Girl in Hyacinth Blue (14 page)

A few hours later, Aletta burst through the doorway shrieking, "Adriaan! Mistress! Don't let them take me." Fighting the aldermen who seized her, she cried out to me, "Don't let them foam my scalp. Don't let them, Adriaan. I'm warning you." She leveled at me a look that paralyzed me, but no one seemed to notice me, and whatever I said was lost amidst her arms flailing against their chests and her hair whipping their faces. They had who they wanted.

I stood dumb and helpless before the door a long time after they left.

"You only think you love her now, Adriaan," Rika said softly. "There will come a time, though you can't imagine it now, when you will not be able to remember her face."

I looked at Rika with her braid wound smugly on the top of her head, not a hair disordered. "You don't know what you're talking about."

I had two beautiful days with the baby in the bell tower. Several times a day and throughout the rainy night, I soaked a corner of Aletta's shawl with ewe's milk I got from the millwright's boy and let the baby suckle it the way I'd seen a farmer do with an orphaned lamb, with his little finger in the lamb's mouth. I did the same, though I didn't know how to hold him properly. I tried to remem ber how Aletta did. When he was satisfied, his wig­ gly arms flew open, and his blue eyes closed to slits. It fairly split me with joy when his tiny dimpled fist with fingernails like flakes of candle wax performed his first miracle: He grasped my index finger.

By the third morning the babe seemed listless. Gnawing hunger had set in. While I fed him again, the truth I had resisted became clear: I would have to give him to someone who could mother him. I wrapped him in clean rags, settled him warmly in the basket hidden in the bell tower and left to search for someone. It occurred to me as I walked that Descartes had a child by his maidservant in Amsterdam. But Descartes got to raise his child as his own. No house in Delfzijl had a small wooden placard covered with red cloth hanging under the eaves announcing a new baby in the family, but what did it matter? If he were suspected to be Aletta's baby, no one would take him.

At the next feeding, I found a way to dribble milk down my finger into the baby's mouth and I think he got more that way, but time was short.

In a chilly mist, I crossed the slippery Damster diep Bridge to Farmsum. Along the way the men of the Water Boards of Delfzijl and Farmsum were measuring seepages and stamping on the ground, and farmers were building cofferdams in suspect places. There were no new birth placards in Farm sum. I returned to feed the baby and then went in land under a steady drizzle along the shores of the Damsterdiep, to Solwerd, crossing fields spongy with eight days of rain. There, farmers were build ing earthen animal ramps and hoisting stores on block and tackles from gable beams into upper rooms and barn lofts. No birth placards in Solwerd either. I would have gone all the way to Ap pingedam but Rika would have asked me where I was if I weren't home for supper. I fed the babe again and came home soaked. Since Uncle Hubert was in Amsterdam, Rika asked me to haul her or nate mahogany spice chest upstairs. Even with all forty-eight drawers taken out, I could barely man age it myself, and fell into bed exhausted.

I wrestled through the night in wakeful dark ness. Aletta Pieters was to hang at noon the next day. If I went to watch, I would live with the horror the rest of my life. If I didn't, I would be forsaking her. Better memory than betrayal, I decided.

A noon hanging was sure to attract a crowd, so if I went and joked with the village lads in front of the Raadhuis, no one would suspect, but when the church tower struck eleven and rain began again, I entered the square and found it empty. If I were the only watcher, that would declare me the father for sure. But that wasn't the reason I kept walking. I just couldn't bear so close a view. In an act of supreme cowardice, I crossed the square and climbed the church tower. From the window grat ing in the bell tower I could see the Raadhuis where they'd raised the gallows. Maybe she'd look up here.

The deadened thump of rain on roof tiles grew to a roar that I hoped might drown out the noon chime. At the half-chime, puddles had joined to be come great pools, and men headed out across the peat bogs with their carts loaded with huge willow mats and boards, slabs of turf and sacks of sand, shovels and stakes and lanterns on poles. Flood was on everyone's mind, so no one came to see Aletta Pieters hang. The only townspeople left were the presiding aldermen and the sheriff, women trying to get their cows upstairs, girls carrying bedclothes and stores of food and peat into attics, and small boys securing skiffs by long ropes to roof beams.

When the cart rolled up, she was strapped to a post, her arms bound to her sides. She had no hair at all! Bitter anger exploded in my throat. Someone had shaved her. Preparation for frothing, she'd think. It was probably only the jailer's wife wanting her hair for its strange color to weave it into belt buckles. Anyone who tried to would be cursed in the attempt. Aletta's silky hair would never hold.

Awkwardly, I held the babe face out in front of me. His first view of the world out the window would be to see his mother hang. How much he had to learn. I draped a corner of Aletta's shawl out the window to tell her we were watching, and prayed she would see it. I think she stood up straighter on the cart just then and stretched her neck longer, as though Rika herself were watching her. The shame of dying, of being sent to die, was nowhere in her posture. She scanned the skies. I hoped, in all that grayness, she might see a stork. Or a bubble bursting that might tell her God was breathing all around her. Her dripping gray dress clung to her and showed the small, beautiful mound of her stomach. I swallowed back the closest thing I knew to love.

Rain pelted the bricks in the square, smacked against the windows and ran down in sheets. No doubt all those windows along the square had gawking faces in them cursing the rain for obscur ing the view. Alderman Coornhert strode back and forth like a general under the stepped eaves of the Raadhuis behind a fringe of water. Get on with it, man! Petty arm of provincial justice. Can't offend anyone by enacting its judgments too soon, or too late, or not at all. Order. Order must be had. Though the water-soaked earth be re moved and though the mountains be cast into the sea, order must be had. They would hang her punctually at noon, making her wait that last mis erable half hour in bone-chilling rain, her head shaved. The defenselessness of her quivering, swollen lip should have shamed them into some kind of mercy, even that of a sooner death than noon.

Close behind me in the tower the great bell sounded. The baby jerked in my arms. I held him tighter. Then again, the bell resounded in my chest on its slow, pompous way to twelve peals.

Would Aletta have appreciated the totality of ef fect—the air gray with rain, and the gibbet and the plain stone Raadhuis behind just a darker gray—if she had been watching this from a different per spective? Would she have noticed rain pouring off the ends of her fingers, elongating them into liquid gray roots like witches' hands?

I'd look at her hands, only her hands, even though I couldn't see where the fingers stopped and the rain began. Rain poured off them until that sudden unmistakable jolt, which I did see, will al ways see, when her feet kicked wildly, kept kicking, her klompen flying off, and in my mind's eye, her hands flung the water away, and in another mo ment rain poured off her hands and her still feet smoothly again in slender silver ropes.

My soul shuddered.

I turned my back to the window and bowed my head over the babe until the echo of the twelfth chime had died. "Father, give Thy benediction, give Thy peace before we part," I whispered, my breath moving the baby's feathery hair. "Peace which pas seth understanding, on our waiting spirits send."

Behind closed eyes I saw again the jolt, the flung water, her feet, wild then still.

Anyone standing close enough to be wet by the flung water, she might have said, ought to expect some bad luck having to do with water, the least of which might be burning one's mouth to shreds with hot tea, the greatest, drowning in the flood that was sure to come. The curse of the flung wa ter, she'd call it.

Quick peals of alarm followed. I nestled the babe in the basket, left him in the tower and stumbled down the narrow stairs hardly able to see, to join the few remaining townsmen running across the peat bogs. Blown rain needled my face and I slipped and fell. All along the Damsterdiep, windmills had stopped with their vanes in the alarm position.

Wind-whipped peaks sloshed over the sea dike in places. Gray, impersonal death was licking at the continent. The waterwolf of Aletta's nightmares was baring white fangs that dripped their foam over the embankment. I joined the lines of men working to raise the crown of the dike with planks. Between each plank, I shoveled clay like a madman.

Late in the afternoon, to the north, where no one was working, the sea folded over the dike and gushed across the lower peat bogs, filling in the pits. We climbed the dike slope to work above wa terline until a skipper in the estuary steered his scow broadside into the breach and we could se cure it with ropes and pack the gaps with seaweed, reed mats and slabs of turf. Then the sea broke through another place. Loss swept over me, and for a moment I couldn't get my breath. Probably all along the coast, the sea was winning.

We mended the new gap with the side of the nearest barn torn down, secured it with ropes to dike cleats, and tamped clay against it. In quickly fading light, I could see the patched place bowing. All night in glassy blackness we lay with our heels dug into the upper incline of the dike and braced it shoulder to shoulder, our arms linked in a numb chain and our backs pressed up against the slanted dike wall. The wolf on the other side sprayed icy seawater on my sweating face, and my arms burned. I closed my eyes against the pain and imagined Aletta walking a sinu ous path to avoid bubbles in puddles. Rain fell down the back of my neck and rain was falling on the church tower and the Raadhuis and the gallows and Aletta's unprotected head. Inland I could see a row of watch fires stretching far to the north. I counted them, and later counted them again, and when there were fewer, I knew the sea had broken in somewhere else. The land would be covered. Thunder and wicked lightning bore wave after wave of shock and disbelief and anger until all shock and anger and dis­ belief were washed out of me and there was only shivering loss. And the babe in the tower hungry and crying through the night.

Eventually we could feel and hear that the tide had turned. Whatever water would come had come already. Slowly shapes began to emerge, the rain thinned to a silver mist, and there was a kind of horrific beauty in the muted dawn. Stepping away from the incline, I stood like a crucifix, unable to lower my arms. In milky gray light, I turned and saw that the fleshy forearm I'd been gripping all night was Alderman Coornhert's.

"You're a fine lad," he said. "Far better'n the likes of her."

Rage hissed through me. Who else had known?

I jostled a place in the first punt back to Delfzijl. Peat bogs and farms were all under water. Bare trees were only bushes of twigs now. Families of peat diggers waited on soggy thatched roofs or shared tree branches with chickens. A miller's fam ily huddled on the cap of the mill. Big, gentle Groningen draft horses swam mutely, aimlessly, without understanding. I envied, for a moment, the simple griefs of animals.

Without the straight lines of canals and ditches outlining farmers' plots, there was less of a human mark upon the land. The town was shortened, diminutive. In Delfzijl, water flooded the just and the unjust. Only the lower rooms of houses were under water. And the church floor. The babe was safe in the tower, I knew. We floated through the square between the Raadhuis and the church, the water as flat as a pewter plate, upon which an enor mous rat rode a wooden door. An omen, Aletta would have said. But the gibbet and Aletta Pieters had been washed away.

Aunt and Uncle's house was scaled down, hum bled by the water at window level on the lower floor. From the punt, I climbed through a half-sub merged window and found Rika, wet from the waist down, on the stairway, in one arm a Ceylon urn, in the other the painting of the girl, each one acquired by sending a soul to hell on earth in the Americas. No human being tied me to Rika's house decorated by oppression, or to this town of quick and simple justice. Redemption earned through the begrudged boarding of an orphan was too easy. I needed to return to more difficult ideas.

"You look like—"

"I have to leave, Aunt."

"Yes, you do. I'm surprised you stayed to help."

"You know?"

"Missing girl. Missing food. Nephew out all hours. Sits in an empty church like some Catholic. I expected you to leave when they—at noon yester day."

"You knew she was in the church, and you sent them there!"

"To save you from her."

"Save me?"

"You're free," she stammered shamefully.

How could I explain to one who thought like that?

"Rika, I need money."

"Money?" She set the urn on a step and gave me a puzzled look. "Half the countryside under water and you're worried about money?"

"There was a second child."

She inhaled a loud, exaggerated breath and made me wait for her answer. "If I give you some thing, will you promise to take the child away?"

"You think I'd leave him to the good people of Delfzijl?"

"Take this." She held forward the painting. "Sell it in Amsterdam. I'll give you the dealer's pa per. It was her favorite, despite her tears." Her chin quivered. "I can't enjoy it anymore."

"My mill drawings?"

"I saved them too. Upstairs."

"Give them to the Water Board."

Through waist-high water I followed her up stairs and took the painting, the paper, another blanket, my books and knapsack, a cheese quarter Rika handed me, loaded Uncle Hubert's skiff and pushed off. Rika stood at the upper window as if on a houseboat, or an ark. "Remember, Rika," I said, "when the Lord repented for having made man, He brought the flood."