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

“Show yourself this instant!”
    There was no response.
    The agent was blowing up a regular hurricane of exasperated breath, summoning up terms like brass, effrontery and cheek, when Joost pointed to a half-filled track in the snow at the rear of the lean-to. Beyond it was a similar print, and beyond that another. Upon closer examination, and after a full sixty seconds given over to reasoning in the deductive mode, the agent determined that these were young Van Brunt’s footprints; viz., the mark of one shoe—the left—roughly paralleled by a shallow trough connecting a pair of pegholes.
    Though the snow had stopped, the wind had begun to kick up and the sky was darkening toward evening. Joost was of the opinion that they should leave well enough alone—the boy was gone, that’s all that mattered. But the agent, scrupulous as he was, felt obliged to make sure. After an exchange of opinion on the subject—Where do you expect him to go, Joost asked at one point, back to Zeeland?—the two set off at a slow plod to track the boy down and evict him properly.
    The trail wound like a tattered ribbon through the forest and into a dense copse where grouse chuckled and turkeys roosted in the lower branches of the trees. Beyond the copse were hills uncountable, balled up like hedgehogs and bristling with timber, home to heath hen, pigeon, deer, pheasant, moose, and the lynx, catamount and wolf that preyed on them. And beyond the hills were the violent shadowy mountains—Dunderberg, Suycker Broodt, Klinkersberg—that swallowed up the river and gave rise to the Kaaterskill range and the unnamed territories that stretched out behind it all the way to the sun’s furthest decline. Looking into all that wild territory with its unknown terrors, with darkness coming on and his toes gone numb in his boots, Joost spurred his horse forward and prayed the trail would take them toward the glowing lights and commodious hearth of the upper house.
    It didn’t. Jeremias had headed south and east, skirting the big house and making instead toward the van der Meulen farm. Joost and the agent saw where he’d stopped to make water in the snow or nibble a few last withered berries and chew a bit of bark; they saw how the pegleg had grown heavier and dug deeper into the snow. And finally, to their everlasting relief, they saw that the tracks wouldindeed lead them across the Meulen Brook, past the great plank doors of Staats van der Meulen’s barn and into the warm, taper-lit, bread-smelling kitchen of Vrouw van der Meulen herself, a woman renowned all the way to Croton for her
honingkoek
and
appelbeignet.
    If they expected hospitality, if they sought the warmth of Meintje van der Meulen’s kitchen and smile too, they were disappointed. She greeted them at the door with an expression every bit as cold as the night at their backs.
“Goedenavend,”
said the agent, doffing his hat with a flourish.
    Vrouw van der Meulen’s eyes shot suspiciously from agent to
schout
and then back again. Behind them they could hear the muffled lowing of the van der Meulen cattle as Staats forked down hay from the barn’s rafters. Meintje didn’t return the agent’s greeting, but merely stepped back and pulled the door open for them to enter.
    Inside, it was heaven. The front room, which ran the length of the house and occupied the lion’s share of its space—there were smaller sleeping quarters in back—was warm as a featherbed with a good wife and two dogs in it. Flickering coals glowed in the huge hearth and the big blackened pot that hung over them gave off the most intoxicating aroma of meat broth. There were loaves in the beehive oven—Joost could smell them, ambrosia and manna—and a little spider pot of corn mush crouched over a handful of coals on the hearthstone. The
kas
doors were open and the table half set. In the far corner, an old water dog wearily lifted its head