Times were hard all over. For two years the plot remained on the market and not a single bid was forthcoming, until finally Rombout put an ad in the Peterskill Post Dispatch (soon to merge with both the Herald and the Star Reporter). The day after the ad appeared, a gleaming late-model Packard sedan made its slow, flatulent way up the drive to the manor house. Inside was Peletiah Crane, principal of the Van Wartville school and descendant of the legendary pedagogue-legislator. He was dressed in his principal’s pinstripes, replete with bow tie, celluloid collar and straw boater, and he carried with him a black satchel similar to those employed by doctors making their rounds.
Pompey led the educator into the brightly lit back parlor, where Rombout and his thirteen-year-old son, Depeyster, sat over a game of chess. “Peletiah?” Rombout exclaimed in surprise, rising and extending his hand.
The principal was smiling — no, grinning — till he looked like a walnut about to split open. Depeyster ducked his head. He knew that grin. It was a variant of the one Old Stone Beak, as they called him, employed just prior to lifting his cane down from the wall and applying it to some miscreant’s backside. Wider, gummier and more compressed about the lips than the caning grin, this one was reserved for special occasions of triumph, as when Dr. Crane had assembled the student body to announce that his own son had won the essay contest commemorating the founding of Peterskill, or when he’d curtailed athletics for a month because Anthony Fagnoli had desecrated the shower stall with an anatomical diagram. Thirteen years old and mortified in the face of that smile, Depeyster felt like slipping down to the cellar for a pinch of dirt. Instead, he concentrated on the chessboard.
The principal pumped his father’s hand joyously and then took a seat. “Mr. Van Wart,” he said, “Rombout,” and he was tapping the black bag in his lap with a knowing and proprietary air, as if it contained the philosopher’s stone or the first draft of Roosevelt’s New Deal speech, “I’ve come to make an offer on the property.”
The Finger
It was February, grim and cold and gray. Walter, a young man with two feet like anyone else, was still in school, sitting down to his desk with a jar of wheat germ and a carton of prune-whip yogurt, trying to make sense of Heidegger. His motorcycle was in the garage out back of the rooming house in which he ate, slept, shat and ruminated over questions pertaining to man’s fate in an indifferent universe, where it stood forlornly amidst a clutter of three-legged tables, disemboweled armchairs and lamps with mismatched shades. He wouldn’t be needing it for a while. The outside temperature was twenty below, he was three hundred fifty miles and a whole universe away from the clapboard bungalow in Kitchawank Colony and the hissing inferno of Depeyster Manufacturing and he had three more interminable months to endure before he could accept his diploma from the liver-spotted hands of President Crumley and tear the pages from Heidegger with the same slow malicious pleasure with which he’d torn the wings from flies as a child.
Jessica was at school too. In Albany. She hadn’t seen Walter since Christmas break and had written him three times without reply in the past week. She’d also written to graduate schools. Scripps, Miami, N.Y.U., Mayaguez. What she wanted from Walter was love, fidelity and an enduring relationship; what she wanted from Scripps, Miami, N.Y.U. and Mayaguez was a chance to study marine biology. At the moment, she was contemplating the typescript of her senior thesis, which lay on the desk beside yet another letter to Walter. Her legs were crossed, and a furry slipper, shaped like a rabbit but made of cotton, dangled from her pink-frosted toes. The title gave her a little thrill of pleasure: The Effect of Temperature Fluctuation on Vanadium Concentration in Tunicates of the Intertidal Zone, by Jessica Conklin Wing. She weathered the thrill, turned the page and began to read.
Tom Crane, grandson to Peletiah, friend and father confessor to Jessica and lifelong boon companion to Walter, was not in school. Not as of two weeks ago, anyway. Nope. Not he. He was a dropout, and proud of it. Cornell, as far as he was concerned, was strictly a bourgeois institution, repressive, reactionary and stultifyingly dull. He’d dissected his last frog, tortured his last rat and struggled for the last time to heft twenty-five-pound textbooks crammed with illustrations, diagrams and appendices. He’d cleaned up his room and sold the whole business — desk, chair, tensor lamp, slide rule, texts, dictionaries, his fieldbook of natural history and a two-year-old calendar featuring the wildflowers of the Northeast as displayed against the wet vulvae of naked, black-nippled Puerto Rican girls — for twenty-six dollars, stuffed his underwear in a rucksack and hitchhiked home.
“What are you going to do now?” his grandfather asked him when he got there.
Hunched and dirty, the eight-foot canary-yellow scarf wrapped around his neck like an anaconda and his World War I German aviator’s coat hanging open to the waist, he merely shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said. “Might get a job, I guess.”
His grandfather, former guiding light of the Van Wartville and Peterskill schools and a firm believer in the dignity of work and the principles of John Dewey, gave a snort of contempt. He was seventyseven years old and his eyebrows rose and fell again like great white swooping owls.
“I wanted to ask you if I could live in the shack.”
For a moment the old man was speechless. “The Indian’s shack?” he said finally, a fine trembling crusty incredulity oscillating his voice. “Way out there in the hind end of nowhere? Good Christ, you’ll freeze to death.”
Oh no, he wouldn’t freeze. Last summer he’d equipped the place with a new wood stove, replaced the windows and patched the chinks in the walls with scrap lumber and wood putty. And the summer before he’d put up a porch, installed a chemical toilet and dragged enough crapped-over discarded furniture up there to make the place habitable. Besides, he had a good down bag and fifty acres of firewood.
His grandfather, he of the sharp Crane beak and devouring Crane eyes, had doted on him since he lay kicking in the cradle, and now that his own son was gone, the old man clung to him with a fierceness that had all the desperate love of dying blood in it. That is, he was a pushover. “If that’s what you want,” he said at last, heaving a sigh that might have raised the curtains.
And so here he was, living like a hermit, a man of the mountains, a saint of the forest and hero of the people, free of the petty pecuniary worries that nag shop owner and working stiff alike. Sure it was nippy, and yes, necessity forced him to trudge out to Van Wart Road and hitch the two miles to his grandfather’s for a hot meal and the occasional ritual peeling of the long johns and immersion in a steaming tub, but he was doing it. Independence was his! Self-direction! The joy of sloth! He lay in bed all morning, wrapped in his sleeping bag, his arms pinned beneath the weight of Indian blankets uncountable and an old reeking raccoon coat he’d found in his grandmother’s closet, watching his breath hang in the air. Sometimes he’d get up to open a can of creamed corn and set it on the kerosene stove or maybe make himself a cup of herb tea or hot chocolate, but mostly he just lay there, listening to his beard grow and relishing his freedom. About ten or eleven — he couldn’t tell which, didn’t have a clock or watch — he’d begin reading. Typically, he’d start out light, with some elfin fantasy or sci fi, with Tolkien or Vonnegut or Salmón. After lunch — chick peas mashed into brown rice with lentil gravy, out of the five-gallon pot — he’d get into the heavy stuff. Lenin, Trotsky, Bakunin, cheap pamphlets with gray or green covers, the paper no better than newsprint. What did he care for leather bindings and rag content? — he was studying for the revolution.