Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

cricket ground, the shipshape clubhouse—such pioneering effort had gone into them!
    Somewhere beyond Poughkeepsie I opened my briefcase to glance at work documents. Protruding from a pocket was Chuck’s gift. I opened the envelope and withdrew a booklet. Titled
Dutch Nursery Rhymes in Colonial Times,
the booklet was a reprint, made by the Holland Society of New York, of the 1889 original edited by a Mrs. E. P. Ferris. I turned the pages with some curiosity, because I knew next to nothing about the ancient Dutch presence in America. There was a song in Dutch about Molly Grietje, Santa Claus’s wife, who made New Year
koekjes,
and a song about Fort Orange, as Albany was first known. There was a poem (in English) titled “The Christmas Race, a True Incident of Rensselaerwyck.” Rensselaerwyck was, I surmised, precisely the district through which my train was now traveling. Stimulated by the coincidence, I gave the poem my closer attention. It commemorated a horse-race under “the Christmas moon” at Wolvenhoeck, the corner of the wolves. The owners of the horses were a certain Phil Schuyler and a gentleman referred to only as Mijnheer: “Down to the riverbank, Mijnheer, his guests, and all the slaves / went trooping, while a war whoop came from all the Indian braves…/ The slaves with their whale lanterns were passing to and fro, / Casting fantastic shadows on hills of ice and snow.” In addition to this poem there were hymns, spinning songs, cradle songs, churning songs, and trotting songs—songs you sang while trotting your child on your knee—apparently in use all over New Netherland, from Albany to Long Island to the Delaware River. One such song caught my attention:

    Trip a trop a troontjes
    De varkens in de boontjes,
    De koetjes in de claver,
    De paarden in de haver,
    De eendjes in de water-plas,
    De kalf in de lange gras;
    So groot mijn kleine _____was!

    You sang your child’s name where the blank was. Adapting the melody of the St. Nicholas song that every Dutch child hungrily learns (
Sinterklaas kapoentje / Gooi wat in mijn schoentje
…), I hummed this nonsense about pigs and beans and cows and clover to my faraway son, tapping my knee against the underside of the lowered tray as I imagined his delighted weight on my thigh.
    The week before, Jake and I had played in his grandparents’ garden. I raked leaves into piles and he helped me bag the leaves. The leaves were dry and marvelously light. I added armloads to the red and brown and gold crushed in the plastic sack; Jake picked up a single leaf and made a cautious, thrilled deposit. At one point he put on his superhero frown and charged a hillock of leaves. Wading into its harmless fire, he courageously sprawled. “’Ook, ’ook!” he screamed as he rolled in the leaves. I looked, and looked, and looked. Fronds of his yellow hair curled out from the hood’s fringe onto his cheeks. He wore his purple quilted jacket, and his thermal khakis with an inch of tartan turnup, and his blue ankle boots with the zip, and the blue sweater with the white boat, and—I knew this because I had dressed him—his train-infested underpants, and the red T-shirt he liked to imagine was a Spider-Man shirt, and Old Navy green socks with rubbery lettering on the soles. We gardened together. I demonstrated how to use a shovel. When I dug up the topsoil, I was taken aback: countless squirming creatures ate and moved and multiplied underfoot. The very ground we stood on was revealed as a kind of ocean, crowded and immeasurable and without light.
    Blocks of color stormed my window for a full minute. By the time the freight train had passed, the sky over the Hudson Valley had brightened still further and the formerly brown and silver Hudson was a bluish white.
    Unseen on this earth, I alighted at Albany-Rensselaer with tears in my eyes and went to my meeting.
             
    S ometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is