World's End by T. C. Boyle

and two white-haired van der Meulen children gazed up at them with the look of cherubim.
    â€œWell,” Meintje said finally, closing the door behind them, “whatever could bring the honorable
commis
and his colleague the
schout
to our lonely farm on such a night?”
    Joost’s back was not nearly so bowed as when he was mounted, yet he still slumped badly. Working the plumed hat in his hands, he slouched against the doorframe and attempted an explanation. “Van Brunt,” he began, but was cut off by the officious agent, who laid out the patroon’s case against Harmanus’ sad and solitary heir as if he were pleading before a court of the accused’s peers (though of course there was neither need nor precedent for such a court, as the patroon was judge, jury and prosecutor on his own lands, and paid the
schout
and hangman to take care of the rest). He ended, having in the process managed to edge closer to the hearth and its paradisaic aromas, byattesting that they’d followed the malefactor’s trail right on up to the
goude vrouw’s
doorstep.
    Meintje waited until he’d finished and then she plucked a wooden spoon from the cupboard and began to curse him—curse
them
—Joost, to his horror, equally indicted in her wrath.
They
were the criminals—no, worse, they were fiends, cloven-hoofed
duyvils,
followers of Beelzebub and his unholy tribe. How could they even think to hound the poor orphaned child from the only home he knew? How could they? Were they Christians? Were they men? Human beings even? For a full five minutes Meintje excoriated them, all the while brandishing the wooden spoon like the sword of righteousness. With each emphatic gesture she backed the agent up till he’d given over his hard-won place at the hearth and found himself pressing his buttocks to the cold unyielding planks of the door as if he would melt into them, while Joost slumped so low in shame and mortification he could have unbuckled his boots with his teeth.
    It was at this juncture that Staats, bringing with him a stale whiff of the barn and a jacket of cold, slammed through the door. In doing so, he relocated the agent’s center of gravity and sent him reeling halfway across the room, where he fetched up against the birch rocker with a look of wounded dignity. Staats was a powerful, big-nosed, raw-skinned man with eyes so intense they were like twin slaps in the face. He seemed utterly bewildered by the presence of
commis
and
schout,
though he must have seen their blanketed horses tied outside the door. “Holy
Moeder
in heaven,” he rumbled. “What’s this?”
    â€œStaats,” Meintje cried, rushing to him and repeating his name twice more in a plaintive wail, “they’ve come for the boy.”
    â€œBoy?” he repeated, as if the word were new to him. His eyes roved about the room, searching for a clue, and he lifted his mink cap to scratch a head as hard and hairless as a chestnut.
    â€œLittle Jeremias,” his wife whispered in clarification.
    Joost watched them uneasily. As he would later learn, the boy had turned up some two hours earlier begging for shelter and a bit to eat. Vrouw van der Meulen had at first shut the door on him in horror—a haunt had appeared on her
stoep,
withered and mutilated, one of the undead—but when she took a second look, she saw only the half-starved child, motherless in the snow. She’d held him to her, bundled him up in front of the fire, fed him soup, hot chocolate andhoney cake while her own curious brood pressed around. Why hadn’t he come sooner? she asked. Where had he been all this time? Didn’t he know that she and Staats and the Oothouses too thought he’d perished in the blaze that took his poor
moeder?
    No, he’d said, shaking his head, no, and she’d wondered whether he was responding to her question or denying some horror she couldn’t know. The fire, he