As for Jeremy Mohonk, the third principal player in the mortal drama about to unfold, he didn’t pay rent, hadn’t ever paid rent and never would. He lived on a seedy corner of his late uncle’s farm amid a tangle of pumpkin vines and corn stalks, in the bark hut he’d erected on a cold winter’s day back in ’81, and he claimed that corner as ancestral land. He was a Kitchawank, after all, or half a one, and he was married to a Weckquaesgeek woman. A woman who’d borne him three sons and three daughters, of whom, unfortunately, only the first son and last daughter had survived infancy. On this particular day — November 15, 1693, the day of Van Wart’s first annual harvest feast — he was sitting before the fire in his hut, smoking kinnikinnick and carefully stripping the skin from his winter bear, a great fat sow he’d shot practically on the doorstep when he went out to make his morning water. He smoked and plied his quick sharp knife. His wife, whatever her name was, busied herself over a pot of corn mush, the smell of which touched the pit of his belly with tiny fingers of anticipation. He was content. For the Van Warts and their party, he had about as much use as he had for words.
Wouter and his mother were among the first to arrive at the upper house, where long plank tables had been set up in the yard around a great deep pit of coals, into which a pair of spitted suckling pigs dripped their sweet combustible juices. Five huge covered pots — of olipotrigo, pea and prune soup flavored with ginger, minced ox tongue with green apples and other aromatic delicacies — crouched around the pigs as if standing watch. The tables were heaped with corn, cabbage, pumpkin and squash, and there were kegs of wine, beer and cider. “Very nice,” Neeltje admitted as her son helped her down from the wagon and her daughters joined her to compose themselves for their grand entrance, such as it was.
The day was overcast and cold, hardly the sort of day for an outdoor gathering, but the patroon — or rather, lord of the manor, as he was now called — had decided to make a grand public occasion of the paying of the rents, rather than the private and often onerous affair it had been for so many years. He would give back his tenants a small portion of what they gave him, he reasoned, and it would help keep them happy with their lot — and besides, it would save him the time and trouble of sending his agent around to collect. And so, no matter that the sky looked as if it had been dredged up from the bottom of the river and it was cold enough to put a crust on a flagon of cider left out to stand, there would be fiddling, merrymaking and feasting at both upper and lower houses on this august day.
Nor was this the only innovation. Since the summer, when William and Mary, acting through the offices of their Royal Governor, had chartered Van Wart Manor and consolidated all Stephanus’ patent purchases with the original estate left him by his father, several other changes had come to Van Wartville as well. There was the alteration of the place name, the Dutch “wyck” subsumed in the English “ville.” A millpond was created and a sawmill erected upstream from the gristmill. Three new farms were cleared and tenanted by red-nosed, horse-toothed, Yankee religious fanatics. And finally, most surprising of all, Van Wart evicted his cousin Adriaen from the upper house, replacing him with his own eldest son, Rombout. Adriaen, like Gerrit de Vries before him, had been sent packing without so much as a thank you, and this provoked a storm of unfavorable comment among the tenants and their sharp-tongued wives. Sluggish, inoffensive, perhaps even a little soft in the head, Adriaen had been well-liked. Rombout, on the other hand, was like his father.
At any rate, by three in the afternoon, the entire community had gathered at the upper house to unload their wagons, fill their bellies with the patroon’s good port, smoke their long pipes and dance, flirt, gossip and drink till long after the sun faded in the west. There were Sturdivants, Lents, Robideaus, Mussers, van der Meulens, Cranes, Oothouses, Ten Haers and Van Brunts, as well as the three new families, with their pinched and stingy faces and sackcloth clothes, and the odd Strang or Brown wandered up from Pieterse’s Kill. Jan Pieterse himself turned out, though he was older now than Methuselah, fat as four hogs and deaf as a post, and Saskia Van Wart, still unmarried at the advanced age of twenty-four, came down from the parlor, where she’d been visiting with her brother, to dance a spirited galliard with her latest suitor, a puny English fop in canions and leather pumps. And throughout the day, old Ter Dingas Bosyn, who was older even than Jan Pieterse — so old he’d lost his fat and shriveled away till he was nothing more than a pair of hands and a head — sat in the lower kitchen, beside the fireplace, his accounts ledger spread open on the table before him and a coinbox at his side. One by one, the heads of the families bowed their way through the low door to stand before him and watch as his arthritic finger pinned their names to the page.
It was growing dark and the party was about to break up, when Pompey II, who’d been assisting the commis with his inventory, found Cadwallader Crane slumped over the olipotrigo pot and led him into old Bosyn’s presence. Cadwallader, towering with drink and dilated like an anaconda with the patroon’s food, belched twice and began to offer the withered commis a whole string of excuses for not having made his rent. He’d got past the death of Geesje and was unsuccessfully fighting back his tears while describing the lamentable and mysterious sacking of his henhouse, when he saw that the old man was holding up a shrunken monkeylike paw in a gesture of forbearance. “Enough,” the commis rasped. Then he wheezed, sighed, studied his books a moment, took a pinch of snuff, sneezed into a silk handkerchief with some very pretty embroidery work along the border, and said: “No need for … huffff, excuses. The lord of the manor, seeing that you’ve lost your wife and have no … hummmm, issue, has decided to terminate your lease forthwith.” The commis turned his head away quickly and spat or perhaps puked into the handkerchief with a prodigious dredging of his throat and trumpeting of his nose, after which he wiped his watering eyes on the sleeve of his jacket. “You have two days,” he announced finally, “before the new tenants take over.”
And then it was Wouter’s turn.
Just as he was getting set to leave, lifting his mother and sisters into the now-empty wagon, his belly full and head light with cider and beer, he felt Pompey’s deferential hand at his elbow. “Old Misser Bosyn, sir, he want a word with you.”
Puzzled, wondering if somehow the old geezer had miscounted his produce or shortchanged him at the mill, he followed the slave into the warm and redolent kitchen. “I’m on my way out, Bosyn, got moeder and the girls waiting in the wagon,” he said in Dutch. “What’s the problem?”
The problem was that the lord of the manor was reviewing his leases with an eye to more profitable management. Wouter’s farm, along with one other, had been reassigned.
“Reassigned?” Wouter echoed in astonishment.
The old man grunted. “The lease was in your father’s name, not yours.”
Wouter began to protest, but the words stuck in his throat.
“Two days,” the commis croaked. “Take the increase of the stock over what Mijnheer allowed your father, pack up your personal belongings, if there be any such, and vacate the premises for the new tenants.” He paused, drew a watch from his waistcoat pocket and consulted it, as if it could plot the course of those honest, hopeful, industrious newcomers. “They’ll be here Tuesday noon. On the sloop up from New York.