“Well, younker,” Jan Pieterse said, drawing the pipe from his mouth, “have you decided on anything?”
Jeremias nodded and replied that yes, sir, he had. He held out a big work-hardened palm in which there were five fish hooks and two glossy cubes of rock candy, and paid with a coin that looked as if it had been buried and dug up six times already. And then, ignoring Joost, he pressed a cube of candy into Neeltje’s palm as if it were a jewel from Africa, tucked the other inside his cheek, and thumped off, the wooden strut stabbing rhythmically at the earth with each thrust of his leg.
They watched in silence — Joost, Neeltje, Farmer Ten Haer and Jan Pieterse — as he swayed off across the lot, awkward and graceful at the same time. His right arm swung out like a baton, his shoulders were thrust back and the dark long blades of his hair cut at the collar of his shirt. They watched as he skirted a rotten stump and passed between a pair of lichen-encrusted boulders, watched as he entered the shadows at the edge of the wood and turned to wave.
Joost’s hands were in his pockets. Farmer Ten Haer and Jan Pieterse lifted their arms half-heartedly, as if afraid to break the spell. Neeltje — only Neeltje — waved back.
The Last of the Kitchawanks
When the market crashed in the fall of 1929, Rombout Van Wart, sire of Depeyster, husband to Catherine Depeyster and eleventh heir to Van Wart Manor, did not jump from the roof of the Stock Exchange or hang himself beneath the stately gables of the upper manor house. He did take a beating, though — in both the literal and figurative senses. Figuratively speaking, he lost a fortune. The family timber business went under; the foundry — which at that time produced iron cookware, but had, during the war, turned out breeches for artillery guns — fell on hard times; he lost an unspecified sum in stock holdings purchased on margin and dropped two thousand dollars in one grim afternoon at Belmont Park. The other beating, the literal one, was administered by a transient with a hawk’s nose and burnt-umber complexion who called himself Jeremy Mohonk and claimed to be the last of the Kitchawanks, a tribe no one in the Peterskill/Van Wartville area had ever heard of. Asserting his right to tribal lands, he threw up a tar-paper shack at Nysen’s Roost, an untenanted sector of the Van Wart estate on which Rombout had recently reintroduced the wild turkey after an attack of feudal nostalgia.
It was Rombout himself who discovered the squatter’s presence. Mounted on Pierre, a bay gelding with blood lines nearly as rich as his own, the lord of the manor was taking his exercise in the bracing autumn air (and at the same time attempting to exorcise the demon of his financial woes with the aid of a silver flask inscribed with the time-honored logo of the Van Wart clan) when he came upon the interloper’s shack. He was appalled. Beneath the venerable white oak in which his great grandfather, Oloffe III, had carved his initials, there now stood a sort of gypsy outhouse, a peeling, unsightly, tumbledown shanty such as one might expect to see at the far end of a hog pen in Alabama or Mississippi. Drawing closer, he spotted a ragged figure crouched over a cookfire, and then, galloping into the miserable, garbage-strewn yard, he recognized the plucked and decapitated carcass of a turkey sizzling on the spit.
It was too much. He sprang down from his horse, the riding crop clenched in his fist, as the tattered beggar lurched to his feet in alarm. “What in hell do you think you’re doing here?” Rombout raged, shaking the whip in the trespasser’s face.
The Indian — for Indian he was — backpedaled, watching for sudden movement.
“This … this is trespassing!” Rombout shouted. “Vandalism. Poaching, for God’s sake. These are private lands!”
The Indian had stopped backpedaling. He was dressed in a cheap flannel shirt, torn working pants and a crushed bowler hat he might have fished out of a public urinal; he was barefoot despite the incipient cold. “Private lands, my ass,” he said, folding his arms across his chest and fixing the lord of the manor with a cold, challenging, greeneyed glare. (Indian? Rombout would later snort in disbelief. Whoever heard of an Indian with green eyes?)
Rombout was beside himself with rage. It should be said too that he was fairly well inebriated, having consumed cognac in proportion to the magnitude of the anxiety it was meant to soothe — and that anxiety, pecuniary in nature, was monumental, blocklike and impervious as marble. In fact, two days earlier he’d confided to a fellow member of the Yale Club that financially speaking he was going to hell in a handbasket. Now he suddenly roared at the Indian, “Do you know who I am?” punctuating each stentorian syllable with a flourish of the whip.
Unutterably calm, as if he were the property owner and Rombout the trespasser, the Indian nodded his head gravely. “A criminal,” he said.
Rombout was struck dumb. No man had insulted him to his face in twenty-five years — not since a brash upperclassman at college had called him “a starched-up ass” and taken a concussive blow to the right ear in swift retribution. And here was this trespasser, this swarthy hook-nosed bum in a ragpicker’s suit of clothes, bearding him on his own property.
“A criminal and an expropriator,” the Indian continued. “A pauperizer of the working classes, a pander to the twin whores of privilege and capital, and a polluter of the land my ancestors lived in harmony with for seven thousand years.” The Indian paused. “You want to hear more? Huh?” He was pointing his index finger now. “You’re the trespasser, friend, not me. I’ve come to reclaim my birthright.”
It was then that Rombout struck him — once only — a vicious swipe of the riding crop aimed at those chilly, hateful, incongruous green eyes. The sound of it, like a single burst of brutal applause, faded quickly on the antiseptic air, till in an instant only the memory of it remained.
For his part, the Indian seemed almost to welcome the blow. He barely flinched, though Rombout had put everything he had into it. Which admittedly wasn’t much, considering the fact that he was in his mid-forties and given to a sedentary life relieved only by the occasional round of golf or canter across the property. By contrast, the Indian appeared to be in his early twenties; he was tall and fine-whittled, hardened by work and indigence. Dew drops of blood began to appear in a band that rimmed his eyes and traced the bridge of his nose like the blueprint for a pair of spectacles.
“Damn you,” Rombout cursed, trembling with the chemical emissions his anger had released in his blood. He didn’t have a chance to say more, because the Indian bent to snatch up a stick of firewood the length and breadth of a baseball bat and laid into the side of his head like the immortal Bambino going for the stands. It later came out — at the Indian’s trial — that the attacker landed several other blows as well, including kicks, punches and knee drops, but Rombout was aware only of the first and of the blackness that followed precipitately on its heels.
He wasn’t dead — no, he would live to recover his health and vigor, only to fatally inhale a raw oyster at Delmonico’s some ten years later — but he might as well have been. He never stirred. For three hours he lay there, bleeding and clotting, clotting and bleeding.’ He came to briefly once or twice, saw a world that looked as if it were ten fathoms beneath the ocean, tasted his own blood and descended again into the penumbral depths of unconsciousness. In all that time the Indian did nothing — he didn’t renew his attack, didn’t attempt to aid his victim, lift his wallet or abscond with Pierre, the magnificent bay gelding. He merely sat there at the doorway of his shanty, rolling and smoking cigarettes, a self-righteous look on his face.