Great Mischief

Unusual commotion downstairs roused me earlier than expected in the morning, and I trudged sleepily down to find out what was going on. Pa was sitting down to breakfast with his grandchildren—a rare occurrence—and answering Mother’s questions. Meneer Halsema had been about on the highway before dawn and had discovered that Zwarte Jan’s corpse had disappeared. He’d run to Van Klost, who’d gathered Bertie, Pa, and Harmanus for an investigation into the slave quarter that had proved fruitless. No one had seen or heard anything. “They’re lying of course,” Pa asserted. “They all know who cut him down and where they’ve buried him!” Van Klost wanted to declare martial law, but Harmanus had argued him out of it, insisting that the farm work was behind schedule enough as it was. “For once, I was nearly ready to side with Van Klost!” Pa declared, thumping his fist on the table. Berendina looked at him in mock amazement. “But I couldn’t go that far!” he added, with the shadow of a mischievous grin on his face—one I remembered from long back. That afternoon I volunteered to do a water-fetch, to spare my sister a second pass—which had only become necessary because my sailors were drinking it up—and I stopped by the crossroads. Nobody had thought to retrieve the bit of rope still tied to the tree branch. It swung about in the breeze, useless. Depending on one’s point of view, it symbolized the determination of law and order forces to see the penalties of crime paid in full—or the determination of Zwarte Jan’s friends to see him decently buried in defiance of a heartless edict. Either way, it was a sore point, not to mention an eyesore. After fuddling myself with irritation that others hadn’t removed it, the obvious solution occurred to me, and I climbed up the tree, out on the limb, and undid the rope. * * * With their hopes sinking, the burghers and their families began to realize that all had not instantly returned to normal after Zwarte Jan’s execution. The other Selectmen had grumbled that Pa and Van Klost had no right unilaterally to acquiesce in the slaves’ abstraction of Jan’s corpse—a matter of obvious and illegal defiance—but, having no practical alternative, they let it drop. Householders who might also have objected became shy of escalating the conflict when word got around that the girl Bette, who’d been in and out of delirium since Bates’ attack, had fallen into a coma. Unobtrusively, I visited the stable and passed purloined food to Jack and Nicholls, managing to get in and out in less than two minutes. Still fatigued from the previous evening—while trying to pretend I felt perfectly normal—I stayed up long past the moment I desired. And I suffered another bad dream, but this one left me feeling dizzy and nauseated, rather than terrified. I can’t recall the specifics, but I woke disoriented in the dark, unsure of everything. Unhappy moments from the last many days wafted in and out of my awareness, from my horrific abduction to my perplexing cousin Charles to Herr Fischl’s impatience with my clumsy fingering. Then one incongruous thought abruptly shook me fully awake: How was it that when we found Bates’ body, it was already stiff? He shouldn’t have been stiff. It was too soon for him to be stiff, for rigor to have set in. We’d found Jan within minutes of finding the corpse, and it had seemed unquestionable not only that he’d killed Bates, but that he’d just then killed him, only minutes before I’d come out and wakened Pa. Jan had clearly been still in the grip of an immense passion, and I’d instantly concluded that the righteous fury he’d visited upon the man in the stocks had stayed with him as he waited for Pa or me to make the discovery of his lethal handiwork. Jan was no thespian able to dissemble a frenzy of emotion on command. How was it that the processes that freeze a corpse’s bones in one position had already taken hold? From my forced observations last summer, I knew it took a couple hours, at least. And—I slapped my palm against my forehead to think of it—I’d said to Pa at the time that Bates was already cold. I’d even said that! But if Jan had attacked Bates much earlier, the moon would still have been up, lighting the common for all to see. Could Jan have been so resigned to his own discovery and the obvious consequence from the very moment he’d decided to act? By the time we’d chased and collared him, he was ready to shout triumphant defiance to the whole town, but had that been his plan hours before? There was no question in my mind that Jan had cut Bates’ throat and that he was resigned to face the law’s wrath, but … how could he have done it at the time I’d assumed he’d done it?