Spring came late that year, but when it came the community breathed a sigh of relief. It’s over, the gossips said, whispering among themselves for fear of jinxing it, for fear of goblins, imps and evil geniuses, and it seemed they were right. Staats van der Meulen’s middle son, Barent, took up his father’s plow and worked the family farm with all the vigor and determination of youth, and Wouter Van Brunt, twenty-five years old and for better than a decade now the real soul of Nysen’s Roost, filled his father’s shoes as if they’d been made for him. The weather turned mild in mid-March, the breezes wafting up from Virginia with just the right measure of sweetness and humidity. Tulips bloomed. Trees budded. Douw van der Meulen’s wife bore him triplets the first of May, the cattle bred and increased and there wasn’t a single two-headed calf born the length and breadth of the valley, so far as anyone knew, and the pigs had litters of twelve and fourteen (but never thirteen, no) and to a one the piglets emerged with three comely twists to their tails. It looked as if finally the world had slipped back into its groove.
But there was one more jolt yet to come, and it was beyond the scope or reckoning of any of the humble farmers and honest bumpkins of Van Wartwyck or Croton It had to do with letters patent, with William III, that distant and august monarch, and with Stephanus Van Wart, no mere patroon any longer, but Lord of the newly chartered Van Wart Manor. It looked forward to the near future when the power of the Van Warts would encompass the whole of northern Westchester. And it looked back to the day when Oloffe Van Wart had brought a disgruntled herring fisherman to the New World to clear land and farm for him, working its inscrutable way through Jeremias’ rebellion, Wouter’s disillusionment and the death of Wolf Nysen. Though no one yet knew it, the final cataclysm was at hand, the last dance between Van Warts and Van Brunts, the moment that would ignite the tongue waggers like no other and then pull the blankets over Van Wartwyck for a snooze that would last two and a half centuries.
On the one side, there was Stephanus Van Wart, now one of the two or three wealthiest men in the Colony, First Lord of the Manor, confidant of the governor, and his minions, van den Post and the impenetrable dwarf. On the other, there was Cadwallader Crane, lover of humble worm and soaring butterfly, bereaved widower, unscholarly scholar, a boy caught in a man’s jerky body. And there was Jeremy Mohonk, savage and speechless, the feral half-breed with the Dutchman’s eyes. And finally, inevitably, borne down under the grudging weight of history and circumstance, there was Wouter Van Brunt.
Barrow
Walter might as well have flown on to Tokyo or Yakutsk — it couldn’t have taken any longer, what with fog delays, connecting flights that ran every third day and the sleepless night he spent in the Fairbanks airport waiting for the red-eyed maniac who would fly him, an oil company engineer and a case of Stroh’s Iron City Beer to Fort Yukon, Prudhoe Bay and Barrow in a four-seat Cessna that had been stripped right down to the bare metal by weather he didn’t want to think about. The oil company man — bearded, in huge green boots that looked like waders and a parka that could have fit the Michelin Man — took the rear seat and Walter sat next to the pilot. It was November third, nine-thirty in the morning, and it was just barely light. By two, the oil man assured him, it would be deepest night again. Walter looked down. He saw ice, snow, the desolation of hills and valleys without roads, without houses, without people. Dead ahead, pink with the reflection of the low sun at their backs, was the jagged dentition of the Brooks Range, the northernmost mountain range on earth.
The Cessna dipped and trembled. The blast of the engine was like a bombardment that never ended. It was cold to the point of death. Walter gazed out on emptiness until exhaustion began to catch up with him. Half-dozing, he focused on the disconcerting little notice taped to the grimy plastic glovebox: THIS AIRCRAFT FOR SALE, it read in shaky upper-case letters, $10,500, TALK TO RAY. Talk to Ray, he thought, and then he was asleep.
He woke with a jolt as they set down in Fort Yukon, where the case of beer was deplaning. Ray grinned like a deviate and shouted something Walter didn’t catch as they taxied up to a grim-looking little shack to refuel; the oil man got out to stretch his legs, though it was something like twenty-seven below with a good wind, and Walter nodded off again. From Fort Yukon it was up over the Brooks Range and into darkness. The oil man got off at a place called Deadhorse, where, he assured Walter, there was enough oil to float Saudi Arabia out to sea. And then it was Ray and Walter, hurtling through endless night, on the way to Barrow, three hundred and thirty miles above the Arctic Circle, the northernmost city in America, the end of the line.
When the lights of Barrow came into view across the blank page of the tundra, Ray turned to Walter and shouted something. “What?” Walter shouted back, distracted by uncertainty, his stomach sinking and the nausea rising in his throat — Here? he was thinking, my father lives here?
“Your foot,” Ray shouted. “I saw you having some trouble there when we were boarding back at Fairbanks. Lost one of your pegs, huh?”
Lost one of his pegs. Walter gazed out on the approaching lights and saw the image of his father, and all at once the roar of the plane became the roar of that ghostly flotilla of choppers in the doomed Sleepy Hollow night. Lost one of his pegs. And how.
“No,” Walter hollered, snatching at the handgrip as a gust rocked the plane, “lost both of ’em.”
Ray shouted something into the teeth of the wind as Walter trudged across the fractured skating rink of the airstrip. Walter couldn’t hear him, couldn’t even tell from the tone whether the man with whom he’d just risked his life in a rickety, worn-out, 10,500-dollar for-sale aircraft was blessing him, warning him or mocking him. “Good luck,” “Look out!” and “So long, sucker,” all sound pretty much the same when the temperature is down around forty below, the wind is tearing in off the frozen ocean with nothing to stop it for god knows how many thousand miles and you’ve got the drawstrings of the fur-lined hood of your parka tightened to the point of asphyxiation. Without turning around, Walter raised an arm in acknowledgment. And promptly fell face first on the jagged ice. When he pushed himself up, Ray was gone.
Ahead lay the six frozen blocks of wooden shacks that comprised the metropolis of Barrow, population three thousand, nine-tenths of whom, Ray had told him, were Eskimos. Eskimos who hated honkies. Who spat on them, pissed on them, cut them to pieces with the glittering sharp knives of their hooded eyes. Walter tottered forward, toward the lights, his suitcase throwing him off balance, the ragged uneven knobs of ice punching at his feet like the bumpers of a giant pinball machine. He’d never been so cold in his life, not even swimming in Van Wart Creek in October or jogging off to Philosophy 451 at the state university, where it sometimes got down to twenty below. No Exit, he thought. The Sickness Unto Death. Barrow. They’d got it all wrong, he thought, some cartographer’s mistake. Barren was more like it. He kept going, fell twice more, and began to regret his Jack London jokes. This was serious business.