The first available ship sailing for Boston was a tired old East Indiaman—De bloem. The captain’s small pointed face, a narrow pointed nose that led to a pointed chin embellished with a pointed wisp of beard, did little to inspire confidence. His cheeks were red, whether from drink or eczema Bernard did not know, but the man promised all speed.
“She looks tired but she moves smart over the waves,” he said. The ship was, in fact, going to be broken up in Boston.
• • •
The ship bucked and sidled in the North Sea. Nicolaus and Bernard put their shared stateroom in order. Bernard’s bucket-top boots took up a surprising amount of space and he finally folded them over and stowed them in his trunk. He would wear them when he was back in Boston.
Nicolaus noticed that Bernard was limping. He had limped for years with his old injury but now he also seemed unwarrantedly slow, as though dazed. Perhaps the news of Outger’s daughter had affected him.
“What is it?” asked Nicolaus. “Aside from our hitherto unknown niece?”
“Nothing, really. My new boot had a nail in it and it cut my foot before we left. Where it pierced seems very sore. I am not so worried about the girl, although we do not know how old she is. We may be able to talk sense with her.”
“If she is half Indian and half Outger I think there is a poor chance of talking sense with her. But we’ll find out. Now let me see your foot,” said Nicolaus. Bernard drew off his stocking and showed a swollen foot.
“I will ask for a basin of hot water,” said Nicolaus. “And perhaps some ointment — if there is any on board.”
The ship’s surgeon, an elderly man with bleared eyes, sent in the cabin boy with a basin of tepid grey water and himself brought the “ointment,” a thick, tarry substance they used on ropes to keep them from chafing. By afternoon Bernard said he felt better but the next morning he was unable to walk. His foot and lower leg were badly swollen. The old surgeon came in and looked at it.
“Keep it elevated,” he said to Nicolaus. “Soak in hot water. Drink rum, as much as you can stand.”
“It is my brother who is ill, not I,” said Nicolaus.
• • •
Nicolaus tried to brighten the fetid cabin by propping the painting of a woodland hunt Bernard had brought from Cornelia’s house. Perhaps he could find surcease from the pain of his leg in contemplating the vivid scene.
The hot water soaks did not help. Daily the leg — his bad leg, of course — swelled. Sores and ulcers appeared and festered from foot to groin. Bernard was unable to leave his bunk and lay in a half swoon, breathing stertorously. The surgeon came in one last time huffing fumes of jenever.
“That leg needs to be amputated,” he said. “Look for my saw.” He went out and did not return. When Nicolaus found him the old man was insensible with drink. The great medical chest stood against the wall, top flung back, the interior gaping. Nicolaus picked up a dried carrot among broken pieces of deer antler. The amputation saw lay on the cabin floor, its teeth crusted with old blood.
He went at once to the captain and told him of the empty medical chest. The little man twisted his pointed beard into a spike and bared his teeth.
“That hyena-headed flea has sold the medicines for jenever. Now his hour has come!” he declared and he rushed away toward the lair of the so-called practitioner of the medical arts.
Nicolaus went back to Bernard, who lay comatose and radiating heat like a birch fire. Bernard stared unseeing at the beams above his head, black and wormholed. The painting stood on a chair near the bunk. One of the huntsmen was raising a horn to his lips. Nicolaus almost thought he heard the sound of the horn and it came to him that his brother was not going to get home.
They buried Bernard at sea three weeks out from Amsterdam.
• • •
In Boston port Nicolaus felt fortunate to find a ship only days away from embarking for Amsterdam and sent a message by its captain to Jan, Piet and George Pickering Duke telling of Bernard’s death and demanding their immediate return.
“This is a Crisis beyond the Loss of dear Bernard,” he wrote.
It is not just a Question of the Penobscot Bay hous and the Dautter, but of our Company itself. Timber and lumber orders stacked hie but Henk Steen not to be fond. He is gone — no leter no word. the Retch. There is no Body to serve as our Book Keeper. No one to serve as Looker of Woodland. Sedley in Grief over loss of his Wife lies ill abed. Your Wifes upset and caling your return. Bernard’s Wife Birgit tears her hair with Soro. Return quick we may marshal our Forces in Business. Charter a ship ere all is lost.
Your loving Brother and Uncle, Nicolaus Duke.
37. change
In later years Piet Duke thought sometimes of Nicolaus’s nightmare letter and the hurried arrangements and great expense of taking passage back to Boston. Outger had not returned with them. Since then he and George and Sedley had suffered under the controlling leadership of Jan and Nicolaus, who allowed no innovation except closing down portions of the business. So the Carolina plantation was sold and Piet assigned the task of handling the New England logging jobbers, the Québec holdings diminished. Jan managed what remained of those forestlands. Nicolaus served as the company president at the Boston headquarters. But as Jan and Nicolaus doddered on they gradually allowed Piet and George a greater say in business decisions, though still watching from the sidelines. And today the cousins had a chance to make an important change.
Piet combed at his thinning hair with his fingers, adjusted his stock and moved his shoulders inside his coat. He called Oliver Wedge, his secretary, a rural youth with aspirations beyond maize and cows, the first secretary Duke & Sons had ever hired and now indispensable.
“Are the papers ready?” he asked Wedge, who pointed to a squared-up stack of pages.
Wedge loved his job passionately, loved being in Boston and away from the farm and its futile, never-ending work, away from his father’s anger at marauding wild animals, anger that Wedge and his six hard-worked brothers shared: huge flocks of birds pulled up the sprouted seeds, especially corn, beloved by turkeys, squirrels, crows, red-winged blackbirds and a thousand other avian robbers, raccoons and bears. The raccoons got the eggs the hens laid and the fox, hawks, falcons, skunks, wolves and weasels killed the hens. Bears took the pigs and calves and once a full-grown cow. Sheep were impossible as long as wolves and catamounts and lynx and bobcats could get their scent. But he thought squirrels were the worst as there were thousands upon thousands of them, the forest and woodlot alive with the furry devils — red, black, gray squirrels and he knew for a fact that two squirrels could make six, seven, even nine more squirrels every year and each of these was soon mature. He tried to work out how many squirrels one pair created over, say, ten years, but the sums became so large they frightened him. The earth might be carpeted with squirrels in his lifetime. And woodchucks ate salads, cabbage, turnips, onions and beans. The house swarmed with mice, more than one cat could ever catch. He would never go back.
• • •
“You are sure that the papers are ready?” Piet could not stop asking.
“Yes, Mr. Duke. Everything is ready.” Wedge’s long knobby fingers, early trained to pull thistles, now flew among papers, creating order. Although he had been employed as a secretary for only a year he had learned much of Boston life from a dirty manuscript folded in the back of an account book, a furious, rambling critique by a man who signed himself Henk Steen. Steen was aggrieved at the cruelties beyond slavery that he saw in the colonies: husbands who beat their wives with iron pokers until ribs crackled, an overbearing bully who pushed a road through an elderly widow’s property, thieving servants branded with B for burglary, the many who fornicated before marriage, trespassing swine, barrels of rotten fish sold as sound, breaches of peace, drunkenness and swearing — it was a wonderfully wicked place.