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World\'s End
Chapter 12: Neeltje Waved Back
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Neeltje

Waved Back
 

Jeremias was not so lucky. He withdrew into

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

    By the time he returned with the schout, the

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

    “Young layabout,” the agent was saying as the

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

    Joost didn’t answer, his black staring eyes

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

    By the time they reached the naked white oak

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

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

to the place.”
 

    Joost gave it a minute, his horse picking through

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

    The agent ignored him. “Over there,” he said,

pointing a thick Unger in the direction of Jeremias’
lean-to. Joost dropped the reins and thrust his
numbed hands into his pockets while his horse—a
one-eyed nag with an overactive appetite and
dropsical mien—bobbed stupidly after the agent’s
mare.
 

    “Van Brunt!” the agent called as they hovered

over the empty lean-to and the snowy hummock
that represented the corpse of the unhappy ox.
“Show yourself this instant!”
 

    There was no response.

 

    The agent was blowing up a regular hurricane of

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

    Though the snow had stopped, the wind had

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

    The trail wound like a tattered ribbon through

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

    It didn’t. Jeremias had headed south and east,

skirting the big house and making instead toward
the van der Meulen farm. Joost and the agent saw
where he’d stopped to make water in the snow or
nibble a few last withered berries and chew a bit of
bark; they saw how the pegleg had grown heavier
and dug deeper into the snow. And Unally, to their
everlasting relief, they saw that the tracks would
indeed lead them across the Meulen Brook, past
the great plank doors of Staats van der Meulen’s
barn and into the warm, taper-lit, bread-smelling
kitchen of Vrouw van der Meulen herself, a woman
renowned all the way to Croton for her honingkoek
and appelbeignet.
 

    If they expected hospitality, if they sought the

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

    Vrouw van der Meulen’s eyes shot suspiciously

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

    Inside, it was heaven. The front room, which ran

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

    “Well,” Meintje said Unally, closing the door

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

    Joost’s back was not nearly so bowed as when

he was mounted, yet he still slumped badly.
Working the plumed hat in his hands, he slouched
against the doorframe and attempted an
explanation. “Van Brunt,” he began, but was cut off
by the ofUcious agent, who laid out the patroon’s
case against Harmanus’ sad and solitary heir as if
he were pleading before a court of the accused’s
peers (though of course there was neither need
nor precedent for such a court, as the patroon was
judge, jury and prosecutor on his own lands, and
paid the schout and hangman to take care of the
rest). He ended, having in the process managed to
edge closer to the hearth and its paradisaic
aromas, by attesting that they’d followed the
malefactor’s trail right on up to the goude vrouw’s
doorstep.
 

    Meintje waited until he’d Unished and then she

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

    It was at this juncture that Staats, bringing with

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

    “Staats,” Meintje cried, rushing to him and

repeating his name twice more in a plaintive wail,
“they’ve come for the boy.”
 

    “Boy?” he repeated, as if the word were new to

him. His eyes roved about the room, searching for
a clue, and he lifted his mink cap to scratch a head
as hard and hairless as a chestnut.
 

    “Little Jeremias,” his wife whispered in

clariUcation.
 

    Joost watched them uneasily. As he would later

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

    No, he’d said, shaking his head, no, and she’d

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

    “Jeremias?” Staats repeated, comprehension

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

    It was then that the subject of the controversy

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

The following summer, a dramatic and sweeping

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

    Pieter Stuyvesant didn’t like it. He was a rough,

tough, bellicose, Ughting Frisian who’d lost a leg to
the Portuguese and would yield to no man. He
hurled deUance in Nicolls’ teeth: come what may,
he would Ught the Englishers to the death.
Unfortunately, the good burghers of New
Amsterdam, who resented the West India
Company’s monopoly, eschewed taxation without
representation and hated the despotic governor as
if he were the devil himself, refused to back him.
And so, on September 9, 1664, after Ufty-Uve years
of Dutch rule, New Amsterdam became New York
—after Charles’ brother, James the duke of York—
and the great, green, roiled, broad-backed North
River became the Hudson, after the true-blue
Englishman who’d discovered it.
 

    Yes, the changes were dramatic—suddenly there

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

    As for Joost, he performed his duties as before,

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

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

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

    The trading post comprised a rude corral, a

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