Mohonk said something in his language that Agatha didn’t catch, and his mother, Wahwahtaysee the Firefly, stepped cautiously into the room. She brought with her a string bag of devil-driving appurtenances (the canine teeth of opossum and she-wolf, the notochord of the sturgeon, various feathers, dried leaves and several discolored lumps of organic matter so esoteric that even she had forgotten their use or origin) and a rank wild odor that reminded Agatha of low tide at Twistzoekeren. Barely glancing at Harmanus, who had begun to thrash on his pallet and call out for pie once again, she shuffled to the table and unceremoniously dumped out the contents of the string bag. Then she called to her son in short angry syllables that shot from her lips like wasps swarming from the hive. Mohonk, in turn, said something to Katrinchee, who swung around on Jeremias and Wouter. “She wants the fire built up — a real blaze. Now run quick to the woodpile!”
Soon the room was infernally hot — hot as a Finnish sauna — and the old squaw, her sweat tinged with the rancid mink oil with which she smeared herself for health and vigor, began tossing her amulets into the flames one by one. All the while, she kept up a rasping singsong chant effective against pukwidjinnies, the ghost spirit Jeebi and devils of all stripes. As Katrinchee was later to learn from Mohonk, she was attempting to exorcise the noxious spirits that had gathered around the place and somehow infected Harmanus. For the cabin, built some six years before by Wolf Nysen, a Swede from Pavonia, had been erected at precisely the spot where the hunting party had found Minewa.
After an hour or so, the old woman thrust her hand into the fire — and held it there until Agatha thought she could smell the flesh roasting. Flames licked up through the spread fingers, played over the swollen veins that stood out on the back of her hand, yet Wahwahtaysee never flinched. The seconds bled by, Harmanus lay quiet, the children watched in horror. When finally the squaw withdrew her hand from the flames, it was unscathed. She held it up and examined it for a long while, as if she’d never before seen flesh and blood, sinew and bone; then she heaved herself up, shambled across the room and laid her palm flat against Harmanus’ brow. There was no reaction; he just lay there looking up at her without interest or animation, precisely as he had when she’d walked in the door an hour earlier. About the only difference was that he didn’t ask for pie.
But in the morning he seemed his old self. He was up at dawn, joking with the boys. Meintje van der Meulen, hearing of their plight, had sent over half a dozen little round loaves, and Harmanus selected the smallest of them, tucked it into his pouch, shouldered his axe and headed off across the fields. At noon, he returned and took a bit of pease pottage—“Have just a spoonful more, won’t you, Harmanus?” Agatha pleaded, but to no avail — and in the evening he ate a rockfish fillet, a bit of lettuce and two ears of Indian corn before drifting off into a contented sleep. Agatha felt as if an immeasurable burden had been lifted from her shoulders; she felt relieved and thankful. Yes, the garden was decimated and the smokehouse empty, and old Van Wart wanted seventy-five guilders in reparation for his boar, but at least she had her husband back, at least the family was whole once again. That night she said a prayer to Saint Nicholas.
The prayer fell on deaf ears. Or perhaps it was intercepted by Knecht Ruprecht, the saint’s malicious servant. Or perhaps, given the mysteries of the New World and its multifarious and competing divinities, the notion of prayer as Agatha had known it in Twistzoekeren didn’t hold much water. In any case, the tempo of disintegration began to accelerate: on the very day following Harmanus’ return to the realm of moderation, an accident befell Jeremias.
Picture the day: hot, cloudless, the air so thick you couldn’t fall down in a swoon if you wanted to. Jeremias was helping his father clear brush on a bristling hillock that abutted Van Wart Pond, a.k.a. Wapatoosik Water, working mechanically, oblivious alike to nip of mosquito and bite of deerfly. He must have humped past the duncolored pond twenty times — arms laden, eyes stung with sweat — before it occurred to him to shuck his clothes and refresh himself. Naked, he waded into the muck at the pond’s edge. He was feeling his way gingerly, the mud tugging at him as if it were alive, when suddenly the bottom of the pond fell away and something seized his right ankle with a grip as fiery and indomitable as Death. It wasn’t Death. It was a snapping turtle, Chelydra serpentina, big as a wagonwheel. By the time Harmanus got there with his axe, the water had gone red with blood and he had to wade in up to his knees to locate the creature’s evil, horny, antediluvian head and cleave it off at the carapace. The head stayed put. The rest of the thing, claws still churning, slid back into the murk.
At home, Harmanus pried open the locked jaws with a blacksmith’s tongs, and Agatha dressed the wound as best she could. Of course, it would be some two hundred years before the agents of sepsis were identified (invisible little animalcules indeed — any fool knew that night vapors turned a wound black and that either the presence or absence of comets made it draw), and so Jeremias’ ankle was bound in dirty rags and left to itself. Five days later the boy’s lower leg was the color of rotten summer squash and oozing a pale wheylike fluid from beneath the bandages. Fever set in. Mohonk prescribed beaver water fresh from the bladder, but each beaver he shot perversely loosed its bowels before it could be drawn ashore. The fever worsened. On the seventh day, Harmanus appeared in the doorway with the crosscut saw from the woodpile. Half a mile away, perched on the lip of the Blue Rock with Jan Pieterse and a cask of Barbados rum, Mohonk, Katrinchee and little Wouter tried to shut their ears to the maddening, startled, breathless screams that silenced the birds like the coming of night.
Miraculously, Jeremias survived. Harmanus didn’t. When bone separated from bone and his son’s pallet became a froth of flesh and churning fluids, he threw down the saw and bolted headlong for the woods, moaning like a gutshot horse. He ran for nearly two miles and then flung himself face down in the bushes, where he lay in shock till after sundown. The next day his skin began to itch, and then finally to erupt in pustules; by the end of the week he lay stretched out supine on the pallet next to his son’s, eyes swollen closed, his face like something out of a leper’s nightmare. Again, Mohonk was called in, this time to lay poultices of sassafras over the sores; when these proved ineffective, Agatha appealed to the patroon, begging him to send downriver for Huysterkarkus. Van Wart was sorry, but he couldn’t help her.
It wasn’t Katrinchee’s fault. All right, perhaps she was dreaming of Mohonk and the way he’d touched her the week before as they emerged from a frolic in the icy waters of Acquasinnick Creek, and perhaps she had sprained her wrist hoeing up a new cabbage patch, but it could have happened to anyone. The stewed haunch of venison, that is. She was moving toward the table with it, the place cramped anyway, tiny, unlivable, the size of the outhouse they’d had in Zeeland, when she banged up against the milkpail, skated across the floor in her wooden shoes and dumped the whole mess — hot enough to repel invaders at the castle wall — down her father’s shirt.