somehow become wedged between her shoulder and the chair arm. Now, as she spoke, the entire family started up in fright, as if the floorboards had shouted “You’re trampling me!” or the kettle had shrieked as the kindling caught fire beneath it. For all that, her message was pretty straightforward. Staats slapped his forehead, Jeremias went cold. Meintje spoke to the wall, four words only, each one bitten off as if it cost a thousand guilders: “Is she gone yet?”

For Jeremias, the choice was clear. He wheeled around, thumped through the door, stalked across the yard and into the barn. Five minutes later he emerged with Squagganeek on his back and the shorn and wild-eyed Katrinchee at his side. He took nothing with him: no clothes, no tools, no food. He didn’t look back.

It took Staats nearly a week to find him. He traveled as far south as the Sint Sink village, went north to Cold Spring and east to Crom’s Pond. He knocked at farmhouse doors, poked his head into shanties, wigwams and taverns, and got the same answer everywhere he went: no one had seen a one-legged boy, nor a shorn meisje or half-breed toddler either — it was almost as if they’d vanished from the face of the earth. But Staats persisted. He had to find them, had to tell Jeremias how he felt, had to explain and absolve himself. It was Meintje — he couldn’t do anything with her. If it was up to him he would have found room under his roof for Katrinchee and her bastard too. He would have. Jeremias knew that. It was just that Meintje was a strong-willed woman, that’s all, a woman who stuck to her principles. …

Staats wasn’t a man for words, but he rehearsed his speech like a practiced orator as he plodded through the woods or walked his horse along the glittering mud banks of the river. If it weren’t for Douw, though, he might never have had the chance to deliver it. Jeremias wasn’t in Croton or Crom’s Pond or Beverwyck or Poughkeepsie either. Douw could have told him that. After all, they’d slept in the same bed for two and a half years, they’d roamed the hills together, sat over hornbooks in the Crane parlor, filched pumpkins and crept up side by side on nesting quail and dozing frogs — Douw knew him as well as he knew himself. When finally his father thought to ask, and Douw let him know where Jeremias would almost certainly have gone, Staats stared at him dumbfounded for a moment, then cursed himself. Of course: the old farm.

That evening Staats ate a hurried supper of bread and porridge, and then made his way on foot out to the Van Brunt place. It was dusk when he got there, fireflies cutting holes in the shadows, the boles of the trees slipping in and out of rank, cicadas chattering, mosquitoes on the wing. At first he saw nothing — or rather, he saw leaves and trees, the ruins of the cabin, the white oak in its full vigor — but then, as he edged closer, he saw that Jeremias’ rotting lean-to, the lean-to of his exile and abandonment, was freshly covered with sheets of elm bark. And there was a sound he picked up now too, a scraping or rasping that could have come from no animal he knew.

He found Jeremias crouched over the carcass of a rabbit, skinning it with a sharpened stone. Katrinchee and Squagganeek, who’d been gathering kindling, looked up with startled faces. “Jeremias,” Staats said, and when the boy shot him a glance over his shoulder, his eyes were feral and cold.

Staats repeated the name twice more, then delivered his halting speech. He’d brought along an axe and a knife, and he held them out now to Jeremias, along with the basket of food — bread, smoked shad and cabbage — Meintje had packed for him. Jeremias said nothing. “Won’t you come home?” Staats asked him, and it was almost a whisper.

“This is my home,” Jeremias said.

It was crazy. Hopeless. Irresponsible. June already, and the crops in the ground, and Jeremias wanted to make a go of it. A cripple with a half-mad sister and her little shit-pants bastard, and he wanted to rebuild the cabin, reclaim the fields, put in a tardy crop and harvest for winter. Meintje clucked her tongue over it, Douw stared down into his cup of cider. But the following morning, Staats, Douw and ten-year-old Barent were there with their tools and a hamper of food that could have provisioned the English fleet. Jeremias embraced them solemnly, one by one. Then they started plowing.

Over the weeks, the entire community pitched in. Reinier Oothouse lent a hand with the carpentry, Hackaliah Crane stopped by with his team, Oom Egthuysen pledged a milk cow that properly belonged to the patroon and Meintje took up a collection among the huts vrouwen for the odd cup and saucer, bedding and cookware. Even Jan Pieterse got into the act, donating two barrels of ’Sopus ale, a sack of seed onions and a new plowshare and moldboard. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to get them on their feet. By early July, Jeremias had wheat and corn in the ground and a patch of pumpkin, calabash and turnip sprouting outside the door, and Katrinchee, now nearly nineteen, was presiding over her own kitchen for the first time in her young life. The cabin had gone up in two weeks, right over the charred remnants of the old one, and though it was crude, musty, close and dank, it would keep them alive through the winter. Things were looking up.

How the patroon got wind of it was a mystery to Staats (old Van Wart was afflicted in knuckle and toe by a virulent eruption of the gout, and hadn’t been up from Croton in six months or more), but get wind of it he did. The patroon was incensed. He was being taken advantage of while he lay on his sickbed. There were squatters at Nysen’s Roost, freeloaders, vagrants who’d moved in like skulking savages and laid claim to his land without bothering to acknowledge his sovereignty or make arrangements to pay him rent. It was intolerable. An outrage to the laws of man and God, and a thumbing of the nose at the very lineaments of a just society. He sent the schout to investigate.

Joost didn’t relish the job. And he didn’t want to bring Neeltje along either. He really didn’t. It wasn’t that he expected trouble — not at this stage, at any rate — but that he was afraid she might see something she shouldn’t. Who knew who these people were? They could be drunk and depraved, living in sin, eating offal and sucking oyster shells; they could be half-breeds or Yankees or runaway slaves. All he knew was that a family — man, woman and child — had taken up residence on the Nysen place and that it was his job either to settle them in properly as tenants of the patroon or evict them. No, he definitely didn’t want to bring his daughter along. But then Neeltje had other ideas. “Vader,” she pleaded, giving him a look that would have stripped the feathers from an angel’s wing, “won’t you take me along with you? Please?” It would be so easy, she argued. He could leave her at Jan Pieterse’s while he saw to his business and then come for her afterward. Moeder had a whole list of things she needed, and why shouldn’t he save himself some time and let her get them? She could pick up little presents for the younkers too. “Oh, please, please?” she begged, and Ans and Trijintje, nine and ten respectively, looked on with hopeful faces. “There’s so much we need.”

So he’d saddled the one-eyed nag and gone up to the patroon’s stable for the mare, and they set out for the upper manor house for the first time since spring and the Crane/Oothouse dispute. Joost was miserable. The day was hot, the deerflies were a plague and a menace, the baldric tugged at his shoulder and the silver plume hung in his eyes, and with each lurching step the nag took he swore he’d rather be out on the bay dipping for crabs, but he went on anyway, ever responsive to the call of duty. Neeltje, on the other hand, didn’t mind the heat a bit. Or the deerflies either. She was going to Jan Pieterse’s, and her sisters weren’t. That was enough for her.

They stopped in at the upper manor house for a bite to eat, and the place was as cool as a cellar with its great three-foot-thick walls. Vrouw van Bilevelt, who, along with Cubit the slave and his wife, looked after the place, served them a cold cream soup and crabcakes. They paid their respects to Gerrit Jacobzoon de Vries and his family, who’d managed the upper farm and overseen the mill since the death of the patroon’s brother, and then made their way down to the Blue Rock so that Neeltje could do her shopping while Joost saw to the interlopers at Nysen’s Roost. But when they got there, they found the trading post deserted and the door barred. Neeltje, biting her lip in frustration, tried the latch sixteen times and.knocked at the door till Joost thought her knuckles would crack open. Then she discovered Jan Pieterse’s note. In the dirt. Dipping crabs, she read aloud. Back at six. Joost shook his head. It was barely two-thirty. There was nothing to do but take Neeltje along with him.

On the way up the hill from Acquasinnick Creek, through the woods that were haunted by the phantoms of murdered Kitchawanks and the unhappy daughters of Wolf Nysen, he told her that he didn’t expect any trouble, but that for her own safety she should come no nearer than the edge of the clearing and under no circumstances should she attempt to interfere or to speak with these people. Was that clear? Neeltje looked glumly at the splintered rock and rotting trunks that lay around her, at the shadows that were like pools in the belly of a cave, and nodded her head. She had no interest in this place or these people, no interest in her father’s affairs, for that matter. All she cared about was Jan Pieterse’s, and Jan Pieterse’s, of all days of the year, had to be closed today. She was so frustrated she felt like shrieking till her lungs turned inside out. And she would have done it too if her father weren’t there — and if the place weren’t quite so hushed and gloomy.

Before long they’d reached the top of the rise and emerged on a clearing dominated by a single high-crowned tree. On the left was a tumbledown wall and to the right a crude cabin of notched green logs. There was no barn, no pond, no orchard and no animals but for a sickly cow tethered beneath the tree. The place seemed deserted. “Stay here,” her father said, and he straightened up in his saddle and jogged forward into the dooryard. “Hello!” he called. “Anybody home?”

Not a sound.

Her father called out again, and the cow gave him a baleful look before dropping its head to crop a tuft of grass at the perimeter of its tether. It was then that a woman appeared from around the corner of the house, a bucket in her hand. The first thing Neeltje noticed was her feet. They were shoeless and filthy, gleaming with fresh muck as if she’d just waded out of a bog or something. And her dress — it was an obvious hand-me-down, patched, faded and stained, and so worn the flesh showed through. But that wasn’t the worst of it. As the woman drew closer to her father, Neeltje saw with a jolt that what she’d taken to be a cap was no cap at all — this wasn’t linen, but flesh. The woman was bald! Scalped, plucked, denuded, her head as smooth and pale and barren as Dominie Van Schaik’s. Neeltje felt something tighten in her stomach. How could a woman do that to herself? she wondered. It was so … so ugly. Was it lice, was that it? Was she a harlot cast out of Connecticut? A Roman nun? Had the Indians got hold of her and … and violated her?

“I’m the sheriff here,” she heard her father say, “Joost Cats. I’ve been sent by the lawful owner and proprietor of these lands to inquire as to your presence here.”

The woman looked bewildered, lost, as if it were she who’d arrived at this place for the first time in her life and not Neeltje. Did she speak Dutch even?

“You have no right here,” Joost said. “Who are you and where have you come from?”

“Katrinchee,” the woman said finally, setting down the bucket. “I’m Katrinchee.”

But then two more figures appeared around the corner of the house — a child, pale eyes in a dark face — and a man swaying awkwardly over a muddy wooden peg. It took her a moment — everything so different, the place so strange — before she recognized him. Jeremias. The name had been on her lips before. In the spring. For a month or so after the last trip it had been with her at the oddest moments — in the early hours of the morning, at prayers, as she sat at the loom or butterchurn. Jeremias. But what was he doing here?

She was no more surprised than her father. The schout jerked his head back as if he’d been snatched by the collar, springing up out of his customary slouch like a jack-in-the-box. “Van Brunt?” he gasped, his voice breaking with incredulity. “Jeremias Van Brunt?”

Jeremias crossed the yard to where the schout perched atop the one-eyed nag. He stopped directly in front of him, no more than a yard away, measuring him with a steady gaze. “That’s right,” he said. “I’ve come back home.”

“But you can’t. … These are private lands.”

“Private lands, my ass,” Jeremias said, and he bent to pluck a stick of firewood from the ground. The woman drew back and pressed the child to her.

Joost snatched angrily at the reins and the nag shivered and showed its teeth in protest. The boy was impossible. A renegade. A loser. He had no respect for authority, no knowledge of the world and nothing to sustain him but his self-righteous smirk. Joost remembered the defiant little face in the van der Meulens’ doorway, the cocky thrust of the shoulders at Jan Pieterse’s, his daughter’s laughter and the gift of sugar candy that was like a violation of his fatherhood. He was beside himself. “You owe the patroon,” he snarled.

“Screw the patroon,” Jeremias said, and it was more than Joost could bear. Before he could think, he was on him, the sword of office jerked from its scabbard like a sudden slashing beam of light, the woman clutching the child and Jeremias falling back before the stagger of the horse. “No!” Neeltje screamed, and Jeremias, holding up the stick to defend himself, glanced at her — she saw him, he glanced at her — at the moment the sword fell. The woman screamed too. Then there was silence.

Chiefly Nuptial

So Walter sought out the twelfth heir to Van Wart Manor, as the smoke-wreathed figure of his adoptive mother had challenged him to, and then, six weeks later, he married Jessica beneath the ancient twisted white oak that loomed over Tom Crane’s cabin like a great cupped hand.

Actually, he didn’t so much seek out Depeyster Van Wart as blunder across him, as if their meeting had somehow been preordained. He got up from the table that morning in the kitchen that still reeked of potato pancakes, groped for his crutches and told Lola that that was exactly what he intended to do: ask Depeyster Van Wart. He borrowed her beat-up Volvo — was he sure? Shouldn’t he rest, just out of the hospital and all? — and backed down the narrow gravel drive, past the trees lit with birds, past the chin-high cornstalks, staked tomatoes and random swelling pumpkins of Hesh’s garden, and out onto the molten blacktop of Baron de Hirsch Road.

If he’d been asleep all these years, unconscious of the impact of history and the myths that shaped him, he still wasn’t fully awake. Thus, he had never connected this Depeyster Van Wart with the eponym of the infernal tool-and-die company that had employed him at minimum wage for the past two months, never connected this figure of dim legend with the dinning caliginous hole where he’d learned to dread the keen of the lathe as he might have dreaded the screech of some carrion bird come each day to tear out his liver anew. No: Depeyster Manufacturing was just a name, that was all. Like Kitchawank Colony, Otis Elevator, Fleischmann’s Yeast. Like Peterskill or Poughkeepsie. It meant nothing to him.

He shifted into first and lurched off down the road, the new foot dead on the gas pedal, and he’d actually reached the first intersection before he realized he had no idea where he was going. Van Wart. Where would he find Van Wart? There were probably thirty Van Warts in Peterskill alone. Leaning on the brake and casting around him for inspiration, he suddenly focused on Skip’s Texaco, with its twin pumps and phone booth, sitting directly across the road from him. He pulled in, lifted himself from the car, and consulted the white pages.

VAN WART, he read, DEPEYSTER R. 18 VAN WART RD., VAN WARTVILLE.

He’d lost a foot, been haunted by ghosts of the past, listened in silence to the story of his father’s perfidy and desertion: he was numb. Van Wartville. It meant nothing to him. Just an address.

He took the Mohican Parkway to the upper end of Van Wart Road, uncertain which way the numbers ran, and discovered to his irritation that here they were in the five-thousand range. The first mailbox he came across told him that much. Rusted, battered, the victim of innumerable scrapes and vehicular miscues, it read, in a script that might have been adapted from the Aztec: FAGNQLI, 5120. Swinging southwest, toward Peterskill, Walter looked neither right nor left, the roadside scenery so familiar he hadn’t given it a second glance since he was an eighth-grader on his way to music lessons. He was in no hurry — it had taken him all these years to begin pursuing the specter of his father, so what was the rush? — and yet before he knew it he was speeding, the alien foot dead on the accelerator, hydrants and mailboxes flashing by like pages in a leafing book. He shot past banks of elm, oak and sycamore, past junked cars, startled pedestrians and scratching dogs. He took the warning light at Cats’ Corners at sixty, downshifted for the S curve beyond it and came out of the chute doing seventy-five. It wasn’t until he blew past Tom Crane’s place, with its hubcap on the tree and the fateful pasture below, that he began to locate the brake.

The houses were clustered more thickly now, falling back from both sides of the road on lawns that were like coves and inlets of green; there was a church, a cemetery, another blinking yellow light. He saw a station wagon backing out of a driveway on his right, and up ahead on the opposite side, like the residue of a nightmare, the cryptic marker that had set the whole thing in motion. Jeremy Mohonk, he muttered to himself. Cadwallader Crane. For one inspired instant he envisioned himself swerving wide, out across the opposite lane and onto the shoulder, bearing down on that insidious road sign in a cloud of dust and obliterating it with a ton and a half of vengeful Swedish steel. But then he was dodging the station wagon — downshifting, stabbing at the brake pedal — and the sign, still canted heavenward, still mocking, was behind him. A moment later, just before he reached the Peterskill town line, he found what he was looking for, Number 18, the numerals cut into the stone pillar outside the gates to the old manor house on the hill. Van Wart Manor. Van Wartville. Van Wart Road. He began to understand.

The woman who answered the door was middle-aged, black, in a cotton shift and apron, and she looked so familiar he thought he’d begun to hallucinate again. “Ye — ess?” she said, drawing it out to two rich clarion syllables, almost yodeling it. “Can I help you?”

Walter was standing on a porch the size of the quarterdeck of. one of the ghost ships anchored off Dunderberg. The house to which it was attached rose over him, fell away beneath him, stretched out on both sides of him like some great living presence, some diluvian monster arisen from the deep to devour him. He saw naked rock, black with age and dug from the earth in some distant epoch; he saw beams of oak that had stood as trees in centuries past; he saw scalloped shingles, wooden shutters, gables, chimneys, a slate roof the color of the morning sky in winter. How many times had he passed by on the road and glanced up at the place without a glimmer of recognition? Now he was here, on the porch, at the door, and he felt as he had on the morning of the potato pancakes. “Uh, yeah,” he said. “I’d like to speak to Mr. Van Wart?”

He’d rehearsed the scene all the way over in the car. There he would be, son of the father, hunched forward on his crutches. Van Wart would open the door, Van Wart himself. The monster, the bogey, the unenlightened Nazi Bircher fiend who’d fomented the riots that shamed his father and broke his mother’s heart. Van Wart. The man who could once and for all damn or vindicate the name of Truman Van Brunt. Hi, Walter would say, I’m Truman Van Brunt’s son. Or no. Hello, my name’s Walter Van Brunt. I think you knew my father? But now he was on the steps of a mansion, a great big gingerbread thing that might have been drawn from the pages of Hawthorne or Poe, talking with a maid who looked like … like … like Herbert Pompey, and he’d begun to feel dislocated and unsure of himself.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking hard at his crutches, the hair gone long down his neck and creeping over his ears, the twenty-seven black specks above his upper lip that might have been a mustache and then again might not have been, “he’s not in right now.” The maid had stopped yodeling, and her face was set with suspicion. “What you want with him?”

“Nothing,” Walter mumbled, and he was about to mumble further and in an even lower and less audible tone that he’d be back later, already thinking about the Peterskill library and the handprinted card catalogue he’d used for high school reports on the state of Alaska, John Steinbeck and the B.&O. Railroad, wondering if there would be any reference to Mohonk or Crane, when a voice called out from deep inside the house: “Lula? Lula, who is it?”

Through the open door Walter could see heavy dark pieces of furniture, a worn strip of Oriental carpet and a gloomy portrait on the wall. “Nobody,” the maid called over her shoulder, and then she turned back to Walter. He could have taken this as his dismissal, he could have swung around on his crutches and thumped down the stairs, across the drive and into his car, but he didn’t. Instead he just stood there, propped up under the armpits, and waited until the footsteps stopped at the door and he was looking up into the tanned inquisitive face of a woman who looked so familiar she might have come to him in a dream.

The woman seemed to be about Lola’s age — or no, younger. Forty or so. She was wearing corduroy pants and moccasins, and some sort of Indian headband encrusted with plastic beads. She gave him a puzzled look, shot a glance at the maid and then turned back to him. “May I help you?” she said.

He was hallucinating, no doubt about it. If the maid had Pompey’s bridgeless nose and bulging eyes, then this woman, with her icy violet stare, her high cheekbones and strong jaw, reminded him uncannily of someone too. But who? He had a sense of déjà vu, felt the flesh tearing as he went down on the hard cold pavement, heard the derisive laughter of the bums ranged along the deck of the U.S.S. Anima. He was almost there — he’d almost got it, that face — when her voice came back at him again, softened now, alarmed even. “Are you all right?”

“I’m Truman Van Brunt’s son,” he said.

“Whose son?”

“Truman Van Brunt’s. My name’s Walter. I wanted to maybe talk with Mr. Van Wart … about my father.”

She didn’t flinch at the name, didn’t raise a hand up to mask her face or fall dead away in a faint. But her eyes, which had begun ever so slightly to defrost, went gelid again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help you.”

So much for the seeking.

Next day, after spending a futile hour in the library (he found references to Mo-ho, Mohole, Moholy-Nagy, the Mohr Diagram and Mohsin-ul Mulk, but no Mohonk, while the Cranes were represented by the juridical reminiscences, circa 1800, of one I. C. Crane), he drove down to Depeyster Manufacturing to pick up his check and tell Doug, the foreman, that he’d be coming back to work in a week or so but couldn’t stand at the lathe anymore on account of his foot. The factory was housed in an ancient brick building on Water Street in Peterskill, amid the derelict warehouses and the tottering ruins of the stove works, wire, hat and oilcloth factories that harkened back to Peterskill’s boom days at the end of the last century. The industries had grown up here along the river’s edge to take advantage of both the fresh water for cooling and waste disposal and easy access to shipping and railways. But the semi-truck had come to supersede barge and boxcar, oilcloth had given way to Formica, pot-bellied stoves to gas and electric ranges, the demand for hoopskirt wire wasn’t what it was and no one wore hats anymore. To Walter, of course, the ruins along Water Street were as incomprehensible as Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid at Giza. Someone had made something there once. What it was or who made it or for what purpose couldn’t have interested him less.

He parked the Volvo in the employees’ lot next to Peter O’Reilly’s primer-splotched ’55 Chevy, exchanged a mumbled greeting with the sullen, bullet-headed brother who worked the loading dock and wore T-shirts imprinted with uplifting slogans like “Off Pigs” and “Free Huey,” and then shoved his way through the big steel door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Unfortunately, the weight of the door threw him off balance, and he lurched into the raging din of the shop like a drunken pencil peddler, fouling his crutches and snatching wildly at the time clock to keep from pitching face forward on the concrete floor. In the next moment he came within an ace of being run down by some idiot on a forklift, and then Doug had him by the arm, leading him along the pocked and faded brick wall to his office.

Walter had been absent for almost three weeks now, and during that time he’d begun to forget just how dismal the place really was. Cavernous and dim, lit at intervals by flickering fluorescent lights that descended from the ceiling on aluminum stalks, reeking of cutting oil and degreasing fluid and vibrating with the ceaseless racket of machinery, it could have been one of the subterranean sweatshops of Metropolis. People ran about in filthy green smocks, dodging in and out of clouds of vapor the color of ginger ale, shouting at one another over the clamor like pale frantic drones. Walter didn’t like it, didn’t like it a bit. As he swung along beside Doug, nodding at his coworkers — they looked up blearily, in a pall of smoke, from their lathes — he knew all at once that he wasn’t coming back. Ever. Even if they offered him a sit-down job in the inspection room, even if they made him foreman, president, chairman of the board. The job had been Hesh’s idea in the first place. Something temporary, something to hold him till he decided what he wanted to do with his degree. All that had changed now.

“So,” Doug said, once he’d pulled Walter into a grimy office decorated with oil-soaked rags and trays of rejected muffins and aximaxes that rose in tottering array to the ceiling, “we heard about your foot.”

In here, behind the smudged glass door, the noise was muted to a dull insistent drone, the sound of a distant phalanx of dentists gearing up their drills. Walter shrugged. He was leaning heavily on his crutches, and the stump of his leg ached. “Yeah,” he said.

Doug was about thirty, a Depeyster Company lifer whose salient physical feature was an upper lip as broad, hairless and mobile as a chimpanzee’s. Once, when Walter had questioned his lathe settings, Doug had reminded him that he wasn’t paid to think, and then, in an offhand and edifying way, had mentioned the key to his own success. “I’m different than the rest of you guys around here, you know,” he’d said, nodding significantly. “And you better believe it — I got a hundred and five I.Q.” Now, pausing to light a cigarette, he glanced down at Walter’s foot and asked, “Does it hurt?”

Walter gave him another shrug. “Look, Doug,” he said, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to work anymore. I just came in to pick up my check.”

Doug had begun to cough. He hacked for a moment, took another drag of his cigarette, and then leaned over to spit in the wastebasket. His eyes had watered, and he looked bewildered, as if Walter had just asked him to dance or name the square root of 256. “I don’t got it,” he said finally. “You got to go up to the front office for that.”

A moment later Walter found himself gliding along a carpeted hallway, looking for Miss Egthuysen’s office, while cooling breezes wafted around him and the mellifluous strains of violin, cello and viola poured forth from hidden speakers to massage his ears. There were potted plants, framed watercolors; the walls looked as if they’d been painted yesterday and the skylights glowed with sunlight that was like a shower of gold. The contrast wasn’t lost on him. No more than a hundred feet from where he’d sweated over the lathe and counted the interminable minutes until the five o’clock whistle blew, there was this. Walter felt cheated.

Miss Egthuysen was the secretary. Doug had scrawled her name and the number of her office on a soiled scrap of paper—#1, or maybe it was #7, Walter couldn’t tell which — and escorted him through the door at the far end of the shop and into the inner sanctum. Then he’d swung around without a word and faded back into the gloom of the shop. Walter was cursing under his breath — cursing Doug, cursing the hours he’d wasted in the pit behind him, cursing Huysterkark and Mrs. Van Wart, cursing the meanness and perfidy of a world every bit as rotten as Sartre had made it out to be in Philosophy 451—when he found it, #1, a frosted-glass door with nothing but the single numeral painted on its face. He tried the door. It was locked. No one answered his knock.

Cursing still — cursing Miss Egthuysen and the bosses who’d hired her, cursing the eggheads in lab coats and ties who strolled out of this very hallway and into the shop once a month to make notations in loose-leaf binders — he swung around and considered the slip of paper in his hand. What he’d taken to be a one could actually have been a seven. Or a nine, for that matter. Doug’s scrawl was just about undecipherable — but then, with his soaring I.Q., Doug couldn’t really be expected to waste his precious mental resources on so tedious a consideration as penmanship. Walter trudged back up the hall, located #7, and tried the door.

It was open.

Manning his crutches with a clatter, he leaned against the corrugated glass and pushed his way in. He saw a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet. Plants. Framed pictures. But wait a minute: something was wrong here. This wasn’t Miss Egthuysen gaping up at him in alarm, slipping an envelope into the desk and slamming the drawer with a report like the blast of a shotgun, this was the man in the tan summer suit, the one he’d glimpsed now and again probing among the eggheads at the door to the shop. “I, uh—” Walter began.

The man was glaring at him now, boring into him with a look of such ferocity that Walter suddenly began to wish he were out in the shop breathing fumes, back in the hospital, anywhere but here. “Uh, I was looking for Miss—” Walter murmured, but then stopped cold. There was a nameplate on the man’s desk. Of course.

“What are you doing here?” Van Wart demanded. He was on his feet now, and he looked alarmed. He looked angry. Threatened. “You were at the house yesterday, weren’t you?”

“Yes, but”—guilty, guilty, why did he always feel guilty? — “I … I work here.”

Van Wart’s face went blank. “You work for me?”

“Just since the end of May, but I didn’t know. … I mean, I didn’t realize—”

But the eponym of Depeyster Manufacturing wasn’t listening. “Well, that’s rich,” he said, dropping into his swivel chair as if the news had somehow weakened his legs. “Out on the floor?”

“Uh-huh. I run one of the lathes?”

“That’s really rich,” Van Wart repeated, and suddenly he cracked a grin that was like a crevasse leaping across an ice field. “Truman Van Brunt’s son.” Then he glanced down at Walter’s foot and the smile faded. “I was sorry to hear about your accident.” There was silence. “Your name’s Walter, right?”

Walter nodded.

“I read about it in the paper.”

Walter nodded again.

“I knew your father.”

Walter said nothing. He was waiting.

“Years ago.”

“I know.” Walter’s voice was hushed, almost a whisper. There was another moment of silence, during which Van Wart slid back the desk drawer and began to fumble through his papers. “That’s why I went out to your house,” Walter confessed. “That’s what I wanted to ask you about. My father.”

Van Wart looked distracted. He looked old, and in that moment, vulnerable. Without lifting the envelope from the drawer, he slipped a pinch of something into his mouth. “Truman?” he said finally. “What, he hasn’t turned up, has he?”

When Walter answered in the negative, Van Wart seemed relieved. He helped himself to another pinch of whatever it was he kept in that precious envelope and then stared down at his impeccable shirt cuffs and manicured hands. So this was the ogre, Walter thought, the bogeyman, the Fascist who’d masterminded the slaughter of the innocents and haunted the bedtime tales of a generation of Colony children. Somehow he didn’t look the part. With his fine, clean, razorcut hair, his strong teeth and even tan, with his air of well-being and the precise hieratic tones of his speech, he could have been the saintly and forebearing father of TV legend, he could have been a judge, a professor, a pianist or conductor.

But all that was dispelled in the next instant. Van Wart looked up and said suddenly, “Don’t you believe them, Walter. Don’t listen to them. Your father was all right. He was somebody who could stand up to the lot of them and their stinking vicious lies.” His eyes had taken hold of Walter’s now and there was nothing genial about them. Those eyes were outraged, formidable, those eyes were capable of anything. “Your father,” he said, leaning forward and making an effort to control his voice, “your father was a patriot.”

Then there was the wedding.

If life had begun to peel away from Walter, layer by layer, like some great unfathomable onion, if all its mysterious manifestations — the accident, the marker, the ghosts and pancakes, the face in the doorway at Van Wart Manor, Van Wart himself — were pieces of a puzzle, the wedding was a breath of fresh air: the wedding, at least, was unequivocal. Walter, former brooding and alienated hero to whom commitment and marriage were as death, loved Jessica, and she loved him. But no, it was more than that. Or maybe less. Walter needed her — he had but one foot on the ground now — and she needed to be needed.

The ceremony was performed in a field of lush, knee-deep grass amidst the sleepy drone of Tom Crane’s bees and within a stone’s throw of his shack. Jessica’s family had pushed for a traditional wedding, with organ music, garter tossing and a seven-tiered cake, to be held at the Episcopal church in Peterskill, but both bride and groom had rejected it outright. They were no slaves to tradition. They were originals, free spirits, flamboyant and daring, and it took them no more than five minutes to hit on Tom Crane’s place as the ideal site of their nuptials.

What could be better, after all? No corrupt institution would cast its gloom over the ceremony, and nature itself would become a celebrant. It would be an outdoor wedding, irreverent and unconstrained, with a barbecue — and tofu sandwiches for the vegetarians. And they would have readings from Gurdjieff or Kahlil Gibran instead of the dreary maunderings of the civil and religious ceremonies, and music from Herbert Pompey and his nose flute rather than the tedium of Mendelssohn. The bride would wear flowers in her hair. The groom would wear flowers in his hair. The guests, in serapes and boots and fringed suede, would wear flowers in their hair. And then of course, for Walter, the pasture below had its own special significance.

Walter arrived early. His bachelor party, which had begun at the Elbow with several rounds of boilermakers and ended with cooking sherry and kif at the apartment of one of his old high school compatriots — he couldn’t remember which — had left him feeling drained and hung over. He’d finally got to bed around four, but a steady procession of historical markers began marching around his room to the beat of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” as soon as he closed his eyes, and his dreams were the dreams of a man who has left his youth behind. He woke at seven, shagged and unrefreshed, to an intense itching in his missing foot. That was when he decided to pull on his wedding outfit and head over to Tom Crane’s.

It was late September, the morning warm and hazy, the light held out to him in a bundle above the treetops. He looked up into the web of branches that fell back from the windshield and saw that the maples had turned, and though it was early yet, he could detect the faint caustic odor of burning leaves on the air. When he’d had his accident, now almost two months ago, he’d stopped shaving, and as he drove, he stroked the patchy stubble that had sprouted beneath his nose and along the plane of his sideburns. He was dressed in white, like a guru or Paschal Lamb, wearing the Nehru shirt and cotton bells Jessica had chosen for his wedding ensemble. His hair, after the fashion of the day, trailed down his neck. He wore the familiar Dingo boots, and for color and good luck both, he’d slipped on a belt that his soulful, sorrowful mother had braided from pink and blue plastic lanyards when she was a girl at summer camp.

He negotiated the hill down from the road without much trouble — he was getting used to the prosthesis in the way he’d got used to his first pair of skates, and he’d been lifting weights to strengthen the long muscles of his thighs for added support. It wasn’t his leg that bothered him, it was his head. The cooking sherry had been a mistake, no doubt about it. As he wound his way down the trail that roughly followed the course of the old road, sidestepping the odd cow pie, he found himself envying Tom Crane, who’d left after two beers, pleading pronubial responsibilities. He paused for a moment in the mist-shrouded meadow that gave on to the creek, thinking Here was the stage, and there the parking lot, then turned and clumped over the footbridge, startling the swallows that nested beneath it. He was going to be married. Here. Here of all places. The choice of it, he understood, hadn’t been so whimsical as he might have led himself to believe.

Walter was climbing the steep trail up from Van Wart Creek, the nervous little tributary known as Blood Creek on his left, Tom Crane’s beehives and the still-burgeoning vegetable patch with its fat zucchini, pumpkins and late tomato on his right, when he ran across the first of the uninvited guests. Her back was to him, the heavy stockings were rolled down over the tops of her shoes and he could see the veins standing out in her legs. He recognized her with the first skip of his heart. She was bent over, searching for something — or no, she was pulling weeds, her knees stiff and her big backside waving in the breeze like a target at the fair. He remembered the day he’d found that target so irresistible and pelted her with dirt clods as she stooped over the tulip bed out front of the house in Verplanck, and he remembered the retribution that had followed when his grandfather came home from his nets and introduced him to the bitter end of an old ship’s halyard. Pulling weeds. It was just like her. He remembered how each hairy taproot or cluster of crabgrass would merit an incantation in the Low Dutch that people had forgotten a century before, as she wished it on the swinish Mrs. Collins across the street or on Nettie Nysen, the witch who’d forced her to disconnect the phone. In the spring, she buried the frozen deadman of a crab — eyestalks and brain — with each new packet of seed. “Gram,” he said, and she whirled around as if he’d startled her.

So what if he had? — he was angry. He thought he was done with all this, thought he’d left the dreams and visions in the hospital or along the road, thought the sacrifice of a foot was enough. But he was wrong.

She was smiling now, fat and glowing with the health of the indiscriminate eater, the woman who’d breakfasted every morning of her life on kippered herring, jelly doughnuts and sugared coffee as thick and black as motor oil. “Walter,” she murmured in her crackling voice, “I just wanted to wish you the best on your wedding day.” And then, with all the finesse of a backyard gossip: “So how’s the foot?”

The foot? Suddenly he wanted to scream at her: Did you have anything to do with that? Did you? But he was staring at the stump of a tree taken down by Jeremy Mohonk on his release from prison in 1946. His grandmother was gone. More history. All at once he felt weary. Nostalgia filled him, wine turned to vinegar, and the birds railed at him from the trees that crowded in on him like a mob. He’d tried to put it all out of his mind, tried to remember that he hated his father and didn’t give a damn where he was, that he had a life and being of his own that transcended that of the abandoned boy, the motherless boy, the boy who’d grown up among strangers. He’d tried to concentrate on Jessica, on the union that would redeem him and make him whole. And now here it was again: more history.

He plodded up the hill and his incorporeal grandmother was whispering in his ear, retelling one of his favorite stories — one he liked better than the betrayal of Minewa or the hoodwinking of Sachoes — the story of his parents’ wedding. What did they wear? he would ask her. What was my mother like? Tell me about the lake.

Your mother was like royalty, she told him. And your father was the handsomest man in the county. An athlete, a prankster, full of jokes and high spirits. He was married in his uniform, with the medals on his chest and the sergeant’s stripes on his shoulder. Your mother was an Alving. Swedish. Her father was Magnus Alving, the architect — he drew up the plans for the free school in the Colony, did you know that? — and her mother was of Dutch descent, an Opdycke. She wore her mother’s gown — peau de soie, trimmed with seed pearls and Madeira lace. Her hair was up and she was wearing white heels like she just stepped out of a fairy tale. They held the ceremony outdoors, on the beach at Kitchawank Lake, though it was late in the year and turning cold, and when the justice said “You may kiss the bride” and your father took your mother in his arms, all the geese around the lake started honking and the fish threw themselves up on shore like pieces of tinfoil. Hesh was best man.

He’d almost reached the top of the hill when another voice began to intrude on his consciousness. He looked up. There before him, pale, bowlegged and naked as a wood sprite, stood Tom Crane. The saint of the forest clutched a bottle of baby shampoo in one hand, and in the other, a towel as stiff as a sheet of cardboard. He was grinning and saying something about getting cold feet, but Walter couldn’t quite make it out, the buzz of his grandmother’s voice murmuring in his ears still. Walter, Walter, she said, her voice dolorous and fading now, don’t blame him. He loved her. He did. It’s just that in his heart … he loved his country … more. …

“Hey, Walter — Van — snap out of it.” The naked saint was two feet from him now, peering into his eyes as if into the far end of a telescope. “You still zonked from last night or what?”

He was. Yes. That was it. He focused on Tom Crane for the first time and saw that the saint’s skinny frame was maculated with boils, blemishes and insect bites. Tom was scratching his beard. His ribs were slats in a fence, his feet so white and long and flat they might have been molded of dough that wouldn’t rise. His lips were moving now and he was saying something about waking up, a dip in the creek and hot coffee and bourbon up at the shack. Walter allowed himself to be led back down the hill, across the footbridge and into the ferns at water’s edge.

The stream was low this time of year, but the saint of the forest, looking to his toilet, had dammed it up under the bridge — the resulting pool was about as deep as a bathtub and three times as wide. Pausing only to wedge his towel in the crotch of a tree, Tom stepped into the pool, exposing the flat pale nates that hadn’t felt the embrace of cotton briefs since his mother had stopped doing his laundry when he went off to Cornell four years earlier. He eased himself into the creek like a mutant water strider, ass first, hooting with the shock of it.

Walter was slower. Fumbling back down the path had left him winded and sweat-soaked. His leg suddenly felt as if it had been rubbed with jalapeño oil from the knee down and his eyes were still playing tricks on him. It was nothing major — the trees didn’t transform themselves into claws or lollipops and his grandmother was nowhere in sight — yet everything seemed skewed and out of focus, the visible world in intricate motion, as if he were examining a drop of pond water under a microscope. The leaves that overhung them, the peeling footbridge, the bark of the trees and the grain of the rock: they’d all been reduced to their components, to a grid of minuscule dancing dots. It was last night, he figured. The cooking sherry. That had to be it. He lowered himself down on a rock and began to tug at his left boot.

Tom was thrashing his limbs spastically and deep-breathing like a seal coming up for air.

“Cold?” Walter asked.

“No, no,” Tom said, too quickly. “Just right.” He averted his eyes as Walter removed the boot from his other foot.

Walter pulled the Nehru shirt up over his head, dropped his pants and undershorts and stood there naked among the ferns and saplings. He could feel the mud of the bank between the toes of his left foot; the right foot, the inert one, planted itself like a stone. No one had seen him like this, not even Jessica. And Tom Crane, his oldest friend and intellectual mentor, wasn’t looking.

“You know something?” Tom said, glancing at Walter as he lowered himself into the water, and then looking away again. “Cars. Automobiles. They were originally going to call them electrobats.” He was snickering with the idea of it. “Electrobats,” he repeated.

The water was cold as glacial runoff. Walter didn’t cry out, didn’t catch his breath, didn’t curse or thrash. He just settled there on his back, the current lifting his genitals and subtly reconstituting itself to accommodate his neck and shoulders. After a moment he lifted his right leg from the water and propped the plastic foot on a rock at the edge of the pool.

“Oleo locomotives,” Tom said. “That one was in the running too.” But the levity had gone out of his voice. “That’s it, huh?” he said. And then: “How does it feel?”

“Right now it hurts like a son of a bitch.” Walter paused, contemplating the plastic sculpture at the nether end of his leg. “The doctor says I’ll learn to live with it.”

The sun was climbing through the trees now, firming up the shadows and suffusing the undergrowth with a rich golden light that clung to the leaves like batter. Walter counted the fronds of the fern beside him, watched the minnows drop down with the current and settle between his legs, listened to the rap of woodpecker and the call of vireo. For a moment he felt a part of it all, creature of the forest primeval that antedated macadam, case-hardened steel and the plastic prosthesis, but then the stutter of a motorcycle out on Van Wart Road brought him back. “All right,” he said, rising from the pool in the slow groping way of an octogenarian. “Okay. I’m all right now.”

“Use my towel if you want,” Tom said. He was sitting up, blowing and puffing still, the long wet queue of his hair trailing down his pimply back like something that had clung to him and drowned.

Walter flayed himself with the stiff stinking towel while mosquitoes whined around him and mud worked between his toes. He was feeling better, no doubt about it. The headache had receded, the leaves and twigs that reached out to him seemed to have consolidated once again, and the pain had gone out of his numbed leg. It was then, standing there on the mud bank and shivering in the early morning light, that he had a revelation. All at once he realized that the whole business of daily life was irrelevant to him, that he didn’t want to make small talk, didn’t want to discuss electrobats, last night’s party, drugs, nerve gas or revolution in Latin America. No: what he really wanted to talk about was his father. He wanted to open himself up to the quivering, abject, bony mass of gooseflesh that now stood dripping beside him and tell him that he’d been fooling himself, tell him that now and always he did give a damn where his father was and wanted nothing more — nothing, not Jessica, not the flesh and bone that had been torn from him — than to find him, confront him, wave the bloody rag of the past in his face and reclaim himself in the process. He didn’t want to talk about his wedding or about music or health food or UFOs. He wanted to talk about the mothball fleet and genealogy, about his grandmother, about a ghost in the scent of a pancake and the trouble with his eyes that made the past come alive in the present.

But he never got the chance.

Because the saint of the forest, blue in the face and chattering with the cold in every molar and ratcheting joint, the ratty towel working furiously at his splayed shoulders and bald scrotum, suddenly said, “What did you do to Mardi, anyway?”

Mardi. She was a shadow, a fragment of memory, a stain on his consciousness — she was another ghost. “Who?”

“You know: Mardi. Mardi Van Wart.”

Walter didn’t know. Didn’t want to know. There was a screaming in his ears, a terrible unquenchable din that all at once rose up from the bloodied ground before him. He could hear the cries of the victims, his mother’s caressing voice stretched taut, the rabid raging curses of the men with sticks and tire irons and fence posts in their hands. Kike, nigger, Commie: he was in the eye of the storm. Van Wart? Mardi Van Wart?

“She says she was with you and Hector the night you, uh, had your accident, you know? Says she really needs to see you.”

He felt it tugging at him, something obscene, unholy, irresistible. “You … you know her?”

Tom Crane was ridiculous. Naked, dripping, the reeking towel clamped under one arm and a toothbrush nonchalantly dangling from his lip, he paused to give Walter a big meaningful goat-toothed grin. “Oh, yeah,” he said, the cries of the innocents echoing around him, “I know her.”

Jessica wore a lace dress laboriously tatted by underfed peasants on the far side of the world, a pair of unadorned white sandals and her grandmother’s ivory cameo brooch. In her hair, which shone with a blonde brilliance that might have blinded the Vikings themselves, there were glimmers of baby’s breath and primrose. Walter stood beside her in the late morning with its insouciant bees and butterflies, flanked by Hesh and Lola and Jessica’s pink-faced parents, while Tom Crane read a passage from a science fiction novel about extraterrestrial propagation and Herbert Pompey danced around under the weight of the flowers in his hair and rendered the serpentine melodies of the Indian snake charmers on his nose flute. Then Jessica recited a couple of verses by an obscure scribbler on the subject of love and fish, and Hesh stepped forward to read the climactic lines from the civil ceremony (“Do you, Walter Truman Van Brunt, take this woman … till death do you part?”). “I do,” said Walter, and he kissed the bride in a surge of emotion — in love and gratitude and the fullest apprehension of life and youth — that lifted him for the moment from the trough of confusion into which the accident had thrust him. It was then that Hector Mantequilla set off a string of Arecibo firecrackers and the celebration began in earnest.

Jessica’s family, Conklins and Wings alike, left early. Grandmother Conklin, a starchy old patrician with dead white skin, pendulous nose and tortoise eyes, had been carried up the hill in a blanket. She sat on a folding chair in the shade of the oak tree, surrounded by aged nieces from Connecticut, a conspicuous smear of cowshit on her black patent leather pumps, glaring her disapproval of the proceedings. Half an hour after the punch was served and the cake cut, she was gone. The aged nieces soon followed, and then John Wing himself — as bland and awkwardly handsome as the star of a sitcom about the wisdom of fathers — was shaking Walter’s hand in parting and telling him to take care of his little girl. By late afternoon, all the representatives of the elder generations had departed, scratching insect bites and dabbing handkerchiefs at sun-blistered faces. Hesh, Lola and Walter’s aunt Katrina (three sheets to the wind and fighting back tears) were the last of them.

The storm began to kick up around four. Jessica, bright-eyed and thick-tongued, was giving Nancy Fagnoli an exhaustive biographical account of Herbert Axelrod, patron saint of tropical fish, Walter was swilling rotgut champagne and smoking a joint with Herbert Pompey out by the bee tenements, and Tom Crane was squatting on the porch in a cloud of smoke with Hector and half a dozen other epithalamial celebrants. Susie Cats, a big overwrought girl with soft-boiled eyes, had passed out on Tom Crane’s cot after drinking fourteen cups of tequila punch and crying without remit for two hours. She lay there now, her faint rhythmic snores drifting across the clearing to where Walter stood with Herbert Pompey. Someone was strumming a guitar somewhere up in the woods.

Walter watched the low belly of the sky as it edged over the treetops, sank into the cleft of the hill behind him and billowed up to snuff out the sun. Within minutes, the sky was dark. Squinting against the smoke, Herbert Pompey handed him the yellowed nub of a joint. “Looks like it’s going to rain on your party.”

Walter shrugged. He was feeling pretty numb. Champagne, pot, a hit of this and a hit of that, the bourbon in his coffee that morning and the excesses of the night before: the cumulative effect was leveling. He was married, and over there by the oak tree stood his bride, that much he knew. He knew too that in a few hours they would take the train up to Rhinebeck and check into a quaint hotel full of gloomy nooks and dusty bric-a-brac and that afterward they’d make love and fall asleep in each other’s arms. As for the weather, he could give a shit. “What’d you expect?” he said, dropping the bottle in the grass. Then he took Pompey by the arm and went looking for another.

The storm didn’t break until nearly an hour later, and by then the second uninvited guest had shown up. Though he’d been fighting it, Walter understood just how susceptible he was at this moment to history, nostalgia and the patterns of the past, and throughout the day he’d half-expected to glance up and see his father perched on the edge of the porch between Tom Crane and Hector Mantequilla or picking his way through the high grass with a bottle of cheap champagne clamped in his big iron hand. But it wasn’t his father who emerged from the shadow of the trees as Walter stood urinating against the side of the shack — it was Mardi.

She made straight for him, half a smile caught on her lips, a package wrapped in tissue paper in her hand. He tried to be nonchalant, but as it turned out he was too hasty with the business of micturition, with stowing away his equipment and zipping up, and he turned to face her with warm urine on his thigh and in the crotch of his pants. “Hi,” she said. “Remember me?”

She was barefoot, wearing a miniskirt (not paper this time, not anything that might dissolve in his wet hands, but leather) and a shimmering low-cut blouse that matched the color of her eyes. There were Indian beads around her neck and she wore earrings fashioned from tiny shells and feathers. She looked like her mother. She looked like her father. “Sure, yeah,” Walter said, “I remember you,” and they both glanced down at his foot.

“I brought this for you,” she said, handing him the package.

“Oh, hey, you didn’t have to—” he began, looking reflexively over his shoulder for Jessica, but no one was there. They stood alone at the rear of the shack; the birds had gone quiet suddenly and the sky was like the underside of a dream. The package was small and heavy. He tore back the paper. Brass and wood, the heft of metal: he held a telescope in his hand. Or no, it was a telescope with something else grafted to it, a dull brass quarter-circle ticked out with calibrations and festooned with clamps, screws and mirrors. She was watching him. He caught her eye and then glanced down at the thing in his hand, trying to look knowledgeable and appreciative. “It’s, uh … nice. Really nice.”

“You know what it is?”

He shook his head slowly. “Not really.” The brass was green with age, the wood of the telescope chipped and gouged as if gnawed by some marooned mariner in times gone by. “Looks old,” he offered.

Mardi was grinning at him. She wasn’t wearing any makeup — or maybe just a trace. Her legs were naked and strong, and her feet — uniformly tan, fine-boned, with perfect arches and a tracery of rich blue veins — were beautiful. “It’s a sextant,” she said. “They used to use them for navigation in the old days. My father had it lying around.”

“Oh,” said Walter, as if it should have been obvious to him all along. He’d just been married, he was stoned and exalted, the sky was splitting open and lightning sat in the trees. He was holding a sextant in his hand, and he wondered why.

“It’s kind of a joke,” she said. “So you can find your way to me, you know?” He didn’t know, but the words stirred him. “Don’t you remember? That night down at the river?”

He gave her a numb look: maybe he remembered and maybe he didn’t. A lot had happened that night. Suddenly, maddeningly, he felt a terrific itch in his missing foot.

She was fishing for something in a leather pouch: Walter saw a comb, a mirror, a tube of lipstick. “I mean our date.” She found what she was looking for — cigarettes — and she shook one from the pack and lit it. Walter said nothing, but he watched her as if he’d never seen match or cigarette before. “My father’s sailboat,” she said. “I’m taking you out to the ghost ships.” She glanced up at him and her eyes were cold and hard as marbles. He felt the first few heavy drops of rain through the back of his shirt. There was a rumble of thunder. “You didn’t forget?”

“No,” he lied. “No, no,” and he knew in that moment he would take her up on it, knew he would go back and walk the barren rusted decks as he’d gone back to stand yearning and bewildered before the road marker, knew he was bound to her in some frightening and unfathomable way.

“How does it feel?” she asked suddenly.

“What?” he said, but he didn’t have to ask.

“You know: your foot.”

The rain was coming harder now, big pregnant drops that tickled his scalp and wet his cheeks. He shrugged. “Like nothing,” he said. “It feels dead.”

And then, just as he was about to turn and jog around the corner to huddle with the others beneath the leaky roof of Tom Crane’s shack, she took his arm and pulled him toward her. Her voice was a whisper, a rasp. “Can I see it?”

Thunder crashed in the trees, a bolt of lightning lit the branches of the big white oak that snaked over them. He didn’t know what he must have looked like at that moment, but his face showed what he felt. She let go of him. “Not now,” he heard her say as he turned and plunged through the quickening rain, seeing the pall of mist, the road marker and the swift glancing shadow all over again, “I don’t mean now.” He kept going. “Walter!” she called. “Walter!” He’d reached the corner of the shack and could see Jessica, Tom and Hector huddled under the eaves before him by the time he stopped to look over his shoulder. Mardi was standing there, indifferent to the rain. Wet hair clung to her face, her hands were outstretched in supplication. “Not now,” she repeated, and the skies broke open above her.

With the Patroon’s Blessing

Dominie Van Schaik, as yet churchless, had to hike all the way out to the Van Brunt farm for the christening. He’d spent the previous night on a pallet at the upper manor house and had breakfasted on hard biscuit and water before conducting a dawn service for Vrouw Van Wart, a service followed by two rigorous hours of prayer and meditation (rigorous, to say the least — the woman was a fanatic). He could feel every amen in the crook of his knee as he shambled over the crude footbridge and struggled up the steep stony path to the farm.

It was late September, overcast but warm — oppressively warm — and by the time he was halfway up the hill he found he had to sit a moment and refresh himself beside the stream that chattered along the path in a ribbon of fern and skunk cabbage. The local farmers, he recalled, referred to the runlet as Blood Creek for some superstitious reason, something about a filicide who supposedly stalked these woods. Rustic superstitions had little effect on the Dominie, a man who followed Gomarus and walked the path of righteousness, but still he had to admit that these woods were particularly gloomy and ominous. What was it? The trees were thicker here, he supposed, the light more tenuous. And there seemed to be a disproportionate number of rotting trunks among the healthy trees, big Cretaceous giants that leaned precariously against their still vital neighbors or stretched out prone — their bark gone in patches and covered all over with earlike growths of fungus — until they were swallowed up in the shadows of the forest floor.

The Dominie had just cupped his hands and bent forward to drink from a limpid stony pool, when he glanced up and spotted the figure of a man poised amidst the scrub oak and mountain laurel. It was a shock, and for all his certainty, for all his contempt for the bogeys that haunt the primitive mind, he felt his heart turn over in him. But the shock was momentary: this was no red-bearded Swede with a dripping axe, this was … nothing. The figure, if it had been there at all, had faded into the undergrowth like a phantom. Had his eyes been playing tricks on him? No. He’d seen it clear as day. A man of flesh and blood, gaunt, tall, with the facial features of an aborigine and wrapped in a coat of animal fur. Shaken, the Dominie rose cautiously to his feet. “Hello?” he called. “Is anyone there?”

Not a leaf stirred. From an invisible perch, high above him, a crow called out in its harsh mocking tones. All at once the Dominie was angry with himself — he’d fallen prey to superstition, if only for an instant. But then anger gave way to fear: rational, cold, self-serving fear. If what he’d seen out there wasn’t an apparition, it occurred to him that a painted savage was even then lurking amidst the bushes, stalking him — the Dominie — as he might have stalked a turkey or quail. Recollections of the Indian massacres of the forties succeeded this revelation, and the Dominie, picturing splayed limbs and tomahawked scalps, gathered himself up and hurried on his way.

He was winded by the time he reached the crest of the hill, and he took a moment to catch his breath and survey the untidy little farm that lay before him. The place was even worse than he’d imagined. A recent thunderstorm had made a quagmire of the yard out front of the house (if you could call it a house), the stone fences were in disrepair and there was a pervasive reek of human slops about the place. The woman, with her shaved head and dumb-staring eyes, came out to greet him. She was wearing a dress that might have been scavenged from a corpse, and the half-breed child — he looked to be about two or so — trailed behind her, naked as the day he was born. The Dominie made his greetings and sat out front on the chopping block, drinking more water — didn’t anyone serve ale any more? — and nibbling at a sourish corn cake while the child ran to fetch his uncle, and a Canada goose with clipped wings looked on expectantly.

Young Van Brunt came in from the fields and extended a callused hand. “Pleased to see you again, Dominie,” he said. “We’re thankful you could make it.”

The pastor had meant to be severe, to give the boy a piece of his mind with regard to raising half-breed bastards, defying the patroon’s authority and running afoul of the schout, but Jeremias’ humble greeting softened him. He took the proferred hand, looked past the angry reddened welt the schout’s sword had left like a surveyor’s plumb line on the boy’s face, and into the shifting deeps of his eyes. “It’s more than God’s duty,” he murmured. “It’s a pleasure too.”

The ceremony was nothing — a saying of words and a sprinkling of water the woman fetched from the creek — a ceremony he’d performed a hundred times and more, but what gave him trouble was the name. He actually stumbled over it, twice, before Jeremias’ soft assured tones corrected him. Jeremy — the Englishers’ version of Jeremias — was no problem; it was the patronym that made his tongue cleave to his palate like a half-baked honeycake. “Mohonk?” he said. “Is that right?”

Two months before, on that stifling July afternoon when Jan Pieterse left his store to dip crabs on Acquasinnick Bay and Joost Cats rode out to Nysen’s Roost on the patroon’s business, Jeremias was hoeing up the weeds between the high sweet burgeoning rows of corn in the stand behind the house. It was a messy proposition. The ground was wet as a sponge with the runoff from the previous night’s storm, and it tugged at the hoe with a whistling suck and plop and clung to his pegleg like the grip of a dirty hand. He swatted insects, sweat dripped from his nose, there were yellow smears of mud on his face and clothing, on his pegleg and the wooden clog he wore on his left foot. It was only because it was so hot and still — even the birds were at rest till the cool of evening — that he was able to hear the shudder and whinny of the horses, and then the voices — one of them was Katrinchee’s — that came to him over the fields in a sunstruck rhapsody. Staats, he thought. Or Douw.

On his way in from the field he found Squagganeek bent over an anthill with a stick, and took him by the hand. “It’s grootvader van der Meulen,” he told the boy. “Come to visit on his horse. And Uncle Douw too, I’ll bet.” But when he rounded the corner of the house, the boy at his side, he saw how wrong he’d been — how bitterly, painfully wrong. He’d expected an embrace from Staats, a walk with Douw, something from moeder Meintje’s oven, and the sight of the schout, with his flugelhorn nose, bowed back and ugly black dab of a beard, stopped him cold. For a moment. A moment only. Then the anger took over. Trembling with it, his heart hammering and his throat gone dry, he crossed the yard, heard what the ass had to say and bent to pluck a stick of firewood from the ground.

He was so enraged—again, the son-of-a-bitch had come to evict him again—that he barely glanced at the second rider hovering at the edge of the trees. Until she called out, that is. Until her father unsheathed his sword and raised it above his head and she cried out in shock and horror and the keenest pitch of lamentation. Jeremias shot her a glance, her name on his lips even as the stick splintered in his hands and the force of the schout’s blow drove him to his knees, feeling somehow awkward and embarrassed, ashamed of his clothes and his uncombed hair, regretful of his rage, his station, his life, wanting only to hold her but holding nothing. Then there was blood in his eyes and he was on the ground.

If the sun stirred in the sky and the shadows lengthened, he was unaware of it. When he opened his eyes he could barely see for the blood that filmed them, but he knew she was there, bent over him, pressing something that smelled of her most intimate self to the side of his face, while Katrinchee sobbed somewhere in the background and Squagganeek, closer at hand, howled like a wild beast. Then it came to him: her skirts. He was bleeding, he was hurt, and she was stanching the blood with her skirts. He could see her now, the light trembling around her in an otherworldy nimbus, the coils of her hair fallen loose, her face gone dead white and her dress steeped in his wet black blood. “Neeltje?” he said, trying to shake it off and sit up.

“I’m right here,” she said, appending his name in a startled whisper, “—Jeremias.”

And then there was the other voice, the voice that stirred him with a thrill of hate even as he lay there flat on his back. “I’m sorry it’s come to this,” the schout said, and Jeremias could see him now too, gargantuan, all nose and broad-rimmed hat, as tall as any tree and broad enough to blot out the sun, “and I’m sorry I’ve struck you down. But you’ve got to learn respect for authority, you’ve got to know your place.”

“Oh, vader, please. Can’t you see he’s hurt?”

The schout went on as if he hadn’t heard her, as if she were made of air or paper. “Under the authority vested in me by the lord and proprietor of these lands, Oloffe Stephanus Van Wart, patroon,” he said, his voice gone nasal in official pronouncement, “I hereby inform you, Jeremias Van Brunt, that you are now in custody of the law.”

Jeremias walked the eight miles to Croton. In his filthy blood-stained clothes, with bits of grass and leaves in his hair, and the side of his face swollen to twice its size with the poultice of mud and medicinal herbs Katrinchee had applied, after the Weckquaesgeek fashion, to his open wound. His hands were bound behind his back, as if he were a thief or axe murderer, and a cord cinched around his waist connected him to the pommel of the schout’s saddle. It was tough going. The nag would quicken its pace unexpectedly and jerk him forward or suddenly slow to a virtual stop, causing him to stagger out to his right to avoid it, the strut digging like a goad at the stump of his leg. Another man would have complained, but not Jeremias. Though horseflies and mosquitoes made him dance with their stings, though he felt light-headed from loss of blood and sick from thirst, though the gash that leapt across his right eye, exposed the bone beneath it and opened up the flesh all the way to the hinge of his jaw felt as if it were being probed with hot needles, he never said a word. No: he just concentrated on the slow, working shift of the nag’s flanks and stepped aside when the animal relieved itself.

Neeltje was up front, on her mare. Her father, in a metallic voice, had commanded her to keep as great a distance as circumstances permitted between herself and the prisoner. She’d begun to protest—“He’s just a boy, vader: he’s hurt and suffering”—but that hard cold voice clamped down on her like a steel trap. Resigned, she’d gone on ahead — ten yards or so out in front of her father — but every so often she glanced over her shoulder and gave Jeremias a look of such concentrated tenderness he felt he would collapse on the spot. Either that or go on till he’d circled the globe six times and dug a rut you could drive a wagon through.

As it turned out, he went on. Past the turnoff for Verplanck’s Landing and along the river, where it was no cooler, past fields and forests he’d never before laid eyes on, through the late afternoon and into the quiet of evening. He was fixating on the mesmeric rise and fall of the nag’s hooves, no longer alert enough to bother dodging the piles of dung it dropped in his path, when they rounded a bend in the road and they were there. He looked up dully. The lower manor house rose out of the fields before him, high-crowned and commanding, with a rambling long porch out front and a stone cellar beneath it that was itself half again as big as the Van Wartwyck house. The schout dismounted, freed Jeremias’s hands with a rough tug at the cords that bound them, jerked open a door in the basement wall and thrust him into a cell the size of a wagon bed. The door closed on darkness.

He woke to a light rapping from the outer world, the rattle of key in lock, and then the sudden effulgence of morning as the door pulled back on its rusted hinges. A black woman, who still bore the facial cicatrices of her lorn and distant tribe, stood in the doorway. She was wearing a homespun dress, the lappet cap favored by country vrouwen from Gelderland to Beverwyck, and an immaculate pair of wooden clogs. “Brekkfass,” she said, handing him a mug of water, a wedge of cheese and a small loaf, still warm from the oven. He saw that he was in a toolshed, the rough walls hung with wooden rakes, shovels, a moldering harness, a flail with a splintered swiple. Then the door slammed shut once more and he lay back in the straw that covered the earthen floor, chewed his breakfast and watched the sun slice through the crevice between the crude door and its stone frame.

The sun was gone by the time the door swung open again, the darkness of the cell so absolute he had to shield his eyes against the lit taper that was suddenly thrust in his face. He’d been alone with his thoughts through the interminable day, dozing fitfully and jerking awake with a start to sit up and hesitantly examine his swollen cheek or rub the butt of his leg, and over the course of so many dead hours the shock of his confrontation with the schout had seeped out of him. In the darkness, in the damp, in the impenetrable solitude of that strange prison, he could feel the rage gnawing at him once again. In their eyes, he was a criminal. But what had he done, really? Lay claim to a piece of land? Try to work it and survive? By what right did the schout claim his neat little bouwerie—or the patroon his estates, for that matter? The more he thought about it, the more incensed he grew. If anyone was a criminal, if anyone should be locked up, it was Joost Cats, it was Oloffe Van Wart and his fat-assed commis with the leather-bound accounts ledgers. They were the real criminals — the patroon and his henchmen, Their High Mightinesses of the States General, the English king himself. They were leeches, chiggers, toads; they’d got under his skin and wouldn’t leave him alone till they’d sucked him dry.

When the door opened this time, he was ready. He’d actually sprung up from the ground, a rake in his hand, actually raised it above his head like a tomahawk and kicked the taper to the floor, before she called out his name in a gasp and he felt foolish all over again. “Hush,” she hissed. “It’s me. I bribed Ismailia and brought you this.” Neeltje handed him a wooden bowl and pulled the door shut behind her. The bowl was warm and it gave off a smell of cabbage. Jeremias watched her numbly as she bent for the rush candle and held it up to illuminate her face, which was like something newly created from the void. “I hate my father,” she said.

Jeremias clung to the bowl as if it were a stone at the edge of a precipice. He appreciated the sentiment, but held his peace.

“He’s so, so” her voice trailed off. “Are you all right?”

He was studying the lock of pale fine hair that had worked its way out from under her cap to cling familiarly to her eyebrow. He wanted to say something significant, passionate, something like Now that you’re here, I am, but he couldn’t find the words. When he spoke, his voice sounded strange in his ears. “I’ll live,” he said.

She motioned him to sit and then squatted beside him as he settled back down in the straw and sipped tentatively from the bowl. “I heard them talking,” she said. “My father and the patroon. They’re going to leave you down here for another night to teach you a lesson, then the patroon’s going to offer you tenancy on your farm.”

Jeremias barely heard her. He didn’t give a damn for the patroon, for the farm, for anything — anything but her. The way she talked, biting off each word like a little girl, the pout of her lips, the way her hips swelled out against the seams of her dress as she squatted there: each movement, each gesture, was a revelation. “Ja,” he said, to say something. “Ja.”

“Aren’t you pleased?”

Pleased? To have his face slashed and his hands shackled, to be hauled off in ignominy and shut up in this hole while his sister and the boy were left to fend for themselves? Pleased? “Ja,” he said finally.

“I’ve got to go,” she said, glancing at the door.

All at once the night was charged with the chirring of insects, with doleful cries and the faint whisper of birds on the wing. Jeremias set down the bowl, edged closer to her. Just as he reached out to her, just as he took hold of her hand to pull her to him, she shook free and rose to her feet. Her eyes had narrowed suddenly and she stood cocked on one leg. “Who was that woman,” she said, watching his eyes. “The one at the farm.”

Woman? Farm? What was she talking about?

“She’s your wife, isn’t she?”

Jeremias came before the patroon the following morning. He was awakened at first light by the black woman with the strange swirling scars about her lips and nostrils. She handed him a bucket of water and a bowl of tepid corn mush, and informed him in a Dutch so crude it was like the dialogue of the beasts that he had better make himself presentable for Mijnheer Van Wart. When she’d gone, Jeremias slipped the crude woolen shirt over his head and gingerly laid the side of his face in the water; he held it there until the mud plaster began to dissolve. The water went cloudy, then turned the color of beef broth in a swirl of fragmented leaves, twisted stems and strange dried petals.

After a time, Jeremias sat up and tentatively explored the wound with his fingertips: a crude split ridge ran from his right eyebrow to his chin, rough ground, a topography of scab, pus and wet puddled blood. He explored it, this new grain of his metamorphosing self, ran his fingers over it again and again, till the spots of fresh blood had dried. Then he washed his hands.

It must have been around nine when the schout came for him. The door flung back, light surged into the room like the flood tide running up against the rocks, and there he stood, bowed over like a great black question mark against the blank page of the day. “Come younker,” he said, “the patroon will see you now,” but there was something odd in the way he said it, something hollow and uncertain. For a moment, Jeremias was puzzled — this wasn’t the schout he knew — but then he understood: it was the wound. The man had gone too far, and he knew it. He’d raised his hand against an unarmed and crippled boy, and here was the evidence of it etched in his victim’s face. Jeremias rose from the straw and strode out of the cell, wearing the mark of the schout’s disgrace like a badge.

Cats escorted him around the corner to the kitchen/dairy room, where milk, butter, cheese and other foodstuffs were stored, and where the patroon’s servants did most of the cooking for the household. As soon as they stepped in the door, the black woman materialized from the shadows to flay Jeremias’ broad back, his shoulders and arms and the seat of his baggy pantaloons with a birch broom so stiff and unyielding it might have been cut yesterday. Then a second black — this one a slight, stoop-shouldered male with a kinked cube of hair that stood up off his head like a toque — led them up the stairs and into the family kitchen above.

This room was dominated by a big round oak-plank table, in the center of which stood a cone of sugar and a blue vase of cut flowers. A painted cupboard stood in the corner beside a heavy mahogany sideboard that must have been shipped over from the old country, and the fireplace was decorated with blue ceramic tiles depicting biblical themes like the salification of Lot’s wife and the beheading of John the Baptist. Jeremias took it all in as he stood at attention just inside the basement door. The schout, plumed hat in hand, slumped beside him while the black knocked respectfully at the door to the parlor. A voice answered from within, and the slave silently pulled open the door and turned to them with a grin that showed off the sharp, filed points of his glistening teeth. “De patroon he see you now,” he said, stepping aside with a sweep of his arm.

Jeremias glimpsed walls hung with portraits, massive blocks of dark oiled furniture, real tallow candles in silver sconces, a carpet of woven colors. As he limped forward, the schout at his side, a high rectangular table came into view, and he saw that it was laid out for tea, with silver service and cups of painted porcelain that might have graced the slim, smooth hands of Chinese emperors. The beauty of it, the elegance and refinement, overwhelmed him, choked him with a nostalgia as fierce and cleansing as a spoonful of horseradish. For a moment — just a moment — he was a young boy in the bosom of his parents, sitting down to Martinmas tea in the parlor of the burgomaster of Schobbejacken.

All at once he became conscious of the harsh rap of his pegleg on the floor, of his filthy shirt and pantaloons and the torn stocking that hung in tatters from his calf: he was passing through the patroon’s kitchen, entering the patroon’s parlor, and he began to feel very small indeed. Compared with the van der Meulens’ modest little farmhouse or Jan Pieterse’s dark and drafty store, the place seemed inexpressibly grand, a sultan’s palace sprung up in the wilds of the new world. In truth, the house comprised but six moderate-sized rooms in its two squat stories, and it was a far cry from the burghers’ houses of Amsterdam and Haarlem, let alone the great estates of the gentry, but to one who lived in a dirt-floor hovel with a thatched roof and split-log walls that dripped sap, to one who drank from wooden mugs, plucked bits of stringy rabbit from the pot with his fingers and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve, it was opulence itself. For all his desperation, for all his anger and resentment, Jeremias was awed by it, humbled; he felt weak and insignificant — he felt guilty; yes, guilty — and he slouched into Van Wart’s parlor like a sinner slouching into the Sistine Chapel.

The patroon, a pale fleshy little man whose features seemed lost in various excrescences, was sunk deep in a settee lined with pillows, his gouty foot propped above the level of his eyes on a makeshift buttress composed of two beaver pelts, a feather duster, the family Bible and a copy of Grotius’ Inleidinge tot de Hollandsche Rechtsgeleerdheid, all piled atop a sagging corner chair. Beside him, looking as bloated and pontifical as the next-to-biggest bullfrog in the pond, was the commis; in the commis’ lap, like the Book of Doom itself, sat the accounts ledger. The moment Jeremias laid eyes on them, his humility evaporated; in its place, he felt an intoxicating rush of hatred surge through him. He didn’t want to farm, care for his sister, make his fortune or wrest Neeltje away from her father — all he wanted at that moment was to snatch the schout’s sword from him and run it through the pasty grublike bodies of commis and patroon, and then lay waste to the place, gouging the furniture, shattering the crockery, dropping his pants to defecate in the silver teapot… but the impulse died before it could take hold of him, died stillborn, supplanted by a breathless gasp of surprise. For Jeremias suddenly realized that patroon and commis were not alone in the room. Seated in the corner, silent and motionless as a snake, was a man Jeremias had never seen before.

He was young, this stranger — no more than five or six years Jeremias’ senior — and he was tricked out in velvet and satin like one of Their High Mightinesses Themselves. With one silk-clad leg crossed casually over the other and a smirk of invincible superiority on his face, the stranger shot Jeremias a glance of cold appraisal that ate through him like acid. For one astonished instant Jeremias locked eyes with him, and then stared down at the floor, humbled all over again. The scar seared his face, no badge now, but the mark of Cain, the brand of a criminal. He didn’t look up again.

Through all that followed — through the patroon’s interminable speech of admonition and reconciliation, through the commis’ pointless pontifications and the schout’s terse and hushed testimony, Jeremias never uttered a word but for ja and nee. The man in the corner (who, as it turned out, was Oloffe’s only son and heir, Jongheer Stephanus Oloffe Rombout Van Wart, newly arrived from the University of Leyden to look after his interests in the face of his father’s declining health) helped himself to a clay pipe of Virginia tobacco and a glass of Portuguese wine, surveying the proceedings with the air of a man watching a pair of dung beetles struggle over a kernel of manure. He merely sat there, an ironic grin compressing his thin haughty lips, holding himself aloof from the whole business — until the moment his father spelled out the terms of Jeremias’ tenancy, that is. Then he came to life like a stalking beast.

“We will, in our, er, magnanimity,” the patroon intoned in a wheezy voice that bespoke ruined health and mismanaged appetites, “absorb unto ourselves the rents and damages accruing to your late, er, father’s tenancy in the unfortunate year of 1663. We, er, refer of course to rent in arrears, the pilferage and wanton slaughter of one, er, rutting boar and the careless usage of our livestock, which resulted in the untimely, er, demise of two milch cows and one piebald ox.”

The agent made as if to protest, but the patroon waved him silent with an impatient hand and continued. “We consider that the physical”—here he paused to suck in a great wheezing breath—“er, blemish that you’ve, er, received at the, er, hands of Joost Cats, is punishment enough for your trespass and willful, er, disregard for established law, and we will forego the levying of fines or remanding you to the, er, stocks, of which we have, er, none in any case.” Here the patroon’s voice had gone so hoarse as to carry no farther than the rasp of quill on parchment, and Jeremias had to lean forward to hear him. Coughing into his fist, the old man took a glass of port the commis held out to him and stared up at Jeremias out of bleary eyes. “Your rent shall be the same as your, er, father’s before you, payable in stuffs and in English pounds or seawant, as you prefer, and it will be, er, due—”

“Vader,” interjected a voice from the corner of the room, and all eyes turned toward the Jongheer, “I beg you to reconsider your judgment.”

The old man’s mouth groped at the air, and Jeremias thought of a tench flung up on the cobblestones in Schobbejacken so many years before. “Your rent,” the patroon began again, but faltered as his voice faded to a timbreless wheeze.

Young Van Wart was on his feet now, his hands spread wide in remonstrance. Jeremias stole a glance at him, then went back to studying the floorboards. The Jongheer had at some point placed atop his head an enormous, floppy-brimmed beaver hat with a two-foot plume, and it magnified his presence till he seemed to fill the entire corner of the room. “I respect your goodheartedness, vader,” he said, “and I agree that it will be to our benefit to settle a tenant at Nysen’s Roost, but is this the man — or boy, rather — to entrust with it? Hasn’t he already proven himself a criminal without respect for the law, the degenerate issue of a degenerate father?”

“Well, well, yes—” the patroon began, but his son cut him off. Regarding Jeremias with a look he might have reserved for the unhappy slug that had crawled one damp night into his glistening leathern shoe, Stephanus held up his palm and continued. “And is he capable of paying rent, this one-legged cripple in his filthy rags? Do you really think this, this … beggar can pay his debts, let alone feed himself and the tribe of naked half-breed savages he’s sired up there in the muck?”

Jeremias was beaten. He couldn’t respond, couldn’t even look young Van Wart in the eye. The gulf between them — he was well-built and youthful, this Jongheer, handsome as the portrait of the Savior hanging in the nave of the Schobbejacken church, powerful, wealthy, educated — was unbridgeable. What commis, schout and the beast of the pond couldn’t take from him with their accounts ledgers, rapiers and unforgiving jaws, the Jongheer had taken with a sneer and half a dozen stinging phrases. Jeremias hung his head. The utter contempt in the man’s voice — he might have been speaking of hogs or cattle — was a thing that would be with him for life.

In the end, though, commis and patroon prevailed, and Jeremias was taken on as tenant with a year’s grace so far as rent was concerned (and a warning that he would be driven off the property at the point of a sword if he was even a stiver short in his accounts at the end of that time), but for Jeremias it was no victory. No: he left the manor house in shame, his stomach rumbling, clothes filthy, the schout’s mark burning on his face and the Jongheer’s words charred into his heart. He didn’t look back. Not even when Neeltje came to the door of her father’s cottage to stand mute with her wet and glowing eyes and watch him as he limped up the road. Not even when at last she called out his name in a voice stung with hurt and incomprehension — not even then could he find it in himself to lift his eyes from the rutted road before him.

Taking stock of the situation the following morning, Jeremias understood that his options were limited. He’d just turned seventeen. He was short a leg and wore the brand of the outlaw on his face, his parents were dead, his sister’s mind was like a butterfly touched by the frost, and the gaping hungry mouth of his half-breed nephew haunted his dreams. What was he going to do — bring the patroon and his smirking son to their knees by starving himself to death in the winter woods? Wearily, painfully (the stump of his leg ached as if his father were taking the saw to it at that very moment), he pushed himself up from the damp straw pallet, took a mouthful of cornmeal, and went out to his chores. He finished hoeing up the weeds, split a cord and a half of wood to take the buzz of the Jongheer’s disdain out of his head, and decided, between two random and otherwise unremarkable strokes of the axe, to have his nephew christened in the church and admitted to the community as a Dutchman and free citizen of the Colony of New York.

When he came to Katrinchee with the idea, she looked down at her hands. Squagganeek sat on the floor, watching him with Harmanus’ eyes. “I thought we should name him after vader” Jeremias said.

Katrinchee wouldn’t hear of it. “The guilt,” she whispered, and her voice trailed off.

“Well, what about ‘Wouter’ then?”

She bit her lip and slowly shook her head from side to side.

Two days later, when Jeremias came in from the fields, his sister was smiling over a pan of rising dough. “I want to call him ‘Jeremias,’ ” she said. “Or how do the Englishers have it—‘Jeremy?’ ”

The surname was another story. On the one hand, the boy was a Van Brunt — just look at his eyes — but on the other, he wasn’t. And if he were to be christened a Van Brunt, who would the Dominie list as his father? They wrestled with the problem through a blistering afternoon and a mosquito-plagued night: in the morning they agreed that the boy should be named for his natural father, who was, after all, the son of a chieftain. It was only proper. Jeremias milked his cows, then sent for Dominie Van Schaik.

It was September before the Dominie actually made it out to the farm to perform the ceremony, but neither Katrinchee nor Jeremias was much bothered by the delay. Once they’d reached their decision, it was as if the thing had already been accomplished. Now they were legitimate. They’d weathered the worst, they’d been orphaned, deserted, evicted and shunned, and now they were members of the community once more, fully sanctioned in the eyes of God, man and patroon alike.

And so things went, on through the fall and the days that slid ever more rapidly toward night, through the harvest that was less than bountiful but more than meager, through the lulling warmth of Indian summer and the cold sting of the first blighting frost. Then one afternoon, late in October, Jeremias was out on the far verge of the cornfield, burning stumps and thinking of the way the blouse clung to Neeltje’s upper arms, when all at once he felt himself gripped by nameless fears and vague apprehensions. His pulse quickened, smoke stung his eyes, he could feel the scar come alive on his face. Not two days earlier, a half-plucked gobbler in his lap, his hands glutinous with feathers and his mind wandering all the way down to Croton, he’d glanced up and seen the figure of his father, clear as day, tearing across the field in his steaming nightshirt. But now, though the blood was beating in his temples and his scalp felt as if it were being manipulated by invisible fingers, though he looked over both shoulders and stared down his nose at the four corners of the field, he saw nothing.

No sooner had he gone back to his work, however, than he was startled by a voice that seemed to leap up out of the blaze before him, as if the very fire itself were speaking. “You. Who gives you the right to farm here?” rumbled the voice in very bad Dutch. Jeremias rubbed the smoke from his eyes. And saw that a man — a giant, red-bearded, dressed in skins and with a woodsman’s axe flung over his shoulder — stood to the right of the burning stump. The smoke shifted, and the man took a step forward.

Jeremias could see him more clearly now. His face was as soiled as a coal miner’s, he wore leggings after the Indian fashion, and the eyes stared out of his head with the exophthalmic vehemence of the eyes of the mad. A pair of coneys, still wet with blood, dangled from his belt. “Who gives you the right?” he repeated.

Backing up a step, wondering how, with his bad leg, he could possibly hope to outrun this madman, Jeremias found himself murmuring the name of his landlord and master as if it were an incantation. “Oloffe Stephanus Van Wart,” he said, “… the patroon.”

“The patroon, is it?” the madman returned, mincing his words in mockery. “And who gives him the right?”

Jeremias tried to hold the stranger’s eyes while casting about for something he could use to defend himself — a stone, a root, the jawbone of an ass, anything. “Their … Their High Mightinesses,” he stammered. “Originally, I mean. Now it’s the duke of York and King Charles of the Englishers.”

The madman was grinning. A flat, toneless laugh escaped his lips. “You’ve learned your lesson well,” he said. “And what are you, then — a man to forge his own destiny or somebody’s nigger slave?”

All at once the world rose up to scream in his ears, the harsh caterwauling of the hollow withered dead: all at once Jeremias understood who it was standing there before him. In desperation he snatched up a stone and crouched low, David in the shadow of Goliath. He understood that he was about to die.

“You,” the madman said, laughing again. “You know who I am?”

Jeremias could barely choke out a response. His legs felt weak and his throat had gone dry. “Yes,” he whispered. “You’re Wolf Nysen.”

Landless Gentry

Marguerite Mott, elder sister of Muriel, edged closer to Depeyster, scuffing the ancient peg-and-groove floor with the feet of the William and Mary side chair. Like her sister, she was a big moon-faced blonde in her mid-fifties who favored false eyelashes and cocktail dresses in colors like champagne and chartreuse. Unlike her sister, however, she worked for a living. Selling real estate. “He’s rejected the bid,” she said, looking up from the sheaf of papers in her lap.

“Son of a bitch.” Depeyster Van Wart rose from his chair, and when he spoke again, his voice was pinched to a yelp. “You kept this strictly confidential, right? He had no idea it was me?”

Marguerite pressed her lashes together in a coy little blink and gave him a look of wide-eyed rectitude. “Like you told me,” she said, “I’m bidding on behalf of a client from Connecticut.”

Depeyster turned away from her in exasperation. He had an urge to pluck something up off the sideboard — an antique inkwell, a china bibelot — and fling it through the window. He was a great flinger. He’d flung Lionel trains, music boxes and croquet mallets as a boy, squash rackets, golf clubs and highball glasses as he grew older. There was actually something in his hand, some damnable piece of Indian bric-a-brac — what was it, a calumet? a tomahawk? — before he got hold of himself. He set the thing down and reached into his breast pocket for a tranquillizing pinch of cellar dust.

“So, what are you saying,” he said, swinging around on her, “the place isn’t for sale then — to anybody? You mean to tell me the old fart isn’t hard up for cash?”

“No, he wants to sell. Word is he’s trying to raise money to leave his grandson something.” Marguerite paused to snap open a compact, peer into it as into a bottomless well, and dab something on the flanges of her nose. “He thinks twenty-five hundred’s too low, that’s all.”

Of course. The son of a bitch. The hypocrite. To each according to his need, share and share alike, the crime of property and all the rest of it. Slogans, and nothing more. When it came down to it, Peletiah Crane was as venal as the next man. Twenty-five hundred an acre for a piece of property that had been worthless since the time of the red Indians, twenty-five hundred an acre for land he’d practically stolen from Depeyster’s father for something like a hundredth of that. And still it wasn’t enough for him. “What’s he want then?”

Marguerite gave him another demure little blink and dropped her voice to soften the blow: “He did mention a figure.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t get excited now. Remember, we are bargaining with him.”

“Yeah, yeah: what’s he want?”

Her voice was nothing, tiny, a voice speaking from the depths of a cavern: “Thirty-five hundred.”

“Thirty-five!” he echoed. “Thirty-five?” He had to turn away from her again, his hands trembling, and take another quick hit of dust. The unfairness of it all! The cheat and deception! He was no megalomaniac, no cattle baron, no land-greedy parvenu: all he wanted was a little piece of his own back.

“We could bargain him down, I’m sure of it.” Marguerite’s voice rose up in lusty crescendo, rich and strong, invigorated by the prospect of the deal. “All’s I need is your go-ahead.”

Depeyster wasn’t listening. He was reflecting sadly on how far the Van Warts had fallen. His ancestors — powerful, indomitable, hawk-eyed men who tamed the land, shot bears, skinned beavers and brought industry and agronomy to the valley, men who made a profit, for Christ’s sake — had owned half of Westchester. They’d built something unique, something glorious, and now it was finished. Eaten away, piece by piece, by blind legislators and land-hungry immigrants, by swindlers and bums and Communists. First they started carving it up into towns, then they built their roads and turnpikes, and before anyone could stop them they’d voted away the rights of the property owners and deeded the land to the tenants. Democracy: it was a farce. Another brand of communism. Rob the rich, screw the movers and shakers, the pioneers and risk takers and captains of industry, and let all the no-accounts vote themselves a share of somebody else’s pie.

And if the politicians weren’t bad enough, the crooks and confidence men were right there behind them. His great-grandfather was fleeced in the Quedah Merchant scheme, his grandfather lost half his fortune to touts and tipsters and the other half to thespian ladies in bustles and black stockings, and then his own father, a man with developed tastes, fell like a gored toreador among the trampling hoofs of the stockbrokers. Sure, there were ten acres left, there was the house and the business and the other interests too, but it was nothing. A mockery. The smallest shard of what had been. Landless, heirless, Depeyster Van Wart stood there in that venerable parlor, the last offshoot of a family that had ruled all the way to the Connecticut border, frustrated over a matter of fifty acres. Fifty acres. His forefathers wouldn’t have pissed on fifty acres.

“What do you say? Should we split the difference with him and come in at three thousand?”

He hadn’t forgotten Marguerite — she was there at his back, calculating, homing in, his woeful ally — but he was too caught up in his fugue of bitter reflection to respond. The thing that galled him above all was that the slobbering incontinent senile old pinko bastard had held his subversive rallies on the place — on land that had been in the Van Wart family from time immemorial. He’d sullied it, bloodied it, defiled it. This was land Depeyster’s ancestors had fought the Indians for, and old man Crane had turned it into a picnic ground for fellow travelers. All right, yes, Depeyster had got him back for that — got him good, what with organizing the Loyalty rallies and then pressuring the school board till they forced the old fraud into early retirement — but still, even after all this time, the thought of those ragtag niggers and Jews and folksingers trampling over his property made his face go hot with rage.

“Depeyster?”

“Hm?” He turned back around again. Marguerite was leaning so far forward she looked like a sprinter crouching in the blocks.

“What do you think?”

“About what?”

“Splitting the difference. Coming in at three thousand.”

What he thought was that he wouldn’t pay three thousand an acre for the tip of Mount Ararat when the second flood came, what he thought was that he’d wait till the old bastard kicked off and then go after the half-wit grandson. What he said was: “Forget it.”

If Marguerite was about to remonstrate with him, she never got the chance. Because at that moment the door was flung open and what appeared to be a troop of marauding gypsies invaded the cool antique confines of the parlor. Depeyster caught a glimpse of scarves and feathers and headbands, hair matted like a dog’s, the stuporous troglodytic expression of the dropout, burnout and drug abuser: his daughter was home. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Behind her, slouch-shouldered and gleaming as if he’d been rubbed with chicken fat, was some sort of spic with an earring and the sick dull eyes of a colicky cow, and behind him, speak of the devil, was the Crane kid, looking as if he’d just been hoisted up out of the Black Hole of Calcutta. “Oh,” Mardi mumbled, on the defensive for once, “I thought you’d … uh, be at work.”

What could he say? Embarrassed in his own parlor, humiliated in front of Marguerite Mott (she was gazing up at the invaders as if at some esoteric form of animal life her sister might have photographed around the Tanzanian water holes), his very hearth and home transmogrified into a hippie crash pad. He could hear the gossip already: “Yes, his daughter. Trumped up like a dope addict or streetwalker or something. And with this, this — God, I don’t know what he was, a Puerto Rican, I guess — and the Crane boy, the one that dropped out of Cornell? Yes, dope is what I heard it was.”

The spic gave him a toothy grin. Mardi, taking the offensive now, shot him a look of the deepest loathing and contempt, and the Crane kid slouched so low his body seemed to collapse in on itself. At that moment, all Depeyster sought was to act casual, to cover himself, brush the whole thing off as if it were just another minor aberration of the environment, on the order of the catalpa tree that dropped its pods in the swimming pool or the mosquitoes that swarmed in great whining clouds over the porch at dusk. But he couldn’t. He was too wrought up. First the news about the property, and now this. He looked down and saw that he was waving his hand spasmodically, as if shooing flies. “Go away,” he heard himself say. “Scat.”

This was what Mardi had been waiting for: an opening, a chink in his armor, a place to drive the spikes in. Glancing over her shoulder for support, she drew herself up, squared her legs and let loose: “So this is what I get, huh? Go away? Like I’m your pet dog or something?” She allowed a fraction of a moment for her rhetoric to hit home, and then delivered the coup de grace: “I do happen to live here, you know. I mean,” and here the great black-rimmed eyes filled with tears and her voice thickened with emotion, “I am your daughter.” Pause. “Even though I know you hate me.”

Behind her, the spic had stopped smiling and begun to shuffle his feet; the Crane kid, stricken with a sudden palsy of the facial muscles, was halfway out the door. Depeyster stood there, poised between grief and surcease, a sordid domestic scenario playing itself out on the Persian carpet while Marguerite Mott looked on. Would he blow up in a rage, take his daughter in his arms and comfort her, stalk out of the room and book the next flight for San Juan? He didn’t know. His mind had gone numb.

And then suddenly, unaccountably, he found himself thinking of Truman’s kid — Walter — and the way he’d looked propped up on his crutches in the office. His hair was longer than Depeyster would have wanted it and there was the first adolescent shadow of a mustache clinging to his upper lip, but he was a solid-looking kid, raw and big-boned, with his father’s jaw and cheekbones and pale faded eyes. Mardi had mentioned him that afternoon in the kitchen. She knew him. Tried to shock her father with it, in fact. Well, he wasn’t shocked. He took one look at these deadheads she was running around with and wished she would take up with somebody like Walter.

“All right,” she was saying, and even the smallest trace of dole had faded from her voice; when she repeated the phrase half a beat later, it had all the punch of a war cry.

He didn’t respond. Or if he did, it was with that same involuntary shooing motion, his hand working of its own accord. No, he wasn’t a bad kid, Walter. A little confused, maybe, but then who wouldn’t be, what with his crazy mother starving herself to death and his father running off with his tail between his legs — worse, running off and leaving him to grow up with a bunch of bleeding hearts and fellow travelers and the like. It was criminal. The kid had heard one side of the story all his life — the wrong side, the twisted, lying and perverted side. It was just the beginning of course, a shot in the dark, one voice raised against a howling multitude, but Depeyster had tried to straighten him out on a few things that afternoon. Beginning with his father.

Patriot, Walter had spat. What do you mean he was a patriot?

I mean he loved his country, Walter, and he fought for it too — in France and Germany, and right here in Peterskill. Tenting his fingers, Depeyster had sunk back in his chair, watching Walter’s eyes. There was something there — the anger, yes, the confusion and the hurt — but something else too: Walter wanted to believe him. For Depeyster it was a revelation. If the child rejected the parent, if Mardi paraded around like a whore and espoused her dime-store radicalism at the dinner table to spit in her father’s eye and undermine everything the community held sacred, then here was a kid who was ready to turn the other way. His parents — foster parents: Jews, Communists, the worst — had fed him hate and lies and their vicious propaganda all his life till he was ready to choke on it. He was clay. Clay to be molded.

You think the Peterskill incidents were nothing? Depeyster said. Walter just stared at him. Well, look what your Communists did four years later with the A-bomb secrets. A patriot fights that kind of business, Walter, fights it with all his heart. And that’s why I say your father was a patriot.

Walter shifted his weight, leaned forward on his crutches. Yeah? And do patriots sell out their friends, their wife, their son?

Yes, Depeyster wanted to say, if they have to. But then he glanced down at the shiny new boot on Walter’s right foot and reminded himself to go easy. Look, Walter, he said, changing tack, you don’t seem to be following me. Communism doesn’t work, it’s as simple as that. Look at Russia today. China. Vietnam. The whole damned Iron Curtain. You want to live like that?

Walter shook his head. But that’s not the point, he said.

No, of course it wasn’t, but it was true, and Depeyster opened up on him anyway. He cited the Pilgrims, Brook Farm and hippie communes, deplored the fate of the kulaks, railed against the Viet Cong and pointed a finger at the face of the Worldwide Communist Conspiracy, but Walter refused to budge. Worse, he kept bringing the dialogue around to that single sore point that lay between them like a bloody stick. Whether or not communism worked wasn’t the question, Walter kept insisting — the question was what had gone down on Peletiah Crane’s property on that hot August evening in 1949. Depeyster dodged around the issue — not yet, not yet — vehemently asserting that he was within his rights, that everything he’d done he would do again. He looked into Walter’s face and saw Truman, and at that moment he understood that he was no longer defending the vanished father — Truman was mad, he was indefensible — no: he was defending himself.

He wanted to give it to him straight, wanted to tell him just how far Morton Blum and Sasha Freeman had gone to provoke the confrontation — how he himself had been duped into responding when it would have been far better to leave it alone — wanted to ask him if he really thought a peaceful rally was worth as much to the cause as a loud and dirty riot with its front-page photographs of bloodied women, screaming children and colored men beaten till they looked like prizefighters on the losing end of a unanimous decision. But he held back. All that was for the next lesson.

Look, Depeyster had said finally, I know how you feel. I admit your father was wrong to go off and desert his family like that — and I admit he had his crazy streak too — but what he did was in the name of freedom and justice. He sacrificed himself, Walter — he was a martyr. Be proud.

But what, Walter gasped, what was it? What did he do?

Depeyster dropped his eyes to slip open the drawer and fortify himself with a pinch of dust, but thought better of it. He looked up before he answered. He was with us, Walter, he said, slamming the drawer home. He was with us all along.

But then the image of Walter was gone and Depeyster found himself staring into the null faces of the subversives and draft dodgers his daughter had brought home with her. Human garbage, and they were here in his house, under his roof; for all Marguerite knew, he approved of them, liked them, shared their dope and bean sprout sandwiches. “Get out,” he repeated.

Through the wild frizzed fluff of her hair, Mardi was giving him a half-hateful, half-frightened look. Perhaps he’d gone too far. Yes: he could see it in her eyes. He wanted to stop himself, soften the blow, but he couldn’t.

“All right,” she shouted for the third time, “all right,” for the fourth, “I’m leaving.” There was a scurry in the hallway, the spic kid ducking out of her way, Tom Crane’s hands fluttering like flushed quail, the frame-wrenching boom of the door, and then they were gone.

Depeyster glanced at Marguerite. She’d gone pale beneath the ruddy film of her makeup, her pupils were dilated and the tip of her tongue was caught between her lips. She looked as if she’d awakened from a trance. “I, um,” she murmured, gathering up her things, rustling papers, reaching for her coat, “I have to be going. Appointments, appointments.”

At the door, he tried to apologize for his daughter, but she waved him off. “Three thousand,” she said, brightening just a bit. “You think about it.”

It was late in the afternoon, and he was out back, spading up the earth around his roses, when he thought of Joanna. He’d been in the house just a moment earlier, looking for a fishing hat to keep the sun out of his eyes, and noted absently that Lula had set but a single place at the dining room table. Now, as the rich black loam of the rose bed turned beneath his spade, that solitary place setting loomed up in his mind till he saw not roots and soil but the pattern of the china, the cut of the crystal, the crease of napkin and glint of silver. It was puzzling. Mardi wouldn’t be eating — probably wouldn’t be home at all after the scene in the parlor — but where was Joanna? She’d left the previous morning for the Shawangunk reservation, the station wagon packed to the roof with the cast-off pedal pushers, clam-diggers and toreador pants she’d collected door to door in her biannual trouser drive. Which meant that she would spend the night at the Hiawatha Motel, as usual, and be home for dinner in the evening. As usual. And yet he was sure he’d seen just the one place.

It was something to think about as he bent to the rose bushes, mounding the earth in little pyramids at the base of the canes and tamping it down deep over the roots. He was in the act of exhuming the previous year’s mulch from the trough around the Helen Traubels, when a startling thought crept into his head: she’d had an accident, that’s what it was. The accident. The one he’d always pictured. Yawing over its oppressed springs, the station wagon had veered off one of the tricky bends of Route 17 and wound up on its roof in the icy pellucid waters of the Beaverkill; a semi had jackknifed, crushing the car like an aluminum can: Joanna was gone. Sarabande, Iceberg, Olé: he could already smell the blossoms. But no. If it were anything serious — anything fatal — Lula would have let him know.

Roses. Here it was mid-October already and he was just now getting around to preparing the beds for the hard frost to come. Not that he’d been neglecting them — he exulted in his roses, prided himself in them, wouldn’t let the gardener near them — it was just that September had been glorious — Indian summer to the hilt — and he’d found himself out on the Catherine Depeyster nearly every afternoon. Or on the links. No, she’d had a flat, that’s what it was. The engine had seized, the fan belt disintegrated, she was stuck in Olean, Elmira, Endicott. He stood, knocked the dirt from his work gloves. Little Darling, Blaze, Mister Lincoln, Saratoga: the very names gave him satisfaction. He’d finish up tomorrow, wrap the canes in burlap, manure them. But where was she? Maybe she’d left him. Vanished. Run off. As he strode up the hill to the house, a guilty little fantasy overtook him for just a moment — she was naked, that big freckle-faced dormmate of Mardi’s, hovering over him and bucking like a wild animal, and he could feel his seed taking hold, could see them — his sons — marching from her hot and fertile young womb as from the mouth of some ancient cave.

Lula’s face dropped when he mentioned the place setting. “Oh my blessed Jesus, it just slipped my mind.” The kitchen, with its concessions to modernity — dishwasher, electric range, frost-free refrigerator — gleamed behind her like something out of a commercial for the newest wonder cleaner. She’d been pounding veal at the kitchen table when he stepped into the room. “Oh Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” she wailed, and you might have thought she’d lost her entire family in a train wreck, “I just can’t figure what’s come over me.”

Depeyster leaned back against the radiant counter and folded his arms.

“It was one o’clock this afternoon she called. Something’s come up up there, something about a protest march — here, I’ve got it written down.” She heaved herself up from the table, a heavy woman, solid as the oaks along the drive, and snatched a scrap of paper from beneath the phone. “Here it is,” she gasped, breathing hard from the effort, “ ‘Six Tribes Against the War.’ She says not to expect her till tomorrow this time.”

Six Tribes Against the War: what a joke. He let the words sit on his tongue a moment before repeating them in a tone of bitter contempt. Six Tribes Against the War. He could picture them — a bunch of unemployed half-looped overfed Indians dressed in toreador pants and carrying placards, his wife out front in curlers and beaded moccasins, marching up and down in front of the feed store in Jamestown. It would almost be funny if they weren’t doing the work of the Viet Cong. And Joanna. The relief business was bad enough, but this — this was demeaning. His own wife involved in a demonstration. What next?

“Piccata tonight,” Lula murmured, shuffling back to her veal.

“And Mardi?” he asked after a moment.

Lula just shrugged.

He stood there a moment longer, listening to the refrigerator start up with a wheeze and gazing out on that single accusatory plate at the dining room table. On the back wall, above the sideboard, hung a murky oil of Stephanus Van Wart, heir to the patroon and first lord of Van Wart Manor, the man who’d doubled and trebled the original holdings and then doubled and trebled them again until he owned every creek and ridge, every fern, every deer and turkey and toad and thistle between the flat gray Hudson and the Connecticut border. Depeyster glanced up at the proud smirking eyes of his ancestor and found that he’d lost his appetite. “Don’t bother, Lula,” he said. “I’ll eat out.”

When Joanna finally did get home the following evening, it was late — past ten — and Depeyster was sitting before a fire in the parlor, halfheartedly poking through a biography of General Israel Putnam, the man who’d closed his ears to all appeals for clemency and hanged Edmund Palmer for a spy on Gallows Hill in August of 1777. For the second night running, the heir to Van Wart Manor had eaten a solitary meal in a clean, well-lighted booth at the Peterskill diner, and for the second night running, he was afflicted with indigestion. He was feeling pretty low in any case — frustrated over the land business, incensed with his daughter (who still hadn’t deigned to return), deeply mortified by the thought of his wife’s making a public spectacle of herself, even if it was in the remotest hinterlands. And so, as he turned at the sound of the latch to confront the spectacle of his tardy wife in her ridiculous Indian costume, he gave himself over to the huffings and puffings of a fine cleansing cathartic rage. “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded, leaping to his feet and flinging the book to the floor.

Joanna was wearing the moccasins and headband she’d affected since first taking up the gauntlet in the name of Indian relief. But now, for some unfathomable reason, she’d got herself up in a ragged deerskin dress and leggings as well. The dress looked like something you’d use on the car after a heavy rain.

“No, don’t tell me — it was a costume party, right? Or is this what the fashionable demonstrator is wearing these days?” The diner’s stuffed peppers shot up his windpipe to immolate the cavity beneath his breastbone. He suppressed a belch.

Joanna said nothing. There was a peculiar look in her eyes, a look he recognized from the distant past. It was the look she used to give him when they were dating, when they were newlyweds, when they were a fecund young couple with a healthy fat-faced blossoming little daughter. She crossed the room to him, and he noticed that her hair was braided, Indian-fashion, with strips of birch bark. And then her hands were on his shoulders — he could smell her, woodsmoke, wild mint, a certain primordial musk of the outdoors that made his knees go weak — and she was asking him, in a lascivious whisper, if he’d missed her.

Missed her? She was pulling him toward her, hanging from his neck like a schoolgirl, pressing her lips with their faintest taste of wild onion and rose hips to his. Missed her? They hadn’t had sex in fifteen years and she was asking him if he’d missed her?

Fifteen years. Over that period, sex for Depeyster had been reduced to a sad series of couplings, a spilling of seed in the desert, a succession of weekends with the Miss Egthuysens of the world or with one or another of the aggressive sun-tanned lionesses he ran into at the country club bar. But never with Joanna, never with his wife. All that had ended when she’d gathered up his lotions and unguents and aphrodisiacs and thrown them in his face, when she’d torn up his love manuals and shredded his ovulation schedules, when she’d asked him if he thought she was a prize bitch for breeding and nothing more. Mardi had been five or six at the time, entering kindergarten — or was it first grade? They’d slept in separate rooms ever since.

And now here she was, probing his palate with her tongue, pushing him back on the couch, pulling him to the floor and the rug before the fire. Was she drunk? he thought vaguely as she tugged at his trousers. She lifted her dress and he saw with a thrill that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath, her breasts high and hard, not a flap or wrinkle on her, forty-three years old and supple as a coed. As she sank into him he felt transported, grateful, hopeful, his fantasy of the big freckled girl realized here on the carpet in the parlor with his own wife, and he closed his eyes and concentrated on the heir to come. Oh yes, there’d be an heir. There had to be. He’d waited so long and now … it was like something out of a fairy tale, The Patient Woodcutter, Sleeping Beauty awakened with a kiss. He gave himself over to the rhythm of it.

For her part, Joanna was doing what she had to do. Not that there wasn’t a certain nostalgic feel to the whole exercise, not that it was particularly repulsive or anything like that. She supposed she loved him, in a way, this bloodless man, her husband. He was all right — she couldn’t imagine being married to anyone else — it was just that he didn’t know how to stir her, to move her in her deepest self, didn’t know or care about love, romance, passion. He was cold, cold as something you’d find crawling up the riverbed waving its claws. He didn’t want to make love, didn’t even want to fuck — he wanted to procreate.

Well, all right. She was no Molly Bloom, but for fifteen years she’d found her romance elsewhere. And now it was necessary to do this. With her husband. Her lawful partner. Presumptive father of the child she would bear, wanted to bear.

For she hadn’t been with Indians the past two days, hadn’t been to the demonstration, hadn’t in fact left Peterskill. Indians, no. But an Indian, one Indian, yes.

The Dunderberg Imp

It was no day for a pleasure cruise. The wind was howling down out of the Canadian wilds, it was cold enough to turn back the Vikings and the sky looked dead, caught up on the mountains like a skin stretched out to dry. Walter couldn’t feel his toes, and when he tried to relight the joint pinched in a vice grip between his thumb and forefinger, a sudden gust snuffed out the match. Three times in a row. Finally he gave up and flicked the thing into the water. He couldn’t believe it. Halloween, and already it was cold as December.

Walter turned up the collar of his denim jacket and watched a couple of ducks huddling in the lee of the boat ramp. All around him, on trailers, on cement blocks, propped up on the cracked concrete as if awaiting a second flood, were boats. Ketches, schooners, catboats and runabouts, yawls and yachts and catamarans. And then there were the boats that would never see the water again, ancient hulks rusted through in every bolt, leprous with rot, splintered and bleached and listing on their bows as if they’d been thrown ashore in a hurricane. This was the Peterskill Marina. Three blocks from Depeyster Manufacturing and just across the tracks from the crapped-over train station and the abandoned factories made of brick so old it was the color of mud. Walter was here, at two o’clock in the afternoon, on Halloween, waiting for Mardi. What could be better? she’d said when she called. I mean, going out to the ghost ships on Halloween. Neat, huh?

Neat. That was the word she’d used. Walter spat in the water and then turned to look over his shoulder for her. There were half a dozen cars in the parking lot, but none of them seemed to contain Mardi. It was funny. Here he was going out sailing with her on a day that was like a blanket for a tombstone, and he didn’t even know what kind of car she drove. He looked beyond the parking lot to the string of rust-streaked boxcars that stretched away from the station and around a corner toward the mouth of Van Wart Creek, and then up at the hills of Peterskill, a dependency of rooftops among the big ascending hummocks of trees. In the foreground, huddled in the lee of some seagoing monster with gleaming rails and curtains hung in the windows, stood his motorcycle, freshly repainted and with a new footpeg and throttle. The helmet, the one Jessica had given him, was hooked over the handlebar, and even at this distance he could make out the dull blotches where he’d scratched off the daisy decals with his penknife.

She hadn’t liked it, this defacing of his birthday present, but he explained to her that daisy decals just didn’t fit his image. He was no flower child — he was harder than that, colder, the nihilist and existential hero still. Then he grinned, as if to say I’m only joking, and she grinned back.

Jessica. She was at work now. His wife, who’d forgone Scripps, Miami, N.Y.U. and Mayaguez for him, was at work, counting fish larvae preserved in trays of formalin. Tom Crane had gotten her the job. Over at the nuclear power plant, the stacks and domes of which rose up from the near shoreline like the minarets and cupolas of some fantastic high-tech mosque. The larva count was part of an environmental impact study Con Ed was funding to atone for the sin of sucking up great stinking mounds of fish in their intake pipes. An old lab mate of Tom’s had got him a job piloting a boat for the project two nights a week, and when a position came open, Tom thought of Jessica. She was in there now. Sniffing formalin, her eyes wet from the fumes of it.

Walter himself was out of work. Not that he didn’t want to work — eventually, maybe, if the right thing came along. He just didn’t feature standing up all day at a greasy whining lathe, turning out those little winged machine parts that had no use under the sun as far as he could figure (unless, as rumor had it, they were used in fragmentation bombs to grind up little children in places with names like Duk Foo and Bu Wop). Or so he told Hesh and Lola. What he didn’t tell them was that Van Wart had offered him a desk job. On the spot. No questions asked.

I like you, you know that? Van Wart had said that afternoon in the office. He’d skirted the issue of the riots for half an hour, advised Walter to read his history and assured him that wherever his father was — alive or dead — he should be proud of him. Walter, who’d taken a seat somewhere between the persecution of the kulaks and the fall of Chiang Kai-shek, had just risen to go when Van Wart made his declaration of esteem. You impress me, Van Wart said. You’ve got a good mind. Maybe we don’t see eye to eye on politics, but that’s neither here nor there. He was standing now too, clasping his hands and beaming like a haberdasher. What I’m trying to say is you’ve got a degree and I’ve got an opening for an assistant manager, $11,000 a year and all the benefits. And you can stay off that leg of yours. What do you say?

No, Walter had said, almost as a reflex, no thanks, already seeing himself in dress shirt and tie, ensconced behind a desk with the elusive Miss Egthuysen at his beck and call, Doug and all the rest of the peons cut down in a single stroke, already picturing the new Triumph, racing green, wire wheels, zero to fifty in 6.9 seconds… but work for Van Wart? It was inconceivable. (Never mind that he’d been doing just that for the past two and a half months — he’d been laboring in ignorance.) No, he told him. He appreciated the offer, but what with the shock of his accident and all he needed some time to recuperate before he could take a step like that.

Later, thinking it over, he wasn’t sure why he’d backed off. Eleven thousand dollars was a lot of money, and Van Wart, despite his preaching, his air of condescension and his Bircherisms, despite the hatred he inspired in Tom Crane’s grandfather, in Hesh and Lola and all the rest, really wasn’t half bad. No ogre, certainly. No mindless, brick-throwing racist. There was a certain style about him, a polish and a toughness that made Hesh seem crude by comparison. And he believed in what he said, the conviction set deep in his eyes — too deep for lies. In fact, by the end of their little chat, Walter had begun to soften toward him. Even more: he’d begun, in an odd and somehow disturbing way, to like him.

Walter was thinking about all this, and thinking too about the consummate weirdness of the situation — married a month, and here he was sneaking down to the marina for an assignation with the ex-ogre’s daughter — when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Mardi. In watch cap and peacoat, in deck shoes and jeans and black leather gloves, looking as if she’d just stepped off a freighter with the rest of the merchant marine. Except for her eyes. Her eyes were pinned to her head, hard and cold as marbles, the pupils shrunk to specks. “Hi,” she said in a breathy voice, and then she kissed him. In greeting. But it was more than a peck on the cheek — it was a full-on osculation with a taste of her tongue in it. Walter didn’t know what to do, so he kissed her back.

“All set?” she said, grinning up at him.

“Yeah,” Walter said, rocking back on his good leg. “I mean, I guess so.” He gestured toward the river, the sky. “You sure you want to go through with this?”

He’d seen Mardi only once since the wedding. He and Jessica and Tom Crane were sitting around the Elbow one night about two weeks back, listening to the jukebox and shooting pool, when she walked in the door with Hector. The game was elimination, it was Walter’s shot, and he was keying in on Jessica’s last ball while she made wisecracks, nudged the cue stick from behind and generally tried to distract, disorient and disarm him. Mardi was wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, no sleeves, no brassiere. Walter froze. But Tom Crane, all elbows and flapping feet, with his ratty braid jogging in the breeze like the knot of hair over a horse’s ass, rushed up to embrace her, pump Hector’s hand in a power-to-the-people handshake and drag them over to the table. Walter exchanged greetings with Hector, nodded at Mardi and missed his shot.

Later, after a couple of pitchers of beer, more pool, innumerable treks across the expanse of dirty sawdust that covered the floor like bonemeal to urinate in the reeking rest rooms and share a surreptitious hit of whatever it was Hector had stuffed into the bowl of his pipe, everyone was feeling pretty relaxed. Jessica got up from the table and excused herself. “The ladies’,” she slurred, lurching across the room like one of the wounded.

Tom had vanished and Hector was up at the bar ordering shots of tequila all around. The table, which had suddenly grown small, was littered with peanut shells, ashes, butts, plates and bottles and glasses. Walter affixed a cautious little smile to his lips. Mardi smiled back. And then, out of nowhere, she asked Walter if he was still serious about the ghost ships — she’d give him a call if he was, no problem. Walter didn’t answer. Instead he posed a question of his own. “What was that business at the wedding?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady. “You know what I mean. About my foot. I didn’t like that.”

She was silent a moment, and then she gave him a smile that would have melted the polar ice caps. “Don’t take it so seriously, Walter,” she said, peering into her drink, “I just like to shock people, that’s all — see how they’ll react. You know: épater les bourgeois.” Walter didn’t know. He’d failed French.

She looked at him and laughed. “Come on, it was a joke, that’s all. I’m really not as wild as I make out. Really.” And then she leaned forward. “The thing I want to know is are you going with me or not?”

And now, here at the marina, hemmed in by spars and halyards and anchor chains, and breathing the very scent of the ghost of his grandfather, he was up against the wall yet again. “I don’t believe you,” Mardi said, and her face went numb for a moment. “Afraid of a little spray or what?” Walter shrugged, as if to say he was afraid of nothing — not cold, nor sleet, nor shadows that flit maliciously across an open roadway in the early hours of the morning. “Good,” she said, grinning so wide he could see the glint of gold in her back teeth, and then he was following her through the boatyard to the dock and the slips at the far end of it.

There were only two boats in the water. The Catherine Depeyster, a thirty-two-foot cruising sloop with auxiliary engine and woodwork varnished to a high gleam, stood alone among the deserted slips. The other boat, a peeling, nondescript, wide-bottomed thing with a broken mast and dry rot to the water line, lay at anchor beyond it, looking as if it had been dredged up from the bottom the week before. Walter was about to join Mardi aboard the Catherine Depeyster—she was already fumbling through the locker for foul-weather gear — when he saw a puff of smoke rise from the stovepipe of the blistered hulk. At first he couldn’t believe his eyes. But then, unmistakably, a thin gray column of smoke began to issue from the blackened pipe. He was stunned. Somebody was actually living aboard that thing, some crazed river rat who’d wake one morning to find himself under twelve feet of water. It had to be a joke. But no, the smoke was coming steadily now, flattened by the wind and blown back to him with the rich, gut-clenching scent of bacon on it. “Christ,” he said, turning to Mardi, “I can’t believe it.”

“Can’t believe what?” she said, handing him a black sou’wester as he stepped aboard.

“Over there. That piece of shit, that floating outhouse. There’s somebody living on it.”

“You mean Jeremy,” she said.

The cold stabbed at his ears. He looked from the hulk to Mardi and back again. The wind was slowly swinging the boat around on its anchor, bringing its stern into his line of vision. “Jeremy?” he repeated, never taking his eyes from the boat.

He heard Mardi at his back. She was saying that Jeremy had been around all summer, that he fished and did odd jobs and helped out at the marina. He was a gypsy or Indian or something, and he was all right for an old guy. Walter heard her as from a great distance, the words echoing in his head as he watched the ship swing around and reveal its name, in chipped and faded letters. He felt odd all of a sudden, felt the grip of history like a noose around his neck and he didn’t know why. The ship’s name was the Kitchawank.

All right: it was cold. But once they’d left the marina and hoisted sail, once they’d felt the pulse of the river under their feet and the first icy slap of spray in their faces, it no longer mattered. Mardi, the watch cap pulled down to her eyebrows, was at the tiller, drinking coffee from a thermos and mugging as if it were June, and Walter, in rubber boots, pants and slicker, was hiking out over the rail like a kid with his first Sunfish. He hadn’t been sailing since his grandfather died, hadn’t even been out on the river for as long as he could remember. It awakened his blood, flooded him with memories: it was like coming home. The mountains may have been dwarfs by the standards of the Alps or Rockies — Dunderberg and Anthony’s Nose were both under a thousand feet — but from here, on the water, they rose up like a dream of mountains, tall, massive and forbidding. Dead ahead lay Dunderberg, sloping back from the water like a sleeping giant, the ghost fleet nestled at its foot. To the south was Indian Point, with its power plants and estuarine biologists, with Jessica and her pickled fish; to the north, opening up like a shadowy mouth, was the entrance to the Highlands, where all the great mountains — Taurus, Storm King, Breakneck and Crow’s Nest — stepped down to wade in the river.

This was the province of the Dunderberg Imp, the capricious gnome in trunk hose and sugarloaf hat who ruled the river through its most treacherous reaches, from Dunderberg to Storm King. It was he who brewed up squalls and flung thunderbolts down on the unsuspecting sloop captains of old, he who made men look foolish and strewed temptation in their paths, he who presided over Kidd’s treasure and ruined any ship that came near. It was he who’d popped all the corks on Stuyvesant’s kegs as old Silver Peg sailed upriver to chastise the Mohicans, he who’d lifted the nightcap from the inviolable pate of Dominie Van Schaik’s wife and deposited it on the steeple of the Esopus church, forty miles distant. His laugh — the wild stuttering whinny of the deranged and irresponsible — could be heard over the keen of the wind, and his diminutive hat could be found perched placidly atop the mainmast during the fiercest gale. Not even the most hardened sea dog would dream of rounding Kidd’s Point without first tacking a horseshoe to the mast and making an offering of Barbados rum to the Heer of the Dunderberg.

Or so the legend went. Walter knew it well. Knew it as he knew the story of every witch, goblin, pukwidjinny and wailing woman that haunted the Hudson Valley. His grandmother had seen to that. But if he’d believed it once, if there’d been a spark of the old joy in the irrational left in him, of the child who’d sat over a liverwurst sandwich and thrilled to the story of Minewa’s betrayal or the legend of the headless Hessian of Sleepy Hollow, then Philosophy 451, Contemporary Philosophy with Emphasis on Death Obsession and Existentialist Thought, had extinguished it and left only the ash of cynicism behind.

Still, as the Catherine Depeyster cut for the base of the black mountain under a sky that was blacker still, he couldn’t help thinking of the twisted little Heer of the Dunderberg. What a concept. It wasn’t lousy seamanship or drunkenness or fog that had been scuttling ships in the Highlands since the time of Pieter Minuit and Wouter the Doubter, but the malicious forces of the supernatural as embodied in a leering little homunculus — the Heer of the Dunderberg, in baggy pantaloons and buckled shoes — who lived only to drive boats upon the rocks. Walter remembered his grandfather pouring two cups of rye and ginger every time he rounded Kidd’s Point: one for the belly and one for the river. What’s that for? Walter, twelve years old and wise in the ways of the world, had asked one day. For the Heer, his hairy grandfather had replied, smacking his lips. For luck. And then Walter, not daring to question the humorless old man, had challenged the Imp under his breath. Kill us, he whispered. Come on: I dare you. Strike us with lightning. Overturn the boat. I dare you.

The Imp had been silent that day. The sun lingered in the sky, the nets were full, they had Coke and crab cakes for dinner. Of course, the next time Walter rounded the point and rode up through the gorge of the mountains with his grandfather, thinking of baseball or a new fly rod or the way Susie Cats’ pedal pushers swelled at the intersection of her thighs, the sky suddenly went dark, the wind howled down off the mountains and the engine coughed, sputtered and went dead. What the—? his grandfather had snorted, rising up over his belly to jerk the starter cord in an automatic rage. They’d just skirted West Point and entered Martyr’s Reach, the most formidable of the fourteen reaches that sectioned the river from New York to Albany, a stretch of water known to generations of sailors for its treacherous winds, unpredictable currents and unforgiving shores. Just below them, two hundred and thirty feet down, lay World’s End, the graveyard for sloops and steamers and cabin cruisers alike, where rotting spars groaned in a current that was like the wind and from which no body had ever been recovered, deepest hole in a river that rarely ran more than a hundred feet deep. It was here that the Neptune capsized in 1824, with the loss of thirty-five passengers, and here too that Captain Benjamin Hunt of the James Coats met his maker when the mainsheet looped around his neck in a sudden gust and severed his head. In wild weather, you could still hear his startled cry, and then, right on its heels, the chilling splash of the trunkless head. Or so the story went.

Walter’s grandfather didn’t like it a bit. He cursed and fiddled over the motor while the ebbing tide carried them downriver and the first few drops of rain began to pucker the surface. Take the oars! he’d roared, and Walter had obeyed without hesitation. He was scared. He’d never seen the daylight so dark. Swing it around and head for home, his grandfather snarled. Row! Walter rowed, rowed till his arms went numb and his back felt as if someone had driven hot splinters into it, but to no avail. The rain caught them just below West Point. But it wasn’t just rain, it was hail too. And thunder that reverberated in the basin of the mountains like a war at sea. They wound up sitting at anchor beneath an overhang on the west bank, huddled and shivering, not daring to venture out on the open water for fear of the lightning that tore the sky apart over their heads. Two weeks later, Walter’s grandfather had his stroke and toppled into the bait pen.

Now, as the mountain loomed above them, Walter pushed himself up and made his way back to where Mardi sat at the tiller.

“Having a good time?” she shouted over the wind.

He just grinned in response, rocking with the boat, and then settled down beside her and helped himself to a cup of coffee from the thermos. The coffee was good. Hot and black and tasting of Depeyster Van Wart’s ten-year-old cognac. “Seen the Imp?” he said.

“Who?”

“You know, the little guy in the high hat and buckled shoes that runs around sitting on people’s masts and whipping up storms and whatnot.”

Mardi gave him a long slow look and a wet-lipped smile that took a moment to spread across her face. She looked good, with the cap pulled down low like that and her hair fanned out behind her in the wind. Real good. She put her free arm through his and drew him closer. “What’ve you been smoking?” she said.

It was Halloween, the night the dead rise from their graves and people hide behind masks, Halloween, and getting dark. Walter stood on the deck of the Catherine Depeyster and gazed up at the ranks of mothballed ships that rose above him on either side in great depthless fields of shadow. This time he hadn’t tried to hoist himself up the anchor chain of the U.S.S. Anima, nor of any of the other ships either. This time he’d been content merely to shove his hands deep in his pockets and stare up at them.

Mardi was in the cabin, sipping cognac and warming herself over the electric space heater. She’d furled the sails and started up the engine when they got in close, afraid the wind would push her into one of the big ships. Then, when they’d maneuvered their way through the picket of steel monsters and anchored amongst them, she picked up the thermos and headed for the cabin. “Come on,” she said, “let’s get in out of this wind,” but Walter wasn’t moving. Not yet, anyway. He was thinking of Jessica and feeling the stab of guilt and betrayal, knowing full well what was going to happen once he got into that cabin with Mardi. Oh, he could delay it, exercise his will, stand out here in the wind and gawk up at the ships as if they meant anything at all to him, but eventually he would follow her into the cabin. It was inevitable. Preordained. A role in a play he’d been rehearsing all his life. This was why he’d come out to the ghost ships — this, and nothing more. “Come on,” she repeated, and her voice dropped to a purr.

“In a minute,” he said.

The cabin door clicked shut behind him, and he never turned his head. This ship that hung over him, with its rusted anchor chain and hull streaked with bird crap, had suddenly become fascinating, riveting, a thing rare and unique in the world. He was thinking nothing. The wind bit at him. He counted off thirty seconds and was about to turn around and submit himself to the inevitable, when something — a sudden displacement of shadow, a furtive movement — caught his eye. Up there. High against the rail of the near ship.

It was almost dark. He couldn’t be sure. But yes, there it was again: something was roaming around up there. A bird? A rat? He tried to keep his eyes fixed on the spot, but at some point he must have blinked involuntarily — because the next thing he knew there was an object perched on the rail, where no object had been a fraction of a second earlier. From down here, beneath the great soaring wall of the ship, it appeared to be a hat — wide of brim, high of crown, and of a fashion that had its day centuries ago, a hat the pilgrims might have worn, or Rembrandt himself. It was at that moment, as Walter stood puzzling over this shadowy apparition, that an odd flatulent sound began to insinuate itself in the niche between the slosh of the waves and the moan of the wind, a sound that brought back memories of elementary school, of playgrounds and ballfields: someone was razzing him.

Walter looked to his right, and then to his left. He looked behind him, above him, he peered over the rail, tore open the locker, searched the sky — all to no avail. The sound seemed to be coming from everywhere, from nowhere, caught up in the very woof of the air itself. The hat was still perched atop the rail of the big rotting merchantman before him, and Mardi — he could see her through the little rectangular windows — was still ensconced in the cabin. The razzing grew louder, faded, pulsed back again, and Walter began to feel an odd sensation creeping up on him, déjà vu, a sensation grown old since the day of his accident.

Sure enough, when he looked up again, the rail of the ship was crowded with ragged figures — bums, the bums he’d seen the night of the accident — each with his fingers to his nose and a vibrating tongue between his lips. And there, in the middle of them, sat their ringleader — the little guy in baggy trousers and work boots his father had called Piet. Piet’s face was expressionless — as stolid as an executioner’s — and the antiquated hat was now sitting atop his head like an overturned milk can. As Walter focused on him, he saw the tip of the little man’s tongue emerge from between his tightly compressed lips to augment the mocking chorus with its own feathery but distinctive raspberry.

So here he was, Walter the empiricist, standing on the deck of a cruising sloop in the middle of the darkling Hudson on the eve of Allhallows, confronting a mob of jeering phantoms, and not knowing what to do next. He was seeing things. There was something the matter with him. He’d consult a shrink, have his head bandaged — anything. But for now he could think of only one thing to do, the same thing he’d done when he’d been razzed in junior high: he gave them the finger, one and all. With both hands. And he cursed them too, cursed them in a ragged raging high-pitched tone till he began to grow hoarse, his extended fingers digging at the air and feet dancing in furious rapture.

All very well and fine. But they were gone. He was cursing a deserted ship, cursing empty decks and berths unslept in for twenty years or more, cursing steel. The razzing had faded away to nothing and the only sound he could hear now was the whisper of a human voice at his back. Mardi’s voice. He turned around and there she was, standing at the cabin door. The door was open, and she was naked. He saw her breasts — silken, pouting, the breasts he remembered from the night of his collision with history. He saw her navel and the fascinating swatch of hair below it, saw her feet, calves, the swell of her thighs, saw the beckoning glow of the electric coil in the darkened cabin behind her. “Walter, what are you doing?” she said in a voice that rubbed at his skin. “Don’t you know I’ve been waiting for you?”

The blood shot from his head to his groin.

“Come on in and get warm,” she whispered.

It was past seven when the Catherine Depeyster motored into the slip at the marina. Walter was late. He was supposed to have been at the Elbow by six-thirty, dressed in costume, to meet Jessica and Tom Crane. They were going to have a few drinks, and then go out to a party in the Colony. But Walter was late. He’d been out in the middle of the river, fucking Mardi Van Wart. The first time — there at the cabin door — he’d practically tackled her, grabbing for flesh like a satyr, a rapist, all his demons concentrated in the slot between her legs. The second time was slow, soft, it was making love. She stroked him, ran her tongue across his chest, breathed in his ear. He stroked her in return, lingered over her nipples, lifted her atop him — he even, for moments at a time, forgot about the blasted torn stump of his leg and the inert lump of plastic that terminated it. Now, as he helped her secure the boat, he didn’t know what he felt. Guilt, for one thing. Guilt, and an overwhelming desire to shake hands, peck her cheek or whatever, and disappear. She’d said she was going to a party up in Poughkeepsie and that he was welcome to come along; he’d stammered that he was meeting Jessica and Tom down at the Elbow.

He watched her face as she tied off the lines and gathered up her things. It was noncommittal. He was thinking about his bike, a quick exit, thinking about what kind of excuse he was going to run Jessica and wondering what he could possibly do in the next five minutes about a costume.

Mardi straightened up and wiped her hands on the peacoat. “Hey,” she said, and her voice was husky, choked to a whisper. “It was fun. Want to do it again, sometime?”

He was about to say yes, no, maybe, when suddenly the image of the ghost ship rose up before him and he felt as if his leg — the good one — was about to buckle and drop him to the hard cold planks of the dock. He was going crazy, that’s what it was. Seeing things. Hallucinating like some shit-flinger up at Matteawan.

“Hm?” she said, and she reached for his arm and leaned into him. “You had a good time, didn’t you?”

It was then that he became aware of a figure standing in the shadows at the far end of the dock. He thought of muggers, trick or treaters, he thought of Jessica, he thought of his father. “Hello?” he called. “Is someone there?”

The light was bad, sky dark, a single streetlamp illuminating the dead geometry of masts and cranes at the far end of the boat yard. Walter felt Mardi go tense beside him. “Who’s there?” she demanded.

A man emerged from the shadows and moved toward them, the slats of the dock groaning under his footsteps. He was big, his shoulders like something hammered on as an afterthought, he wore a flannel shirt open to the navel despite the cold, and his graying hair trailed down his back in a thick twisted coil. Walter guessed he must have been fifty-five, sixty. “That you, Mardi?” the man asked.

She dropped Walter’s arm. “Jesus, Jeremy, you scared the shit out of us.”

He’d reached them now, and stood grinning before them. His two front teeth were outlined in gold, and he wore a bone necklace from which a single white feather dangled. “Boo,” he said in a ruined, phlegmy voice. “Trick or treat.”

Mardi was grinning now too, but Walter was glum. Whatever was about to happen, he didn’t want any part of it. He glanced longingly at his motorcycle, then turned back to the stranger. “I’ll take the treat,” Mardi said.

“Looks like you already got it,” the man said, giving Walter a sick grin.

“Oh,” she said, taking Walter’s arm again, “oh, yeah,” and she made as if to slap her brow for forgetfulness. “This is my friend—”

But the Indian — that’s what he was, Walter realized with a jolt — the Indian cut her off. “I know you,” he said, searching Walter’s eyes.

Walter had never laid eyes on him before. He felt his stomach drop. “You do?”

The stranger tugged at the collar of his lumberjack shirt and winced as if it were choking him. Then he spat and looked up again. “Yeah,” he rasped. “Van Brunt, right?”

Walter was stunned. “But, but how—?”

“You could be two toads out of the same egg, you and your father.”

“You knew my father?”

The Indian nodded, then ducked his head and spat again. “I knew him,” he said. “Yeah, I knew him. He was a real piece of shit.”

Mohonk, or the History of a Stab in the Back

He was born on the Shawangunk reservation, Jamestown, New York, in 1909, the green-eyed son of a green-eyed father. His mother, a Seneca ye-oh whose bellicose forefathers had been pacified by none other than George Washington himself, had eyes as black as olives. Ignoring those black eyes and the warlike temperament that lurked behind them, Mohonk père followed the patrilineal custom of his own tribe, the Kitchawanks, of which he was the last known surviving member, and christened the boy Jeremy Mohonk, Jr. The boy’s mother was scandalized. Her people, the warriors of the north, the survivors, claimed descent through the womb. The boy, his mother insisted, was by all rights a Seneca and a Tantaquidgeon. If he married in the clan, he’d be committing incest. But the elder Mohonk wouldn’t be moved. Twice during the first month of little Jeremy’s existence he took a half-strung snowshoe to the side of his wife’s head, and once, after an especially vehement disputation, he chased her through the Jamestown feedlot with a dibble stick honed to the killing sharpness of a spear.

The upshot of all this was an informal knife fight between Mohonk pére and Horace Tantaquidgeon, his wife’s brother. They were scaling fish on the banks of the Conewango — yellow perch, walleyes, maskinonge — their knives glinting in the sun. Mohonk fils, barely able to focus his eyes, was strapped to his mother’s back and gazing up into the dancing green of the trees and the stolid, unmoving sky that rose up everywhere around him, oceanic and blue. The men’s hands were wet with blood, with mucus. Translucent scales clung to their forearms. There was no sound but for the rasp of the knives and the furious drone of the flies. Suddenly, and without warning, Horace Tantaquidgeon rose to his feet and sank his knife into the back of the last of the Kitchawanks but one. The knife stuck there, quivering, the blade lodged like a splinter between two ridges of the lumbar vertebrae.

For a moment, there was no reaction. The elder Mohonk, barechested and dressed in stained work pants, squatted over his mound of fish as before. And then all at once his eyes went cold with a new kind of knowledge, and he dropped to his buttocks, sitting upright among those hacked and dumb-staring fish that squirted out from under him as if they’d come back to life … but no, he wasn’t just sitting, he was pitching backward from there, his legs, his gut, his bowels gone, cut loose and drifting like so many balloons puffed with helium.

The Tantaquidgeons were remorseful and penitent. Horace extracted a rumpled dollar bill from the hoard of eight he kept buried in a gourd out back of his house, walked the six miles to Frewsburg, and purchased a wheelchair from the widow of a white man who’d been crippled in the Spanish-American War. Then he wheeled it back home, all the long way up the dusty road to the reservation. And Mildred, the fractious wife, was fractious no more. Not only did she dismiss the subject of little Jeremy’s descent (the boy was his father’s son, a Kitchawank, one of two surviving members of the once-mighty Turtle Clan and rightful inheritor of the Kitchawank domain to the south, and that was that), but she devoted the rest of her days to the care of her husband. She prepared stewed opossum and venison, collected berries for him in season, greased his hair and diapered him like a second son. And all this was necessary, and more. For Jeremy Mohonk, son of Mohonks uncountable, last of his race but one, would never walk again.

The boy grew to manhood there on the reservation, where the light was a thing that invested the visible world with its glory, where streams met and bears roamed and the clouds held the setting sun in a grip as gentle as a mother’s hand. He listened to the dew settle on the grass at night, watched the sun pull itself out of the trees in the morning, stalked game, gigged frogs, fished and climbed and swam. He learned to read and write at the agency school, learned about Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus from a white man who wore a starched collar and whose face was like an overripe plum; at night he sat at the foot of his father’s wheelchair and discovered the history of his race.

His father sat stiff in the chair, holding himself erect with arms that were eternally flexed against the numbness of his belly and bowels. The injury had made him gaunt, and he seemed to grow more attenuated day by day, year by year, as if Horace Tantaquidgeon’s blade had somehow let the spirit escape like air from his body, leaving only the husk behind. Still, he told the old stories in a voice that sang, strong and true, told them with the breath of history. Jeremy was no more than four or five when he heard them the first time; he was a full-grown man of eighteen summers when he heard them the last.

His father told him how Manitou had sent his big woman to earth and how she squatted in the water that covered everything and gave birth to dry land. Undaunted by this mighty feat of parturition, she heaved herself up again and gave birth to trees and plants, and then finally to three animals: the deer, the bear and the wolf. From these, all the men of the earth are descended, and each of them — man, woman and child — has the nature of one of these beasts. There are those who are innocent and timid, like the deer; those who are brave, revengeful and just of hand, like the bear; and those who are false and bloodthirsty, like the wolf.

Wasted, his face drawn and cheeks sucked back to bone, the elder Mohonk sat beneath the stovepipe hat given him by the Tantaquidgeons as partial recompense for his injury and told his son of god and the devil, of the spirits in things, of pukwidjinnies, neebarrawbaigs and the imps that haunt the still and sheltered lagoons of the Hudson. Jeremy was eleven, he was twelve, fourteen. His father was dying, but the stories never stopped. In school he learned that Lincoln had freed the slaves, that the square root of four is two and that everything in the world is composed of atoms. At home he sat before the fire with his father while the spirit of the flames raised her hackles along the length of a sputtering log.

After his father’s death, the last of the Kitchawanks had no reason to linger on the reservation. His mother, ancient enemy of his tribe and betrayer of his father, took another husband before the grass had gone yellow on the grave. Horace Tantaquidgeon, who’d taught him to hunt and fish and fire a clay cookpot, turned his back on him now, as if, with his father’s death, the debt had been paid. And though Jeremy had stayed on to finish school with a white man’s diploma, he found the doors in Jamestown shut to him. Hey, chief, people called to him on the street, where’s your wigwam? Hey, you. Geronimo. No, there was nothing in Jamestown. And so it was the most natural thing in the world to bundle up his possessions — the knife that had cut his father’s legs out from under him, a bearskin sleeping bag, two strips of eel jerky, a dog-eared copy of Ruttenburr’s Indian Tribes of the Hudson’s River and the notochord of a sturgeon his father had worn around his neck to remind him of the perfidy of fishes — and head east, along the Susquehanna and Delaware, then across the Catskills to that gleaming apotheosis of modern technology, the Bear Mountain Bridge, and then over the storied river to the hills of Peterskill itself.

He was almost surprised to see that those hills had houses on them, to see that the streets were paved with brick and cobblestone and lined with automobiles and telegraph poles. Battened on tales, he’d expected something different. If not dewy forests, free-running streams and open campfires, then at least a sleepy Dutch village with dogs drowsing in the streets and a noonday silence that sank into the marrow of the bones. He was sadly deluded. For Peterskill in 1927 was clanking along with the industrial revolution, stirring up dust and turning over the greenback dollar; to an Indian from the reservation it was teeming, dirty, pandemonium itself. On the other hand, it wasn’t a bad place to get lost in. No one noticed an Indian on the street. No one even knew what an Indian was. They recognized Bohunks, Polacks, wops, micks, kikes and even the occasional nigger — but an Indian? Indians wore headdresses and funny underwear and lived in teepees somewhere out west.

Dressed in the work pants and faded flannel shirt he’d worn on the reservation, his hair cropped close with the blade that had stuck his father, Jeremy appeared one morning at 7:00 A.M. outside the gate of the Van Wart Foundry on Water Street, asking for work. Half an hour later he was dodging around vats of molten iron, hammer and file in hand, hacking lumps of fused residue from the castings. The first week he slept in a clump of smartweed near the mouth of Acquasinnick Creek, and he got wet twice; once he’d been paid, he took a room in a boardinghouse on the west end of Van Wart Road. From here, in the shortening evenings, on half-day Saturdays and breezy Sunday mornings, he hiked up into the hills to commune with the spirit of his ancestors.

It was on one of these hikes that he met Sasha Freeman.

Carrying nothing that would identify him to the casual observer as the innocuous footslogger and nature lover he was — no rucksack, no canteen or alpenstock, no sandwiches wrapped in butcher’s paper — Jeremy made his way up Van Wart Creek one warm September afternoon, keeping off the roads and out of the way of cottages and farmhouses. He didn’t want to run into any watchdogs, any fences or posted signs or inquisitive white faces. He saw enough white faces at work. In his element, in the forests that had given birth to his ancestors, he wanted to see where the deer had come down to drink, where quail nested in the grass, he wanted to see the brook trout wagging in the current and test his reflexes against the one that would make his lunch … it was nothing personal, but when he was outside the walls of the foundry, he wanted to see the world as it had been, and white faces were no part of it.

But it was a white face he discovered peering up at him in alarm from a clump of mountain laurel as he rounded a bend in the creek and flung himself over a fallen birch in a single gangling unconscious leap. The face was bearded, bespectacled, small-eyed and suspicious, and it was attached to the stark white body of a naked man with a book in his hand. Jeremy halted in mid-stride, every bit as surprised as the naked man stretched out there in the mountain laurel as if in his own bed, uncertain as to whether he should slink off into the undergrowth or continue on his way as if nothing were amiss. But before he could make a decision either way, the white man was on his feet, simultaneously bobbing into a pair of baggy undershorts, shouting hello and extending his hand in greeting. “Sasha Freeman,” he said, pumping the Indian’s hand as if he’d been expecting him all afternoon.

Jeremy gaped down at him in bewilderment. The stranger was at least a foot shorter than he, round-shouldered and slight, with the musculature of an adolescent girl and a berserk growth of coiled black hair that sprang up like a pelt on his limbs, his back, even his hands and feet. The only place he lacked hair, it seemed, was on the crown of his head, where it was thinning, though he couldn’t have been more than twenty or so. “You’re a fresh-air fiend too, I take it,” the stranger said, squinting up into the trees.

“Sure,” Jeremy mumbled, numbly shaking the proferred hand. “Fresh-air fiend. That’s right.” He was embarrassed, impatient, angry at this stranger for intruding on his solitude, and he was anxious to get on up the stream and explore the tributary that branched off to the left and ascended the ridge to the crown of the forest. But Sasha Freeman, with his mad toothy smile and dancing little feet, already had him by the arm, offering him a sandwich, a drink, a seat on his blanket, and for some reason — out of a desire to please, out of loneliness — Jeremy joined him.

“So what did you say your name was?” Sasha Freeman handed him half an egg salad sandwich and a tin cup of fruit punch.

“Mohonk,” Jeremy said, looking away. “Jeremy Mohonk.”

“Mohonk,” the stranger echoed in a ruminative tone, “I don’t believe I’ve heard that one before. Is it shortened from something?”

As a matter of fact, it was.

“From Mohewoneck,” Jeremy said, staring down at his feet. “He was a great sachem of my tribe.”

“Your tribe?” Behind the wire-rimmed spectacles that gave him the look of a startled scholar, Sasha Freeman’s eyes blinked in amazement. “Then, you’re … you’re—?”

“That’s right,” Jeremy said, and he could feel the power growing in him as if he were a tree rooted to the earth, as if all the strength of the ancestral soil beneath him were suddenly his. He’d never spoken the words before, but he spoke them now. “I’m the last of the Kitchawanks.”

It was the beginning of a friendship.

For the next two years — until the Depression descended on them and Sasha was forced to move back with his parents on the Lower East Side, until the foundry foundered and Jeremy lost his job and left the boardinghouse to reclaim his birthright from Rombout Van Wart — they met nearly every weekend. Neither of them had a car, so Sasha would bicycle down from his grandparents’ place in Kitchawank Colony, and from there they’d hike out along the river to fish the inlets or climb one of the peaks of the Highlands and camp overnight in the old way, in a wickiup made of bent and interwoven saplings. Or they’d take the train into New York for the latest Pickford, Chaplin or Fairbanks, for lectures on the people’s revolution in Russia or meetings of the I.W.W.

For his part, Sasha Freeman, city kid and future novelist, who in that fall of 1927 was three months out of N.Y.U. and teaching for a gratuity at the Colony free school, felt that in Jeremy he’d found a link to an older, deeper way of knowledge. It was as if the earth had opened up and the stones begun to speak. Jeremy didn’t merely teach him how to listen for the footfall of fox and deer or how to gather and boil herbs against poison ivy, impetigo and the croup, didn’t merely give him the means to walk out into the woods with nothing more than the clothes on his back and survive — no, he gave him more, much more: he gave him stories. Legends. History. Leaning into a campfire on Anthony’s Nose or Breakneck Ridge, snow sifting down out of the sky, Sasha Freeman learned the story of Jeremy’s people, a people dispersed like his own, crowded onto reservations that were like the shtetls of Cracow, Prague, Budapest. He heard the story of Manitou’s big woman, of Horace Tantaquidgeon’s treachery, heard about the reservation school and the delusions of the plum-faced preceptor in the starched collar. Smoke ascended to heaven. It was spring, summer, fall again. The Indian forced up every legend, every memory, giving up his history as if it were a last testament.

Eight years later Sasha Freeman published his first book, a polemic called Marx Among the Mohicans. It took the redoubtable father of communism back in history, to the time of the American primitives, and allowed him to score points against the slave state of modern industrial society as contrasted with the simple communal fraternity of the Indians. So what if it sold fifty-seven copies, half of them at a meeting of the Young People’s Socialist League attended by six of his cousins from Pearl Street? So what if it was printed in a basement and had a paper cover that fell to pieces if you looked at it twice? It was a beginning.

And what did Jeremy get in return? Companionship, for one thing — Sasha Freeman was the first white friend he’d ever had, and the only friend he made in Peterskill. But it went deeper than that. Jeremy too was awakened to a new way of thinking, a new way of perceiving the world that had chewed up his people as if they were lambs of the field: he became radicalized. Sasha took him to unadvertised meetings of the I.W.W., gave him Ten Days That Shook the World and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, gave him Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Fourier. Jeremy learned that property is theft, that destruction is a kind of creation, that the insurrectionary deed is the most efficacious means of propaganda. He was beaten by hired goons outside a shoe factory in Paramus, New Jersey, hit with truncheons, billy clubs, brass knuckles and two-by-fours in the streets of Brooklyn, Queens and lower Manhattan, and it hardened him all the more. His people had never owned the land beneath their feet, but had lived on it, with it, a part of it. They hadn’t bought and sold and expropriated the means of production — they’d lived in their clans, cooperating, planting and harvesting together, sharing game, manufacturing their clothes and tools from nature. Sure. And the white men — the capitalists, with their greed for pelts and timber and real estate — they changed all that forever, strangled a great and giving society, a communist society. Sasha Freeman wrote a book. Jeremy Mohonk climbed the hill to Nysen’s Roost, an ancient place that spoke to him like no other, and swatted down Rombout Van Wart — the very type and symbol of the expropriator — swatted him down like a fly.

In prison he was recalcitrant, as hard and unyielding as the stones they’d stacked atop one another to build the place. Prison regulations, the guard told him the day they ushered him through the admitting gate and down the long gray corridor to the barber’s chair. He’d let his hair grow out till it trailed down his back in a coil as thick as his arm, and he wore the notochord cinched around his forehead like a strip of gut. And if he’d been thin and gangling when he first met Sasha Freeman, now he was forty pounds heavier — and still growing. It took four men to hold him down while they shaved his head. They tore the notochord from his brow and swept it up with the refuse. To improve his attitude, he was given three weeks in solitary.

When the three weeks were up, he was assigned a cell on the prison block. His cellmate was a white man, a housebreaker, skin the color of raw dough and blemished all over with tattoos like grape stains. Jeremy wouldn’t talk to him. Wouldn’t talk to anyone — not his fellow prisoners, not the guards or trustees or the sorry fat-assed preacher who poked his head in the cell door every month or so. He hated them all as one, the race that had polluted his blood, stolen his land and locked him away, the race of money grubbers and capitalists. He was twenty years old, and for every year he’d lived he had a year to serve: twenty years, the judge had intoned, his words as harsh as the thump of his gavel. Twenty years.

During the second month, one of the guards — soft and pockfaced, an ignorant Irish from Verplanck — singled him out and taunted him with all the old sneers: chief, Hiawatha, squaw, dog eater. When Jeremy refused to respond, the Irish went further, dousing him with a pail of slops, spitting through the bars at him, waking him in the dead of night for meaningless inspections. Jeremy might as well have been deaf and mute, carved of stone. He never moved, never spoke, never expressed surprise or alarm. But one morning, early, when the lights had begun to go soft against the gray of dawn, he was there, in the shadows against the wall of his cell, waiting. The Irish was on wakeup, moving along the cellblock with a baton, rapping it on the bars to the sound of curses, groans, the thump and wheeze of men tumbling out of their beds. “Rise and shine!” he called with malicious joy, repeating it over and over as he worked his way toward Jeremy’s cell, “Up and at ’em!” The Indian crouched down, motionless, as intent as if he were stalking deer or bear. And then the Irishman was there, the baton rattling the bars, his voice punishing and sadistic: “Hey, Geronimo. Hey, asshole. Roll out.”

Jeremy got him by the throat, both arms thrust through the bars. They’d been working him in the quarry, and his grip was like the grip of all the Mohonks through all the generations gone down. The guard dropped the baton with a clatter, snatching desperately at the Indian’s wrists. His face was a blister. Swelling. Red and swelling. Inches away. If Jeremy could only hold on long enough he’d burst it once and for all. But there was someone behind him — his cellmate, the tattooed idiot — shouting and tearing at his arms, and now there weretwo, three more guards, their billies raining on his hands, his wrists, the whole cellblock in an uproar. They broke his grip, finally, but he seized on the soft fat hand of one of the others and squeezed till he could feel the bones give. Then they were in the cell, they were all over him and they administered their own kind of justice.

When it was over, he got three months in solitary and two more years tacked onto his sentence.

So it was throughout his career at Sing Sing. He fought them each minute — each second — of each day. When the war came and they released muggers, second-story men and arsonists to fight the Fascists, he wouldn’t yield. “You’re the Fascists,” he told the warden, the recruiter, the guards who stood over him in the warden’s office. “The Revolution will bury you.” It was the first thing anyone could remember him saying in years. The cell door clanked shut behind him.

For all his resolve, though, for all his toughness, prison finally broke him down. He knew prisoners who were executed, saw men who’d spent their entire lives behind bars, their backs stooped, faces sunk in on themselves. He was a young man still. Last of his line. His business in life was to reclaim some of what his tribe had lost, to seek out a woman of constant blood — a Shawangunk, an Oneida, even a Seneca, as his father had done — and keep the race alive. He was meant to roam the woods, to remember the old ways, to honor the sacred places — there was no one else to do it, no one among the pulullating hordes that blighted the earth like locusts. The knowledge of it mellowed him. The war years slipped past, Sing Sing was quiet, underpopulated. He stayed out of trouble. In 1946, five years short of the full term of his sentence, they set him free.

He walked out of the gate at 8:00 A.M. on a chill and windblown December morning, wearing a cheap prison-issue suit and overcoat and with the token recompense for his seventeen years’ labor tucked deep in his breast pocket. By nightfall he was back at Nysen’s Roost, huddled over an open fire with a can of corned beef hash and the knife he’d picked up at a pawn shop in Peterskill, a knife exactly like the one Horace Tantaquidgeon had inserted between his father’s lumbar vertebrae in a time that seemed as distant as the first moment of history.

He lived there a year before anyone discovered him. He’d built himself a timber and tar-paper shack for half of what it had cost Thoreau to build his place a century earlier. Built it beneath the white oak, in the place that spoke to him, precisely where his first shack had stood so briefly twenty years before. What he didn’t have — nails, an axe, plastic to stretch across the windows — he appropriated from the suburbanites who crowded the verges of his domain with their blacktop driveways and brick barbecues. When the prison suit fell away to nothing he made himself a breechclout and jacket from the hide of a doe. For cooking, he had a clay pot, shaped, tooled and fired in the way of the centuries.

The year was 1947, the season fall. Standard Crane, son of Peletiah, a sharp-nosed, round-eyed gawk of a man in his early thirties, was out hunting squirrel one morning when he blundered across the shack. Jeremy, in his stained buckskin and with the flight feathers of the red-tailed hawk braided into his hair, stepped out onto the porch and shot him a corrosive look. Puzzled, Standard dropped the muzzle of his shotgun, shoved back his cap and scratched his head. For a moment he was so disoriented, startled and surprised he could only make a series of throat-clearing noises that the Indian took to be a sort of rudimentary game call. But then, shuffling his feet, he managed to say “Good morning,” and went on from there to inquire as to whether he and Jeremy were acquainted. The Indian, remembering Van Wart, said nothing. After a moment, Standard tipped his hat and wandered off down the trail.

But Standard Crane was no Van Wart. Nor was his father, Peletiah, who despite a head cold, rheumy eyes and a bad knee, hiked all the way out to the shack in twenty-five-degree weather to view this prodigy, this green-eyed Indian who was squatting on his land. Jeremy was waiting for them. On the porch. Ready for anything. But Peletiah merely greeted him with a nod of his head and invited himself to a seat on the rough-hewn step beside him. Standard, who’d served as his father’s guide, hung back and grinned in embarrassment. Producing a tinfoil pouch from the inner pocket of his red-and-black plaid hunting jacket, Peletiah offered the Indian a chew, and then, in the most neighborly way imaginable, explained how he’d acquired the land from the late Rombout Van Wart.

The Indian was a tough audience. He refused the tobacco with a gesture so curt he might have been shooing flies, then made his face into a mask. Though his expression didn’t reflect it, he was secretly pleased to hear that the land had passed from control of the Van Warts and deeply gratified to discover that the son of a bitch who’d put him behind bars was no longer among the living. And so he listened, as mute as the peeled logs of the porch, as the wheezy white man went on about the history of the place and circled around the question of Jeremy’s identity like a mosquito looking for a patch of bare flesh. But when Jeremy cut him off in mid-sentence and began quoting Proudhon, when he insisted that property was theft and that it was his tribal right to live there beneath the hallowed oak and be damned to all thieves and expropriators, Peletiah surprised him.

Not only could this runny-eyed, pointy-nosed, skeletal old white man outquote him, he agreed with him. “On paper, I’m the owner of this land,” Peletiah said, ducking his head to spit and then looking around him with a bemused little smile that barely parted his lips, “but in fact the land belongs to everyone equally, every man that walks the earth. You’ll find no posted signs here.”

Jeremy glanced up at the trees as if to confirm the assertion and found himself staring into the reticent eyes of the squirrel hunter. Standard slouched against a tree at least twenty feet from the cabin, and he was picking his teeth meditatively. At the mention of posted signs, he made a noise deep in his throat that was meant to convey good humor and amusement but that sounded more like the death rattle of a drowning man.

“I bought the land because I had the money when nobody else did and because I got it for a song,” Peletiah was saying. “There was something about the place. I thought I’d like to build on it someday, but you know how that is. …” He waved his hand in dismissal. His eyes were shrewd; the little smile clung to his lips. “You want it?” he asked after a moment. “You want to camp here, swim in the creek, tramp the woods — go ahead. It’s yours. More power to you.”

Two years later, Peletiah extended the invitation to 20,000 likeminded people, and the field below, on the far side of Acquasinnick Creek, filled with them. That was a fine and triumphant thing, but it was the first night — the night of the aborted concert — that was the real test. No more than a hundred and fifty turned up that night, with their picnic baskets and blankets to spread out in the grass. Jeremy watched them from the trees. He had no idea that Sasha Freeman had organized the event — hadn’t heard from him in twenty years — but it was a thing he could approve of, a thing he could recognize and applaud.

When the trouble started, he never hesitated. Circling the arena, a shadow among shadows, he surprised bat-toting veterans and skulking boys alike, springing from the bushes with a whoop or merely rising up before them like a wrathful demon. Most took to their heels at the sight of him, but a handful — drunker or more foolish than the rest — kept coming. It was just what he wanted. He broke noses, bloodied lips, bruised ribs — and each kick, each punch, was a debt repaid. A paunchy veteran came at him with a tire iron and he kicked him in the groin. He snatched a fence post from a man with the sunken red-flecked eyes of a pig and slapped his backside with it till he began to squeal. At some point he discovered blood on his hands and forearms, and he paused to draw a single incarnadine slash beneath each of his eyes, and then, looking fierce and aboriginal, looking like a warrior of old, he chased a pair of teenaged boys till they collapsed in tears, begging for mercy. Mercy was a thing he’d never known, but he stayed his hand, thinking of Peletiah, thinking, for once, of the repercussions. He let them go. And then, as dusk began to thicken the branches of the trees and the cries from the roadway grew more hellish and disjointed, he drifted instinctively toward the open field to the north, and there, in the gathering gloom, made the acquaintance of Truman Van Brunt.

Truman was wearing a polo shirt and a pair of baggy white trousers, and he was conferring with a big-armed man in a bloodied work shirt and what appeared to be a boy of six or seven. Though the Indian had never laid eyes on Truman before, and didn’t learn his name till the following morning in Peletiah’s kitchen, there was something familiar about him, something that tugged at his consciousness like a half-remembered dream. Crouched low in the bushes, Jeremy watched. And listened.

The big-armed man was wrought up, his eyes wild, his hands raking at one another as if with some uncontainable itch. He wanted to know if the man in the polo shirt would make a sacrifice for them, if he’d try to slip through the mob and get help — because if help didn’t come soon, they were doomed. Truman didn’t hesitate. “Sure,” he said, “I’ll go, but only if I can take Piet with me,” and he indicated the boy. It was when the boy spoke—“Fuck, you goddamned well better take me with you”—that Jeremy recognized his mistake. He looked again. This was no boy — no, this was a man, a dwarf, his twisted little face blanched with evil, this was the pukwidjinny come to life. Jeremy clenched his fists. Something was wrong here, desperately wrong. Suddenly there was a shout from the direction of the arena, and the big-armed man threw a nervous glance over his shoulder. “Take him,” he said, and Truman and the dwarf started across the field.

The Indian gave it a minute, till the man with the big arms had turned and jogged back toward the arena, and then he emerged from the trees and started after Truman. Silent and slow as a moving statue, bent double in his stalking crouch, he crept up on the man in the polo shirt and his undersize companion. Truman never once glanced over his shoulder. In fact, he strode through the field as if he hadn’t a care in the world, as if he were strolling into a restaurant for Sunday brunch instead of going out to risk his neck among the mad dogs on the road ahead of him. The Indian, hurrying now to keep up, thought he must be insane. Either that or he was the bravest man alive.

Suddenly three figures broke from the trees at the road’s edge and started for Truman and the dwarf. They wore Legionnaire’s caps and dirty T-shirts. All three brandished weapons — jack handles and tire chains hastily plucked from the trunks of their cars. “Hey, nigger-lover,” the one in the middle called, “come to poppa.”

Jeremy sank low in the grass, ready for trouble. But there wasn’t any trouble, that was the odd thing. Truman just walked right up to them and said something in a low urgent tone — something the Indian couldn’t quite catch. Whatever he’d said, though, it seemed to placate them. Instead of raising their weapons, instead of flailing at him like the mad dogs and capitalist tools they were, they ducked their heads and grinned as if he’d just told the joke of the century. And then, astonishingly, one of them held a bottle out to him and Truman took a swig. “Depeyster Van Wart,” Truman said, and his voice was as clear suddenly as if he were standing right there beside the Indian, “you know him?”

“Sure,” came the reply.

“Is he up the road somewhere or what?”

At that moment, a dull roar rose up from the concert grounds, and all five of them — the dwarf, the Legionnaires and Truman — turned their heads. Jeremy held his breath.

“I seen him up around the bend there, up at the road into the Crane place.” The man who clutched the tire chains was speaking, the dry rasp of his voice punctuated by the clank of steel on steel. “We’re going to make a run at the fuckers soon as it’s dark.”

“Take me to him, would you?” Truman said, and the Indian, buried in the tall grass like a corpse, went cold with an apprehension that was like a stab in the back, that was like the hard-edged message his father had received from Horace Tantaquidgeon in a time past. “I’ve got news.”

“Kikes and niggers, kikes and niggers,” the dwarf sang, his voice pinched and nasal, echoing as if he’d poured himself into the bottle Truman had handed him. Then the five of them moved off through the trees that fringed the road. As soon as they were gone, Jeremy Mohonk pushed himself up from the grass. White men. They’d betrayed the Kitchawanks, the Weckquaesgeeks, the Delawares and Canarsees, and they betrayed their own kind too. It was on his lips: the taste of the shit they’d made him eat in prison. He thought of Peletiah, thought of the men he’d punished in the woods, thought of the women and children huddled around the stage with their pamphlets and picnic baskets. Thought of them all and rose up out of the weeds to trail the fink in the polo shirt.

Out on the road, all was confusion. Some of the cars parked along the shoulders had flicked on their headlights, and the pavement glittered with broken glass. In this naked white light, the Indian could see groups of men and boys hurrying in both directions, while dogs nosed about and people perched on fenders or sat in their cars as if awaiting a fireworks display or the heifer judging at the county fair. There was a smell of scorched paint on the air, of creosote and burning rubber. Somewhere a radio was playing. Jeremy squared his shoulders and emerged from the bushes between two parked cars. He sidestepped a cluster of young women passing a bottle of wine and started up the road. No one said a word to him.

The noise grew louder as he neared the entrance to the concert grounds — yelps, cries, curses, screams of drunken laughter and the roar of revving engines. Groups of men with makeshift weapons stalked past him, and boys, some as young as nine or ten, hurried up the road with sacks of stones. A blackened car lay on its side in the middle of the road up ahead, and another burned furiously behind it. He quickened his pace, craning his neck for a glimpse of the Judas in the polo shirt and his obscene little companion. A man in an overseas cap and a chest full of medals shouted something at him, an old woman in rolled-up blue jeans waved a flag in his face, there was smoke in his nostrils and the blood had dried beneath his eyes. He was about to break into a trot when he saw him, Truman, leaning in the window of a late-model Buick. In the same instant he spotted the dwarf too, propped insouciantly against the fender and leering with apparent satisfaction at the conflagration around him.

The Indian kept walking, and as he passed them, he caught a glimpse of the man behind the wheel of the Buick. He knew the face, though he’d never seen it before, knew the humorless mouth and outthrust chin, the eyes like branding irons: it was the face of the man who’d sent him to prison, the face of a. Van Wart. Fighting the desire to glance over his shoulder, Jeremy felt the dwarf’s eyes on him and kept going. He was about to double back — if only he could get this red-headed fink alone — when a horde of vigilantes, led by Truman’s pal with the tire chains, came streaming past him.

Under cover of the diversion — all heads turned, even the dwarf’s, to watch them hurry down the road toward the undefended pasture — Jeremy ducked between two cars, crouched down and waited. A moment later, Van Wart emerged from the Buick, said something to Truman and started up the road toward the barricade at the entrance to the concert grounds. Truman and his pukwidjinny fell into step behind him, and the Indian, after counting to ten, rose up out of the gloom to bring up the rear. He was taking a chance — the mob could fall on him any minute, his skin, his hair, his clothes like nothing they’d ever seen, like some nigger’s or Communist’s — but he didn’t care. Hatred fueled him, and he snaked through the knots of angry men as if he were invisible.

As he approached the barricade, the crowd thickened, dark shapes moving in and out of the static glare of the headlights that flooded the narrow dirt road beyond it. This was the omphalos of confusion and strife, rage stamped on every face, voices reduced to a collective snarl, the mob shoving first one way and then the other. Jeremy almost lost his quarry here — the faces all alike, shirts and shoulders and hats, the crush of bodies — but then he spotted Van Wart conferring with a bald-headed man in an open-collared dress shirt, and just beyond him, Truman and the pukwidjinny. Truman was conferring with no one. He was weaving through the crowd, a man in a hurry, heading up the road and away from the whole messy business of betrayal and bigotry; the dwarf was right behind him, visible only as a sort of moving furrow in the standing field of the mob. He’s getting away, Jeremy thought, and he surged forward, heedless, shoving vigilantes aside as if they were so many straw men. “Hey!” someone shouted at him, “Hey you!” but he never even bothered to turn his head.

By the time Jeremy managed to break free of the crowd, Truman and the drawf were a hundred yards up the road, clots of black against the richer texture of the night. They hurried past a line of stalled and battered cars on the darkened roadway, then angled off on an unpaved lane that wound through the woods in the direction of Peterskill. Jeremy broke into a run. He passed a pair of teenagers bent over a gas can in the dark, dodged a man who stood flatfooted and astonished in the middle of the road, and saw a frightened black face peering from the window of a stalled car; a moment later, still running hard, he was turning into the lane. Immediately, he saw that his luck had changed. The shouts of the crowd were muted here, the road all but deserted: this was the chance he’d been waiting for.

He came at Truman without warning, swift silent steps in the dirt, flinging himself at the shadowy form ahead of him like a linebacker going for the tackling dummy. He caught him in the small of the back — something gave: bone, cartilage, hinges that need oil — and slammed his face down in the dirt. At the moment of impact, the dwarf leapt aside with a squeal and Truman let out a gasp of surprise before the hard compacted dirt of the road sucked the breath out of him. The Indian knew then that he was going to kill this son of a bitch in the polo shirt, this back stabber, this white man, and he locked an arm around his throat and ground his face into the road. When he was done with him, he’d get up and crush the dwarf like an egg.

“Get off!” Truman choked, tearing at the Indian’s arm. “Get… off!”

Shrill, manic, the dwarf leapt up and down in the dirt like a rodent in a cage. “Murder!” he piped. “Help! Murder!”

The Indian tightened his grip.

And so it would have gone — Truman, powerful as he was, taken by surprise, cut down and emasculated before his invisible adversary’s rage, first fatality of the riots … so it would have gone, but for the dwarf. He screamed, and a hundred feet came running, vigilantes by the score, soreheads and rednecks and born-again racists with blood on their hands. That in itself would have been enough, but the little man was wickeder than the Indian could have guessed. He had a knife. Three inches’ worth. Nothing like Horace Tantaquidgeon’s gutting knife, but a knife nonetheless. And he slipped that knife from his pocket, sprung the blade with a soft evil click, and began punctuating the Indian’s back. He dug a full stop first, then a colon; he slashed commas, hyphens and a single ragged exclamation point.

Half a second, that’s all it took. The Indian reared up and slapped the dwarf as he might have slapped a fly, but the moment’s distraction allowed Truman to wriggle free. In the next moment, he was on his feet, gasping for breath and flinging frenzied blows at his assailant, who rose up out of the darkness like a mountain in motion. Wordlessly, without so much as a grunt of effort or pain, the Indian returned the blows. With interest. “You crazy?” Truman gasped, throwing up his arms to protect himself. “You nuts or what?” Behind them, the thin white lances of flashlights and the slap of running feet.

Jeremy felt a weak fist glance off the side of his head, then another. He moved in closer. It was then that he got his first good look at the man he was about to kill. The onrushing beam of a flashlight played across the traitor’s face, and again the Indian felt he somehow knew this man, knew him in some deep and tribal way. Truman must have got a good look at Jeremy too, because suddenly he dropped his hands in bewilderment. “Who the—?” he began, but it was too late for introductions. The Indian lunged for his throat and got hold of him again, both hands locked around the windpipe in an unbreakable grip, a death grip, the grip that leaves the rabbit twitching and the goose cold. Jeremy would have answered the half-formed question, would have answered Truman as he’d answered Sasha Freeman and Rombout Van Wart and anyone else who cared to know, but he never got the chance. All at once the patriots were on him, swarming over him with their sticks and tire irons and chains.

It was Sing Sing and the prison guard all over again. Jeremy held on like the swamp turtle that lent its name to his clan — pummel him, stab him, cut off his head, his grip was good to death and beyond — held on despite the wounds in his back and the fingers jerking at his wrists. Then someone brought a jack handle down across the back of his skull and he felt Truman slipping away from him. Just before he fell, desperate, guided by the turtle, he lunged forward and locked his jaws in the traitor’s flesh — the ear, the right ear — and clamped down till he tasted blood.

All was quiet when he opened his eyes again, and he thought for a moment he was back in his cot listening to the crickets tick off the seconds till dawn. There were no shouts. No tires squealed, no engines roared, there were no cries of grief and rage. But he wasn’t in his cot. He was laid out on his back in a ditch beside the road and his body was possessed by the demons of pain. He’d been clubbed, kicked, stabbed; his left arm was broken in two places. Lying there in the ditch, gazing up at the stars through the interstices of the trees, he listened for a moment to the chant of the crickets and let his mind touch each of his wounds. He thought of his ancestors, warriors who’d used their pain as a tool, mocking their torturers even as the blade bared the nerve. After a while, he pushed himself up and started down the road for Peletiah’s place.

Jeremy Mohonk left the hills of Van Wartville six months later. The despair that had eaten at him in prison, the sense of decay and futility, drove him from his shack beneath the white oak as no man could ever have done. He returned to the reservation outside of Jamestown, looking for the mother of his twenty sons. His own mother was dead. Ten years earlier, while he was languishing beneath the stones of Sing Sing, she succumbed to a mysterious wasting disease that stole her appetite and left her looking like a corpse mummified over the centuries. Her brother, he of the perfidious knife, was hardier. Jeremy found him in a cluttered little house on the bank of the river. Snaggle-toothed and wizened, with his white hair bound in a topknot and his suit of burial clothes draped over a chair in the corner, he stared at his nephew with eyes that could barely place him. As for Jeremy’s coevals, the clean-limbed boys and efflorescent girls of his school days, they’d either sunk into fat so pervasive their eyes were barely visible or vanished into the world of the expropriators. Jeremy found himself a picking job — grapes at that season, apples to follow — and within the month had married a Cayuga named Alice One Bird.

She was a big woman, One Bird, with calves that swelled under the fullness of her and a broad open face that spoke of her good nature and optimism. Her two sons by a previous marriage were grown men, and though she claimed to be thirty-four, she was closer to forty. To Jeremy, her age didn’t matter, so long as she was capable of bearing children, and her sons — both of them razor-eyed and tall — gave proof of that. He picked grapes, he picked apples. In the fall, he hunted. When the snow lay over the ground like a fungus and the larder was empty, he got a job as a stock boy in a supermarket in Jamestown.

A year passed. Two, three. Nothing happened. One Bird grew heavier, though she wasn’t carrying a child. Jeremy was forty-three years old. He consulted a Shawangunk medicine man who’d known his father, and the old man asked him for a lock of One Bird’s hair. Jeremy snipped the hair while she slept and brought it to him. With trembling fingers, the medicine man selected a hank of Jeremy’s hair, clipped it close, and then rolled the two locks vigorously between his palms, as if he were trying to start a fire. After a moment he separated the strands, dropping them one by one on a sheet of newspaper. For a long while he studied their configuration in silence. “It’s not you,” he said finally, “it’s her.”

Jeremy left the next morning for Van Wartville and the tumbledown shack he’d deserted three years earlier. Save for the structure itself, there wasn’t much left. The elements had taken their toll on the place, birds and rodents had used it as a dormitory and midden both, and vandals had smashed everything they couldn’t carry. No matter. The Indian lived in the old way, silent and secretive, snaring rabbit and opossum, liberating what he lacked from the homes and garages and toolsheds of the wage slaves who pressed in on the property from all sides. Over the course of the ensuing years, he drifted back and forth between Peterskill and Jamestown, drawn on the one hand to his ancestral soil, and on the other to his people. One Bird always welcomed him, no matter how long he’d been gone, and he was grateful to her. Driven by natural urges, he even came to her bed now and again, but it was an exercise without hope or meaning.

The last of the Kitchawanks grew older, and as he did so, he grew increasingly embittered. The world seemed a bleak place, dominion of the people of the wolf, the bosses ascendant, the workers crushed. He was doomed. His people were doomed. Nothing mattered — not the sun in the sky, not the great Blue Rock on the verge of the Hudson or the mystic hill above Acquasinnick Creek. A decade came and went. He was in his mid-fifties — still vigorous, still powerful, still young — and he wanted to die.

Yes. And then he met Joanna Van Wart.

The Wailing Woman

The first of the Jeremy Mohonks, son of Mohonk son of Sachoes, distant ancestor of that sad radicalized jailbird whose tribe seemed destined to die with him some three centuries later, was two and a half years old and uttering his first halting words of Dutch when the shadow of Wolf Nysen fell over his world like a month of starless nights. It was October 1666, late in the afternoon of a dark graceless day that promised a premature sunset and heavy frost. Jeremy was under the kitchen table playing with sticks and dirt clods and rehearsing the words he liked best—suycker and pannekoeken—while his mother stoked the fire and stirred things into the soup. He was also watching his mother’s feet as she stood at the table chopping cabbage or crossed the room to poke the fire and adjust the blackened cauldron on its armature. When he saw those feet slip into their clogs and head out the door in the direction of the woodshed, he crawled out from under the table. In the next moment he was on the stoep, and in the moment after that, he was gazing up at the great swirling columns of smoke that blotted the sky at the far end of the cornfield. Though he couldn’t yet put it into words, he had an intuitive grasp of the situation: Uncle Jeremias was burning stumps.

Jeremy was two and a half years old, and he knew several things. He knew, for instance, that until recently his name had been Squagganeek and that he’d lived in a smoky wet hut in a smoky wet Indian village. He knew too that the wood brooding over him was home to wolves, giants, imps, ogres and witches and that he was never to leave the immediate vicinity of the house except in the company of his mother or uncle. And he knew the penalty for transgression. (No suycker. No pannekoeken. Three clean swats across the bottom and bed without supper.) Still, the shapes those columns of smoke made against the sky as they fanned out — there a butterfly, here the face of a cow — were not to be denied. Before he could think twice, he was gone. Down the steps, across the yard and out into the field with its weathered furrows and sheaves bound up like corpses.

He ran like a shorebird, stiff-kneed and quick-legged, tottering from one furrow to the next, splashing through puddles, falling flat on his face and as quickly scrambling to his feet again. When he reached the nether end of the field, he saw the stumps, a whole army of them like decapitated little men spouting smoke from their headless trunks. His uncle was nowhere to be seen. But there before him was a family of scuttling grouse, and to these he gave chase with a shout of joy. Round and round he chased them, through a funnel of smoke and a half-cleared thicket, right on up to the verge of the wood. And then he stopped. There was Jeremias, right in front of him. And another man too. A big man. A giant.

“You know who I am?” the giant roared.

His uncle knew, but he spoke so softly the boy could barely hear him. “Wolf,” he said, and that was when Jeremy called out his name.

As it happened, Wolf Nysen didn’t cleave Jeremias in two. Nor did he set fire to the hogpen, rape Katrinchee or devour the livestock. In fact, he merely gave Jeremias a lopsided grin, tipped the brim of his deerskin cap and slipped back into the woods. No matter: the damage was done. Just as Jeremias had taken up the yoke, just as he’d bowed his head and accepted the imprimatur of the patroon, here came this renegade to mock him and inflame all his old hate and rancor. Who gives you the right? The Swede’s words echoed in his ears as he bent to his soup that evening, as he laid his head on the pillow that night, and when he pulled on his underwear in the morning. But that wasn’t the worst of it, not by a long shot. The sequel was a steady downward slide in the fortunes of the little family at Nysen’s Roost, as if the madman were indeed the evil genius of the place and they the victims of his curse.

Though they were now well-furnished (in addition to what the van der Meulens and the others had donated, the patroon, on coming to terms with his newest tenants, had sent them a wagonload of farm and household implements — on loan, of course — as well as a yoke of sway-backed oxen, a yearling calf to go with the manorial cow Oom Egthuysen had lent them, and three Hampshire shoats), nonetheless Jeremias had planted late and harvested little. The wheat, which was customarily sown in the autumn rather than the spring, had done poorly, as had his crops of rye and peas, which he’d hoped to use for winter fodder. He’d done well with Indian corn, largely because of Katrinchee’s expertise, and their kitchen garden — cabbages, turnips, pumpkins and herbs — had flourished for the same reason. Still, with little grain for bread or porridge and the lion’s share of the corn reserved for the stock, the menage at Nysen’s Roost would be almost wholly dependent on game during the coming winter.

Problem was, the game was gone.

In the days and weeks following Wolf Nysen’s visit, wildlife became increasingly scarce, almost as if the madman, like some insatiable Pied Piper, had taken the birds and beasts with him. Where Jeremias might have shot a dozen pigeons in the past, he now came back with one. Where he might have swatted gobblers from the trees and tucked them in a sack that bulged so he could barely carry it, he now found none. Ducks and geese eschewed the marshes, the deer had vanished, and bears, which tasted like pine gum and tallow anyway, had gone early to their dens. Even the squirrels and rabbits seemed to have disappeared. Of necessity, Jeremias took to the river, and for a while the river sustained them. Through November and the grim crowded days of early December, as the sun faded from the sky and the breath of the Arctic stretched a sheet of ice across Acquasinnick Bay, Katrinchee made fish balls, fish pie, fish in blankets, fried fish, boiled fish, fish with turnips and pine nuts, fish with fish. But then winter settled in in earnest, the ice stretched to the foot of Dunderberg and back and there were no more fish.

Day by day it grew colder. The well crusted over. Wolves sniffed at the door. In the woods, jays and sparrows froze to their perches, as lifeless and hard as ceramic ornaments on a Christmas tree. There was an ice storm at the New Year, followed by dropping temperatures and snow that accumulated like the sands of Egypt. When the wolves made off with one of the shoats, Jeremias moved the animals indoors.

In spite of it all, Katrinchee seemed to grow stronger by the day. She took the fish regimen in stride, put on weight, grew her hair out. For the first time in years she slept through the night. When Jeremias inventoried the corn and cut their daily ration by half, she became a genius of conservation. When the snow mounted and Jeremy took cold, when the winds blew through the house with such force as to snuff the taper on the mantelpiece, when it was dark as night though half past one by the clock, she never uttered a complaint. Not even the uncomfortable proximity of the animals could discourage her, though the shoats capered underfoot, the old cow moaned in the dark like one of the unburied dead and the oxen drooled, stank, chewed their cuds, dropped their dung and breathed their hot foul breath in her face. No, it was a small thing that undid her finally, a serendipitous discovery Jeremias made out on the front stoep one icebound morning toward the end of January.

What he discovered there on the porch, come to them like an answered prayer, was meat. Rich, red, life-sustaining meat. He pulled open the door to step outside and relieve himself, and blundered into the stripped and freshly dressed carcass of a doe, hanging by its hind legs from the roof of the porch. He couldn’t believe it. A doe. Hanging there. And already butchered. Jeremias let out two hungry hoots of joy — Staats, it must have been Staats — and in the time it takes to draw a knife he had one haunch on the spit and the other in the pot. He was so excited his hands were trembling. He didn’t notice the look on his sister’s face.

When finally he did notice, the aroma of roasting venison filled the room and Katrinchee was backed up in the corner, shrunk in on herself like a spider starved in its web. “Get it out of here,” she said. “Take it away.”

Already the flames licked up to sear the meat; fat gilded the joint and dripped hissing into the coals. Little Jeremy stood transfixed before the fire, hands in his pants and a rhapsodic smile on his face, while Jeremias hustled around the room, hunting up the odd vegetable for the pot. The tone of his sister’s voice stopped Jeremias cold. “What? What did you say?”

She was twisting the hem of her dress in both hands as if she were throttling a doll. Her hair was in her face. And her face — drawn and blanched, the eyes big with terror — was the face of a madwoman clinging to the bars in the asylum at Schobbejacken. “The smell,” she murmured, her voice trailing off. In the next moment she was shrieking: “Get it out! Get it out of here!”

Jeremias could barely speak for the saliva foaming in his mouth, barely think for the knife and fork sawing away in his head, barely focus on her for the vision of the golden dripping haunch on the spit and the pretty little hoof projecting from the lip of the pot. But then he looked hard at her, and all at once he understood: it was the meat. The venison. She wanted to take it away from him. When he spoke, the words came in a rush. It was all in the past, he told her — she had to be reasonable. What were they going to eat? They were into the seed corn already. Should they kill the livestock and starve next year? “It’s venison, Katrinchee. Fresh meat. Nothing more. Eat it to keep up your strength — or don’t eat it if you really can’t. But surely you couldn’t … you wouldn’t prevent me, your own brother … and what about your son?”

She just shook her head, back and forth, implacable, inconsolable, shaken with regret. She was sobbing. Biting her finger. Jeremy buried himself in her skirts; Jeremias rose from the hearth to hold her, comfort her, remonstrate with her. “No,” she said, “no, no, a thousand times no,” and shook her head late into the night while her brother and son sat down at the table and picked clean the least bones of the butchered doe and then cracked them with a mallet to get at the grainy rich marrow. By then, Katrinchee was beyond caring. For the second time in her short life she’d found the edge and slipped over it.

It was February. The snow fell steadily, relentlessly, mountains of it lying over the countryside in frozen blue ripples that were like the folds of a shroud. They were down to quarter rations of corn now, and even so they were decimating next year’s seed. “Half a bushel of this,” Jeremias would say, pounding the hard kernels to meal, “would yield a hundred next summer. But what can you do?” Katrinchee could barely lift the spoon to her mouth for guilt. She was having trouble sleeping too, the images of her father, mother, little Wouter haunting her the minute she closed her eyes. The deer hadn’t come from Staats — he was having a terrible time finding meat himself, he told them a week after the second one, gutted, skinned and butchered, had appeared mysteriously on the porch. She’d known all along. Not from Staats, not from God in his heaven. It was her father, poor scalded man, who brought them … to punish her.

One night Jeremias woke from a dreamless sleep and felt a draft of cold air on his face. When he looked up, he saw that the door stood open, and that the hills and trees and naked snowfields had come to bed with him. Cursing, he pushed himself up and crossed the room to slam shut the door, but at the last moment something arrested him. Tracks. There were tracks — footprints — in the fresh dusting of snow on the stoep. Jeremias puzzled over them a moment, then eased the door shut and called to his sister in an urgent whisper. She didn’t answer. When he lit the taper, he saw with a start that little Jeremy was sleeping alone. Katrinchee was gone.

This time — the first time — he found her huddled beneath the white oak. She was in her nightdress, and she’d taken a knife to her hair; strands of it lay about her in the snow like the remains of a night-blooming plant. Inside, he tried to comfort her. “It’s all right,” he soothed, pressing her to him. “What was it — a bad dream?”

There they were, in tableau: the animals of the manger, the sleeping child, the mutilated brother and mad sister. “A dream,” she echoed, and her voice was distant, vague. Behind them, the calf bleated forlornly and the hogs grunted in their sleep. “I feel so … so …” (she meant to say “guilty,” but that’s not how it came out) “… so hungry.”

Jeremias put her to bed, fed the fire and boiled up some milk for porridge. She lay motionless on the husk mattress, staring at the ceiling. When he brought the spoon to her lips, she pushed it away. And so the next day, and the next. He made her a stew of turnip and dried fish, baked some heavy hard bread (full of weevils, unfortunately) and gave it to her with a slab of cheese, cut the ears off one of the shoats to make her a meat broth, but she wouldn’t eat. She just lay there, staring, the white parchment of her skull gleaming through the stubble of hair, her cheeks sunk in on themselves.

It was in early March, on a night that dripped from the eaves with the promise of warmth, that she wandered off again. This time she pulled the door shut behind her, and Jeremias didn’t notice she was gone till first light. By then the snow had started. A wet warm drizzling snow that changed twice to rain, hovered a while on the brink of freezing, and finally, propelled by gusts blown in off the river, became a whirlwind of hard stinging pellets. By the time Jeremias had dressed the boy and started off after her, the wind was steady and the visibility no more than twenty feet.

This time there were no tracks. With the boy on his back and the pegleg skidding out from under him, Jeremias traced an ever-widening circle around the house, shouting her name into the wind. Nothing came back to him. The trees were mute, the wind threw its voice in a hundred artful ways, beads of snow rattled off his coat, his hat, his muffler. Struggling, stumbling, afraid of losing his way in the snow, afraid for Jeremy’s life as well as his own, he finally turned around and hobbled back to the cabin. He tried again, early in the afternoon, getting as far as the cornfield where he’d encountered Wolf Nysen. For a moment he thought he heard her, way off in the distance, her voice raised in a doleful bone-chilling wail, but then the wind took it over from him and he couldn’t be sure. He called her name, over and over, till his foot went numb and the wind drove the strength from his body. Just before dark, he put Jeremy to bed and went out again, but the snow had drifted so high he was exhausted before he reached the cornfield. “Katrinchee!” he shouted till his voice went hoarse. “Katrinchee!” But the only answer was the strange mournful cry of a great white owl beating through the storm like a lost soul.

It snowed for two days and two nights. On the morning of the third day, Jeremias fed the livestock, closed up the house and struggled through the drifts to the van der Meulens’, his nephew on his back. Staats alerted the Cranes, Reinier Oothouse and the people at the upper manor house, then rode in to Jan Pieterse’s to see if she’d turned up there, and if she hadn’t, to locate an Indian tracker.

A party of Kitchawanks went out that afternoon, but came back empty-handed: the snow had obliterated any sign of her. If a twig had caught in her dress or a stone squirted out underfoot, the evidence was buried under three feet of snow. Jeremias despaired, but he wouldn’t give up. Next morning he borrowed Staats’ cart horse, and while Meintje looked after Jeremy, he and Douw poked through copses and thickets, searched and re-searched the valleys and streambeds, knocked on doors at outlying farms. They roamed as far afield as the Kitchawank village at Indian Point to the south, and the Weckquaesgeek camp at Suycker Broodt to the north. There was no trace of her.

It was Jan Pieterse who finally found her, and he wasn’t looking. He was out behind the trading post one morning toward the end of the month, hauling a bucket of slops down to the Blue Rock so he could pitch them into the river, as he did every morning, the peglegged Van Brunt kid and his mad wandering shorn-headed miscegenating sister the farthest things from his mind, when something just off the path up ahead caught his eye. A swatch of blue. In a snowbank at the base of the Blue Rock, no more than a hundred feet from the store. He wondered at that swatch of blue, and set down the bucket to slash through the crusted snow and investigate. The weather had turned warmer the past few days, and his eyes had gradually gotten used to the appearance of color in what had been for some months now a world as blank as an untouched canvas. Scabs of mud had begun to break through the path he’d carved, the sky that hung low overhead like a dirty sheet had given way to the fine cerulean of a midsummer’s day, pussy willows were in bloom along the Van Wartwyck road and tiny tight-wound buds graced box elder and sycamore. But this, this was something else. Something man-made. Something blue.

In a moment, he was standing over the spot, braced uneasily against the yielding snow on the one side and the great smooth slab of rock on the other. He was staring down at a piece of cloth projecting from the snow as if it were just the tip of something larger. He was a shopkeeper and he knew that cloth. It was blue kersey. He’d sold bolts of it to the Indians and to the farmers’ wives. The Indians fashioned blankets from it. The farmers’ wives liked it for aprons. And nightdresses.

Jeremias buried her beneath the white oak. Dominie Van Schaik turned up to say a few words over the grave, while the six van der Meulens, draped in black like a flock of maes dieven, comprised the mourners. Jeremias knelt by the grave, his lips moving as if in prayer. But he wasn’t praying. He was cursing God in his heaven and all his angels, cursing St. Nicholas and the patroon and the dismal alien place that rose up around him in a Gehenna of trees, valleys and bristling hilltops. If only they’d stayed in Schobbejacken, he kept telling himself, none of this would have happened. He knelt there, feeling sorry for Katrinchee, for his father and mother and little Wouter, feeling sorry for himself, but when finally he stood and took his place among the mourners, there was a hard cold look in his eye, the look of intransigence and invincibility he’d leveled on the schout time and again: he was down, but not defeated. No, never defeated.

As for Jeremy, two and a half years old, he didn’t know what defeat was — or triumph either. He held back while first his uncle, then grootvader van der Meulen and the rest knelt at the grave. He didn’t cry, didn’t really comprehend the loss. What was this before him but a mound of naked dirt, no different from the furrows Jeremias turned up with the plow? Moles lived in the ground, beetles, earthworms, slugs. His mother didn’t live in the ground.

Afterward, as they sat over the cider and meat pies Meintje had brought along for the funeral supper, Staats lit his pipe, let out a long sigh, and said, in an unnaturally high voice: “It’s been a trying year, younker.”

Jeremias barely heard him.

“You know, you’re always welcome to come back to us.”

Barent, eleven now, and with the square head and cornsilk hair of his mother, sucked noisily at a cube of venison. The younger children — Jannetje, Klaes and little Jeremy — sat hunched over their plates, silent as stones. Meintje smiled. “I’ve got a contract with the patroon,” Jeremias said.

Staats dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. “You can’t go on without a woman,” he yodeled. “You’ve got a boy here not three years old and nobody to look after him.”

Jeremias knew his adoptive father was right, of course. There was no way he could go on farming without someone to share the work — especially with Jeremy underfoot. Jeremias may have been mulish, pertinacious, headstrong and tough, but he was no fool. The day Katrinchee disappeared, as the hopeless hours wound down and he searched the woods till his leg gave out, the germ of an idea took hold of him. There it was, in his head. A plan. Practical and romantic both: a contingency plan. “I’ll get one,” he said.

Staats snorted. Meintje glanced up from her plate, and even Douw, who’d been focusing every particle of his attention on the meat pie and pickled cabbage before him, paused to shoot him a questioning glance. There was a moment of silence, during which the children stopped eating to look around them as if a ghost had entered the room. Meintje was the first to catch on. “You don’t mean—?”

“That’s right,” Jeremias said. “Neeltje Cats.”

Tofu

“I forget, did you say you like tofu or not?”

“Sure,” she said, “anything.” She was huddled in a ball in the corner of Tom Crane’s bed, fully clothed, in gloves, maxicoat and knit hat, sipping sour wine from a Smucker’s jar. Once, maybe twice in her life, she’d been colder. She pulled the musty frigid blankets and down comforters up over her head and tried to keep her shoulders from quaking.

“Green onions?”

“Sure,” came the muffled reply.

“Garlic? Soy grits? Squash? Brewer’s yeast?”

Jessica’s head emerged from beneath the blankets. “You ever know me to complain?” She was six feet off the ground, which was where Tom Crane had located his bed — on high, and giving onto bare rafters strewn with cobwebs, the dangling husks of dead insects, streaks of bird or bat shit, and worse. The first time she’d ever visited the cabin — summer before last, and in the company of Walter — she’d asked Tom about that. He’d been sitting by the greasy back window in his greasy Salvation Army armchair, his hair down past his shoulders even then, drinking an evil-looking concoction of powdered milk, egg yolk, lecithin, protein powder and wheat germ out of a pint glass borrowed from an Irish pub in the City. “Stop by sometime in the winter,” he said, “and you won’t have to ask.”

Now she understood. Up here, aloft in the place of honor, she began to feel the first faint emanations from the woodstove. She held out her glass. “You mean it never warms up down there?”

Beneath her, in his tattered aviator’s coat, sweat-stained thermal undershirt and zip-up boots with the jammed zippers, Tom was flinging himself around the one-room shack like the chef at Fagnoli’s Pizza after a high school basketball game. Simultaneously feeding the fire, chopping onions, celery and chives, measuring out eight cups of brown rice from a grime-filled pickle jar and stirring hot oil in the bottom of a five-gallon pot so blackened it might have been a relic of the Dresden firebombing, he never missed a beat. “Down here?” he echoed, sweeping the vegetables into the depths of the cauldron with one hand while reaching up gallantly to fill her glass with the other. “On a good day — and I’m talking maybe like just twenty or twenty-five out — if I really stoke the stove, I can get the floor temp up to around fifteen.” He looked thoughtful as he poured himself a second jar of the sour, viscid wine, momentarily absorbed in the question of caloric variables while the oil hissed in the pot behind him and the hole at the juncture of the stovepipe spewed smoke into the room. “Up there, I’d say it might even get up to forty or fifty on a good night.”

It didn’t look to be a good night. Half-past six, and already the mercury in the rusted thermometer outside the window was dipping toward the flat red hashmark that indicated no degree of temperature at all. To Tom’s credit, he had managed to get the fire going seconds after stepping through the door, hurling himself at the tinder box with all the urgency of the desperate doomed chechaquo in the Jack London story, but as he explained between strokes of the knife on the cutting board, the place took a while to warm up. Jessica was thinking that this was an understatement in the master class, when Tom suddenly snatched up a galvanized pail and darted for the door. “You’re not going back out there?” she asked in genuine horror.

The answer came in the form of a duosyllabic yelp as he fumbled with the buttons of his aviator’s coat and inadvertently clanked the pail against a footlocker piled high with yellowing laundry. “Water!” he cried, hustling past her, and then the door slammed shut behind him.

Earlier that day — in the pale light of dawn, to be precise — Jessica, who’d been married for all of twelve weeks now, had complained to her husband that the car wouldn’t start, and that because the car wouldn’t start, she was late for work. Walter wasn’t very helpful. Unemployed, unshaven, hung over from yet another late night at the Elbow, he lay inert in the center of the bed, mummy-wrapped in the quilt Grandmother Wing had given them on their wedding day. She watched the slits of his eyes crack open. The lids were about six inches thick. “Call Tom,” he croaked.

Tom didn’t have electricity. Tom didn’t have running water. He didn’t have an electric toothbrush, hair dryer or waffle iron. He didn’t have a phone, either. And even if he did have one, there were no phone lines running through the woods, across Van Wart Creek and up the hill to his shack, so it wouldn’t be of much use to him. Stalking back and forth in her herringbone maxicoat, gulping cold coffee and running a nervous brush through her fine blond hair, she attempted to point this out to her supine husband.

The quilt was motionless, the life presumably held in its grip, silent. After a moment she heard his breathing ease into the gentle autonomous rhythm of sleep. “Walter?” She prodded him. “Walter?”

Muffled, slurred, his words might have come from the brink of an unbridgeable gulf: “Call in sick,” he murmured.

It was a temptation. The day was cold enough to exfoliate flesh, and the thought of eight hours beneath the fluorescent lights sniffing formalin was enough to make her long for the term papers, final exams and lab reports of the year before. The job had turned grim in the past few weeks, nothing but larva counts and record keeping, nothing but sitting and watching the clock — it would be March before they got out on the water again. Even Tom, who’d been hired to run the dredge on the big boat, had lately found himself hunched over a glass dish swimming with bits of weed and insect and fish larvae, breathing fumes. No: she didn’t want to go to work. Especially if she had to fight Arctic blasts and a sapped battery to get there.

“You know I can’t do that,” she pleaded, the dregs of the coffee gone sour in her mouth. She was hoping he’d argue with her, tell her to stuff the job and come back to bed, but he was already snoring. She started up the kettle for another cup of instant, padded across the cold linoleum in her slippers and was fumbling through the cupboard for the Sanka, when she was suddenly seized with spasms of guilt. She had to go to work, of course she did. There was her career to think about — she knew just how good this job would look on her record when she applied to grad school again in the fall — and then, on a more prosaic level, they needed the money. Walter hadn’t worked since his accident. He claimed he was weighing his options, feeling things out. Trying to deal with the trauma. He was going into teaching, sales, insurance, banking, law, he was going to go back to school, start a motorcycle repair shop, open a restaurant. Any day now. Jessica cut the flame beneath the kettle and slipped into the other room to call her father. If she was lucky, she’d catch him before he left for the train. …

She was lucky. As it turned out, she was only twenty minutes late, and she got to breathe formalin all through the long gray morning and the dim, slow, Hyperborean afternoon.

Tom had given her a ride home. In the dark. On the back of his ratcheting, rusty, mufflerless Suzuki 50, in wind-chill conditions that must have approximated those at Ice Station Zebra. Dancing high up off her toes, thrashing herself with clonic arms and dabbing wildly at her runny nose, she’d dashed up the steps of the cozy little Kitchawank Colony bungalow (rent: $90 a month, plus utilities) that she and Walter had chosen from among a hundred identically cozy little Kitchawank Colony bungalows, only to find that Walter was gone. Tom stood behind her, helmet in hand, the yellow scarf wrapped around the lower part of his face like a camel driver’s kaffiyeh. “He’s not here,” she said, turning to him.

Tom’s eyes were distant and bleary above the scarf. They took in the kitchen and living room in a single glance. “No,” he said, “I guess not.”

A long moment ticked by, her disappointment like some heavy weight they both suddenly had to carry — she couldn’t face it, a cold night alone with defrosted enchiladas and quesadilla chips that had the taste and texture of vinyl — until Tom tugged the scarf down past his lips and asked if she wanted to come out to his place for dinner. They could leave Walter a note.

And now, here she was, clutching her legs to her chest and watching her breath crystallize before her face, a farrago of warring odors broiling up around her. There was the cold salt stink of unwashed socks and underwear, the must of mold and woodrot, the acid sting of the smoke and the unconquerable, insurmountable, savory, sweet, stomach-clenching aroma of garlic frying in the pan. She was about to spring down and give it a stir, when in came the saint of the forest, elbows flailing, water sloshing, feet beating the floor like drumsticks. He was breathing hard, and his nose was the color of tinned salmon. “Water,” he gasped, setting the bucket down beside the stove, and without pausing, measuring out twenty-four cups of it for the rice. “Blood Creek,” he added with a grin. “It never lets me down.”

Later, after they’d each put away two heaping tin plates of gummy rice and vegetables with garlic-fried tofu and soy grits à la maison, they shared another five or six jars of wine and a joint of homegrown, listened to Bobby Blue Bland sing “Call on Me” on Tom’s no-fidelity battery-powered record player, and discussed Herbert Axelrod, talking chimps and UFOs with all the passion of rabbinical students delving into the mysteries of the Cabala. Tom had left the door to the stove open, and at some point Jessica had stopped shivering long enough to climb down from the airy bed and prop herself up on a chair just beyond the range of incineration. She told Tom the story of the time Herbert Axelrod, invited to lecture at the University of San Juan, had stepped off the plane and discovered a new species of fish in a puddle just off the runway. In return, Tom told her about the Yerkes Primate Center, dolphins that could do trigonometry and the UFO he’d seen right out there on Van Wart Road. Finally, though, and inevitably, the conversation turned to Walter.

“I’m worried about him,” Jessica confided.

Tom was worried too. Ever since the accident Walter had grown increasingly strange, obsessed with road signs, history and the Robeson riots, jabbering about his father as if the man existed and generally working himself into a frenzy at the Elbow every night. Even worse, he was hallucinating. Seeing his grandmother and a host of leprechauns behind every tree, seeing his mother, his father, his uncles and cousins and ancestors. All right: it must have been terrible having his foot hacked off like that, and sure, he needed time to adjust, but things were getting out of hand. “Does he tell you about seeing things?”

Jessica leaned toward him as he bent to feed the stove. “Seeing things?”

“Yeah, you know, like people? Dead people?”

She thought about this a minute, her mind numbed by the wine, the faintest queasiness spreading its fingers in her deepest gut. “His father,” she said finally. “He told me once — I think it was just after the accident — that he saw his father. But I mean”—she shrugged—“maybe he did.”

“Is he dead, or what?”

The wine was going to her head. Or maybe it was the pot. Or the tofu. “Who?”

“Walter’s father.”

She shrugged again. “Nobody knows.”

It was then that they heard the thump of footsteps on the porch out front of the shack in the middle of nowhere, a sound like the rap of fleshless knuckles on the lid of a pine box, and both of them froze. “Walter,” Jessica murmured in the next breath, and they relaxed. But then the door flew open and there was Mardi, in sealskin boots and a ratty raccoon coat that fell to her knees, shouting “Hey, Tom Crane, you hairy old satyr, you old man of the mountain! Have I got something for you!”

She was in, the door slammed shut behind her, and she was warming her hands over the fire and stamping her feet in a furious little seal-pounding fandango before she acknowledged Jessica’s presence. “Oh,” she said, the big cold coat in Jessica’s face, her eyes bloated and streaked with red, “oh … hi.”

Tom poured her a glass of wine while she shouted about the path in from the road—“Nothing but ice, like a fucking bobsled run or something”—and how she’d fallen on her ass at least six times. “See?” she said, lifting the coat to show off her buttocks in the grip of a pair of tight faded jeans that didn’t show a wrinkle.

Suddenly Jessica felt as sour as the rancid wine in the pit of her stomach.

“You know what?” Mardi said, flinging off the coat to reveal a ski sweater featuring what appeared to be a band of humping reindeer, and following this with a squealing non sequitur (“Oh, what’s this? Ummmmm. …”) as she first peered into the pot and then began to pick bits of squash and tofu from it. “Hmmmmm, that’s good. What is it, tofu?” She sat above them, perched on the edge of the table, jaws working, licking at her fingertips. Her hands were slim, pretty, no bigger than a child’s, and she wore two or three rings on each finger. “You know what?” she repeated.

Silence. Jessica could hear the low moan and suck of the stove, the pop and wheeze of sap in the burning wood. Tom was grinning at Mardi like a hick at the sideshow. “What?” he said finally.

Mardi came up off the table in a theatrical leap and threw out her arms like a cabaret singer. “Hash!” she announced. “Blond Lebanese!” It was, she assured them, the best, the purest, the most potent, unrefined, mind-numbing, groovy and auspicious hash they’d ever partake in the glory of, and furthermore, she added with a lopsided wink, she had five grams of it for sale. Not that she wasn’t tempted to keep it all for herself — just to have around, you know — nor did she usually do anything like sell drugs or anything, but it was just that she, like, needed the cash.

Jessica tried, she really did. But there was something about this girl in the raccoon coat that irritated her to the depths of her soul, that made her want to grind her teeth and howl. It wasn’t just that she was crude, loudmouthed, sloppy and offensive — it went deeper than that. There was something in the very timbre of her voice, in her movements, in the way she rubbed at the touched-up mole at the corner of her mouth or drew breath through the gap between her front teeth, that unhinged Walter’s sweet-tempered wife. Every word, every gesture, was a sliver driven beneath her nails.

Stoned, Mardi couldn’t stop talking. She told a long, barely coherent story about seducing two of her professors at Bard, appreciated motorcycles with Tom — come spring she was going to get the big Honda, the 750—and dissolved in giggles over something that had happened at a concert the two of them had attended. In the middle of all this, she produced a pipe from the breast pocket of the raccoon coat, lit it, took a suction-hose drag and handed it to Tom. Resinous and rich, with an edge to it that defeated even the acid sting of the woodsmoke, the aroma of the smoldering drug filled the shack. Tom passed the pipe to Jessica.

Now when it came to hashish, Jessica was no neophyte. Hacking like a tubercular, she’d shared the occasional hookah with her college dorm mates or taken furtive hits from Walter’s foil-wrapped pipe out back of the Elbow, and everything had been fine, no problem. ButMardi’s stuff took her by surprise. Especially on top of all that spoiled wine and tofu and Tom Crane’s own, tight-rolled little joint. Five minutes after Mardi lit the pipe, Jessica felt as if she were sinking through the floor, great pulsing blotches of color exploding across her field of vision like the blips on a blank movie screen. The queasiness she’d felt earlier had migrated all of a sudden, from her bowels to her stomach, and it was creeping up her throat like the disembodied hand in “The Beast with Five Fingers.” She was about to gag, about to leap up, throw herself through the door and spew squash, tofu, brown rice and sour white wine out into the crystallized and pristine night, when the door swung open of its own accord.

And who should be standing there, cocked on his good leg and framed by that same Arctic night, his Salvation Army greatcoat and scarf a mess of shaved leaves, burrs, twigs and other woodland refuse? Who, with his Dingo boots scuffed beyond recognition and the look of not one, not two, but falls and scrapes uncountable in his eyes? None other. It was Walter.

MacArthur coming ashore at Leyte could hardly have generated more excitement. Tom was up and across the room in two hops, slapping backs with the lost wanderer, Jessica’s gorge sank momentarily and she sprang up to embrace him and peck a kiss, and Mardi, while she never moved, nonetheless allowed a big wicked lascivious smile to spread across her lips and the light of knowledge — knowledge in the narrowest and most euphemistic biblical sense — to manifest itself in her perfect, glacial, deep-set and mocking violet eyes.

All right. Questions flew. No, he hadn’t eaten. Sure, he’d love some tofu. Yeah, he was at a bar down in Verplanck, shooting pool with Hector, and he hadn’t realized how late it was. Uh-huh, yeah: he got the note. Probably no more than ten minutes after they’d left. Well, yeah, he got cleaned up a bit, took a shower and whatnot, and thought it might be fun on the coldest night in history to come on out and see how the saint of the forest was taking things. (This with a grin for Tom Crane, who was already at the stove, stirring the depths of the cauldron with a wild and spastic rotation of his bony arm.) And yes, he must have gone down about a hundred times on the path — damn worthless son-of-a-bitching foot kept skidding out from under him.

“Want a hit of this?” Mardi, still perched on the edge of the table, leaned toward him, her voice pinched with the effort to contain the inestimable smoke, the pipe held out to Walter like a propitiary offering.

“Sure,” Walter said, touching his hand to hers, “thanks,” and Jessica saw something in his eyes. “How you been, Mardi,” he said, bringing the pipe to his lips, and Jessica heard something in his voice. She looked at Mardi, sitting there like a cat with a mouthful of feathers, and she looked at Walter, squinting through the smoke at Mardi, and all at once the most devastating, most heartrending and sickening thought came to her.

Mardi was talking now, her voice coming fast and hard, honed like a razor, telling Walter the same story she’d told fifteen minutes before, about the professors and her own provocative and irresistible self. And Walter, sprawled in a chair, unbuttoning his coat and passing the pipe, was listening. But no. No. She was just being paranoic, that’s all. It was the hash. It always did this to her. So what if Walter wasn’t home for dinner, so what if he stayed out at the Elbow half the nights of the week, so what if Mardi had preceded him by a matter of mere minutes—what did that prove? Oh no, she was way out of line.

For all that, though, she was on her feet in the next instant, the half-full Smucker’s jar hurtling to the floor like a two-ton bomb, on her feet and out the door to the porch, where she leaned over the railing and brought up all the fire in her guts, retching so furiously, so uncontrollably and without remit or surcease, that she thought for the longest while she’d been poisoned.

Martyr’s Reach

It wasn’t another woman, she was sure of that. But that something was wrong, radically wrong, Christina had no doubt. She leaned back on the dog-smelling davenport her mother had fished out of the basement for her, held the steaming cup of Sanka to her lips and stared out the bungalow’s yellowed windows and into the saturate dusk that gathered in the trees like a precursor of heavy weather to come. All the world was quiet. Walter was asleep already, Hesh and Lola gone out for the night. Dropping her gaze from the trees to the pine desk beneath the window (her husband’s desk, with its hulking black Smith Corona and its neatly squared row of arcane little volumes with titles like Agrarian Conflicts in Colonial New York and Van Wart Manor: Then and Now), she felt a pang of sadness so acute it was like giving birth to something twisted and deformed, ugly as a lie. When she looked up again, she had to bite her ring finger to keep from crying out.

It wasn’t another woman, but she almost wished it were. At least then she would know what she was up against. As things stood now, she didn’t know what had gone wrong, but she had only to look into Truman’s eyes to know it was bad. For the past few nights he’d been “unwinding” after work at one of the local taphouses, lurching in at midnight with wild eyes and volatile breath, distant as an alien dropped from another world into the bed beside her. Unwinding. Yes. But before that — through the whole course of that blighted summer — he’d grown so strange and self-absorbed she hardly recognized him. Each night he would drag himself back from the foundry, his face set, hardened, all the sympathy driven out of it. He’d duck away from her embrace, spin Walter in the air and pour himself a drink. Then he’d sit down at the desk, pull open his notebook and lose himself until dinner. “How was work?” she’d ask. “Okay if we have green beans again for a vegetable? Have the Martians landed yet?” Nothing. No response. He was a monk of the sacred texts, he was carved of stone. After dinner he would read his bewildered son a chapter of Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York, his voice toneless and dull, and then it was back to the books. Sometimes, even on work nights, she’d wake at one or two in the morning and there he’d be, reading, underlining, making notes, his whole being caught up in the page.

“You’re working too hard,” she told him.

He looked up at her like a beast surprised over its prey, the book spread open in his lap as if it were the thing he’d stalked and killed, the bloody meat he was gnawing in the refuge of his den. “Not hard enough,” he growled.

At first she’d been sympathetic. She kept telling herself that there was nothing wrong, that he was under too much pressure, that was all. Working a forty-hour week, commuting to the City for his final courses in education and history, attending party meetings, maintaining the car, the yard, the house, and on top of it all trying to research and write a senior thesis in the space of ten short weeks: it was enough to put anyone off track. But as the summer progressed and he became increasingly withdrawn, unloving, single-minded and hostile, she began to realize that she was fooling herself, that the problem went deeper than she dared guess. Something outside of him, something poisonous and irrevocable, was transforming him. He was hardening himself. He was driving a wedge between them. He was slipping away from her.

It had begun in June, when Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum announced the party’s plans for a rally in Peterskill and Truman had started on his final project at City College, the senior thesis. Truman chose an obscure episode of local history for his paper — Christina had never even heard of it — and he set to work with all the monomaniacal concentration of a Gibbon chronicling the decline of Rome. Suddenly there was no time for dinner with Hesh and Lola, no time for cards, a drive-in movie, no time to take Walter out on the river or to throw him a ball in the cool of the evening. There was no time for sex either. He’d work half the night, frowning in the puddle of light the lamp threw over his desk, and he’d come to bed like a man with an arrow through his back. The door would creak on its hinges, he’d take three steps and he’d fling himself forward, asleep before he hit the bed. On Saturdays and Sundays, all day, he was at the library. She tried to reason with him. “Truman,” she pleaded as he jotted notes or tossed one book down to snatch up another, “you’re not writing the history of Western civilization; give yourself a break, slow down. Truman!” her voice rising to a shout, “it’s only a term paper!”

He never even bothered to answer.

And what was he writing? What was he killing himself over, night and day, till his wife felt like a widow and his son barely recognized him? She took a look one afternoon. One flawless sunstruck afternoon when Truman was at the plant and Walter sat smearing pea soup into his shirt. She was hauling out the kitchen trash, arms laden with two bursting bags of bones and peels and coffee grounds, when suddenly there it was, the focus of the room, the house, the city, the county, the world itself: there, in the center of his desk, lay the battered manila folder that never left his sight except when he was stretched out unconscious on the bed or punching the clock for the bosses down at the foundry. It was a magnet, a ne plus ultra and a sine qua non. She picked it up.

Inside, in a wad thick as the phone directory, were hundreds of pages of lined yellow paper covered with the jerking loops and slashes of his tiny cramped script. Manorial Revolt: The Crane/Mohonk Conspiracy, she read, by Truman H. Van Brunt. She flipped the page. “The history of Van Wart Manor is a history of oppression, betrayal and deceit, a black mark in the annals of colonial settlement. …” The style was wild, cliché-ridden, declamatory and passionate — hysterical, even. It was like no history she’d ever read. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought the author personally involved, the victim of some terrible injustice or false accusation. She read five pages and put it down. Was this it? Was this what had taken hold of him?

She had her answer three weeks later.

It was a Saturday afternoon, a week before the concert. The course was done, the paper finished (at two hundred fifty-seven closely typed pages it was five times the length of any other submitted that semester), the degree awarded. They took the train back from the graduation ceremony and she pressed close to Truman in the gently swaying coach, thinking Now. Now we can breathe. It was late in the day when they got back to the house. Truman crossed the room and sat heavily at his desk, still dressed in cap and gown — the rented cap and gown he obstinately refused to return — the sweat seeping through the heavy black muslin in dark fists and slashing crescents. “Let’s celebrate,” she said. “We’ll pick up Walter and we’ll go out someplace for dinner — someplace nice. Just the three of us.”

He was staring into the trees. He didn’t look like a man who’d just crowned three years of hard work with a supreme and enduring triumph — he looked like a thief about to be led off to the gallows.

“Truman?”

He brought his face around slowly, and his eyes were strange with that shifting vacant gaze she’d come to recognize over the past few weeks. “I’ve got to go out,” he said, glancing away again. “With Piet. I’ve got to help Piet with his car.”

“Piet?” She threw the name back at him like a curse. “Piet?” She could see him, Piet, as pale as a hairless little grub, an ineradicable smirk on his face. “What about me? What about your son? Do you realize we haven’t done anything as a family for what — months now?”

He only shrugged. His upper lip trembled, as if he were fighting back a wicked leering little smile that said Yes, yes, I’m guilty, I’m a shit, abuse me, hate me, divorce me. He couldn’t hold her eyes.

They’d been married nearly four years — didn’t that mean anything to him? What was wrong? What happened to the man she’d fallen in love with, the daredevil with the quick smile who’d flown under the Bear Mountain Bridge and swept her off her feet?

He didn’t know. He was tired, that was all. He didn’t want to argue.

“Look at me,” she said, seizing him by the arms as he rose to go, the coarse fabric of the gown bunching under her fists. “You’re seeing someone else, aren’t you?” Her voice rose to a lacerating wail that filled her head till she thought it would burst. “Aren’t you?”

She knew in that instant that she was wrong, and the knowledge crumpled her like a balled-up sheet of foil. It wasn’t another woman. It wasn’t the Crane/Mohonk conspiracy or the forty hours a week at the foundry either. She was looking into the depths of him and what she saw there was as final and irrevocable as the drop of a guillotine: he was already gone.

The paper was done, and now he had the cap and gown, artifacts of his accomplishment. He slept in them through the remainder of that week, wore them to work, fluttered into Outhouse’s Tavern like the scholar-gypsy, the mortarboard raked back on his head as if it had fallen out of the sky and miraculously lighted there. She saw him in the soft light of morning as he pulled on his steel-toed boots, and she saw him silhouetted against the harsh yellow lamp in the living room as he staggered in at night: that week, that dismal fractured week that began with his commencement and ended with the concert, he didn’t spend a single evening at home.

She remonstrated at dawn, pleaded at midnight, spat out her fury and despair through the small hours of the morning. He was impervious. He lay in bed, drunk, the tattered gown wound around his legs, the breath whistling through his lips. At the sound of the alarm, he started up out of bed, fumbled into his boots and staggered out the door — without coffee, without cornflakes, without a hello or goodbye. And so it went until Saturday, the day of the concert. On that mild and fateful morning, Truman was up at first light, grinning wildly at her, spouting one-liners like a desperate comedian up against an immovable audience. He whipped up a batch of pancakes, fried eggs and sausages, clowned around the kitchen for Walter with a colander on his head. Could it be all right after all? she wondered. The pancakes were on the table, Walter was giggling at his silly Daddy, Christina smiled for the first time in a week, and Truman, leering like a court jester, like a zany, like a madman pressed to the bars of his cage, tore the ragged academic gown from his back and sent it hurtling across the room and into the wastebasket in a high arcing jump shot. Then, with a wink, he disappeared into the bedroom and returned a moment later in a sparkling pristine polo shirt — a shirt she’d never seen before, a miracle of a shirt — still creased with newness and striped in glorious bands of red, white and blue.

Walter went off with his grandparents to spend the day amidst the fascinating fishes of the Hudson, while Truman and Hesh loaded the sound equipment into the back of Hesh’s Plymouth and Christina made sandwiches, cookies, a thermos of iced tea. Was she humming to herself? Smiling over her private thoughts? She’d seen it in his eyes, seen that he was dead to her inside, and she didn’t want to believe it. She wanted to believe that this morning of the concert was a new beginning, radiant and propitious. He was recovering, coming back to her — it had been the pressure after all, and now it was over. He’d got his degree, worn his robe to tatters. So what if he’d been out letting off steam? It was only natural.

Wrapping sandwiches, she thought of the concert of the year before, at the pavilion in the Colony, when they’d sat on a blanket in the grass, holding hands, Walter asleep beside them. Robeson sang “Go Down, Moses,” he sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and something from Handel’s “Messiah,” and she slid into the cradle of Truman’s arms and closed her eyes to let the great deep thrumming voice quaver on the sounding board of her body. There was no Piet then, no manila folder, no Crane/Mohonk conspiracy. There was only Truman, her husband, the man with a smile for the world, the athlete, the scholar, the party acolyte and hero — only Truman, and her.

And then the morning was gone and she was collating the pages of her pamphlets and thinking how maybe next weekend they could go up to Rhinebeck or someplace — just to get away for a couple of days. They could stay at that old inn on the river, and maybe go sailing or horseback riding. Her fingers were ink-stained. It was three o’clock, four. She was sitting by the window and listening to the radio, waiting for her husband and Hesh to get back from their last-minute conference with Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum, when she glanced up to see Hesh’s Gillette-blue Plymouth swing into the driveway. She was out the door, picnic basket in one hand, A&P bag of literature in the other, before the car rolled to a stop. “Hey,” she was about to call out, “I was beginning to think you forgot all about me,” but she caught herself. For at that moment, with fear and loathing and a sinking sense of defeat, she saw that they were not alone. There, perched between them like a ventriloquist’s dummy, his naked little hands braced against the dashboard and his face locked in a mad evil sneer of triumph, was Piet.

When she looked back on that night, the night that broke her life in two, she saw faces. Piet’s face, as it was in the car, insinuated in some unspeakable way between her husband and herself. Truman’s face, turned away from her, hard and unsmiling. Hesh’s face: bluff, honest, opened wide to her as she slipped into the seat beside him, numb and composed for death as he lay unconscious on the scuffed pine boards of the stage while the criminals and brownshirts howled like demons in the dark. And then there were the faces of the mob itself: the rabid women thumbing their noses, eyes popping with hate; the boy who’d leaned forward to spit on the windshield; a man she recognized from the butcher shop in Peterskill who’d bared his teeth like a dog, cupped his genitals in both hands and then clasped the crook of his arm in the universal gesture of defiance and contempt. A day passed, two, three, four, a week, a month, and still she saw them. Though she struggled to escape them, though she shut her eyes fast, paced the floor, fought for sleep, those faces haunted her. They were there, ugly and undeniable, when she started up in the morning from the fitful sleep that overtook her at first light, they were there in the afternoon as she sat sobbing on the davenport, and in the maw of the night when the dark conjured its images. These were her ghosts, this her attack of history.

It began in the deeps of that first night, when the nervous phone calls had ceased and Hesh’s blood had dried to a crust on the sleeve of her blouse, when she’d got to the end of the list of hospitals in the Westchester-Putnam phone book and found that none had admitted a bleeding athlete with hair the color of tarnished copper and a torn polo shirt, when she pictured him lying unconscious in a ditch or crawling home like a dog struck down on the highway. She sat by the phone, listless, the eyes sunk back in her head, willing him to call. He didn’t call. The night held on, tenacious, implacable. From the back room came the arhythmic click and scrape of Walter’s teeth, grinding, bone on bone. And then, caught in the window, hovering over the coleus, peering out from behind the radio console, the faces began to show themselves. Piet’s face, Truman’s, Hesh’s, the twisted feral mug of the man from the butcher shop.

The next day Lola sat beside her through the never-ending morning, the unendurable afternoon and the starless night that fell on her like a curse. Don’t worry, Lola said, her voice dabbing at the wounds, he’ll turn up. He’s safe, I know it. For all they knew he could have gotten away to the City with a carload of concertgoers or doubled back to Piet’s place in Peterskill. He’ll call, she said, any minute now. Any minute.

She was wrong. Soothing, but wrong. He didn’t call. Hesh beat the bushes and Hesh found nothing. Lola wanted to know if she could get her a sleeping pill. It was 11:00 P.M. No one had seen or heard from Truman in twenty-seven hours. Scotch? Vodka? Gin?

Then it was Monday, early — seven, eight, she didn’t know. Lola was standing behind the counter at the van der Meulen bakery and Hesh, his arms rough with scab and his face ripened like a fruit, was on his way to Sollovay’s Auto Glass and Mirror on Houston Street. That was when he walked in. She hadn’t slept in fifty hours and she was seeing faces, Walter was wound up like a dervish in his private three-year-old’s dance of denial and trauma, the trash was overflowing, the larder empty, her mother rushing back from a vacation in Vermont to be with her in that bankrupt hour, and he walked in the door.

He was limping. He was drunk. There was a dark punished bruise beneath his left eye, his ear was bandaged and he was wearing the same clothes he’d worn to the concert, dirty now, torn, steeped in blood. What was there to say? We were worried sick, where were you, did they hurt you, I’m so glad, we’re so glad, Walter, look, look who’s come home. She was up off the davenport and rushing to him, Walter at her side, leaping to the familial embrace, tears of gratitude, Odysseus home from the wars, unfurl the banners, sound the horns, lights, camera…but he was numb to their touch. In the next moment he shoved past them, shielding his face like a gangster outside the courthouse, and then he was in the bedroom, the suitcase gaping open on the bed like a set of jaws.

“What are you doing?” She was on him now, tugging at his arm. “Truman, what is it? Talk to me! Truman!” Beneath her, clinging to his father’s legs, Walter kept up a steady dirge, “Daddy, daddy, daddy.”

Nothing could touch him. He shrugged her off as he’d shrugged off tacklers in the years of his glory, single-minded and heedless, plunging for the goal line. Books, clothes, his notes, the manuscript: the house was on fire, the woods were burning. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, his lip quivering with that sick betrayer’s grin — she didn’t exist, Walter was invisible — and then he was on his way out the door.

Outside, the car. The Buick. They said later it was Van Wart’s car, but how would she know? It was black, long, funereal. She’d never seen it before. “Truman!” She was at the door, she was on the stoop. “Talk to me!” He wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t even look at her. He flung the suitcase in back and sprang into the driver’s seat like a hunted man, and then the car jerked into gear and lurched back down the driveway. She stood there, stricken immobile, and in that moment, through the sad slow dance of light on the windshield, she caught her final glimpse of him. Jaw set, eyes dead, he never even turned his head.

But Truman didn’t leave her without a valediction of sorts. As the car swerved to the left on Kitchawank Road, presenting her with the long gleaming plane of the passenger side, Piet suddenly appeared at the open window, sprung up like a toadstool from the sunless depths of the interior. He turned to her, slow as clockwork, and lifted his pale cupped child’s hand in the least and smallest wave.

Bye-bye.

When Anna Alving swung into the driveway it was just past two in the afternoon and her hands were trembling on the wheel. She’d left the rented cottage on Lake St. Catherine at seven that morning, her husband following in the second car. They stopped for lunch somewhere outside Hudson (Magnus so preoccupied with his vanishing son-in-law he barely touched his tuna on rye, and she so wrought up she had six cups of coffee with her danish) and then set off again in tandem. The Chevrolet was a racehorse compared to Magnus’ creeping Nash, and though she tried to hang back and keep him in sight, by the time they reached Claverack the rear-view mirror showed nothing but blacktop. She thought about pulling over to wait for him, but the grip of emergency tightened on her, and her foot went to the floor. Mama, her daughter’s voice came to her as it had on the phone the night before, Mama, he’s gone, and she took the curves in a headlong rush that savaged her tires and nearly jerked the steering wheel from her hands. Now, as she pulled up to the silent bungalow, the bungalow that sat newly painted in a lattice of leaf-thrown shadow, looking placid, normal, staid, she loosened her grip on the wheel and cut the ignition. She sat there a moment, listening to the ticks and groans of the dying engine, gathering up her purse and composing her face. Then she started up the front steps.

She found Christina sunk into the davenport, shoulders bunched, legs clutched to her chest. Beside her, stretched out prone atop an avalanche of children’s books, was Walter. He was asleep — mouth agape, eyelids half-closed — and she was reading to him. Oblivious. Her voice sunk to a weary monotone. “Jack Sprat could eat no fat,” she read, “his wife could eat no lean.”

“Christina?”

Christina looked up. In the past six hours she’d been through every fairy tale and nursery rhyme in the house. Cinderella, Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, they all lived happily ever after. Babar, Alice, Toad of Toad Hall, life a bowl of cherries. Then there was Jack — Jack of the beanstalk, Jack of Jill, Jack the housebuilder and Jack the candlestick jumper — and Humpty Dumpty, Wee Willie Winkie and poor Cock Robin. “Have they found him yet?” her mother asked.

Slowly, reverently, as if it were part of some ritual, Christina closed the book in her lap. Her mother was standing there before her, tanned from her month on the stony shingle of Lake St. Catherine, her hair newly done and a look of permanent anguish on her face. Found him? What she wanted to know was who killed Cock Robin.

Her mother’s voice came back at her: “Is he all right?’

She looked up into her mother’s face, the face that had been her sun and moon, her comfort and refuge since she lay helpless in the cradle, the face that vanquished all those horrific others that infested the shadows and leered through her dreams, but all she could think of was poor Cock Robin and the birds of the air that fell a-sighing and a-sobbing when they heard the news. “They found him,” she said finally.

Her mother was unconsciously clenching and unclenching her fists, there was the rumble of a second car in the driveway, Walter murmured something in his sleep. “They found him,” she repeated. A car door slammed. She could hear her father’s footsteps on the pavement, the stoop, she could see his anxious face through the mesh of the screen.

“Yes?” her mother said.

“Yes,” she said. “He’s dead.”

He wasn’t dead, but far better that he were. By nightfall the Alvings had heard the rumors — had heard Hesh’s version, Lola’s, Lorelee Shapiro’s and Rose Pollack’s — and Christina, stretched the length of her childhood bed like a corpse laid out for embalming, finally admitted the truth. Truman had left her. Left her unprotected at the concert, left her to agonize through two sleepless days and nights, then packed up his things and left her for good. “I can’t believe it,” her mother said. Her father rose from his chair. “I’ll kill him,” he said.

There was the second concert at the end of that week, big with triumph and pared down with defeat, and then August gave way to September, with its lingering warmth and deluded butterflies, with the fullness that yields to decay. By the time the trees turned, Christina had lost twenty-two pounds. For the first time since she was fifteen she weighed less than a hundred pounds, and her mother was concerned. “Eat,” she said, “you’re wasting away to nothing. Forget him. Forget him and eat. You’ve got to keep your strength up. Think of Walter.”

She was thinking of Walter. On the first of October, while her mother was out, she met with a lawyer from Yorktown and drew up the papers giving legal guardianship to his godparents in the event of her death. As for her mother’s injunctions, they were meaningless. Eat? She might as well have urged her to fly. One ate to replenish oneself, to renew cells, to build bone and muscle and fat, to live. She didn’t want to live. She wasn’t hungry. Meat sickened her, the smell of cooking was an anathema, fruits were vile and vegetables hateful. Milk, cereal, bread, rice, even potato latkes — they were all poison to her. Her mother would make her pudding, doughnuts, eggs Benedict, she’d appear in her room with a tray of soda crackers and broth and sit there chiding, holding the spoon to her lips as if she were a child still, but it did no good. Christina would force herself to take a swallow, if only to smooth the lines in that kind and solicitous face that hung over her, but the broth was like acid on her stomach and within the hour she’d be hunched over the toilet, gagging till the tears stood out in her eyes.

Dr. Braun, the family practitioner who’d assuaged her childhood fevers, dabbed at her chicken pox and stitched up her knee when she’d fallen from the precipitous step of the schoolbus, prescribed a sedative and felt it might do her some good to chat with Dr. Arkawy, a colleague who practiced psychiatric medicine. She didn’t want to chat. She spat out the sedatives, clutched Walter and his bright hopeful books to her chest and saw faces, rabid hateful faces, Truman’s the most hateful of all. By the first of November she was down to eightyeight pounds.

They fed her intravenously at Peterskill Community Hospital but she jerked the IV from her arm whenever they left the room. She was dreaming when they moved her to the other hospital, but she smelled the river strong in her nostrils in that little space between the ambulance and the great heavy fortress door. When they pinned her arms down and started that drip of life, she could feel the water rising around her. Gray, lapping waves, nothing severe, a ripple fanning out across the broad flat surface, rocking the boat as gently as the breeze rocked the cradle of that baby high in the treetops. She was with Truman suddenly, long ago, long before Walter, the bungalow, long before the papers and the books and the party meetings that found his hand entwined in hers. Long before. They were out on the river in his father’s boat, the boat that stank of fish and that was gouged across the gunwales by the friction of a thousand ropes hauling up secrets from the bottom. He’d spread a blanket for her in the bow, there was that peculiar sick-sweet smell of exhaust, the sun was high, the wind had fallen to nothing. What’s that, she asked, over there? That point across the river? He sat at the tiller, grinning. Kidd’s Point, he said, after the pirate. That’s Dunderberg behind it, and straight ahead is what they call the Horse Race.

She felt the water swell beneath her. She looked up the river to where the mountains fell away in continents of shadow and seagulls hung in oceans of filtered light. Above that, and around the bend, he told her, it’s a clear channel up to West Point. Then we hit Martyr’s Reach. He knew an island there, in the middle of the river, beautiful spot, Storm King on the one side, Breakneck on the other. He was thinking maybe they’d land and have lunch there.

Lunch. Yes, lunch.

Pity was, she just wasn’t hungry.

Sons and Daughters

It was the morning of Neeltje’s sixteenth birthday, a morning like any other: damp, dismal, curdled with the monotony of routine. There were eggs to be gathered, ducks, geese and chickens to be fed. The fire needed stoking, the porridge thickening, she could feel her fingers go stiff with the thought of the spinning, churning and milling to come. Her father was gone, off somewhere on the patroon’s business and not due back till nightfall, and though it was barely light yet, her mother already sat stiffly at the flax wheel, her right arm rising and falling mechanically, her eyes fixed on the spindle. Her sisters, girls still, warmed themselves at the fire and gazed expectantly into the pot. No one so much as glanced at her as she lifted her cloak down from the hook and slipped into her clogs.

Feeling hurt and angry — she might as well have been one of the patroon’s black nigger slaves for all the notice anybody took of her — Neeltje slammed out the door, crossed the yard and stopped to poke through the grass for the morning’s eggs. She didn’t ask much — a smile maybe, best wishes on her birthday, a hug from her mother-but what did she get? Nothing. It was her birthday, and no one cared. And why should they? She was just a pair of hands that chopped and milked and scrubbed, a back that lifted, legs that hauled. She was sixteen today, a full-grown woman, an adult, and no one knew the difference.

Absorbed in bitter reflections, she bent for eggs, her skirts already heavy with dew. Unmilked, the cows mooed emphatically from the barn, while a troop of ragged hens pecked at her heels and cocked their heads to rebuke her with their bright censorious eyes. A pall of mist breathed in off the river with a smell of sludgy bottoms, the dead and drowned, and she shivered, pulling the cloak tight around her throat. In the next moment she plucked an egg from the new grass along the fence, found two more beneath the canopy of the woodshed, and rose to dry her hands on her apron. It was then — as she straightened up, the basket caught in the crook of her arm, hands bunched in the folds of her apron — that she became aware of a movement off to her left, where the outline of the barn sank into mist. She turned her head instinctively, and there he was, cocked back on his leg, smiling faintly, watching her.

“Jeremias?” She made a question of it, her voice riding up in surprise, conscious all at once of her uncovered head, the utter plainness of her cloak and skirts, the mud that spattered her yellow peasant’s clogs.

“Shhhhhh!” He held a finger to his lips and motioned her forward, before receding into the fog at the nether end of the barn. She glanced around her twice — the cows protesting, chickens squabbling, ducks and geese raising an unholy racket down by the pond — and turned to follow him.

Behind the barn, in the spill of briars and weeds and with the smell of cow dung wafting up around them, he took her hand and wished her a happy birthday (gefeliciteerd met je verjaardag), then dropped his voice and told her to forget the eggs.

“Forget the eggs? What do you mean?”

The mist steamed around him. The smile was gone. “I mean you won’t be needing them. Not now.” He opened his mouth to expand on this abrupt and rather cryptic proposition, but seemed to think better of it. He looked down at the ground. “Don’t you know why I’ve come?”

Neeltje Cats was sixteen years old that day, as short and slight as a child, but ancient with the sagacity of her entrepreneurial and poetical ancestors, the bards and shopkeepers of Amsterdam. She knew why he’d come — would have known even if he hadn’t sent old Jan the Kitchawank to tell her three separate times in the past eight months. “I know,” she whispered, feeling as if, for form’s sake at least, she should fall down at his feet in a swoon or something.

He’d let go of her hand in the rush of his eloquence on the subject of the eggs, and now he stood there, looking awkward, his arms hanging like empty sleeves. Frustrated, impatient, suffering, the cows bellowed. “It’s all right, then?” Jeremias said finally, addressing a tree trunk twenty feet behind her.

All right? She’d been dreaming of this moment for months, lying on the rough mattress between her sprawled sisters in the dead black night, struggling to summon the image of him before she drifted off (Jeremias, the prince who would ascend the ladder of her tresses and free her from the hag’s tower, who would slay dragons and crush villains for her, Jeremias of the stonemason’s build and sea-green eyes). She never doubted he would come for her. She’d seen it in his eyes, seen it in the slump of his shoulders as he limped past her in his humiliation and slouched up the Peterskill road, felt it in his touch, heard it in his voice. When old Jan took her aside after delivering missives to the patroon and singing a three-note greeting to her mother from a cousin at Crom’s Pond, she knew before the words had passed his lips that Jeremias Van Brunt sent his good opinion and best wishes. And she knew too when he pressed a slip of paper into her hand that it was from Jeremias and that it would open her life up for her.

Heart pounding, she’d ducked away from the family gathered around the tottering Indian and hurried out the door in the direction of the privy. When she was out of sight, when she was sure she was beyond the prying eyes of her father, her mother, her sisters, she tore open the slip of paper. Inside, she found a laboriously worked copy of Jacob Cats’ paean to matrimonial ethics. She skimmed the lines, but it wasn’t the poem that stirred her, it was the valediction. In the crude block letters of an unpracticed hand, Jeremias had written Eye wll cum for u, and then scrawled his signature across the bottom of the page in a deluge of loops and slashes. And now, as Neeltje stood there in her muddy clogs and uncombed hair, the basket of eggs clutched to her chest and the dust of sleep barely wiped from her eyes, she saw that he was as good as his word. All right? It was perfect.

“Your father doesn’t think much of me,” he said.

She reached up to trace the scar along the length of his cheek. “No matter,” she whispered. “I do.”

It took him a minute — a minute punctuated by the lowing of the cattle and suffused with the fishy reek of the river — before he moved into her arms. There was the fog, the tsk-tsking of the hens, the rank wild odor of the awakening season. When he spoke finally, his voice was thick. “Put down the basket,” he said.

The basket was still lying there in the mud at four that afternoon when Joost Cats climbed down from the bony back of Donder, his purblind nag, and smoothed the seat of his sweat-soaked and tumultuous pantaloons. He’d spent the morning in Van Wartville, mediating yet another dispute between Hackaliah Crane and Reinier Oothouse — this time over the disposition of a lean, slack-bellied sow the Yankee had caught rooting up his seed onions — after which he’d hurried home with a pair of Jan Pieterse’s best Ferose stockings for Neeltje on her birthday. As he led the wheezing nag into the barn, thinking of how Reinier Oothouse, in his cups, had gone down on his knees before the Yankee and pleaded for the sow’s life like a father pleading for his child (“Don’t kill her, don’t hurt my little Speelgoed, she didn’t mean it, never been naughty before, anything, I’ll pay anything you ask”), his two youngest burst from the house, arms and legs churning, faces lit with the joy of disaster. “Vader! Vader!” they cried in breathless piping unison, “Neeltje’s gone!”

Gone? What were they talking about? Gone? But in the next instant he saw his wife at the door, saw the look on her face and knew it was true.

Together, led by the fluttering Trijintje and intoxicated Ans, they rounded the corner of the barn to hover over the spilled basket, the tracked and muddy earth, the shattered eggs. “Was it Indians?” Ans shouted. “Did they kidnap her and make her their white squaw?”

Bent like a sickle and stroking his puff of chin hair, Joost tried to picture it — naked red devils slipping from the weeds to bludgeon his defenseless little Neeltje, a rough hand cuffed over her mouth, the stinking hut and moldering furs, the queue of greasy randy braves jostling at the door. … “When?” he murmured, turning to his wife.

Geesje Cats was a dour woman, hipless, fleshless, wasted, a woman who bore only daughters and wore her troubles at the corners of her mouth. “This morning,” she said, her eyes stung with dread. “It was Trijintje — she found it, the basket. We called and called.”

The mud was puckered in dumb mouths that told the schout nothing. Staring down at the sad upended basket and the spill of egg yolk that seemed to claw at the earth like the fingers of a grasping hand, he relived the scenes of violence and depravity he’d encountered in his seven years as schout, drowned men and stabbed men floating before his eyes, women abused, bereft, violated, bones that poked through the flesh and eyes that would see no more. When he looked up he was shouting. “You searched the orchard?” he demanded. “The river? The pond? Did you inquire at the patroon’s?”

Startled, shamefaced, his wife and daughters lowered their eyes. They had. Yes, vader, yes, echtgenoot, they had.

Well, then, had they gone to the de Groodts, the Coopers, the van Dincklagens? To the inn? The ferry? The pasture, the stable, van der Donk’s Hill?

A light rain had begun to fall. Ans, ten years old, began to sniffle. “All right!” he shouted, “all right: I’ll go to the patroon.”

The patroon was supping, bent low over a plate of pickled beets, hard cheese and a shad in cream sauce he was glumly forking up as if to remark the disparity between this and Zuider Zee herring, when Joost was shown into the room. The patroon’s unburdened hand was bandaged against the knife thrusts of his gout, and his face was flushed the color of a rare wine. Vrouw Van Wart, a woman given to the denial of the flesh, sat stiffly beside him, a single dry crust before her, while his brother’s widow and her daughter Mariken perched on the hard bench opposite her. The Jongheer, in a lace collar the size of a wheel of Gouda, occupied the place of honor at the foot of the table. “My Savior in Heaven!” cried the patroon. “What is it, Cats, that couldn’t keep?”

“It’s my daughter, Mijnheer: she’s disappeared.”

“How’s that?”

“Neeltje. My eldest. She went out for chores this morning and there’s been no trace of her since.”

The patroon set down his fork, plucked a loaf from the pewter dish before him, and turned it over in his hand as if it were the single telling bit of evidence left behind at the scene of the crime. Joost waited patiently as the florid little man split the loaf and slathered it with butter. “You’ve, er, contacted the, er, other tenants?” the patroon gasped in his dry, windless voice.

Joost was beside himself with frustration — this was no time for the niceties of leisurely inquiry. They had his daughter, the heart and soul and central joy of his existence, and he had to get her back. “It’s the Kitchawanks,” he blurted, “I’m sure of it. They snatched her”—here his voice broke with a sob—“snatched her as she, she—”

At the mention of Indians, the Jongheer was on his feet. “I told you so,” he roared at his father. “Beggars in their blankets. Aborigines, criminals, vermin, filth. We should have driven them into the river twenty years ago.” He crossed the room in two great strides and lifted the harquebus down from the wall.

The patroon had risen now to his gouty feet, and the ladies pressed powdered hands to their mouths. “But, er, what’s this, mijnzoon?” the patroon wheezed in some alarm. “What are you thinking?”

“What am I thinking?” the Jongheer shrieked, the blood rushing to his face. “They’ve raped an honest man’s daughter, vader!” The harquebus was about as wieldy as a blacksmith’s anvil, and twice as heavy. He raised it over his head in a single clenched fist. “I mean to exterminate them, annihilate them, pot them like foxes, like rats, like, like—”

It was then that a knock came at the door.

The deferential head of the tattooed slave appeared between the oak door and the whitewashed wall that framed it. “A red man, Mijnheer,” he said in his garbled Dutch. “Says he’s got a message for the schout.”

Before either patroon or Jongheer could give the command, the door flew back and old Jan stumbled into the room to exclamations of excitement from the ladies. Jan was wearing a tattered cassock, out at elbows and shoulders, and an ancient crushed caubeen with half the brim missing. His loincloth hung from his hips like a tongue, his legs were spattered with mud and his moccasins were as black as the muck in the oyster beds of the Tappan Zee. For a long moment he just stood there, swaying slightly, and blinking in the light of the candles hung around the room.

“Well, Jan,” the patroon wheezed, “what is it?”

“Beer,” the Indian said.

“Pompey!” Vrouw Van Wart called, and the black reappeared. “Beer for old Jan.”

Pompey poured, Jan drank. The patroon looked befuddled, the schout anxious, the Jongheer enraged. Mariken, who’d been Neeltje’s playmate, looked on with a face as pale and drawn as a mime’s.

The old Indian set down the cup, composed himself a moment and began a slow shuffling dance around the table, all the while chanting Ay-yah, neh-neh, Ay-yah, neh-neh. After half a dozen repetitions, he sang his message — in three tones, and to the same beat:

Daugh-ter, sends you,

Her greet-ings, neh-neh.

And then he stopped. Stopped singing, stopped dancing. He was frozen, like a figure in a clocktower after the hour’s been struck. “Spirits,” he said. “Genever.”

But this time, Pompey didn’t have a chance to respond. Before he could so much as glance at the patroon for his approval, let alone lift the stone bottle and pour, the Jongheer had slammed the Indian into the wall. “Where is she?” he demanded. “Is it ransom, is that what you want? Is it?”

“Let him go,” Joost said, taking Stephanus by the arm and pushing his way between them. “Jan,” he said, his voice faltering, “who is it? Who’s got her? Mohonk? Wappus? Wennicktanon?”

The Indian stared at his feet. There was a smear of dirt on his cheek. He was pouting like a hurt child. “No more message,” he said.

“No more? You mean that’s it?”

“Listen, you son of a bitch,” Stephanus began, making another charge at him, but Joost held him off.

“But — but who gave you the message?”

The Indian looked around the room as if he were trying to remember. In the background, Joost could hear Vrouw Van Wart berating her husband in a terse rasping voice. “Herself,” Jan said finally.

“Neeltje?”

The Indian nodded.

“Where is she? Where did she give it to you?”

This was more difficult. Joost poured Jan a pewter cup of genever while the Jongheer breathed fumes and the patroon and his wife and sister-in-law and niece sat in silence, as if they were at the theater. Suddenly the Indian made a slash in the air with the flat of his hand; then he made the sign of two fingers walking.

“What?” Stephanus asked.

“Speak up, man,” the patroon croaked.

It was only Joost who understood, and he held on to the knowledge for a stunned moment, as a knifed man might have held on to the haft of the blade in his belly. The Indian had made the sign of the cripple, the one with half a leg — the sign for Jeremias Van Brunt.

Next morning, before the dogs had lifted their muzzles from the nests of their forepaws or the cock had had a chance to stretch the sleep from his wings, Joost saddled a sore and reluctant Donder and set out for Nysen’s Roost. He was accompanied by the Jongheer, who suddenly, it seemed, had taken a passionate interest in his daughter’s welfare, and he carried a brace of dueling pistols the patroon had ceremoniously retrieved from a chest in the seignorial bedroom (in addition, of course, to the silver-plated rapier that had already wrought such havoc on young Van Brunt’s physiognomy). The Jongheer, in silk doublet, French cuffs and midnight-blue cassock with matching knee breeches, had given over the unwieldy harquebus in favor of a fowling piece loaded with pigeon shot and a Florentine dirk that looked like a surgical instrument. To complete the ensemble, he wore a jeweled rapier at his side, a floppy hat surmounted by a three-foot yellow plume, and so many silver and brass buckles he actually jingled like a sack of coins as his mount picked its way up the road.

The day was typical of April in the vale of the Hudson — raw and drizzling, the earth exhaling vapor as if it were breathing its last — and they made slow progress on the slick river road. It was late in the morning when they passed the cluster of buildings that would one day become Peterskill and turned east on Van Wart’s Road. The schout, hunched in the saddle, had little to say. As he bobbed and swayed to the nag’s erratic rhythm, he focused on the image of Jeremias Van Brunt with such intensity the world was swallowed up in it. He saw the watchful cat’s eyes squinted against the onslaught of the summer sun, saw the squared jaw and defiant sneer, saw the blade come down and the blood flow. And he saw Neeltje, kneeling over the fallen renegade and glaring up at him, her father, as if he were the criminal, the trespasser, the scoffer at the laws of God and man. Had she gone with him voluntarily, then? Was that it? The thought made him feel dead inside.

If Joost was uncommunicative, the Jongheer never noticed. He kept up a steady stream of chatter from the time they left Croton to the moment they forded the rain-swollen Van Wart Creek and Joost hushed him with a peremptory finger tapped against his lips. Stephanus, who’d expatiated on everything from the Indian problem to the poetry of van den Vondel, and who, despite the inclemency of the weather and the dead earnestness of their mission had been humming a popular ditty not five minutes before, now slipped from his mount with a stealthy look. Joost followed suit, dismounting and leading the nag behind him up the steep slick hill to Nysen’s Roost. Wet branches slapped at their faces, the Jongheer lost his footing and rose from the ground with a stripe of mud painted the length of him, armies of gnats invaded their mouths and nostrils and darted for their eyes. They were halfway up when the drizzle changed to rain.

The house was silent. No smoke rose from the chimney, no animals chased around the yard. The rain drove down in sheets of pewter. “What do you think?” the Jongheer whispered. He was hunched in his cassock, water streaming from the brim of his hat.

Joost shrugged. His daughter was in there, he knew it. Defying him, betraying him, lying in the arms of that recreant, that nose thumber, that uncrackable nut. “He’s taken her by force,” Joost whispered. “Give him no quarter.”

They approached the house warily. Joost could feel the mud tugging at his boots; the plume hung limp in his face and he flicked it back with a swipe of his dripping hand. Then he drew his rapier. He glanced over at the Jongheer, who did likewise, the firearms rendered useless by the damp. Water dripped from the tip of the Jongheer’s well-formed nose, the yellow plume clung to the back of his neck like something fished out of the river, and he wore a strangely excited look, as if he were off to a fox hunt or pigeon shoot. They were twenty feet from the door when a sudden burst of sound froze them in mid-step. Someone was inside, all right, and whoever it was was singing, the lyric as familiar as a bedtime song in old Volendam:

Good evening, Joosje,

My little box of sweetmeats,

Kiss me, we are alone …

… I call you my heart, my consolation, my treasure.

Oh! oh! how I’ve tricked you!

There was a giggle, and then Neeltje’s husky contralto (unmistakable, no doubt about it, the schout knew that voice as well as he knew his own) rose up out of the patter of rain to reprise the final line—“Oh! oh! how I’ve tricked you!”—to a spanking of applause.

That was it, the breaking point, the moment that confirmed his worst fears and gravest suspicions. The schout was across the yard and slamming through the door before he could think, brandishing the rapier like an archangel’s sword and sputtering “Sin! Sin and damnation!”

The room was dark, cold, damp as a cave; it reeked like a hog pen and the water dripped almost as persistently inside as out. Joost saw a crude table, a wall hung with kitchen implements, the cold hearth, and there, across the room, the bed. They were in it. Together. In their nightshirts still and with a mound of stinking furs piled atop them. He saw his daughter’s face as a spot of white in the gloom, her mouth open to scream, eyes twisted back in her head. “Slut!” he roared. “Filth, whore, woman of Babylon! Get up out of your harlot’s bed!”

The next moment was a crowded one. Everything happened at once: the half-breed child sprang up from the shadows like a cat and scurried across the room to cower behind his uncle; the smirking Jongheer appeared in the doorway, sword at the ready; a cookpot fell from the wall; Neeltje cried out. And Jeremias, surprised without the strut that supported him, rose up out of the bed and came at the schout with a prejudicial look in his eye.

No slash this time, but a thrust meant to kill: the schout squared himself and shot his arm forward, and so would have skewered Jeremias like a sausage and left his daughter sans husband and honor both, but for this: Jeremias slipped. Slipped and fell heavily to the floor while the tip of the rapier danced over his head like an angry hornet.

Now Joost Cats was a reasonable man, prone neither to fits of temper nor acts of violence, happier far with the role of mediator than enforcer. He’d pitied the Van Brunt boy on that chill November day when the officious and soft-bottomed ass of a commis had dragged him, the schout, out into the naked wild to evict the half-starved lad from a worthless and unlucky plot of land, had felt foolish and ashamed standing before Meintje van der Meulen’s hearth with his plumed hat in hand, regretted with all his heart the brand he’d struck on the boy’s face. But for all that, he wanted to kill him. He looked into his daughter’s eyes and then down at this human garbage that had stolen her away, and he wanted to cut him, perforate him, pierce his heart, his liver, his lights and bladder and spleen.

If the first thrust was instinctive, the second was a liberation. Guilt, anger, fear, resentment and jealousy broke loose in him and he jabbed the hilt forward with all the punch of his uncoiled arm. Jeremias dodged it. He rolled to his right, Neeltje flashing up off the bed with her hands outspread, the Jongheer lunging into the room, the child howling, the rain rising to a crescendo on the roof. “Spuyten duyvil!” Joost cursed, and struck a third time, but again the tip of the sword betrayed him, wagging wide of the mark and burying itself in the beaten wet earth of the floor.

He was drawing himself up for the fourth and fatal thrust, when Neeltje, entering the fray, flung herself down atop Jeremias, shrieking “Kill me! Kill me!” Stooped over double, his back murdering him, reason and restraint flung to the winds, he paused only long enough to reach down his free hand and fling her roughly aside. She hated him, his own daughter, a mouthful of teeth, claws tearing at his sleeve, but no matter. The blade flashed in his hand and he thought only of the next thrust and the next and the next one after that — he’d make a pincushion of the son-of-a-bitch, a sieve, a colander!

If Joost was deranged, he was also deluded: there would be no more thrusts of the rapier. For in the confusion Jeremias had clawed his way to his feet (or rather, foot) and snatched a crude weapon from the inglenook. The weapon, known as a curiosity in those parts, was a Weckquaesgeek pogamoggan. It consisted of a flexible length of fruitwood, to the nether end of which a jagged five-pound ball of granite had been affixed by means of leather ligatures. Jeremias swung it once, catching the schout just behind the ear and plunging him into the rushing interstitial darkness of a dreamless sleep, and then braced himself to face the Jongheer.

For his part, the heir to the Van Wart patent looked like a man who’s nodded off in his box at the opera only to wake and find himself at a bear baiting. In the instant the schout pitched forward, the smirk died on the Jongheer’s face. This was more than he’d bargained for. This was sordid, primitive, beastly — not at all the sort of thing a lettered man should hope to experience. He tried to draw himself up and project the authority of his father, the patroon, whose rights, privileges and responsibilities would one day devolve upon himself. “Put up your weapon this instant,” he demanded in a voice that sounded like someone else’s, “and submit to the legally constituted authority of the patroon.” His voice dropped. “You are now in my custody.”

Neeltje was bent over her father now, pressing a handkerchief to his head. The child had stopped his unearthly howling and Jeremias had propped himself against the back of a chair. The club, with its freight of human hair and blood, swung idly in his hand and the scar stood out on his face. He made no answer. He turned his head and spat.

“Vader, vader,” Neeltje cried. “Don’t you know where you are? It’s little Neeltje. It’s me.” The schout moaned. Rain drummed at the roof. “With all due respect, Mijnheer,” Jeremias said in a voice reined in with the effort to control it, “you may own the milch cow, the land under my feet, the house I’ve built with my own hands, but you don’t own Neeltje. And you don’t own me.”

The Jongheer held the blade out before him as if it were a fishing pole or divining rod, as if he didn’t know what to do with it. He was soaked to the skin, his clothes were filthy, ruined, the plume of authority hung limp over the brim of his hat. For all that, though, the smirk had returned to his face. “Oh yes,” he said, so softly he was nearly inaudible, “oh yes, I do.”

At that, Jeremias idly swung the war club to his shoulder, where the weight of the ball bowed it like the arm of a catapult. The door stood open still and the elemental scent of the land rose to his nostrils, a scent of vitality and decay, of birth and death. He looked the Jongheer full in the face. “Come and get me,” he said.

Two weeks later, on an afternoon in May as soft and celestial as the one on which they’d first met amongst the furs and hogsheads of Jan Pieterse’s trading post, Neeltje Cats and Jeremias Van Brunt were married by a subdued and solemn Dominie Van Schaik, not thirty feet from where Katrinchee lay buried. By all accounts, the feast that followed was a rousing success. Meintje van der Meulen baked for three days straight, and her husband Staats set up a pair of temporary tables big enough to accommodate every tippler and trencherman from Sint Sink to Rondout. Reinier Oothouse and Hackaliah Crane buried the hatchet for the day and drank the bride’s health side by side. There was game and fish and cheese and cabbage, there were pies and puddings and stews. Drink, too: ’Sopus ale, cider and Hollands out of a stone jug. And music. What would a wedding be without it? Here came young Cadwallader Crane with a penny whistle, there Vrouw Oothouse with her prodigious bottom and a bombas that made use of a pig’s bladder for a sound box; someone else had a lute and another a pair of varnished sticks and an overturned kettle. Mariken Van Wart came up from Croton and danced the whole afternoon with Douw van der Meulen, Staats led Meintje through half a dozen frenetic turns of “Jimmy-be-still” and old Jan the Kitchawank danced with a jug till the sun fell into the trees. Neeltje’s sisters were dressed like dolls, her mother cried — whether for joy or sorrow no one could be sure — and the patroon sent Ter Dingas Bosyn, the commis, as his official representative. But the crowning moment of the day, as everyone agreed, was when the schout, dressed in funereal black and standing as tall as his affliction would allow, his head bound in a snowy bandage and with good leather boots on his feet, strode resolutely across the front yard and gave away the bride.

When Mohonk, son of Sachoes, appeared on the doorstep of the little farmhouse at Nysen’s Roost some three months later, Jeremias was a changed man. Gone was the wild-eyed glare of the rebel, the underdog, the unsoothable beast, and in its place was a look that could only be described as one of contentment. Indeed, Jeremias had never known a happier time. The crops were flourishing, the deer were back, the shack had been elevated to the status of domicile through the addition of a second room, furniture both functional and pleasing to the eye and that hallmark of civilized living, a clean, planed and sanded plank floor that soared a full foot and a half above the cold dun earth below. And then there was Neeltje. She was a voice in his head, a presence that never left him even when he was adrift in the canoe or roaming the scoured hilltops with a musket borrowed from Staats; she clove to him like a second skin, each moment a melioration and a healing. She mothered Jeremy, managed the house, spun and sewed and cooked, rubbed the tightness from his shoulders, sat with him by the river while fish stirred in the shallows and the blue shadows closed over the mountains. She made peace with her father, baked as fine a beignet as moeder Meintje, arranged and rearranged the front room till it looked like a burgher’s parlor in Schobbejacken. She was everything that was possible, and more. Far more: she was carrying his child.

All this the Indian saw in Jeremias’ face as the door swung open. Just as quickly, he saw it fade. “You,” Jeremias choked. “What do you want?”

Mohonk was gaunter than ever, his face rucked and seamed with abuse. He was a nose, an Adam’s apple, a pair of black unblinking deep-buried eyes. “Alstublieft,” he said, “dank u, niet te danken.”

“Who is it?” Neeltje called from the back of the house. They’d finished supper — pea soup, bread, cheese and beer — and she was getting Jeremy ready for bed. The house had fallen dark in the gathering dusk.

Jeremias didn’t answer. He stood there, letting his mood go sour. This was the man, the shit-smeared skulking savage heathen, who’d ruined his sister and then deserted her. And here he was, filthy and ragged, angular as a wading bird, standing on the doorstep with no more Dutch than he’d had four years ago. “I have nothing for you,” Jeremias said, enunciating the words in the way of the pedagogue, each syllable bitten off clean and distinct. “Get out of here.” It was then that he felt a movement at his side and glanced down to see Jeremy standing beside him. The boy was rapt, gazing up in wonder at this apparition in the raccoon skin coat.

“Alstublieft,” Mohonk repeated, then turned his head to call out something in the Kitchawank dialect, the words like stones in his mouth.

At this, two Indians stepped out of the shadows at the corner of the house. One of them was old Jan, grinning broadly and trailing flaps of greasy deerskin and a smell of the swamp. The other was a young buck Jeremias recognized from Jan Pieterse’s. The buck’s face was painted, and a tomahawk decorated with the crest feathers of tanager and bunting dangled like a toy from the fingertips of his right hand. Instinctively, Jeremias reached down and pushed his nephew back into the room. “You have a message for me?” Jeremias asked, glancing from the buck to Jan.

They stopped at the front step. The buck was expressionless. Jan grinned. Mohonk hugged the coat to him as if he were cold. “Yes,” old Jan said finally, “I have a message.”

Neeltje had come up behind her husband now, and was pressing Jeremy to her skirts, rocking him gently back and forth. The light drained away in the west.

Jan was grinning still, as if he’d reached a height beyond the gravitational pull of simple drunkenness and passed into a realm of giddiness and light. “From him,” he said, indicating Mohonk with an abrupt laugh. “From Mohonk, son of Sachoes.”

The son of Sachoes never blinked. Jeremias studied him a second, then turned back to Jan. “Well?” he demanded.

Suddenly the old Kitchawank dropped his head and began to shuffle his feet. “Ay-yah, neh-neh,” he chanted, “Ay-yah, neh-neh,” but Mohonk cut him off. He said something in a voice as harsh and rapid as gunfire, and old Jan looked up, blinking. “He wants his son back.”

If the three of them weren’t so crapulous, if old Jan weren’t wasted by the years, the smallpox and the curse of the burning water, if Mohonk weren’t degenerate and weak and if the buck had had his senses about him, the outcome might have been different. As it was, they made a critical mistake. Jeremias, enraged by the very suggestion, drew one hand flat across the other, said “Nee” for emphasis and stepped back to shut the door on them; it was at that very moment that the young buck chose to let fly with the tomahawk. The weapon rocketed through the air with a deadly whoosh, only to be deflected by the edge of the door and drop harmlessly to the floor in the middle of the room. There was a moment — fleeting, the fraction of a fraction of a second — during which the Indians looked remorseful and deeply ashamed, and then they surged toward the door.

Or rather, the buck did. Mohonk insinuated his long flat-arched foot, clad in a dirty moccasin, between door and frame, while old Jan lost his balance and sat down heavily in the dirt with a grunt of surprise.

Reacting to the threat, Jeremias slammed the door on the foot of his erstwhile brother-in-law, and when it sprang back from contact with that bony appendage, he found that he was gripping the venerable pogamoggan in his right hand (Neeltje, remembering her father, had snatched it up from the inglenook and pressed it on him). The first to blunder through the door was the buck, his warpaint smeared to reveal the uncertain face of a fifteen-year-old peering out from beneath it; he caught the full force of the granite ball in the abdomen and fell gasping to the floor, where he writhed about for several minutes in imitation of an eel in a pot. Next was Mohonk, hopping on one foot while cradling the throbbing other one in both hands. Jeremias took a half-hearted swing at him, but missed, striking the wall in a storm of splinters.

It was then that things turned nasty. For Mohonk, his dignity wounded, gritted his teeth, set down the palpitating foot and drew a bone knife from the blameless folds of his raccoon skin coat. And then this same Mohonk — lover and abettor of meisje and squaw alike, sire of Jeremias’ nephew and husband to his dear dead beloved sister — came at Jeremias with murder in his heart.

Thinking back on it, Jeremias would remember the feel of that primitive weapon in his hand, the spring of the fruitwood shaft as the ball whipped forward as if under its own volition, the deadly wet final thump that collapsed the Indian’s skull like a rotten pumpkin. He remembered too the look in his nephew’s eye — the boy too young to know who this gaunt toppling giant was and yet somehow connected to the moment with a look that would endure a lifetime — and then the crablike retreat of the humiliated buck and old Jan’s interminable, wheezing, marrow-chilling dirge.

Mohonk, last fruit of Sachoes’ loins, had been laid low.

Jeremias was sorry for it. Heartily sorry. But he’d done what any other man would have done under the circumstances: his home and family had been threatened, and he’d defended them. Afterward, shaken and penitential, he laid the body out on the table and sent for the schout. Hours later, old Jan, wearied by the sad drone of his own whiskey-cracked voice, set off for the Kitchawank village at Indian Point, bringer of sad tidings.

Next morning, so early the color had yet to return to the earth, Wahwahtaysee the Firefly, bent double and older by what seemed like another century, came to claim the body. Locally, from Croton all the way up to Suycker Broodt, the Indians would suffer for this attack on the white men — the schout would see to that, and Wahwahtaysee knew it. Her people had lived with the Mohawk, with the Dutch, with the English. Anger was futile. Reprisal meant counter reprisal, reprisal meant extermination. That was the way of the people of the wolf. Betrayal. Deceit. The open smile and the stab in the back. She wasn’t bitter, only confused.

As she stood there in the dark room in that unhappy place, exuding a scent as wild and incorruptible as the spoor of the tree-dweller, the pouched one, the white beast that had lent it to her, chanting her ancient threnody and anointing her son’s flesh with the unguents and resins of the gods themselves, she glanced up to see a small, dark-eyed thing in the corner of the room, a woman, a white woman, her belly hard with child. She held those dark eyes a moment, and then turned back to her dead son.

Five months later, when the snow lay crusted on the ground, Neeltje went into labor. Her mother was there to help her, and there was a Yankee midwife too. Her father, the schout, wasn’t quite ready yet to set foot in that tainted house, and so had installed himself in the upper manor house as the guest of Vrouw Van Wart, who was once again mortifying her flesh in religious retreat. Jeremias sat before a fire in the outer room, his green-eyed nephew and adoptive father at his side, and listened to his wife’s cries of anguish. “Hush,” said Vrouw Cats from within. “There, there,” said the midwife.

At some point the cries reached a crescendo, then fell away to a silence thick as doom. There was a rustling of skirts, the scrape of clogs on the floorboards and a new cry, thin and resilient, a cry that had to adjust itself to the novelty of throat and voicebox, lungs and air. Vrouw Cats appeared in the doorway a moment later. “It’s a boy,” she said.

A boy. Jeremias stood and Staats rose to embrace him. “Congratulations, mijnzoon,” Staats said, drawing the pipe from his lips to hold him at arm’s length and gaze into his eyes. “And have you got a name yet for this prodigy?”

Jeremias felt lightheaded, giddy, felt as if he’d crossed the far boundaries of the little life he’d led up till now and entered onto a new and glorious plane of existence. “Oh, yes,” he murmured. “Yes: we’re going to call him Wouter.”

Collision the Second

In another age, in a time when meat and bread came wrapped in plastic and cabbage appeared spontaneously between the kohlrabi and bok choy in the produce section of the supermarket, Walter Van Brunt found himself leaning up against a fieldstone fireplace in the house of a stranger, sipping warm Cold Duck from a wax cup and digesting a lunatic rap on the subject of Smaug the dragon’s relevance to the war in Southeast Asia (“Clearly, man — I mean how could Tolkien make it any clearer without slapping you in the face with it? — Smaug’s just a stand-in for Nixon, right?”). Walter was profoundly drunk, seminauseous, bombarded by angst and raked with regrets as with flying bullets, and he was simultaneously trying to get drunker, fend off the jerk who’d pinned him up against the fireplace and keep an eye out for Mardi. “Fiery breath!” shouted the jerk, who wore his hair in braids, exhaled his own fiery breath and had received his draft notice two days earlier. “And what do you think that’s all about, huh?”

Walter hadn’t the faintest idea. He swallowed the dregs of the Cold Duck, now flecked with bits of exfoliated wax, and felt the jerk’s grip on his forearm. “Napalm, brother,” the jerk whispered with a knowing shake of his head, “that’s what Tolkien’s talking about.”

Looking fearlessly into the draftee’s bloodshot eyes, Walter said he agreed with him a hundred percent, then shoved past him and made for the bathroom. On the way, he stepped over half a dozen recumbent bodies, snaked unsteadily through a maze of reeling, treacherous, arm-flailing dancers and very nearly lurched into a withered Christmas tree festooned with cigarette papers and the dangling, disconnected limbs of plastic dolls. Drums kneaded him like dough, guitars throbbed in his gut. Mardi was nowhere in sight.

It was New Year’s Eve, 1968, and this was the fifth or sixth house full of strangers to which Mardi had dragged him. By way of celebration. Somewhere on the dim periphery of the evening there’d been a suburban interior and someone’s gaping, tartar-toothed parents insisting they have a toddy, and then there was Mardi’s father saying “You will look in on the Strangs, won’t you? And the Hugleys?” and Mardi sneering “Sure, and we’ll stop in at the D.A.R. quilting bee too.” Then there was Cold Duck, $1.79 the bottle, Mexican pot that tasted as if it had been cured in Windex, the little striated pill Mardi had slipped him in the coffee shop where they’d stopped to get out of the cold, and houses, houses full of drunken, grinning, suspicious, long-toothed, dog-faced, silly-ass strangers. And now there was this place, with its dirty wood paneling, its unrelenting assault of Top Ten hits and its hermeneutical draftee. He didn’t even know where he was exactly — somewhere out in the hind end of Tarrytown or Sleepy Hollow, he guessed. At least that’s what it had looked like when Mardi, straddling the Norton and clinging to his back like a mountaineer pressed to a wind-sheared scarp, shouted “This is it!” and he’d shot right up on the lawn and skidded into the stone slab at the foot of the porch, no problem, you okay?

That was an hour ago. At least. Now he was looking for the bathroom. He fumbled into the kitchen, startling two guys in serapes and cowboy hats who were cleaning pot in a colander, and tore open the door to the broom closet. “Down the hall, man,” said the near cowboy in an accent right out of western Queens.

When finally he located the bathroom, he pulled back the door to find himself staring into the steamed-up eyes of a girl with frizzy hair and a pair of blue crepe bell bottoms puddled around her ankles; she lowered herself daintily to the toilet seat and gave him a look that would have corroded metal. “Sorry,” he mumbled, backing out the door like a crayfish feeling for its hole. The moment the door clicked shut, he felt a familiar grip on his arm and swung around to discover that he was standing toe-to-toe with the deluded draftee. “She’s really something, huh?” the jerk said, wiping something from his hands on the sleeves of Walter’s jacket.

“Who?” Walter said, knowing he should have let it drop. They were alone in the hallway. Music thumped from the direction of the living room, the Queens cowboys shared a laugh in the kitchen behind them. Walter was beginning to forget what Mardi looked like.

“My sister,” the draftee said. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, but with his beard and hair and the twisted maniacal leer that suddenly flamed up to disarrange his features, he might have been the ancient mariner himself, his hand fastened on the wedding guest’s sleeve. “In the crapper,” he added with a significant nod. “Doesn’t she remind you of Galadriel, you know — the elf princess? Like when Elrond gets it on? You know who I’m talking about, right?”

No, Walter didn’t know. And in any case, he’d stopped listening — perhaps, propped up against the wall with an ache in his bladder and a rushing, hissing spume of light rising like a heavy sea in his head, he even closed his eyes for a moment. He was thinking about Jessica and Tom Crane, Hector, Herbert Pompey — the people he should be with now, the people he couldn’t be with. He was thinking of that bleak cold Saturday afternoon three weeks back when the sun shone pale as milk through the worn curtains in the bedroom and Jessica, booted, gloved, wrapped and muffled from her sinewy higharched feet to the glowing turned-up tip of her Anglo-Saxon nose, had bent to kiss him as he lay caught between sleep and waking. “Where to?” he’d managed.

She was going Christmas shopping. Of course.

“So early?”

She laughed. It was half-past twelve. “How do you feel about a blender?” she called from the next room. “For your aunt Katrina?” He didn’t feel. His mouth was dry, he had to take a piss, and the lining of his brain seemed to have swollen overnight like dough in a pan. “I thought …” she murmured, and now she was talking to herself, feet beating a brisk tattoo to the door, the wheeze of the hinges, a breath of refrigerated air, and then her last words hanging suspended till the door shut softly behind her, “… frozen daiquiris and whatnot.”

In his very next moment of consciousness he was aware of a new voice — Mardi’s — projecting forcefully from the front of the house. “Hey! Anybody home? Fa-la-la-la-la! Deck the halls and all that shit!” The door slammed behind her. “Walter?”

He propped himself up on one elbow, smoothed down his mustache and pushed the hair out of his eyes. “In here,” he said.

He’d been seeing Mardi three or four times a week since the afternoon of the ghost ships, and feeling bad about it too. Here he was, married less than four months, and already he was running around behind his wife’s back. Worse: he was doing it while she was at work earning the money he spent on beer and cigarettes and rib-eye steak. When he let himself think about it, he felt like a shit — a real, First Class, Select, Grade A, certifiable shit. On the other hand, he was still soulless, hard and free, wasn’t he? Married or not. What would Meursault have done in his situation? Fucked them both, that’s what. Or neither of them. Or somebody else altogether. Sex didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He was Walter Truman Van Brunt, nihilist hero, Walter Truman Van Brunt, hard as stone.

Besides, Mardi was something he couldn’t get enough of. She was dangerous, wild, unpredictable — she made him feel as if he were living on the edge, made him feel bad in the best sense of the word, like James Dean, like Belmondo in Breathless. While Jessica made him feel bad, period. She came home from work, stinking of formalin, her eyes red, a sack of groceries clutched to her high tight bosom while he lay sprawled on the couch amidst the refuse of the day, and she never said a word. Never asked if he’d looked for a job or made up his mind about going back to school, never reproached him for the sink full of dishes, the beer bottles set up on the coffee table like bowling pins, the haze of incinerated pot that clung to the curtains, seeped into the furniture and filmed the windows. No. She just smiled. Loved him. Went to work on the dishes with one hand and whipped up some trout amandine, fettuccine Alfredo or Texas hot chili and a vitamin-choked spinach salad with the other, all the while singing along to Judy Collins or Joni Mitchell in a high pure soprano that would have made all the angels in heaven faint with the superabundant beauty of it. And oh, did he feel bad.

He knew now that all along he’d wanted to hurt her, alienate her, test her — did she love him, did she really love him? No matter what? If he was bad, if he was worthless — the worthless son of a worthless father — then he would play his role to the hilt, scourge himself with it, scourge her. He wanted her to come home with the blender for Aunt Katrina and walk into that dark connubial bedroom, her cheeks abloom with good will to men, the golden foil of the gift-wrapped packages crepitating against her chest, sacred hymns and timeless carols on her lips, and see him there, naked, thrusting away at Mardi Van Wart. He must have wanted it — else why would he have done it?

They couldn’t hear the car, it was true, but the front door was unmistakable. Bang. “Walter?” Footsteps across the floor, the rustle of packages, “Walter?”

But it was Mardi too. On top of him, surging against him, pinning her mouth to his with all the frantic haste of resuscitation. She heard the door slam. She heard the footsteps and Jessica’s voice — she heard them as well as he did. He moved to break away from her, to hide, run, dissemble — he was in the shower, Mardi had a headache and went in to lie down, no, that wasn’t her car out front — but she wouldn’t let go of him, wouldn’t stop. He was inside her when Jessica came through the door. Then, only then, did Mardi look up.

Jessica’s father came for her things two days later. Walter was passed out on the couch, drunk from hating himself. The door slammed and John Severum Wing, of Wing, Crouder & Wing, Investment Counsellors, was on him. “Get up, you son of a bitch,” he hissed. Then he kicked the couch. John Wing, forty-eight years old, Rotarian, Little League sponsor, churchgoer, father of four, as imperturbable as a box turtle drowsing in the sun, snaked out a Hush Puppy-clad foot and shook the couch to its particle-board frame. Walter sat up. John Wing, standing over him, delivered sotto voce insults. “Sleazeball,” he whispered. “Scum. Creep.”

Walter had the feeling that his father-in-law would have gone on indefinitely in the same vein, plumbing the lower strata of his vocabulary, driving the spikes ever deeper, but for the sudden appearance of Jessica. For at that moment, the hair swept back from her high pale patrician brow and a Kleenex pressed to her face as if to protect her from the odor of something long dead, Jessica darted through the door and disappeared into the bedroom. In the silence that fell over them like the aftershock of an artillery barrage, Walter, sitting, and John Wing, standing, listened to the thump and scrape of drawers flung violently open, the screech of hangers jerked hastily from the rack, the clatter of knickknacks, perfume bottles, gewgaws, curios and all the other hard-edged odds and ends of life flung carelessly together in sack and box. And they listened to something else too, a subtler sound, pitched lower, a quirk of hypothalamus and larynx: Jessica was weeping.

Walter stood. He fumbled for a cigarette.

John Wing kicked the coffee table. He kicked the wall. He launched a pillow into the kitchen as if it were a football splitting the uprights. “Answer me,” he said. “How could you do it?”

Walter hated himself at that moment, oh yes indeed, and he felt bad to the bone. He lit that cigarette, let it dangle from his underlip like one of Belmondo’s, and blew the smoke in John Wing’s face. Then he lifted his leather jacket from the chair and sauntered out the door, shaky but somehow serene too. The door shut behind him and the wind caught him in the face. Squinting against the smoke of the cigarette, he straddled the Norton, gave it a kick that would have wrenched the leg off a John Wing, and obliterated the universe with a twist of the throttle.

But now, of course, standing there in the hallway of a strange house in the waning minutes of the old year, aching to take a piss, surrounded by strange faces and bedeviled by fools and halfwits, he had his regrets. Jessica wouldn’t talk to him. (He must have called fifty times, must have sat out in front of her parents’ house on the Norton fifty more till John Wing stormed out and threatened to call the police.) Tom Crane wouldn’t talk to him either. Not yet, anyway. And while Hector had sat down and shared a pitcher of beer with him, he kept looking at him as if he’d developed a case of twentyfour-hour leprosy or something. Even Hesh and Lola blamed him. He’d begun to feel like a character in a country and western song, lost the most precious thing in my life, o lonesome me, and all the rest of it. Now, of course, now that he didn’t have her — couldn’t have her — he wanted her more than anything. Or did he?

“And Mordor,” the jerk was saying, “what do you think that shit stands for, huh?”

Just then the bathroom door swung open and Galadriel strutted out, shooting Walter a withering glance and lifting her nose as if she’d stepped in dogshit. Her brother — if indeed he was her brother — was too wound up to acknowledge her. He tightened his grip on Walter’s arm and leaned into him: “The good ol’ U.S. of A.,” he said. “That’s what.”

So small a pill, half the size of an aspirin, and Walter was rushing with light. Jessica. The upturned nose, the leggy leg, the martyr in the kitchen: who needed her? He had Mardi, didn’t he? “Tell it to the gooks,” he said, staring the jerk down. Then he was in the bathroom, bolting the door behind him.

In the mirror he saw eyes that were all pupil, a mustache in motion, hair parading around his ears. Balanced on his good foot, he flipped back the toilet seat with the toe of the other, but then missed his aim when the toilet unaccountably sprang up and danced across the room. He was zipping up when he noticed his grandmother. She was in the tub. Wearing a shower cap decorated with leaping pink, green and blue frogs. The water, soapy, dark as the Hudson, rose to her big tallowy naked breasts, which she rubbed from time to time with a washcloth. She didn’t say a word till he turned to leave. “Walter?” she called, as he shot back the bolt. “You didn’t forget to wash up, did you?”

Out in the hallway, there was no draftee, no draftee’s sister. There were no cowboys in the kitchen. From the living room, however, there arose a clamor of shouts and razzing party horns, and when Walter got there he saw that all the strangers in the house were grinning, tossing confetti and pitching themselves deliriously into one another’s arms. “Happy New Yeeah!” shouted one of the cowboys. Blazing like an angel with the light, Walter strode into the midst of them, shouldering a smooching couple out of the way and arresting the arm of a guy in mirror sunglasses who was lifting a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to his lips. “Hey!” he shouted above the clatter of noisemakers and tinny horns, “you seen Mardi?”

The guy was wearing a cutoff army jacket with pink suspenders and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. He was older, maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven. He pushed back his shades and gave Walter a baggyeyed look. “Who?”

Walter fended off an assault from the rear — a big horse of a girl with smeared lipstick and a conical paper hat raked over her eyes like a rhino’s horn came down hard on his plastic foot, belched an apology and shrieked “Happy Noooo Year!” in his face — and tried again. “Mardi Van Wart — you know, the girl I came with.”

“Shit,” the guy shrugged, rubbing the bottle for comfort, “I don’t know nobody. I’m from New Jersey.”

But the big girl was there now, lurching unsteadily before him. “Mardi?” she repeated in surprise, as if he’d asked for Jackie Kennedy or the Queen Mother. “She split.”

The horns razzed in his ears. Everything was moving. He tried to control his voice. “Split?”

“Uh-huh. Must of been an hour ago. With Joey Bisordi — you know Joey, right? — and I don’t know who all. For Times Square.” She paused, watching Walter’s face, then broke into a sloppy grin. “You know,” she said, with a shake of her uncontainable hips, “Noooo Year’s!”

The year was about ten minutes old when Walter fired up the Norton, swung it away from the stoop and skidded back up the lawn. He was still rushing like a comet with the light, but there was a dark place inside of him too — as dark and forbidding as the back side of the moon — and it was growing. He felt like shit. Felt like he wanted to cry. No Jessica, no Mardi, no nothing. And fuck, it was cold. He dodged a diseased-looking azalea, rattled over something that scattered under the back wheel — bricks? firewood? — and then he was out on the road.

Fine. But where was he? He passed up the first intersection and took the next instead, swinging into a long dark tunnel of stripped and twisted trees. He’d driven a mile or so, going too fast, clinging to the bends and accelerating out of them with a twist of the throttle, when he clattered across an old wooden bridge and came to a dead end. An iron chain thick as a boat hawser stretched across the mouth of the road. There were red and yellow reflectors mounted on the trees and a sign that read PRIVATE. He cursed out loud, wheeled the bike around and headed back up the road.

He was thinking that if he could find the high school he’d be all right. (Sleepy Hollow. He remembered the place from school, when he’d played forward on the Peterskill basketball team — funky showers, a gymnasium that smelled of paste wax and sweat, a big old stone and brick building just off the main drag.) It was on Route 9, that much he knew. From there it was no more than twenty minutes to Peterskill and the Elbow. He was thinking he’d drop in and have a few beers with Hector maybe, or Herbert Pompey — drown his sorrow, bewail his fate, give them his side of the story over the pool table and a shot of something that would dim the raging light in his head — when, over the roar of the bike and the stinging rush of the wind, he became aware of a noise at his back. Deep-throated, whelming, omnipresent, it came at him like the rumble of toppling mountains, the blast of the hurricane. He turned his head.

There behind him, issuing from the nowhere of the dead-end lane, was a platoon of motorcycles. Their headlights lit the night till the patchy blacktop road and the screen of naked tree trunks blazed like a stage set. Almost involuntarily, he slowed down. There must have been thirty of them, the roar growing steadily louder. He looked over his shoulder again. Was it the Disciples? The New York chapter of the Hell’s Angels? But what would they be doing out here?

He didn’t have long to wonder, because in the next moment they were on him, cruising, the thunder of thirty big bikes beating like a fist in his chest. As he slowed to merge with them they came up on either side and he could see them now, raked back on their choppers, colors flapping in the dead night air. Two, six, eight, twelve: he was in the eye of the hurricane. The bikes stuttered and purred, they hammered, screamed, spat fire. Fourteen, eighteen, twenty.

But wait: something was wrong. These weren’t Angels — they were hoary and decrepit, leather-faced, skin on bone, their raggedy yellow beards and piss-colored locks fanned back smooth in the glare of the headlights. It was coming to him — yes, yes — like the opening motif of a recurring nightmare, when an old geek swooped in ahead of him and the legend on his jacket leapt out at him like a face in the dark. THE APOSTATES, it read, in a band of hard block letters above a winged death’s head, PETERSKILL. Yes. Walter turned his head to the left and there he was — the shrunken Dutchman, the imp, the sugarloaf hat clinging to his head in defiance of wind and logic both, the crude denim colors forced down over a baggy homespun shirt he might have looted from a museum. Yes. And the imp’s lips were moving: “Happy New Year, Walter,” he seemed to be saying over the din.

Walter never hesitated. He jerked his head to the other side — his right side — and sure enough, his father was there, riding in tandem with him on a chopped Harley with flame decals spread like claws across the gas tank. The old man’s eyes were hidden behind antiquated goggles, the slick reddish fangs of his hair beat around his head. He gave Walter his profile, then turned to face him. There was a stink of exhaust, the rush of the air, the blast of the engines and a single attenuated moment in which the whole night was suspended between them. Then Walter’s father flashed a smile and repeated the dwarf’s benediction—“Happy New Year, Walter.” Walter couldn’t resist — he could feel the smile tugging at the corner of his mouth — when all of a sudden, without warning, his father reached out and gave him a shove.

A shove.

The night was black, the road deserted. Caught in the sick slashing parabola of disaster, Walter went down again, went down for the second time. It would have been better had he gone down on his right side, nothing there but plastic and leather, after all. But he didn’t. Oh, no. He went down on his left.