One night Jeremias woke from a dreamless sleep and felt a draft of cold air on his face. When he looked up, he saw that the door stood open, and that the hills and trees and naked snowfields had come to bed with him. Cursing, he pushed himself up and crossed the room to slam shut the door, but at the last moment something arrested him. Tracks. There were tracks — footprints — in the fresh dusting of snow on the stoep. Jeremias puzzled over them a moment, then eased the door shut and called to his sister in an urgent whisper. She didn’t answer. When he lit the taper, he saw with a start that little Jeremy was sleeping alone. Katrinchee was gone.
This time — the first time — he found her huddled beneath the white oak. She was in her nightdress, and she’d taken a knife to her hair; strands of it lay about her in the snow like the remains of a night-blooming plant. Inside, he tried to comfort her. “It’s all right,” he soothed, pressing her to him. “What was it — a bad dream?”
There they were, in tableau: the animals of the manger, the sleeping child, the mutilated brother and mad sister. “A dream,” she echoed, and her voice was distant, vague. Behind them, the calf bleated forlornly and the hogs grunted in their sleep. “I feel so … so …” (she meant to say “guilty,” but that’s not how it came out) “… so hungry.”
Jeremias put her to bed, fed the fire and boiled up some milk for porridge. She lay motionless on the husk mattress, staring at the ceiling. When he brought the spoon to her lips, she pushed it away. And so the next day, and the next. He made her a stew of turnip and dried fish, baked some heavy hard bread (full of weevils, unfortunately) and gave it to her with a slab of cheese, cut the ears off one of the shoats to make her a meat broth, but she wouldn’t eat. She just lay there, staring, the white parchment of her skull gleaming through the stubble of hair, her cheeks sunk in on themselves.
It was in early March, on a night that dripped from the eaves with the promise of warmth, that she wandered off again. This time she pulled the door shut behind her, and Jeremias didn’t notice she was gone till first light. By then the snow had started. A wet warm drizzling snow that changed twice to rain, hovered a while on the brink of freezing, and finally, propelled by gusts blown in off the river, became a whirlwind of hard stinging pellets. By the time Jeremias had dressed the boy and started off after her, the wind was steady and the visibility no more than twenty feet.
This time there were no tracks. With the boy on his back and the pegleg skidding out from under him, Jeremias traced an ever-widening circle around the house, shouting her name into the wind. Nothing came back to him. The trees were mute, the wind threw its voice in a hundred artful ways, beads of snow rattled off his coat, his hat, his muffler. Struggling, stumbling, afraid of losing his way in the snow, afraid for Jeremy’s life as well as his own, he finally turned around and hobbled back to the cabin. He tried again, early in the afternoon, getting as far as the cornfield where he’d encountered Wolf Nysen. For a moment he thought he heard her, way off in the distance, her voice raised in a doleful bone-chilling wail, but then the wind took it over from him and he couldn’t be sure. He called her name, over and over, till his foot went numb and the wind drove the strength from his body. Just before dark, he put Jeremy to bed and went out again, but the snow had drifted so high he was exhausted before he reached the cornfield. “Katrinchee!” he shouted till his voice went hoarse. “Katrinchee!” But the only answer was the strange mournful cry of a great white owl beating through the storm like a lost soul.
It snowed for two days and two nights. On the morning of the third day, Jeremias fed the livestock, closed up the house and struggled through the drifts to the van der Meulens’, his nephew on his back. Staats alerted the Cranes, Reinier Oothouse and the people at the upper manor house, then rode in to Jan Pieterse’s to see if she’d turned up there, and if she hadn’t, to locate an Indian tracker.
A party of Kitchawanks went out that afternoon, but came back empty-handed: the snow had obliterated any sign of her. If a twig had caught in her dress or a stone squirted out underfoot, the evidence was buried under three feet of snow. Jeremias despaired, but he wouldn’t give up. Next morning he borrowed Staats’ cart horse, and while Meintje looked after Jeremy, he and Douw poked through copses and thickets, searched and re-searched the valleys and streambeds, knocked on doors at outlying farms. They roamed as far afield as the Kitchawank village at Indian Point to the south, and the Weckquaesgeek camp at Suycker Broodt to the north. There was no trace of her.
It was Jan Pieterse who finally found her, and he wasn’t looking. He was out behind the trading post one morning toward the end of the month, hauling a bucket of slops down to the Blue Rock so he could pitch them into the river, as he did every morning, the peglegged Van Brunt kid and his mad wandering shorn-headed miscegenating sister the farthest things from his mind, when something just off the path up ahead caught his eye. A swatch of blue. In a snowbank at the base of the Blue Rock, no more than a hundred feet from the store. He wondered at that swatch of blue, and set down the bucket to slash through the crusted snow and investigate. The weather had turned warmer the past few days, and his eyes had gradually gotten used to the appearance of color in what had been for some months now a world as blank as an untouched canvas. Scabs of mud had begun to break through the path he’d carved, the sky that hung low overhead like a dirty sheet had given way to the fine cerulean of a midsummer’s day, pussy willows were in bloom along the Van Wartwyck road and tiny tight-wound buds graced box elder and sycamore. But this, this was something else. Something man-made. Something blue.
In a moment, he was standing over the spot, braced uneasily against the yielding snow on the one side and the great smooth slab of rock on the other. He was staring down at a piece of cloth projecting from the snow as if it were just the tip of something larger. He was a shopkeeper and he knew that cloth. It was blue kersey. He’d sold bolts of it to the Indians and to the farmers’ wives. The Indians fashioned blankets from it. The farmers’ wives liked it for aprons. And nightdresses.
Jeremias buried her beneath the white oak. Dominie Van Schaik turned up to say a few words over the grave, while the six van der Meulens, draped in black like a flock of maes dieven, comprised the mourners. Jeremias knelt by the grave, his lips moving as if in prayer. But he wasn’t praying. He was cursing God in his heaven and all his angels, cursing St. Nicholas and the patroon and the dismal alien place that rose up around him in a Gehenna of trees, valleys and bristling hilltops. If only they’d stayed in Schobbejacken, he kept telling himself, none of this would have happened. He knelt there, feeling sorry for Katrinchee, for his father and mother and little Wouter, feeling sorry for himself, but when finally he stood and took his place among the mourners, there was a hard cold look in his eye, the look of intransigence and invincibility he’d leveled on the schout time and again: he was down, but not defeated. No, never defeated.
As for Jeremy, two and a half years old, he didn’t know what defeat was — or triumph either. He held back while first his uncle, then grootvader van der Meulen and the rest knelt at the grave. He didn’t cry, didn’t really comprehend the loss. What was this before him but a mound of naked dirt, no different from the furrows Jeremias turned up with the plow? Moles lived in the ground, beetles, earthworms, slugs. His mother didn’t live in the ground.