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.