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garden of peas, haricots verts, carrots, cabbages, turnips and cauliflower, as well as a double row of Indian corn and pumpkin squash, the seeds of which she’d obtained from the late Sachoes’ degenerate son, Mohonk. 1 Under Katrinchee’s patient tutelage, the ancient, long-faced cows—
Kaas
and
Boter,
as they were hopefully christened by little Wouter—gradually came to take on the silky svelteness of adolescence. Each morning she tugged at their shrunken teats; each evening she fed them a mash of hackberry and snakewort, serenading them in a wavering contralto that drifted out over the fields like something snatched from a dream. The turning point came when, with Mohonk’s contrivance, she obtained the newly tanned hides of a pair of calves, which she stuffed with straw and propped up on sticks in the cows’ pen—within a week the old bossies were nuzzling the forgeries in maternal bliss and filling the milk pails as fast as Katrinchee could empty them. And as if that weren’t enough, the hens too seemed rejuvenated. Inspired by their bovine counterparts, they began to lay like blue-ribbon winners, and the tattered cock sprouted a magnificent new spray of tail feathers.
    The land was fat, and the Van Brunts tumbled into the expansive embrace of it like orphans into a mother’s lap. If sugar was dear, honey was theirs for the taking. So too blueberries, crab apples,chickory and dandelion greens. And game! It practically fell from the heavens. A blast of the blunderbuss brought down a rain of gobblers or scattered coneys like grain, deer peered in at the open windows, geese and canvasbacks tangled themselves in the wash as it hung out to dry. No sooner would Jeremias shove off onto the Hudson—or North River, as it was called then—than a sturgeon or rockfish would leap into the canoe.
    Even the house was beginning to shape up under the rigorous regime of Vrouw Van Brunt. She expanded the cellar, scoured the floors with sand, fashioned furniture from wicker and wood, put up shutters to keep out deerflies and the fierce sudden thunderstorms that emanated like afterthoughts from the crown of Dunderberg on a muggy afternoon. She even planted tulips out front—in two rows so straight they could have been laid out by a surveyor.
    Then, in mid-August, things began to go sour. Outwardly, life had never been better: trees were falling, the woodpile growing, the fields knee-high with wheat and the smokehouse full. Katrinchee was turning into a woman, the boys were tanned and hard and healthy as frogs, Agatha hummed over her dustmop and broom. And Harmanus, liberated from the patrimonial nets, worked like five men. But slowly, imperceptibly, like the first whispering nibble of the first termite at the floor joists, suffering and privation crept into their lives.
    It began with Harmanus. He came in from the fields one night and sat down at the table with an appetite so keen it cut at him like a sword. While Agatha busied herself with a
hutspot
of turnips, onions and venison, she set out a five-pound wheel of milk cheese and a loaf of day-old
bruinbrod,
hard as stone. Flies and mosquitoes hung in the air; the children, playing at tag, shouted from the yard. When she turned around, bread and cheese were gone and her husband sat contemplating the crumbs with a strange vacant gaze, the hard muscles working in his jaw. “My God, Harmanus,” she laughed, “save something for the children.”
    It wasn’t till supper that she became alarmed. Besides the stew—it was enough for the next three days, at least—there was a game pie, another loaf, two pounds of butter, garden salad and a stone jar of creamed fish. The children barely had time to fill their plates. Harmanus lashed into the eatables as if he were sitting down to theannual
Pinkster
eating contest at the Schobbejacken tavern. Jeremias and Wouter ran off to kick a ball in the fading light, but Katrinchee,