Now Joost Cats was a reasonable man, prone neither to fits of temper nor acts of violence, happier far with the role of mediator than enforcer. He’d pitied the Van Brunt boy on that chill November day when the officious and soft-bottomed ass of a commis had dragged him, the schout, out into the naked wild to evict the half-starved lad from a worthless and unlucky plot of land, had felt foolish and ashamed standing before Meintje van der Meulen’s hearth with his plumed hat in hand, regretted with all his heart the brand he’d struck on the boy’s face. But for all that, he wanted to kill him. He looked into his daughter’s eyes and then down at this human garbage that had stolen her away, and he wanted to cut him, perforate him, pierce his heart, his liver, his lights and bladder and spleen.
If the first thrust was instinctive, the second was a liberation. Guilt, anger, fear, resentment and jealousy broke loose in him and he jabbed the hilt forward with all the punch of his uncoiled arm. Jeremias dodged it. He rolled to his right, Neeltje flashing up off the bed with her hands outspread, the Jongheer lunging into the room, the child howling, the rain rising to a crescendo on the roof. “Spuyten duyvil!” Joost cursed, and struck a third time, but again the tip of the sword betrayed him, wagging wide of the mark and burying itself in the beaten wet earth of the floor.
He was drawing himself up for the fourth and fatal thrust, when Neeltje, entering the fray, flung herself down atop Jeremias, shrieking “Kill me! Kill me!” Stooped over double, his back murdering him, reason and restraint flung to the winds, he paused only long enough to reach down his free hand and fling her roughly aside. She hated him, his own daughter, a mouthful of teeth, claws tearing at his sleeve, but no matter. The blade flashed in his hand and he thought only of the next thrust and the next and the next one after that — he’d make a pincushion of the son-of-a-bitch, a sieve, a colander!
If Joost was deranged, he was also deluded: there would be no more thrusts of the rapier. For in the confusion Jeremias had clawed his way to his feet (or rather, foot) and snatched a crude weapon from the inglenook. The weapon, known as a curiosity in those parts, was a Weckquaesgeek pogamoggan. It consisted of a flexible length of fruitwood, to the nether end of which a jagged five-pound ball of granite had been affixed by means of leather ligatures. Jeremias swung it once, catching the schout just behind the ear and plunging him into the rushing interstitial darkness of a dreamless sleep, and then braced himself to face the Jongheer.
For his part, the heir to the Van Wart patent looked like a man who’s nodded off in his box at the opera only to wake and find himself at a bear baiting. In the instant the schout pitched forward, the smirk died on the Jongheer’s face. This was more than he’d bargained for. This was sordid, primitive, beastly — not at all the sort of thing a lettered man should hope to experience. He tried to draw himself up and project the authority of his father, the patroon, whose rights, privileges and responsibilities would one day devolve upon himself. “Put up your weapon this instant,” he demanded in a voice that sounded like someone else’s, “and submit to the legally constituted authority of the patroon.” His voice dropped. “You are now in my custody.”
Neeltje was bent over her father now, pressing a handkerchief to his head. The child had stopped his unearthly howling and Jeremias had propped himself against the back of a chair. The club, with its freight of human hair and blood, swung idly in his hand and the scar stood out on his face. He made no answer. He turned his head and spat.
“Vader, vader,” Neeltje cried. “Don’t you know where you are? It’s little Neeltje. It’s me.” The schout moaned. Rain drummed at the roof. “With all due respect, Mijnheer,” Jeremias said in a voice reined in with the effort to control it, “you may own the milch cow, the land under my feet, the house I’ve built with my own hands, but you don’t own Neeltje. And you don’t own me.”
The Jongheer held the blade out before him as if it were a fishing pole or divining rod, as if he didn’t know what to do with it. He was soaked to the skin, his clothes were filthy, ruined, the plume of authority hung limp over the brim of his hat. For all that, though, the smirk had returned to his face. “Oh yes,” he said, so softly he was nearly inaudible, “oh yes, I do.”
At that, Jeremias idly swung the war club to his shoulder, where the weight of the ball bowed it like the arm of a catapult. The door stood open still and the elemental scent of the land rose to his nostrils, a scent of vitality and decay, of birth and death. He looked the Jongheer full in the face. “Come and get me,” he said.
Two weeks later, on an afternoon in May as soft and celestial as the one on which they’d first met amongst the furs and hogsheads of Jan Pieterse’s trading post, Neeltje Cats and Jeremias Van Brunt were married by a subdued and solemn Dominie Van Schaik, not thirty feet from where Katrinchee lay buried. By all accounts, the feast that followed was a rousing success. Meintje van der Meulen baked for three days straight, and her husband Staats set up a pair of temporary tables big enough to accommodate every tippler and trencherman from Sint Sink to Rondout. Reinier Oothouse and Hackaliah Crane buried the hatchet for the day and drank the bride’s health side by side. There was game and fish and cheese and cabbage, there were pies and puddings and stews. Drink, too: ’Sopus ale, cider and Hollands out of a stone jug. And music. What would a wedding be without it? Here came young Cadwallader Crane with a penny whistle, there Vrouw Oothouse with her prodigious bottom and a bombas that made use of a pig’s bladder for a sound box; someone else had a lute and another a pair of varnished sticks and an overturned kettle. Mariken Van Wart came up from Croton and danced the whole afternoon with Douw van der Meulen, Staats led Meintje through half a dozen frenetic turns of “Jimmy-be-still” and old Jan the Kitchawank danced with a jug till the sun fell into the trees. Neeltje’s sisters were dressed like dolls, her mother cried — whether for joy or sorrow no one could be sure — and the patroon sent Ter Dingas Bosyn, the commis, as his official representative. But the crowning moment of the day, as everyone agreed, was when the schout, dressed in funereal black and standing as tall as his affliction would allow, his head bound in a snowy bandage and with good leather boots on his feet, strode resolutely across the front yard and gave away the bride.
When Mohonk, son of Sachoes, appeared on the doorstep of the little farmhouse at Nysen’s Roost some three months later, Jeremias was a changed man. Gone was the wild-eyed glare of the rebel, the underdog, the unsoothable beast, and in its place was a look that could only be described as one of contentment. Indeed, Jeremias had never known a happier time. The crops were flourishing, the deer were back, the shack had been elevated to the status of domicile through the addition of a second room, furniture both functional and pleasing to the eye and that hallmark of civilized living, a clean, planed and sanded plank floor that soared a full foot and a half above the cold dun earth below. And then there was Neeltje. She was a voice in his head, a presence that never left him even when he was adrift in the canoe or roaming the scoured hilltops with a musket borrowed from Staats; she clove to him like a second skin, each moment a melioration and a healing. She mothered Jeremy, managed the house, spun and sewed and cooked, rubbed the tightness from his shoulders, sat with him by the river while fish stirred in the shallows and the blue shadows closed over the mountains. She made peace with her father, baked as fine a beignet as moeder Meintje, arranged and rearranged the front room till it looked like a burgher’s parlor in Schobbejacken. She was everything that was possible, and more. Far more: she was carrying his child.