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.