Free World's End by T. C. Boyle Page A

and sat rigid as an ice sculpture while Van Wart’s agent fidgeted in the saddle, blustered, cajoled and threatened. The agent tried to reason with him, tried to beat him down and strike fear into his heart—he even tried appealing to the boy’s better nature, singing “Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me” in a high reedy tenor that belied his bulk. The wind howled down out of the mountains. Jeremias wouldn’t even look at him. Finally the agent swung his horse around and thundered off to fetch the law.
    By the time he returned with the
schout,
the weather had worsened. For one thing, it was snowing—big feathery flakes torn from the breast of the sky and mounting against the downed trees and bracken like the sign of some cumulate cosmic wrath; for another, the temperature had dropped to six degrees above zero. The
schout,
whose duty it was to enforce the law for the patroon, of the patroon and by the patroon, was a lean ferrety fellow by the name of Joost Cats. He came armed with an eviction notice bearing the mark of his employer (a V wedded to a W, VW, the logo utilized by Oloffe Stephanus to authenticate his edicts, identify his goods and chattels and decorate his undergarments), and the rapier, baldric and silver-plumed hat that were the perquisites of his office.
    â€œYoung layabout,” the agent was saying as the snow played around his jowls. “Slaughtered the livestock and let the place fall to wrack and ruin. I’d as soon see him hung as evicted.”
    Joost didn’t answer, his black staring eyes masked by the brim ofhis hat, the sharp little beard clinging like a stain to his chin. Erratic posture bowed his back like a sickle and he sat so low in the saddle you wouldn’t know he was coming but for the exuberant plume jogging between his horse’s ears. He didn’t answer because he was in a vicious mood. Here he was out in the hind end of nowhere, the sky like a cracked pitcher and snow powdering his black cloak till he looked like an
olykoek
dusted with sugar, and for what? To listen to the yabbering of the fat, red-faced, pompous ass beside him and bully a one-legged boy out into the maw of the great barren uncivilized world. He cleared his throat noisily and spat in disgust.
    By the time they reached the naked white oak that in better times had shaded the Van Brunt household, the snow had begun to taper off and the temperature had dropped another five degrees. To their left, against the fastness of the trees, was the half-finished fieldstone wall begun by Wolf Nysen before he went mad, butchered his family and took to the hills. He’d cut their throats as they lay sleeping—sister, wife and two teenaged daughters—and left them to rot. When Joost’s predecessor, old Hoogstraten, had finally found them, they were so far gone they might have been molded of porridge. People said that the Swede was still up there somewhere, living like a red Indian, swathing himself in skins and killing rabbits with his bare hands. Joost glanced uneasily about him. Dead ahead lay the charred bones of the cabin poking through the skin of snow like a compound fracture.
    â€œHere,” puffed the agent, “see what they’ve done to the place.”
    Joost gave it a minute, his horse picking through the drifted snow like an old man stepping into a bath, before he responded. “Looks like the patroon ought to give up on this place. It’s nothing but bad luck.”
    The agent ignored him. “Over there,” he said, pointing a thick finger in the direction of Jeremias’ lean-to. Joost dropped the reins and thrust his numbed hands into his pockets while his horse—a one-eyed nag with an overactive appetite and dropsical mien—bobbed stupidly after the agent’s mare.
    â€œVan Brunt!” the agent called as they hovered over the empty lean-to and the snowy hummock that represented the corpse of the unhappy ox.