World's End

The Hoodwinking of Sachoes

This time the room was painted marigold yellow, and the doctor’s name was Perlmutter. Walter lay sedated in the comfortless crank-up bed while Hesh and Lola kept watch at his side and the hushed voices of the intercom whispered in his ear like the voices of the incorporeal dead. His left foot, the good one, was good no more.

As he lay there, his face as composed as a sleeping child’s — not a mark on him, the hair swept back from his brow where Lola’s hand had rested, his lips parted and eyelids trembling in the deeps beyond consciousness — he was assailed by dreams. But this time everything was different, this time his dreams were free of mocking fathers, sententious grandmothers and carcasses stripped to the bone. He dreamed instead of an unpeopled landscape, misted and opaque, where sky and earth seemed to meld into one and the air was like a blanket pulled over his face. When he woke, smothering, Jessica was leaning over him.

“Oh, Walter,” she moaned, a low rumble of grief rising up like gas from deep inside her. “Oh, Walter.” Her eyes were wet for some reason, and two sooty streaks of mascara traced the delicate flanges of her nose.

Walter looked around the room in bewilderment, looked at the gleaming instruments, the IV bag suspended above him, the empty bed in the corner and the cold gray eye of the television mounted on the wall. He gazed on the chipper yellow of the wall itself, that uplifting, breakfast-nook yellow, and closed his eyes again. Jessica’s voice came to him out of the darkness. “Oh, Walter, Walter … I feel so bad for you.”

Bad? For him? Why should she feel bad for him?

This time he didn’t take her hand, press his lips to hers, fumble with the buttons of her blouse. He merely flashed open his eyes to give her a venomous look, a look of resentment and reproach, the look of the antihero on his way out the door; when he spoke, he barely moved his lips. “Go away,” he murmured. “I don’t need you.”

Walter didn’t become fully aware of his predicament until late that afternoon, when, on waking to the hellish heat of his invalid’s room and a blur of snow across the window, he glanced up to see Huysterkark grinning and scraping his way into the room. Then, and only then, did he feel for his left foot — his favorite, his precious, his only foot — and understand that it was no longer a part of him. The image of the deserted landscape of his dream fused in that moment with the leering face of his father.

“Well, well, well, well,” Huysterkark said, rubbing his hands together and grinning, grinning. “Mr. Van Brunt—Walter Van Brunt. Yes.” Clamped firmly between his right arm and chest as if it were a rolled-up copy of the Times was the new prosthetic foot. “Well,” Huysterkark beamed, drawing up a chair and crab-walking to the bed, “and how are we on this fine blizzardy afternoon?”

How were we? There was no way to answer that question. We were panicked, in the throes of despair and denial. We were angry. “You, you—” Walter sputtered. “You took my, my only—” He found himself overwhelmed by self-pity and sorrow. “Son of a bitch,” he snarled, tears in his eyes. “You couldn’t save it? You couldn’t try?”

The question hung between them. Snow drove at the windows. Dr. Rotifer to Emergency, Dr. Rotifer, crackled the intercom.

“You’re a very lucky young man,” Huysterkark said finally, wagging his head and pressing a pensive finger to his blanched lips. His voice dropped and he extracted the foot from the nest of his underarm. “Lucky,” he whispered.

Walter had been out for two days, Huysterkark informed him. When they’d got him into Emergency it was nearly dawn and he was frozen half to death. He was lucky to be alive. Lucky he hadn’t lost his fingers and nose to frostbite in the bargain. Did he think the staff here was incompetent? Or apathetic? Did he understand just how mangled that foot had been — comminuted fracture, ankle joint demolished, soft tissue mashed to pulp? Did he know how Doctors Yong, Ik and Perlmutter had worked over him for two and a half hours, trying to restore circulation, set fragmented bones, reattach blood vessels and nerves? He was lucky he hadn’t gone down someplace upstate or on the other side of the river — or what about in the Deep South or in Italy or Nebraska or some other godforsaken place where they didn’t have Hopkins-trained physicians like Yong and Ik and Perlmutter? Did he realize just how fortunate he was?

Walter didn’t realize it, no, though he tried. Though he listened to Huysterkark’s voice sail through its range of expression, through the sforzando of intimidation to the allegro of thanksgiving and the bustling hearty brio of salesmanship. He could think of one thing only, and that was the unfairness of it all, the relentless, crippling, terrifying assault of history and predestination and lurking conscious fate that was aimed at him and him alone. It boiled in him till he closed his eyes and let Huysterkark do with him what he would, closed his eyes and fell back into his dream.

It was on the afternoon of the third day that Mardi showed up. She’d abandoned the raccoon skin for a black velvet cape that sculpted her shoulders and hung from her like a shroud. Underneath it she was wearing blue jeans, painted cowgirl boots and a see-through blouse in a shade of pink that glowed like Broadway on a rainy night. And beads. Eight or ten strands of them. In the doorway behind her was a guy Walter had never seen before.

There was the pain killer, the drowsy stuffiness of the room, the leaden sky with its angry black bands of cloud that stretched like bars across the window. “You poor thing,” she cooed, clacking across the linoleum to bend over him in a blast of perfume and briefly insert her tongue in his mouth. He could feel the nimbus of her hair framing his face, tendrils of sensation poking through the flat dead field of his pain, and despite himself experienced the first faint stirrings of arousal. Then she was straightening up, unfastening the clasp of the cape and indicating her companion with a jerk of her head. “This is Joey,” she said.

Walter’s eyes cut to him like knives. Joey was in the room now, but he wasn’t looking at Walter. He was looking out the window. “Joey’s a musician,” Mardi said.

Joey was dressed like Little Richard’s wardrobe designer, in three clashing paisleys and a Tillamook-colored cravat that fell to his waist. After a moment he stole a glance at Walter, laid out flat and footless in bed, and said “What’s happening, man?” without a hint of irony.

Happening? What was happening? Mutilation, that’s what. Dismemberment. The reduction of the flesh, the drawing and quartering of the spirit, the metastasis of horror.

“God,” Mardi said, perched on the bed now, the cape fallen open to reveal the see-through blouse and all there was to see beneath it, “if only you’d come with Joey and Richie and me the other night — down to Times Square, I mean. …” She didn’t finish the thought. Finishing the thought would have meant admitting the inadmissible. She settled for a pronouncement on the lack of proportion in the cosmos: “It’s just so bizarre.”

To this point, Walter hadn’t uttered a word. He wanted to utter a few, though. He wanted to give vent to the outrage percolating inside him, wanted to ask her what she meant by leaving him in a house full of strangers while she trotted off to New York with this chinless fop in the Beatle boots and cheesy necktie, wanted to ask if she loved him still, if she’d have sex with him, if she’d shut the door and pull the shades and tell Joey to go take a hike, but her eyes went strange all of a sudden and he checked himself. Her slow gaze took in the length of him stretched supine on the bed, and then she turned to look him in the face. “Does it hurt?” she murmured.

It hurt. Oh, god, did it hurt. “What do you think?” he said.

At that moment Joey let out with a whoop that might have been derisive but then again might only have been symptomatic of upper respiratory distress, and buried his face in a polka dot handkerchief the size of a prayer rug. Walter’s eyes shot to him. Were his shoulders twitching? Did he find this funny, was that it?

Mardi took Walter’s hand. “So now,” she said, looking for a way in, “now you, uh, you won’t be able to ride the bike anymore, I guess, huh?”

The bitterness welled up in him, shot through his veins like embalming fluid. Bike? He’d be lucky to walk, though Huysterkark had breezily assured him he’d be on his feet in a month, walking without support in two. Without support. He knew what it would be like, no balance, no connection, staggering down the sidewalk like a drunk walking barefoot over a bed of hot coals. He wanted to cry. And he might have, too, but for the presence of Joey and the dominion of cool. Would Lafcadio have cried? Would Meursault? “It was all you,” he said suddenly, choking up despite himself. “It was you — you left me there, you bitch.”

Mardi’s face went cold. She dropped his hand and pushed herself up from the bed. “Don’t lay it on me,” she said, her voice riding up the register, a single deep groove cut between her perfect eyebrows. “It was you — drunk, stoned on your ass … shit, you almost killed us pulling up to the porch — or did you forget about that, huh? And if you want to know, we looked all over for you — must’ve traipsed through that craphole twenty times, didn’t we, Joey?”

Joey was looking out the window. He said nothing.

“You fucking vampire!” Walter shrieked. “Ghoul!”

A nurse appeared in the doorway, the color drained from her face. “I’m very sorry,” she said, bustling into the room, “but the patient really mustn’t—”

Hostile, deliberate, with her glacial eyes and untameable hair, Mardi wheeled around on her. “Stuff it,” she snarled, and the nurse backed away from her. Then she turned to Walter. “And don’t you ever call me a bitch,” she said, her voice sunk low in her throat, “you, you footless wonder.”

This time Joey really did laugh — it was unmistakable — a high brazen bellow choked off in mid-guffaw. And then he was flashing Walter the peace sign and following Mardi’s cape out the door. But that wasn’t the end of it. Not quite. He paused in the doorway to look back over his shoulder and give Walter a showman’s wink. “Later, bro,” he said.

It all came loose right there. Walter fought off the nurse and sat up rigid, the veins in his neck purple with fury. He began to shout. Curses, jeers, nursery school taunts — anything that came into his head. He shouted like a bloody-nosed mama’s boy in the middle of the playground, cried out every cunt and cocksucker and motherfucker he could muster, howled out his rage and impotence till the corridors echoed like the dayroom at the asylum, and he was shrieking and cursing and babbling still when the rough arms of the attendants pinned him to the bed and the hypodermic found its mark.

When he woke — next day? day after that? — the first thing he noticed was that the bed in the corner was occupied. The curtains were drawn, but he could see the IV stand poking out beneath them, and at the foot of the bed the folds parted to reveal a plastered limb hanging suspended over the crisp white plane of the sheets. He looked hard, as if he could somehow penetrate the curtains, curious in an idle, just-waking, bedridden sort of way — what else was there but lunch, Huysterkark and TV? — and at the same time perversely gratified: someone else was suffering too.

It wasn’t until lunch — soup that was like gravy, gravy that was like soup, eight all-but-indigestible wax beans, a lump of an indefinable meatlike substance and Jello, ubiquitous Jello — that the nurse drew back the curtains to reveal his roommate and fellow sufferer. At first, Walter could barely locate him in the confusion of pillows and sheets, his view obstructed by the expansive backside of Nurse Rosenschweig, who was leaning over to minister to the new arrival’s alimentary needs — good god, were his hands gone too? — but then, when the nurse straightened up, he was rewarded with his first good look at his fellow victim. A child. Shrunken, tiny, propped up in the enormous bed like a stuffed toy.

Then he looked again.

He saw a flurry of pale blanched hairy-knuckled little hands, the glint of knife and fork and, before his field of vision was occluded once again by the fearsome interposition of Nurse Rosenschweig’s nates, a snatch of hair as white as a patriarch’s. Peculiar child, he was thinking, reaching idly to itch at the bandage constricting his calf, when suddenly the nurse was gone and he found himself staring slack-jawed into the face of his dreams.

Piet — for Piet it was, unmistakable, unforgettable, as loathsome and arresting as a tick nestled behind a dog’s ear — was inclined at a forty-five-degree angle, blithely impaling cubes of glistening emerald Jello on the tines of his fork. His nose and ears were enormous, absurdly disproportionate to his foreshortened limbs, white hair sprouted from his nostrils like frost-killed weed, his lips were slack and pouty and there was a dribble of gravy on his chin. A full five seconds thundered past before he turned to Walter. “Howdy, Chief,” he said, grinning diabolically, “good chow, huh?”

Walter was lost in a chamber of horrors, a room with no exit, the dripping dark dungeon of the asylum. He was frightened. Terrified. Certain, finally, that he’d lost his mind. He turned away from the leering little homunculus and stared numbly at the slop on his tray, trying desperately to review his sins, his lips trembling in what might have been prayer if only he knew what prayer was.

“What’s the matter,” Piet rasped, “cat got your tongue? Hey, you: I’m talking to you.”

The misery lay so heavily upon him that Walter could barely bring himself to raise his eyes. What were the five stages of dying, he was thinking, as he slowly swiveled his head: Fear, Anger, Renunciation, Acceptance and—?

Piet, hunched over his floating leg like a sorrowful gargoyle, was regarding him sympathetically now. “Don’t take it so hard, kid,” he said finally, “you’ll get over it. You’re young and strong yet, got your whole life ahead of you. Here,” he was reaching out a stunted arm, at the stunted extremity of which appeared a stunted hand clasping a half-empty bowl of Jello, “you want my dessert?”

Walter’s rage uncoiled with all the vehemence of a striking snake. “What do you want from me?” he spat.

The little man looked puzzled. “From you? I don’t want nothin’ from you — I’m offering you my dessert. I might of ate a bite or two of it, but hey, it’s no big deal — I mean I’m not in here for bubonic plague or anything.” He withdrew the Jello and indicated the plaster-bound foot that swayed above him. “Stubbed my toe!” he hooted, and let out a crazed choking peal of laughter.

He was chortling to himself when the nurse returned. “I just told him I … I … I stubbed my”—he couldn’t go on; it was too much. He was a deflated balloon, all the air knocked out of him with the sheer debilitating hilarity of it. “My toe!” he finally bawled, subsiding into giggles.

Nurse Rosenschweig watched him patiently through all his droll contortions, her big moon face constellated with freckles, her drooping underlip coaching him on. Her only comment, once he’d delivered his punch line, was: “Well, aren’t we lively today.” Then she turned to Walter.

“Hey, sister!” the little man suddenly shouted, his voice twittering with mirth. “Want to dance?”

That was it. Walter had had it. “Who is this man?” he demanded. “What’s he doing in here? Why in christ’s name did you stick him in here with me?”

Nurse Rosenschweig was no sour fraulein, as she’d just demonstrated, but Walter’s protestations made her face go hard. “You want a private room, you’ve got to make the proper arrangements,” she said. “In advance.”

“But — but who is this man?” Something was beginning to dawn on Walter, confused, bereft, drugged and tormented though he may have been. It went like this: if the nurse was real — walking, talking, breathing, flesh, blood and bone — and she admitted Piet’s existence, then either the whole world was a hallucination or the phantom in the bed beside him was no phantom at all.

“Name’s Piet Aukema,” the dwarf rasped, leaning way out over the chasm between the beds to extend his hand, “and I’m pleased to meet you.”

Nurse Rosenschweig fixed her withering glare on Walter, who reluctantly leaned forward to shake the proferred hand. “Walter,” he mumbled, voice sticking in his throat, “Walter Van Brunt.”

“There now, isn’t that better?” the nurse was saying, beaming at Walter like a contented schoolmarm, when Piet suddenly dropped Walter’s hand and jerked upright in bed. Slapping his forehead, he gasped “Van Brunt? Did you say Van Brunt?”

Faintly, weakly, almost imperceptibly, Walter nodded.

“I knew it, I knew it,” the dwarf sang. “Soon as I laid eyes on you, I knew it.”

The chill of history was descending yet again — Walter could feel it, familiar as a toothache, and he shivered inwardly.

“Sure,” the dwarf said, marshaling his features into an obscene parody of amity and ingenuousness, “I knew your father.”

Every time Walter opened his eyes during the course of the next three days, Piet was there, the cynosure of the room, the hospital, the universe, the first and only thing that mattered. He would wake in the morning to the little man’s booming “Up and at ’em, lazybones!” jolt up from a tormented nap to see him calmly paring his nails or crunching into an apple, arouse himself from a sitcom-induced doze to watch him leaf through a pornographic magazine or hold up the centerfold with a complicitous wink. Still, Walter couldn’t quite believe he wasn’t hallucinating — not until Lola came to visit and recognized the wizened little runt in her first breath. “Piet?” she said, narrowing her eyes to examine him as she might have examined the ghostly figures of a faded photograph.

The dwarf perked up like a dog catching the faintest ring of silverware from the farthest corner of the kitchen. “I know you,” he said, his big leathery lips twisted into the best facsimile of a smile. “Lola, isn’t it?”

Lola’s hands went to her hair. She fumbled with her purse, her bulky coat, and sat heavily in the visitor’s chair. A change came across her face, her mouth grim, lips trembling.

“What’s it been,” he said, “twenty years?”

Her voice was dead. “Not long enough.”

Piet went on as if he hadn’t noticed, filling her in on the sliding scale of his fortunes over the past two decades. Smirking, winking, rolling his eyes, gesticulating so violently he set the traction wires atremble, the little man told her of his careers in carpentry, Off-Broadway theater (a supporting role in a short-lived musical based on Todd Browning’s “Freaks”), commercial fishing, managing a bar and grill in Putnam Valley, selling doughnut makers door-to-door and Renaults, VWs and Mini-Coopers at a lot in Brewster. He chattered on for the better part of an hour, hooting at his own jokes, dropping his voice to an ominous rasp to underscore the bad times, rushing with passion as he described his loves and triumphs, going on and on, signing, guffawing and wisecracking, performing the grand symphony of his little life for an audience chained to their seats. Never once did he mention Truman.

The moment Lola left, Walter turned to him. Puffed up like a toad with the litany of his adventures, Piet regarded him slyly. “You, uh, you said you knew my father,” Walter began, and then faltered.

“That’s right. He was a real card, your old man.”

When did you see him last? What happened to him? Is he alive? The questions were stacked up in Walter’s head like jetliners over La Guardia — Why did he leave us? What happened that night in 1949? Was he gutless? A fink? A turncoat? Was he the no-account, perfidious, two-faced, backstabbing son of a bitch everyone made him out to be? — but before he could ask the first of them, Piet was off on another jag of reminiscence.

“A card,” he repeated, wagging his head in disbelief. “Did you hear about the time—?” Walter hadn’t heard. Or if he had, he was going to hear it again. Waving his stumpy arms like a conductor, leering, grimacing, clucking, chortling, Piet served up the old stories. There were the pranks — flying upside down under the Bear Mountain Bridge, stealing the life-size figures from the crèche outside the Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception and hoisting them up the flagpole in front of the monument on Washington Street, substituting distilled vinegar for vodka at the VFW Memorial Day picnic; there were the drinking bouts, the women, the crab boils and card games — names and places and dates that meant nothing to Walter. Finally the rasping atonal voice paused a moment, as if to collect itself — as if perhaps, at last, it had run out of stories — when Piet threw his head back on the pillow, slapped the rock-hard cast with an exclamatory palm and uttered a single astonishing proper noun, one that hadn’t been uttered in Walter’s presence since the death of his grandmother. “Sachoes,” the dwarf said in what amounted to a prefatory sigh.

“Sachoes?” Walter flung it back at him. “What about him?”

Piet gave him a long, smirking, supremely self-satisfied look, simultaneously plumbing an ear for wax and running a gnarled hand through his hair. “That’s all Truman’d talk about when I first met him back in, what? — ’40, I guess it was, just before the War. Sachoes this, Sachoes that. You know, the Indian chief. Owned all this”—his hand swept the room in a gesture meant to suggest the dubious worth not only of the paltry room but of the gray landscape that fell away from the windows in a bristle of bare-crowned trees—“before us white men took it away from him, that is. Damndest thing. For a couple of months or so back then your father was all worked up about it, as though we could turn history around or something.” Piet — the gargoyle, the imp — looked him full in the face. “You know the story?”

Walter knew it — one of his grandmother’s stories — and suddenly he saw that neat square little house perched over the river, a night of crippling cold, his grandfather hunched hairily over the fire, plucking and jabbing at the muck-smelling length of his drift net like an old lady with her needlepoint, his grandmother busy shaping clay in a maelstrom of newspaper at the kitchen table. She was attempting something big — her major statement on trash fish, a planter in the shape of three intertwined and gaping carp. Walter was nine or ten — it was the winter Hesh and Lola had gone down to Miami over the Christmas break and left him with his grandparents. There was no TV — his grandmother mistrusted televisions as she mistrusted telephones, prying eyes and ears, conduits into which her enemies could pour their malice — but there would have been a radio. Christmas carols maybe, playing softly in the background. Cookies in the oven. Snow flying at the black impervious panes of the big bay window that looked out over the river. Gram, Walter said, tell me a story.

Her hands — big and fleshy, spotted with age — worked at the clay. She rolled out a string of it, formed an O and gave the near carp a set of lips. At first he thought she hadn’t heard him, but then she began to speak, her voice barely audible over the snap of the fire, the carols, the wind in the eaves: It was the winter after they’d buried Minewa, and Sachoes, great sachem of the Kitchawanks, was in despair. Smeared with otter fat against the cold, wrapped in the fur of Konoh, the bear, he stared glumly into the fire while the wind flapped the thatch of elm bark and basswood strips till he could have sworn all the geese in the world were beating around his head.

Despair? Walter asked. What’s that?

Soon enough, growled his hairy grandfather, looking up from his torn drift net, you’ll find out. Soon enough.

Walter’s grandmother gave her husband an impatient look, etched a triad of scales under the gill plate of the middle carp, and turned to Walter. He was sad, Walter, she said. He’d lost hope. Fizzled out. Given up. He sat there in the longhouse with Wahwahtaysee, with Matekanis and Witapanoxwe, his elder sons, and Mohonk, the lanky, flat-footed boy who was to disappoint his mother so, and poked at the embers of tobacco and red dogwood bark in the bowl of his pipe. When morning came, Jan Pieterse would be at the door, bearing gifts. A pair of yellow-eyed dogs, kettles harder than stone, knives, scissors, axes, blankets, nuggets of colored glass that made even the most highly polished disk of wampumpeak look like just another pebble. Gifts, yes: but no gift comes without a price.

When Jan Pieterse came amongst them some six years before, the Kitchawanks were amazed not only by the limitless supply of wellmade and bewitching objects he brought with him for trade, but also by the persistence and subtlety of his haggling, by the stream of graceless and mangled Mohican words that never stopped dribbling from his lips. “Composed of Mouth” is what they called him, and they came to him in all their strength and dignity to trade skins for these fine wares with which he’d loaded his little sloop to the gunwales. But it wasn’t just beaver pelts he wanted, no — it was the land itself. It was the Blue Rock and the land that lay around it. Sachoes, as chief and elder statesman, came forward to negotiate with him.

And what did Sachoes get for his people in exchange for the land on which Composed of Mouth set up the boxy inhospitable fortress of his trading post? Things. Possessions. Objects of envy and covetousness. Axes whose handles broke and whose blades went dull, jars that shattered, scissors that locked at the joint with rust and the gleaming insuperable coins that introduced theft and murder to the village of bark huts on Acquasinnick Bay. And where were these things now? All gone their own careless way — even the blankets eaten up by some mysterious corruption from within — while the beaver that helped buy them were as scarce as hairs on a Mohawk’s head. Composed of Mouth was no fool. He had the land. Incorruptible and eternal.

In the early days, Jan Pieterse came to them. But now they came to Jan Pieterse. Wasted by the English pox, sick with drink, starved with a winter severe beyond the recall of old Gaindowana, eldest man of the tribe, they’d crept like dogs in the humiliation of their need to the big barred door of Composed of Mouth’s trading post and begged him to remember the land they’d given him. They wanted cloth, food, things of iron, things of beauty — to their everlasting shame, they wanted rum. Sure, Composed of Mouth told them, certainly, of course and why not? Credit, he said, in his barker’s patois, a Dutch term festering deep in a felicitous Mohican sentence, Credit for all, and especially for you, my reverend friend, my dear, dear, dear Sachoes.

Nothing for nothing, Walter’s grandmother said, giving the far carp a round and staring eye with a swirl of her little finger. The old chief owed that canny Dutchman, and he knew it.

Well, Jan Pieterse, so the story goes, had a friend. Two friends. They were the Van Wart brothers, Oloffe and Lubbertus. Oloffe, who had influence in the Company, was granted a patroonship by Their High Mightinesses that encompassed not only all the Kitchawanks’ tribal lands, but those of the Sint Sinks and Weckquaesgeeks as well. It was already carved up and mapped out, plenty for him and his brother and half the population of the Netherlands too. All he had to do was satisfy the original owners, who, as everybody in Haarlem knew, were a bunch of naked, illiterate, drink-besotted and disease-ridden beggars who couldn’t add up their fingers and toes, let alone survey the land and read the fine print of your basic, binding, inviolate and ironclad contract. Jan Pieterse, an adept in Indian ways, was to be his go-between. For a fee, of course.

Now Sachoes didn’t know anything of this — couldn’t begin to imagine the polders and dikes and cobbled streets, the factories, breweries and cozy pristine parlors of that distant and legendary Dutch homeland — but he did know that come morning, with its pale streaks of Arctic light, Composed of Mouth would be on his hut step, with the great mustachioed and bloat-bellied patroon-chief in tow, and that the patroon-chief was hungry to own what no man had a right to own: the imperishable land beneath his feet. But what could the old chief do? Deer were dropping dead in the woods, their stomachs stuffed with bark; snowdrifts buried the village; Mother Corn was comatose till spring; and the people wanted everything the trader put up for sale. If he didn’t deal with Jan Pieterse, then Wasamapah, his bitterest rival for control of the tribe, a man who understood credit, spoke with the wind and leaped tall trees in a single bound, would. And Manitou help the old chief if he let Composed of Mouth and the patroon-chief cheat him.

But cheat him they did, Walter’s grandmother said, rising with a groan to rinse her hands at the sink in the kitchen. And do you know how they managed it? she asked over her shoulder.

Walter was nine years old. Or maybe ten. He didn’t know much. Uh-uh, he said.

She shuffled back into the room, a big gray-haired woman in a print dress, rubbing her thumb over the tips of her first two fingers. Vigorish, she said, that’s how.

When Sachoes sat down in his hut the following morning with Composed of Mouth and the patroon-chief and his brother, Wasamapah sat down beside him. And rightfully so. For Wasamapah was the memory of the tribe. As each term of a treaty was struck, he would carefully select a polished fragment of clam, mussel or oyster shell from the pile spread out in the dirt before him, and string it on a piece of rawhide. Each article, each proviso, amendment and codicil had its own distinctive signifier; afterward, when the dust had settled over the mountain of exchanged gifts, when the kinnikinnick had been smoked and the yokeag and doe’s tongue eaten, Wasamapah would convene the council of elders and repeat for them, over and over, the significance of each buffed and rounded shell.

And so it was this time. Sachoes put on his most inflexible face, the patroon-chief tugged uneasily at the joints of his puffed-up fingers, Composed of Mouth talked till he was hoarse, Wasamapah strung shells. With dignity, with stateliness and a serenity that belied his unease, Sachoes accepted the gifts, made his demands on behalf of the tribe and grudgingly gave ground in the face of Composed of Mouth’s verbal onslaught. Then they passed a pipe and feasted, the patroon-chief eating sparingly of the cornmeal and tongue and plentifully of the Dutch stuffs — stinking cheeses, rock-hard loaves, salted this and pickled that — that he’d brought along. The new dogs took care of the scraps.

As he smoked, as he gnawed at the foul-smelling cheeses and chewed the tongue, Sachoes felt elated. In addition to the heap of gifts piled up outside the longhouse and distributed throughout the tribe, he’d bargained for barrels of meal, for blankets and bolts of cloth, for beads by the hundredweight and sturdy iron plows and adzes and cookpots. Even better, the patroon-chief’s brother had been persuaded to give up the gold ring that encircled his little finger, Jan Pieterse threw in a gilt-edged mirror and a keg of black powder, and in the crowning moment of the negotiations, the patroon-chief himself presented Sachoes with a great floppy-brimmed sugarloaf hat that trailed a plume half as long as his arm. And best of all, Sachoes had given up practically nothing in return — a little plot of land that ran north from the Blue Rock to the Twice Gnarled Tree, south only as far as Deer Run and east to the Brook That Speaks. Nothing! He could walk the length and breadth of it three times over in an afternoon. Finally, finally he’d bested them. Yes, he thought, pulling at the ceremonial pipe and inwardly gloating, what a deal!

But alas, his elation was short-lived. For Wasamapah, eager to make the old chief look bad and with the patroon’s note for two thousand guilders stuffed in his moccasin, had surreptitiously added three jagged bruise-colored shells to the treaty string, shells that extended the boundaries of the patroon’s purchase till they encompassed every last verst, morgen and acre of the Kitchawank’s homeland. Where Sachoes had heard the Twice Gnarled Tree, Wasamapah, so he claimed, had heard the Twice Gnarled Tree Struck Twice by Lightning. And where Sachoes had agreed to Near Deer Run as the southern boundary, Wasamapah had registered Far Deer Run, another matter altogether; so too with the Brook That Speaks, which Wasamapah had recorded as the Brook That Speaks in Winter. When Wasamapah told over the treaty shells for the council of elders, outrage crept into the worn and weary faces of that august body, the light of recrimination flickered in their ancient eyes.

Six months later, Sachoes was dead. Unable to eat, to sleep, unable to stand or sit or lie flat in his robes, the old chief ate himself up with grief over what he’d done. Or rather, what Jan Pieterse, Oloffe Van Wart and Wasamapah had done to him. Not a brave in the tribe sided with him — he was senile, doddering, a woman in a breechclout, and he’d dealt away the soul of his tribe for a few baubles, for dogs that had run off, a white man’s hat that mouldered away to nothing, for food that had been eaten and beads that hid themselves in the grass. He was done. Finished. Wasamapah, stern, righteous, unforgiving, a man of sudden wealth and confidant of the great patroon-chief who now held dominion over them, stepped in to replace him. Outcast, hunched with grief, a traitor to his own tribe, Sachoes fell away to nothing, his life as tenuous as the fluff that clings to the dandelion. Wahwahtaysee tried to protect him, but it was no use. One day, in the middle of the strangely pale and wintry summer that succeeded the patroon’s coup, the wind blew. Blew hard. Blew a regular gale. And that was. the end of Sachoes.

“Yeah, Sachoes,” Piet sighed, and Walter started and looked around him as if he were waking to a nightmare. “Got taken by one of his own, wasn’t that the story?” The imp was leering at him now, showing acres of gum at the edges of his grin, his eyes recessed in twin sinkholes of wrinkle. “Betrayed, fucked over, stabbed in the back. Right?”

Walter only stared.

And then Piet leaned way out over the abyss between the beds, his face still squinched in that unholy leer, and hit Walter with everything he had: “So what do you hear from your old man?”

What does he hear? The question choked him with bitterness — he could barely get the words out. “I haven’t heard from him. At all. Not since — since I was eleven.” He looked down at the floor. “I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

The dwarf fell back into himself with surprise — or feigned surprise. His eyebrows shot up. He fanned himself with a quick hand. “Eleven? Shit. I got a card from him just — when? — shit, must of been a week before my accident.”

The whole of Walter’s being was caught up in the sudden hammering of his heart. “Where?” he blurted. “Where is he?”

“He’s teaching,” Piet said, and let a beat go by. “In Barrow.”

“Barrow?”

“Point Barrow.” Pause, grin, lick lips. “You know: like in Alaska?”

Next morning, Piet was gone. Walter woke to the clatter of the dayshift nurse and the furtive tones of desperation and bewilderment that trickled down the corridor to him, and saw that the bed in the corner was made up as if it had never been occupied. After breakfast, Lola appeared with the big dusty clothbound atlas from the bookshelf in the front room, and Walter barely had time to graze her cheek before snatching it from her hands. “Barrow, Barrow, Barrow,” he muttered to himself, flipping impatiently through the pages and then scanning the jagged, glaciated outline of the big bleak mysterious state as if he were seeing it for the first time. He found Anchorage, Kenai, Spenard and Seward. He found the Aleutians, the Talkeetna Mountains, Fairbanks, the Kuskokwim Range. But no Barrow. He had to consult the index for Barrow — G-I — and follow his finger to the top of the map. There it was, Barrow, the northernmost city in the world. Barrow, where windchill took the temperature down to a hundred below and night reigned unbroken for three months of the year.

Lola, looking on with a bemused smile, had a question for him: “Why the sudden interest in Alaska — thinking of doing some seal hunting?”

He looked up as if he’d forgotten she was there. “There was a thing on TV about it last night,” he said, flashing his winning smile. “Sounds cool.”

“Cool?”

They laughed together. But the minute she left he got an outside line and phoned a travel agent in Croton. Round-trip from Kennedy to Anchorage/Fairbanks alone was $600, plus tax, and service from Fairbanks to Barrow was spotty at best, and could cost another hundred on top of that, not to mention cabs, food and hotel. Where was he going to get that kind of money?

This time, when Walter was discharged from the hospital to continue his recuperation at home, it was not the sweet-smelling champagnetoting Jessica who came to retrieve him; this time Walter departed those depressing tangerine and avocado hallways in the company of his adoptive mother, haunted more than ever by ghosts of the past. Lola drove: white hair, skin tanned to leather, the turquoise earrings she’d picked up in New Mexico. The Volvo ratcheted and wheezed. Did he want a monster burger? she wanted to know. With pickle, relish, mayonnaise, mustard and three-star chili sauce? Or did he just want to go straight home and rest? No, he told her, he didn’t want a monster burger, though the food in the hospital had been crap — tasteless, overcooked and heavy on the Jello end of the scale — but he didn’t want to go home either.

Where to, then — Fagnoli’s? For pizza?

No. He didn’t think so. What he really wanted was to go to Depeyster Manufacturing. On Water Street.

Depeyster—?

Uh-huh. He had to see about a job.

But he’d just got out of the hospital. Couldn’t it wait a few days?

It couldn’t.

Walter didn’t bother with the entrance marked EMPLOYEES ONLY — he had Lola park out front, and he swung through the big double doors that gave onto the carpeted vestibule of the inner sanctum, fluid as a gymnast on his crutches, all his weight on his arms and what was now, by default, his good leg. He didn’t bother with Miss Egthuysen either, clumping down the hall as if he owned it, pausing half a moment to knock at the frosted-glass door of executive office #7, and then, without waiting for a response, pushing his way in.

“Walter?” Van Wart gasped, getting up from his desk. “But I thought … I mean, my daughter told me—”

But Walter had no time for explanations. He leaned forward, the padded supports of the crutches cutting like knives into the pits of his arms, and waved his hand in dismissal. “When do I start?” he said.

Open House

All right, he was thinking, so maybe the place did need a new coat of paint, and perhaps the wisteria was lifting the slate off the stepped gables out front, and yes, the window frames were gouged, the roof leaked and the interior, big as it was, had grown too small for the clutter of ancestral furnishings, but for his money Van Wart Manor was still the best-kept place of its kind in the Hudson Valley, bar none. Sure, there were the museums — Philipsburg Manor, Sunnyside, the lower Van Wart house itself — but they were soulless, husks of houses, uninhabited, ghostly, useless. Even worse were the private restorations like the Terboss place in Fishkill or the Kent house in Yorktown, owned and occupied by strangers, parvenues, interlopers with names like Brophy, Righetti, Mastafiak. Talk about tradition — it went all the way back to some tramp steamer out of Palermo in 1933. It was a joke, that’s all. A bad joke.

Depeyster Van Wart stood in the loam of his rose garden at the base of the great sloping manorial lawn and gazed up at the house with a rush of proprietary pride, secure in his heritage, in his position, and now, with the unhoped-for miracle of Joanna’s news, secure in his future too. No parvenu he — he was born here, in the master bedroom on the second floor, between the Chippendale chest-on-chest and the Duncan Phyfe wardrobe. His father had been born here too, in the shadow of that same wardrobe, and his father before him. For better than three hundred years, none but Van Warts had trod those peg-and-groove floors, none but Van Warts had mounted the groaning staircases or crouched in the ancestral dirt of the hoariest and bottommost cellar. And now, at long last, he knew in his heart that none of it would ever change, that Van Warts and Van Warts alone would walk those venerable corridors into the golden, limitless, insuperable future.

For Joanna was pregnant. Forty-three-year-old Joanna, bride of his youth, mother of his daughter, lover of unguents and creams and the cuisines of Naples, Languedoc and the Fiji Islands, champion of the dispossessed, stranger to his bed and purveyor of rags, Joanna was pregnant. After fifteen years of desperate longing, recrimination, rancor and despair, she’d come to him and he’d responded, simple as that. He’d risen to the occasion, impregnated her, knocked her up, got her with child. But not just a child, not just any child — a male child. What else could it be?

He remembered the cruel disappointment that had followed on the heels of that intoxicating, primal, woodsy tryst before the fireplace last fall—Honey, she’d said to him a scant month later, darling, I think I’m going to have a baby. A baby? He could barely speak for astonishment. Had his prayers been answered, his hopes exhumed? A baby? Was it true? Was he really going to have one more shot at it?

The answer was as unequivocal as the flow of blood: no, he wasn’t. It was a false alarm. She was late with her period, that was all, and he fell into a despair more profound than he’d ever known. But then, just after the New Year, she came to him again. And then again. She was frenzied, urgent, wild, her skin darkened with smears of some reddish pigment, a smell of swamps and cookfires and bitter uncultivated berries caught in the heavy braids of her hair, buckskin against naked flesh. He was John Smith and she was Pocahontas, untamed, feverish, coupling as if to preserve their very lives. Who was she, this stranger beneath him with the musky smell and the faraway look in her eyes? He didn’t care. He mounted her, penetrated her, spilled his seed deep within her. Blissfully. Gratefully. Thinking: this Indian business isn’t so bad after all.

Then there was the second alarum, the trip to the doctor, the test, the examination, the indubitability of the result: Joanna was pregnant. So what if she was mad as a hatter? So what if she shied away from him even more violently than before and redoubled her visits to the reservation? So what if she humiliated him at the market in her paints and leggings and all the rest? She was pregnant, and Van Wart Manor would have its heir.

And so it was that on this particular day — this day of days — as he clipped roses for the big cut-glass vases stationed strategically throughout the house for the delectation of the sightseers and history buffs who would any moment now begin to arrive with appropriately awed and respectful faces, Depeyster felt supreme, expansive, beyond hurt, felt like Solomon awaiting the morning’s petitioners. It was June, his wife was pregnant, the sun shone down on him in all its benedictory splendor, and the house — the ancient, peerless, stately, inestimable house — was open to the public and looking good.

“Did you hear about Peletiah Crane?”

Marguerite Mott, in a huddle with her sister Muriel, balanced a white bone china cup on its saucer and looked up expectantly at her host. It was late in the afternoon, and a small band of the historically curious, eyes glazed after an exhaustive three-hour tour of the house and grounds that left no shingle undefined or nook unplumbed, was gathered for refreshments in the front parlor. Lula, in white apron and cap, had just served tea and a very old but distinctly musty sherry, and set out a platter of stale soda crackers and tinned pâté, and the group, which consisted of two nuns, a legal secretary from Briarcliff, a self-educated auto mechanic and the withered octogenarian treasurer of the Hopewell Junction Historical Society, as well as young Walter Van Brunt, LeClerc and Ginny Outhouse and, not least, the redoubtable Mott sisters, fell upon these humble offerings like wanderers come in off the desert.

Marguerite’s question caught the twelfth heir in the middle of a complex architectural dissertation on how the present house had managed to grow up over the generations from the modest parlor in which they now stood. Buoyant, with the energy and animation of a man half his age, Depeyster had driven the octogenarian and the legal secretary up against the Nunns, Clark & Co. rosewood piano in the corner, urging them to appreciate the thickness and solidity of the wall behind it. “Built from native fieldstone and oyster-shell mortar, all the way back in 1650,” he said. “We’ve painted it, glazed it, repaired the mortar, of course — go ahead, feel it — but that’s it, the original wall put up by Oloffe and Lubbertus Van Wart three hundred and nineteen years ago.” Depeyster had been talking for three hours, and he wasn’t about to stop now — not as long as anyone was still standing. “The patroon settled in Croton, at the lower house — you know, the museum—and he built this one for his brother, but after Lubbertus passed on he alternated between the two houses. Ironically, the lower house went out of the family just after the Revolution — but that’s another story — while this one has been continuously occupied by Van Warts since the day—” he suddenly broke off and turned to Marguerite. “What did you say?”

“Peletiah. Did you hear about Peletiah?”

In that moment, secretary and treasurer were forgotten, and Depeyster felt his heart leap up. “He’s dead?” he yelped, barely able to contain himself.

The auto mechanic was watching him; LeClerc and Walter, who’d had their heads together, looked up inquisitively.

“No,” Marguerite whispered, pursing her lips and giving him a quick closer’s wink, “not yet.” She let the moment hang over him, huge with significance, and then delivered the clincher: “He’s had a stroke.”

He didn’t want to seem too anxious — the legal secretary was glancing around her uneasily, afraid to set her cup down, and the old boy from Hopewell Junction looked as if he were about to have a stroke himself — and so he counted to three before he spoke: “Is it… serious?”

Marguerite’s smile was tight, the white-frosted lips pressed firmly together, the foundation at the corners of her eyes barely breached. It was a realtor’s smile, and it spoke of quiet triumph, of the thorny deal at long last closed. “He can’t walk,” she said. “Can’t talk or eat. He keeps slipping in and out of it.”

“Yes,” Muriel said, interposing her glazed face between them, “it looks bad.”

Looks bad. The words stirred him, gladdened him, filled him with vengeful joy. So the old long-nosed land-grubbing pinko bastard was finally slipping over the edge, finally letting go … and now it was the grandson — the pothead — who would take charge of things. It was too perfect. Thirty-five hundred an acre — ha! He’d get it for half that, a quarter — he’d get it for the price of another fix or trip or whatever it was the kid doped himself up on … yes, and then he’d find himself a horse, a Kentucky Walker like his father used to have, old blood lines, blaze on the forehead; he’d refurbish the stables, lean on the town board to erect one of those horse-crossing signs up the road at the entrance to the place, and then, with his son up in front of him, he’d ride out over the property first thing every morning, sun like fire on the creek, the crush of hickory nuts underfoot, a roast on the table. …

Unfortunately, the grand and triumphal procession of his thoughts suddenly pulled up lame. For there, outside the window, in full Indian drag and shouldering a bundle the size and shape of a buffalo’s head, was Joanna. Back. Early. Hauling garbage out of the station wagon in full view of the legal secretary and the wheezing old ass from Hopewell Junction. But what was she doing home already? he thought in rising panic. Wasn’t she supposed to be up in Jamestown overseeing the canned succotash drive or some such thing? Suddenly he was moving, nodding his way out of range of the Mott sisters’ waxen smiles, shaking off the auto mechanic’s query about BTUs and heating costs, trying desperately to head her off.

He was too late.

The parlor door eased open and there she was, in fringed buckskin and plastic beads, her skin darkened to the color of mountain burgundy. “Oh,” she faltered, glancing around the room in confusion and finally settling on her husband, “I saw all the cars … but it just — it’s open house, then — is that it?”

Silence gripped the room like fear.

The nuns looked bewildered, the secretary appalled; Ginny Outhouse smiled tentatively. It was Lula, coming forward with the tray of pâté and crackers, who broke the spell. “Want some canopies, Mizz Van Wart?” she said. “You must be half-starved after that drive.”

“Thank you, Lula, no,” Joanna said, dropping the bundle to the floor with a clatter, “I had some — some dried meat on the way down.”

By now, Depeyster had moved forward stiffly to greet her. Muriel had begun to gush small talk (“How are you dear, so good to see you again, you’re looking fit, still rescuing the Indians I see”), and the murmur of conversation had resumed among the others.

Depeyster was mortified. LeClerc and Ginny were old friends — they knew of Joanna’s growing eccentricity, and it was nothing. Or almost nothing. And Walter was his protegé, no problem there. But these others, the Mott sisters and these strangers — what must they think? And then it came to him. He’d take them aside, one by one, that’s what he’d do, and explain that his wife’s getup was part of the spirit of the open house, touching base with the aboriginal inhabitants of the Valley in a spontaneous bit of historical improvisation and all that — cute, wasn’t it?

Trie thought calmed him, and he was turning to the shorter of the nuns with an anecdote on his lips, when the door flew open and Mardi, the wayward daughter, burst into the room. “Hello, hello, everyone!” she shouted, “isn’t it a fantastic day?” She was wearing an imitation leopard-skin bikini that showed more of her than her father cared to know about, and her skin was nearly as red as her mother’s with overexposure to the sun. She went straight for the sherry decanter, downed a glass, made a sour face, then downed another.

It was too much, it was impossible.

Depeyster turned away from the horror of the scene, fumbling for a pinch of cellar dust to sprinkle over his tea, the mechanic at his elbow, nuns agape, the legal secretary gathering up her things to go. “Oh, hi, LeClerc,” he heard his daughter say in a voice as false and unctuous as an insurance salesman’s. “Must be a bear to heat this place,” the mechanic opined.

Next thing he knew, Mardi was leading Walter out of the room—“Come on,” she purred, “I want to show you something upstairs”—the nuns were thanking him for a lovely afternoon, Joanna had thrown open her satchel in the middle of the Turkish rug and was offering Indian pottery for sale, and LeClerc and Ginny were talking about dinner. “How about that Italian place in Somers?” Ginny said. “Or the Chinese in Yorktown?”

And then he was standing at the front door, numbly shaking hands with the mechanic, who’d laid out five dollars apiece for a pair of unglazed Indian ashtrays that looked like a failed kindergarten project (what were they supposed to be, anyway — fish?). “Mind if I take a look at the plumbing on my way out?” The mechanic — he was a young man, bald as an egg — gave him a warm, almost saintly look. “I’d really like to see what you did with the pipes and those three-foot walls.”

“Or that steak and lobster joint in Amawalk? What do you think, Dipe?” LeClerc said, pulling him away from the mechanic.

What did he think? The Mott sisters were covering their retreat with a desperate barrage of clichés and insincerities, the old boy from Hopewell Junction announced in a clarion voice that he was going to need help getting to the bathroom, and the legal secretary left without a word. Dazed, defeated, traumatized, he couldn’t say what he thought. The day was in ruins.

For Walter, on the other hand, the day had just begun.

He’d been sitting there with LeClerc Outhouse, uncomfortable in his seersucker suit and throat-constricting tie, his lower legs aching from the rigors of the estate tour, discussing, without candor and with little conviction, the moral imperative of the U.S. presence in Indo-china and the crying need to bomb the gooks into submission with everything we had. And now, here he was, following Mardi’s compelling backside up the stairs and into the dark, enticing, black-lit refuge of her room. She was talking trivialities, chattering — Did he know that Hector had joined the marines? Or that Herbert Pompey landed a gig with the La Mancha road company? Or that Joey’s band broke up? She wasn’t seeing Joey any more, did he know that?

They were in her room now, and she turned to look at him as she delivered this last line. The walls were painted black, the shades drawn. Behind her, a poster of Jimi Hendrix, his face contorted with the ecstasy of feedback, glowed wickedly under the black light. Walter gave her a cynical smile and eased himself down on the bed.

Actually, he didn’t know that Hector had joined the marines or that Herbert was going on the road — he hadn’t set foot in the Elbow since he left the hospital. And as for Joey, the only emotion that might have stirred in him had he heard that the band hadn’t merely broken up but burst open and fallen to pieces in unidentifiable fragments would have been joy. Mardi had hurt him. Cut him to the quick. Touched him where Meursault could never have been touched. And he was all the better for it. Stronger. Harder and more dispassionate than ever, cut adrift from his anchors — from Jessica, from Tom, from Mardi and Hesh and Lola — the lone wolf, the lonesome cowboy, the single champion and seeker after the truth. Love? It was shit.

No. He hadn’t seen Mardi, Tom, Jessica — any of them. He’d been seeing Miss Egthuysen, though. Twenty-seven years old, slit skirts, lips like butterflies. And he’d been seeing Depeyster. A lot. Learning the business, learning history. He’d moved out of the clapboard bungalow in Kitchawank Colony and taken his own place — a vine-covered guesthouse behind the big old place overlooking the creek in Van Wartville. And the Norton was gone too. He drove an MGA now, sleek, throaty and fast.

Mardi pulled the door closed. Her hair was in her face, the flat flawless plane of her belly showed a bruise of sunburn, a gold chain clasped her ankle. She crossed the floor to drop the needle on a record, and the room opened up with a cataract of drums and a thin manic drone of guitar. Walter was still smiling when she turned to him again. “What did you want to show me?” he said.

She padded back across the room, a paradigm of flesh — Walter thought about his ancestors and how inflamed the mere sight of an ankle would get them — and held out a tightly closed fist. “This,” she said, uncurling her fingers to reveal a fat yellow joint. She waited half a beat, then unfastened her halter and wriggled out of the leopard-skin panties. “And this,” she whispered.

In de Pekel Zitten³

Well, yes, here were a Van Wart and a Van Brunt fornicating in historic surroundings, but it had taken them centuries to arrive at so democratic a juncture. At one time, such a thing would have been unthinkable. Unspeakable. As absurd as the coupling of lions and toads or pigs and fishes. In the early days, when Jeremias Van Brunt was chafing under the terms of his indenture, when the patroon’s authority went uncontested and those that worked his land were little higher on the social scale than Russian serfs, the closest a Van Brunt had come to a Van Wart was the pogamoggan incident, in which the aforementioned Jeremias had threatened to open up the side of the Jongheer’s head for him.

At that time, the incident seemed a serious challenge to manorial prerogatives — almost an insurrectionary act — but over the years, all that had been forgotten. Or at least covered over with a shovel or two of dirt, like a corpse hastily buried. Absorbed in looking after his burgeoning family and staving off the anarchic forces of nature that threatened at any moment to overwhelm the farm and thrust him back into the desperate penury he’d known after the death of his parents, Jeremias barely gave a passing thought to his landlord. In fact, the only time he called to mind the man who held sway over him and by whose sufferance he earned his daily bread and raised the roof over his head was in November of each year, when the annual quitrent was due.

For weeks in advance of the date he would storm and rage and fulminate about the inequity of it all, and the old contumacious fire-breathing spirit arose like a phoenix from the ashes of his contentment. “I’ll move!” he’d shout. “Rather than pay that parasitic fat-assed son of a bitch a single penny I’ll pack up every last stick of furniture, every last cup and saucer and plate, and go back to Schobbejacken.” And every year Neeltje and the children would plead and beg and remonstrate with him, and on the fifteenth, when Ter Dingas Bosyn wheeled up in the patroon’s wagon, Jeremias would lock himself in the back room with a bottle of rum and let his wife count out the coins, the pots of butter, the pecks of wheat and the four fat pullets the patroon demanded as his yearly due. When he emerged the following day, red-eyed and subdued, he’d limp wordlessly out into the yard to repair the barn door or put a new wall in the henhouse where the porcupines had chewed their way through it.

And for his part, Stephanus, who’d succeeded his father as patroon after the pestilence of ’68 carried the old man off in a fit of wheezing, was too busy maneuvering his way around the Governor’s Council of Ten (of which he was the guiding light), managing the shipping business he’d inherited from his father and raising his own family to worry about an ignorant dirt clod on a distant and negligible plot of land. It was enough that said dirt clod paid his annual rent — a fact duly registered in the commis’ accounts ledger for the given year. Beyond that, Jeremias could go to the devil and back for all Stephanus Van Wart cared.

All well and good. For twelve years Van Warts and Van Brunts went their own way, and slowly, gradually, the wounds began to heal and a truce settled over the valley.

But scratch a scab, however feebly, and it will bleed.

So it was that in the summer of 1679, just after Jeremias’ thirtieth birthday, Neeltje’s father, the redoubtable schout, paid a visit to the farm at Nysen’s Roost with a message from the patroon. Joost arrived late in the afternoon, having spent the better part of the day making the rounds of the neighboring farms. At fifty, he was more bowed than ever, so badly contorted he looked as if he were balancing his head on his breastbone, and the nag he rode was as bony, sway-backed and ill-tempered as its predecessor, the little-lamented Donder. He’d long since reconciled himself to his fiery son-in-law (though every time he glanced at the pogamoggan on its hook beside the hearth his left temple throbbed and his ears began to sing), and when Neeltje begged him to spend the night, he agreed.

It was at dinner — or rather, after dinner, when Neeltje served seed cakes and a fragrant steaming caudle of cinnamon and wine — that Joost gave them the news. The whole family was gathered around the big rustic table, which Neeltje had set with the veiny china and Zutphen glassware she’d inherited on the death of her mother. Jeremias — shaggy, mustachioed, huge and hatless — pushed back his chair with a sigh and lighted his pipe. Beside him, in a long tapering row on the bench that grew shorter every year, sat the boys: nephew Jeremy, with his wild look and tarry hair, now nearly fifteen and so tight-lipped he would have exasperated the stones themselves; Wouter, eleven and a half and a dead ringer for his father; and then Harmanus and Staats, eight and six respectively. The girls — each as slight and dark-eyed and pretty as her mother — sat on the far side of the table, ranged beside their grandfather. Geesje, who was nine, got up to help her mother. Agatha and Gertruyd were four and two. They were waiting for seed cake.

“You know, younker,” Joost said, tamping tobacco in the bowl of a clay pipe half as long as his arm, “I’m up here on the patroon’s business.”

“Oh?” said Jeremias, as indifferent as he might have been to news of the emperor of China, “and what might that be?”

“Not much,” Joost managed, between great lip-smacking sucks at the stem of the pipe, “not much. Road building, is all.”

Jeremias said nothing. Geesje cleared away the children’s pewter bowls and the remains of the milk soup. Erect and unfathomable, Jeremy Mohonk exchanged a look with Wouter. “Road building?” Neeltje echoed, setting down the bowl of spiced wine.

“Hm-hm,” returned her father, sucking and puffing as vigorously as if he’d been plunged into the icy waters of Acquasinnick Creek. “He’s going to be here at the upper house for the rest of the summer. With a carpenter from New York. He’s planning to fix up the house where it’s got run-down and I guess he couldn’t persuade his brother to come out from Haarlem and take it over, but he’s got Lubbertus’ boy of an age now to move in and start a family. …”

“And what’s it to me?” Jeremias asked, puffing now himself and sending up a bitter black cloud of smoke.

“Well, that’s just it, you see — that’s what I’ve been going around to the tenants for. The patroon wants—”

Jeremias cut him off. “There is no patroon — this is an English colony now.”

Puffing, waving his hand impatiently to concede the point, Joost lifted his head up off his breastbone and went on: “Patroon, landlord — what’s the difference? Anyway, he’s calling on all the tenants to give him five days’ work with their teams — he wants to widen the road from Jan Pieterse’s to the upper house and then on out to the new farms at Crom’s Pond. There’s a post road to go through here one day, and Mijnheer wants to be sure it won’t pass him by.”

Jeremias set down his pipe and dipped a cup of wine. “I won’t do it,” he said.

“Won’t do it?” Joost’s eyes hardened. He watched the angry scar on his son-in-law’s cheek as it flushed with blood and then went dead white again. “You’ve got no choice,” he said. “It’s in your contract.”

“Screw the contract.”

Here it was, all over again. Jeremias would never learn, never accept it, not if you locked him up in that cell for a hundred years. But this time, Joost wouldn’t rise to the bait. This time things were different. This time the renegade sat there across the table from him, husband to his daughter, father to his grandchildren. “But the patroon—” Joost began, controlling himself, trying to reason with him.

He was wasting his breath.

Jeremias’ fist hit the table with a shock that set the china jumping and so startled little Gertruyd that she burst into tears. “Screw the patroon,” he snarled.

Wouter sat silently through his father’s outburst, his head bowed, his eyes on the platter of seed cakes in the middle of the table. “Jeremias,” his mother reproved in the soft, chastening voice Wouter knew so well, “you know it’s your duty. Why fight it?”

The words were barely out of her mouth before his father turned on her, as Wouter knew he would, the stubborn disputatious tones of the old man’s voice riding up the scale to explode in a thunderous tirade against the patroon, the lord governor, rents, taxes, stony soil, wood rot, white ants, earwigs and anything else that came to mind. As his father cocked himself toward her and his mother took an involuntary step away from the table, Wouter made a quick snatch at the seed cakes, secreted a fistful in his shirt and nodded at Jeremy. “Wouter took all the cakes!” howled little Harmanus, but in the heat of the moment, no one noticed. As the two accomplices ducked away from the table and slipped out the door, grandfather Cats was raising his voice too, urging everyone to calm down, to please calm down!

Neither Wouter nor Jeremy uttered a word as they felt their way down the path to Acquasinnick Creek in the gloom of dusk. They’d been up and down the trail so many times the figure approached infinitude, and though it was barely light enough to see, they knew every dip, drop-off, pothole and rib of stone as if they’d carved them themselves. In less than five minutes they were sitting on the high undercut bank of the creek, listening to the suck and pop of rising trout and the flatulent complaint of the bullfrog. Wouter had made off with six cakes. He handed three to his cousin.

For a long while they merely chewed, the water dodging the rocks at their feet in rhythmic wash, mosquitoes cutting the air, crickets chirruping. Wouter broke the silence. “Damned if I’m going to bust my back for the patroon,” he said in a sort of ruminative, octave-shattering yelp. He was at that stage in his life when his father was a small deity, reverenced and wise, incapable of error, the very oracle of truth and decision. If Jeremias told him that geese knew algebra and the creek flowed backward, he’d never doubt it, all appearances to the contrary.

Jeremy said nothing. Which wasn’t unusual, since he rarely spoke, even if directly addressed. He was tall, dark, with the spidery limbs and prominent Adam’s apple of his late progenitor, and though he knew Dutch and English both, he declined to use either, communicating in gurgles, grunts and belches, or in an elaborate sign language of his own device.

“You know vader won’t do it,” Wouter said, reaching out to snatch a firefly from the air and smear its phosphorescence in a greenish streak across his forearm. “He’s no slave.”

Night was deepening around them. There was a splash downstream, from the direction of the bridge. Jeremy said nothing.

“It’ll be us, you know,” Wouter said. “Vader won’t do it, and then moeder and grootvader Cats’ll make us do it. Just like the wood. Remember?”

The wood. Yes. Jeremy remembered. When the rent came due last November and Jeremias retreated, muttering, to the back room, it wasn’t just the pounds and pence, the butter, wheat and pullets the patroon demanded, but two fathoms of firewood to boot. No son of mine, Jeremias had blustered, or nephew either … but his voice had trailed off, and he’d taken a pull at the bottle and staggered out into the yard to be alone with his indignation and his rage. Neeltje, moeder Neeltje, had seen to it that Wouter, Harmanus and Jeremy cut and split the patroon’s wood for him. The three of them — Harmanus was only eight and not much good — worked through two bitterly cold afternoons, and then had to hitch up the oxcart and drive out to the upper manor house with the firewood to warm the patroon’s crazy skeletal old mother, who’d been living there ever since the old patroon kicked off. That was in November, when the wood needed cutting. Now it was July, and the road needed widening.

“Well I’m not going to do it,” Wouter growled. “No matter what moeder says.”

Though he heartily concurred, still Jeremy said nothing.

A long moment passed, the night sounds of the forest crepitating around them, the water spilling ever louder over the stones at their feet. Wouter tossed a handful of pebbles into the black swirling water, then pushed himself up. “What are we going to do?” he said. “I mean, if the patroon comes.”

Jeremy’s reply was so guttural, so strangled, so full of clicks and grunts and pauses, that no one but Wouter, his bosom companion and bedmate, would have known what he said. But Wouter heard him as clearly as if he’d spoken the purest King’s English — or stadtholder’s Dutch — and in the darkness he smiled with the comfort of it. What his cousin had said, in his arcane and contorted way, was this: “The patroon come, we fix him.”

Inevitably, like frost in its season, like corn blight or bread mold, like the crow that arrives to feast on the dead ox or the fly that hovers over the pan of rising dough, the patroon came. He came by sloop, to the landing at Jan Pieterse’s Kill, and he brought with him his wife, Hester Lovelace (who was, by happy coincidence, niece to the most powerful man in New York, his honor the lord governor), his four children, three rooms of furniture, two crates of crockery, a spinet and several somber family portraits meant to enliven the dreary atmosphere of the upper house. Pompey II, now eighteen and the only male issue of the union between the late patroon’s domestic slaves, Ismailia and Pompey the First, rode shotgun over the crates, stores and furniture. His sister Calpurnia, a light-skinned girl with something of the old patroon in the crook of her nose and the odd, almost spastic skew of her limbs, kept Mijnheer’s three young boys from drowning themselves and saw to the tonsorial needs of Saskia, the patroon’s ethereal ten-year-old daughter.

Stephanus was met at the Blue Rock by a fatter, older and considerably richer Jan Pieterse, and by a delegation of slow-moving, baggy-breeched farmers with chaff in their hair and clay pipes in their pockets. His factotum, an unctuous, incessantly twitching whipsnake of a man by the name of Aelbregt van den Post, took charge of the unloading of the sloop and the concurrent loading of the two wagons that stood ready to receive the patroon and his effects. Summoning all his sinewy energy, van den Post, who was said to have survived a shipwreck off Cape Ann by clinging to a spar and eating jellyfish for three weeks, flung himself into the task like a desperate man. He skittered up and down the big slab of rock, shouting orders to the sloop’s torpid crew, handing Mijnheer’s wife down from the gangplank and up into the wagon, steadying the horses, cuffing the hapless carpenter for lagging behind with his tools, castigating Pompey, chiding the children and managing, in the intervals, to bow and scrape at Mijnheer’s heels like a fawning spaniel. When all was ready, the patroon and his family went ahead in the light wagon, Pompey at the reins. Van den Post and the carpenter, hunched over a pair of evil-smelling oxen on the rough plank seat of the overladen farm wagon, brought up the rear.

The patroon was anxious to get to the house. He’d paid a visit during the spring and was shocked by the general decline of the place, the millstones ground to dust, the farms run down, the house itself sagging into the earth like a ship listing at sea. Mismanagement was what it was. That, and his own preoccupation elsewhere. How could he expect his tenants to advance at more than a crawl if there was no one to crack the whip over them?

Well, all that was about to change.

He planned to live at the upper house himself till the weather turned, tightening the reins on his tenants and putting things in order so he could install his dunderhead of a cousin in the place without having to worry about its falling to wrack and ruin. In a decade’s time he’d want the house for Rombout, his eldest boy, and when he passed on himself, the lower house — and the Cats farm — would go to Oloffe, his middle son, and Pieter, the youngest. But for now he was here with his family to live beneath the roof of the fine old stone house his father and uncle had raised not thirty years ago, and he meant to put all his energy into it. Old Ter Dingas Bosyn, the commis, would look after the lower house and the goods due in from Rotterdam at the end of the month, and he had Cats to see to things in Croton as well. And then, of course, it wasn’t as if he were going into exile on a desert isle or anything — the lower house was no more than half a day’s ride, if something should come up.

It took him a week to get settled. His mother, who’d been living there alone, was cold and irascible, and he spent the first several days trying to disabuse her of the notion that he’d come to turn her out to her martyrdom among the beasts of the wilderness. Then there was Vrouw van Bilevelt, the housekeeper, who took every suggestion as a personal affront, regarded Pompey and Calpurnia as cannibals in Dutch clothing, and fought bitterly over every cup, saucer and stick of furniture Hester brought into the house. And finally, there was the sticky question of the de Vries. It was they — Gerrit Jacobzoon de Vries, his wife and two cretinous sons — who’d managed the farm all these years — and managed it badly. On the very first night, after a dinner of stewed eel and cabbage charred into the pan out of spite by a murderous-looking Vrouw van Bilevelt, Stephanus summoned Gerrit de Vries to the front parlor. He began by saying how much he appreciated the long and honorable service Gerrit had given him and his father before him, sketched in his plans for the upper house and mill, and ended by offering him a new farm out beyond the van der Meulens’ place, on the same terms he’d offer any prospective tenant — a stake in building materials, livestock and farm machinery, all improvements descending to the patroon, quitrent due in November.

De Vries was struck dumb. His face flushed; he turned his hat over in his rough hands. Finally, in his peasant’s Dutch, he managed to stammer, “You — you mean, start all over again?”

Mijnheer nodded.

The rest was simple. De Vries spat at his feet and the patroon had van den Post show him to the door. The following morning, after thirteen years at the upper house, the de Vries were gone.

Once all that had been settled, the patroon set van den Post to work on the farm and ordered the carpenter to begin reroofing the house and hauling stone to frame the two-story addition that would more than double the size of the place. Then he turned his thoughts to road building. And widening.

It was on a fine hot August morning, while the blackberries ripened in the woods, the corn grew sweet in the fields and the crabs crawled right up out of the bay and into the pot, that the patroon called on his tenants to give him the labor that was his due. By eight o’clock they were there, gathered in front of the house with their carts and teams, their axes and shovels and harrows. The patroon, dressed in flowing rhinegrave breeches and a sleeveless silk jerkin, and mounted on the sleek Narragansett pacer the schout had brought up from Croton for him, acknowledged each of them with a lordly nod of his head — first the van der Meulens, old Staats and his son, Douw, who leased his own farm now; next the Cranes and Ten Haers and Reinier Oothouse’s boy, who’d taken over after the delirium tremens softened his father’s brain; and finally, the Lents, the Robideaus, the Mussers and Sturdivants.

All told, there were nearly two hundred people living on the Van Wart estate, upper and lower manors combined, but the majority of these were gathered along the Hudson in Croton and sprinkled inland along the Croton River. Up here, on the northern verge of Stephanus’ estate, there were only ten farms under cultivation, and a total, at last count, of fifty-nine souls — excluding, of course, the ragged band of Kitchawanks at Indian Point and the twenty-six free subjects of the Crown who lived at Pieterse’s Kill, on plots the trader had sold them for fifty times what he’d paid for them. Ten farms. That was four more than there’d been in his father’s time, but in the Jongheer’s eyes it was nothing. Not even a start.

He’d been buying up land to the east from a degenerate tribe of the Connecticuts, and to the south from the Sint Sinks. And by skillful recruitment among the dazed and seasick immigrants who staggered ashore at the Battery with little more than the wind at their backs and stuffed-up noses, he’d managed to find tenants for nearly all the choice Croton plots — and he would find more, a hundred more, to domesticate the wild lands up here. What he wanted was nothing less than to amass the biggest estate in the Colony, a manor that would make the great estates of Europe look like so many vegetable patches. It had become his obsession, his overmastering desire, the one thing that made him forget the paved streets, the quiet taverns, the music, art and society of Leyden and Amsterdam. He looked out over the sun-burnished faces of the farmers who’d come to build him a road — a road that would bring swarms of beholden peasants up from the river to fell the trees, fire the stumps and plow up the ground — and for the briefest moment he saw it all as it would one day be, the hills rolling with wheat, onions sprouting from the marshes, pumpkins and cabbages and crookneck squash piled up like riches, like gold. …

But then one of the farmers cleared his throat and spoke up, and the picture was gone. It was Robideau, a bitter, leathery Frenchman who’d lost an ear in a calamitous brawl outside the Ramapo tavern, which mysteriously burnt to the ground a week later. Robideau sat high up on the hard plank seat of his wagon, his close-set eyes gleaming, the whip lazily flicking at the flies that settled on the blistered rumps of his oxen. “And what about Van Brunt,” he said. “The pegleg. Where’s he?”

Van Brunt? For a moment the patroon was confused, having so successfully suppressed the memory of that ancient and unseemly confrontation that he’d forgotten Jeremias existed. But in the next moment he was back in that miserable hovel, the schout laid out on the hard dirt floor, Jeremias Van Brunt defying him, challenging him with a crude aboriginal weapon, and slim pretty dark-eyed little Neeltje regarding him from her bed of sin. You don’t own Neeltje, Jeremias said. And you don’t own me.

“It is because he’s married to the schout’s daughter — is that why he gets special treatment?”

Van Brunt. Yes: where in hell was he? Stephanus turned to the schout, who’d come up from Croton the previous evening to oversee the road work. “Well?” he said.

Cats was bowed nearly to the ground as he shuffled forward to make his excuses. “I don’t know where he is, Mijnheer,” he said in a voice so halting and reluctant he seemed to gag on each word. “I’ve informed him, and — and he said he would come.”

“Oh, he did, did he?” The patroon leaned forward in his saddle, the great billowing folds of his breeches engulfing his stockings, his buckled pumps and the stirrups too. “That’s very generous of him.” And then, straightening up again so that he towered over the schout like an equestrian monument come to life, he cursed so vilely and emphatically that young Johannes Musser snatched a hand to his mouth and Mistress Sturdivant, the stoutest woman in Van Wartwyck, fainted dead away. “I want him here within the hour,” he said, speaking through clenched teeth. “Understand?”

The day was half gone, and the patroon in a rage approaching apoplectic closure, when finally the Van Wart wagon, drawn by a pair of gaunt, toothless and half-lame oxen, appeared around the bend and made for the work crew at a somnolent pace. Joost Cats, leading his nag and listing so far forward it looked as if he were about to plunge face down in the dirt, limped beside it. The patroon glanced up angrily, then turned to the first farmer at hand — young Oothouse — and began an earnest chat about manure or dried shad or some such nonsense; he wasn’t about to give Van Brunt the satisfaction of thinking that he, Stephanus Oloffe Rombout Van Wart, landowner, patroon, shipping magnate and member of the Governor’s Council, could experience even the slightest anxiety over the whereabouts of so insignificant a creature as he.

The crew — men and women both, including a revived Mistress Sturdivant — had cleared and graded the outside lane in front of the patroon’s house, and were now taking their de noen break. They lounged in the shade, appropriating a round from one of the felled trees for a table, chewing hard black bread, cold bacon and cheese. One of them — Robideau, from the look of his stockings and shoes — was snoring blissfully beneath a blackberry bush, a soiled white handkerchief spread over his face. As the patroon listened to young Oothouse apotheosize dung, he was aware of every creaking revolution of the wagon wheels behind him, of every snort and wheeze of the winded old oxen. Finally, with an excruciating shriek of the axles, the wagon ground to a halt at his back.

Lifting his nose, and turning around with all the imperious dignity he could muster, the patroon was prepared to be mollified, Van Brunt’s very presence — however reluctant, however tardy — proof positive that yes, he did own him, just as he owned all the rest of these sorry soil grubbers, his word the law, eviction and banishment his prerogatives. He turned, but what he saw wasn’t at all what he expected. This wasn’t Van Brunt hunched over the reins — this was a boy, a half-breed, with the soupy staring eyes of the mentally deficient. And beside him another boy, younger, weaker, thinner, the sort of boy you’d send out to gather nuts, not build roads.

“I’m — I’m—” Cats was trying to say something. The patroon speared him with a savage glance. “—I’m sorry, but my son-in-law, I mean, Farmer Van Brunt, is, uh, indisposed, and he, uh, sent, his, uh—”

“Silence!” the patroon exploded. “I ordered you,” he roared, advancing on the shrinking schout in the great boatlike mules he wore over his pumps to protect them from the dirt of the road, “to bring him here, did I not!?”

“Yes, Mijnheer,” the schout said, whipping off his hat and working it in his hands. He was staring at his feet. “But instead because he, he was ill—”

It was then that the boy spoke up — the smaller one, the white boy. His voice was as high and shrill and discordant as a badly played piccolo. “That’s not it at all, grootvader,” he said, working himself up. He turned to face the patroon, as bold as a thief. “He won’t come, that’s all. Said he’s busy. Said he’s paid his rent. Said he’s as good a man as you.”

The patroon said nothing. He turned his back on them, shuffled over to the pacer, kicked off the mules and swung himself into the saddle. Then he motioned to young Oothouse. “You,” he growled, “go fetch Heer van den Post.” Everyone — even Mistress Sturdivant, who’d been addressing herself to a shepherd’s pie the size of a football — turned to watch him go. No one moved, and no one said a word, till he returned.

Young Oothouse, an indolent young man given to fat and a measured pace, jogged all the way, and he was red-faced and running with sweat when he appeared around the bend in the road, van den Post loping easily at his side. In the next moment, van den Post stood before the patroon, gazing up steadily at him from beneath the brim of his steeple hat. “Yes, Mijnheer?” he said, barely winded.

From his eminence atop the horse, the patroon spoke, his voice cold and brittle. “Aelbregt, you will remove from Heer Cats the plumed hat and silver-plated rapier that are the perquisites of his office — they now belong to you.” And then, addressing Joost, who stood there in a daze as van den Post took the rapier from him, “Heer Cats, you will oversee the roadwork this afternoon, and then return to your farm.”

Still, no one said a word, but shock was written on every face. Why, Joost Cats had been schout as long as anyone could remember, and to have him removed just like that — it was unheard of, impossible.

A moment later, grinning like a shark, van den Post stood before his patroon in silver-plumed hat and rapier, awaiting his further instructions.

“Heer schout,” Stephanus said, raising his voice so that all could hear him, “you will take these two young renegades,” indicating Wouter and Jeremy Mohonk, “and confine them in the root cellar at the house on a charge of impertinence and sedition.”

This brought a murmur of protest from the farmers, particularly from Staats van der Meulen, who stood up angrily amidst the crumbs of his lunch. Someone sneezed and one of the oxen broke wind. Robideau’s snores sawed away at the motionless air. No one dared to speak up.

“And when that’s done, I want you to ride out to Nysen’s Roost and inform the tenant there, one Jeremias Van Brunt”—here the patroon paused to look menacingly on the faces gathered beneath the trees—“that his lease is hereby terminated. You understand?”

Van den Post practically writhed with delight. “Ja,” he said, licking his lips. “Do we evict him tonight?”

In his anger, in his wrath and resentment, Stephanus very nearly said yes. But then his pragmatic side spoke to him and he relented, thinking of the crops in the field. “November,” he said finally. “After he’s paid his rent.”

Grand Union

Half an inch taller, ten pounds gaunter, his sunken cheeks buried beneath the weedy untamed beard of the prophet or madman, Tom Crane, self-proclaimed hero of the people and saint of the forest, made his way down the cool umbrageous aisles of the Peterskill Grand Union, blithely pushing a shopping cart before him. It was high summer, and he was dressed for the season in huaraches, a pair of striped bell-bottoms big enough to picnic on, a tie-dyed T-shirt that featured a series of dilating archery targets in three shades of magenta, and various scarves and headbands and dangling superfluous strips of leather, the whole of it overlaid with a gypsy jangle of beads, rings, Cocopah god’s eyes, pewter peace signs, Black Power buttons and feathers. In contrast, the cart itself appeared almost spartan. It was wonderfully free of the specious glittering boxes of the newest improved wonder product shoved down the throat of the consumer by those running dogs of the profit mongers, the ad execs of Madison Avenue. The saint of the forest wasn’t about to be taken in by frills and false promises; he went only for the basics — the unrefrigerated, plain-wrapped, vegetarian basics, that is.

Back at the shack, where rodents whispered in the eaves and delicate iridescent flies settled on unwashed plates, the larder was bare; though his vegetable garden was producing all the kohlrabi, bok choy and beet tops he could want, he was out of staples — out of pinto beans, brown rice, yeast powder and soy grits. He was out of soap and Sterno, hyssop and teriyaki. He’d awakened that morning to marmiteless toast, watery thrice-used tea leaves, to gruel bereft of condensed milk, and felt he’d procrastinated long enough. And so here he was, shopping. Whistling along with a peppy version of “Seventy-six Trombones” rendered on glockenspiel and cowbell, startling watery-eyed widows in the meat department, squeezing grapefruit, trotting up and down the aisles jingling like a turnstile and exuding the peculiar odor of rotting leaves that seemed to follow him everywhere, as happy a soul as you could find between Peterskill and Verplanck.

Happy? Yes. For he was no longer the horny celibate monkish saint he’d been for so long — things were different now, radically different: now he had a roommate. A soulmate. A love to share his vegetable medley and mung bean casserole and hang his socks out on the line where the sun peeked through the sylvan umbrella to warm the mossy banks of Blood Creek. It was this love that made him blissful, rapturous, silly even, this love that made him want to cut capers in the parking lot like Herbert Pompey sailing across the stage in La Mancha or kiss old Mrs. Fagnoli as she dragged herself from the car at the post office. Tom Crane had passed from sainthood to ecstasy.

He was happy on other counts too. For one thing, he’d failed his draft physical for the third straight time. Too skinny. He’d fasted the whole month of June (no way he was going to be a tool of the capitalist oppressors and take up arms against his revolutionary brothers in Vietnam) and staggered off the Selective Service scale at six foot two, a hundred and twenty-three pounds. Now he wouldn’t have to skulk off to Canada or Sweden or go through the trouble of faking a suicide. And to compound the joy, on the very day he’d failed his physical, the bees came into his life. Forty hives. Put up for sale by some decrepit old bankrupt redneck in Hopewell Junction for a pittance, a fraction of what they were worth. Tom had them now. Bees. What a concept: they did all the work, and he collected the profit. It was like the goose that laid the golden eggs. All he had to do was gather the stuff, strain it, pour it into the old mason jars he’d found in his grandfather’s basement, and sell it by the roadside, each jar decorated with a twenty-five-cents-the-gross lick ’em and stick ’em label that read TOM CRANE CRANE’S GOLD in Jessica’s handsomest script.

And then, as if all this bounty of bliss weren’t enough, there was the Arcadia.

Since he’d left Cornell, he’d led an aimless, commitmentless, dirt-bagging, pot-growing, goat-turd-mulching sort of existence, drifting from one placid scene to the next, like a water chestnut before it puts down roots. The Arcadia gave him an anchor for those roots. If there was a God, and He had come down from the portals of heaven to sort through all the world’s employments and enthusiasms in order to match Tom Crane up with his true, his only, his quintessential métier, the Arcadia would have been it.

The first he’d heard of it was at the April meeting of the Manitou-on-Hudson Marshwort Preservationists’ League. The speaker that evening was a tiny, bearded, lectern-thumping apologist for the Arcadia Foundation who, between thumps, gave a brief history of the fledgling organization, fulminated against the polluters and despoilers of the river, distributed membership applications and passed the hat (a porkpie cap, actually) for donations. What’s more, he showed slides of the Arcadia itself, sprung full-blown from Will Connell’s imagination.

It seemed that Will, the crusty radical folksinger and friend of the earth whose voice had rung loud and clear over Peletiah Crane’s cow pasture on that infamous day back in 1949, had had a dream. A vision. One that involved gentle breezes, halcyon days, sails and rigging and teakwood decks. He’d been reading a dog-eared old tome (Under Sail on Hudson’s River, by Preservation Crane, New York, 1879) that hearkened back to the days when the river was crowded with the low-bellied, broad-beamed Dutch sloops rendered obsolete by the steam engine, and suddenly the Arcadia rode up out of the misty recesses of some old chantey lodged in his brain. That very afternoon he strapped the mandolin to his back and hitchhiked down to the Scarsdale home of Sol and Frieda Lowenstein.

The Lowensteins were Communists who’d weathered the McCarthy era to make a killing in the recording industry. They were longtime friends and champions of Will and his music, known for their generosity in support of worthy causes. Will plunked himself down on the white linen couch in the Lowenstein drawing room, picked a song or two on the mandolin and wondered aloud why there were no big old work sloops on the Hudson anymore, the kind you saw in dim oil paintings and daguerreotypes in bars with names like “The Ship ’N’ Shore” and “The Spouter Inn.” You know, he said, the kind of big, quiet, white-sailed ship that would make people feel good about the river, and he showed them some pictures from Preservation Crane’s book. Sol and Frieda didn’t know, but they were willing to put up a piece of the money to find out. The result was the Arcadia Foundation, eight hundred and sixty-two strong, a nonprofit, tax-deductible organization dedicated to cleaning up the river, saving the short-nosed sturgeon, the osprey and the marshwort, and the Arcadia itself, all one hundred and six feet of her, a working replica of the sloops of old that would run up and down the river spreading the good news. The launching, from a shipyard in Maine, was scheduled for the Fourth of July.

Tom was electrified. It was as if all the disparate pieces of his life had come together in this one inspired moment. Here was something he could get behind, a slogan, a banner, a raison d’être: Save the River! Hail, Arcadia! Power to the People! Here was a way to protest the war, assert his extraterrestrial/vegetarian/nonviolent hippie credo, stick a thorn in the side of the establishment and clean up the river all in one blow. It was too perfect. The Will Connell connection went all the way back to the early days of the struggle that had consecrated the ground on which the shack stood, and the ecology thing tied up the loose ends of his job at Con Ed — with his experience, with his savvy and know-how, he could step aboard the Arcadia as a crew member, maybe even captain it! The fluorescent lights sizzled overhead, the little man raised his fist aloft in exhortation and all at once Tom pictured himself at the helm, champion of the lowly perch and sucker, foe to the polluters, the robber barons, the warmongers and orphan makers, the glorious high-masted ship cutting upriver like the great Ark itself, bastion of righteousness, goodness and light.

He joined that night. The next morning he quit his two-day-a-week job at Con Ed (no more formalin sniffing for him!) and gunned the Packard all the way up to South Bristol, Maine, where he found the Arcadia and volunteered his services as carpenter, fitter, pot scrubber and gofer. He was aboard for the launching, crewed on the trip down from New England, and in two weeks — was it only two weeks? — he’d be going aboard for a month as second mate.

Too much, too much, too much. The thought of it — all of it, love, freedom, bees and the sloop — had him capering around the Grand Union like a fool in motley. In fact, he was juggling two oranges and an avocado, watching his hands and gradually expanding the perimeter of his arc, when he looked up and saw Walter standing there before him.

It was a shock. His mood evaporated, his concentration broke. One of the oranges skewed off to the right and vanished in a bin of bean sprouts; the other landed at his feet with a sick thump. Walter caught the avocado.

The saint let out a gasp, mumbled two or three nonsensical phrases along the lines of “Hi are you, how?” and inadvertently jerked the cart over the little toes of his right foot.

Walter said nothing. He merely stood there, smiling faintly, the sagacious professor with an awkward student. He was dressed, to Tom’s amazement, in wingtip shoes, Arrow shirt, light tan summer suit and clocked tie. He was suntanned, handsome, big, standing up straight and tall on his inert feet like a man who’d never known the violence of the surgeon’s blade. “Tom Crane,” he said finally, grinning wider to show off his strong white teeth, “so how the hell are you? Still living up in the shack?”

Tom was fine. And yes, he was still living in the shack. And though he didn’t look it — and didn’t feel it — he was glad to see Walter. Or so he heard himself saying, the words dropping from his mouth as though he were a grinning little wooden dummy and someone else was doing the talking: “I’m glad to see you.”

“Me too,” Walter said. “It’s been a while.”

The two considered the weightiness of this observation for a moment, while strangely silent shoppers glided past them, each affixed to his or her own cart. Tom stooped for the smashed orange, and was surreptitiously reinserting it in the display pyramid, when Walter caught him with the question he’d been dreading: “Seen Jessica lately?”

Now, while the aforementioned love that had played so big a part in transforming Tom Crane’s life has not, to this juncture, been named, her identity should come as no surprise. That love, of course, was Jessica. For whom else had the saint silently yearned all his miserable life — or for years, anyway? Whom else had he dreamed of marrying even as Walter slipped the ring on her finger and the sky outside the shack grew as dark and turbulent as his own tempestuous feelings? Who else had sat between him and Walter at the movies while he burned to take her hand, kiss her throat, blow in her ear? Could he begin to count the times he’d sat transfixed with lust as she’d tried on clothes in a dress shop, licked at a double scoop of Bavarian fudge chocolate swirl ice cream or read aloud to him from Franny and Zooey or The Dharma Bums in her soft, hesitant, little-girl voice? Or the times he’d envisioned the sweet, tapering, blondpussied length of her stretched out beside him in his musty hermit’s bed?

Jessica. Yes, Jessica.

Hurt, bewildered, disoriented, subject to sudden attacks of snuffling and nose-blowing, knee-knocking and sulks, she’d come to him, her dear old platonic friend, for comfort. And he’d plied her with fried okra and brown rice with shredded carrots and pine nuts, with the peace of a winter’s night, a spring morning, the everlasting and restorative midsummer’s eves at the cabin, with birds, fireflies, the trill of lovesick toads, the timeless tranquility that holds beyond the range of streetlights and paved roads. What could he say? One thing led to another. Love bloomed.

Walter was crazy. Walter was crippled. Walter was gloomy, angry, self-destructive. In his bliss, in his jealously guarded happiness, the saint of the forest forgot all about his old friend and boon companion. Walter had gone over to the other side now — working with that fascist Van Wart, not just for him — and it wasn’t as if he hadn’t rejected her, after all. Humiliated her, kicked her aside like a piece of trash. No, Tom Crane didn’t feel any guilt, not a shred of it. Why should he? Of course, for all that, as he stood there puzzling over Walter’s tight-cropped hair with the razor-slash part and vanishing sideburns, he couldn’t help but think of Jessica, stuffing underwear, sheets and filth-stiffened jeans into the washer at the laundromat next door — or, more particularly, of the fact that she was due to join him any minute now.

“J-Jessica?” he stammered in response to Walter’s query. “Yes. No. I mean, I quit that Con Ed gig, did I tell you?”

Walter’s smile faded. There was something of it in his eyes still, but now his lips were pursed and the lines of his forehead lifted in surprise.

“You know, with Jessica? At Indian Point?”

“No, I didn’t know,” Walter murmured, turning aside to sift through a basket of plums, the dark bruised fruit like strange coin in his hand, “—I just … wondered … you know, if she’s okay and all.”

The saint of the forest threw a nervous glance up the aisle, past the checkout counters, the slouching boxboys and impatient housewives, to the automatic door. It was just an ordinary supermarket door — one way in, one way out — but suddenly it had taken on a new and hellish aspect.

“So you don’t see much of her anymore either, huh?” Walter said, dropping a handful of plums into a plastic bag. Tom noticed that he was bracing himself against the cart now, using it as an old woman with fused hips might use an aluminum walker.

“Well, no, I wouldn’t say that. …” He took a deep breath. What the hell, he thought, might as well tell him — he’ll find out sooner or later anyway. “What I mean is, uh”—but then, why spoil a beautiful afternoon? — “actually, you know, I think I left my wallet in the car and I think I better, um, well—”

But it was too late.

Here she was, Jessica, sweeping through the door like a poster come to life, like Miss America stepping over the prostrate forms of the second, third and fourth runners up, the light in her hair, her flawless posture, her golden knees. He saw the soft anticipatory smile on her lips, watched the graceful sweep of her head as she scanned the aisles for him, then the full flower of her smile as she spotted him and waved. He didn’t wave back — he could barely bob his head and force his lips back over his gums in a paralyzed grin. His shoulders seemed to be sinking into his chest.

Walter hadn’t looked up yet. He was fumbling with a recalcitrant bunch of bananas, a little unsteady on his feet, waiting for the sequel to what Tom had been saying about his wallet. Jessica was halfway down the aisle, caught between the eggplant and summer squash, when she recognized him. Tom saw her face go numb, then suffuse with blood. There was confusion — no, outright panic — in her eyes, and she faltered, nearly stumbling over a pudgy six-year-old from whose mouth a Sugar Daddy protruded like a second tongue. Tom tried to warn her off with his eyes.

And then Walter looked at Tom, and saw that Tom was looking at someone else.

“Jessica!” Tom shouted, trying to inject as much surprise into his tone as he could. “We were — we were just talking about you!”

Walter was rigid. He gripped the cart so hard his knuckles turned white, and he cradled the bananas as if they were alive. Jessica was on them now, awkward, too tall, gangling, her legs and arms naked, the shell top too bright, the cloisonné earrings scorching her ears. “Yeah,” Walter murmured, looking down at the floor and then up into her eyes, “we were. Really.” And then, in an undertone: “Hi.”

“What a coincidence, huh?” Tom yelped, slapping his hands together for emphasis. “God,” he said, “God, you’re looking good, Jessica. Isn’t she, Van?” and he trailed off with a strained laugh.

Jessica had regained her composure. She moved toward Tom, erect and commanding, hair floating at her shoulders, neck arched, mouth set, and slipped an arm around his waist. “We’re living together, Walter,” she said. “Tom and I. Up at the shack.”

In that moment Tom felt as small and mean as a saint ever felt. He watched Walter’s face — the face of his oldest and closest friend — as it struggled for control, and he felt like a liar, a traitor, he felt like a scorpion in a boot. Jessica gripped him tighter. She was leaning into him now with virtually her full weight (which, by latest reckoning, was six pounds greater than his), and he found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to strain toward her to keep from tumbling backward into the onions. She had spoken decisively, bluntly, treading wide of emotion, but now her lower lip was trembling and her eyes were bright with fluid.

Walter’s face had initially registered the shock of seeing her, and then, as she came up to them, he uttered his heavy-lidded and sheepish greeting, with all its conciliatory freight, and he’d looked open, hopeful, truly and ingenuously pleased. Now, as her words sank in, his expression hardened, all the emotion chiseled away, until at last he wore the perfect unassailable mask of the outcast, the cold of eye and hard of heart, the man who feels nothing. He began to say something, but caught himself.

“It’s been so long,” Jessica said, softening. “We — Tom and I — thought about you, wondered how you were coming along”—and here she glanced down at his feet—“and we would have called, really, but I didn’t know how you felt about it, I mean, after that last time in the hospital and all. …” She trailed off, her voice catching in her throat.

Walter was silent. Tom couldn’t look him in the eye; he tried to think about pleasant things, good things, things of the earth. Like his goat, his cabbage, his bees. “You and Tom,” Walter said finally, as if trying out the words for the first time; “you and Tom,” he repeated, and his tone had turned venomous.

Tom could feel Jessica go tense beside him; she shifted her weight suddenly and he had to snatch at the cart to keep his balance. “Yeah, that’s right,” she said, cold fury in her voice. “Tom and me. You have any objections?”

A version of “Love Me Do,” for bicycle horn and chorus, droned through hidden speakers. An elderly man, guiding his cart with the broad beam of his fallen abdomen, maneuvered his way between them and began sifting through the onions as if he were panning for gold. “Hey, Ray!” the manager barked at an invisible stockboy, “get the lead out of your pants, will ya?”

As Tom feared, Walter did have objections. He vented them nonverbally at first, clutching the cart with both hands and hammering it with his invulnerable foot till it shuddered, and then he waxed sarcastic. And rhetorical. “Objections?” he sneered. “Who, me? I’m only your husband — why should I object if you’re fucking my best friend?”

The onion sifter turned to look at them. Tom felt like an interloper. Or worse: he felt like a Lothario, a snake in the grass, and envisioned Walter’s hands at his throat, Walter’s fist in his face, Walter’s hundred and ninety footless pounds hurtling at him over the basket laden with soy grits and rice. Jessica suddenly let go of him, snatching her arm from around his waist and holding up a single searing finger: “You walked out on me,” she said between her teeth, each syllable edged with an inchoate sob.

“You walked out on me,” Walter shot back. Puffed with rage, big as cueballs, his eyes swept from Jessica to Tom and back again.

Out of the corner of his eye, Tom saw the old onion sifter jam his hands to his hips as if to say “Enough, already!” The saint, agitated enough as it was, swiveled his head to give the old fart his fiercest “fuck off” look (which admittedly wasn’t all that fierce), and when he turned back to Jessica she was stamping her feet like a flamenco dancer warming up to the beat, and tears glistened on her face. “I don’t have to take this, this”—her voice went over the top in a breathy squeak—“this shit!”

Walter stepped back then, calmly, gravely, and gave them all — Tom, Jessica, the old man with the bag of onions and the half-dozen housewives who’d lingered over the Swiss chard to eavesdrop — a look of supreme contempt. Then he nodded his head fifteen or twenty times, as if to concede the point, and wobbled out behind his cart, shuffling unsteadily down the aisle till he rounded the corner by the condiments and disappeared.

Jessica didn’t take it lightly. She felt around her for a moment as if she were blind, dabbed a damp wrist to her eyes and bolted for the exit without a word. She was sobbing when Tom, who’d left the cart behind and dashed out after her, reached the car. She sobbed as he drove, sobbed as she pressed the duffel bag crammed with still-wet laundry to her chest and made her way down the steep path from the road, through the pasture, across the footbridge and up the hill to the shack. She sobbed as Tom boiled up the last of the old rice and threw together a Bibb lettuce and zucchini salad from the garden, and she sobbed as they sat in the gathering darkness sharing a forlorn joint and two jelly jars of sour wine.

By nightfall, she’d wound down from a sporadic mewl and whimper to the regular heaving of long, stuttering, world-weary sighs. The saint of the forest was gentle, tender, awkward and clumsy. He clowned for her, joked that she should take salt tabs to replenish that vital mineral she’d extruded by the shaker-full and even (partly by design, partly by accident) fell backward over the porch railing and into the big washtub full of dirty dishwater. This last brought a rueful smile to her lips, and he poured it on, standing on his hands, balancing a broom on his nose and all the rest. She laughed. Her eyes cleared. They went to bed.

The bony saint made love to her that night, a soft, therapeutic love, and he was as careful and tentative in his lovemaking as if it were the first time. After she fell asleep, he lay there beside her in the darkness, the day’s events replaying themselves over and over in his head. He winced when he thought of his own falseness and cowardice, of the role Walter’s sudden appearance had thrust him into, but when he thought of Jessica, he was afraid.

He reached out to touch her, to stroke her sleeping arm, as if to reassure himself she was still there. It was the picture of her disconsolate eyes and tortured mouth, of her runny nose and quaking shoulders, that got him. She wasn’t his, she was Walter’s — why else would she act like that?

Sad to the core, jealous, fearful, the would-be saint lay there in the darkness with his hurt and his regret. They made such a great pair, he and Jessica — into fish, the Hudson, goats and bees and home-pressed cider. They did. Of course they did. And as he thought of all the things they had in common, he began to feel better. Certainly she had feelings for Walter — they’d been through a heavy thing together — but she had feelings for him too. He knew it, and she knew it. They fit together. They were made for each other. Theirs was such a — and the joke sprang into his head like an anodyne, like a cold compress applied to a fresh bruise — such a grand union.

A Question of Balance

Coolly, methodically, step by scrupulous step, Walter went through the motions of his biweekly trip to the supermarket as if nothing had happened. Was he out of dental floss, or no? Planter’s peanuts? Saltwater taffy? Onions? He deliberated over the pasta — linguine, vermicelli or shells? — tapped the watermelons, rejected the Pancho Villa Authentic Mexican TV dinner (enchilada, rice, beans and salsa verde, with a dollop of baked custard on the side) in favor of the I Ching (egg roll, pork fried rice, Canton strudel and fortune cookie). Never lifting his head, never peering around the corners or gazing up the aisles, he examined each product as if he’d never seen its like before, as if each individual package were a wonder on the order of bleeding statues or extraterrestrial life.

He may have looked cool, but beneath the broad-cut lapels and flared waist of his beige Bertinelli suit, he was seething. And sweating. His armpits were wet — Right Guard, was he out of Right Guard? — water coursed down his back inside the Arrow shirt and pasted it to his skin, his crotch was clammy. As he stood at the checkout stand staring hostilely at the herd of cud-chewing checkout girls, pregnant housewives, yammering children and pimply boxboys, he wanted to scream out, hit something, slam his fist into the counter till the skin opened up to reveal the naked bones of his hand, cracked and white and hurt to the marrow. Tom Crane and Jessica. It couldn’t be true. It wasn’t. They were kidding him — it was a joke, that’s what it was.

He bowed his head and tried to concentrate on a wad of soiled paper balled up beneath the candy display. He counted to twenty. Finally, when he could stand it no longer, he lifted his head and glanced furtively around him. One quick look: to the right, to the left, then face forward and out the window to scan the lot for her car.

They were gone.

Son of a bitch. He wanted to tear the place apart, wanted to kill her, kill him. “Hey, shake it up there, will you,” he heard himself snarl, the checker, the woman ahead of him, the stringy looking boxboy all suddenly gone white in the face, “you think I got all day here?”

Outside, the first thing he did — even before he loaded the perishables into the trunk of the MG or stripped off his damp jacket and rolled up the sleeves — was trundle angrily on up to the liquor store on the far side of the laundromat and buy himself a pint of Old Inver House. He didn’t usually drink in the afternoon — even on a Saturday afternoon — and he hadn’t been drunk, or stoned either, since New Year’s and the occasion of his second dire miscue in the face of history. But this was different. This was a situation that called for meliorative measures, for a dampening and allaying of the spirit, for loss of control. He dropped the groceries in the trunk and eased into the driver’s seat. Right then and there, though the top was down and everyone could see him, he cracked the Scotch and took a long burning hit of it. And then another. He glared at a beefy armed old woman who looked suspiciously like his grandmother, tossed the bottle cap over his shoulder, jammed the pint between his legs and took off in a smokescreen of exhaust, laying down rubber as if he were flaying flesh.

The bottle was half-gone and he was hurtling up the Mohican Parkway, concentrating on pinning the obstinate little white needle on a speck of dust mired between the 8 and the o, when he thought of Miss Egthuysen — of Laura. If he was now the very model of the disaffected hero, cut off from friends, wife and family (the last two times he’d stopped in for dinner with Hesh and Lola he’d wound up in a shouting match over his relationship with Depeyster Van Wart), cut off from feeling itself, well, at least he had Laura. As a consolation of sorts. If Meursault had his Marie (“A moment later she asked me if I loved her. I said that sort of question had no meaning, really; but I supposed I didn’t”), Walter had his Laura. And that was something. Especially at a time like this.

He might have paused to reflect on the turmoil of his feelings, to wonder why, when ostensibly he couldn’t have given a shit what Jessica, Tom Crane, Mardi or the pope in Rome himself did or didn’t do, he felt so bitter and desperate all of a sudden. But he didn’t pause. The trees beat past him, endless lashings of green, the wind tore at his hair and the image of Miss Egthuysen loomed up out of his fevered brain. He saw her stretched out naked on the black velvet couch in her living room, her lips puckered in a kissy pout, hands masking her breasts, her private hair so blonde it might have been white. Suddenly the onrushing breeze went sweet with the scent of the vanilla extract she dabbed behind her ears, on her wrists and ankles and between her breasts (extra-thick shakes, napoleons, Boston cream pie, that’s what he thought of when he closed his eyes and plunged into the creamy aromatic core of her), and he hit the brakes so hard the car fishtailed a hundred yards up the parkway. In the next instant he was humping over a grassy divider — no one coming either way, thank god — and peeling out on the far side of the road, headed south.

The bottle was two-thirds gone and the day’s second disappointment on him as he jabbed angrily at what for a moment had become the glowing little omphalos of Miss Egthuysen’s existence, the door buzzer. He listened, first with anticipation, then with impatience, and finally with despair shading into rage, as the harsh trill of the buzzer sounded in the cluttered hallway he knew so well. There was no answer. He felt defeated. Put out. Abused. The bitch, he muttered, throwing himself down heavily on the front steps and peering into the aperture of the bottle like a jeweler examining a rare stone. As luck would have it, he was sitting in a puddle of something resinous and sticky, something that was even then irreparably transforming the hue of his beige slacks, but he was too far gone to notice.

Overwhelmed with drunken gloom, Walter tilted the bottle back and drank, pausing only to level his eyes on the pinched censorious features of Laura’s landlady, Mrs. Deering, who was regarding him with loathing from behind the sunstruck front window of the apartment next door. Walter momentarily lowered the bottle to fix her with a look so vehement, so bestial, slack-jawed and irresponsible, that she backed away from the window as if from the sight of some half-wit abusing himself in the street. Keeping her eyes on him all the way, she disappeared into the fastness of her apartment, no doubt to telephone the sheriff, the state police and the local barracks of the National Guard. Okay, fine. What did Walter care? What were they going to do to him — string him up by his feet? He had a bitter laugh at the thought, but it only served to intensify his gloom. The fact was that the confectionery comforts of Miss Egthuysen were not available to him, and his bottle was nearly empty. Yes, and his wife was living with his best friend, he himself was crippled, unloved and doomed by the scourge of history, and all those letters he’d addressed to Truman Van Brunt, c/o General Delivery, Barrow, Alaska, had vanished as if into the snowy wasteland itself, pale missives overwhelmed by white.

Cursing, he took hold of the rusty wrought-iron railing and pulled himself to his feet. He stood there a moment, swaying like a sapling in a storm, glaring angrily at Mrs. Deering’s window as if challenging her to show herself again. Then he killed the bottle, dropped it in the bushes and wiped his hands on his shirt. A kid on a bicycle — eight, nine years old, red hair, freckles — came tearing down the sidewalk as he lurched for the car, and it was all Walter could do to avoid him. Unfortunately, the concentration and force of will expended in this tricky maneuver left him vulnerable to other obstacles. Like the fire hydrant. In the next instant, the kid was gone, Mrs. Deering’s head had reappeared in the window, and Walter was reclining face down on the lawn.

Back in the car, he examined the grass stains on the knees of his once-beige trousers and the suspicious smear at the base of his clocked tie. What next? he muttered angrily, jerking the tie from his neck and flinging it into the street. It took him a while to fit the key into the little silver slot of the ignition, which kept dodging away from him and bobbing back again, like a float with a nibbling fish beneath it, but at last he succeeded, firing up the car with a vibraphonic rattle of the valve lifters. He looked around him for a moment, the world gone suddenly strange, his face tingling as if a swarm of tiny hairy-legged creatures were trapped beneath the skin and struggling to get out. Then he slammed the car into gear and took off with a screech Mrs. Deering would never forget.

Before he knew it, he was on Van Wart Road. Heading west. That is, heading in the direction of several significant landmarks. Tom Crane’s hubcap, for one. Van Wart Manor, for another. And for yet another, the hellish, mysterious, realigned and reinforced historical marker that had launched him on this trail of tears in the first place.

And where was he going?

Not until he’d come within a cigarette’s length of sideswiping a van full of fist-waving teenagers at Cats’ Corners, not until he’d lumbered through the wicked S curve that followed, not until he slowed at Tom Crane’s elm to bore his eyes into the back of the car pulled up on the shoulder beneath it, did it become clear to him: he was going to Van Wart Manor. For Mardi. The MG rolled to a halt and he gazed ruefully at the hubcap leering at him from the bole of the elm I’m home, yes, it seemed to mock, and so is she—until a station wagon roared past him in the outside lane, horn blaring, and he came to his senses. He jerked the wheel and lurched away from that declamatory hubcap, intent on Van Wart Manor and the solace of Mardi, but almost as soon as he hit the gas — gravel flying, tires protesting, Jessica’s Bug falling away to his right — he was stabbing for the brake. Violently. Desperately.

There before him, strung out across the road and down the shoulder as far as he could see, was a line of people. Picnickers. The men in hats and baggy pants, the women in culottes and sandals and ankle socks, their arms laden with baskets, children, lawn chairs, newspapers to spread out on the ground. He was headed right for them, their cries of alarm terrible in his ears, people scattering like dominoes, a single woman — pamphlets tucked under her arm, a toddler at her side — frozen in his path, and his foot, his impotent alien foot, only now finding the brake. There was a scream, a blizzard of paper, his own face, his mother’s, and then they were gone and he was wrestling with the wheel, all the way out on the far side of the road.

He wasn’t aiming for it, didn’t mean it — he was drunk, freaked out, hallucinating — but there it was. The marker. Dead ahead of him. By the time he reached it, he couldn’t have been doing more than twenty, battling to keep out of the ditch, billows of dust rocketing up behind him — on the wrong side of the road, for christ’s sake! Still, he did hit it, dead on, the bumper of the MG like the prow of an icebreaker, cryptic Cranes and unfathomable Mohonks flung to the winds, metal grinding on metal. In the next instant he was in control again, swerving back across the road just in time to thread the stone pillars and make the hard cut into the long stately sweeping drive of Van Wart Manor.

Here, peace reigned. The world was static, tranquil, timeless, bathed in the enduring glow of privilege and prosperity. There were no phantasms here, no signs of class strife, of grasping immigrants, trade unionists, workers, Communists and malcontents, no indication that the world had changed at all in the past three hundred years. Walter gazed out on the spreading maples, the flagstone paths, the spill of the lawns and the soft pastel patterns of the roses against the lush backdrop of the woods, and he felt the panic subside. Everything was all right. Really. He was just a little drunk, that was all.

As he swung around the parabola of the driveway and approached the house itself, he saw that there were three cars pulled up at the curb in front: Dipe’s Mercedes, Joanna’s station wagon and Mardi’s Fiat. He was a little sloppy with the wheel — almost nodded off while shifting into reverse, in fact — but managed to wedge himself in between the station wagon and Fiat without hitting anything. So far as he could tell, that is. He was standing woozily in front of the MG, inspecting the bumper where the sign had raked it, when he heard the front door slam and looked up to see Joanna coming down the steps toward him.

She was dressed in moccasins and leggings, in fringed buckskin spotted with grease or ink or something, and her skin had a weird rufous cast to it, the color of old brick. Bits of feathers and seashells and whatnot dangled from her hair, which was knotted and tangled and so slick with grease she must have shampooed with salad oil. She had a box with her. A big cardboard supermarket box that bore the logo of a detergent guaranteed to brighten your shirts and socks and your mornings too. The box was overladen and she was balancing it on the apex of her swollen abdomen, waddling a bit, her lips molded in a beatific smile.

“Hi,” Walter said, straightening up and rubbing his hands together, as if crouching down in her driveway were the most natural thing in the world for him to have been doing. “Just, uh, checking to see if the beast was leaking oil again, you know?” he slurred, making it a question, an excuse and a plea all rolled in one.

Joanna acted as if she hadn’t heard him. Just kept coming, waddling, embracing the big box full of — what was it, dolls? “Hi,” Walter repeated, as she drew even with him, “need a hand with that?”

Now, for the first time, her eyes seemed to focus on him. “Oh, hi,” she said, her voice as tranquil and steady as if she’d been expecting him, “you startled me.” Her eyes were Mardi’s, but all the ice was melted from them. She didn’t look startled at all. In fact, if Walter didn’t know better, he would have guessed she was stoned. “Yes,” she said, dumping the box in his arms, “please.”

Walter took the box. Inside were dolls. Or rather, parts of dolls: heads, limbless torsos, the odd arm or leg with its molded sock and shoe affixed. Each of them — each face, limb, set of buttocks, belly and chest — had been slathered with some sort of paint or polish that made it look rusty, flesh gone the color of rakes left out in the rain. Walter clutched the box to his chest while Joanna fumbled through her rabbit-skin purse for the keys to the station wagon’s rear door.

It seemed to take her forever. Walter began to feel uncomfortable, standing there beneath the unwavering August sun in his stained pants and sweaty shirt, staring drunkenly into the heap of dismembered limbs, frozen smiles and madly winking eyes, and so he said, “For the Indians?” just to say something.

She took the box from him, gave him a look that made him wonder if she really had recognized him after all, then slid the box into the back of the wagon and slammed the door. “Of course,” she said, turning away from him to make her way to the front of the car, “who else is there?”

Next it was Lula.

She knew him now, of course, knew him well — he was the friend of her nephew Herbert and one of Mr. Van Wart’s executives. And a very special friend of Mardi too. She greeted him at the door with a smile that showed all the fillings in her teeth. “You look like you been run down in the street,” she said.

Walter gave her a sloppy grin and found himself in the anteroom, glancing first up the staircase to where the door to Mardi’s lair lay masked in shadow, and then to his left, where the comforting gloom of the old parlor was steeped in muted sunlight.

“Mardi’s upstairs,” Lula said, giving him a sly look, “and Mr. Van Wart’s out back someplace — poking around in the barn, I think. Which one you want?”

Walter was aiming for nonchalance, but the Scotch was drilling holes in his head and his feet seemed to have called in sick. He took hold of the banister for support. “I guess I came to see Mardi,” he said.

Only now did he notice that Lula was clutching her purse, and that a little white straw hat floated atop the typhoon of her hair. “I’m on my way out the door,” she said, “but I’ll give her a hoot.” Her voice rose in stentorian summons, practiced, assured and familiar all at once—“Mardi!” she called, “Mardi! Somebody here to see you!”—and then she gave him another great wide lickerish grin and ducked out the door.

There was a moment of restive silence, as if the old house were caught in that briefest hiatus between one breath and another, and then Mardi’s voice — querulous, world-weary, so shot through with boredom it was almost a whine — came back to him: “Well, who is it — Rick?” Silence. Then her voice again, faint, muffled, as if she’d already lost interest and turned away, “So send him up already.”

Walter was not Rick. Walter did not in fact know who Rick was, nor did he much care. Shakily, unsteadily, he lifted the stones of his feet, gripping the banister as if it were a lifeline, and mounted the stairs. At the top, Mardi’s door, first one on the right. The door stood slightly ajar, a garish poster of a band Walter had never heard of crudely affixed to the face of it. He hesitated a moment, staring into the hungry shameless eyes of the band’s members, trying out the ponderous flat-footed syllables of their esoteric name on his tongue, wondering if he should knock. The booze decided for him. He pushed his way in.

The room was as dark as any cave, a low moan of bass and guitar caught in the far speaker, Mardi, in the light from the door, hunkered over an ashtray in the middle of the bed. She was wearing a T-shirt and panties, nothing more. “Rick?” she said, squinting against the invasion of light.

“No,” Walter murmured, feeling immeasurably weary, vastly drunk, “it’s me, Walter.”

The light fell across her face, the wild teased bush of her hair. She lifted a hand to shield her eyes. “Oh, fuck,” she spat, “shut the door, will you? The top of my head feels like it’s about to lift off.”

Walter stepped inside and shut the door. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark, a moment during which the plaint of bass and guitar was amplified by the addition of a muddy quavering vocal track — some guy who sounded as if he were singing through his socks. From the bottom of a sewer. In hell. “Nice music,” Walter said. “Who is it — the guys on the door?”

Mardi didn’t answer. Her cigarette — or no, it was a joint; he could smell it — glowed in the dark.

He started for the bed, thinking to ease himself down on it, maybe take a hit of the joint, help her off with her T-shirt, forget himself for a space. But he didn’t quite make it. Something immovable — the beveled edge of her bureau? — caught him in the groin, and his foot came down hard on something else, something frangible, that gave way with a splintering crack.

Still Mardi said nothing.

“You got a headache?” he said, struggling for balance, bending low to reach for the near corner of the mattress, “is that it?” And then, mercifully, he was sinking into the mattress, off his feet at last and so close to her he could feel the heat of her body, smell her hair, her sweat, the least maddening essence of her secret self.

“I’m waiting for Rick,” she said, and her voice was strange, distant, as if it weren’t really plugged in. “Rick,” she repeated, in a murmur. And then: “I’m stoned, really stoned. I’m tripping. Seeing things. Scary things.”

Walter pondered this revelation for a minute, then confessed that he wasn’t feeling so hot himself. This, he hoped, would be the prelude to some meliorative embraces and consolatory sex, but his hopes were immediately dashed when she sprang up from the bed as if she’d been stung, stalked across the room and flung the door open. Her face was twisted with fury and the cold hard irises of her eyes contracted round the pinpoints of her pupils. “Get out!” she shouted, her voice rising to a shriek with the punch of the adverb.

The term “flipping out” came to him, but he didn’t know whether it properly applied to Mardi or himself. In any case, he got up off the bed with alacrity, envisioning a vindictive Depeyster taking the stairs two at a time to see what his most trusted employee was doing to his half-dressed and hysterical daughter in the darkness of her room. As he staggered toward her, though, all the hurts and dislocations of the day began to fester in him, and he stopped short to demand an explanation along the lines of I thought we were friends and what about last month when we … and then we…?

“No,” she said, trembling in her T-shirt, nipples hard, navel exposed, legs strong and naked and brown, “never again. Not with you.”

They were face to face now, inches apart. He looked down at her: a tic had invaded the right side of her face, her lips were parted and dry. All of a sudden he was seized with an urge to choke her, throttle her, knead that perfect throat till all the tightness went out of it, till she dropped from his hands limp as a fish slapped against the gunwale. But in the same instant she shouted “You’re just like him!” and the accusation caught him off balance.

“Like who?” he sputtered, wondering what she was talking about, how he’d managed to put his foot in it in the space of two minutes, and even, for a second there, wondering who he was. He watched her closely, drunk but wary. She was swaying on her feet. He was swaying on his feet. Her breath was hot in his face.

“My father!” she shrieked, lunging into him to pound her balled hands on the drum of his chest. He tried to snatch at her wrists, but she was too quick for him. “Look at you,” she snarled, pushing away from him so violently he nearly lurched backward over the railing and plunged to the unforgiving peg-and-groove floor below. “Look at you, in your faggoty suit and fucking crew cut — what do you think you are, some kind of Shriner or something?”

“Mardi?” Depeyster’s voice echoed from the rear of the house. “That you?”

She stood poised in the doorway, drilling Walter with a look that tore through the last tattered rags of his self-esteem. “I’ll tell you what you are,” she said, lowering her voice as a bull lowers its horns for goring, “you’re a fascist just like him. A fascist,” she repeated, lingering over the hiss of it as if she were Adam discovering the names of things — fink, pig, narc, fascist — and slammed the door for punctuation.

Terrific, Walter thought, standing there in the empty hallway. He was footless, fatherless, loveless, his wife was living with his best friend and the woman he’d left her for probably felt better about Mussolini than she did about him. And on top of it all, he was sick to his stomach, his head ached and he’d nearly ripped the bumper off his car. What next?

Walter braced himself against the banister and turned to peer down the well of the staircase. Below him, at the foot of the stairs, in an old pair of chinos and a faded blue shirt that brought out the color in his eyes, stood Depeyster Van Wart — Dipe — his boss and mentor. Depeyster was working something in his hands — a harness or bridle, it looked like — and he wore a puzzled expression. “Walter?” he said.

Walter started down the stairs. He was forcing a smile, though the muscles of his face seemed dead and he felt as if he were either going to pass out cold or break down and sob — hard, soulless and free though he may have been. All things considered, he did pretty well. When he reached the last step, leering like a child molester, he held out his hand and boomed “Hi, Dipe,” as if he were greeting him from the far side of Yankee Stadium.

They stood a moment at the foot of the stairs, Walter losing all control of his face, the lord of the manor dropping the bridle — yes, bridle it was — to lift a hand and scratch the back of his head. “Did I hear Mardi?” he asked.

“Uh-huh,” Walter said, but before he could enlarge on this curt and wholly inadequate reply, Depeyster cut him off with a low whistle. “Jesus,” he said, “you look like hell, you know that?”

Later, over successive cups of coffee in the ancient cavernous kitchen that gleamed with the anachronisms of dishwasher, toaster, refrigerator and oven, Walter experienced the release of confession. He told Depeyster of Jessica and Tom, of his hallucination on the road, the defeat in his heart and his crazy confrontation with Mardi. Hunched over the bridle with a rag soaked in neat’s-foot oil, Depeyster listened, glancing up from time to time, his aristocratic features composed, priestly, supremely disinterested. He offered the encouragement of the occasional interrogatory grunt or interjection, heard him out and chose sides without hesitation. “I hate to say it, Walter”—he spoke in clean, clipped, incisive tones—“but your wife sounds like she’s gone off the deep end. I mean, what can you expect from a woman who could move into a shack that hasn’t even got electricity, let alone running water — and with a doped-up screwball like that Crane kid, yet. Is that stable or what?”

No, of course it wasn’t. It was irrational, stupid, a mistake. Walter shrugged.

“You made a mistake, Walter, forget it. We all make mistakes. And as for Mardi — well, maybe that’s for the best too.” Depeyster gave him a long look. “I admit it, Walter, I hoped that maybe you and her, well. …” He broke off with a sigh. “I hate to say this about my own daughter, but you’re worth ten of her.”

Walter blew the steam from his fifth cup of coffee and toyed with a wedge of peach cobbler. He was feeling better, the nausea held temporarily in check, his despair tempered in absolution. And he was feeling something else too, a sense that his moment of triumph and decision was hovering just in front of him: his life had come to a point of crisis, and now, he thought, still drunk but infused with a sort of alcoholic rapture, he was on the verge of release. “You know all those letters I wrote to my father?” he asked suddenly. “In Barrow?”

If Depeyster was caught off guard by the abrupt turn in the dialogue, he didn’t show it. He leaned back in the chair, dropping the bridle on the newspaper he’d spread out on the table. “Yeah,” he said, “what about them?”

“They never came back.” Walter paused to let this sink in.

“So you think he’s there, then, huh?”

“Uh-huh. And I want to go find out.” Walter raised the cup to his lips, but in his excitement put it down without drinking. “I’ve been saving my money. I’m going to fly up there.”

“Walter, listen,” Depeyster began, “that’s terrific, that’s great — but have you really thought about it? What if he’s not there and you waste all that time and money for nothing? How you going to feel then? Or what if he won’t see you? Or if he’s changed? You remember his problem with alcohol. What if he’s a drunk in the gutter? Look, I don’t want to discourage you, but don’t you think if he wanted to see you he would have answered your letters? It’s been what — eleven, twelve years? A lot can happen in that time, Walter.”

Walter was listening — Dipe was only trying to protect him, he knew that. And he was grateful to him. But he had to go. He hadn’t told Depeyster about the marker — he’d never have believed it was an accident — but the fact was that it was gone: blasted, obliterated, wiped out. There was nothing here that had a hold on him any more — not Hesh, not Dipe, not Mardi, Jessica, Tom Crane or Laura Egthuysen. The marker had started the whole sick cycle and now he’d completed it — the Van Wartville stage of it, anyway. There was nothing left now but to go find his father and bury the ghosts forever.

“I think you’re crazy,” Depeyster was saying. “You’re a strong smart young man, Walter, with a lot of good qualities and personal attractiveness. You’ve had some bad luck — terrible, rotten luck — but I say forget the past and look ahead of you. With what you’ve got you can go a long way — and I don’t just mean in my business, but in any business you want.” Depeyster pushed back the chair and went to the stove. “More coffee?”

Walter shook his head.

“You sure? You feel all right to drive?” Depeyster poured himself a cup and crossed the room to sit back down at the table. Outside the window, a solid unbroken monolith of shadow fell from the house to engulf the lawn and the rose garden at the foot of it. “I’m paying you a good salary, Walter — damn good, for a kid of your age,” Depeyster said finally. “And you’re worth every penny of it. Stick with me. It can only go up.”

Walter pushed himself up from the table. “I got to go, Dipe,” he said, a fearful sense of urgency on him, of things closing in.

At the front door, he turned to shake hands with him, so charged with emotion he felt as if he were leaving that moment for the penumbral wastes of the north, felt like a daredevil climbing into his barrel on the icy lip of Niagara. “Thanks, Dipe,” he said, nearly choking up, “thanks for listening and, you know, for the advice and all.”

“My pleasure, Walter,” Depeyster said, grinning his aristocratic grin. “Be careful now, huh?”

Walter dropped his hand, and then, in the rush of his good feeling, said, “One other thing, Dipe — I’m going to need two weeks off. … I mean, if it’s not going to be a problem or anything.”

In that instant Depeyster’s face went cold. The look he gave Walter was the same look Hesh put on when he was challenged or disappointed. Confused, growing hot, already knowing the answer from the set of that face, Walter suddenly thought of the last time he’d seen Hesh, nearly a month ago. It was during dinner — Walter’s favorite, borscht, lamb chops and potato latkes, with sauerkraut and homemade apple sauce and lettuce from the garden — and Walter had mentioned his father — Truman — and Hesh had made some deprecatory remark. Well, you may hate him, Walter blurted, but Depeyster says—

At the very mention of Depeyster’s name Hesh had exploded, leaping up from his chair to pound his fist on the table, leaning over to rage in Walter’s face like a barking dog. Depeyster says, he mocked. Who the hell you think it was that raised you, huh? The bum that left you an orphan? This, this robber baron, this crook that puts all these ideas in your head — is he the one? What right does he have?

Hesh, Lola was at his side now, her slim blue-veined hand on the rock of his forearm, trying to restrain him, but he shook her off. Walter sat frozen in his chair.

Hesh rose up to his full height, his bald head flushed and his nose as red as the borscht in the bowl before him. His voice dropped an octave as he struggled to control it. When I got you that job at Depeyster Manufacturing it was through Jack Schwartz because I know him from all my life and I thought you could use some experience of the real world and maybe some money in your pockets … but this, this is crazy. The man is a monster, Walter, don’t you know that? A Nazi, a union buster. Depeyster this, Depeyster that. It was him that ruined your father, Walter. Know it. On the grave of your mother, know it.

The same look. Depeyster leveled it on him now. “Walter, you know this is our busy season. We’ve got six thousand aximaxes and three thousand muffins to ship to Westinghouse by the end of the month. Orders are coming in by the truckload. And then that guy just quit in the paint room, didn’t he?”

Walter may have been fatherless, but everybody seemed to want the job. “You won’t let me go, then?”

“Walter, Walter,” Depeyster said, and again his arm went around his shoulder, “I’m just trying to look out for you. Listen, if you really want to go, can’t it wait a little? Two months, how’s that? I’ll give you your time off in two months, in the fall, when things slow down at the plant and you’ve had some time to think about it — what do you say?”

Walter said nothing. He broke away, and trying to muster all the dignity he could, what with his rumpled shirt, crapped-over pants and the first sharp stab of a crippling hangover shooting through his brain, he shuffled down the steps of the porch.

“Walter,” Depeyster called at his back. “Hey, come on, look at me.”

Walter turned when he reached the MG, and despite himself gave his boss and mentor a rueful smile.

“Hey, I didn’t tell you the good news!” Depeyster shouted as Walter turned the engine over. Walter waited, the car shuddering beneath him, as Depeyster sprang down the steps and leaned over the passenger side. He still had the bridle in his hand, and now he held it up in triumph, like a hunter with a brace of pheasant. “I’m buying a horse!” he sang, and the evening seemed to rise up around him in all its promise, the golden glow of the setting sun illuminating his grinning face as if this were the final frame of a movie with a happy ending.

As for Walter, he made it home without incident — no scrapes with history, no shadows springing up out of the blacktop, no ghosts or mirages or other tricks of the eye. He pulled into the driveway of his lonely little rented place, cut the engine and sat a moment as the air balled up around him. Sitting there, he gradually became aware that there was something wrong with this air he’d dragged in with him — it was tainted, rotten, the rank, foul air of the fish market or dump. It was then that he remembered the groceries.

He lifted the lid of the trunk, and there they were: strewn cans, wilted lettuce, fractured eggs, deliquescing meat. It was too much for him. The smell of corruption rose up out of the hot enclosure to stagger him, ram one fist into his belly and another down his throat. He lost his balance and fell to his knees, mercifully, before the Old Inver House, the coffee and peach cobbler and whatever it was he’d had for breakfast began to come up. For the longest time he knelt there, bent over this acrid little puddle of spew. From a distance, you might have thought he was praying.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

In that distant and humid summer of 1679, when the patroon came to Van Wartville to widen roads and improve his property, and Jeremias Van Brunt brazenly defied him, the Jongheer saw that defiance for what it was: yet another insolent blow struck against the very system of civilized government itself. Not half a mile from the cow pasture in which the Peterskill riots would one day unfold, and not much farther than that to where Walter knelt cathartically in the driveway of his rented cottage, Stephanus took his stand. If this ignorant, unwashed, violent, one-legged clod could challenge him, what would prevent a reprobate like Robideau or a subtle snake like Crane from doing the same? There were no two ways about it: if he were to give an inch, if he showed the slightest hint of indecision or trace of flexibility, the whole edifice of the manor would come crashing down around his ears. And how would that sit with his plans to build an estate that would make Versailles look like a cabbage patch?

And so, in high dudgeon, the patroon demoted Joost Cats, incarcerated Van Brunt’s half-breed nephew and incontinent son, and sent word to the shirker that his tenancy was terminated come November. Then he ordered the carpenter to cease work on the roof and begin constructing a set of public stocks. Abuzz with gossip, scandalized and not a little afraid for themselves, the common folk — the Cranes and Sturdivants and van der Meulens and all the rest — took up their tools and went back to work. Scythes rose and dropped, trees fell, dust rose and deerflies hovered over redolent paltroks and sweaty brows. But they worked with one eye only, the other fixed firmly on the road ahead of them — the road that branched off to Nysen’s Roost.

It was late in the afternoon — past four, by Staats’ reckoning — when two figures appeared in the distance. Van den Post was one of them, unmistakable in his new, high-crowned, silver-plumed hat and with the gleam of the rapier electric at his side, but the other — well, it wasn’t Jeremias. No way. This figure was smaller, far smaller, and slighter too. And there was no trace either of the wide-slung, irregular gait peculiar to the man who’d lost a leg in early youth and communicated with the ground through a length of oak ever since. To a man — and woman — the workers paused to lean on the hafts of their rakes and shovels, steady their teams or lower their scythes. And then all at once, as the figures drew closer, a whisper raced through the crowd. “It’s Neeltje!” someone exclaimed, and the rest took it up.

They had to send a boy to fetch Stephanus, who’d retired to the house for refreshment. In the meantime, Neeltje, pale and trembling, fell into her father’s arms, while Staats and Douw kept the others back to give them room. Van den Post, with a triumphant leer, swaggered through the crowd to prop one dusty boot up on a log and help himself to a cup of cider from the keg the patroon had provided for the enjoyment of his tenants. He took a long drink, spat the dregs in the dirt and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve, and then, with studied insolence, pulled out his pipe and had himself a smoke.

Neeltje’s face was wet. “Vader,” she cried, “what are we going to do? He’s … he’s evicted us and taken the boys and still Jeremias won’t come.”

Bent over double, looking twice his already considerable age, the former schout had no ready answer. Silently cursing the day Jeremias Van Brunt had come into their lives, he pressed his daughter to him, clinging to her as if he were caught in a torrent and about to go under.

“He can’t just … he’s got no right … after all these years, to just—” Staats sputtered. “We’ll fight it, that’s what we’ll do.”

But now Robideau was there, insinuating his hard, leathery face between them. “What do you mean, he’s got no right?” he rasped. “The patroon’s word is law, and every one of us knows it. There’s nobody here that didn’t sign his lease with his wits about him, and I’ll be damned to know why Mijnheer shouldn’t evict the son of a bitch when I’ve got to break my back out here in the sun while Mr. High-and-Mighty sits home with a bowl of punch.”

There was a rumble of assent from the crowd, but Staats, loyal as a bulldog, turned on Robideau and warned him to stay out of it.

That was all the Frenchman needed. He took a step forward and gave Staats a shove that sent him reeling back into Neeltje and her father. “Fuck off, cheese-eater,” he hissed.

The obscenity was too much for the virginal ears of Goody Sturdivant, and for the second time that day she let out a doleful whoop and fainted, pitching face forward into the dust with a cyclonic rush of air. In the same instant, Douw and Cadwallader Crane stepped between the antagonists. “Calm down, vader,” Douw pleaded, “this isn’t doing anyone any good,” while on his end, the scrawny loose-limbed young Crane held fast to the bucking Frenchman with a pair of arms so long and attenuated they might have been hemp ropes wound twice around him. “Let me go!” Robideau grunted, dancing in place and uttering a string of oaths that might have embarrassed a sailor. “Let me go, damn you!”

Thus it was that faces were hot, the crowd bunched and Mistress Sturdivant stretched out in the dirt like a sick cow when the patroon drew up on his pacer, a look of the severest condemnation quivering in his fine nostrils. “What in the name of God is going on here?” he demanded, and instantly the scuffling stopped. Neeltje looked up out of her tear-stained face, Meintje van der Meulen bent to assist poor Mistress Sturdivant, Robideau backed away from Cadwallader Crane and glared angrily about him. No one said a word.

The patroon scanned the crowd from on high, his eyes finally coming to rest on van den Post. “Aelbregt,” he snapped, “can you tell me what’s going on?”

Stepping forward with a bow, a wide malicious grin flapping the wings of his beard, van den Post said, “With pleasure, Mijnheer. It seems that Van Brunt’s criminality has infected his neighbors. Farmer van der Meulen, for instance—”

“Enough!” Stephanus cast a withering glance out over the lowered heads of the farmers and their wives and progeny, then turned back to van den Post. “I want to know one thing only: where is he?”

“With all respect, Mijnheer, he would not come,” van den Post replied. “Had you given the order to employ force,” he continued, grinning the grin of a man who could survive indefinitely on jellyfish and saltwater, “I assure you he would be standing before you now.”

It was then that Neeltje came forward, desperately pushing her way through the ranks of her neighbors, her face spread open like a book. “Mijnheer, please,” she begged, “the farm is all we have, we’ve been good tenants and we’ve improved the place ten times over for you — just this year we cleared a full morgen along Blood Creek and put in rye for fodder and a crop of peas on top of it. …”

Stephanus was in no mood to hear appeals to sympathy or reason. He was a powerful man, an educated man, a man of taste and refinement. He looked at Neeltje in her humble clothes, still pretty after all these years, and saw her as she was in that filthy bed with her sluttish mouth and the hair in her eyes, a picture no gentleman should have to carry around with him, and he gritted his teeth. When finally he spoke, he had to struggle to contain his voice; he drew himself up, staring down like a centaur over the powerful sculpted shoulder of the mount that was one with him. “The half-breed and the other one, the loudmouthed boy, are in our custody,” he said, barely moving his lips. “Tomorrow, when my man has completed work on the stocks, they will commence their punishment.” Here he paused to let his words build toward the final pronouncement. “And, I assure you, huis vrouw, they will sit in those stocks until such time as your husband comes to this house and goes down at my feet to beg — yes, beg — for the privilege of serving me.”

There were mice in the root cellar, rats, slugs and other lowly things that throve in the absence of light. It was as black as the farthest wheeling reaches of a sunless universe, eternal midnight, and it was damp, dripping wet as the bottom of a deep and lonely grave. Wouter didn’t like it. He was eleven and a half years old, and his imagination festooned the invisible ceiling with the leering faces of the imps, demiurges and savage gods that people the quiet places of the valley, with the bloody visage of old Dame Hobby, who’d been scalped and left for dead by a renegade Sint Sink, with Wolf Nysen’s flaming beard and butcher’s eyes. Huddled close to his cousin, for comfort and warmth both, he took it as long as he could, which is to say about three and a half minutes after van den Post dragged the heavy timber pallet over their heads, and then confessed that he was frightened. They were seated at the bottom of a four-foot-deep pit dug into the earth of the cellar floor, and the hatch above it was secured by the weight of three hogsheads of ale. “I’m scared, Jeremy,” Wouter said, his voice a thin squeak in that unfathomable dark.

Characteristically, Jeremy said nothing.

“Vader says they buried the old patroon’s brother just out there, in back of the house … what if, if he’s still, you know — like a ghost? He could come through the dirt and—”

Jeremy grunted. This was followed by a series of sounds emanating from deep in the hollow of his throat: clicks, chirps, gurgles, the muffled signifiers of a private system of speech. What he said was, “You open your hole, they dump us in this one.”

Wouter couldn’t deny the truth of the assertion, but it gave him small comfort. The seat of his pantaloons was soaked through and his crotch began to itch. If anything, the darkness was deeper than it had been a moment before. He edged closer to his cousin. “I’m scared,” he said.

Later — how much later he couldn’t say — a medley of homely sounds manifested themselves in the void beyond their cell, and then there was the quick tattoo of footsteps on the pallet above them, followed by the quavering tones of a dry and withered voice. “Here, boy,” the voice wheezed, “put those barrels back where they belong and lift that pallet this instant.” Light shone down from above, faint and diffuse. Barrels rumbled over their heads. “This is simply intolerable,” the voice went on in Dutch, falling off to a nagging murmur, “treating half-grown boys like hardened criminals. …”

When the pallet edged back a foot or two, they stood on cramped legs to poke their heads from the hole like a pair of groundhogs at the mouth of their burrow. Above them, peering into the pit as keenly as they were peering out of it, stood the patroon’s stooped and ancient mother, shrouded in black and holding a tallow candle out in front of her like a talisman; beside her, the light leaping from his eyes, was a slave not much older than Jeremy, and what Wouter, in his confusion, at first mistook for an angel of Elysium. But then the angel giggled, and for the moment the spell was broken. “Come up out of there this instant,” the old woman scolded, as if they’d locked themselves up in that foul airless hole for the sheer irresistible joy of it.

Wouter glanced at Jeremy. His cousin’s stony profile showed nothing, but the fist of his Adam’s apple rose and fell twice in rapid succession. Then, cool as the patroon himself, Jeremy stepped lightly from the pit and stood before the little group gathered in that larger cellar with its kegs of ale and cider, its firkins of butter, its buckets of milk and wheels of cheese set high off the floor on rude wooden racks. Wouter was scared and disoriented, images of the grave rising up again to play tricks with his eyes: old Vrouw Van Wart could have been a ghoul wrapped in her winding sheet, the slave some tarry servant of the devil and the girl — well, the girl was clearly a heavenly intercessor come down to do battle for his soul. “Out!” the old woman suddenly squawked, seizing his ear in a ferocious grip, and then he too was up and arisen from the tomb.

The old woman gave him a reproachful look, her jaw set, lips faintly trembling. “Don’t you understand Dutch?” she demanded.

Shamefaced, on the verge of tears, Wouter was trying to stammer a reply when the girl began tittering again. He stole a quick glance at her — the broad, full-lipped grin, eyes that overwhelmed him, the abundance of her hair beneath the cap that perched like a butterfly on the crown of her head — and looked down at his feet. He didn’t know it at the time, but this was to be his introduction to Saskia Van Wart.

“No matter,” the old woman wheezed, softening a bit. Then she turned to the slave. “You, Pompey,” she said, recovering her voice, “take them into the kitchen and see that they’re fed. And then I want you to put some straw down here in the corner for them,” indicating a space along the wall, “—and don’t you give me that look. I don’t care what my son says — until he banishes me to the woods I’m still mistress of this house.”

The next morning, early, the jellyfish man came for them.

Van den Post was wearing grootvader Cats’ plumed hat and rapier, and a discomfiting emotion lit his eyes and played at the corners of his mouth. “Up,” he barked, kicking at them as they lay in the straw, and Wouter saw it in his face — the look of a boy with a sharp stick and a cornered rabbit.

He led them out of the penumbral gloom of the storage cellar, through the bright and vivid lower kitchen with its paradisiac aromas, its sour-looking cook and glowing hearth, and then out into the explosion of light that was the morning and the world all around them. Shielding his eyes and blinking, half-asleep yet, Wouter hurried to keep up with the schout: he didn’t see the stocks until he was on them.

Pine. White and fresh and with a smell of resin to it. Four footholes under the lower cross bar, four wristholes beneath the upper. Behind the frame, a bench. Or no, it was just a log, crudely trimmed, rough with bark and bole, so green it must have been standing yesterday.

At first Wouter didn’t understand. But as van den Post lifted the crossbar, a taut smile fixed on his lips, Wouter’s emotions got the better of him. He wanted to protest — what had they done? He’d only talked, spoken up to the patroon, told the truth. They hadn’t stolen anything or hurt anybody. It was only words. But he couldn’t protest: he was too frightened. All at once he felt as if he were choking. Strangling. The air wouldn’t pass his throat, there was something heavy in his chest, and it was rising, rising, ready to burst—

It was then that Jeremy made his break.

One moment he was standing there beside Wouter, gazing with his sullen green eyes on the contraption before him, and the next he was streaking across the cornfield like a white-tailed deer with the bloody mark of the catamount on its rump. Jeremy was a wicked runner, as quick and lank and fleet of foot as the intrepid chieftains he counted among his ancestors. This was Mohonk’s son, after all, and though Mohonk may have been a degenerate, a miscegenator and a disgrace to his tribe, he was nonetheless as much a familiar to these hills and valleys as the bears, wolves and salamanders themselves, and a runner of the very first water. And so, kicking up his heels, flailing his bony legs and pumping his bony arms, Jeremy Mohonk — son of Mohonk son of Sachoes — called up the spirit of his ancestors and beat a path for the sanctuary of the woods.

What he hadn’t figured on was the tenacity of van den Post, the eater of jellyfish. Without a thought for Wouter, the hyperkinetic schout threw off hat and rapier and lit out after Jeremy like a hound. They were twenty paces apart at the outset, and twenty paces apart they remained, as first the Indian, then the schout, disappeared into the woods at the far verge of the field.

Wouter looked around him. The sun was climbing over the ridge behind him now, pulling back the shadows as if drinking them up. He watched a flock of blackbirds—maes dieven—settle back down in the corn where Jeremy and van den Post had cut their swath through it, and then he looked down at the plumed hat and rapier lying in the wet grass. Somewhere a cow was lowing.

Wouter didn’t know what to do. He was afraid. Afraid of the cellar, afraid of the stocks and their cruel chafing grasp, afraid of van den Post and the patroon. What he wanted more than anything was to go home and bury himself in his father’s arms, ask him to explain it all to him once again — he wasn’t sure he had it right anymore. He’d stood up to the patroon, defended his father, made his stand, and what had he got for it? Pain and abuse, a pinched ear, wet pants and moldy bread. He looked down the hill, past the great house and out to the road that lay quiet before it. Fifteen minutes. He could be home in fifteen minutes, hugging his moeder, watching the light flash in his vader’s eyes when he found out what they’d done to him. …

But no. If he ran, they’d come for him. He could see them already: a dozen armed men, the strange black among them, come with dogs and shouts, with hot pitch and feathers, their torches lighting the night. What’d he do? one of them would holler as they held him down, and another, grim as death, would answer in a voice edged with outrage: Why, he bearded the patroon, the little snipe, that’s what he did.

Biting his lips to fight back the tears, Wouter Van Brunt, eleven and a half years old and as full of regrets as any septuagenarian, slouched around the white pine frame, sat himself down on the rough log behind it and stuck his feet out straight before him. Slowly, deliberately, giving it all his concentration, he eased down the crossbar until it clamped firm around his ankles. Then he went to work on his hands.

He was still there when his father came for him.

Up the dusty road, through the gauntlet of his neighbors with their bent backs and anxious faces, his shoulders thrown back, powerful arms laid bare, Jeremias never faltered. He lashed out with the wooden strut as if it were a weapon, striding with such brisk determination he might have been marching off to war, and he didn’t stop to say a word to anyone, not even Staats or Douw. Everyone looked up, of course, but they couldn’t see his face, which was hidden beneath the turned-down brim of his hat. One-two, one-two, his arms swung out at his sides, and he was moving so fast he was almost through them when Staats flung down his shovel and started after him.

The act was contagious. One by one the farmers threw down their tools and silently followed Jeremias up the drive to the house — even Robideau, though he was the last. By the time Jeremias had reached the meadow in front of the house, the whole neighborhood — Cranes and Oothouses, van der Meulens, Mussers and all the rest — was behind him. No one said a word, but there was fear and expectancy on every face.

The patroon had ordered the stocks erected midway up the ridge behind the house, where they would be convenient to the immediate discharge of any sentence he might pass down, and yet not so close as to discommode him with any noise, odor or other unpleasant contingency that might arise as a result. To get to them, one had to circumnavigate the kitchen garden and cross a meadow of pasturage, beyond which lay a cornfield and the woods into which cousin Mohonk and van den Post had vanished. Jeremias was in a hurry. He did not circumnavigate the kitchen garden, but instead trod right through it, intent only on the tiny distant figure imprisoned in the cruel machine on the slope above. He trampled parsnips, beets and succory, rent the leaves of lettuce, leeks and cresses, crushed cucumbers and burst tomatoes. In their agitation, the others followed him.

They were close enough to see that only half the contraption was occupied and to see too that it was the younger boy who occupied it, when the three riders, barely settled in their saddles, shot out from the rear of the barn to intercept them. Jeremias kept going. And his neighbors, aware of the riders bearing down on them, aware of the patroon’s certain displeasure and of the wrong they were doing, followed. If you’d stopped any one of them — even Robideau or Goody Sturdivant — and asked him why, he couldn’t have told you. It was in the air. It was electric. It was the will of the mob.

The riders cut them off no more than thirty feet from the stocks. Clods flew, the horses beat the ground with iron hoofs. “Halt!” bellowed the patroon. They looked up into his face and saw murder there. His mount wheeled and stamped while he fought to level his late father’s dueling pistols — one in each hand — on the crowd. Beside him, clinging like a leech to a dappled mare, was van den Post, the recovered rapier held high and naked to the sun, and beside him, the third rider, a stranger no taller in the saddle than a boy of eight, his wizened face set in a smirk, a musket clenched in his gnarled little fist. Now normally, at the very least, they would have remarked the arrival of this stranger — of any stranger, but particularly of such an ill-favored and lean-fleshed little radish as this one — but there wasn’t time to think, let alone gossip.

“The next man that moves dies by this hand!” roared the patroon.

They stopped. All of them. To a man, woman and child. Except for Jeremias, that is. He never broke stride, never wavered. He marched straight for the patroon as if he didn’t see him, his eyes fixed on the stricken face of his son. “Halt!” the patroon commanded in a voice that lost itself in the effort, and almost simultaneously, he fired.

There was a shout from the crowd, while Wouter, impotent, unheeded, eleven and a half years old, cried out in a voice of dole — and for the third time in two days, Mistress Sturdivant fell. Hugely. Thunderously. With all the dramatic moment of a Phaedra or Niobe. Suddenly, all was confusion: women shrieked, men dove for cover, young Billy Sturdivant flung himself atop his mother’s supine hulk and the patroon ducked his head like a man guilty of the ultimate solecism. As it turned out, however, Goody Sturdivant wasn’t hit. Nor, for that matter, was Jeremias. The ball kicked up a divot at the blameless instep of Cadwallader Crane’s well-oiled boot and buried itself harmlessly among the grubs and worms.

Jeremias kept walking. He brushed past the patroon’s horse, moving like a somnambulist, and threw himself on the stocks. Before the enraged patroon could steady the second pistol, Jeremias had thrown back the lock and lifted the crossbar from his son’s wrists. He’d just taken hold of the lower bar when the patroon fired again.

Wouter was to remember that moment for the rest of his life. He cried out a second time, kicking wildly though his legs were held fast, no horror to approach it, no nightmare or trauma, and watched his father’s hands lock on the crossbar. Watched them lock. Freeze. As if his father had suddenly turned to stone. Was he hit? Was he dead?

The day was still, suspended on the cusp of the afternoon, breathing down the silence of the ages. No one moved. No one spoke. Then, the kindness of a breeze. It came up from the river with a smell of the mud flats on it — Wouter could feel it in his hair — and it lifted the hat from his father’s head.

Someone gasped, and Jeremias turned his head slowly toward them, toward the white-faced patroon and the men and women pressing their hands to their mouths. Ever so slowly he straightened up and began to move forward — a step, two steps, three — until he stood in the shadow of that powerful man aloft in the fluttering breeches, and it was then that Wouter noticed the change in his face. Vader wore an expression he didn’t recognize — this was his father, and yet it wasn’t, as if at the moment the shot rang out some ghost or demon had taken possession of his soul. The look on that face — it wasn’t fear or resignation, but a look of defeat, utter and abject defeat — hurt Wouter more than all the stocks and patroons in the world could have begun to. And then, before he could react, vader was down on his knees and begging the patroon’s forgiveness in a tearful croak.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wouter knew it too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He knew these woods as no adult did — as no jellyfish eater could ever hope to know them — and he was heading for the maze of swamps the Kitchawanks called Neknanninipake, That Has No End. It was a place of darkness at noon, of floating islands and hummocks of grass surrounded by muck that tugged you down till it took hold of you by the groin and refused to let go. It was a place Jeremy Mohonk knew as well as any snake or frog. It was a place where even the jellyfish eater would be powerless.

When he reached the fringes of the swamp — skunk cabbage, black slime to the ankles — Jeremy’s heart leapt up. By the time he’d reached the heavy stuff, springing lightly from hummock to hummock, van den Post was out of sight, floundering in the slop and cursing like a virtuoso. Five minutes later there was no sound behind him but the brak-brak of the frogs and the homely call of the warbler flitting through the thatch of the trees. But he didn’t stop. He traversed the swamp, dried his clothes and kept on going — going north, to a place he knew only in dimmest memory, a place his forgotten mother had gone for refuge when his forgotten father had turned his back on her. He didn’t know where the camp was, knew the Weckquaesgeeks only as a ragged, scarred and bandaged lot that twice a year crowded the stoep at Jan Pieterse’s, and knew only the haziest outlines of his parents’ story, but somehow something led him to the camp at Suycker Broodt.

It was late. Dogs barked at him. Cook fires glowed in the wilderness of trees. Three braves, not much older than he, confronted him. Sentinels of that hapless and clumsy tribe, one was missing a hand, another was bereft of an ear and the third limped on a fused ankle. They regarded him in silence till the rest of their kith and kin shoved in around him. “What do you want?” One-Hand demanded in his trading-post Dutch, and Jeremy, scorner of the language of words, said nothing. One-Hand repeated the question, and still Jeremy said nothing. When finally, in frustration, the brave reached for his knife, Jeremy realized that even if he’d wanted to answer the question, even if the words were available to him, he couldn’t. What did he want? He had no idea.

But then an old woman shuffled forward and cocked her head to regard him with eyes as opaque as a winter storm. She walked around him twice and then peered again into his face, so close he could smell the hide she’d been chewing with the stumps of her worn molars. “Squagganeek,” she said, and turned her head to spit.

After a moment, one of the others took it up, an old man so wrinkled and dirty he might have been dug from the ground for the occasion. “Squagganeek,” he rasped, and then, like children with a new plaything, they all tried it out, repeating the phrase over and over in a soft, caressing, rhythmic chant.

Wouter didn’t find him that evening, or the next either. Even in the depths of his fright and disillusionment, of his despair and denial, he couldn’t have imagined that it would be another eighteen months before he would lay eyes on his cousin again. He did go home eventually, for lack of anything better to do — home to his mother. She tended to his chafed wrists and ankles, fed him, put him to bed. In time, he healed. Or rather, part of him did. His cousin was gone and he missed him as he would have missed a limb wrenched from his body. And his father — he had no father. Sure, the man who sat heavily in the birch rocker or cut and baled hay shirtless in the field looked like his father, but he wasn’t. He was an imposter. A spineless man, a man without definition or spirit, a man who floated through his days like a jellyfish at sea, waiting only for some survivor to snatch him up and consume him.

Such Sweet Sorrow

The footing was bad — very bad, treacherous even — and it was all Walter could do to ease himself down the path step by step, clinging like a mountaineer to an extended lifeline of low-hanging branches, willowy saplings and flimsy shrubs that whipped away from him like catapults and left a gummy residue in the palm of his hand. It had rained the night before, and the path was slipperier than an eel’s back — or belly, for that matter. And the leaves didn’t help any. Wads of them, yellow, red, orange, the dingy brown of crumbling newsprint, all glued wet to the ground and to each other, too. If there were times when the business of life made him forget that he stood upright only through the intercession of two lumps of molded plastic, this wasn’t one of them.

Still, he didn’t bother asking himself why, on this day before his departure for Fairbanks, Nome and Points North, on this thirty-first day of October, on this Halloween, he was fighting his way down the slope to the infamous pasture that gave onto the bridge that in turn gave onto the path up to Tom Crane’s cramped and goat-stinking shack. Especially when the question would have been complicated by the fact, duly noted and painstakingly observed over the course of the past several weeks, that while at this hour of any given day the salutatory hubcap remained in place, the Packard — Tom Crane’s Packard — was gone. And the corollary to that fact, that the Bug — Jessica’s Bug — sat idly, invitingly, provocatively even, on the shoulder beneath it.

But no, he didn’t question himself, didn’t think. There was no reason to. Ever since that cleansing afternoon in mid-August, that afternoon of the Grand Union, he’d entered on a new and intoxicating phase of his life, one in which he acted rather than considered, one in which he accepted his demons for what they were and let his impulses take him where they would. He was leaving for Barrow in the morning. Jessica was home alone. In the cabin. Cut off from the world. Isolated. Without water, electricity, indoor plumbing, without a telephone. He was paying her a visit, that was all.

But these feet!

Damn, and now he was on his ass. In the mud. Some leafy crap in his face, the whole woods stinking of mold and rot, of leaves gone bad and some defunct squirrel or skunk quietly turning to mulch under a bush. Furious, he grabbed hold of a branch and jerked himself to his feet. The seat of his new Levi’s was soaked through, and his lumberjacket — the one he’d bought to wear beneath the big down parka in Alaska — was so festooned with dangling bits of twig and leaf he might just as well have used it to line the bottom of his trash can. He beat angrily at his clothes, snatched some catkins from his hair and struggled down the relentless grade to the pasture below.

Here the going was easier. Walking straight ahead, walking on a flat — that he’d mastered. It was the up and down that gave him trouble. He brushed at his clothes as he walked, stepping aside to dodge the occasional cow pie, the new hiking boots with the supergrip tread no more connected to him than the dead appendages that filled them. It was a low-hung day, raw and opaque, and he was just coming up on the bridge when he spotted something moving in the trees along the creek. He gritted his teeth, expecting some further collision, some parting gift of history. He squinted. The haze shifted. It was only a cow.

Moooo.

Going up was a little better, though the path was just as slick. Somehow it was easier to wedge his feet into the dirt here, and there seemed to be more rock, ribs of it washed clean by the runoff of a thousand storms. He snatched at branches, a mountaineer still, and hoisted himself up. Soon he was passing through Tom’s garden, with its wet glowing pumpkins and the brown stalks of all the rest, and then he sideskirted a clutch of beehives to emerge in the little clearing beneath the big naked oak.

There it was, the cabin, in all its ramshackle glory — but was she home, that was the question. Just because her car was out front was no guarantee. What if she’d gone someplace with Tom? What if she was out gathering nuts or acorns or dried flowers? Or washing her undies, taking a shower, painting her pretty toenails in her parents’ spacious and well-appointed bathroom? What if she was even then breezing up and down the rarefied aisles of the Peterskill Grand Union? The possibility that he’d find the place empty had haunted him all the way down the path from the road, across the field and up the ridge to the cabin. But now, even before he fastened on the smeared windows or glanced at the porch, he knew he had her — the smoke gave her away. He smelled it first, then lifted his eyes to the rust-eaten stovepipe and there it was, smoke, pale wisps of it against a sky that was like smoke itself.

Suddenly confident, elated even, he started across the yard, the place just as he remembered it: a few scattered stumps, honeysuckle fallen back from the house in frost-killed clumps, rusted machinery poking its bones from the subsiding bushes. The porch, as usual, was cluttered with everything that wouldn’t fit in the house but was too valuable yet to toss to the elements, and then there was the venerable old wood of the shack itself, aged to the color of silver fox, no lick of paint ever wasted on its parched and blistered hide. As he mounted the steps, a pair of bandy-legged goats stuck out their necks to peer at him around the far corner of the house, and a cat — brindled, with a patch of white over one eye — shot between his legs and vanished in the litter along the path. And then all at once he could feel Jessica moving across the floorboards inside — the same boards that supported him outside the door. Or at least he thought he could. What the hell. He forced his face into a smile and rapped twice. On the door. With his knuckles.

Dead silence.

Frozen silence.

Silence both watchful and tense.

He tried again, tap-tap, and then thought to make use of his voice: “Jessica?”

Now she was moving, he could feel her, could hear her, moving across the floor with a pinch and squeak of the dry boards beneath her, beneath him. One, two, three, four, the door swung open — stove going, bed made, jars of this and that on the shelf — and she was standing there before him.

“Walter,” she said, as if identifying a suspect in a police lineup. He saw the surprise and consternation on her face, and he grinned harder. She was wearing jeans, a pair of men’s high-top sneakers and a cable-knit sweater. Her hair hung loose, and bangs — folksingers’ bangs, newly cut — concealed the high white patrician swell of her brow. She looked good. Better than good. She looked like the girl he’d married.

“I was just passing by,” he joked, “and thought I’d stop in to say hello, I mean, goodbye—”

Still she stood there, the door poised on its hinges, and for a second he thought she was going to slam it in his face, send him packing, boot him out like a fast-talking door-to-door salesman with a vacuum cleaner strapped to his back. But then her face changed, she stepped back, and, perhaps a little too brightly, said: “Well, why don’t you come in out of the cold, at least?”

And then he was in.

As soon as she shut the door, though, confusion took hold of them both — they were in a cell, a box, a cave, there was nowhere to go, they didn’t know what to do with their hands, where to cast their eyes, where to sit or stand or what to say. His back was to the door. She was there, two feet from him, her face as white as it was the time they’d carved a sun-warmed melon in a Catskill meadow and the knife had slipped and gashed her palm. Her head was bowed, her hands clasped in front of her. Was this an awkward moment? You bet.

It was Jessica who recovered first. She turned, brushed past him and bent briskly to relieve the room’s sole armchair of its burden of hats, jackets, dope pipes, cheese graters, paperback books and other impedimenta, at the same time echoing what he’d said at the door: “Goodbye? What do you mean — are you moving or something?”

And so he was able to settle into the vacant armchair and tell her of his impending journey to the heart of the polar night, to joke about mushers and mukluks and ask, in mock earnestness, if she knew a good dog he could take along to warm his hands in. “But seriously,” he went on, encouraged by her laugh, “you don’t have to worry about me — I’m no tenderfoot. I mean, I know my Jack London cold, and there’s no way I’m going to try humping from my motel room to the bar without spitting first.”

“Spitting?”

He glanced over his shoulder as if revealing a closely guarded secret, and then leaned forward. “Uh-huh,” he said, dropping his voice. “If your spit freezes before it hits the ground, you go back to bed and wait till spring.”

Laughing, she offered him a glass of wine — the same vinegary stuff Tom Crane had been fermenting in the corner for the past two years — and settled down at the table beneath the window to string beads and listen. He took it as a good sign that she poured herself a glass too.

“You know,” he said suddenly, “there was this guy in the hospital, in the bed next to me … a midget, I guess he was. Or a dwarf. I always forget the difference.”

“Midgets look like little children,” she said, drawing the shape with her hands. “Everything in proportion.”

“Well, this guy was a dwarf then. He was old. And his head was huge, big ears and nose and all that.” He paused. “His name was Piet. He knew my father.”

She snuck a look at him, then turned back to her work, tugging at a coil of monofilament with her teeth.

“He’s the one who told me he was in Alaska.”

“So that’s it,” she said, turning to him. “Your father.”

Walter chafed the glass between his palms as if he were trying to warm them. He smiled, staring down at the floor. “Well, it’s not exactly the time of year for a vacation up there, you know. I mean, people are losing their noses, earlobes frozen solid, toes dropping like leaves—”

Again she laughed — an old laugh, a laugh that gave him hope.

He looked up, no smile now. “I’m hoping to track him down. See him. Talk to him. He is my father, after all, you know?” And then he was telling her about the letters he’d written — sometimes two or three a day — trying to catch up eleven years in a couple of months. “I told him it was okay, let bygones be bygones, I just wanted to see him. ‘Dear Dad.’ I actually wrote ‘Dear Dad’ at the top of the page.”

He drank off the wine and set the glass down on a carton of old magazines. She was turned away from him, in profile, stringing her beads as if there were nothing else in the world. He watched her a moment, her lips pouted in concentration, and knew she was faking it. She was listening. She was trembling. On fire. He knew it. “Listen,” he said, shifting gears all of a sudden. “I never told you how hurt I was that day in the Grand Union. But I was. I wanted to cry.” His voice was locked deep in his throat.

She looked up at him then, her eyes soft, a little wet maybe, but she let it drop. It was almost as if she hadn’t heard him — one moment he was pouring out his heart to her and the next she was off on a jag of disconnected chatter. She talked about the war, protest marches, the environment — there was untreated sewage being pumped into the river, could he believe that? And then ten miles downstream people were drinking that very same water — incredible, wasn’t it?

Incredible. Yes. He gave her a soulful, seductive look — or what he thought was a soulful, seductive look — and settled in to hear all about it. They were on their third glass of wine when she brought up the Arcadia.

To this point, her litany of industrial wrongs, her enumeration of threatened marshes and polluted coves, her wide-eyed assertion that so-and-so had said such-and-such and that the something-or-other levels were a thousand times the maximum allowable by law, had only managed to lull him into a state of quiet contentment. He was half-listening, watching her hands, her hair, her eyes. But now, all of a sudden, he perked up his ears.

The Arcadia. It was a boat, a sloop, built on an old model. He hadn’t seen it yet, but he’d heard about it. Heard plenty. Dipe and his VFW cronies were up in arms about it—It’s the riots all over again, Walter, Depeyster had told him one night, we taught them a lesson twenty years ago in that cow pasture down the road and now it’s as if it never happened. As far as Walter was concerned, it was no big deal — who cared if there was one hulk more or less on the tired old river? — but at least he had some perspective on it. It was Will Connell’s connection to the thing that burned Dipe and LeClerc and the others, that much was clear. The very name was a bugbear, a red flag, a gauntlet flung down at their feet — Robeson was dead, but Connell was still going strong, vindicated by the backlash against the McCarthy witch hunts, a survivor and a hero. And here he was parading up and down the river in a boat the size of a concert hall (Can you believe it, Walter, Depeyster had asked, his voice lit with outrage, to put together this, this floating circus as a front for his Communistic horseshit … clean water, my ass. All he cares about is waving the Viet Cong flag on the steps of the Capitol Building …), here he was laughing in the faces of the very people who’d turned out to shut him and Robeson down twenty years back.

Rednecks. That’s how Walter had always thought of them — how he’d been taught to think of them — but now that he actually knew Dipe, now that he’d worked with him, sat in his living room, drunk his Scotch, confided in him, he saw that there was a lot more to it than he’d imagined. Hesh and Lola and his mother’s parents had forced their version on him, and wasn’t that propaganda? Hadn’t they given him one side of the story only? Hadn’t they told him all his life that his father was no good, a traitor, a fink, a broken man? They were wrong about the Soviets, after all — they knew in their hearts they were. Here they’d bought the party line as if it were carved in stone, and then Stalin rotted away from within, and where were they? Freedom? Dignity? The Workers’ Paradise? Russia had been a morgue, a slave camp, and the party the ultimate oppressor.

They were gullible — Hesh, Lola, his own sad and wistful mother and her parents before her. They were dreamers, reformers, idealists, they were followers, they were victims. And all along they thought they were the champions of the weak and downtrodden, thought they could blunt the viciousness of the world by holding hands and singing and waving placards, when in truth they themselves were the weak and downtrodden. They were deluded. Unhard, unsoulless, unfree. They were dreamers. Like Tom Crane. Like Jessica. He was leaving for Alaska in the morning and he was going to find his father there and his father was going to tell him how it was. Traitor? Walter didn’t think so. Not anymore.

“You didn’t know we were founding members?” Jessica said, and he was looking right through her. “Tom and me? Tom even crewed down from Maine on her maiden voyage.”

He hadn’t known. But he could have guessed. Of course, he thought, hardening all of a sudden, Jessica and Tom Crane, Tom Crane and Jessica. The two of them, out on the river, clasped together in their sanctimonious bunk, waving their I’m-Cleaner-Than-You banners on the deck and chanting for peace and love and hope, crowing for the spider monkeys and the harp seals, for Angel Falls and the ozone layer and all the rest of the soft-brained shit of the world. Suddenly he pushed back the chair and stood. “Did you hear me before?” he asked, and there was no trace of humor in his voice now, no humility, no passion even. “When I said how much you mean to me?”

She bowed her head. The stove snapped, a bird shot past the window. “I heard you,” she whispered.

He took a step forward and reached for her — for her shoulders, her hair. He could feel the heat of the stove on his left side, saw the dreary woods through the smeared window, felt himself go hard with the first touch of her. She was still sitting, slumped in the chair, a welter of beads, elastic thread, fishing line and sewing needles spread out across the table before her, and though he pressed her to him, she didn’t respond. He petted her hair, but she turned her head away and let her arms fall limp at her sides. It was then that he felt it, a tremor that began deep inside her, a wave that rose against the tug of gravity to fill her chest to bursting and settle finally, trembling, in her shoulders: she was crying.

“What’s the matter?” he said, and his voice should have been soft, tender, solicitous, but it wasn’t. It sounded false in his ears, sounded harsh and impatient, sounded like a demand.

She was sniffling, catching her breath at the crux of a sob. “No, Walter,” she breathed, looking away from him still, as limp as one of the dead, “I can’t.”

He had his hands on the sweater now, and he was pressing his lips to the part of her hair. “You’re my wife,” he said. “You love me.” Or no, he’d got that wrong. “I love you,” he said.

“No!” she protested with sudden vehemence, turning on him with a face that was like a mask, like someone else’s, like something she’d put on for a costume party, for Halloween, and then she seized both his arms just above the elbow and tried to push him away. “No!” she repeated, and all at once he could see her as if through a zoom lens, the tiny capillaries of her eyes gorged with blood, droplets of moisture trapped in her lashes that were thick as fingers, the nostrils of her turned-up nose dilated and huge, red as an animal’s. “It’s over, Walter,” she said. “Tom. I’m with Tom now.”

Tom. The name came at him out of nowhere, out of another universe, and he barely heard it. Victims. Dreamers. He fought down her arms and jerked at the sweater like a clumsy magician trying to pull the tablecloth out from under a service for eight. She cried out. Flailed her arms. Fell back against the table. Beads scattered, falling to the floor like heavy rain, like the drumbeat of the polluters marching off to war. He tugged the sweater up, bunched it in an angry knot beneath her chin and lifted her from the chair, pinning her groin to the edge of the table with the weight of his own. He went for her mouth, but she turned away from him; he went for her breasts, but she hung on to the sweater with both hands. Finally, he went for her jeans.

She cried the whole time, but she clung to him. And he leaned into her and felt her tongue and when she stiffened against him she held fast to him as if he were her life and her all. When it was over he pulled back from her and the look in her eyes frightened him. She looked whipped, wounded, like a dog that’s been fed and beaten at the same time. Was that a bruise under her left eye? Was that blood on her lip? He didn’t know what to say — he’d run out of words. In silence he zipped up, buttoned his jacket; in silence he backed away from her and felt for the door.

Slowly, tentatively, as if he were facing down a wild beast that might spring at him if he glanced away for even an instant, he turned the knob behind him. It was then that she let herself fall to the floor, lifeless as a doll. She lay there, motionless, her head cradled in her arms, the jeans down around her ankles. He couldn’t hear her sobs now, but the balled white length of her was trembling with them, that much he could see.

It was his last picture of her.

Coming down the hill was nothing. He seemed to skate on his feet and each time he lost his balance a stiff young sapling sprang up for him to latch hold of. He squeezed his mind as he might have squeezed a blister, and purged himself of the image of her. By the time he reached the bridge he was in Barrow, with its unfathomable shadows, its hard edges, its geometry of ice. He saw his father there, and his father was healthy and vigorous, the man who’d taken him to the trestle to plumb the murky river for crabs, the man who’d stood up to Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum and all the rest. Walter, his father said, it’s been a long time, and he held out his arms.

Costumes

She was a good-looking woman, a beauty, what with her expensive teeth, her full proud bosom, the flat abdomen that had grown round only once to contain the swell of life. He liked her eyes too, eyes that were like the marbles he’d won as a boy, the palest cloud of violet in a prism of glass, and he liked the way she looked at him when he was telling her things. He told her about Manitou’s big woman or Mishemokwa the bear-spirit or about his father and Horace Tantaquidgeon, and she leaned forward, her lips parted, brow furrowed, eyes so intent she might have been listening to the oracle, to the father of nations, to Manitou himself. But what he liked best of all about her was that she was a white woman, the wife of the son of his ancient enemy — that was too perfect.

He’d first met her up there, in Jamestown. What was it — four, five years ago? He was tired of the shack, tired of carrying the burden of his hopeless race, tired of solitude, and he’d gone north to pick apples and shoot duck for a couple of weeks — till Thanksgiving, maybe. Till the lakes froze and the ducks were gone, anyway. It was November, the Tuesday before Turkey Day, and he was sitting out on One Bird’s porch with a rag, a can of 3-In-One oil and One Bird’s hoary single-shot Remington. He’d used it the day before to bring down a pair of canvasbacks and a pintail, and he’d cleaned and oiled it after supper. He wasn’t really cleaning it now — he was just stroking the barrel with a rag soaked in oil, just to have something to do with his hands. The day was clear, breezy, with a scent of the tundra on the wind.

The station wagon — it was a Chevy, brand-new, white, with that fake wood business along the side — surprised him. It came around the corner by Dick Fourtrier’s place, muscling its way over the washboard dirt and the potholes, and then slowed in front of One Bird’s, jerking to a halt finally just down the road. On came the back-up lights, and the wagon lumbered back till it was even with him. He saw a head bob in the window, saw the wind tug at the exhaust. The morning locked itself up in silence. Then the driver’s door fell open and there she was, Joanna, the charity lady, coming around the side of the car in her leather pumps, her cashmere sweater and pleated skirt, coming up the flagstone path with its hackles of stiff yellow weed, coming to the house that needed paint, coming to him.

“Hello,” she said when she was halfway up the walk, and her smile gave back the glory of all those years of six-month checkups and all those miles of dental floss well-plied.

He was stoic, he was tough, he was an ex-con, a survivor, a man who lived off the land, a communist. His own teeth were rotten as a hyena’s and he was wearing work pants, a flannel shirt and a vest that had once been sky blue in color but was now smeared with grease, blood, steak sauce, the leavings of rabbit, pheasant, fish. He watched her with cold green eyes and he said nothing.

She stopped at the foot of the porch, her smile just the smallest bit strained, and she clasped her slim hands together and began twisting a ring round her finger — a diamond, of the type that proclaimed her the property of another man. “Hi,” she said, reiterating the greeting, as if he might not have heard her the first time, “can you tell me where I might find the social hall?”

The social hall. He wanted to sneer at her, shock her, hurt her, wanted to tell her she could look for it up her ass for all he cared, but he didn’t. There was something about her — he couldn’t say what — that set her apart from the others, those blue-haired old loons with their ratty blankets and their bibles and the rest of their do-goody claptrap, and it frightened him. Just a bit. Or maybe it wasn’t fright exactly — it was more of a frisson, a jolt. He just couldn’t picture her waving a placard (Save the Poor Ignorant Downtrodden Native American!) with the rest of them or slipping into a cheery barbecue apron and serving up flapjacks and sausage links at one of those horrific charity breakfasts.

She was a good-looking woman, of course — young, too — but that wasn’t it. There was something else here, something deeper, something that was coming to him like a gift, like a birthday cake with all the candles aglow. He didn’t know what. Not yet. It was enough to know it was there.

Since he’d said nothing, merely dug into her with those insolent eyes and dropped the barrel of the gun between his legs, rubbing it up and down as suggestively as he could, she went on, her voice a little jumpy, talking too fast now: “It’s my first time. Here, I mean. I’m from downstate, in Westchester, and Harriet Moore — she’s a friend of my cousin from Skaneateles — well, to make a long story short,” tossing her hair to indicate the wagon behind her, “I’ve got a load of stuff that we collected in the Peterskill area — cranberries, canned peaches and yellow beans, and — and gravy mix — for the, for you, I mean — no, I mean for your people and …” she trailed off in confusion, the green gaze too much for her.

He stopped rubbing. A wedge of geese called out from half a mile up. She glanced over her shoulder to where the car sat at the curb, still running, the door flung open wide, and then turned back to him: “So can you tell me where it is?”

For the first time, he spoke: “Where what is?”

“The social hall.”

He set the gun down on the newspaper spread out to protect the weathered boards of the porch, then rose from his chair to tower over her. And then he grinned, rotten teeth and all. “Sure,” he said, coming down off the steps to stand there and catch the scent of her, “sure I know where it is. I’ll take you there myself.”

He had sex with her that night, after she’d unloaded her dusty cans of succotash and anchovy paste and whatever other garbage the good wives of Peterskill had found cluttering the dark recesses of their cupboards, sex that necessarily involved some damage to underwear that looked as if it had just come off the shelf at Bloomingdale’s. He tore it from her on the bed of her sanitized room at the Hiawatha Motel, where everything — chairs, bureau, mirror frame, even the TV cabinet — was constructed of Lincoln Logs, painstakingly fit, glued and shellacked by reservation squaws for fifty cents an hour. It was a decor designed to give you that woodsy feeling, that half-naked, tomahawk-thumping, mugwump-in-his-lodgehouse sort of feeling. In Jeremy, however, it produced a very different feeling. One that made him want to tear the underwear from charity ladies.

Joanna surprised him, though. He’d expected prim, he’d expected blushing and beautiful, the averted eye and the trembling flesh. But she wasn’t like that at all. She was hungry, needful, more savage than he. Once he’d heard her name, once he’d unraveled the threads of her identity—“Van Wart?” No, it can’t be? Depeyster Van Wart, son of the old man, old Rombout?”—he knew he’d have her, that it was destined to be, that this was the gift wrapped specially for him, and he knew that he would humiliate her, ravage her, fill her right up to the back of the throat with all the bitterness of his fifty-five bleak and hopeless years. But she surprised him. The more brutal he was, the more she liked it. She came at him, lashing, lacerating, leaving marks on his back, and the whole thing turned on him. He backed off. Gave in. Fell, for the first time in his life, in love.

He waited for her, every other week, for the station wagon laden with rhinestone-encrusted handbags, golf clubs, Caldor sneakers, with wood-etching sets, men’s overcoats, galoshes, and took her directly from the social hall to the motel. He never confessed to her how much he hated the place, how much he resented it. But after a month or two, after he’d overstayed his welcome at One Bird’s, and Christmas and New Year’s had come and gone, he told her that the Hiawatha Motel made him sick. But it wasn’t just the motel, it was the whole godforsaken, fenced-in, roped-off disease of the reservation itself. It was One Bird. The Tantaquidgeons. The whole thing. It stank.

They were walking the banks of the Conewango after making love, she in the fringed buckskin jacket and leggings he’d given her for Christmas, he in his work pants and flannel shirt and the new down vest she’d given him in return, and she stopped him with a tug of her arm. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean it’s time for a change. I’m going back to Peterskill.”

Her face went strange for a moment, and he could see that she was trying to fit the idea into her scheme of things, trying to place her wild aboriginal lover in the tranquil picture of her Peterskill, alongside her husband, her daughter, the big galleon of a house that rode the sea of all those perfect lawns in an unbroken chain of perfect days. Then she shrugged. Reached her face up to his and kissed him. “Fine with me,” she said. “I’ll be able to see you all the more.”

And so he packed up his things — underwear, socks, moccasins, the rude garments he’d fashioned from hides and that he wore only on his native soil, Ruttenburr’s book, the gutting knife — while One Bird offered her opinion of the charity lady with the glass eyes, and then he climbed into the station wagon beside Joanna and rode in comfort over the creeks and hills he’d crossed on foot for the first time so many years before. He gazed out the window on the Allegheny, the Cohocton and the Susquehanna rivers, on the timber-lined mounds of the Catskills, on the plunging dark drop of the Hudson’s gorge. Then they were over the Bear Mountain Bridge, through the outskirts of Peterskill and heading east on Van Wart Road, and he felt like Hannibal coming into Rome, like a conquering hero, like a man who would never again know defeat.

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

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

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

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

“Throw what away?”

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

“You mean—?”

“That’s right,” he said.

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

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

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

Yes. Oh, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What things?”

“Boats.”

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

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

She didn’t like it, didn’t like it a bit. For one thing, her husband had a boat at the marina, and how could she visit Jeremy there without arousing suspicion? And for another, Indians didn’t live on boats. They lived in longhouses, in lodges and wickiups and tar-paper shacks, they lived on land. And why in God’s name would he want to spoil the setup they already had? The way it was, she could visit him any time the spirit moved her — through the woods, direct to his bed, a fifteen-minute walk that got her juices flowing and put the sparkle back in her eyes. No, she didn’t like it, but she gave him the money all the same. And now, in the grimmest month of her life, in the penultimate month of her pregnancy, in the dismal, disastrous October of a year of riots in the streets, assassinations and men on the moon, now, after two years of trysts in the secret swaying darkness of that damp and fishy boat, she knew why he’d done it — to get away from her, that’s why. To mock her. To punish her.

It was an old story, a sad story, and it went like this: three weeks ago, gravid, swollen with his child, weighed down by this alien presence within her and yet lighter than air too, she went to him, full of the future, wanting only to hold him, touch him, rock with him in the cramped bunk of the Kitchawank as it rode the translucent skin of the river. As usual, she parked in the lot of Fagnoli’s restaurant and took a cab to the marina, and as usual, she found him below decks, reading. (He was going through two or three books a day — anything from Marcuse, Malcolm X or Mao Tse Tung to James Fenimore Cooper and the fantasies of Vonnegut, Tolkien or Salmón.) On this particular day — she remembered it distinctly — he was reading a paperback with a cover that featured a busty half-clad woman cowering before a liver-colored reptilian creature with teeth like nail files and an unmistakable genital bulge in the crotch of his silver jumpsuit. “Hello,” she said softly, ducking low to avoid the insidious beam on which she’d cracked her head a hundred times in the past.

He didn’t return her greeting. And when she made as if to squeeze in beside him on the bunk — stooped awkwardly, the baby swinging like a pendulum — he didn’t move. She felt the boat lurch beneath her and she sat heavily on the edge of the bunk across from him, a distance of perhaps three feet in those cramped quarters. For a long while she just sat there, glowing, beaming at him, drinking in the sight of him, and then, when she felt she wanted him so badly she couldn’t take it another second, she broke the silence with a soft amiable inquiry: “Good book?”

He didn’t answer. Didn’t even so much as grunt.

Another moment passed. The air coming down the gangway was cool, salt, smelling of the mélange of things that ran through the river’s veins — fish, of course, and seaweed. But other things too, things that weren’t so pleasant. Or natural. Who was it had told her they were dumping sewage upriver? She peered out the grimy porthole behind Jeremy and pictured the gray chop awash with human excrement, with toilet paper and sanitary napkins, and all at once she felt depressed. “Jeremy,” she said suddenly, and the words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. “I’m going to leave Depeyster.”

For the first time, he looked at her. The hooded eyes she knew so well lifted themselves from the page and focused their green squint on hers.

“I don’t care what he thinks or my parents or the neighbors or anyone else either. Even if he won’t give me a divorce. What I mean is, I want to be with you”—she reached out to squeeze his hand—“always.” Now it was said, now it was out in the open and there was no turning back.

It was a subject he’d avoided. Strenuously. Assiduously. Even, it seemed to her, fearfully. Yes, he assured her, he wanted her to have his child. Yes, he wanted to live out on the river for a while, fishing, crabbing, doing odd jobs around the marina to pick up the little he needed to get by — a dollar here and there for used paperbacks, a carton of eggs, the occasional soft drink. And yes, he loved her (though the question really didn’t have any meaning, did it?). But she was another man’s wife and things were fine the way they were. Besides, he couldn’t see the future at all. Not yet, anyway, not yet.

But now it was out in the open and there was no turning back: she was going to leave Depeyster for him. “I could live here on the boat with you,” she went on, staring at the floor, the words coming in a spate, “and we could go upriver and dock at Manitou or Garrison or Cold Spring. Or maybe on the other side of the river — at Highland Falls or Middle Hope. I have some money, my own money, a trust fund my mother’s father set up for me when I was a girl, and I’ve never touched it, you know, thinking that someday—” but she couldn’t go on, because now, suddenly, unconsciously, she was looking into his face.

And his face was terrible. No longer the face of the stoic who could have posed for the frieze on the back of a nickel, nor even of the strange charismatic man who’d led her across the threshold of the bright little room at the Hiawatha Motel or taught her to slip through the woods like the ghost of a deer, it was the face of the raider, the avenger, the face beneath the raised tomahawk. He sat up. Shoved himself violently from the bunk and stooped over her, his back, shoulders, neck melding with the dark low rafters. “I don’t want you,” he said. “I don’t want your half-breed bastard, or your quarter-breed either.”

His face was in hers. She could smell the fish on his breath, the sweat dried in the armpit of his shirt. “Destroyer,” he hissed. “Usurper. She-wolf. Charity Lady.” He pursed his lips, almost as if he were about to kiss her, and held her with his fierce unstinting gaze. “I spit on you.”

The next morning, the Kitchawank was gone.

Depeyster’s voice—“Joanna! Joanna, get that, will you?”—came to her as if from another dimension, as if she were trying to conduct her life on the cold floor of the river and the current drove all the words down. “Joanna!”

It was the door. Children were at the door — she could see them through the window — dressed as witches, ghosts, imps, Indian braves, Indian princesses. A jack-o’-lantern leered from the corner, where her husband, who couldn’t have loved the tradition more were he a child himself, had set out a bowl of candy corn and Hershey’s Kisses. Numbly she rose from the chair, fought the tug of the current, and fumbled to open the door. Their voices piped around her, swallowed her up, and their ugly little paws clutched at the contents of the bowl she’d somehow managed to lift from the table and prop against the swell of her belly. Then they were gone and she was struggling up-stream to sink ponderously into the waiting chair.

“Joanna? Sweetheart?”

She turned in the direction of his voice, and there he was, in silk hose and knee breeches, in a square-skirted coat with stupendous brass buttons, in buckled shoes and sugarloaf hat. “How do I look?” he said, adjusting the brim of his hat in the mirror over the mantelpiece.

How did he look? He looked like a refugee from one of Rembrandt’s group portraits, like a colonist, a pioneer, like the patroon who’d wrested the place from the Indians. He looked, down to the smallest detail, exactly as he looked each year for LeClerc Outhouse’s Halloween party. There was one year, a long time back, when he was still young and adventurous, that he’d dressed as Pieter Stuyvesant, pegleg and all, but ever after he’d been the patroon. After all, he told her, why fool with perfection? “You look fine,” she said, the words trailing from her mouth as if encapsulated in the little bubbles they used in the funny papers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Van Wartwyck, Sleeping and Waking

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

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

And Jeremy?

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

At any rate, even if Jeremy had lost the power of speech, his prodigious return, coupled with the arrival of Adriaen Van Wart, gave the tongue waggers plenty of fodder over the next several months: To think that after all this time, and who didn’t know but that he was dead and disemboweled by the wild beasts and didn’t he have it coming to him, running off from the law like that? to think he’d show up on his uncle’s doorstep nice as you please, as if he’d been out for a stroll around the neighborhood or something. And with a woman at his side, no older than a child really, swaddled in greasy skins and stinking like the kitchen midden, and his own little half-breed bastard bound up in one of those papoosey baskets — or no, it’d be a quarter-breed, wouldn’t it? Couldn’t talk though, not a word. Goody Sturdivant says he’d forgot his Dutch and his English both, living up there amongst the heathens (like his mother before him, and wasn’t that a sad case?), taking part in their lewd and ungodly rites and who knows what all. Mary Robideau says they cut his tongue out, the savages, but who knows what’s true and what isn’t these days? And did you get a load of the patroon’s cousin — the one that’s going to sit by his big fat bachelor self up in the grand house? Yes, yes, that’s what I heard too — Geertje Ten Haer dressed her daughter up like a tart, the little one, not fifteen yet — shameless, isn’t it? — and came calling the very day the young bucket of lard moved his bags in. Oh, I know it, I know it. …

And so it went, till Adriaen was settled in, the silent Jeremy and his equally silent wife became fixtures at Nysen’s Roost, and the incestuous little community of Van Wartwyck could doze off again.

To Wouter, the fact of his cousin’s return was miraculous enough, but that he had a place to return to was even more miraculous. The autumn of their impending doom came and went and still the Van Brunts were in possession of the five-morgen farm at Nysen’s Roost. On November 15 old Ter Dingas Bosyn wheeled up in the wagon and collected the quitrent, which vader, obsequious as a lapdog, counted out and loaded up himself. The patroon had moved his family back down to Croton as soon as the first frost put the trees to bed for the winter, and he took his schout, the jellyfish eater, with him. And that was that. No eviction. Another year rolled by and again vader paid his rent without demur and again the globular old commis accepted it and made his precise notation in the depths of his accounts book. Wouter, who’d expected the worst — who’d expected to be driven from his home while his mother and sisters wrung their hands and his father fawned and begged and licked the patroon’s boots — was puzzled. He’d been dreading the day, dreading the patroon’s sneer, the dwarf’s evil stare and stunted grasp, the cold naked steel of the rapier that had once laid his father’s face open, but the day never came.

Word had it that the patroon had relented. Geesje Cats had gone down on her knees to the patroon’s mother, and the crabbed old woman, that eschewer of pleasure and comfort both, had interceded in the Van Brunts’ behalf. Or so they said. And then too, Wouter remembered a week in late October of that fateful year when Barent van der Meulen came to keep him and the other children company while moeder and vader hitched up the wagon and drove down to stay with grootvader Cats in Croton. No one knew what went on then, but Cadwallader Crane, who’d got it from his father, claimed that Neeltje and Jeremias had petitioned the patroon indefatigably, haunting his garden, crying out their fealty day and night, even going so far as to kneel to him and kiss his gloved hand as he sauntered to the stable for his daily exercise — all in the hope that they might convince him to change his mind.

However it was, the whole thing revolted Wouter. He almost wished the patroon had come and chased them off his lands, wished that they could have gone west and started over, lived as beggars on the streets of Manhattan, hacked their hair and scarified themselves to live naked among the Indians. At least then his father might have come back to life. As it was now, he was a slave, a gelding, a sot who lived only to serve his betters. He worked the fields, anesthetized, from dawn till dusk, whitewashed the house, cleared acreage, put up stone fences — and all for the patroon, for the profit and increase of the man by whose magnanimity he drew breath from the air, water from the ground and bread from the oven. After that horrific day in the patroon’s back lot, he shied away from Wouter, always his favorite, and fell into a sort of trance, like an ass harnessed to the wheel of a gristmill. He was a husk of his former self, a man of straw, and his son — his eldest, the joy of his life, the boy who’d made an icon of him — regarded him with contempt, with pity, with the unassuageable hurt of the betrayed.

Wouter turned twelve in the bleakness of that first winter, thirteen in the second. It was the most hopeless period of his life. He’d lost his father, lost the cousin who was a brother to him, lost his own identity as son to the man who defied the patroon. For the longest while, he couldn’t eat. No matter what his mother served him — pancakes, cookies, the most savory roast or meaty stew — the very smell of it made him sick, his throat constricted and his stomach seized. He lost weight. Wandered the woods like a ghost. Found himself sobbing inexplicably. If it weren’t for Cadwallader Crane, he might have gone off the deep end of his grief, like his Aunt Katrinchee before him.

Young Cadwallader, who had attained the physical age of twenty by the first of those miserable winters, was the last-born and least quick-witted of that scholarly and grallatorial clan presided over by the ancient Yankee intellectual, Hackaliah Crane. For some fifteen years, the elder Crane had maintained Van Wartwyck’s sole institution of learning, known among the wags at Jan Pieterse’s as Crane’s Kitchen School, in reference to its venue. Each winter, when the crops were harvested and stowed away in attic and loft, when the days grew short and the weather wicked, Hackaliah gathered his six, eight or ten reluctant scholars in the kitchen of the rambling stone house he’d built with his own blistered hands, and lectured them in the mysteries of conning the letters of the alphabet and doing simple sums, throwing in a smattering of Suetonius, Tacitus and Herodotus for good measure. He held his sessions because he had a calling, because it was the purpose and office of his life to keep the lamp of learning lit and to pass it on from hand to hand, even on the wild and darkling shores of the New World. But, of course, it wasn’t solely a labor of love — there was a small matter of recompense. And the Yankee preceptor, notorious skinflint that he was, exacted his basket of apples or onions, his string of cucumbers dried for seed, his bundle of combed flax or his turkey gobbler battened on corn as if it were tithed him — and woe to the unsuspecting scholar who was remiss with his payment. It was in this rudimentary seat of learning that Wouter, over the desolation of the months, gradually began to attach himself to Cadwallader Crane.

In happier days, Jeremy had expertly mimicked the younger Crane’s erratic gait and the darting, birdlike movements of his scrawny neck and misshapen head, while Wouter had done an inspired impersonation of his laryngeal squawk of greeting and the tepid washed-out drone with which he read from slate or hornbook, but now, in his loneliness, Wouter felt strangely drawn to him. He was ridiculous, yes, five years older than Tommy Sturdivant, the next oldest student in the class, unable to master his lessons though he’d been through them five hundred times, the bane of his venerable father’s existence and a sore trial to his mother’s love. But he was interesting too, in his own way, as Wouter would soon discover.

One forbidding January afternoon, when Wouter lingered after lessons were over, Cadwallader took him around back of the house to the woodshed and produced, from a hidden corner, a board on which he’d tacked a brilliant spangle of moths and butterflies caught in hovering flight. Wouter was dumbstruck. Chocolate and gold, chrome blue, yellow, orange and red: there, in the dim confines of the winterbound shed, the breath of summer touched him.

Astonished, Wouter turned to look at his friend and saw something in Cadwallader’s eyes he’d never recognized before. The habitual glaze of stupefaction was gone, replaced by a look at once alert, wise, confident, proud, the look of the patriarch showing off his progeny, the artist his canvases, the hunter his string of ducks. And then, miracle of miracles, Cadwallader, the lesser Crane, the hopeless scholar, the beardless boy-man who couldn’t get out of the way of his own feet, began to discourse on the life and habits of these same moths and butterflies, speaking with what almost approached animation of worms and caterpillars and the metamorphosis of one thing into another. “This one, do you see this one?” he asked, pointing to a butterfly the color of tropical fruit, with regular spots of white set in a sepia band. Wouter nodded. “He was a milkweed worm, with horns and a hundred ugly feet, just last summer. I kept him in a stone jar till he changed.” Wouter felt the wonder open up like a flower inside of him, and he lingered in that comfortless shed till he couldn’t feel his feet and the light finally failed.

In the coming weeks, the awkward enthusiast — now bounding over a precipice to pluck a wisp of moss from between two ice-bound boulders, now shimmying up a decayed trunk to retrieve a two-year-old woodpecker’s nest — opened up the visible world in a way Wouter had never dreamed possible. Oh, Wouter knew the woods well enough, but he knew them as any white man knew them, as a place to pick berries, hunt quail, bring down squirrels with a sling. But Cadwallader knew them as a naturalist, as a genius, a spirit, a revealer of mysteries. And so Wouter followed him through the stripped bleak woods to gaze on a slit of barren earth in the midst of a snowbank where Cadwallader assured him a black bear was sleeping out the winter, or to listen as he pulled apart a handful of wolf droppings to speculate on the beast’s recent diet (rabbit, principally, judging from the lean withered turds bound up in cream-colored hair and flecked with tiny fragments of bone).

“See that?” Cadwallader asked him one day, indicating the frozen hindquarters of a porcupine wedged in the crotch of a tree. “When the sun warms it in spring, that meat will give rise to new life.” “Life?” Wouter questioned. And there, on the lesser Crane’s thin lips and hairless cheeks, crouched a smile all ready to pounce. “Blowflies,” he said.

Though there was eight years difference in their ages, the friendship was not so one-sided as one might imagine. For his part, Cadwallader, long an object of contempt and denigration, was happy to have anyone take him seriously, particularly someone who could share in his private enthusiasm for the underpinnings of nature, for worms, caterpillars, slugs and the humble nuggets of excrement he so patiently scrutinized. Wouter suited him perfectly. No rock of maturity himself — any other man of twenty would have had his own farm and family already — he found the Van Brunt boy his equal in so many ways, a natural leader, really, persuasive, agile, curious, but not so much his equal as to challenge him seriously. As for Wouter, his fascination with the scholar’s son was a distraction from the emptiness he felt, and he knew it. Cadwallader, absorbing though he may have been in his own skewed way, made a poor substitute for Jeremy — and for the lapsed father who worked the farm like an encumbered spirit, an old man at thirty. Thus, like all incidental friends, they came together out of mutual need and because each propped up the other in some unspoken way. Cadwallader sought out Wouter, and Wouter sought out Cadwallader. And before long, the scholar’s unscholarly son became a regular guest at Nysen’s Roost, staying to supper and taking Jeremy’s spot at the table, occasionally even spending the night when the weather was rough or the company too stimulating.

The company, yes. Though Jeremias faded into the background as if he were fashioned from the stuff of clouds, Neeltje was busy with her spinning or sweeping or washing up and the younger children, confined to the house throughout the endless winter, hissed, squabbled and caterwauled like aborigines, the young long-nosed Yankee nature lover found the company irresistible. Ah, but it wasn’t Wouter, either, who moved him, though he liked him well enough and would claim him as his closest friend till nearly the time of his death — no, it was Geesje. Little Geesje. Named after her grandmother, inheritor of her mother’s fathomless eyes and rebellious ways, ten years old the day he first stepped through the door.

They played cards through those long winter evenings — Cadwallader hunched over his knees like a singing cricket, Wouter with a ferocious zeal to win that sometimes astounded even him, and Geesje, her legs drawn up beneath her, the cards masking her sly child’s face, playing with an insouciance that belied a will to win every bit as ferocious as her brother’s. They skated on the pond where Jeremias had long ago lost his foot to the swamp turtle. They played at big ball, I spy, flick-fingers, hunt-the-slipper and quoits, the gangling, awkward scholar’s son as eager and excited as the children he was playing with. By the time the second winter came around, the winter of Adriaen Van Wart’s ascension and Jeremy’s return, Wouter began to understand that it was no longer for him that Cadwallader Crane came to the house.

If Wouter felt betrayed, he didn’t show it. He played just as hard, followed his long-legged companion just as often through copse and bower, bog and bramble, lingered as usual in the Crane woodshed to marvel over a set of fossilized horse’s teeth or a pipefish preserved in pickling brine. But inwardly he felt as if he’d been knocked off balance again, shoved from behind just as he’d begun to regain his footing. Disoriented, uneasy, thirteen years old and set adrift once again, he went to the door one raw February night and found his cousin standing there in a blanket of sleet, and in the grace of a single moment he felt redeemed: Jeremy was back.

But redemption doesn’t come so easily.

Even as he embraced him, even as he shouted out his cousin’s name in triumph and heard the household rouse behind him, he knew something was wrong. It wasn’t the Indian getup — the ragged bearskin, the string of seawant, the notochord cinched around his cousin’s brow — or the fierce primordial reek of him either. Nor was it the strategic emplacement of bone, sinew and flesh that had transformed him from boy to man. It wasn’t that at all. It was ice. His cousin was made of ice. Wouter embraced him and felt nothing. Cried out his name and saw that his eyes were glazed and impenetrable, hard as the surface of the pond. In confusion he let go of him as the doorway filled with jostling children, with moeder’s smile and vader’s lifted eyebrows and fallen lip. Jeremy merely stood there, rigid as stone, and for a terrible moment Wouter thought he was hurt — he’d been gouged, stabbed, they’d cut out his tongue and he’d come home to die, that’s what it was. But then Jeremy stepped back into the shadows and there, in his place, stood a squaw.

A girl, that is. A female. Calves, thighs, bosom. Wrapped up in deerskin, otter and mink, her hair greased and queued, mouth set in a pout. And in her arms, an infant. Wouter was stunned. He looked up into the shadowy features of his cousin and saw nothing. He looked at the girl and saw the quiet triumph of her eyes. And then he looked at the infant, its face as smooth and serene as the Christ child’s. “In, in,” moeder was piping, “it’s no night for visiting on the stoep,” and all at once Wouter became conscious of the sleet pelting his face, of the dank subterranean breath of the wind and the restlessness of the night. Then the squaw brushed past him and the infant, dark as cherrywood and not half the size of a suckling pig, opened its eyes. Its eyes were green.

A moment later Jeremy was sitting in the inglenook, mechanically spooning porridge into the dark slot of his mouth, while the girl crouched on the floor beside him, the baby at her breast. Where had he been? the children asked. Why was he dressed like that? Was he an Indian now? Moeder’s voice was tender. She hoped he was home to stay, and his wife too — was this his wife? She was welcome, more than welcome, and what was her name? Vader wanted to know the obvious: was this his child? Wouter said nothing. He felt as if the floor were buckling under him, he felt jealous and betrayed. He looked from Jeremy to the girl and tried to imagine what it was between them, what it meant and why his cousin wouldn’t look him in the eye.

For his part, Jeremy couldn’t begin to fathom their questions, though he felt for them and loved them and was glad in his heart to be back. Their voices came at him like the rumble of the foraging bear, like the soliloquies of the jays and the clatter of the brook outside the door, rising and falling on an emotional tide, a song without words. Dutch words, English, the markers and signifiers of the Weckquaesgeek and Kitchawank dialects he’d once known — all was confusion. He knew things now as Adam must have known them that first day, as presences, as truths and facts, tangible to touch, sight, smell, taste and hearing. Words had no meaning.

His wife had no name — or no name that he knew. Nor his son either. He looked shyly at Wouter and he knew him, and he knew Jeremias, Neeltje, Geesje and the other children. But to summon their names was beyond him. He knew, in an immediate and concrete way, in the way of enzymes churning in the gut or blood surging through the veins, that Jeremias had killed his father, that the jellyfish eater had wanted to lock him up in his infernal machine, that the people of the wolf were ravening unchecked over the face of the earth. He knew too that Jeremias had raised him as his own and that Wouter was his brother and that his place was both here and among the Weckquaesgeeks at the same time. He knew that he was grateful for the food and for the fire. But he couldn’t tell them. Not even with his eyes.

In the morning, Jeremy went out beyond the last deadened tufts of the farthest, stoniest pasture and built himself a wigwam. By late afternoon, he’d covered the ground with a mat of sticks, on which he meticulously arranged an assortment of moldering furs. Then he got a cookfire going and moved in the girl and the baby. Over the years to come, as he fell into the old ways with Wouter, as he bearded the patroon and lived off his land without once breaking the ground, as he watched the pestilence take two of his daughters and scar his son, he rebuilt, remodeled and expanded the crude bark domicile he’d erected that morning, but he never left it. Never again. Not until they came for him, that is.

As for Wouter, his cousin’s return devastated him. Here was yet another stab in the back, another wedge driven between him and the savior he so desperately needed. First it was Cadwallader and Geesje, now Jeremy and this moon-faced girl with the pendulous teats and the green-eyed little monkey who clung to them. He was hurt and confused. What was it about his spindly-legged little sister that could so captivate Cadwallader? What did Jeremy see in an evil-smelling little squaw? Wouter didn’t know. Though he was awash with hormones and driven by indefinable urges, though he ducked away from the fields to spy on Saskia Van Wart as she romped with her brothers on the lawn at the upper house, though he ached in the groin to think about her and woke from tangled dreams to a bed mysteriously wet, he still didn’t know. All he knew was that he was hurt. And angry.

In time, as he began to reforge his relationship with Jeremy, as he worked around the inescapable conclusion that Cadwallader Crane cared more for his little sister than he did for him, he recovered. Or at least outwardly he did. He was fourteen and thought he was in love with a girl from Jan Pieterse’s Kill by the name of Salvation Brown; he was fifteen and followed Saskia Van Wart around like a tomcat with the scent on him; he was sixteen and stood best man when Cadwallader Crane took his sister’s hand in marriage. It all passed — the death of his father’s spirit, the renunciation of Cadwallader Crane, the blow he’d received from his cousin on that sleet-struck night when the squaw stepped between them. He grew into his manhood, and to look at him you’d never know the depth of his hurt, never guess that he was as crippled in his way as his father before him.

Van Wartwyck slumbered again. The decade of the eighties, which had begun so promisingly, petered out in the unimpeachable dullness of the quotidian. Nothing happened. Or at least nothing scandalous or violent or shocking. No one died even. Each spring the crops came up, the weather held — not too wet, not too dry — and the harvests got better by the year. On a still night you could hear the gossips snoring.

It was Jeremias Van Brunt, so long the catalyst for ferment and upheaval, who woke them up again. He didn’t know it at the time, nor would he live to see it, but he unwittingly set in motion a series of events that would plunge the community into darkness, rouse the tongue waggers as if their very sheets and counterpanes had been set ablaze, and culminate finally in the last tragic issue of his youthful rebellion.

It began on a day of unforgiving wind and flagging temperature, a blustery afternoon at the very end of October 1692, some three years after that crafty Dutchman, William of Orange, had been proclaimed king of England and all her colonies. Shouldering a battered matchlock that had once belonged to his father and with a crude flax bag cinched at his waist, Jeremias left the cabin just after the noon meal and slouched off into the woods to commune with his favorite chestnut tree. Though this was to be a nutting expedition and nothing more, he carried the gun because one never knew what one might encounter in those haunted woods.

He worked his way arduously down the path from the cabin, snatching at trees and bushes to brake his descent, driving his pegleg into the compacted earth like a piton into rock, the wind hissing in his face and threatening in gusts to take his hat. Thumping across the bridge and wading into the marshy hollow that lay between Acquasinnick Creek and Van Wart’s Road, he startled a pair of ravens from their perch in a crippled elm. Up they rose, like tatters from the Dominie’s funereal gown, bickering and complaining in their graceless tones. Jeremias went on, a little more circumspectly than usual — the sight of a raven never brought anyone an excess of good luck, so far as he knew — until he was halfway across the marsh and the crown of the chestnut came into view in the near distance, shouldering its way above the lesser trees that surrounded it. It was then that he flushed the unlucky birds again, this time from the ground — or rather from a weedy hummock choked with vines and a blaze of blood-red sumac that seemed to float up out of the puddled expanse of the marsh like some sort of strange haunted craft.

Jeremias was curious. He tugged at his boot, straightened the brim of his hat, and slogged off to investigate, thinking he might find the buck he’d wounded two days back, holed up and breathing its last. Or maybe the remains of the pig that had mysteriously disappeared just after the leaves turned. The birds were on to something, that much was sure, and he meant to find out what.

He parted the vines, hacked at the sumac with the butt of the gun, paused twice to disentangle the sack from the scrub that seized it like fingers. And then he spotted something in the tangle ahead, a glint of iron in the pale cold sunlight. Puzzled, he bent for it, and then caught himself. The smell — it hit him suddenly, pitilessly — and it should have warned him off. Too late. He was stooping for an axehead, and the axehead was attached to a crude oaken handle. And the handle was caught, with all the rigor of mortis, in the grip of a hand, a human hand, a hand that was attached to a wrist, an arm, a shoulder. There before him, laid out in the sumac like the giant fallen from the clouds in a fairy tale, was the man who’d given Blood Creek its name. The eyes were sunk into the face, raw where the birds had been at them, the beard was a nest for field mice, the arms idle, the hair touched with the frost of age. He’d looked into that face once before, so long ago he could barely remember it, but the terror, the humiliation, the mockery, these he remembered as if they were imprinted on his soul.

It took all five of them — Jeremias, his three sons and his nephew Jeremy — to haul the body, massive and preternaturally heavy even in death, out of the marsh and up to the road, where with a concerted effort they were able to load it into the wagon. Jeremias laid out the body himself, helped by the cold snap, which mercifully kept the odor down. If he’d thought to charge admission to the wake, he would have been a rich man. For the news of Wolf Nysen’s death — the death that confirmed his life — spread through the community like the flu. Within an hour after Jeremias had stretched the fallen giant out on his bier, the curious, the incredulous, the vindicated and the faithful had gathered to stand hushed over this legend in the flesh, this rumor made concrete. They came to marvel over him, to measure him from crown to toe, to count the hairs of his beard, examine his teeth, to reach out a trembling finger and touch him, just once, as they might have touched the forsaken Christ pulled down from the cross or the Wild Boy of Saardam, who’d cooked and eaten his own mother and then hung himself from the spire outside the drapers’ guild.

They came from Crom’s Pond, from Croton, from Tarry Town and Rondout, from the island of the Manhattoes and the distant Puritan fastnesses of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Ter Dingas Bosyn showed up, Adriaen Van Wart, a wizened old cooper from Pavonia who claimed to have known Nysen in his youth. On the second day, Stephanus himself rode up from Croton, with van den Post and the dwarf, and a delegation of somber, black-cloaked advisors to Colonel Benjamin Fletcher, the new governor of the Colony and His Majesty William Ill’s loftiest representative on the continent. By the third day, the Indians had begun to pour in — maimed Weckquaesgeeks, painted Nochpeems, even a Huron, before whom all the others gave way as if to the devil himself — and after them, the oddballs and cranks from outlying farms and forgotten villages, women who claimed they could transform themselves into beasts and had the beards and talons to prove it, men who boasted that they’d eaten dog and lived as outlaws all their lives, a boy from Neversink whose tongue had been cut out by the Mohawk and who said a prayer over the body that consisted entirely of three syllables, “ab-ab-ab,” repeated endlessly. It was on the evening of the third day that Jeremias put an end to the circus and laid the giant to rest. Beneath the white oak. Just as if he’d been a member of the family.

Well, this stirred the gossips up, sure enough. I told you, I told you a thousand times that mad murthering Swede was a fact, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you he nearly scared the life out of Maria Ten Haer that time down by the creek and can you believe this unholy fool burying the devil right there in the ground where he put his own sister and father too?

Worse, far worse, was the sequel. For the death of Wolf Nysen — bogey, renegade, scapegoat, the monster who’d taken on all the sins of the community and worn them in his solitude like a hairshirt — was the death of peace itself. In the months that followed, the accumulated miseries of a decade rained down upon the heads of Van Wartwyck’s humble farmers, and the grave opened its maw like some awakening beast at the end of a long season’s fast.

Under the circumstances, perhaps it was only appropriate that Jeremias was the first to go. What happened to him, so they said, was the Lord’s retribution for his unholy alliance with the outlaw Nysen and for his early sins against the patroon and the constituted authorities, against the king himself, if you came down to it. What happened to him was by way of just deserts.

Two weeks after he’d laid Nysen to rest, Jeremias was dead, a victim of his father’s affliction. No sooner had the shovel tamped the Swede’s grave and the mourners and curiosity seekers gone on their way, than Jeremias felt the first preternatural pangs of hunger. It was a hunger like nothing he’d ever felt, a hunger that snatched him up and dominated him, made him its creature, its slave, its victim. He wasn’t merely hungry — he was ravenous, starved, voracious, as empty as a well that went down to China without giving up a drop of water. He came in after the funeral, and though for so long now he’d been invisible in his own house, he shoved in between his hulking sons and lashed into the olipotrigo Neeltje had made for the funeral supper as if he hadn’t eaten in a week. When it was gone, he scraped the pot.

In the morning, before the family was up, he managed to devour the six loaves his good wife had baked for the week, a pot of cheese, a string of thirty-six smoked trout the boys had caught in the course of three days’ fishing, half a dozen eggs — raw, shells and all — and an enormous trencher of hashed venison with prunes, grapes and treacle. When Neeltje awoke at first light, she found him passed out in the larder, his face an oleaginous smear of egg, grease and molasses, a half-eaten turnip clutched like a weapon in his hand. She didn’t know what was wrong, but she knew it was bad.

Staats van der Meulen knew, and Meintje too. Though Wouter scoffed and Neeltje protested, Staats made them pin Jeremias to the bed and bind him ankle and wrist. Unfortunately, by the time Staats had got there, the damage was already done. The family’s winter provisions were half-exhausted, three of the animals — including an ox and her calf — were gone, and Jeremias was bloated like a cow that’s got into a field of mustard. “Soup!” he cried from his pallet. “Meat! Bread! Fish!” For the first few days his voice was a roar, as savage as any beast’s, then it softened to a bray and finally, near the end, to a piteous bleat of entreaty. “Food,” he whimpered, and outside the wind stood still in the trees. “I’m, I’m”—his voice a croak now, fading, falling away to nothing—“starrrr-ving.”

Neeltje sat by his side the whole time, sponging his brow, spoonfeeding him broth and porridge, but it was no use. Though she begged grain from the van der Meulens, though she plucked hens she would need for eggs, though she fed him two, three, four times what any man could hold, the flesh seemed to fall from his bones. By the end of the first week his jowls were gone, his stomach had shrunk to a layer of skin thin as parchment and the bones of his wrists rattled like dice in a cup. Then his hair began to fall out, his chest collapsed, his legs withered and his good foot shrank into itself till she couldn’t tell it from the stump of the other. Midway through the second week she could stand it no longer, and when her sons left to hunt meat, she slipped in and cut his bonds.

Slowly, painfully, like one waking from the dead, Jeremias — or what was left of him — rose to a sitting position, threw back the blankets and swung his legs to the floor. Then he stood, shakily, and made for the kitchen. Neeltje watched in horrified silence. He ignored the decimated larder, bypassed the dried fruits, the strings of onions, cucumbers and peppers suspended from the rafters, and staggered out the door. “Jeremias!” she called, “Jeremias, where are you going?” He didn’t answer. It was only after he’d crossed the yard and swung back the door of the barn that she saw the butcher’s knife in his hand.

There was nothing she could do. The boys were God knew where, desperately beating the bushes for grouse, coney, squirrel, anything to replace the meat their wild-eyed father had squandered; her own father was all the way down in Croton and so enfeebled by age he barely responded to his own name any more; Geesje was with her husband; and she’d sent Agatha and Gertruyd to the van der Meulens, so as to spare them the sight of their father’s decline. “Jeremias!” she cried as the door blew shut behind him. The sky was dead. The wind spat in her face. She hesitated a moment, then turned back to the house, bolted the door behind her and knelt down to pray.

He was already cold when they found him. He’d gone for the pigs first, but apparently they’d been too quick for him. Rumor, the old sow, had two long gashes in her side and one of the shoats was dragging a leg half-severed at the hock. The milch cows, confined in their stalls, were less fortunate. Two of the yearlings had been eviscerated — one partially butchered and gnawed as it lay dying — and Patience had had her throat cut. The boys found her like that, the black stain of her blood like a blanket thrown over the earthen floor, and Jeremias, his teeth locked in her hide, pinned beneath her. It was the fifteenth of the month, rent day. But Jeremias Van Brunt, former rebel, longtime ghost, spiritual brother to Wolf Nysen and sad inheritor of his father’s strange affliction, would pay rent no more. They buried him the next day beneath the white oak, and thought they’d seen the end of it.

It was only the beginning.

Next to go was old vader van der Muelen, who went rigid with the stroke as he was splitting wood, and from whose hands the axe had to be pried before the Dominie could commit him to the frozen earth. He was followed shortly by his stalwart wife, that merciful and strong-willed woman who’d been a second mother to Jeremias Van Brunt and whose apple beignet and cherry tarts were small tastes of heaven. The cause of death was unknown, but the gossips, stirred up like a nest of snakes, attributed it variously to witchcraft, toads under the house and tuberous roots taken with wine. Then, in a single horrific week in January, the two Robideau girls broke through the ice while skating on Van Wart’s Pond and vanished into the black waters below, Goody Sturdivant choked to death on a wad of turkey breast big as a fist and old Reinier Oothouse got away from his wife, drank half a gallon of Barbados rum, saw the devil and tried to climb Anthony’s Nose in his underwear. They found him clinging frozen to a rock high above the river, pressed to the unyielding stone like a monstrous blotch of lichen.

The community was still reeling from the grip of catastrophe when the Indians came down with the French disease and brought it to the settlements. All the children under five died in their beds and word came from Croton that old vader Cats had succumbed and that a whole host of people who didn’t even know they were alive had passed on too. It was blackest February and just after Cadwallader Crane’s Geesje had expired in childbirth that the goodmen and goodwives of Van Wartwyck, led by the stooped and aged Dominie Van Schaik, marched up to Nysen’s Roost and hacked open the grave of the monster who’d lurked through their dreams and now threatened to destroy their waking lives too. The Swede was unchanged, frozen hard, the black earth clinging to him like a second skin. Huddied in his cloak and shouting prayers in three languages, the Dominie ordered a pyre built and they set fire to the corpse and let it burn, warming their hands over the leaping flames and standing watch till the faggots were coals and the coals ashes.

Spring came late that year, but when it came the community breathed a sigh of relief. It’s over, the gossips said, whispering among themselves for fear of jinxing it, for fear of goblins, imps and evil geniuses, and it seemed they were right. Staats van der Meulen’s middle son, Barent, took up his father’s plow and worked the family farm with all the vigor and determination of youth, and Wouter Van Brunt, twenty-five years old and for better than a decade now the real soul of Nysen’s Roost, filled his father’s shoes as if they’d been made for him. The weather turned mild in mid-March, the breezes wafting up from Virginia with just the right measure of sweetness and humidity. Tulips bloomed. Trees budded. Douw van der Meulen’s wife bore him triplets the first of May, the cattle bred and increased and there wasn’t a single two-headed calf born the length and breadth of the valley, so far as anyone knew, and the pigs had litters of twelve and fourteen (but never thirteen, no) and to a one the piglets emerged with three comely twists to their tails. It looked as if finally the world had slipped back into its groove.

But there was one more jolt yet to come, and it was beyond the scope or reckoning of any of the humble farmers and honest bumpkins of Van Wartwyck or Croton It had to do with letters patent, with William III, that distant and august monarch, and with Stephanus Van Wart, no mere patroon any longer, but Lord of the newly chartered Van Wart Manor. It looked forward to the near future when the power of the Van Warts would encompass the whole of northern Westchester. And it looked back to the day when Oloffe Van Wart had brought a disgruntled herring fisherman to the New World to clear land and farm for him, working its inscrutable way through Jeremias’ rebellion, Wouter’s disillusionment and the death of Wolf Nysen. Though no one yet knew it, the final cataclysm was at hand, the last dance between Van Warts and Van Brunts, the moment that would ignite the tongue waggers like no other and then pull the blankets over Van Wartwyck for a snooze that would last two and a half centuries.

On the one side, there was Stephanus Van Wart, now one of the two or three wealthiest men in the Colony, First Lord of the Manor, confidant of the governor, and his minions, van den Post and the impenetrable dwarf. On the other, there was Cadwallader Crane, lover of humble worm and soaring butterfly, bereaved widower, unscholarly scholar, a boy caught in a man’s jerky body. And there was Jeremy Mohonk, savage and speechless, the feral half-breed with the Dutchman’s eyes. And finally, inevitably, borne down under the grudging weight of history and circumstance, there was Wouter Van Brunt.

Barrow

Walter might as well have flown on to Tokyo or Yakutsk — it couldn’t have taken any longer, what with fog delays, connecting flights that ran every third day and the sleepless night he spent in the Fairbanks airport waiting for the red-eyed maniac who would fly him, an oil company engineer and a case of Stroh’s Iron City Beer to Fort Yukon, Prudhoe Bay and Barrow in a four-seat Cessna that had been stripped right down to the bare metal by weather he didn’t want to think about. The oil company man — bearded, in huge green boots that looked like waders and a parka that could have fit the Michelin Man — took the rear seat and Walter sat next to the pilot. It was November third, nine-thirty in the morning, and it was just barely light. By two, the oil man assured him, it would be deepest night again. Walter looked down. He saw ice, snow, the desolation of hills and valleys without roads, without houses, without people. Dead ahead, pink with the reflection of the low sun at their backs, was the jagged dentition of the Brooks Range, the northernmost mountain range on earth.

The Cessna dipped and trembled. The blast of the engine was like a bombardment that never ended. It was cold to the point of death. Walter gazed out on emptiness until exhaustion began to catch up with him. Half-dozing, he focused on the disconcerting little notice taped to the grimy plastic glovebox: THIS AIRCRAFT FOR SALE, it read in shaky upper-case letters, $10,500, TALK TO RAY. Talk to Ray, he thought, and then he was asleep.

He woke with a jolt as they set down in Fort Yukon, where the case of beer was deplaning. Ray grinned like a deviate and shouted something Walter didn’t catch as they taxied up to a grim-looking little shack to refuel; the oil man got out to stretch his legs, though it was something like twenty-seven below with a good wind, and Walter nodded off again. From Fort Yukon it was up over the Brooks Range and into darkness. The oil man got off at a place called Deadhorse, where, he assured Walter, there was enough oil to float Saudi Arabia out to sea. And then it was Ray and Walter, hurtling through endless night, on the way to Barrow, three hundred and thirty miles above the Arctic Circle, the northernmost city in America, the end of the line.

When the lights of Barrow came into view across the blank page of the tundra, Ray turned to Walter and shouted something. “What?” Walter shouted back, distracted by uncertainty, his stomach sinking and the nausea rising in his throat — Here? he was thinking, my father lives here?

“Your foot,” Ray shouted. “I saw you having some trouble there when we were boarding back at Fairbanks. Lost one of your pegs, huh?”

Lost one of his pegs. Walter gazed out on the approaching lights and saw the image of his father, and all at once the roar of the plane became the roar of that ghostly flotilla of choppers in the doomed Sleepy Hollow night. Lost one of his pegs. And how.

“No,” Walter hollered, snatching at the handgrip as a gust rocked the plane, “lost both of ’em.”

Ray shouted something into the teeth of the wind as Walter trudged across the fractured skating rink of the airstrip. Walter couldn’t hear him, couldn’t even tell from the tone whether the man with whom he’d just risked his life in a rickety, worn-out, 10,500-dollar for-sale aircraft was blessing him, warning him or mocking him. “Good luck,” “Look out!” and “So long, sucker,” all sound pretty much the same when the temperature is down around forty below, the wind is tearing in off the frozen ocean with nothing to stop it for god knows how many thousand miles and you’ve got the drawstrings of the fur-lined hood of your parka tightened to the point of asphyxiation. Without turning around, Walter raised an arm in acknowledgment. And promptly fell face first on the jagged ice. When he pushed himself up, Ray was gone.

Ahead lay the six frozen blocks of wooden shacks that comprised the metropolis of Barrow, population three thousand, nine-tenths of whom, Ray had told him, were Eskimos. Eskimos who hated honkies. Who spat on them, pissed on them, cut them to pieces with the glittering sharp knives of their hooded eyes. Walter tottered forward, toward the lights, his suitcase throwing him off balance, the ragged uneven knobs of ice punching at his feet like the bumpers of a giant pinball machine. He’d never been so cold in his life, not even swimming in Van Wart Creek in October or jogging off to Philosophy 451 at the state university, where it sometimes got down to twenty below. No Exit, he thought. The Sickness Unto Death. Barrow. They’d got it all wrong, he thought, some cartographer’s mistake. Barren was more like it. He kept going, fell twice more, and began to regret his Jack London jokes. This was serious business.

Five minutes later he was staggering up the main drag — the only drag — of Barrow, last home and refuge of Truman Van Brunt. Or so he hoped. If the airstrip was deserted, the street was pretty lively, considering the temperature. Snowmobiles shrieked and sputtered around him, racing up and down the street; dogs that looked like wolves — or were they wolves? — fought and snarled and careened around in packs; hooded figures trudged by in the shadows. Walter’s hand, the one that gripped the suitcase, had gone numb despite his thermal mittens, and he thought grimly that at least he didn’t have to worry about his feet. No problem there. No sir.

The wind was keen and getting keener. The hairs inside his nostrils were made of crystal and his lungs felt as if they’d been quick-frozen. He’d stumbled past three blocks of windowless shacks already, most of them with chunks of some sort of frozen meat, bloody naked ribs and whatnot, strung up on the roof out of reach of the dogs, and still no sign of a hotel, bar or restaurant. There were only three blocks more to go, and then what? He was thinking he might go on trudging up and down that icy dark forbidding street until he curled up in a ball and froze through like a side of beef, doomed like the heedless tenderfoot in the Jack London story, when finally, up on the left, he spotted an Olympia Beer sign, red neon, white script, glowing like a mirage in the desert, and below it, a hand-painted sign that read “Northern Lights Café.” Shaken, desperate, shivering so hard he thought he’d dislocate his shoulders, he fumbled in the door.

For a minute, he thought he’d found nirvana. Lights. Warmth. A Formica counter, stools, booths, people, a wedge of apple pie in a smudged glass case, a jukebox surmounted by a glowing neon rainbow. But wait a minute, what was this? The place smelled, stank like a latrine. Of vomit, superheated piss, rancid grease, stale beer. And it was filled to capacity. With Eskimos. Eskimos. He’d never seen an Eskimo in his life, except in books and on TV — or maybe that was only Anthony Quinn in mukluks on a backlot in Burbank. Well, here they were, slouching, standing, sitting, snoozing, drinking, scratching their privates, looking as if they’d been dumped out of a sack. Their eyes — wicked, black, sunk deep beneath the slits of their lids — were on him. Their hair was greasy, their teeth rotten, their faces expressionless. To a one — he couldn’t tell if they were man or woman, boy or girl — they were dressed in animal skins. Walter dropped his suitcase in the corner and shuffled up to the counter, where an electric heater glowed red.

There was no one behind the counter, but there were dirty plates and beer bottles on the tables, and a couple of the Eskimos were bent over plates of french fries and what looked like burgers. No one said a word. Walter began to feel conspicuous. Began to feel awkward. He cleared his throat. Shuffled his feet. Stared down at the floor. Once, when he was sixteen, he and Tom Crane had taken Lola’s car down to the City, to an address they didn’t know — a Hundred Thirtieth or Fortieth Street, something like that — because Tom had seen an ad for cheap jazz albums at a Hearns department store. It was the first time Walter had been in Harlem. On the street, that is. In the hour he spent there, he saw only two white faces — his own, reflected in the grimy window of the department stores, and Tom’s. It was an odd feeling, a feeling of alienation, of displacement — even, almost, of shame for his whiteness. For that hour, he wanted desperately, with all his heart, to be black. Beyond that, nothing happened. They bought their records, climbed into the car and drove back to the suburbs, where every face was white. It was a lesson, he realized that. An experience. Something everyone should go through.

Somehow, he’d never felt the need to repeat it.

How long had he been standing here — a minute, five minutes, an hour? This was worse, far worse, than Harlem. He’d never seen an Eskimo before in his life. And now he was surrounded by them. It was like being on another planet or something. He was afraid to look up. He was beginning to feel that anything was better than this — even freezing to death on the streets or being torn to pieces by the wolf dogs or run down by drunken snowmobilers, when the swinging doors to the kitchen flew open and an extravagantly blonde, heavily made-up, rail-thin woman of Lola’s age hustled into the room, six long-necked beers in one hand and a steaming plate of something in the other. “Be with you in a minute, hon,” she said, and eased past him, arms held high.

The waitress seemed to have broken the spell. She served the beers and the plate of something, and the place came back to life. A murmur of low, mumbled conversation started up. An old man, his face as dead and leathery as the face of a shrunken head Walter had once seen in a museum, pushed past him with a seething glare and practically fell atop the jukebox. And then a teenager — yes, he could distinguish them now — tried to catch his eye and Walter looked timidly away. But now the waitress was there, and Walter looked into her tired gray eyes and thought for just an instant he was back in Peterskill. “What’ll it be, honey?” she asked him.

The old man struggled with a quarter at the jukebox, dropped it to the floor and let out a low heartfelt curse, the gist of which Walter didn’t quite catch — a malediction involving seals, kayaks and somebody’s mother, no doubt. Or on second thought, had he said something about honkies? Honkie sons of bitches?

“Uh,” Walter fumbled, tearing frantically at the parka’s drawstring, “um, uh … coffee,” he finally squeaked.

Without ceremony the waitress turned to the nearest Eskimo, said “Charley,” and jerked her neck. Scowling, the man got up from his stool and lurched across the room, a bottle of beer in his hand.

“But, I—” Walter protested.

“Sit,” the waitress said.

Walter sat.

He was on his second cup of coffee and had begun to detect signs of life in his fingertips, when the old man at the jukebox finally managed to locate the quarter and feed it into the slot. There was a mechanical buzz, succeeded by the plop of the record dropping, and then Bing Crosby was singing “White Christmas,” crooning to the grim, silent, drunken men in their animal skins, crooning to the grease, the forlorn-looking wedge of apple pie, the shacks, the ice sheet, the heaps of frozen dogshit in the streets, crooning to Walter about white Christmases he used to know …

Was this a joke? A dig? Walter was afraid to look around him.

“Refill?” the waitress asked, poised above him with a steaming Pyrex pot.

“Uh, no, no thanks,” Walter stammered, putting his hand over the cup for emphasis, “but, uh, maybe you could help me—?”

The waitress gave him a big lipsticky smile. “Yes? You looking for someone?”

“Maybe you don’t know him. I mean, maybe he doesn’t even live here any more. Truman Van Brunt?”

But for Bing Crosby, the place went quiet. The waitress’ smile was gone. “What do you want with him?”

“I’m”—he couldn’t say it, couldn’t spit out the words—“I’m his son.”

“His son? He never had a son. What are you talking about?”

Nothing could have prepared him for that moment. It hit him like a shove from behind, like something immovable along the side of the road. He was devastated. He wanted to dig a hole in the dirty linoleum at his feet and bury himself till the world slid closer to the sun and palm trees sprouted outside the window. He never had a son. For this he’d come four thousand miles.

The waitress’ mouth was a tight slash of suspicion. The Eskimos were silent, watching him, the indifference in their eyes replaced all at once by a look of cruel amusement, as if now the fun were about to begin, as if Walter — big and white and with his dirty red hair and freakish eyes and feet that didn’t work — had come to town as part of some sideshow. And Bing, Bing was going on with it, warbling about days being merry and bright—

“Hey, dude.” The young Eskimo who’d tried to catch his eye earlier was standing beside him. Walter looked up into the broad smooth face and hesitant eyes of a kid of fourteen or so. “Mr. Van Brunt, he lives up there,” jerking his thumb, “third house on the left, got a old car broke down out front.”

Numb, Walter rose to his feet, fought to tug a crumpled dollar from his pocket, and dropped it on the counter beside his cup. He was hot, burning up inside the heavy parka, and he felt lightheaded. He bent to pick up his suitcase, then turned back to the kid and ducked his head in acknowledgment. “Thanks,” he said.

“Hey, no sweat, dude,” the kid said, grinning to show off the blackened nubs of his teeth, “he’s my teacher.”

It was four in the afternoon and black as midnight. In two weeks the sun would set on Barrow for the final time — till January 23 of next year, that is. Walter had read about it in A Guide to Alaska: Last American Frontier, while he swatted mosquitoes in the lush backyard of his cottage in Van Wartville. Now he was here. On the steps of the Northern Lights Café, gazing up the dim street to where a ’49 Buick sat up on blocks in front of an unremarkable, low-roofed shack no different from any of the others, except for the dearth of caribou carcasses frozen to the roof. His father’s house. Here, in the far frozen hind end of nowhere.

Walter started across the street, the wind at his back, suitcase tugging at his arm. “Look out, asshole!” shouted a kamikaze on a snow machine as he shot past, engine screaming, treads churning up ice, and as Walter lurched out of the way he found himself in the middle of a pack of snarling dogs contending for a lump of offal frozen to the ice between his feet. Barrow. The sweat was freezing to his skin, his fingers were numb, and fourteen blood-crazed wolf dogs were tearing themselves to pieces at his feet. He’d been in town for something like half an hour and already he’d had it. In a sudden rage he struck out viciously at the dogs, swinging his suitcase like a mace and shouting curses till the wind sucked his voice away, and then he staggered up the berm of frozen garbage and dogshit that rose up like a prison wall in front of his father’s house. Fifty yards. That’s all it was from the café to his father’s doorstep, but they were the hardest fifty yards of his life. He never had a son. Four thousand miles to hear that little bulletin from the lips of a stranger, a hag in a baggy sweater and two tons of makeup. God, that hurt. Even if he was hard, soulless and free.

Walter hesitated on the icy doorstep. He felt like some poor abused orphan out of a Dickens story — what was he going to say? What was he going to call him, even — Dad? Father? Pater? He was weary, dejected, chilled to the marrow. The wind screamed. There was something like slush caught in the corners of his eyes. And then suddenly it didn’t matter — the son of a bitch never had a son anyway, right? — and Walter was pounding on the weather-bleached door for all he was worth. “Hey!” he bawled. “Open up! Anybody in there?” Boom, boom, boom. “Open up, goddammit!”

Nothing. No movement. No response. He might as well have been pounding on the door of his own tomb. His father didn’t want him, he wasn’t home, he didn’t exist. Walter knew then that he was going to die right there on the doorstep, frozen hard like one of the grotesque carcasses on the roof next door. That would show him, he thought bitterly. His son, his only son, the son he’d denied and deserted, frozen on his doorstep like so much meat. And then, all at once, the rage and frustration and self-pity building in him till he couldn’t help himself, he threw back his head and shrieked like an animal caught in a trap, all the trauma of a lifetime — all the ghosts and visions, the tearing of flesh and the wounds that never healed — all of it focused in the naked shattering plaint that rose from his belly to startle the wolf dogs and silence the wind: “Dad!” he sobbed. “Dad!” The wind choked him, the cold drove at him. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”

It was then that the door fell back and there he was, Truman Van Brunt, blinking at the darkness, the ice, at Walter. “What?” he said. “What did you call me?”

“Dad,” Walter said, and he wanted to fling his arms around him. He wanted to. He did. As much as he’d ever wanted anything. But he couldn’t move.

Forty below. With wind. Truman stood there with the door open, still big, still vigorous, the deep red fangs of his hair shot through with dirty bolts of gray and beating furiously around his head, a look of absolute bewilderment on his face, as if he’d awakened from one dream to find himself in the midst of another. “Walter?” he said.

Inside, the place was meticulously tidy, almost monastic. Two rooms. Woodstove in the corner of the front one, bookshelves lining three walls, kitchenette against the other, a glimpse of a tightly made bed and night table in the back room, more books. The books had titles like Agrarian Conflict: Van Wart and Livingston Manors; County Records, North Riding; Under Sail on Hudson’s River; Folk Medicine of the Delaware; A History of the Indian Tribes of Hudson’s River. Up against the stove, so close it might have been kindling, was a desk piled high with papers and surmounted by the dark hump of a big black ancient typewriter. Under the desk, a case of Fleischmann’s gin. There was no running water.

His father had filled two mugs with hot lemonade and gin before he could even get his parka off, and now Walter sat there in a patched easy chair, cradling the hot cup in his insensate hands and silently reading off book titles. Truman straddled a wooden chair opposite him. The stove snapped. Outside, there was the sound of the Arctic wind, persistent as static. Walter didn’t know what to say. Here he was, at long last, face to face with his father, and he didn’t know what to say.

“So you found me, huh?” Truman said finally. His voice was thick, slow with alcohol. He didn’t exactly seem overjoyed.

“Uh-huh,” Walter said after a moment, staring into his cup. “Didn’t you get my letters?”

His father grunted. “Letters? Shit, yeah — I got your letters.” He pushed himself up from the chair and lumbered into the back room, a big square-shouldered man with the sad vague air of a traveler lost in a city of strangers. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, wrong with his legs. Or feet. A moment later he thumped back into the room with a cardboard box and dropped it in Walter’s lap.

Inside were the letters: Walter’s hopeful script, the postmarks, the canceled stamps. There they were. Every one of them. And not a one had been opened.

He never had a son. Walter looked up from the box and into his father’s glassy stare. They hadn’t touched at the door, hadn’t even shaken hands.

“How’d you know where to find me?” Truman asked suddenly.

“Piet. Piet told me.”

“Pete? What do you mean ‘Pete’? Pete who?” The old man wore a full beard, red as Eric the Conqueror’s, gone gray now about the mouth. His hair was long, drawn back in a ponytail. He was scowling.

Walter felt the gin like antifreeze in his veins. “I forget his name. A little guy — you know, your friend from all those years ago, when …” He didn’t know how to put it. “Lola told me about him, about the riots and how—”

“You mean Piet Aukema? The dwarf?”

Walter nodded.

“Shit. I haven’t seen him in twenty years — how the hell would he know where I was?”

Walter’s stomach sank. He felt history squeezing him like a vise. “I met him in the hospital,” he said, as if the fact would somehow corroborate his story. “He told me he just got a letter from you. From Barrow. Said you were teaching.”

“Well, he’s a goddamned liar!” Truman roared, lurching to his feet, his face puffed with sudden rage. He looked around him wildly, as if he were about to fling his cup against the wall or rip the stove up off the floor or something, but then he waved his hand in dismissal and sat down again. “Ah, piss on it,” he murmured, and looked Walter hard in the eye. “Hey, I’m glad to see you anyway,” he suddenly boomed, a bit too heartily, as if he were trying to convince himself. “You’re a good-looking kid, you know that?”

Walter might have thrown it back at him—What the hell do you know about it? — and he would have been justified, too, but he didn’t. Instead he gave him a shy smile and looked back down into his cup. It was the closest they’d come.

But then the old man surprised him again. “There’s nothing wrong with you, is there — physically, I mean? You weren’t limping when you walked in here or anything, were you?”

Walter’s eyes leapt at him.

“I mean, it’s none of my business. … I just … it’s easy to get a touch of frostbite up here, you know.” He shrugged his shoulders, then threw back his head to drain his cup.

“You mean you don’t know?” Walter looked at him and saw the ghost ships, the dark lane opening up before him with its patches of ice clinging like scabs to the blacktop. He was incredulous. He was indignant. He was angry.

Truman looked uneasy. Now it was his turn to glance away. “How the hell would I know,” he mumbled. “Listen, I’m sorry — I left all that behind. I haven’t been much of a father, I admit. …”

“But, but what about that night—?” Walter couldn’t finish, it was all a hallucination, of course it was, he’d known that all along. The man sitting before him now was a hallucination, a stranger, the vacant terminus of a hopeless quest.

“I told you I’m sorry, for christ’s sake,” Truman snapped, raising his voice. He pushed himself up from the chair and crossed the room to the stove. Walter watched him fill his cup from the kettle perched atop it. “Another toddy?” the old man peered at him over his shoulder, his voice softening.

Walter waved him off, then struggled to his feet. “All right,’ he said, thinking, the letters, the letters, he never even bothered to open them, “I know you don’t give two shits about me and I know you want to get this over with, so I’m going to tell you why I came all the way up here into the ass-end of nowhere to find you. I’m going to tell you everything, I’m going to tell you what it feels like to lose your feet — yes, both of them — and I’m going to tell you about Depeyster Van Wart.” His heart was hammering. This was it. Finally. The end. “And then,” he said, “I want some answers.”

Truman shrugged. Grinned. Lifted his mug as if to offer a silent toast, and then drained it in a gulp. He brought the bottle of gin back to the chair with him, sat down and filled his cup, nothing to dilute it this time. His expression was strange — sheepish and belligerent at the same time, the look of the schoolyard bully hauled up in front of the principal. “So go ahead,” he said, the gin at his lips, “tell me.” He nodded at the door, the blackness, the unbroken tundra and the icy sea that lay beyond it. “We’ve got all night.”

Walter told him. With a vengeance. Told him how, when he was twelve, he waited through the summer for him, and then waited again the next summer and the next. Told him how hurt he’d felt, how tainted and unwanted, how culpable. And how he got over it. Told him how Hesh and Lola had nurtured him, sent him to college, how he’d found a soft and sweet girl and married her. And then, when the first bottle was empty and the gin burned like acid in his veins, he told him of his visions, of the poison that infested him, of how he’d skewered Jessica with his bitterness and run up against the ghost of his father till his feet were ground to pulp. He talked, and Truman listened, till long after the sun should have set and the cows come home. But there were no cows. And there was no sun.

Walter was disoriented. He peered through the iced-over window and saw the deep of night. He hadn’t eaten in god knew how many hours and the drink was getting to him. He fell heavily into the chair and glanced up at his father. Truman was slouched over, his head lolling sloppily on the prop of his hand, his eyes weary and red. And it came to Walter then that they were sparring, that was all, and that for all the exhilaration he’d felt in laying out his wrongs, it was only the first round.

“Dad?” he said, and the word felt strange on his tongue. “You awake?”

The old man lurched up as if from a bad dream. “Huh?” he said, instinctively feeling for the bottle. And then: “Oh. Oh, it’s you.” Outside, the wind held steady. Unforgiving, relentless, eternal. “All right,” he said, rousing himself. “You’ve had it tough, I admit it. But think of me.” He leaned forward, the massive shoulders and great brazen head. “Think of me,” he whispered. “You think I live up here because it’s a winter wonderland, the great vacation paradise, the Tahiti of the North or some shit? It’s penance, Walter. Penance.”

He rose, stretched, then shuffled back to reach under the desk and fish out another bottle. Walter watched him crack the seal with a practiced twist of his hand, pour out a full cup and then proffer the bottle. Walter was going to say no, going to lay his palm over the rim of the cup as he’d done in the café, but he didn’t. This was a marathon, a contest, the title bout. He held out his cup.

“You get tired,” Truman said, “you sleep over there, by the stove. I’ve got a sleeping bag, and you can take the cushions off the couch.” He sat again, arching his back against the hard wooden slats of the chair. He took a long sip from the cup and then walked the chair across the floor till he was so close to Walter he might have been bandaging a wound. “Now,” he said, his voice a hard harsh rumble of phlegm, “now you listen to my story.”

Truman’s Story

“No matter what they tell you, I loved her. I did.”

The old man drained his cup, flung it aside and lifted the bottle to his lips. He didn’t offer Walter any. “Your mother, I mean,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “She was something. You probably don’t remember her much, but she was so — what do you call it? — earnest, you know? Idealistic. She really bought all that Bolshevik crap, really thought Russia was the workers’ paradise and Joe Stalin everybody’s wise old uncle.” There was a single lamp burning, brass stand, paper shade, on the desk behind him; the shadows softened his features. “She was like Major Barbara or something. I’d never met anybody like her.”

Walter sat there transfixed, the rasping voice and the everlasting night holding him as if by spell or incantation. His mother, she of the soulful eyes, was right there before him. He could almost smell the potato pancakes.

“But you’ve been married, right? What was her name?”

“Jessica.” The name was an ache. Jessica and his mother.

“Right,” the old man said, his voice gravelly and deep, ruined by drink and nights that never end. “Well, you know how it is, then—”

“No,” Walter snapped, suddenly belligerent. “How is it?”

“I mean, once the first glow dies and all that—”

Walter jumped on him. “You mean you screwed her over. From the beginning. You married her so you could destroy her.” He tried to get up, but his feet were numb. “Sure I remember her. I remember her dead too. And I remember the day you left her — in that car out there, right? Depeyster Van Wart’s car, isn’t it?”

“Bullshit, Walter. Bullshit. You remember what Hesh taught you to remember.” The old man’s voice was steady — he wasn’t debating, he was narrating. The pain of it, the pain that made him hide out in the hind end of the world, was up on a shelf in a little bottle with a tight cap. Like smelling salts. “Don’t give me that self-righteous look, you little shit — you want to know hurt, you listen to me. I did it. Yes. I’m a fink, I’m a backstabber. I murdered my wife, set up my friends. That’s right, I’ll tell you that right off. So don’t argue with me, you little son of a bitch. Just listen.”

The temperature had gone up high under the old man’s voice, and for the second time in as many hours he looked as if he were about to lurch up and tear the place apart. Walter sat frozen, so close he could smell the stink of the gin on his father’s breath. “If you want to get beyond all that, I mean. And you do, right? Or you wouldn’t have come all the way up here.”

Numb, Walter nodded.

“Okay,” the old man said, “okay,” and the calm had returned to his voice. He was wearing mukluks and a bulky wool sweater with reindeer dancing across the front of it, and when he leaned forward, his hair and beard touched with gray, he looked like some scored and haunted figure out of an old Bergman movie, the pale oracle of the north. “Let me start at the beginning,” he said, “with Depeyster.”

Truman had met him in England during the war — they were both G2, Army Intelligence, and they’d struck an immediate chord on discovering they both hailed from the Peterskill area. Depeyster was a smart guy, good-looking, tough — and a pretty good ball player too. Basketball, that is. They shot some hoop with a couple of other guys once in a while when they were off duty. But then Depeyster got another assignment and they drifted apart. The important thing was that Truman met Christina — and married her — before he ever laid eyes on Depeyster Van Wart again. And that was the truth.

“But you joined the party,” Walter said, “—I mean, that’s what Lola—”

“Oh, fuck,” Truman spat, a savage crease cut into his forehead. He pushed himself up from the chair and paced the little room. Outside, the wolf dogs set up a howl. “Yeah. Okay. I joined the party. But maybe it was because I was in love with your mother, ever think of that? Maybe it was because she had some influence over me and maybe because, in a way, I wanted to believe that happy horseshit about the oppressed worker and the greed of the capitalists and all the rest of it — hey, my father was a fisherman, you know. But who was right, huh? Khrushchev comes along and denounces Stalin and everybody in the Colony shits blood. You got to put things in perspective, Walter.” He paused at his desk, picked up a sheaf of paper covered in a close black typescript, then set it down again. Instead he shook a cigarette — a Camel — from the pack that lay beside it, and raised a lighter to it. Walter could see that his hands were shaking, for all his bravado.

“So then, what — we’re married a year, two years — and Depeyster comes back into the picture. After, Walter,” he said, something like a plea in his eyes for the first time, “after I met your mother and married her, I run into him in the store at Cats’ Corners out there, we’re going on a picnic, your mother and me and Hesh and Lola, and I stop in for a beer and pack of smokes on a Sunday afternoon, and there he is.” He paused, took another drink from the neck of the bottle. “There’s a lot of factors here, things you know nothing about. Don’t be so quick to judge.”

Walter found that he was gripping the arms of the chair as if he were afraid he would topple out of it, as if he were high up on a Ferris wheel in a wind like the wind outside the door. “I told you,” he said, “I work for him. He’s all right. Really, he is. He says Hesh and Lola are wrong. Says you’re a patriot.”

Truman let out a bitter laugh, the pale swampy green of his eyes obscured in smoke, the massive torso swaying ever so slightly with the effect of the alcohol and maybe the emotional charge too. “Patriot,” he repeated, his face contorted as if he’d bitten into something rotten. “Patriot,” he spat, and then he stretched himself out on the floor in front of the stove and fell asleep, the lit cigarette still jammed between his fingers.

In the morning — if you could call it morning — the old man was guarded, frazzled, hung over and furious, as communicative as a stone. At some point, deep in the folds of that interminable night, Walter had heard him stagger up from the floor, pour himself a drink and dial the phone. “I’m not coming in today,” he growled into the receiver. There was a pause. “Yeah, that’s right. I’m sick.” Another pause. “Let ’em read the Constitution — better yet, have them copy it out.” Click.

Now it was light — or rather there was a noticeable softening of the darkness that pressed up against the windows — and there was a smell of bacon, strong as life, mixed in with a subtler smell, a mnemonic smell, a cruel and heartless smell: potato pancakes. Walter lurched up out of the sleeping bag as if it were on fire, living flesh in a house of ghosts. The dogs howled. It must have been about noon.

Truman served him bacon, eggs over easy, potato pancakes—“Like your mother used to make,” he said out of a pouchy, expressionless face, and then he said nothing more till the sun flickered out an hour later. “Gone dark,” he said suddenly out of the silence. “Cocktail hour,” he said with a sloppy grin. “Story time.”

There was more gin. Endless gin. Gin that flowed like blood from the gashes under a middleweight’s eyes. Not yet two in the afternoon and Walter was reeling. Slouched in the easy chair, his limbs gone plastic and light, so light they seemed detached from his body, Walter cradled a glass of industrial-strength gin and listened to his father tell out history like an Indian sachem telling out beads.

“Depeyster,” the old man rumbled by way of introduction, “I was talking about Depeyster Van Wart, wasn’t I?”

Walter nodded. This is what he’d come to hear.

Truman ducked his head, stuck a thick finger in his drink — gin and gin — and sucked it. “Maybe I misled you a little last night,” he said. “About that day when I ran into him at the store. It was an accident on my part, I swear it was, but not on his. No. Nothing he ever does is by accident.”

Walter fought down his fear, his anger, fought down the urge to challenge him, and sank deeper into the chair, sipping gin that tasted like cleaning fluid, while the old man went on.

It was funny, he said, the way Depeyster suddenly came back into his life. After that day at Cats’ Corners, he began to see more and more of him, even as he fell into the routine of Colony life, attending the lectures and concerts, even as he joined the association and then the party. Depeyster was everywhere. He was getting a new muffler at Skip’s garage when Truman took the car in for shocks and brake pads, he was hunkered over a drink at the Yorktown Tavern when Truman stopped in with one of the guys after work, he was in Genung’s buying drapes, at Offenbacher’s with a bag of kaiser rolls. He was everywhere. But especially, he was on the train.

Two days a week, when the 4:30 whistle blew at the plant, Truman picked up his lunchbox, pulled an old army rucksack out from under the iron work bench and walked the six blocks down to the train station. He was studying American history at City College, studying sociology, transcendentalism, American labor movements, the causes and effects of the War of Independence, and he chewed a sandwich, sipped coffee and read his texts on the seventy-five-minute ride into New York. One evening he looked up from his books and there was Depeyster, tanned and easy, in a business suit and with a briefcase under his arm. He had business in town, he said, though what sort of business he might have had at six o’clock at night Truman never thought to ask.

After that, Truman saw him frequently on the train, sometimes alone, sometines in the company of LeClerc Outhouse. They made a good group. Van Wart, of course, came from the old family, and he was a real repository of local history, not to mention a Yale B.A., class of ’40. LeClerc collected artifacts from the Revolutionary War, most of which he’d dug up himself, and he knew more about the fight for New York than Truman’s professor. They talked history, current events, they talked politics. LeClerc and Depeyster were hard-line Republicans, of course, Dewey men, and they saw Communists everywhere. In China, Korea, Turkey, in the incumbent’s administration. And, of course, in Kitchawank Colony. Truman found himself in the position of defending the Left, defending Roosevelt and the New Deal, defending the Colony, his wife and father-in-law and Hesh and Lola. He didn’t do very well at it.

And why not? Maybe because he was confused himself.

“What did you mean,” Walter asked, interrupting him, “about Dipe never doing anything by accident? You mean he came after you? Purposely?”

The old man leaned back in that Essene chair, that hard untenable rack of a chair, and leveled a contemptuous look on him. “Don’t be a jerk, Walter — of course he did. Some of those guys we knew in G2 stayed on after the war and wound up in some pretty high places. Depeyster kept in touch.”

“So you were a spy,” Walter said, and the emotion was gone from his voice.

Truman sat up, cleared his throat and turned his head to spit on the floor. For a long moment he fiddled with the rubber band that held his hair in place. “If you want to call it that,” he said. “They convinced me. Made me see the light. Them and Piet.”

“But—” Walter was defeated, his last hope a fading contrail in a leaden sky. The rumor was truth. His father was shit. “But how could you?” he insisted, angry in his defeat and loud in his anger. “I mean how could anybody convince you — words, how could words convince you — to, to screw over your friends, your own wife, your”—it still stuck in his throat—“your son?”

“I was right, that’s how. I did what I did for a higher principle.” The old man spoke as if he had no problem with it, as if it hadn’t destroyed his life, taken his family, made him into a drunk and an exile. “There might have been people like Norman Thomas around, people like your mother, but there were also devious little shits like Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum, who set us all up, traitors and crazies like Greenglass, Rosenberg, Hiss, who just wanted to kill everything we had in this country — and they were right there in the Colony too. Still are.”

“But your own wife — I mean, don’t you have a conscience? How could you do it?”

The old man was silent a moment, regarding him fixedly over the lip of the bottle. When he spoke, his voice was so soft Walter could barely hear him: “How could you?”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Your wife — what’s her name?”

“Jessica.”

“Jessica. You lost it with her, didn’t you? You fucked her over, didn’t you? And for some reason you can’t even name.” Truman’s voice came on again, caustic, harsh, a snarl that overrode the wind. “And what about Depeyster Van Wart—‘Dipe,’ as you call him. He’s your man now, isn’t he? Screw Hesh. Fuck the old man. Dipe’s the one. He’s more your father than I am.”

The old man’s eyes were bright with malice. “Walter,” he whispered. “Hey, Walter: you’re already halfway there.”

Walter suddenly felt weak, terminally exhausted, felt as if he were going down for the count. It was all he could do to rise shakily from the chair. “Bathroom,” he murmured, and staggered toward the back room. He tried to walk tall, tried to throw back his shoulders and tough it out, but he hadn’t gone five steps before his feet got tangled and he slammed into the doorframe.

Bang. End of Round Two.

For a long while Walter knelt over a bucket in the frigid closet that served the old man for a bathroom, his insides heaving, the sweetsour stench of his own guts overpowering him. There was another smell there too, the smell of his father, of his father’s shit, and it made his stomach clench again and again. His father’s shit. Shit in a bucket. Christina and Jessica. Truman and Walter.

There was a barrel of water in the kitchenette. Walter cupped his hands and splashed some on his face. He put his mouth to the tap and drank. Outside, the night went on. The old man, rock-still in his chair, meditatively sipped his drink. Walter shivered. The place was cold, though Truman had stoked the stove with coal till the iron door glowed on its hinges. Walter crossed the room, picked his parka up from the floor and shrugged into it.

“Going someplace?” the old man said, faintly mocking.

Walter didn’t answer. He plucked his cup from the arm of the chair and held it out for the old man to fill, glaring so hard Truman had to look away. Then he shook a Camel from the old man’s pack, lit it and settled back in the chair. It would go three rounds, he could see that now. Then he could take the plane back to Van Wartville and he’d be free of his ghosts forever—Father? What father? He never had a father—damaged, but free. There was another possibility, of course. That the old man would triumph. Lay him out. Crush him. And then he’d board that plane with his tail between his legs and go on home to a life scrambled like a plate of eggs, pursued and haunted till he died.

“You’d do it again,” Walter said finally, jabbing, probing, “you were right, a patriot, and my mother, Hesh and Lola, Paul Robeson himself, they were the traitors.”

Truman brooded over the bottle. He said nothing.

“They got what was coming to them, right?”

Silence. The wind. The snow machines. Muffled shouts. Dogs.

“The children too. I could have been there that day, your own son. What about the children playing in front of the stage — did they deserve it too? Do patriots beat the shit out of Communists’ children? Do they?” Walter was reviving, coming alive again, so hot for the fight he forgot which side he was on. Let him refute that, he thought. Let him convince me. And then I can rest.

Truman rose with a sigh, stirred his drink vaguely and then crossed the room to where his own coat — animal skin, just like the Eskimos’—hung from a peg. He took down the hat that hung above it, a Sergeant-Preston-of-the-Yukon sort of affair, leather and fur, with earflaps pinned up like wings, and dropped it on his head. He circled the chair twice, as if reluctant to sit, and then, mashing the hat down low over his eyes, he eased himself down again. “You want black-and-white,” he sighed. “Good guys and bad guys. You want simple.”

“ ‘I was right,’ you said. ‘I loved her,’ you said. So which was it?”

The old man ignored the question. Then he looked up suddenly and held Walter’s eyes. “I didn’t know she was going to die, Walter. It was a divorce, you know, that’s how I saw it. Happens every day.”

“You twisted the knife,” Walter said.

“I was young, confused. Like you. We didn’t shack up in those days, you know, we got married. I loved her. I loved Marx and Engels and the Socialist revolution. Three and a half years, Walter — it’s a long time. It can be, anyway. I changed, all right? Is that a crime? Like you, like you, Walter.

“Your mother was a saint, yeah. Selfless. Good. Righteous. Those eyes of her. But maybe too good, too pure, you know what I mean? Maybe she made me feel like shit in comparison, made me feel like hurting her — just a little, maybe. Like your Jessica, right? Am I right? Goody-good?”

“You’re a son of a bitch,” Walter said.

Truman smiled. “So are you.”

There was a silence. Then Truman went on. He’d been wrong to hurt her so deeply, he said, he knew it, and this life was his penance, this talk his act of contrition. He should have just left, got out. He should have warned her. But for a year and a half he’d been meeting secretly with Depeyster, LeClerc and the others — vets, like himself — and he’d fed them information. It was no big deal — minutes of the association, who said what at party meetings — nothing, really, and he didn’t take a cent for it. Didn’t want it. He’d turned around, one hundred eighty degrees, and he believed in his heart that he was right.

Sure it hurt him. He drank more, stayed away from the house, looked into Christina’s martyred eyes and felt like a criminal, like shit, like the two-faced Judas he was. “But you know, Walter,” he said, “sometimes it feels good to feel like shit, you know what I mean? It’s a need, almost. Something in the blood.”

The week that preceded the concert was the worst of his life. The end was coming and he knew it. He was out every night, drunk. Piet was with him then, and that helped. Piet was there with a joke, with an arm around the shoulder. Funny little guy. “What should I do, Piet?” Truman asked him. “Do it,” Piet said. “Stick it to ’em. Jews, Commies, niggers. The world’s gone rotten like an apple.” There was money this time. Money to get away and start over, sort things out. Someplace. Anyplace. Barrow, even. He wasn’t supposed to take the car — permanently, that is. But when it was all over, he hated Depeyster more than he hated Sasha Freeman and the Worldwide Communist Conspiracy. For making him hate himself. So he kept it. Drove the shit out of it. Seven, eight years, up here and back. Till it gave out. Till there was no reason to go back.

The funny thing was, it was all in vain.

Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum and whoever controlled them were one step ahead of Depeyster all along. “You want to talk expediency,” Truman growled, “you want to talk cynicism, Freeman and Blum, those sons of bitches had a corner on the market.”

Truman was supposed to let the boys in at some point so they could break things up — really tan the asses of Robeson and Connell and all the rest of the nigger lovers, teach them a lesson they’d never forget: Wake Up, America: Peterskill Did! That’s how Depeyster saw it. That was the plan. Truman would help the cause and he’d get a thousand dollars to bail himself out of his life and start someplace else. But it all backfired, of course. If Sasha Freeman had been there he would have let the animals in himself. Gladly. It was his idea all along to stir thing up till they were good and hot, work in a little slaughter of the innocents with some broken bones and bloody noses thrown in for good measure and get a bunch of pictures of women in blood-stained skirts into the newspapers. And if some poor coon got lynched, so much the better. A peaceful sing-along? What the hell good was that?

“You tell me, Walter,” the old man said, leaning into him, “who the bad guys were.”

Walter had no answer. He looked away from his father’s eyes, and then back again.

Truman was fingering his right ear. The lobe was deformed, shriveled back on itself like the inner fold of a sun-dried apricot. Walter knew that ear well. Shrapnel, the old man had said when he took Walter down to the trestle to catch crabs, Walter eight, nine, ten years old. “That’s how this happened,” Truman said suddenly, no act of contrition if not entire, if not heartfelt and complete.

“You always told me it was the war.”

The old man shook his head. “That night. It’s my Judas mark. The weirdest thing, too.” His eyes were squinted against the smoke of his fiftieth Camel, his face struck with something like wonder. Or puzzlement. “It was over and we were gone, Piet and me, out of the mob and up one of those back roads to where we’d left the car, when this maniac comes flying out of the bushes and takes me down from behind. I’m pretty strong in those days, pretty big. This guy is bigger. He doesn’t say a word, just starts beating the shit out of me — trying to kill me. And I mean kill. Weirdest thing …”

“Yeah?” Walter prompted.

“He was an Indian. Like you see on TV — or out in New Mexico.” Pause. “Or out the window here. Stank like a septic tank, greased up, feathers in his hair, the whole schmeer. He would have killed me, Walter — and maybe he should of — except for Piet. Piet got him off me. Stabbed him with his penknife. Then a bunch of guys jumped on him, five or six or more, I don’t know. But the guy wanted me — just me — and I’ll never know why. They had his hands, so he bit me. Like an animal. He went down, Walter, and he took a piece of me with him.”

Walter leaned back in the chair. He knew it all now, the fight was over, and where had it got him? His father was nothing, neither hero nor criminal, he was just a man, weak, venal, confused, impaled on the past, wounded beyond any hope of recovery. But so what? What did it mean? The imp. Piet. The waking nightmares and the hallucinations, a life lived out on feet that were dead, the marker, Tom Crane, Jessica. You’re already halfway there, the old man had said. Was that it? Following in his father’s footsteps? History come home to roost?

“Crazy, huh?” the old man said.

“What?”

“My ear. The Indian.”

Walter nodded absently. And then, as if correcting for that nod, he snarled, “Tell you the truth, who cares? I don’t want to know about some crazy Indian biting your ear, I want to know why, why you did it.” Walter pushed himself up from the chair and he could feel his face twisting toward some explosive show of emotion, tears or rage or desperation. “The whole thing — Piet, Depeyster, you were confused — it’s all just excuses. Words. Facts.” He found to his surprise that he was shouting. “I want to know why, why in your heart, why. You hear me: why?”

The old man’s face was cold, implacable, hard as stone. Suddenly Walter felt frightened, felt he’d gone too far — over the edge and into the abyss. He took a step back as his father, exuding gin from his very pores and with the savage skin hat raked down over eyes that shone with malice, rose from his chair to deliver one final blow, the knockout punch.

No, Walter thought, it isn’t over yet.

“You’re a real masochist, kid,” Truman hissed. “You want it all, don’t you? And you push till you get it. Okay,” he said, turning his back on him and lumbering toward the big oak desk that dominated the room.

“This is it,” he said, looking over his shoulder and hefting a manuscript, and in that moment he looked just as Walter had pictured him in his waking dreams; in that moment he was the ghost on the ship, the joker in the hospital room, the annihilator on the motorcycle. Walter felt something seize him then, something that would never let go. It was tightening its grip, yes, he could feel it, terrible and familiar, when the old man turned on him again. “Walter,” he said, “you listening?”

He couldn’t speak. There were pine needles in his throat, wads of fur. He was mute, he was gagging.

“So you’re into Colonial history, huh? Done a little reading, huh? About Peterskill?” The words dangled like a hangman’s noose. “What I want to ask you is this: you ever run across a reference to Cadwallader Crane?”

He was dead. He knew it.

“Or maybe Jeremy Mohonk?”

Gallows Hill

The manuscript lay in his lap, dead weight. It was massive, ponderous, like the Sunday Times on Labor Day weekend, like a Russian novel, like the Bible. Six inches high, typed space and a half on legalsized sheets, better than a thousand pages. Walter glanced at the title page in stupefaction: Colonial Shame: Betrayal and Death in Van Wartville, the First Revolt, by Truman H. Van Brunt. Was this it? Was this why he’d destroyed his wife, deserted his son and hid himself so far out on the frozen tip of the continent even the polar bears couldn’t find him?

Betrayal and death. Colonial shame. He was crazy as a loon.

Fighting back his dread, Walter thumbed through the pages, read over the title again with a slow studied movement of his lips. It was only words, only history. What was he afraid of? Cadwallader Crane. Jeremy Mohonk. A marker along the side of the road — passed it by a thousand times. He’d never even bothered to read it.

But Truman had.

At the moment Truman was in the kitchenette, his back to Walter, spreading butter and Gulden’s mustard on slices of white bread. He had about him an air of unconcern, as if showing his alienated son the work of his mad wasted life was an everyday occurrence, but Walter could see from the way he too briskly lathered the bread and then clumsily poured himself a tall gin and lemonade that he was wrought up. The old man suddenly darted a glance over his shoulder. “Hungry?” he asked.

“No,” Walter answered, his stomach still clenched in anticipation of some terrible withering revelation, his father the phantom come to life, the book of the dead spread open in his lap. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Sure? I’m making sandwiches — spam and onions.” He held up an onion as if it were a jar of beluga caviar or pickled truffles. “You’re going to need something on your stomach.”

Was this a threat? A warning?

“No,” Walter said, “thank you, no,” and he flipped back the page and began to read:

Feudalism in the U.S.A., land of the free, home of the brave, the few over the many, lords and ladies set up over the common people, English corruption (and Dutch before it) throttling American innocence. Hard to believe? Think back to a time before the Revolution (the bourgeois revolution of 1777, that is), when patroons and manor lords reared their ugly heads over Negro slaves, indentured servants and tenant farmers who could not even be sure of passing on the fruit of their labors to their own children. …

This was the introduction — thirty-five, forty, fifty pages of it. Van Wartville. 1693. An uprising. A revolt against Stephanus Rombout Van Wart, First Lord of the Manor. Walter tried to scan it, plowing through, looking for the meat, the essence, the key, but there was too much of it, the whole mad tome nothing more than a sustained rant. He flipped to the last page of the introduction:

… and it looked forward to a time not so long ago when an unchecked populace ran amok on that very same hallowed ground and those who would undermine our precious democracy nearly held sway. We refer, of course, to the Peterskill (more properly, Van Wartville) Riots of 1949, the treatment of which, in their fatal connection to that first doomed revolt, will occupy the later chapters of this work. …

Was that it? The old man manipulating history to justify himself? He skipped to the bottom of the page:

We purpose here to examine a truth that resides in the blood, a shame that leaps over generations, an ignominy and infamy that lives on in spirit, though no text dares to present it. We, in this history, are the first to—

“Pretty fascinating, huh?” The old man was hovering over him, drink in one hand, an indented sandwich in the other.

Walter looked up warily. “Jeremy Mohonk. Cadwallader Crane. Where are they?”

“They’re in there,” Truman said, waving his sandwich at the mountain of paper, “they get hung. But you knew that already. What you want to know is how. And why.” He paused to address the sandwich, and then, easing himself back down on the chair, he said, in a kind of sigh, “First public execution on the Van Wartville books.”

Walter was indignant. “You mean you expect me to read this — all of it?” The weight of it alone was putting him through the floor. He couldn’t read ten pages of it, not if it promised eternal life, revealed the secret names of God and gave him his feet back. Suddenly he felt tired, immeasurably weary. The sky was black. How long had he been here? What time was it?

“No,” Truman said after a while, “I don’t expect you to read it. Not now, anyway.” He paused to lick a smear of mustard from the corner of his mouth. “But you wanted answers and I’m going to give them to you. Twenty years I been working on this book,” and he leaned over to tap the manuscript with a thick proprietary finger, “and you can sit home in Peterskill and read it when it’s published. But now, since you asked — since you especially asked — I’m going to tell you what it’s about. All of it. No stone unturned.” There was a grin on his face, but it wasn’t a comforting grin — more like the smirk of the torturer as he applies the hot iron. “And I’m going to tell you what it means to both of us, Walter, you and me both.

“Hey,” he said, reaching out that same hand to take Walter by the arm, the affectionate squeeze, first bodily contact between them, “we are father and son, right?”

The old man had edged the chair closer. His voice was the only thing in the room, and the room was the only place in the universe. There was no longer any sound of dogs — not so much as a whimper. The snow machines had fallen silent. Even the wind seemed to have lost its breath. Uneasy, wishing he’d let it go, Walter sat rigid in his chair, submitting himself to his father’s harsh rasping voice as to a dose of bitter medicine.

It was the fall of 1693. A time before historical markers, Norton Commandos, Nehru shirts and supermarkets, a time so distant only the reach of history could touch it. Wouter Van Brunt, ancestor of a legion of Van Brunts to come, was getting ready to take his wagon down to the upper house to settle his quitrent and enjoy a day of dancing and feasting. He was twenty-five years old and he’d buried his father a year ago to the day. In the back of the wagon there were two fathoms of split firewood, two bushels of hulled wheat, four fat pullets and twenty-five pounds of butter in clay crocks. The five hundred guilders — or rather, its equivalent in English pounds — had already been paid out at Van Wart’s mill in value of wheat, barley, rye and peas for sale downriver. Wouter’s mother would ride beside him in the wagon. His brother Staats, who worked the farm with him, would walk, as would his sisters Agatha and Gertruyd, now eighteen and sixteen respectively; and as pretty-footed and nubile as any girls in the county. Brother Harmanus was no longer living at home, having left one morning before light to seek his fortune in the great burgeoning metropolis of New York, a city of some 10,000 souls. Sister Geesje was dead.

Cadwallader Crane was also planning to attend the festivities, though he wouldn’t be paying his rent. Things had gone sour on him since Geesje’s death, and he just didn’t have it. The butter he was able to churn had turned rancid (and in any case it was closer to five pounds than twenty-five), some mysterious agent of the wild had got into his henhouse and carried off the lot of his poultry, and his fields, broken by his doleful plow and seeded by his lugubrious hand, hadn’t yielded enough to bother taking to the mill. Of cash, he had none. But firewood! Firewood he’d cut and delivered with a vengeance. Six, eight, ten fathoms, he’d filled the young lord’s woodshed to the top of its canted ceiling and then built a tower of wood beside it that could have warmed all the hearths of Van Wartville right on through the winter and into the blaze of July.

What he was hoping, as he loped down the road from his farm on the birdlike sticks of his legs, was that the plethora of his firewood might make up for his dearth of coin and the inadequacy of his produce. His heart was like a stone, of course, and he wore a suit of black clothes, as befits a widower in mourning, and he was determined not to enjoy himself. He wouldn’t lift his eyes to admire the way the petticoats peeked out from beneath the skirts of Salvation Oothouse (née Brown), nor gaze on the resplendent face and figure of Saskia Van Wart either, if she was there. No, he would just take his long face up to the refreshment table — keeping an eye out for old Ter Dingas Bosyn and his damnable accounts ledger — and drink up Van Wart’s wine and gorge on Van Wart’s food till he swelled up like a garter snake with a whole family of frogs inside.

As for Jeremy Mohonk, the third principal player in the mortal drama about to unfold, he didn’t pay rent, hadn’t ever paid rent and never would. He lived on a seedy corner of his late uncle’s farm amid a tangle of pumpkin vines and corn stalks, in the bark hut he’d erected on a cold winter’s day back in ’81, and he claimed that corner as ancestral land. He was a Kitchawank, after all, or half a one, and he was married to a Weckquaesgeek woman. A woman who’d borne him three sons and three daughters, of whom, unfortunately, only the first son and last daughter had survived infancy. On this particular day — November 15, 1693, the day of Van Wart’s first annual harvest feast — he was sitting before the fire in his hut, smoking kinnikinnick and carefully stripping the skin from his winter bear, a great fat sow he’d shot practically on the doorstep when he went out to make his morning water. He smoked and plied his quick sharp knife. His wife, whatever her name was, busied herself over a pot of corn mush, the smell of which touched the pit of his belly with tiny fingers of anticipation. He was content. For the Van Warts and their party, he had about as much use as he had for words.

Wouter and his mother were among the first to arrive at the upper house, where long plank tables had been set up in the yard around a great deep pit of coals, into which a pair of spitted suckling pigs dripped their sweet combustible juices. Five huge covered pots — of olipotrigo, pea and prune soup flavored with ginger, minced ox tongue with green apples and other aromatic delicacies — crouched around the pigs as if standing watch. The tables were heaped with corn, cabbage, pumpkin and squash, and there were kegs of wine, beer and cider. “Very nice,” Neeltje admitted as her son helped her down from the wagon and her daughters joined her to compose themselves for their grand entrance, such as it was.

The day was overcast and cold, hardly the sort of day for an outdoor gathering, but the patroon — or rather, lord of the manor, as he was now called — had decided to make a grand public occasion of the paying of the rents, rather than the private and often onerous affair it had been for so many years. He would give back his tenants a small portion of what they gave him, he reasoned, and it would help keep them happy with their lot — and besides, it would save him the time and trouble of sending his agent around to collect. And so, no matter that the sky looked as if it had been dredged up from the bottom of the river and it was cold enough to put a crust on a flagon of cider left out to stand, there would be fiddling, merrymaking and feasting at both upper and lower houses on this august day.

Nor was this the only innovation. Since the summer, when William and Mary, acting through the offices of their Royal Governor, had chartered Van Wart Manor and consolidated all Stephanus’ patent purchases with the original estate left him by his father, several other changes had come to Van Wartville as well. There was the alteration of the place name, the Dutch “wyck” subsumed in the English “ville.” A millpond was created and a sawmill erected upstream from the gristmill. Three new farms were cleared and tenanted by red-nosed, horse-toothed, Yankee religious fanatics. And finally, most surprising of all, Van Wart evicted his cousin Adriaen from the upper house, replacing him with his own eldest son, Rombout. Adriaen, like Gerrit de Vries before him, had been sent packing without so much as a thank you, and this provoked a storm of unfavorable comment among the tenants and their sharp-tongued wives. Sluggish, inoffensive, perhaps even a little soft in the head, Adriaen had been well-liked. Rombout, on the other hand, was like his father.

At any rate, by three in the afternoon, the entire community had gathered at the upper house to unload their wagons, fill their bellies with the patroon’s good port, smoke their long pipes and dance, flirt, gossip and drink till long after the sun faded in the west. There were Sturdivants, Lents, Robideaus, Mussers, van der Meulens, Cranes, Oothouses, Ten Haers and Van Brunts, as well as the three new families, with their pinched and stingy faces and sackcloth clothes, and the odd Strang or Brown wandered up from Pieterse’s Kill. Jan Pieterse himself turned out, though he was older now than Methuselah, fat as four hogs and deaf as a post, and Saskia Van Wart, still unmarried at the advanced age of twenty-four, came down from the parlor, where she’d been visiting with her brother, to dance a spirited galliard with her latest suitor, a puny English fop in canions and leather pumps. And throughout the day, old Ter Dingas Bosyn, who was older even than Jan Pieterse — so old he’d lost his fat and shriveled away till he was nothing more than a pair of hands and a head — sat in the lower kitchen, beside the fireplace, his accounts ledger spread open on the table before him and a coinbox at his side. One by one, the heads of the families bowed their way through the low door to stand before him and watch as his arthritic finger pinned their names to the page.

It was growing dark and the party was about to break up, when Pompey II, who’d been assisting the commis with his inventory, found Cadwallader Crane slumped over the olipotrigo pot and led him into old Bosyn’s presence. Cadwallader, towering with drink and dilated like an anaconda with the patroon’s food, belched twice and began to offer the withered commis a whole string of excuses for not having made his rent. He’d got past the death of Geesje and was unsuccessfully fighting back his tears while describing the lamentable and mysterious sacking of his henhouse, when he saw that the old man was holding up a shrunken monkeylike paw in a gesture of forbearance. “Enough,” the commis rasped. Then he wheezed, sighed, studied his books a moment, took a pinch of snuff, sneezed into a silk handkerchief with some very pretty embroidery work along the border, and said: “No need for … huffff, excuses. The lord of the manor, seeing that you’ve lost your wife and have no … hummmm, issue, has decided to terminate your lease forthwith.” The commis turned his head away quickly and spat or perhaps puked into the handkerchief with a prodigious dredging of his throat and trumpeting of his nose, after which he wiped his watering eyes on the sleeve of his jacket. “You have two days,” he announced finally, “before the new tenants take over.”

And then it was Wouter’s turn.

Just as he was getting set to leave, lifting his mother and sisters into the now-empty wagon, his belly full and head light with cider and beer, he felt Pompey’s deferential hand at his elbow. “Old Misser Bosyn, sir, he want a word with you.”

Puzzled, wondering if somehow the old geezer had miscounted his produce or shortchanged him at the mill, he followed the slave into the warm and redolent kitchen. “I’m on my way out, Bosyn, got moeder and the girls waiting in the wagon,” he said in Dutch. “What’s the problem?”

The problem was that the lord of the manor was reviewing his leases with an eye to more profitable management. Wouter’s farm, along with one other, had been reassigned.

“Reassigned?” Wouter echoed in astonishment.

The old man grunted. “The lease was in your father’s name, not yours.”

Wouter began to protest, but the words stuck in his throat.

“Two days,” the commis croaked. “Take the increase of the stock over what Mijnheer allowed your father, pack up your personal belongings, if there be any such, and vacate the premises for the new tenants.” He paused, drew a watch from his waistcoat pocket and consulted it, as if it could plot the course of those honest, hopeful, industrious newcomers. “They’ll be here Tuesday noon. On the sloop up from New York.

“And oh yes,” he added, “the Indian, or half-breed or whatever he is, he goes too.”

Wouter was too thunderstruck to reply. He merely turned his back, ducked through the open door and climbed into the wagon. His mother and sisters were chattering about the party, about who danced with whom and did you see so-and-so in that ridiculous getup, but he didn’t hear them. He was eleven years old, the boy who sat himself in the stocks, the boy who’d seen his father broken and humiliated and felt the shame of it beating like poison through his veins. The horses lifted their feet and set them down again, the wagon swayed and creaked, trees melted into darkness. “Is there anything the matter?” his mother asked. He shook his head.

He unhitched the wagon and stabled the horses in a state of shock. He hadn’t said a word to his mother — or sisters — and his brother had stayed on at the party with John Robideau and some of the other young bucks. For all they knew, the world was still in its track, they’d acquitted themselves of their obligations to the landlord for another year and the farm at Nysen’s Roost would go down through the generations from father to son. It was a joke, a bad joke. He was rubbing down the horses, barely able to control his hands for the rage building in them, when he heard the doorlatch behind him.

It was Cadwallader Crane. The widower, the naturalist, his sad and sorry brother-in-law. Cadwallader’s coat and hat were dusted with the fine pellets of snow that had begun to sift down out of the pale night sky. His eyes were red. “I’ve been evicted,” he said, his voice quavering. “From the farm my father … helped me … set up for, for”—he began to blubber—“for Geesje.”

“I’ll be damned,” Wouter said, and he never guessed how prophetic the expression might prove.

Five minutes later they were in cousin Jeremy’s hut, warming themselves over the fire and passing a bottle of Dutch courage. Wouter pressed the bottle to his lips, handed it to his brother-in-law and leaned forward to give Jeremy the bad news. Gesturing, pantomiming, running through a stock of facial expressions that would have made a thespian proud, he told him what the commis had said and what it meant for all of them. Jeremy’s wife looked on solemnly, the baby in her arms. Young Jeremy, twelve years old now and with the eyes of a Van Brunt, quietly ran his fingers over the teeth of the bear his father had killed that morning. Jeremy said nothing. But then he hadn’t said anything in fourteen years.

“I say we go back up there,” Wouter took the bottle back and waved it like a weapon, “and let the scum know how we feel.”

Cadwallader’s eyes were muddy, his voice lost somewhere in the pit of his stomach. “Yeah,” he wheezed, “yeah, let ’em know how we feel.”

Wouter turned to his cousin. “Jeremy?”

Jeremy gave him a look that needed no interpretation.

Next thing they knew, they were standing on the lawn outside the upper house, gazing up at the parade of bright, candle-lit windows. The snow was falling harder now and they were thoroughly drunk — drunk beyond reason or responsibility. The party had long since broken up, but three hardy souls were still hunkered over the open fire, gnawing bones and making doubly sure the cider and beer kegs were properly drained. Wouter recognized his brother and John Robideau. Coming closer, he saw that the third member of the group was Tommy Sturdivant.

The three conspirators, who hadn’t as yet decided what they were conspiring to do, joined the others around the fire. Someone threw on a few extra logs from the mountain of wood stacked around the patroon’s woodshed, and their faces flared diabolically — or perhaps only drunkenly. The news — the shocking, heartless, arbitrary news — went around the little circle in the time it took the gin to make a single pass. Tommy Sturdivant said it was a damn shame. The flames leapt. John Robideau agreed. Staats, who was more directly affected, cursed the patroon and his mealy-mouthed son in a voice loud enough to be heard in the house. Wouter seconded his brother with an enraged whoop, the like of which hadn’t been heard in the valley since the Indian hostilities of ’45, and then — no one knew quite how it happened, least of all Wouter — the bottle left his hand, described a graceful parabola through the drift of the falling snow, and took out the leaded glass window in the parlor. This was immediately succeeded by a shriek from inside the house, and then a general uproar punctuated by cries of terror and confusion.

Pompey was the first out the door, followed closely by young Rombout and the English fop who’d been making love to Saskia. The fop lost his footing on the slick doorstep and went down on his overbite, and Pompey, recognizing the glitter of abandonment in the eyes of the little group around the fire, pulled up short. But Rombout, in his leather pumps and silk hose, came on. “Drunkards!” he screeched, slowing to what might have been a dignified, if hurried, walk if it weren’t for the outrage jerking at his limbs. “I knew it, I knew it!” he exploded, stalking up to Wouter. “Nothing’s good enough for you … you rabble. Now this, eh? Well, you’ll pay, damn your hide, you’ll pay!”

Rombout Van Wart was twenty-one years old and he wore his hair in ringlets. He wasn’t old enough to grow a beard, and his voice had a hollow gargling catch to it, as if he were trying to speak and swallow a glass of water at the same time.

“We’ve already paid,” Wouter said, gesturing with a sweep of his arm at the woodshed, the cellar, the henhouse.

“Yeah,” Cadwallader jeered, suddenly interposing his long sallow face between them, “and we’ve come”—here he was interrupted by a fit of hiccoughs and had to pound his breastbone before he could recover himself—“we’ve come,” he repeated, “to tell you and your father to go fuck yourselves.” And then he stooped down, as calmly as if he were picking wildflowers or assaying the sinuous path of the earthworm, and plucked a fist-sized fragment of brick from the gathering snow. Straightening up, he let his gangling arm drop behind him, paused to give Rombout a look of drunken bravado and then heaved the brick through the upper bedroom window.

The English fop was just getting to his feet. Pompey had vanished in the shadows. A howl of outrage arose from the upper bedroom (with some satisfaction, Wouter recognized the bristling voice of old Ter Dingas Bosyn) and the faces of the women could be seen at the door.

Everything hung in the balance.

Worlds. Generations.

“You, you—” Rombout sputtered. Struck dumb by rage, he raised his hand as if to box the transgressor’s impertinent ears, and Cadwallader shrank bank from the anticipated blow. The blow never came. For Jeremy Mohonk, his lank ancestral frame fleshed out with the solid Dutch brawn of the Van Brunts, struck him a stunning warrior’s thump just over the left temple and laid him out cold. From then on, no one was quite sure what happened or how, though certain moments did tend to stand out.

There was Saskia’s scream (or somebody’s, some female’s, that is. It might have come from Vrouw van Bilevelt or Rombout’s young wife, or even, for that matter, from that aged and decrepit relic, Vrouw Van Wart. Somehow, though, Wouter liked to think of it as Saskia’s scream). And under cover of that scream, there was the fop’s judicious retreat, followed by the icy crash of the third and fourth windows. Then, too, there was the fire. Somehow it got away from the safe and cheery confines of the roasting pit and into the hayloft of the barn, a distance of perhaps two hundred feet. And, of course, given the hour and the meteorological conditions, there was the ensuing conflagration that climaxed with a roar of shattering timber. And finally, there was the long, cold night spent by a bitter and headachy Rombout, who gathered his family about him in the cellar of the windowless and snowswept house while the plaint of singed ungulates echoed in his throbbing ears.

By noon the following day, Stephanus himself was in Van Wartville, accompanied by his schout, the bellicose dwarf and a posse comitatus composed of eight baggy-breeched, pipe-puffing, weather-beaten farmers from Croton. To a man, the farmers were mounted on ponderous, thick-limbed plow horses and they were armed with scythes and mathooks, as if they were going haying rather than pursuing a dangerous and degraded lot of seditionists and barn burners. Most of them, owing to the season, had runny noses, and they all wore great floppy-brimmed elephantine hats that hid their faces, banished their heads and drooped down over their shoulders like parasols.

Stephanus posted a reward of one hundred English pounds for the capture of any of the malefactors, and instructed his carpenter to erect a gallows at the top of the ridge behind the house, a place ever after known as Gallows Hill. Within the hour, he had Tommy Sturdivant, John Robideau and Staats Van Brunt lined up in front of him and pleading their innocence. He gave them each five minutes to defend themselves, and then, with respect to the ancient rights of court baron and court leet invested in him by His Royal Majesty, King William III, he administered justice as he saw fit. Each was stripped to the waist and given twenty lashes and then ordered to sit in the stocks for three days, the foul weather notwithstanding. The gallows he reserved for the ringleaders: Crane, Mohonk and Wouter Van Brunt.

Unfortunately, that infamous trio was nowhere to be found. Though he searched the farms of both the elder and young Cranes, though he personally razed the half-breed’s shack at Nysen’s Roost and oversaw the eviction of Neeltje and her daughters, though he scoured the miserable stinking huts of the Weckquaesgeeks at Suycker Broodt and the Kitchawanks at Indian Point, Stephanus could discover no trace of them. After three days of boarding his troops at the upper house (true Dutch and Yankee trenchermen, for whom a side of venison was little more than an hors d’oeuvre), the first lord of the manor retired to Croton, leaving van den Post and the dwarf behind to pursue the search and see to the completion of the gallows and the construction of a new barn. The reward was raised to two hundred fifty pounds sterling, a sum for which half the farmers in the valley would have given up their own mothers.

The fugitives held out for nearly six weeks. Once the barn caught fire, they understood, drunk as they were, that things had gotten out of hand and that Van Wart and the jellyfish eater would pursue them to the ends of the earth. Staats, John Robideau and Tommy Sturdivant were guilty of nothing more than stamping their feet and shouting, but the others — Wouter, Jeremy and Cadwallader — were in deep. Wouter had started it all, Cadwallader had broken windows in full sight of everyone present and Jeremy had assaulted the eldest son of the lord of the manor. And then there was the more serious question of the fire. It wasn’t Jeremy, it wasn’t Cadwallader, it wasn’t any of the three lesser offenders who’d carried the flaming brand into the barn: it was Wouter. Seized suddenly with the fury of his father, he’d snatched up the torch and raced across the yard like an Olympian to toss it high into the rafters of the barn. When it caught and the barn went up, when Wouter felt the madness rise to a crescendo in his chest and then fall again to nothing, he’d taken his brother by the sleeve and admonished him to go home and look after moeder. Then he rounded up Jeremy and Cadwallader and fled.

They hid themselves in a cave not half a mile from the scene of the crime, and there they lived like cavemen. They were cold. Hungry. Snowed in. They built meager fires for fear of detection, they ate acorns, chewed roots, trapped the occasional skunk or squirrel. They might have gone to Neeltje for help, but the dwarf kept a perpetual watch on the cramped hovel in Pieterse’s Kill into which she’d moved with Staats and her daughters and Jeremy’s wife and children. And then too there was van den Post to contend with. He was indefatigable — and mad with a thirst for revenge against Jeremy Mohonk, who’d escaped him once before. He’d found himself an Indian tracker to sniff them out, a fierce and mercenary Mohawk who wore a belt of scalps and would as soon cut a throat as squat down and relieve himself or skin a hare for supper. They had no choice but to lie low.

Jeremy brooded. Cadwallader hunched himself up like a praying mantis and sobbed for days on end. And Wouter — Wouter began to feel as he had on that terrible afternoon when he sat himself down in the stocks and dropped the crossbar on his own feet.

One night, when the others were asleep, he slipped out of the cave and made his way through the nagging branches and crusted snow to the upper house. He was wasted, his lungs ached with the cold and the clothes hung from him in tatters. The house was dark, the yard deserted. He saw that the windows had been replaced and that a crude unpainted and unroofed structure stood where the old barn had been. It was too dark to see the gallows on the hill.

He was thinking of his father as he knocked at the door, thinking of the fallen hero, the coward who’d been a traitor to his son and to himself too. He knocked again. Heard voices and movement from within and saw his father, mad and broken, lying beneath the cow in the barn. Rombout answered the door with a candle in one hand, a cocked pistol in the other.

“I want to turn myself in,” Wouter said. He dropped to his knees. “I beg for your mercy.”

Rombout shouted something over his shoulder. Wouter could detect movement in the background, a hurry and scuffle of feet, and then the pale face of the unattainable Saskia floated into view amidst the shadows. He dropped his eyes. “It was the half-breed,” he said. “He set fire to the barn, he was the one. And Cadwallader too. They made me go along with them.”

“On your feet,” Rombout gargled, backing away from him with the gun. “Inside.”

Wouter lifted his hands to show that they were empty. A gust of air fluttered his rags as he rose to his feet. “Spare me,” he whispered, “and I’ll lead you to them.”

The execution took place on the first of January. The half-breed, Jeremy Mohonk, offered no defense when he came before the first lord of the manor to meet his accusers, and his co-defendant, Cadwallader Crane, was thought to be wandering in his mind. No one contradicted the testimony of Wouter Van Brunt.

In his wisdom, in his clemency and forbearance, the first lord of the manor waived the capital charges against Wouter Van Brunt. Van Brunt was lashed, branded for a criminal on the right side of his throat and banished forever from Van Wart lands. After wandering for some years he returned to live in Pieterse’s Kill with his mother, where he took up the trade of fisherman, eventually married and had three sons. He died, after a long illness, at the age of seventy-three.

As for Jeremy Mohonk and Cadwallader Crane, they were convicted of high treason and armed rebellion against the authority of the Crown (the brick constituting, for Stephanus’ purposes, a potentially lethal weapon — lethal, in any case, to manorial windows). Their sentence read as follows: “We decree that the Prisoners shall be drawn on a Hurdle to the Place for Execution, and then shall be hanged by the Neck, and then shall be cut down alive, and their Entrails and Privy members shall be cut from their Bodies, and shall be burned in their Sight, and their Heads shall be cut off, and their Bodies shall be divided into four Parts, and shall be disposed of at the King’s Pleasure.”

Whether or not it was fully complied with is not recorded.

When the old man had finished, the sky was growing light beyond the windows for the second time since Walter had arrived in Barrow. Mad — certainly, definitively and inarguably mad — Truman had dwelt obsessively on each smallest detail of his story, puffing and fulminating as if he were trying the case himself. Cadwallader Crane, Jeremy Mohonk. Walter knew it all now. Finally, he knew it all.

“You know what ‘Wouter’ translates to in English?” Truman asked him with a leer.

Walter shrugged. He was beaten. Down for the count and out.

“ ‘Walter’ that’s what,” the old man snarled as if it were a curse. “I named my own son after one of the biggest scumbags that ever lived — my ancestor, Walter, your ancestor — and I didn’t even know it till I was a grown man in college, till I went to Professor Aaronson and told him I wanted to write about Van Wartville and the illustrious Van Brunts.” He was on his feet now. Pacing. “Fate!” he shouted suddenly. “Doom! History! Don’t you see?”

Walter didn’t see, didn’t want to see. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “You mean this is the big secret, this is why you screwed us all over — because of some forgotten shit that went down hundreds of years ago?” He was incredulous. He was enraged. He was frightened. “You’re crazy,” he murmured, trembling as he said it, the marker looming up on his right — Cadwallader Crane, Jeremy Mohonk — the pale green walls of the hospital closing in on him, Huysterkark with the plastic foot in his lap. …

Suddenly Walter was out of the chair, stuffing things into his suitcase, the door, the door, thinking only to run, to get away, fight himself out of the nightmare and start again, back in Peterskill, in Manhattan, Fiji, anywhere but here, anything but this. …

“What’s the hurry?” Truman asked with a laugh. “You’re not leaving already? All this way to see your dear old dad and you stay what, two days?”

“You’re crazy!” Walter shouted. “Nuts. Apeshit.” He was spitting out the words, out of control, the suitcase clutched tight in his hand. “I hate you,” he said. “Die,” he said.

He jerked open the door and the wind caught him by the throat. The sick pale light played off the torn ribs on the roof next door. His father stood there in the shadows of his box at the end of the world. He wasn’t grinning, he wasn’t jeering. He seemed small suddenly, tiny, shrunken, wasted, no bigger than a dwarf. “No use fighting it,” he said.

The wind came up, the dogs went mad.

“It’s in the blood, Walter. It’s in the bones.”

Hail, Arcadia!

She was one hundred and six feet long, from her taffrail to the tip of her carved bowsprit, and her mainmast — of Douglas fir, a towering single tree — rose one hundred and eight glorious feet above the deck. When the mainsail was raised, the jib flying and the topsail fluttering against the sky, she carried more sail than any other ship on the East Coast, better than four thousand square feet of it, and she plied the Sound or glided across the Hudson like a great silent vision out of the past.

Tom Crane loved her. Loved her unreservedly. Loved her right down to the burnished cleats on the caprail and the discolored frying pans that hung above the woodstove in the galley. He even somehow managed to love the cracked plastic buckets stationed beneath the wooden seats of the head. He swabbed the decks as they swayed beneath his feet, and loved them; he split wood for the stove and loved the cloven pieces, loved the hatchet, loved the hoary oak block with its ancient grid of gouges and scars. The sound of the wind in the sails made him rhapsodic, dizzy, as drunk with the pulse of the universe as Walt Whitman himself, and when he took hold of the smooth varnished grip of the tiller and the river tugged back at him like something alive, he felt a power he’d never known. And there was more, much more — he loved the cramped bunks, the dampness of his clothes when he slipped into them in the morning, the feel of the cold decks beneath his bare feet. And the smells too — of woodsmoke, salt air, rotting fish, the good rich human macrobiotic smell of the head, the incense of the new raw wood of the cabin, garlic frying in the galley, someone’s open beer, clean laundry, dirty laundry, the funky sachet of life at sea.

It amazed him afresh every time he thought of it, but he was saint of the forest no longer. He was a seaman, a tar, a swab, Holy Man of the Hudson, no hermit but a communer with his mates, admired and appreciated for his clowning, his beard, the soft and soulful Blues harp he mouthed in his bunk at night, Jessica curled beside him. The Arcadia. It was a boon. A miracle. As amazing to Tom as the first Land Rover must have been to the aborigines of the Outback. Just think: a floating shack! A floating shack christened in and dedicated to all the great hippie ideals — to long hair and vegetarianism, astrology, the snail darter, Peace Now, satori, folk music and goat turd mulching. And, surreptitiously, to pot, hash and acid too. The original month aboard — September — had turned to two, and then Halloween came and went and it was November, and Tom Crane had risen through the ranks to the office of full-time second mate. Holy Man of the Hudson. He liked it. Liked the ring of it.

And the shack? The summer’s crop? The goat? The bees? Well, he’d get back to them someday. For now, the exigencies of the seafaring life made it impossible to keep the place up, and so he’d padlocked the door, sold the goat, abandoned his late squash and pumpkins to the frost and left the bees to fend for themselves. Since the funeral, he and Jessica had quietly moved their things into his grandfather’s roomy, gloomy, eighteenth-century farmhouse with all its gleaming appurtenances of modernity, with its dishwasher, its toaster, its TV, its paved driveway and carpeted halls. It all seemed a bit too — well, bourgeois — for him, but Jessica, with her frantic schedule, liked the convenience of it. She’d been accepted at N.Y.U. in marine biology, and what with the commute and her part-time job at Con Ed, she was running around like a madwoman. After the shack, she suddenly realized how much she liked running water, frost-free refrigerators, reading lamps and thermostats.

He knew he was being selfish, deserting her like that. But they’d discussed it, and she’d given him her blessing — everybody’s got to do their own thing, after all. And it wasn’t as if they didn’t see each other — she joined him whenever she could, even if it was just to study a couple of hours in the main cabin or lie beside him and close her eyes as the river gently rocked the bunk. Besides, she’d soon have him back full-time — for the winter at least. It was mid-November, and this was the Arcadia’s last sail of the year. From now till April he’d be home every day, shuffling around in his grandfather’s fur-lined slippers in the morning and whipping her up a batch of tofu-carrot delight in the electric skillet when she came in at night. Of course, Tom would gladly have stayed out all winter, breaking ice on the water barrel and beating his hands on the tiller to keep them from stiffening up — hell, he’d even hang an albatross around his neck if he thought it’d do any good — but the business of the Arcadia was to educate people about the river, and it was kind of hard to get their attention when the temperature dipped to nineteen degrees and the icy gray dishwater of the spume swatted them in the face with every dip of the bow. And so, they were on their way upriver to put into port at Poughkeepsie for the winter; two days hence, the ex-saint of the forest would bum a ride back to Van Wartville and drydock himself till spring in his grandfather’s snug, oil-heated den.

But for now — for this thumping, glorious, wind-scoured moment — he was sailing. Beating upriver against a strong head wind, standing proud and runny-nosed at the helm while the captain, first mate and bosun sat around the coffeepot below. Jessica was below too, elbows braced on the big square dining table in the main cabin, boning up on the morphology of the polychaete worm as the pale silk of her hair fell forward to trickle over her ears and mask her face. He looked out over the gray chop of the river — not another boat in sight — and he looked down through the spattered glass and into the cabin. The deck moved beneath his feet. The captain drank coffee. Jessica studied.

They were just rounding Dunderberg and heading into the Race, Manitou Mountain and Anthony’s Nose looming up on the right, Bear Mountain rising on the left. They’d left Haverstraw at noon, and were scheduled to dock at Garrison for the night. Normally, they’d be in within the hour, but the wind was steady in their faces and the tide was slack. There was no telling when they’d get there. Tom studied the sky, and saw that it looked bad. He sniffed the breeze and smelled snow. Shit, he thought, of all days.

But then he brightened. Snow or no snow, they were on their way to a party. Dockside at Garrison. And it couldn’t start till they got there. Awash in light, he took in the mountains, the plane of the river, the soar and dip of the gulls, he filled his lungs, savored the spray. A party, he thought, working the image over in his mind until he could taste the food and hear the music. But it wasn’t just another party, it was a foot-stomping, finger-waving, do-si-doing, year’s end blowout for all the members and friends of the Arcadia, replete with a mini concert from the guru himself, Will Connell, and the Tucker, Tanner and Turner Bluegrass Band. They’d set up a big circus tent with electric heaters right down on the green, and there would be square dancing, there would be beer, a bonfire, hot food and hotter drinks. It was a big day. A great day. Her inaugural year was over, and the Arcadia was coming home to roost.

The sky darkened. The chop got rough. Sleet began to drive down, pins and needles whipped by the wind. And the wind — suddenly it was playing tricks, blowing steady across the bow one minute, puffing from the stern the next and then all at once shearing across the port side in a sudden gust that whipped the boom halfway around and nearly jerked the tiller from the numbed hands of the scrawny exsaint. There were eight crew members aboard, and all eight of them — plus Jessica — got into the act before it was over.

With the first lurch of that great deadly boom, Barr Aiken, the Arcadia’s captain and a man for whom Tom would gladly plunge into raging seas or fight off the Coast Guard single-handed — just let him give the word — shot across the cabin and up the gangway like a hurdler coming out of the blocks. He called for all hands, relieved Tom at the helm and in half a minute had everybody scrambling to reef the sails. Thirty-five years old, a sallow and weather-beaten native of Seal Harbor, Maine, with a hangdog look and eyes that always focused in the distance, the captain was a man of few and soft-spoken words. He pronounced his name Baaaa, like a forlorn sheep.

Now, the wind dancing and the sleet in their teeth, he spoke so softly he might have been whispering, yet his every word was as distinct as if he’d been screaming to the roots of his hair. Down came the jib. The mainsail was reefed again. Everyone held on as he jibed and began tacking from point to point across the narrow neck of the Race. It was business as usual, no problem, only a little more exciting maybe with the way the wind was kicking up. Tom almost fainted from happiness when the captain handed the tiller back to him.

“Must be the Imp,” Barr observed, folding his arms and spreading his feet for balance. He spoke in his characteristic whisper, and there was something like a smile hovering around the lower part of his face.

Tom looked around him. The mountains were shaggy with denuded trees, their great puffed cheeks bristling with stubble. The sky was black over Dunderberg, blacker ahead. “Uh huh,” Tom said, and found that he was whispering too.

It was almost five, the sleet had changed to a pasty wet snow and the party was in full swing when they motored into the dock at Garrison. A purist, Barr had kept her under sail as long as he could, but with the unpredictable wind he’d given up any notion of sailing in, and started the engines five hundred yards out.

The decks were slick and anything that stood upright, including the crew, trailed a beard of snow. Ahead, the dock was white, and beyond it the ground lay pale and ghostly under an inch of snow. There was the scent of food on the cold air, distant strains of music. Hunched and bony, the ex-saint of the forest stood in the bow, holding Jessica’s hand and watching as the lights rode toward them across the water. “Well I’ll be damned,” he said, “if they didn’t start without us.”

By seven o’clock Tom had gone through three soyburgers, an egg salad sandwich, two falafel delights, a bowl of meatless chili, six or seven beers (he’d lost count) and maybe just one too many hits of Fred the bosun’s miracle weed, puffed stealthily in the lee of the tent. Winded, he’d just sat down after a spate of fancy gangly-legged do-si-doing and swinging his partner, and he was beginning to feel a little vague about his surroundings. Those are the walls of the tent, he said to himself, gaping up from his hard wooden seat as if he were tarred to it, and those the big electric heaters. Outside, in the dark, is the dock. And next to the dock is the sloop. Yes. And down deep, tucked way up under the taffrail in the innermost recess of the main cabin, is my bunk. Into which I can fall at any moment. Suddenly he blinked his eyes rapidly and jerked up with a start. He was babbling. Only seven o’clock and he was babbling.

He was giving some thought to extricating himself from the oozing tarpit of his chair and maybe bellying up to the food table for just one more soyburger with tomato, lettuce, ketchup and onions, when he was assailed by a familiar, probing, cat’s purr of a voice and found himself staring up into a face so familiar he knew it as well as his own.

The purr rose to a yowl. “Tom Crane, you horny old dirtbagging sex fiend, don’t you recognize me? Wake up!” A familiar hand was on his elbow, shaking it like a stick. And now that familiar face was peering into his, so close it was distorted, big hard purple eyes, ambrosial breath, lips he could chew: Mardi.

“Mardi?” he said, and a flood of emotions coursed through him, beginning with a thunderbolt of lust that stirred his saintly prick and ending with something very like the fear that gives way to panic. He was suddenly lucid, poised on the edge of his chair like a debutante and scanning the dance floor for Jessica. If she should see him talking to … sitting beside … christ, breathing the same air in the same tent…

“Hey, you okay or what? T.C.? It’s me, Mardi, okay?” She waved her mittened hands in his face. She was wearing some sort of fur hat pulled down to her eyes and a raccoon coat over a flesh-colored body stocking. And boots. Red, blue, yellow and orange frilled and spangled high-heeled cowgirl boots. “Anybody home?” She rapped playfully at his forehead.

“Uh—” he was stalling, scheming, caught between lust and panic, wondering how he was going to keep himself from bolting out of the tent like a purse snatcher. “Um,” he said, somewhat redundantly, “um, I was thinking. Want to step outside a minute and have a hit of some miracle weed with me and Fred the bosun?”

She put her hands to her hips and smiled out of the corner of her mouth. “Ever know me to refuse?”

And then he was outside, the chill air revivifying him, a cold whisper of snow on his face. Mardi trooped along beside him, her coat open and sweeping across the ground, her breasts snug in spandex. “Isn’t this a trip?!” she said, whirling twice and throwing her hands out to the sky. There was snow in her hair. Across the river, to the north, the lights of West Point were dim and diffuse, as distant as stars fallen to earth.

“Yeah,” he said, throwing his head back and spreading his arms, remembering the excitement of waking as a boy to a world redeemed by snow, remembering the big console radio in his grandfather’s living room and the measured, patient voice of the announcer as he read off the list of school closings. “It is, it really is.” And suddenly the torpor was gone — indigestion, that’s all it was, indigestion — and he was whirling with her, cutting capers, swinging her by the arm and do-si-doing like a double-jointed hog farmer from Arkansas. Then he slipped. Then she slipped. And then they went down together, helpless with laughter.

“Pssssst,” called a voice from the shadows. “Tom?”

It was Fred. The bosun. He was conferring over a joint with Bernard, the first mate, and Rick, the engineer. They were being discreet.

Unfortunately, discretion was not one of Mardi’s strong points.

The first thing she said — or rather shouted — when they joined the nervous little group hunkered over the glowing joint was: “Hey, what are you guys — hiding? You think pot’s illegal or something?”

She was met by stony looks and a furtive rustling of anxious feet. There were plenty of people out to kill the Arcadia—the same chicken-necked, VFW-loving, flag-waving, anti-Communist warmongers who’d beat the shit out of everybody twenty years ago in Peterskill — and a drug bust would be heaven come to earth for them. Tom could envision the headline in the Daily News, in block letters left over from Pearl Harbor: POT SHIP SCUTTLED; GOV ASKS POT SHIP BAN. That was all they needed. People mistrusted them already, what with the Will Connell connection and the fact that the crew was composed exclusively of longhairs in Grateful Dead T-shirts with FREE HUEY! and MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR buttons pinned over their nipples. The first time they’d docked at Peterskill there’d been a bunch of jerks waiting for them with signs that read WAKE UP, AMERICA: PETERSKILL DID! and at Cold Spring a troop of big-armed women in what looked like nurses’ uniforms had showed up to wave flags as if they had a patent on them.

“It’s a sacrament,” Mardi said. “A religious rite.” She was trying to be funny, trying to be hip and bubbly and trying to act more stoned than she was. “It’s, it’s—”

“Barr Aiken catches us with this shit, we can hang it up,” Bernard drily observed. In a whisper.

Fred was a little guy with a Gabby Hayes beard, bandy legs and the upper body of a weight lifter. He loved puns, and couldn’t resist one now. “Barr catches us, our ass is grass.”

Rick tittered. “He’ll keelhaul us.”

“Make you walk the plank, hey, right?” Mardi said, getting into the spirit of it. For some strange reason, probably having to do with the moon shot, UFOs and the accoustic quality of the snow-laden air, her voice seemed to boom out across the water as if she were leading cheers through a megaphone. Someone handed her the joint. She inhaled, and was quiet.

For a time, they were all quiet. The joint went around, became a roach, vanished. The snow anointed them. Beards turned white, Mardi’s hair got wilder. The music fell away and started up again with a skitter of fiddle and a thump of bass. Fred produced a second joint and the little group giggled conspiratorially.

It was at some point after that — at what point or what time it was or how long they’d been there, Tom couldn’t say — that Mardi took him aside and told him he was an idiot for living with that bitch Walter was married to, and Tom — ex-saint, apprentice holy man and red-hot lover — found himself defending his one and only. The snow was falling faster and his head was light. Rick and Bernard were engaged in a heated debate over the approach to some island in the Lesser Antilles and Fred the bosun was unsuccessfully trying to shift the conversation back to the time he’d heroically climbed the shrouds in a thunderstorm to free the fouled mainsail and how he’d slipped and fallen and cut his arm in six places.

“ ‘Bitch’? What are you talking about?” Tom protested. “She’s like the calmest, most copacetic—”

“She’s skinny.”

Tom’s hair was wet. His beard was wet. His denim jacket and the hooded sweatshirt beneath it were wet. He began to feel the chill, and the vagueness was coming over him again. Jessica was probably looking for him that very minute. “Skinny?”

“She has no tits. She dresses like somebody’s mother or something.”

Before Tom could respond, Mardi took hold of his arm and lowered her voice. “You used to like me,” she said.

It was undeniable. He used to like her. Still did. Liked her that very minute, in fact. Had half a mind to — but no, he loved Jessica. Always had. Shared his house with her, his soy grits, his toothbrush, his bunk aboard the Arcadia.

“What’s wrong with me?” Mardi was leaning into him now and her hands, mittenless and hot, had somehow found their way up under his shirt.

“Nothing,” he said, breathing into her face.

Then she smiled, pushed him away, pulled him back again and gave him a kiss so quick she might have been counting coup. “Listen,” she said, breathless, warm, smelling of soap, perfume, herbs, wildflowers, incense, “I’ve got to run.”

She was five steps away from him, already swallowed up in a swirl of snow, when she turned around. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “There’s something else. I shouldn’t tell you cause I’m mad at you, but you’re too cute, right? Listen: watch out for my old man.”

The snow was a blanket. The vagueness was a blanket. He tried to lift it from his head. “Huh?”

“My father. You know him. He hates you.” She waved her hand at the tent, the dock, the dim tall mast of the Arcadia. “All of you.”

If he hadn’t had to take a leak so bad — all that beer and all — he would have run into Jessica a lot sooner. She was looking for him. And she passed the very spot where Rick, Bernard and Fred were conducting their huddled rant, but Tom had vacated it to drift off into the storm and christen the breast of the new-fallen snow. Problem was, he got turned around somehow and the snow was falling so fast he couldn’t for the life of him figure out exactly where he was. The band was on a break, apparently, so the music was no help, and even the noise of the party itself seemed muted and omnipresent. Was it over there, where those lights were? Or was that the train station?

All he wanted, really, after he’d zipped up and plunged off into the gloom, was to find Jessica and crawl back to his bunk and the comfort of his ptarmigan-down sleeping bag, the one that could keep a man toasty and warm out on the tip of the ice sheet. But which way to go? And Jee-sus! it was cold. Shouldn’t have stayed out so long. Shouldn’t have smoked so much. Or drunk so much. He belched. His hair had begun to freeze, trailing down his neck in ringlets of ice.

He started toward the lights, but when he was halfway there he realized that they were, after all, the old-fashioned hooded lamps of the railway station. Which meant that, if he turned around one hundred and eighty degrees and marched off toward those lights glimmering behind him, he’d reach the tent. Three minutes’ effort, punctuated by a series of desperate arm-flailing slaloms across the slick earth, proved him wrong. He was under a light, all right, but it illuminated a false storefront that carried the legend YONKERS over it. Well that stumped him for a minute, but then the vagueness let go long enough for him to remember Hello, Dolly, and how the crew that filmed it had put up all sorts of gingerbread facades over the weathered old buildings to evoke the spirit of Yonkers in some bygone era. He stared stupidly at the sign for a moment, thinking Yonkers? The spirit of Yonkers? Yonkers was a derelict place of rotten wharves, blasted tenements and a river that looked like somebody’s toilet — that was somebody’s toilet. And this place, Garrison, had about as much spirit as Disneyland.

God, this snow was something. He couldn’t see the nose in front of his face. (He was attempting the experiment, looking cross-eyed at the index finger and thumb of his cold and wet right hand, which were tugging at the cold and wet tip of his nose, when a pair of headlights swept across him.) Ah, so, here he was. In front of the antique shop. And down there, yes, the barn-red duplex with the Hollywood front, and around the corner, the green and the tent. He was on his way now, oh yes, stepping out with real confidence, when he spotted something that caught him up short. Somebody up ahead. Slipping around the corner. He knew that walk. That tottering, footshorn, awkward, big-shouldered walk. “Walter?” he called. “Van?”

No answer.

A car started up behind him, then another farther up the street. Two girls in knit hats rounded the corner, arm in arm, and then an older couple, in matching London Fog raincoats. When Tom got to the corner, he found the tent, found the party, found about a hundred people milling around over goodbyes and plastic cups of beer. A moment later, he even found Jessica.

“I was worried,” she said, “where were you? God, you’re soaked. You must be freezing.”

“I, uh, had too much. … Took a walk, you know. Try to clear my head.”

Onstage, the band had been joined by Will Connell for an encore. Will’s goatee was flecked with white. He was thin and hunched, his face like something out of an old painting. He made a few cracks about the weather and then started strumming his banjo like an eggbeater salesman. After a while he set it aside in favor of the guitar and launched into “We Shall Overcome.”

“You’re shivering,” Jessica said.

He was. He didn’t deny it.

“Let’s go,” she whispered, and her hand closed over his.

When they got back to the sloop, everyone was gathered around the woodstove in the tiny galley, eating cookies and drinking hot chocolate. Tom stripped down right there, hugging the stove. He drank chocolate, munched cookies, cracked jokes with his mates. He didn’t worry about Mardi or the worrisome fact that he’d failed to mention her to Jessica. He didn’t worry about Mardi’s father or Walter either. (Had he really seen him? he wondered ever so briefly between sips of hot chocolate. But no, he must have been dreaming.) He didn’t worry about tomorrow’s sail or the icy decks or his yellowed underwear. He merely yawned. A great, yodeling, jaw-cracking yawn of utter peace and satiation, and then he shrugged into his longjohns and climbed into the ptarmigan-down bag, his lady love at his side. He lay there a moment, breathing in the atmosphere of quiet joy and repletion that closed gently over the cabin, and then he shut his eyes.

The bunk was snug. The river rocked them. The snow fell.

World’s End

It was one of those pressed-glass lamps with a hand-painted shade, ancient, no doubt, and priceless, and Walter was staring into it as if into a crystal ball. He was sitting hunched over his knees on a loveseat in the front parlor of the museum Dipe called home, clutching a tumbler of single-malt Scotch that had probably been distilled before he was born and trying to smoke a menthol cigarette in a properly nihilistic way. He’d been back from Barrow just over a week now, and he was feeling very peculiar all of a sudden, feeling light-headed and a bit nauseous. His groin ached, he was wet under the arms and the arch of his right foot began to itch so furiously he was actually reaching for it before he caught himself. It was funny — or no, it wasn’t funny at all — but it was almost as if he were bracing himself for another attack of history.

Dipe sat on the couch across from him, sipping at his Scotch and furrowing his handsome brow at LeClerc Outhouse and a stranger in trench coat and black leather gloves. The stranger, whose name Walter hadn’t caught, wore his hair in a crewcut so severe his scalp shone through like a reflector. He didn’t unbutton his trench coat and he didn’t remove his gloves. “It’s a shame,” the stranger said, slowly shaking his head, “it really is. And nobody seems to care.”

LeClerc, who always seemed to have a suntan, even in winter, and whose favorite expression was “damn straight,” said, “Damn straight.”

Dipe leaned back in his chair with a sigh. He glanced at Walter, then back at LeClerc and the man in the trench coat. “Well, I tried. Nobody can say I didn’t.” He sipped Scotch, and sighed into it. The others made consoling and affirmative noises: yes, he’d tried, they knew that. “If it wasn’t for the damn weather—” He waved his hand at the ceiling in futility.

“Damn straight,” LeClerc said.

Depeyster set his glass down and the stranger finished the thought for him, “—they’d never have got that floating circus within half a mile of Garrison.”

“Damn straight,” LeClerc said.

“Snow,” Depeyster grunted, and from the tone of his grunt you would have thought shit was dropping from the trees.

The conversation had been going on along these lines for the better part of an hour. Walter had come home with Depeyster after work and had stayed for supper with Joanna, LeClerc and the grimlooking stranger, who’d kept his gloves on even while buttering his bread. Mardi’s seat was vacant. Walter couldn’t taste his food. It had been snowing — unseasonably, unreasonably — since three.

The principal theme of the evening was the Arcadia, and Dipe’s thwarted effort to organize a rally against its landing at Garrison, “or, for shit’s sake, anywhere else on this side of the river.” The centerpiece of the rally was to have been a flotilla from the Peterskill Yacht Club — everything from cabin cruisers to dinghies — that would track north with banners and flags, harass the Arcadia and then block access to the Garrison dock through sheer force of numbers. The only problem was the weather. Dipe had taken Walter down to the marina at lunch, and only three boat owners had showed up. The rest were presumably discouraged by gale winds and predictions of two to four inches of snow that were later updated to as much as a foot.

“Apathy,” Depeyster growled. “Nobody gives a good goddamn.”

“Damn straight,” LeClerc said.

The stranger nodded.

“If I was twenty years younger,” Depeyster said, glancing at Walter again.

“It’s a shame,” the stranger said in a doleful whisper, and whether he was referring to Depeyster’s age or the Communist-inspired, anti-American, long-haired hippie outrage being perpetrated that very moment and not five miles from his tumbler of Scotch, wasn’t clear.

Walter didn’t wait for clarification. All at once he was assailed by the most racking, god-awful stomach pains he’d ever known. He jerked upright, then leaned forward to set his tumbler down on a coffee table older than coffee itself. The pain hit him again. He snubbed his cigarette with a shaking hand. “You all right?” Dipe asked him.

“I’m”—he stood, wincing—“I think I’m … hungry, that’s all.”

“Hungry?” echoed LeClerc. “After a meal like that?”

Lula had served stuffed pork chops, mashed potatoes and canned asparagus, with homemade apple pie, ice cream and coffee for dessert. Walter hadn’t felt much like eating, but he’d done justice to it anyway, putting away a modest portion, if not exactly polishing his plate. But now, as the words escaped his lips, he realized that the sudden pains, these volcanic contractions and dilations that felt as if they would split him open, were hunger pains. And that he was hungry. But not just hungry. Ravenous, starved, mad — killing mad — for the scent and texture and taste of food.

Dipe laughed. “He’s a growing boy. You remember growing, right, LeClerc?” This was a reference to LeClerc’s ballooning gut. The stranger laughed. Or rather snickered. The gloom lifted momentarily.

“Go on into the kitchen, Walter,” Dipe was saying. “Stick your head in the refrigerator, go through the cupboards — you’re welcome to anything I’ve got, you know that.”

Walter was already in the hallway when the stranger called out, “Bring me back some peanuts or something, will you?”

The first think he saw on opening the refrigerator door was a six-pack of Budweiser. He didn’t want beer, not exactly, but he popped one and drained it anyway. Beside the beer were the remains of the apple pie — nearly half of it, in fact — still in its baking dish. Walter made short work of it. In the meat compartment he found half a pound of pastrami, a rock-hard fragment of Parmesan and six thin pink slices of roast beef in an Offenbacher’s bag. Before he knew what he was doing, he had the whole mess in his mouth and was washing it down with another beer. He was reaching for the glossy bright can of whipped cream, thinking to squirt some of it down his throat, when Mardi walked in on him.

“Oh, uh, hi,” he said, guiltily closing the refrigerator door. He held a beer in one hand, and, somehow, a jar of marinated artichoke hearts had appeared in the other.

“What’s happening?” Mardi said, laconic, her eyes wide and amused, yet a bit blunted too. She was wearing a flesh-colored body stocking, no brassiere, cowgirl boots. Her raccoon coat and woolen scarf were thrown over one arm. She reeked of pot. “Pigging out, huh?”

Walter set the beer down to unscrew the lid of the jar. He fished out a couple of artichoke hearts with his fingers and wedged them in his mouth, dabbing with the back of his hand at the oil dribbling down his chin. “I’m hungry,” he said simply.

“Why don’t you just move in?” she said in a breathy whisper. “Take my room.” She opened the refrigerator and took a beer herself.

From across the house came the rumble of lamentation and the muffled but unmistakable tones of LeClerc Outhouse affirming an unheard proposition: “Damn straight!”

Walter couldn’t help himself. He finished the artichoke hearts — there were only about twelve of them — and, still chewing, tilted back the jar and drank off the thick, herb-flavored olive oil in which they’d been preserved.

Mardi pulled the short-necked bottle from her lips and gave him a look of mock horror. “Disgusting,” she said.

Walter shrugged, and went for the crullers in the bread box.

She watched him eat a moment, then asked him how Alaska was.

“You know,” he said between mouthfuls, “cold.”

There was a silence. The voices from the parlor became more animated. Joanna, hugely pregnant Joanna, passed by in the hallway in a silk dressing gown. Her skin was white, her hair upswept in a conventional coif. She wasn’t even wearing moccasins.

“What’s going on in there,” Mardi asked, indicating the parlor with a jerk of her head, “—they plotting something or what?”

Walter shrugged. He was considering the half loaf of thin-sliced whole wheat bread he’d found beside the crullers. Peanut butter? he was thinking. Or pimento cream cheese?

Suddenly Mardi had hold of his arm and she was leaning into him, brushing his cheek with her own. “Want to go upstairs for a quickie?” she breathed, and for a minute, just a minute, he stopped chewing. But then she pushed away from him with a laugh—“Had you, didn’t I? Huh? Admit it.”

He looked from the loaf in his hand to her breasts, her lovely, familiar breasts, the upturned nipples so well delineated she might just as well have forgone the body stocking. The hunger — the hunger of the gut, anyway — began to subside.

Mardi was grinning, poised to dodge away from him like a kid with a swiped cap or notebook. “Only kidding,” she said. “Hey, I’m on my way out the door.”

Walter managed to summon a “where to?” look, though at the moment he couldn’t have cared less.

“Garrison,” she said, “where else?” And then she was gone.

Walter stood there a long moment, listening to the voices drifting in from the parlor, listening to Dipe Van Wart, his employer, his mentor, his best and only friend. Dipe Van Wart, who’d molded his father into a piece of shit. He thought about that a moment longer, and thought about Hesh and Lola, Tom Crane, Jessica, the late lamented Peletiah, Sasha Freeman, Morton Blum, Rose Pollack. They were pieces of shit too. All of them. He was alone. He was hard, soulless and free. He was Meursault shooting the Arab. He could do anything, anything he wanted.

He put the bread back in the bread box and poured the rest of his beer down the drain. His coat was in the parlor, but he wouldn’t need it. He didn’t feel like going back in there now, and besides, it wasn’t cold — not when you’ve just come back from Barrow, anyway. He leaned against the counter and focused on the clock over the stove, forcing himself to wait until the second hand had circled it twice. It’s in the blood, Walter, he heard his father say. And then he crossed the kitchen and slipped out the back door.

The night assaulted him with silence. He stumped through the snow, fighting for balance, and caught himself on the fender of the car. When he fired up the engine and flicked on the lights, he could see the dark rectangle where Mardi’s car had been drawn up to the curb, and then the long trailing runners of her tire tracks sloping gracefully down the drive. And when he got to the bottom of the drive he saw that the tracks veered left, toward Garrison.

He could have turned right and gone home to bed.

But he didn’t.

Fifteen minutes later he was pulling into the commuter lot on the dim far fringes of the Garrison station. The lot was unpaved and untended, a dusty Sonoran expanse of sharp-edged rock and brittle weed. Tonight it was white, smooth, perfect. Cars lined the single street in front of the station and there were another fifty or so in the lot, but they were close in, beneath the station lights. Walter chose to go beyond them, to blaze his own path. He wanted to be inconspicuous.

The MG had good traction, but he could feel the wheels slipping out from under him. Hidden obstacles were giving him a roller coaster ride, the visibility was about the same whether he had his eyes open or not and the rear end seemed to have a will of its own: before he knew it he was sunk in a crater deep enough to swallow a school bus. Furious, he gunned the accelerator. The rear wheels whined, the chassis shuddered beneath him. He slammed it into reverse, gunned it, rammed it back into first, gunned it again. Nothing. He kept at it for maybe ten minutes, gaining an inch on one run to lose it on the next.

Shit. He pounded the wheel in frustration. He didn’t even know why he’d come — it wasn’t to see Tom and Jessica, that was for shit sure, or Mardi either. In fact, he didn’t want to see anyone, or be seen either. And now he was stuck. Like an idiot. Enraged, he popped the clutch and gunned it again, and then he slammed his fist into the dash so hard he went through the odometer lens and slashed his knuckles. He was sucking at the wound and cursing, so frustrated he could cry, when someone rapped at the windshield.

A muffled figure stood there in the snow. Walter rolled down the window and saw a second muffled figure lurking behind the first. “Need help?” A guy with shaggy wet hair and a beard stuck his head in the window. For a moment Walter panicked, thinking it was Tom Crane, but then he recovered himself. “Yeah. Son of a bitch. There’s a pit or something here, feels like.”

“We’ll push,” the guy said. “Hit it when I yell.”

Walter left the window down. Snow drifted in to melt against the side of his face. It was warm, really it was. He was wondering how it could possibly be snowing when it was so balmy, when he heard a yell from behind and hit the accelerator. The car went up the hump, hesitated, and then a new impetus from the rear put it over the top and he was sailing out across the lot. He didn’t stop till he’d reached the far side, all the way across, under the lowering cover of the trees. When he climbed out, his benefactors were gone.

He still didn’t know why he’d come, or what he was going to do, but he thought for starters he’d maybe just cross the lot and poke his head in at the tent. He wasn’t sure Jessica would be there, but he knew she and Tom were really into this sloop thing — that much she’d told him herself — and he guessed she would be. Tom too, of course. Maybe he’d just have a beer, hang out in the back. He didn’t really want to talk to her — not after what had happened in the cabin. But a beer. Maybe he’d just have a beer.

Easier said than done.

The going was tough — as tough as it had been in Barrow, though not as icy — and he went down twice on his knees before he reached the railway platform. His jacket — wool blend, black and gray herringbone, one hundred and twenty-five bucks — was wet through already, ruined no doubt, and the tie had tightened like a noose around his neck. He began to regret not going back for his coat. For a long moment he stood hunched on the platform, sucking at the gash between his knuckles. Then he drifted off toward the music.

He was shivering by the time he ducked inside, and despite himself, he made his way toward the nearest of the heaters. He was surprised at how many people had turned out — a couple of hundred, at least. There looked to be half that many out on the dance floor alone — four big double rows of square dancers, going at it like refugees from the harvest hoedown in Hog’s Back, Tennessee. The beer was good — Schaeffer, on tap — but after his eating attack Walter felt filled up right to the back of his throat and he could only sip at it. He didn’t recognize a single face in the crowd.

He was still wondering what he was doing there and beginning to feel less than inconspicuous in his short hair, sports coat and tie, when he caught a glimpse of Jessica. She was out on the dance floor, in the middle of the throng, swinging from somebody’s arm, he couldn’t see whose. Wedging his way between a pair of middle-aged characters with white ponytails and mustard-colored sweatshirts that featured reproductions of the Arcadia listing beneath the swell of their middle-aged bellies, he got a better look. She was wearing an old-fashioned calico dress with ruffles and peaked shoulders, her hair was in braids and there was a smile of pure pleasure on her lips. He didn’t recognize the guy she was dancing with, but it wasn’t Tom Crane. He fell back away from the heater and into the shadows, suddenly agitated. He felt his face twist up and he flung his beer violently to the ground. The next minute he was outside again.

The snow seemed heavier now and a wind had come up to make it dance and drift. It seemed colder too. Walter crossed in front of the tent and made his way into a deep fold of shadow behind the duplex that fronted the street. There he propped himself up against the wall, lit a cigarette with hands that had already begun to tremble and watched. He watched the party wind down and begin to break up. He watched people slap backs, gesture at the sky, heard them call out to one another in hearty, beery voices, watched them troop off, heads bowed, toward the cars parked along the street and in the commuter lot beyond it. He watched an elderly couple in matching London Fog raincoats hump up the hill past him and he watched Tom Crane, gangling like a great pinched spider, his denim jacket so sodden it practically pulled him down, stagger through the mob and into the tent. He watched Mardi too — leaving with a guy in serape, boots and sombrero who looked as if he were on his way to a costume party. He watched all this, and still he didn’t know why he’d come. Then Will Connell was singing “We Shall Overcome,” cars were cranking over like the start of the Grand Prix, and Tom and Jessica, arms entwined, sauntered out of the tent.

Like lovers.

Like lovers in a dream.

Walter watched as they turned away from the crowd and made their way toward the dock — and the sloop. And then he understood: they had the romance of the storm, the romance of the do-gooders and marshwort preservers, of the longhairs and other-cheek turners, the romance of peace and brotherhood and equality, and they were taking their weary righteous souls to bed in the romance of the sloop. All at once he knew why he’d come. All at once he knew.

It took them an hour to settle down. At least. Equipment loaders, garbage haulers, stragglers and kibitzers, all of them milling around the front of the tent as if they’d just stepped out of an Off-Broadway theater. Walter, chilled through now, fumbled his way back to the MG — the snow so furious he could barely find it — to huddle over the heater and give them time. He smoked. Listened to the radio. Felt the jacket pinch around his shoulders and pull back from his wrists as the moisture began to steam out of it. An hour. The windshield was gone, his footprints erased. He concentrated on the eerie spatulate light of the station and crossed the lot for the third time that night.

The ship was dark, the marina deserted. He stood there on the snow-covered dock, breathing hard, the musty, damp, polluted breath of the river in his face, the sloop rising above him like an ancient presence, like some privateer dredged up from the bottom, like some ghost ship. Creaking, whispering, moaning with a hundred tongues, she rode out away from the dock on the pull of the flood tide, and the dock moaned with her. Three lines held her. Three lines, that was all. One aft, one amidships, one at the stern. Three lines, looped over the pilings. Walter was no stranger to boats, to cleats and half-hitches and the dark tug of the river. He knew what he was doing. He rubbed his hands together to work the stiffness out of them, and then he reached for the stern line.

“I wouldn’t do it, Walter,” sang a voice behind him.

He didn’t even have to turn around. “Go home, gram,” he whispered. “Leave me alone.”

“It’s in the bones,” his father said, and there he was, big-headed and crude, the snow screening his face like a muffler. He was bent over the piling amidships, tugging at the line.

“Leave it!” Walter shouted, startled by the sound of his own voice, and he stalked up the dock and right through the old man as if he weren’t there. “Leave it,” he muttered, clomping around the piling like a puppet on a string, “this is for me to do, this is for me.” He lifted his hand to his mouth, sucked at the dark blood frozen to his knuckles. And then, in a rage, he jerked the line from the piling and dropped it in the river.

He straightened up. Laughter. He heard laughter. Were they laughing at him, was that it? His mouth hardened. He squinted into the driving snow. Up ahead, in the shadows, he saw movement, a scurry of pathetic little legs and deformed feet, dwarfish hands fussing over the aft line. There was a splash, muted by the snow and the distance, and then the sloop swung free like the needle of a compass until it fixed on the open river, held now only by the single rigid line at its stern.

It took him a moment. A long moment. He moved back down the dock and stood there over that last frail line, and the line became a ribbon, the bow on a little pony Parilla motorbike, just tug it — tug it once — and it falls free. He jerked his head around. Nothing. No father, no grandmother, no ghosts. Only snow. What had he wanted — to go aboard, climb into the bunk with them, save the marshwort and become a good guy, an idealist, one of the true and unwavering? Is that what it was? The thought was so bitter he laughed aloud. Then he pulled the ribbon.

The moment held — perfect balance, utter silence, the slow grace of gathering movement — and then off she went, all one hundred six feet and thirteen tons of her, pulling away from him like a figure in a dream. She followed her nose and the flood tide and she drifted out across the invisible river, dead on for Gees Point and the black haunted immemorial depths of World’s End. He watched till the snow closed over her, and then he turned away.

He was trembling — with cold, with fear, with excitement and relief — and he thought of the car. Almost wistfully, he looked once more out into the night, out over his shoulder and into the slashing strokes of the snow and the void beyond, and then he turned to go. But the dock was slick and his feet betrayed him. Before he could take a step, the hard white surface of the dock was rushing up to meet him and he hit it with a boom that seemed to thunder through the night. And then the unexpected happened, the unaccountable, the little thing that pumped him full of dread: a light went on. A light. Out there at the end of the dock, thirty feet from him, a sudden violation of the night, the river, the storm. He lay there, his heart hammering, and heard movement from below: heavy, muffled sounds.

And then he saw it — the low shadow of a boat drawn up on the other side of the dock, a second light gone on now, much closer. He pushed himself up, choked with panic, and his feet slid out from under him again. “Hey,” a voice called out, and it was right beside him. There was a man on the boat, a man with a flashlight, and as the boat materialized from the shadows, Walter went numb. He knew it. He knew that boat. He did. Peterskill Marina. Halloween. The floating outhouse with the bum aboard, the Indian — what had Mardi called him?

Jeremy. She’d called him Jeremy.

Suddenly he was on his feet and running — scrambling, flailing, staggering, pitching headlong into the night — the voice raking him from behind. “Hey,” it called, and it was the bay of a hound. “Hey, what’s going on?”

Walter didn’t know how many times he’d fallen by the time he reached the end of the dock and broke right along the tracks, his jacket torn and heavy with snow, the strap of his left foot twisted loose. He kept going, whipping himself on, expecting to hear the Indian’s footsteps behind him, expecting the madman to leap out of the gloom and throw himself at him, lock onto his throat, his ear. …

The snow came at him like a judgment. He went down again and this time he couldn’t get up — he was winded, out of shape, he was a cripple. There was a stitch in his side. His lungs burned. He gagged. And then it was coming up, all of it, beer, pastrami, artichoke hearts, crullers, the stuffed pork chops and canned asparagus. The heat of it rose in his face and he pushed himself away from it, sprawling in the snow like a dead man.

Later, when the cold made him move, his fingers refused to work. The prosthesis was loose — both of them were — and he couldn’t pull the straps. When finally he stood, he couldn’t feel the ground. He could feel his bleeding knuckles, could feel the tightness in his chest, but he couldn’t feel the earth beneath his feet. And that was bad, very bad. Because the earth was covered with snow and the snow was mounting and everything seemed like something else. He knew he had to get to the car. But which way was the car? Had he crossed the tracks? And where was the station? Where were the lights?

He started off in what must have been the right direction — it must have been — but he couldn’t feel the ground, and he fell. The cold had begun to sting now, the cold that was eighty degrees warmer than Barrow’s, and he pushed himself up. Carefully, methodically, putting one foot in front of the other and lifting his arms high for balance, he started off again. Counting steps — three, four, five, and where was the car? — but he went down like a block of wood. He got back up and almost immediately pitched forward again. And again. Finally, he began to crawl.

It was while he was crawling, his hands and knees gone dead as his feet, that he heard the first tentative whimper. He paused. His mind was fuzzy and he was tired. He’d forgotten where he was, what he’d done, where he was going, why he’d come. And then there it was again. The whimper rose to a sob, a cry, a plaint of protest and lament. And finally, shattering and disconsolate, beyond hope or redemption, it rose to a wail.

Heir Apparent

There was no reason to have come in at all, really. Orders were traditionally slow this time of year, and even if they weren’t, even if another world war broke out and they had to cook aluminum and cast aximaxes around the clock, they wouldn’t have needed him anyway — except maybe to sign the paychecks every other week. He was superfluous, and no one knew it better than he. Olaffson, the production manager, could have handled ten times the volume without even switching his brain on, and the kid they’d found to replace Walter in sales and advertising was a natural. Or so they told him. Actually, he hadn’t even met the kid yet.

But Depeyster liked the office. He liked to stretch out for a nap on the leather couch in the corner or cogitate over a paperback thriller in the rich spill of light from the brass desk lamp with the green glass shade. He liked the smell of the desk, liked the sound of the electric pencil sharpener and the way the big walnut chair tilted with the small of his back and glided across the carpet on its smooth silent casters. In the afternoons, he liked taking a two-hour lunch or slipping off to play a round of golf with LeClerc Outhouse — or, when the weather permitted, sailing up to Cold Spring for a Beefeater’s martini, straight up, at Gus’ Antique Bar. Best of all, though, he liked to get out of the house, liked to feel productive, useful, liked to feel he’d put in his day like anybody else.

Now, idly fanning the pages of a magazine and sitting over a cup of stone-cold coffee, he lifted his gaze to the window and the parking lot beyond, and saw that it was raining. Again. It seemed as if it had rained every day now since that freak snowstorm two weeks back. The plow had left a snowbank five feet high at the far end of the lot, and now there was nothing left of it but a broken ridge of dirty ice. All at once he had a terrible premonition: the rain would turn to sleet, the roads would ice up like a bobsled run and he’d be stuck here, away from home, and there’d be no way to get Joanna to the hospital.

He jerked open the drawer and fumbled with the phone book. “Weather service,” he muttered to himself, “weather service, weather service,” and he paged through the book and muttered until he gave it up and had Miss Egthuysen dial for him. Bland and indifferent, the recorded voice came over the wire with a crackle of static: “Rain ending late this afternoon, temperatures in the mid to high thirties, slight chance of overnight freezing in outlying areas.”

In the next moment he was pacing around the desk, half-frantic with worry, fighting the temptation to call home again. He’d called not five minutes before and Lula, in her laconic way, had done her best to reassure him. Everything was fine, she told him. Joanna was resting. She didn’t think she should be disturbed.

“Her water hasn’t broken yet, has it?” he asked, just to hear his own voice.

“Nope.”

There was a silence over the line. He was waiting for details, an update on Joanna’s condition, today was the day, didn’t she know that for christ’s sake? Didn’t she know that Dr. Brillinger had called it, right down to the very day — to this very day? The only reason he’d come into the office in the first place was because Joanna said he was making her nervous poking his head in the door every other minute. Pale to the roots of her hair, she’d squeezed his hand and asked him if he wouldn’t feel better at the office, the diner, a movie — anything to make the time pass for him. Just leave a number, that’s all. She’d call him. Not to worry, she’d call.

“Nope,” Lula had repeated, and he began to feel foolish.

“You’ll call me,” he said. “The minute anything happens, right?”

Lula’s voice was deep and rich and slow. “Uh huh, Misser Van Wart, soon’s anything happen.”

“I’m at the office,” he said.

“Um-hm.”

“Okay, then,” he said. And then, for lack of anything better to do with it, he’d dropped the receiver back in its cradle.

No, he couldn’t call again. Not already. He’d wait half an hour — or no, fifteen minutes. God, he was jittery. He looked out at the rain again, trying to mesmerize himself, clear his brain, but all he could think of was ice. His hands were trembling as he reached into his breast pocket for the envelope of cellar dust, dipped a wet finger in it and rubbed the fine ancient dirt over his front teeth and gums as if it were a drug. He prodded it with the tip of his tongue, rolled it luxuriously against his palate, worked it over his molars and ground it between his teeth. He closed his eyes and tasted his boyhood, tasted his father, his mother, tasted security. He was a boy, hidden in the cool, forgiving depths of the cellar, and the cellar was the soul of him, avatar of Van Warts past and Van Warts to come, and he felt its peace wash over him till he forgot the world existed beyond it.

And then the phone rang. And he jumped for it.

“Yes?” he gasped. “Yes?”

Miss Egthuysen’s airy voice came back at him. “Marguerite Mott on line two.”

Marguerite Mott. It took him a moment. The tang of the cellar dust began to fade and the familiar contours of his office came back to him. Yes. All right. He would talk to her. He punched the button.

“Dipe?” Her voice was a distant crowing.

“Yes? Marguerite?”

“We’ve got it.”

He was at a loss. Got what? Had Joanna delivered already? He had a sudden vision of Marguerite, in her champagne cocktail dress and white pumps, holding the baby by its feet as if it were something she’d pounced on in the bushes. “Huh?” he said.

“The property,” she cried. “Peletiah’s place.”

All at once it began to take hold of him, flowering in his brain like a whole long double row of Helen Traubels opening their sweet compacted buds in a single unstoppable moment. The property. The Crane property. Desecrated by Communists and fellow travelers, lost to the Van Warts nearly his whole life — the fifty wild undeveloped and untrammeled wooded acres that were his link to the glorious past and the very cornerstone and foundation of the triumphant future. And she was telling him that now, at long last, it was his. “How much?” he asked.

Marguerite gave a little laugh. “You won’t believe it.”

He waited, the smile growing on his face. “Try me.”

“Sixty-two and a half.”

“Sixty—?” he repeated.

“Dipe!” she crowed. “That’s twelve-fifty an acre! Twelve-fifty!”

He was stunned. He was speechless. Twelve-fifty an acre. It was half what he’d offered the old long-nosed son of a bitch — twenty-two fifty less than what he’d been asking. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew it. Peletiah’s grave isn’t even cold yet and already the kid needs money — what’s he going to do, buy a truckload of pot or something?”

“It’s not pot, Dipe”—she cleared her throat—“but the catch is he’s going to need the money right away.”

“No problem.” Christ, he practically had the ten percent down in his pocket, and Charlie Strang down at County Trust would write him a note for six times sixty thousand. Without even blinking. “I knew it,” he repeated, crowing himself now. “So what was it? Gambling? Women? What the hell does that little shit need with sixty thousand?”

Marguerite paused for dramatic effect, then lowered her voice. “Listen, he didn’t want to tell me — not at first. But you know how I am, right?”

He knew. She’d probably taken out her false teeth and gummed him into submission.

“It was that boat. The ecology thing? You know, the one that had that accident in the paper two weeks ago or so?”

“The Arcadia.”

“Yeah. Well listen, I mean I don’t know much about it, but apparently it was pretty well beat up — Sissy Sturdivant says there was this hole you could drive a Volkswagen through in the bottom of it and god only knows how much water damage. …”

The light of perfect understanding settled on him and Depeyster found himself grinning. He anticipated her: “So he’s going to put up his own money for repairs, right?”

“Uh huh. That’s what he says.” She paused. “He’s a weird kid, you know — and I don’t just mean the way he dresses. It’s almost as if there’s something not right with him, know what I mean?”

Hallelujah and amen. There was something not right with his daughter too — with half the kids in the country — and he could have curled the ends of her wig with what he knew about it, but he didn’t answer. He was savoring the rich irony of the whole thing — his money going to repair the Arcadia—and then, in the next instant, he was thinking about Walter, about the funeral and the cold driving rain that fell without remit as they lowered him into the ground. Tom Crane was there, looking half-drowned, and a tall, flat-chested blonde with a ski-slope nose who must have been Walter’s wife. Mardi showed up too, though she wouldn’t deign to come with her father — or be seen with him either. She stood off on the far side of the group gathered around the open grave, huddled under a torn beach umbrella with a ragtag crew of hippies — the spic she ran around with and a nigger kid dressed up like the Fool in King Lear. There was no minister, no service. Hesh Sollovay read something — some atheistic hogwash that gave everybody about as much comfort as the rain did — and that was that. No ashes to ashes, no dust to dust. Just dump the poor kid in the ground and forget it.

They said he’d been dead twelve hours or more by the time they found him. It was late in the afternoon, when the storm was already on its way out to sea and everybody was busy digging out. Eighteen inches had fallen, and it had drifted to three and four times that. No one thought a thing of the buried car, and if it hadn’t been for a couple of sixth-graders building a snow fort, they might not have found him at all — at least until the rain cut the drifts down. The plant was closed, the schools were closed, everything was closed, and all anybody could talk about that afternoon was the Arcadia gone aground at Gees Point and how the police were looking into reports of sabotage. Depeyster and LeClerc and one or two of the others were actually celebrating the sad and untimely demise of that noble craft with a good fire and a bottle of Piper-Heidsieck when the call came about Walter. No one made the connection. Not at first. But Depeyster knew what had happened, knew just as certainly as if he’d been there himself. Walter had done it, done it for him.

Depeyster had wanted to cry. Standing there in the hallway, the cold black receiver in his hand, LeClerc and the others gaping at him from the parlor, he felt stricken. Walter had sacrificed himself. For him. For America. To strike a blow at the dirty little kikes and atheists who’d poisoned his childhood and somehow got a stranglehold on the whole great suffering country. It was a tragedy. It really was. It was Sophocles. It was Shakespeare. And the kid was, was — he was a hero, that’s what he was. A patriot. He’d wanted to cry, he really had, thinking of the waste, thinking of Walter’s sad and doomed life and the sad doomed life of his father before him, and he felt something high in his throat that might have been the beginning of it and something in his chest too. But he wasn’t in the habit of crying. Hadn’t cried probably since he was a child. The moment passed.

“Dipe?” Marguerite was still on the line.

“Hm?”

“You there?”

“Sorry,” he said. “I went blank there for a minute.”

“I was saying, do you want me to go ahead with it?”

Of course he wanted her to go ahead with it. He wanted it more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. Except for a son. His son. Due today. “Yeah, sure,” he said, glancing at his watch. Fifteen minutes. Maybe Joanna had been trying to get through, maybe he’d missed her, maybe—“Listen, Marguerite, you take care of it. Got to go. ’Bye.”

And then he was dialing home.

The rain had stopped. The roads were clear. Depeyster Van Wart, twelfth heir to Van Wart Manor and the imminent acquirer of fifty pristine ancestral acres marred only by a single flimsy ramshackle structure the wind might have blown down on a good day, paced the worn gray carpet of the Peterskill Community Hospital’s maternity ward. Joanna was somewhere inside, beyond the big double swinging doors, strapped down and sedated. There was a problem with the delivery, that much he knew, that much Flo Dietz — Nurse Dietz — had told him as she flew through the door on one of her hundred errands to god knew where. The baby — his baby, his son — was in the wrong position. His head wasn’t where it was supposed to be and they couldn’t seem to turn him around. They were going to have to do a C-section.

Depeyster sat. He stood. He looked out the window. He rubbed dirt on his gums. Every time the double doors swung open he looked up. He saw corridors, gurneys, nurses in scrub suits and masks, and he heard sobs and shrieks that would have made a torturer wince. There was no sign of Joanna. Or of Dr. Brillinger. He tried to occupy his mind with other things, tried to think about the property and the satisfaction he’d have in leveling that tumbledown shack and how he’d ride with his son in the first light of morning, before breakfast, when the world was still and their breath hung on the air, but it didn’t work. The intercom would crackle, the doors would fly open, and he was undeniably, interminably and irrevocably there, in the hospital, watching the second hand trace its way around the great ugly institutional clock and staring at the pale green walls as if at the interior of a prison cell. He ducked his head. He felt as if he were going to throw up.

Later, much later, so much later he was sure Joanna had died on the operating table, sure his son was a fantasy, already dead and pickled in a jar as a curiosity for some half-baked obstetrical surgeon who’d got his training in Puerto Rico and barely knew which end the baby was supposed to come out of, Flo Deitz slipped up behind him in her noiseless, thick-soled nurse’s shoes and tapped him on the shoulder. He jerked around, startled. Flo was standing beside Dr. Brillinger and a man he didn’t recognize. The man he didn’t recognize was wearing a scrub gown and rubber gloves and he was so spattered with blood he might have been butchering hogs. But he was smiling. Dr. Brillinger was smiling. Flo was smiling. “Dr. Perlmutter,” Dr. Brillinger said, indicating the bloody man with a nod of his head.

“Congratulations,” Dr. Perlmutter said in a voice too small to be hearty, “you’re the father of a healthy boy.”

“Nine pounds, six ounces,” Flo Deitz said, as if it mattered.

Dr. Perlmutter snapped the glove from his right hand and held the bare hand out for Depeyster to shake. “Joanna’s fine,” Dr. Brillinger said in a fruity whisper. Numb, Depeyster shook. Relieved, Depeyster shook. All around. He even shook Flo’s hand.

“This way,” Flo was saying, already whispering off in her silent shoes.

Depeyster nodded at Drs. Brillinger and Perlmutter and followed her down a corridor to his right. She walked briskly — amazingly so for a pigeon-toed, middle-aged woman who couldn’t have stood more than five feet tall — and he had to hurry to keep up. The corridor ended abruptly at a door that read NO ADMITTANCE, but Flo was already gliding down another corridor perpendicular to it, her brisk short legs as quick and purposeful as a long-distance runner’s. When Depeyster caught up to her, she was standing before a window, or rather a panel of glass that gave onto the room beyond. “The nursery,” she said. “There he is.”

It had been what — twenty, twenty-one years? How old was Mardi? — and he could barely contain himself. His heart was pounding as if he’d just sprinted up ten flights of stairs and the hair at his temples was damp with sweat. He pressed his face to the window.

Babies. They all looked alike. There were four of them, hunched like little red-faced monkeys in their baskets, hand-lettered name tags identifying their parentage: Cappolupo, O’Reilly, Nelson, Van Wart. “Where?” he said.

Flo Deitz gave him an odd look. “There,” she said, “right there in front. Van Wart.”

He looked, but he didn’t see. This? he thought, something like panic, like denial, rising in his throat. There it was — there he was — his son, swaddled in white linen like the others, but big, too big, and with a brushstroke of tarry black hair on his head. And there was something wrong with his skin too — he was dark, coppery almost, as if he’d been sunburned or something. “Is there anything … wrong with him?” he stammered. “I mean, his skin—?”

Flo was smiling at him, beaming at him.

“Is that some kind of, of afterbirth or something?”

“He’s darling,” she said.

He looked again. And at that moment, as if already there were some psychic link between them, the baby waved its arms and snapped open its eyes. It was a revelation. A shock. Depeyster’s eyes were gray, as were his father’s before him, and Joanna’s the purest, regal shade of violet. The baby’s eyes were as green as a cat’s.

For a long while, Depeyster stood there in the hallway. He stood there long after Nurse Deitz had left him and gone home to her supper, long after the other proud fathers had come and gone, so long in fact that the janitor had to mop around him. He watched the baby sleep, studied its hair, the flutter of its eyelids and the clenching of its tiny fists as it drifted from one unfathomable dream to another. All sorts of things passed through Depeyster’s mind, things that unsettled him, made him hurt in the pit of his stomach and feel as empty as he’d ever felt.

He was a strong man, single-minded and tough, a man who dwelt in history and felt the pulse of generations beating in his blood. He had those thoughts, those unsettling thoughts, just once, just then, and he dismissed them, never to have them again. When at long last he turned away from the window, there was a smile on his lips. And he held that smile as he strode down the corridor, across the lobby and through the heavy front door. He was outside, on the steps, the cool sweet air in his face and the stars spread out overhead like a benediction, when it came to him. Rombout, he thought, caught up in the sudden whelming grip of inspiration, he would call him Rombout. …

After his father.