It was the end of Harmanus. He rose from the straw pallet in one astonishing leap that left him hanging in the air like a puppet for a full five seconds before he burst through the new shutters without so much as a whimper and ran off into the trees, flailing blindly from one trunk to another as the family gave chase. They found him amongst the jagged stones at the base of Van Wart Ridge, a sheer drop of some one hundred fifty feet. Jeremias had trouble with the chronology of events that year, but as near as he could recall, it was about a month later that lightning struck the house and burned it to the ground, taking his mother and Wouter with it. The next day, Katrinchee consigned herself to the fires of hell by running off to Indian Point with the heathen Mohonk.
When November came around and the rents fell due, Van Wart’s agent rode up from the lower manor house in Croton, a saddle pouch crammed with accounts ledgers flapping at his rear. He’d expected trouble at the Van Brunt farm — they were delinquent both with regard to firewood and produce delivery — but when he found himself at the end of the cart track that gave onto the property, he was stupefied. Where the cabin had once stood, there were only ashes. The grain had parched in the field, and then, beaten down by the first winter storm, it had frozen to the ground in scattered clumps. As for the livestock, it had disappeared altogether: the far-flung heaps of feathers gave testimony to the fate of the poultry, but the ox and milch cows were nowhere to be seen. Now the agent was a practical man, a scrupulous man, big of bottom and gut. Though he would have liked nothing better than to hie himself to Jan Pieterse’s trading post and sit before the fire with a mug of lager, he nonetheless chucked the cold flanks of his mount and trundled forward to pursue the matter further.
He circumnavigated the white oak that stood in the front yard, turned up a rusted plow by the half-finished fence, peered down the well. Just as he was about to give it up, he spotted a wisp of smoke rising from the bristle of woods before him. Pausing only to relight his pipe and shift his buttocks in the icy saddle, Van Wart’s agent traversed the clearing and plunged into the winter-stripped undergrowth on the far side. The first thing he saw was the ox, or rather what was left of it, hide frozen to bone, eyes, ears and lips picked away to nothing by woodland scavengers. Beyond it, a crude lean-to. “Hallo!” he called. There was no response.
Then he saw the boy. Swathed in rags and depilitated furs, crouched atop a cowhide in the shadow of the lean-to. Watching him.
The agent maneuvered the horse forward and cleared his throat. “Van Brunt?” he asked.
Jeremias nodded. The temperature was in the teens, the wind from the northwest, out of Canada. He shifted his good leg beneath him. The other one, the one that ended in a wooden peg like the pugnacious Pieter Stuyvesant’s, lay exposed, insensitive to the cold. He watched in silence as the fat man above him twisted in the saddle to reach behind him and produce a big leather-bound book. The fat man thumbed through this book, marked the place with the stem of his pipe and looked down at him. “For the use and increase of this land under the patroonship of Oloffe Stephanus Van Wart in the Van Wartwyck Patent, you now stand in arrears of two fathoms of firewood, two bushels of wheat, two pair of fowl, twenty-five pounds of butter and five hundred guilders annual rent. Plus a special assessment of seventy-five guilders in the case of one misappropriated boar.”
Jeremias said nothing. He leaned forward to rake up the coals of the fire, the smoke stinging his eyes. The fat man was wearing shoes with silver buckles, flannel hose, a fur cloak and rabbit-skin earmuffs beneath his high-peaked hat. “I say, Van Brunt: have you heard me?” the agent asked.
A long moment ticked by, the winter woods as silent as a tomb. “I’m just a boy,” Jeremias said finally, his voice choked with the weight of all he’d been through. “Vader and moeder are dead, and everybody else too.”
The agent shifted in his saddle, cleared his throat a second time, then drew on his pipe. A gust tore the smoke from his lips. “You mean you haven’t got it, then?”
Jeremias looked away.
“Well, sir,” the agent said after a moment, “I must inform you that you are in default of the conditions of your agreement with the patroon. I’m afraid you’ll have to vacate the premises.”
Ancestral Dirt
Depeyster Van Wart, twelfth heir to Van Wart Manor, the late seventeenth-century country house that lay just outside Peterskill on Van Wart Ridge where it commanded a sweeping view of the town dump and the rushing, refuse-clogged waters of Van Wart Creek, was a terraphage. That is, he ate dirt. Nothing so common as leaf mold or carpet dust, but a very particular species of dirt, bone-dry and smelling faintly of the deaths of the trillions of microscopic creatures that gave it body and substance, dirt that hadn’t seen the light of day in three hundred years and sifted cool and sterile through the fingers, as rarefied in its way as the stuff trapped beneath the temple at Angkor Wat or moldering in Grant’s Tomb. No, what he ate was ancestral dirt, scooped with a garden digger from the cool weatherless caverns beneath the house. Even now, as he sat idly at his ceremonial desk behind the frosted glass door at Depeyster Manufacturing, thinking of lunch, the afternoon paper and the acquisition of property, the business envelope in his breast pocket was half-filled with it. From time to time, ruminative, he would wet the tip of his forefinger and dip it furtively into the envelope before bringing it to his lips.
Some smoked; others drank, cheated at cards or abused their wives. But Depeyster indulged only this one harmless eccentricity, his sole vice. He was a toddler, no more than two, when he first wandered away from his nurse (an ancient black woman named Ismailia Pompey who’d been with the family so long she was able to overlook the fact that Lincoln had freed the slaves), found the bleached and paint-stripped door ajar and pushed his way into the comforting cool depths of the cellar. Silently, he pulled the door to and sat down to his first repast. While he squatted there in the dark, grinding dirt between his milk teeth, shaping it with his tongue, relishing the faint fecal taste of it, a search that became part of the family legend raged on above him. Edging back into that nurturing ancestral darkness, he must have heard his name called a thousand times while he listened to the beat of frantic footsteps overhead, his mother’s voice on the telephone, his father, summoned home from the office, raging, angrily clacking decanter and glass. How many times had the door to his sanctuary been flung back so that he could see framed in a rectangle of light the face of one worry-worn adult after another? How many times had they propelled his name into that consuming darkness before finally, when the sun had set and they were dragging the pond, he had emerged, lips smeared with his secret? His mother had pressed him to her bosom in a nimbus of body heat and perfume, and his father, that humorless and profligate man, dissolved in tears: the wayward child had come home.
He was no child now. Fifty years old — fifty-one come October — smooth and handsome and with an accent rich with the patrician emphases of the Roosevelts, Schuylers, Depeysters and Van Rensselaers who’d preceded him, scion of the Van Wart dynasty and nominal head of Depeyster Manufacturing, he was a man in the prime of life, tanned, graceful and athletic, the cynosure of the community. He was also a man who carried his sorrow around with him like that hidden envelope of dust. That sorrow was an ache in the loins, a stutter-shot to the heart — to think of it was to think of extinction, the black and uncaring universe, the futility of human existence and endeavor: he was the last of the Van Warts.