It was late May, the planting was done and the mornings were as gentle as a kiss on the cheek. Joost had left the lower manor house at dawn with a bundle of things for the patroon’s wife, Gertruyd, who was in the midst of a religious retreat at the upper manor house, and with instructions from the patroon to arbitrate a dispute between Hackaliah Crane, the new Yankee tenant, and Reinier Oothouse. Neeltje, who’d turned fifteen the month before, had begged to come along, ostensibly to keep her father company, but in truth to buy a bit of ribbon or hard candy at Pieterse’s with the stivers she’d earned dipping sacramental candles for Vrouw Van Wart.
The weather was clear and fair, and the sun had dried up the bogs and quagmires that had made the road practically impassable a month before. They covered the eight miles from Croton to the upper manor house in good time, and were able to meet with both Crane and Oothouse before noon. (Reinier, who was drunk as usual, claimed that the long-nosed Yankee had called him an “old dog” after he, Reinier, had boxed the ears of the Yankee’s youngest boy, one Cadwallader, for chasing a brood of setting hens off their nests. Reinier had responded to the insult by “twisting the Yankee’s great flapping ears and giving him a flathand across the bridge of his broomstick nose,” immediately following which the Yankee had “treacherously thrown [him] to the ground and kicked [him] in a tender spot.” Crane, a learned scion of the Connecticut Cranes, a family destined to furnish the Colonies with a limitless supply of itinerant pedants, potmakers and nostrum peddlers, denied everything. The schout, attesting Reinier’s drunkenness and perhaps a bit cowed by the Yankee’s learning, found for Crane and fined Oothouse five guilders, payable in fresh eggs, to be delivered to Vrouw Van Wart at the upper manor house — raw eggs being the only foodstuff she would consume while suffering the throes of religious abnegation — at the rate of four per day.) Afterward, father and daughter dined on eels, shad roe and perch with pickled cabbage in the great cool thick-walled kitchen at the upper manor house. Then they stopped at Jan Pieterse’s.
The trading post comprised a rude corral, a haphazardly fenced chicken coop and a long dark hut illuminated only by a pair of slit windows at front and back and the light from the door, which stood open from May to September. Jan Pieterse, who was said to be among the richest men in the valley, slept on a corn husk mattress in back. His principal trade had originally been with the Indians—wam-pumpeak, knives, axes and iron cookpots in exchange for furs — but as beaver and Indian alike had been on the decline and Boers and Yankees on the upswing, he’d begun to stock bits of imported cloth, farm implements, fish hooks, pipes of wine and kegs of soused pigs’ feet to appeal to his changing clientele. But there was more to the place than trade alone — along with the mill Van Wart had erected up the creek, the trading post was a great gathering spot for the community. There you might see half a dozen skulking Kitchawanks or Nochpeems (it was strictly verboden to sell rum to the Indians, but they wanted nothing more, and with a nod to necessity and a wink for the law, Jan Pieterse provided it), or Dominie Van Schaik taking up a collection for the construction of a yellow-brick church on the Verplanck road. Then too there might be any number of farmers in homespun paltroks, steeple hats and wooden shoes accompanied by their vrouwen and grimly linking arms with their ripe young daughters who made the fashions of the previous century seem au courant, and, of course, the horny-handed, red-faced, grinning young country louts who stood off in a corner thumping one another in the chest.
On this particular day, as Joost helped his daughter down from her mount, he saw only Jan Pieterse and Heyndrick Ten Haer sharing a pipe on the porch while a Wappinger brave lay spread-eagled in a patch of poison ivy up the lane, drunk as a lord and with his genitals exposed for all the world to see. Beyond the Indian, the river was as flat and still as hammered pewter, and Dunderberg rose up, a deep shadowed blue, to tilt at the horizon.
“Vader,” Neeltje said before she’d touched ground, “please, may I go right in?” She’d spoken of nothing but ribbon, broadcloth and velvet since they’d left Croton that morning. Mariken Van Wart had the prettiest silk petticoats and blue satin skirt, and she was only thirteen, even if she was the patroon’s niece. And armozine ribbon — you should have seen it!
Joost handed her down, straightened up briefly and then fell again into his habitual slump. “Yes,” he whispered, “yes, of course, go ahead,” and then he ambled up to shoot the breeze with Jan Pieterse and Farmer Ten Haer.
He’d been slouching there on the stoep some ten minutes or so, puffing fraternally at his clay pipe and relishing the rich westering sun in those few moments before he would ask Jan Pieterse to join him in a pint of ale, when he became aware that his daughter was talking to someone inside the store. He remarked it only because he’d assumed the store was empty. There were only two horses in the lot — his own sorry, one-eyed nag and the sleek tawny mare he’d conscripted from the Van Wart stable for his daughter — and Farmer Ten Haer’s wagon stood alone beneath the chestnut tree. Whoever could she be talking to? he wondered, but Heyndrick Ten Haer was in the middle of a story about Wolf Nysen — whether or not he was even alive still, the renegade Swede had become the bogey of the neighborhood, blamed for everything from a missing hen to some huis vrouw’s shin splints — and Joost momentarily forgot about it.
“Oh, ja, ja,” Farmer Ten Haer said, nodding vigorously. “He come up out of the swamp near that turtle pond where his farm used to be, black as the devil, not a stitch on him and covered head to toe with mud, and he had this terrific big axe with him, the blade all crusted over with blood—”
Joost was picturing this monster, this Nysen, when he quite distinctly heard his daughter giggle from inside the dim storehouse. He craned his neck to peer through the gloomy doorway, but could see nothing aside from the pile of ragged furs and the gray-whiskered snout of Jan Pieterse’s retriever, asleep in their midst. “Is someone in there?” he asked, turning to the trader.
“She was gathering mushrooms out there, my Maria was, when he come for her without warning, howling like a beast—”
“Yes, and I suppose his hoofs were cloven and he smelled of brimstone too,” Jan said, and then, leaning toward Joost and lowering his voice: “Oh, ja — the pegleg, you know, the Van Brunt boy.”
It came back to him in a rush — the night at the van der Meulen farm, the look of unquenchable hatred on the boy’s face, his own shame and uneasiness — and his first reaction was fear for his daughter. He’d actually turned away from the others and squared his shoulders for action when he checked himself. This was only a boy, an orphan, one of the afflicted and downtrodden of the earth — not some sort of ogre. He’d been overwrought that night, that was all.
“It’s the God’s honest truth,” Farmer Ten Haer declared, clamping his arms across his chest.
It was then that Neeltje appeared in the doorway, a pretty girl in petticoats and tight-waisted skirt, smiling still, as if at some private joke. Behind her, dwarfing her, was a man six feet tall at least, with shoulders that had burst the seams of his woolen hemdrok. He guided her through the doorway and then stepped out into the sunlight himself, the pegleg knocking at the floorboards like a fist at the door. Joost saw the same unyielding expression, the same arrogance, he’d seen in the boy. If Jeremias recognized him, he gave no sign of it.