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.