World's End Read online

  T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE

  WORLD’S END

  A NOVEL

  In memory of my own lost father

  After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

  —T. S. Eliot,

  “Gerontion”

  Contents

  Principal Characters

  Part I

  MARTYR’S REACH

  A COLLISION WITH HISTORY

  O PIONEERS!

  ANCESTRAL DIRT

  PROSTHESIS

  NEELTJE WAVED BACK

  THE LAST OF THE KITCHAWANKS

  THE FINGER

  PATRIMONY

  AMONG THE SAVAGES

  CHIEFLY NUPTIAL

  WITH THE PATROON’S BLESSING

  LANDLESS GENTRY

  THE DUNDERBERG IMP

  MOHONK, OR THE HISTORY OF A STAB IN THE BACK

  THE WAILING WOMAN

  TOFU

  MARTYR’S REACH

  SONS AND DAUGHTERS

  COLLISION THE SECOND

  Part II

  WORLD’S END

  THE HOODWINKING OF SACHOES

  OPEN HOUSE

  IN DE PEKEL ZITTEN3

  GRAND UNION

  A QUESTION OF BALANCE

  BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

  SUCH SWEET SORROW

  COSTUMES

  VAN WARTWYCK, SLEEPING AND WAKING

  BARROW

  TRUMAN’S STORY

  GALLOWS HILL

  HAIL, ARCADIA!

  WORLD’S END

  HEIR APPARENT

  Acknowledgments

  Footnote

  By the Same Author

  Principal Characters

  In the Seventeenth Century

  At Nysen’s Roost

  Among the Kitchawanks

  SACHOES, sachem of the Kitchawanks

  WAHWAHTAYSEE, his wife

  MINEWA, their daughter

  MOHONK (MOHEWONECK), their son

  JEREMY MOHONK (SQUAGGANEEK), son of Katrinchee Van Brunt and Mohonk

  At Van Wartwyck

  IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  At Kitchawank Colony

  At the Shawangunk Reservation

  JEREMY MOHONK père

  MILDRED TANTAQUIDGEON, his wife

  JEREMY MOHONK, their son and last of the Kitchawanks

  HORACE TANTAQUIDGEON, Mildred’s brother

  In Van Wartville

  ROMBOUT VAN WART, eleventh heir to Van Wart Manor

  CATHERINE DEPEYSTER VAN WART, his wife

  DEPEYSTER VAN WART, their son and heir

  JOANNA VAN WART, Depeyster’s wife

  MARDI VAN WART, their daughter

  PELETIAH CRANE

  STANDARD CRANE, son of Peletiah

  TOM CRANE, son of Standard

  PIET AUKEMA

  Part I

  Martyr’s Reach

  He began to doubt

  whether both he and the world around him

  were not bewitched.

  —Washington Irving,

  “Rip Van Winkle”

  A Collision with History

  On the day he lost his right foot, Walter Van Brunt had been haunted, however haphazardly, by ghosts of the past. It began in the morning, when he woke to the smell of potato pancakes, a smell that reminded him of his mother, dead of sorrow after the Peterskill riots of 1949, and it carried through the miserable lunch break he divided between nostalgic recollections of his paternal grandmother and a liverwurst sandwich that tasted of dead flesh and chemicals. Over the whine of the lathe that afternoon he was surprised by a waking dream of his grandfather, a morose, big-bellied man so covered with hair he could have been an ogre out of a children’s tale, and then, just before five, he had a vague rippling vision of a leering Dutchman in sugarloaf hat and pantaloons.

  The first ghost, the ghost of the pancakes, was conjured by the deft culinary hand of Lola Solovay, his adoptive mother. Though Walter was only midway through his fourth year when his natural mother succumbed to the forces of bigotry and misguided patriotism, he remembered her chiefly for her eyes, which were like souls made flesh, and her potato pancakes, which were light, toothsome, and drowned in sour cream and homemade applesauce. Lying abed, waiting in the limbo between dreaming and consciousness for the alarm to summon him to his hellish job at Depeyster Manufacturing, he caught the scent of those ethereal pancakes, and for just a moment his mother was there with him.

  The ghost of his grandmother, Elsa Van Brunt, was also mixed up with the scent of food. He unwrapped the liverwurst on white Lola had concocted for him in the penumbral dawn, and suddenly he was ten years old, spending the summer on the river with his grandparents, the day as dark as December with the storm sitting atop Dunderberg Mountain. His grandmother had got up from her potter’s wheel to fix his lunch and tell him the story of Sachoes’ daughter. Sachoes, as Walter knew from previous episodes, was chief of the Kitchawanks, the tribe that was flimflammed out of its land by the founders of Peterskill-on-the-Hudson back in the days of the Colony. At that time, the Kitchawanks, who were, generally speaking, a lethargic, peace-loving, oyster-eating clan of layabouts and bark-hut builders, owed fealty to the fierce Mohawk to the north. Indeed, so fierce, so savage, so warlike and predatory were these Mohawk that a single brave could be sent down to collect tribute, and Manitou have mercy on the tribe that failed to feast him like a god and laden him with wampumpeak and seawant. Kanyengahaga, the Mohawk called themselves, people of the place of flint; the Kitchawanks and their Mohican cousins called them Mohawk, people who eat people, a reference to their propensity for roasting and devouring those who failed to please them.

  Well. White bread was laid out on the plate, tomatoes were sliced, a cellophane-wrapped tube of liverwurst produced from the refrigerator. He had a daughter, Walter’s grandmother said, and her name was Minewa, after the goddess of the river who hurled thunderbolts. She pointed out the window and across the broad back of the Hudson to where lightning sprang like nerve endings from the crown of Dunderberg. Like those.

  One lazy August afternoon, a Mohawk brave strode into the village, naked but for his breechclout and painted like death and the devil. Tribute, he demanded, in a tongue that sounded like the thrashing of adders, and then he fell down in a swoon, blood pouring from his mouth and ears, and the pockmarks standing out on his face. Minewa nursed him. If he died, there would be no more oyster eating, no fooling around in bark canoes and plucking the sweet white meat from the cavities of blueclaw crabs: there would be no more Kitchawanks. The Mohawk would see to that.

  For a month he lay prostrate in Sachoes’ hut, his head cradled in Minewa’s lap while she assuaged his fever with otter musk and fed him herbs and wild onion. Gradually he began to regain his strength, until one day he was able to stand without support and repeat his demand for tribute. But this time it wasn’t beaverskins or wampumpeak he wanted: it was Minewa. Sachoes was reluctant, but the Mohawk blustered and threatened and cut open his chest in three places to show his sincerity. He would take her to the north country and make her a queen. Of course, if Sachoes preferred, the brave would go home empty-handed and then return one starless night with a raiding party and cut up the Kitchawanks like dogs. Sachoes, who was shortly thereafter to be hoodwinked by the Dutch trader who founded Peterskill on the sacred rock where the chief’s forefathers had watched Manitou’s big woman descend to earth, said “Sure, take her.”

  Two weeks later a party of Kitchawanks was combing the adjoining valley for acorns, chestnuts and rose hips when they came across the smoke of a cooking fire. With stealth, with courage and curiosity and not a little audacity—Manitou knows, it could have been the devil himself cooking up a plague—they approached the clearing from which the smoke rose into the sky like a capnomancer’s dream. What
they saw, Walter’s grandmother said, spreading mayonnaise, was betrayal. What they saw was the Mohawk and Minewa, what was left of her. She was nothing from the waist down, his grandmother said, setting the sandwich before him—liverwurst, the texture and color, the very smell of flesh—nothing but bone.

  If the images of mother and grandmother had been summoned by a tickle of the olfactory lobe, the ghost of his grandfather was more problematic. Perhaps it was a matter of association: once the pattern is established, one thing gives rise to another and the mind plays out memories like beads on a string. At any rate, in the heat of the afternoon, old Harmanus Van Brunt had materialized just to the left of the lathe, big-boned, big-bellied, and big-headed, hairy as a hog, with cutting oil and aluminum shavings caught in the hair of his forearms and a clay pipe clenched between his teeth. All his life he’d been a fisherman, hauling nets with the strength of his shoulders and the counterbalance of his belly, and he’d died as he’d been born: on the river. Walter had been twelve or thirteen at the time. His grandfather, too old at that point to handle the big gill nets weighted down with stripers or sturgeon, had kept his hand in by netting killifish and keeping them in pens for sale as bait. One afternoon—and for Walter the recollection was like a hot cautery—the old man’s face went numb and the stroke folded him up like a jackknife and pitched him into the bait pen, where the mass of killifish closed over him. By the time Walter could get help, the old man had drowned.

  The Dutchman was something else. Something Walter had seen in a gallery in Amsterdam when the Solovays had taken him to Europe. Or maybe on a cigar box. He puzzled over it a minute, then chalked it up to genetic memory and indigestion, in equal parts. When the five o’clock whistle blew, he shook his head twice, as if to clear it, and then ran his bike down to the Throbbing Elbow to drain a sad pitcher of beer in honor of his twenty-second birthday.

  But even here in the shrine of the present, with its neon glare, its thumping woofers and black lights, he suffered an attack of history. Clumping through the door in his new Dingo boots with the imitation spur straps, he could have sworn he saw his father standing at the bar with a girl whose dress was so short as to expose the nether curve of her buttocks. He was wrong. About his father, that is; for their part, the girl’s buttocks were incontrovertible. She was wearing a paper miniskirt hand-dyed by the Shawangunk Indians on their reservation south of Jamestown, with matching panties. The man beside her turned out to be Hector Mantequilla, with ragged wild hair and eight-inch collar points. “Van,” he said, swinging around, “what’s happening?” The girl turned around now too, hair in her eyes, a pout of makeup, nothing wrong and nothing right. Walter hadn’t seen his father in eleven years.

  Walter shrugged. He was feeling sorry for himself, feeling orphaned and martyred and strung out, full of the merde of human existence and sick with the idea of decay: feeling old. It was 1968. Sartre was front-page news, Saturday Review was asking “Can We Survive Nihilism?” and Life had photographed Jack Gelber adrift on an ice flow. Walter knew all about it. He was an alienated hero himself, he was a Meursault, a Rocquentin, a man of iron and tears facing the world in unhope and as riddled with the nausea as a Jarlsberg is with holes. There was no way, for instance, he was going home to the chicken cordon bleu, asparagus vinaigrette, and glittering chocolate mousse his adoptive mother had prepared for him. No way he was going to thankfully tear open his sweetheart Jessica’s gift—a new helmet, bronze like the sun and decorated with daisy decals that spelled out his name—and then tenderly undress her beneath the azalea bush out back with the night like a sleeper’s breath whispering in his ear. No way. At least for a while yet.

  “What you drinking, man?” Hector said, leaning into the bar for support. His shirt, which seemed to be fashioned from a synthetic fabric composed of Handi-Wrap and styrofoam, featured a pair of bleeding eyeballs and a slick pink tongue that plunged into the depths of his waistband.

  Walter didn’t answer right away, and when he did it was with a non sequitur. “It’s my birthday,” he said. Though he was looking at the girl, he was seeing his grandmother again, the flesh of her heavy arms trembling over a mound of turnip peels, the look on her face when she told him she’d had the phone disconnected because her neighbor—a notorious witch—was sending witch lice over the wire. Superstitious in a way that connected her to the past as firmly as the gravestones rooted in the cemetery on the hill, she’d spent the last twenty years of her life making ceramic ashtrays in the shape of the trash fish her husband extracted from his nets and tossed on the riverbank to rot. They’re the dispossessed, she used to say, glaring at Walter’s hairy grandfather. God’s creatures. I can see them in my sleep. Fish, fish, fish.

  “Yes, yes!” Hector shouted. “Your birthday, man!” And then roared for Benny Settembre, the bartender, to set them up. Hector was a native of Muchas Vacas, P.R., the son of slaves and Indians who became slaves. The son of something else too: his eyes were as green as the Statue of Liberty. “I got something for you, man—something special,” he said, taking Walter’s arm. “In the men’s room, you know?”

  Walter nodded. The jukebox started up with the sound of shattering glass and rocks against the flanks of buses. Hector took hold of his arm and started toward the bathroom, then stopped cold. “Oh yeah,” he said, indicating the girl. “This is Mardi.”

  Six hours later, Walter found himself thinking about water sports. But only fleetingly and because the occasion suggested it. He was on the far side of the river from Peterskill, a mile and a half from home as the fish swims, eleven or twelve by car, and up to his neck in the greasy Stygian drift of the nighttime Hudson. Swimming. Or about to swim. At the moment he was feeling his way through the bottom muck, planted firmly against the current, the rich organic scent of the river in his nostrils, a perfume that managed to combine the essences of aquatic devolution, orange peels, diesel fuel and, yes, merde. Ahead of him, in the dark, he could hear Mardi’s laughter and the soft gentle swirl of her scissor kick. “Come on,” she whispered. “It’s nice, really.” And then she giggled, a sound so natural it could have come from one of the lovelorn insects in the trees that rose up from the shore in a black unfathomable wall.

  “Shit!” Hector cursed softly behind them, and there was a terrific splash—the sound of disporting porpoises, depth charges, beer kegs dropped from a pier—and then his high wild laugh.

  “Shhhh!” Walter hissed. He didn’t like this, didn’t like it at all. But he was drunk—worse, he was stoned off his feet on the pills Hector had been feeding him all night—and past the point of caring. He felt the buoyancy of the water like the hands of the river nymphs as he lifted off and dug into the surface in a stealthy breaststroke.

  They’d left the Elbow at ten to sit out back in Hector’s bumper-blasted ’55 Pontiac and pass a pipe. Walter hadn’t called home—hadn’t done much of anything for that matter except pin beer bottles to his lips—and he thought of Jessica, of Hesh and Lola and his aunt Katrina, with a sort of perverse pleasure. They were missing him now, that was for sure. The chicken Cordon Bleu had dried up in the oven, the asparagus gone limp, the mousse fallen. He pictured them huddled glumly around the redwood picnic table, cocktails going weak with melted ice, toothpicks congealing in a puddle of grease on the platter long since denuded of Swedish meatballs. He pictured them—his family, his girlfriend—waiting for him, Walter Truman Van Brunt, creature of his own destiny, soulless, hard, free from convention and the twin burdens of love and duty, and took the pipe from the hand of a stranger. They were missing him now, oh yes indeed.

  But then he felt a stab of guilt, the curse of the apostate, and saw his father again. This time the old man was crossing the parking lot alone, hands thrust deep in the pockets of his striped bell-bottoms, a mauve scarf trailing down his chest. He stopped even with the car window, bent from the waist, and peered in with that mad, tortured look he’d brought with him when he appeared out of nowhere for Walter’s eleventh birthday.

  Out
of nowhere. Like an apparition. Huge, his head cropped to a reddish stubble, pants torn and greasy, jacket too small, he’d looked like a cross between the Wandering Jew and the Ghost of Christmas Past, he’d looked like an ecstatic who’s lost the ecstasy, a man with no future, a bum. So insubstantial Walter would have missed him altogether if it weren’t for the shouting. Eleven years old, glutted on pink-frosted cake, root beer, chocolate marshmallow supreme and Mars Bars, Walter was up in his room knocking around with his new set of Presidents, Regents and Ministers of the World when he heard a tumult of voices from the front of the house. Hesh’s voice. Lola’s. And another, a voice that sounded as if it were inside his head, as if it were thinking for him, strange, magnetic and familiar all at once.

  The front door was open. Hesh stood in the doorway like a colossus, Lola at his side. Beyond them, on the front lawn, was a man with a head like a pumpkin and colorless, rinsed-out eyes. He was wrought up, this man, nearly amuck, dancing on one foot with anger and chanting like a shaman, the litany of his hurts pouring out of him like vinegar. “Flesh of my flesh!” the man yelled, over and over.

  Hesh, big Hesh, with his bald honest head and his forearms that were like hammers, was shouting at this man who looked like a bum—at Walter’s father—as if he wanted to kill him. “Son of a bitch!” Hesh raged in a high agitated voice, each word cut clear and distinct. “Liar, thief, murderer! Get out. Get out of here!”

  “Kidnappers!” the man bawled back at him, bending to pound the earth in his rage. But then all of a sudden Walter edged into view, puzzled and frightened, and the man fell silent. A change came over his face—it had been ugly and vehement and now suddenly it was as composed as a priest’s—and he went down on one knee and spread his arms. “Walter,” he said, and the tone of it was the most seductive thing the boy had ever heard. “Don’t you know who I am?”