“But your own wife—I mean, don’t you have a conscience? How could you do it?”
The old man was silent a moment, regarding him fixedly over the lip of the bottle. When he spoke, his voice was so soft Walter could barely hear him: “How could you?”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Your wife—what’s her name?”
“Jessica.”
“Jessica. You lost it with her, didn’t you? You fucked her over, didn’t you? And for some reason you can’t even name.” Truman’s voice came on again, caustic, harsh, a snarl that overrode the wind. “And what about Depeyster Van Wart—‘Dipe,’ as you call him. He’s your man now, isn’t he? Screw Hesh. Fuck the old man. Dipe’s the one. He’s more your father than I am.”
The old man’s eyes were bright with malice. “Walter,” he whispered. “Hey, Walter: you’re already halfway there.”
Walter suddenly felt weak, terminally exhausted, felt as if he were going down for the count. It was all he could do to rise shakily from the chair. “Bathroom,” he murmured, and staggered toward the back room. He tried to walk tall, tried to throw back his shoulders and tough it out, but he hadn’t gone five steps before his feet got tangled and he slammed into the doorframe.
Bang. End of Round Two.
For a long while Walter knelt over a bucket in the frigid closet that served the old man for a bathroom, his insides heaving, the sweetsour stench of his own guts overpowering him. There was another smell there too, the smell of his father, of his father’s shit, and it made his stomach clench again and again. His father’s shit. Shit in a bucket. Christina and Jessica. Truman and Walter.
There was a barrel of water in the kitchenette. Walter cupped his hands and splashed some on his face. He put his mouth to the tap and drank. Outside, the night went on. The old man, rock-still in his chair, meditatively sipped his drink. Walter shivered. The place was cold, though Truman had stoked the stove with coal till the iron door glowed on its hinges. Walter crossed the room, picked his parka up from the floor and shrugged into it.
“Going someplace?” the old man said, faintly mocking.
Walter didn’t answer. He plucked his cup from the arm of the chair and held it out for the old man to fill, glaring so hard Truman had to look away. Then he shook a Camel from the old man’s pack, lit it and settled back in the chair. It would go three rounds, he could see that now. Then he could take the plane back to Van Wartville and he’d be free of his ghosts forever—Father? What father? He never had a father—damaged, but free. There was another possibility, of course. That the old man would triumph. Lay him out. Crush him. And then he’d board that plane with his tail between his legs and go on home to a life scrambled like a plate of eggs, pursued and haunted till he died.
“You’d do it again,” Walter said finally, jabbing, probing, “you were right, a patriot, and my mother, Hesh and Lola, Paul Robeson himself, they were the traitors.”
Truman brooded over the bottle. He said nothing.
“They got what was coming to them, right?”
Silence. The wind. The snow machines. Muffled shouts. Dogs.
“The children too. I could have been there that day, your own son. What about the children playing in front of the stage—did they deserve it too? Do patriots beat the shit out of Communists’ children? Do they?” Walter was reviving, coming alive again, so hot for the fight he forgot which side he was on. Let him refute that, he thought. Let him convince me. And then I can rest.
Truman rose with a sigh, stirred his drink vaguely and then crossed the room to where his own coat—animal skin, just like the Eskimos’—hung from a peg. He took down the hat that hung above it, a Sergeant-Preston-of-the-Yukon sort of affair, leather and fur, with earflaps pinned up like wings, and dropped it on his head. He circled the chair twice, as if reluctant to sit, and then, mashing the hat down low over his eyes, he eased himself down again. “You want black-and-white,” he sighed. “Good guys and bad guys. You want simple.”
“ ‘I was right,’ you said. ‘I loved her,’ you said. So which was it?”
The old man ignored the question. Then he looked up suddenly and held Walter’s eyes. “I didn’t know she was going to die, Walter. It was a divorce, you know, that’s how I saw it. Happens every day.”
“You twisted the knife,” Walter said.
“I was young, confused. Like you. We didn’t shack up in those days, you know, we got married. I loved her. I loved Marx and Engels and the Socialist revolution. Three and a half years, Walter—it’s a long time. It can be, anyway. I changed, all right? Is that a crime? Like you, like you, Walter.
“Your mother was a saint, yeah. Selfless. Good. Righteous. Those eyes of her. But maybe too good, too pure, you know what I mean? Maybe she made me feel like shit in comparison, made me feel like hurting her—just a little, maybe. Like your Jessica, right? Am I right? Goody-good?”
“You’re a son of a bitch,” Walter said.
Truman smiled. “So are you.”
There was a silence. Then Truman went on. He’d been wrong to hurt her so deeply, he said, he knew it, and this life was his penance, this talk his act of contrition. He should have just left, got out. He should have warned her. But for a year and a half he’d been meeting secretly with Depeyster, LeClerc and the others—vets, like himself—and he’d fed them information. It was no big deal—minutes of the association, who said what at party meetings—nothing, really, and he didn’t take a cent for it. Didn’t want it. He’d turned around, one hundred eighty degrees, and he believed in his heart that he was right.
Sure it hurt him. He drank more, stayed away from the house, looked into Christina’s martyred eyes and felt like a criminal, like shit, like the two-faced Judas he was. “But you know, Walter,” he said, “sometimes it feels good to feel like shit, you know what I mean? It’s a need, almost. Something in the blood.”
The week that preceded the concert was the worst of his life. The end was coming and he knew it. He was out every night, drunk. Piet was with him then, and that helped. Piet was there with a joke, with an arm around the shoulder. Funny little guy. “What should I do, Piet?” Truman asked him. “Do it,” Piet said. “Stick it to ’em. Jews, Commies, niggers. The world’s gone rotten like an apple.” There was money this time. Money to get away and start over, sort things out. Someplace. Anyplace. Barrow, even. He wasn’t supposed to take the car—permanently, that is. But when it was all over, he hated Depeyster more than he hated Sasha Freeman and the Worldwide Communist Conspiracy. For making him hate himself. So he kept it. Drove the shit out of it. Seven, eight years, up here and back. Till it gave out. Till there was no reason to go back.
The funny thing was, it was all in vain.
Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum and whoever controlled them were one step ahead of Depeyster all along. “You want to talk expediency,” Truman growled, “you want to talk cynicism, Freeman and Blum, those sons of bitches had a corner on the market.”
Truman was supposed to let the boys in at some point so they could break things up—really tan the asses of Robeson and Connell and all the rest of the nigger lovers, teach them a lesson they’d never forget: Wake Up, America: Peterskill Did! That’s how Depeyster saw it. That was the plan. Truman would help the cause and he’d get a thousand dollars to bail himself out of his life and start someplace else. But it all backfired, of course. If Sasha Freeman had been there he would have let the animals in himself. Gladly. It was his idea all along to stir thing up till they were good and hot, work in a little slaughter of the innocents with some broken bones and bloody noses thrown in for good measure and get a bunch of pictures of women in blood-stained skirts into the newspapers. And if some poor coon got lynched, so much the better. A peaceful sing-along? What the hell good was that?
“You tell me, Walter,” the old man said, leaning into him, “who the bad guys were.”
Walter had no answer. He looked away from his father’s eyes, and then back again.
Truma
n was fingering his right ear. The lobe was deformed, shriveled back on itself like the inner fold of a sun-dried apricot. Walter knew that ear well. Shrapnel, the old man had said when he took Walter down to the trestle to catch crabs, Walter eight, nine, ten years old. “That’s how this happened,” Truman said suddenly, no act of contrition if not entire, if not heartfelt and complete.
“You always told me it was the war.”
The old man shook his head. “That night. It’s my Judas mark. The weirdest thing, too.” His eyes were squinted against the smoke of his fiftieth Camel, his face struck with something like wonder. Or puzzlement. “It was over and we were gone, Piet and me, out of the mob and up one of those back roads to where we’d left the car, when this maniac comes flying out of the bushes and takes me down from behind. I’m pretty strong in those days, pretty big. This guy is bigger. He doesn’t say a word, just starts beating the shit out of me—trying to kill me. And I mean kill. Weirdest thing …”
“Yeah?” Walter prompted.
“He was an Indian. Like you see on TV—or out in New Mexico.” Pause. “Or out the window here. Stank like a septic tank, greased up, feathers in his hair, the whole schmeer. He would have killed me, Walter—and maybe he should of—except for Piet. Piet got him off me. Stabbed him with his penknife. Then a bunch of guys jumped on him, five or six or more, I don’t know. But the guy wanted me—just me—and I’ll never know why. They had his hands, so he bit me. Like an animal. He went down, Walter, and he took a piece of me with him.”
Walter leaned back in the chair. He knew it all now, the fight was over, and where had it got him? His father was nothing, neither hero nor criminal, he was just a man, weak, venal, confused, impaled on the past, wounded beyond any hope of recovery. But so what? What did it mean? The imp. Piet. The waking nightmares and the hallucinations, a life lived out on feet that were dead, the marker, Tom Crane, Jessica. You’re already halfway there, the old man had said. Was that it? Following in his father’s footsteps? History come home to roost?
“Crazy, huh?” the old man said.
“What?”
“My ear. The Indian.”
Walter nodded absently. And then, as if correcting for that nod, he snarled, “Tell you the truth, who cares? I don’t want to know about some crazy Indian biting your ear, I want to know why, why you did it.” Walter pushed himself up from the chair and he could feel his face twisting toward some explosive show of emotion, tears or rage or desperation. “The whole thing—Piet, Depeyster, you were confused—it’s all just excuses. Words. Facts.” He found to his surprise that he was shouting. “I want to know why, why in your heart, why. You hear me: why?”
The old man’s face was cold, implacable, hard as stone. Suddenly Walter felt frightened, felt he’d gone too far—over the edge and into the abyss. He took a step back as his father, exuding gin from his very pores and with the savage skin hat raked down over eyes that shone with malice, rose from his chair to deliver one final blow, the knockout punch.
No, Walter thought, it isn’t over yet.
“You’re a real masochist, kid,” Truman hissed. “You want it all, don’t you? And you push till you get it. Okay,” he said, turning his back on him and lumbering toward the big oak desk that dominated the room.
“This is it,” he said, looking over his shoulder and hefting a manuscript, and in that moment he looked just as Walter had pictured him in his waking dreams; in that moment he was the ghost on the ship, the joker in the hospital room, the annihilator on the motorcycle. Walter felt something seize him then, something that would never let go. It was tightening its grip, yes, he could feel it, terrible and familiar, when the old man turned on him again. “Walter,” he said, “you listening?”
He couldn’t speak. There were pine needles in his throat, wads of fur. He was mute, he was gagging.
“So you’re into Colonial history, huh? Done a little reading, huh? About Peterskill?” The words dangled like a hangman’s noose. “What I want to ask you is this: you ever run across a reference to Cadwallader Crane?”
He was dead. He knew it.
“Or maybe Jeremy Mohonk?”
Gallows Hill
The manuscript lay in his lap, dead weight. It was massive, ponderous, like the Sunday Times on Labor Day weekend, like a Russian novel, like the Bible. Six inches high, typed space and a half on legalsized sheets, better than a thousand pages. Walter glanced at the title page in stupefaction: Colonial Shame: Betrayal and Death in Van Wartville, the First Revolt, by Truman H. Van Brunt. Was this it? Was this why he’d destroyed his wife, deserted his son and hid himself so far out on the frozen tip of the continent even the polar bears couldn’t find him?
Betrayal and death. Colonial shame. He was crazy as a loon.
Fighting back his dread, Walter thumbed through the pages, read over the title again with a slow studied movement of his lips. It was only words, only history. What was he afraid of? Cadwallader Crane. Jeremy Mohonk. A marker along the side of the road—passed it by a thousand times. He’d never even bothered to read it.
But Truman had.
At the moment Truman was in the kitchenette, his back to Walter, spreading butter and Gulden’s mustard on slices of white bread. He had about him an air of unconcern, as if showing his alienated son the work of his mad wasted life was an everyday occurrence, but Walter could see from the way he too briskly lathered the bread and then clumsily poured himself a tall gin and lemonade that he was wrought up. The old man suddenly darted a glance over his shoulder. “Hungry?” he asked.
“No,” Walter answered, his stomach still clenched in anticipation of some terrible withering revelation, his father the phantom come to life, the book of the dead spread open in his lap. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Sure? I’m making sandwiches—spam and onions.” He held up an onion as if it were a jar of beluga caviar or pickled truffles. “You’re going to need something on your stomach.”
Was this a threat? A warning?
“No,” Walter said, “thank you, no,” and he flipped back the page and began to read:
Feudalism in the U.S.A., land of the free, home of the brave, the few over the many, lords and ladies set up over the common people, English corruption (and Dutch before it) throttling American innocence. Hard to believe? Think back to a time before the Revolution (the bourgeois revolution of 1777, that is), when patroons and manor lords reared their ugly heads over Negro slaves, indentured servants and tenant farmers who could not even be sure of passing on the fruit of their labors to their own children. …
This was the introduction—thirty-five, forty, fifty pages of it. Van Wartville. 1693. An uprising. A revolt against Stephanus Rombout Van Wart, First Lord of the Manor. Walter tried to scan it, plowing through, looking for the meat, the essence, the key, but there was too much of it, the whole mad tome nothing more than a sustained rant. He flipped to the last page of the introduction:
… and it looked forward to a time not so long ago when an unchecked populace ran amok on that very same hallowed ground and those who would undermine our precious democracy nearly held sway. We refer, of course, to the Peterskill (more properly, Van Wartville) Riots of 1949, the treatment of which, in their fatal connection to that first doomed revolt, will occupy the later chapters of this work. …
Was that it? The old man manipulating history to justify himself? He skipped to the bottom of the page:
We purpose here to examine a truth that resides in the blood, a shame that leaps over generations, an ignominy and infamy that lives on in spirit, though no text dares to present it. We, in this history, are the first to—
“Pretty fascinating, huh?” The old man was hovering over him, drink in one hand, an indented sandwich in the other.
Walter looked up warily. “Jeremy Mohonk. Cadwallader Crane. Where are they?”
“They’re in there,” Truman said, waving his sandwich at the mountain of paper, “they get hung. But you knew that already. What you want to know is how.
And why.” He paused to address the sandwich, and then, easing himself back down on the chair, he said, in a kind of sigh, “First public execution on the Van Wartville books.”
Walter was indignant. “You mean you expect me to read this—all of it?” The weight of it alone was putting him through the floor. He couldn’t read ten pages of it, not if it promised eternal life, revealed the secret names of God and gave him his feet back. Suddenly he felt tired, immeasurably weary. The sky was black. How long had he been here? What time was it?
“No,” Truman said after a while, “I don’t expect you to read it. Not now, anyway.” He paused to lick a smear of mustard from the corner of his mouth. “But you wanted answers and I’m going to give them to you. Twenty years I been working on this book,” and he leaned over to tap the manuscript with a thick proprietary finger, “and you can sit home in Peterskill and read it when it’s published. But now, since you asked—since you especially asked—I’m going to tell you what it’s about. All of it. No stone unturned.” There was a grin on his face, but it wasn’t a comforting grin—more like the smirk of the torturer as he applies the hot iron. “And I’m going to tell you what it means to both of us, Walter, you and me both.
“Hey,” he said, reaching out that same hand to take Walter by the arm, the affectionate squeeze, first bodily contact between them, “we are father and son, right?”
The old man had edged the chair closer. His voice was the only thing in the room, and the room was the only place in the universe. There was no longer any sound of dogs—not so much as a whimper. The snow machines had fallen silent. Even the wind seemed to have lost its breath. Uneasy, wishing he’d let it go, Walter sat rigid in his chair, submitting himself to his father’s harsh rasping voice as to a dose of bitter medicine.
It was the fall of 1693. A time before historical markers, Norton Commandos, Nehru shirts and supermarkets, a time so distant only the reach of history could touch it. Wouter Van Brunt, ancestor of a legion of Van Brunts to come, was getting ready to take his wagon down to the upper house to settle his quitrent and enjoy a day of dancing and feasting. He was twenty-five years old and he’d buried his father a year ago to the day. In the back of the wagon there were two fathoms of split firewood, two bushels of hulled wheat, four fat pullets and twenty-five pounds of butter in clay crocks. The five hundred guilders—or rather, its equivalent in English pounds—had already been paid out at Van Wart’s mill in value of wheat, barley, rye and peas for sale downriver. Wouter’s mother would ride beside him in the wagon. His brother Staats, who worked the farm with him, would walk, as would his sisters Agatha and Gertruyd, now eighteen and sixteen respectively; and as pretty-footed and nubile as any girls in the county. Brother Harmanus was no longer living at home, having left one morning before light to seek his fortune in the great burgeoning metropolis of New York, a city of some 10,000 souls. Sister Geesje was dead.