It was Herbert Pompey — chauffeur, stable hand, gardener, factotum, jack-of-all-trades, major domo and son of Ismailia the nurse — who ultimately rescued the lord of the manor. When after several hours Rombout hadn’t returned, Herbert went to his mother to ask her advice. “He drunk is what he is,” she opined. “Pass out against some tree, or maybe he just fell off that animal and broke his head.” Then she told him to put one foot in front of the other and go have a look for him.
Pompey tried the dairy farm first. Rombout would sometimes ride out there to drink black coffee and grappa with Enzo Fagnoli, whose family had been milking cows for the Van Warts for eighty years. (The Fagnolis had taken over for the van der Mules or Meulens, tenants at Van Wart Manor since the world began. Apprised that the state legislature was about to put an end to the manorial system in the Hudson Valley, giving leaseholders title to the farms they’d worked for generations, Rombout’s great grandfather, Oloffe III, had evicted the Dutchmen in favor of the intrepid Italians, who converted the farm to dairy production and worked for an annual wage. It was hard on Oloffe, having to adjust to paying his tenants rather than vice versa, but the unquenchable hordes of New York City clamored for his milk, butter and cheese, his herds multiplied till they darkened the hills and in time he was able to admit that it was all for the best.) Enzo, in overalls and porkpie hat, greeted Pompey with enthusiasm and offered him a swig of apple wine from a green jug, but regretted to say that he hadn’t seen Rombout in nearly a week.
Next it was the Blue Rock Inn, where the lord of the manor was wont to take a hiatus from the rigors of equestrian exercise in order to share a cup of bootleg bourbon with the proprietor, Charlie Outhouse, who more typically regaled his guests with soda water and orange pekoe tea. Pompey retraced his steps, passing within hailing distance of the manor house — still no Rombout — and hiked down to where the inn perched over Van Wart Creek as it debouched in the Hudson. Charlie was out back, plucking hens for dinner. He hadn’t seen Rombout either. Pompey kept walking, skirting Acquasinnick Ridge and following the bank of the creek until finally he swung north for Nysen’s Roost.
He struck the stony path that traversed Blood Creek (so named because Wolf Nysen had incarnadined its waters in trying to wash the blood of his daughters from his hands), his legs heavy with fatigue as he pumped up the steep hill. His mother, a gossipy, superstitious woman, repository of local legend and guardian of the Van Wart family history, had told him tales of Wolf Nysen, the mad murdering Swede. And of the loup-garou, the pukwidjinnies and the wailing woman of the Blue Rock, who’d perished in a snowstorm and whose voice could still be heard on nights when the snow fell thick. The woods were dense here — never lumbered — and the shadows gathered in clots around the bones of fallen trees. It was an unlucky place, strangely silent even in summer, and as boy and man, Pompey had avoided it. But now, though the leaves were ankle deep on the trail, he could see that a horse had passed this way recently, and he felt nothing but relief.
When he emerged from the woods at the top of the rise, he was as surprised as his employer had been to find a crude habitation of notched saplings and tar paper huddled beneath the big old white oak that stood sentinel over the place. The next thing he noticed was Pierre, still saddled, grazing quietly beneath the tree. Then, as he drew closer, he became aware of a stranger sitting in the doorway of the shack — a bum, from the look of him — and beyond him, something like a heap of rags cast off in the stiff high grass. But where was Rombout?
Never hesitating, though his gut was clenched with foreboding, Pompey strode right on up to the shack to confront this stranger. He halted five feet from him, hands on hips. Who the devil are you? — the words were on his lips when he glanced down at that heap of rags. Rombout looked as if he were sleeping, but there was blood on the side of his head. His riding boots — Pompey had put a shine on them that very morning — glinted in the pale autumn light.
“What happen here?” Pompey demanded of the Indian, who’d barely raised his head to watch him stride up to the shack. A great lowering ancestral fear gripped Pompey as he looked down at the white man sprawled in the grass.
The Indian said nothing.
“You do this?” Pompey was scared. Scared and angry. “Huh?”
Still the Indian held his silence.
“Who you, anyway? What you want?” Pompey was glancing distractedly from the Indian to the horse and from the horse to the terrible inert bundle of clothing on the ground.
“Me?” the Indian said finally, raising his head slowly to pin him with those fanatic’s eyes. “I’m the last of the Kitchawanks.”
The trial didn’t last an hour. The Indian was accused of criminal trespass, assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder. His attorney, appointed by the court, had gone to school with Rombout. The sheriff, the court recorder, the district attorney and the district attorney’s assistant had also gone to school with Rombout. The judge had gone to school with Rombout’s father.
“Clearly, your honor,” the Indian’s attorney pleaded, “my client is not in possession of his faculties.”
“Yes?” returned the judge, who was a big, harsh, reactionary man, known for his impatience with hoboes, panhandlers, gypsies and the like. “And just how is that?”
“He claims to be an Indian, your honor.”
“An Indian?” The judge lifted his eyebrows while everyone in the courtroom stole a glance at the Kitchawank, who sat erect as a pillar in the witness box.
The judge now turned to him. “Jeremy Mohonk,” he began, and then glanced at the court recorder. “Mohonk? Is that right?” The recorder nodded, and the judge turned back to the accused. “Do you understand the nature of the charges against you?”
“I was defending my person and my property,” the Indian growled, his eyes sweeping the room. Rombout, his head still bandaged and the left side of his face swollen and discolored, looked away.
“Your property?” the judge asked.
The Indian’s attorney was on his feet. “Your honor,” he began, but the judge waved him off.
“Are you aware, sir, that the property you claim as your own has been in the Van Wart family since before this country, as we know it, even came into existence?”
“And before that?” the Indian countered. His eyes were like claws, tearing at every face in the courtroom. “Before that it belonged to my family — until we were cheated out of it. And if you want to know something, so did the land this courtroom stands on.”
“You do then claim to be an Indian?”
“Part Indian. My blood has been polluted.”
The judge gazed at him for a long moment, smacking his lips from time to time and twice removing his glasses to wipe them on the sleeve of his robe. Finally he spoke. “Nonsense. There are Indians in Montana, Oklahoma, the Black Hills. There are no Indians here.” Then he dismissed the defense attorney and asked the D.A. if he had any further questions to put to the accused.
The jury, eight of whom had gone to school with Rombout, was out for five minutes. Their verdict: guilty as charged. The judge sentenced Jeremy Mohonk to twenty years at Sing Sing, a place named, ironically enough, for the Sint Sinks, a long extinct tribe that had been second cousin to the Kitchawanks.
Rombout had seen justice done, and yet that piece of property — disputed by a madman and never much good for anything anyway — proved too great a burden to bear. Six months after Jeremy Mohonk had been shunted off to prison and his shack razed, Rombout was forced to put the place up for sale. Over the years, through legislation, population pressure, division among heirs and other forms of attrition, the original Van Wart estate had shrunk from 86,000 acres to fewer than two hundred. Now it would be deprived of fifty more.