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 Damsterdiep 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 Farmsum. I returned to feed the baby and then went inland under a steady drizzle along the shores of the Damsterdiep, to Solwerd, crossing fields spongy with eight days of rain. There, farmers were building 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 Appingedam 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 ornate mahogany spice chest upstairs. Even with all forty-eight drawers taken out, I could barely manage it myself, and fell into bed exhausted.
I wrestled through the night in wakeful darkness. 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 grating 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 become 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 stood 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 obscuring 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 removed 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 miserable 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 effect—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 perspective? 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 always 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 moment 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 passeth 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 water, 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 lines of men working to raise the crown of the dike with planks. Between each one, 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 water line until a skipper in the estuary steered his scow broadside into the breach and we could secure 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 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 sinuous 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 al
l shock and anger and disbelief 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 family 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, as flat as a pewter plate, upon which an enormous 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, humbled by the water at window level on the lower floor. From the punt, I climbed through a half-submerged 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 yesterday.”
“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 something, 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 paper. 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 upstairs 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.”
I climbed into the church loft, changed the baby’s rags, fed him, wrapped him in Aletta’s shawl and blanket and laid him in the stern of Uncle’s skiff so I could see him, propped the painting and my knapsack next to him and covered the whole with another blanket like a tent. Exhausted, I pulled away from the town of Delfzijl and its muddy truths.
At first, swirling water mastered me, and the current of the Damsterdiep carried me backwards until I learned to recognize it rippling the surface, and navigated near farmhouses to avoid it. My arms cramped and I had to let go of the oars from time to time, and my ears ached from cold air blown across them.
Inland, toward Solwerd, the waters calmed, and the rhythmic motion of the boat cradled the babe to sleep. Wind drove an opening in the clouds, and the sun cast a silver glare over the water. Past Solwerd, watery desolation spread out in a dreadful, false calm. When the land was drained, the fields would be covered with sea sand, and the soil would be salted for years. All my pride at science mastering nature was swept away in the waters. Time was sporting with man. My faster pump mill was years too late, and Aletta and I were years too early.
“Far better than the likes of her” wasn’t true. I hadn’t fought off any demons. I had just drifted with her currents, while she… never did she succumb to the cowardice of self-pity. I had fancied love a casual adjunct and not the central turning shaft making all parts move. I had not stood astonished before the power of its turning. All I’d learned at university to be firm and eternal was floating unanchored, and as a result, God seemed much less scrutable on the long row back.
Appingedam was under water too. I reached it by midafternoon. People were out in skiffs rescuing animals and goods before the early dark. Past it, in the hamlet of Oling, two young children leaning out a red-shuttered upper window waved to me and called out, “St. Nicholas! St. Nicholas,” laughing.
“Have you any milk?” I called.
They only giggled. I asked again, and they disappeared below the sill. Above the water, I could see that the door, arched over by a leafless vine, was painted with a rustic scene the way country people do farther south. In few moments a woman came to the window and lowered down a wooden bucket with an earthenware jar of milk inside. I picked it out, thanked her and rowed on out of view behind a barn and tied up to a tree. I soaked my sleeve in the milk and dripped it into the baby’s mouth.
I regretted that I didn’t know any lullabies. All those mothery sounds one makes for babies—I knew none of them, and all I could think of was the doxology.
“Praise God from whom all blessings flow,” I softly sang, letting the milk flow into his mouth and smiling at him.
“Praise Him, all creatures here below.”
The woman had asked no questions before she brought the milk to the window. A knot swelled in my throat. Those were happy children in the window. Here was the place.
“Praise Him above, ye Heavenly Host.”
This first time would be the last time I’d sing to my little son. My voice cracked in a thin whistle.
“Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”
At dusk, a man rowed a skiff toward the house, tied it to the gable, handed a flapping chicken through the window, and then climbed through himself. I dug into my knapsack for a pencil stub and on the back of the art dealer’s document, I wrote, “Sell the painting. Feed the child,” and wrapped my son, the paper and the cabbage leaf in the blanket. Lulled to a sitting sleep by exhaustion and the lap of water against the hull, I woke in darkness and placed our beautiful son in the man’s skiff, sheltering him with the painting and the blanket, and took to my oars.
Pulling away, I heard the boat nudging the house in timid little wave surges, as if knocking politely, like a blessing, and I knew that I would row all the way back to Groningen, if need be, until I could feel solid ground under me once more.
And for this return, I wonder, would it be blasphemy to thank God?
Adriaan Kuypers, College of Science and Philosophy, Groningen University, St. Nicholas Eve, December 5, 1747. Rain all day.
Still Life
In the stately brick townhouse of Pieter Claesz van Ruijven on the Oude Delf
t Canal, Johannes was welcomed into the same wood-paneled anteroom where he’d come to offer his paintings, one by one over the past ten years.
“He is occupied at present,” the young servant said. “What shall I tell him is the nature of your business?”
“I was hoping to see the paintings.”
A quick, two-note giggle escaped her. “You? You haven’t seen them enough already?” She ushered him into the great hall. “I’ll tell him you’re here.”
Left alone. Exactly what he’d hoped for. His paintings warming the room from all sides.
View of Delft, large and alone and radiant on the far wall. Morning’s breathless stillness before the city wakes from within. Light the only actor, streaming down lovingly onto the far tower of Nieuwe Kerk and the orange roofs in the city’s distance. And in the foreground the town wall, Schiedam and Rotterdam Gates and even the herring boats, all still, darker, under a cloud, not yet waking. In such momentary quietness, would anyone else ever feel the grace of God? To see the painting from this distance, he could take it all in at once. Walking toward it as if approaching the city thrilled him. He’d never experienced that sensation in the small upper room across the river he had rented to paint the view.
Oh, for that room again. For its gift of silence. Now he painted in the main room of his family’s cramped lodgings right on the market square. Eleven children were always running underfoot, their klompen clattering on the tile floor. The boys screaming their imaginary battles. The girls bickering over chores. Little Geertruida’s tortured coughing. The baby crying. His mother’s boisterous tavern just next door, and Willem, his besotted brother-in-law, shouting wild claims through the passageway.
He craved quietness. Any abrupt noise could make him take a stroke at the wrong angle; then light wouldn’t fall correctly on the grooves left by the brush hairs; he’d have to stroke over it again. With that extra layer of paint, the mistake would be raised from its surroundings by the width of a silk thread. That he could not disguise. Every time he looked, there it would be, screaming at him. Failures like that would paralyze him if he saw any today.