Текст книги "Dominion"

Автор книги: Calvin Baker

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

“I want to talk to all of you today about the Knowledge and Love of God,” he said, “and how it belongs to all of us in equal measure. It is a message that will not be popular with some, so let me first give you my background and how I came to be here today.”

The tent was silent as they listened, for he spoke with intense care for his words, but also with a strange accent.

“I am what is known as an Episcopi Vagantes, which means I have been fully invested with the sacraments of the one original church. I received my ordination first as a priest, while still in my youth, and was raised still young to bishop – I was twenty-six at the time – by no less a vassal of God than the Pope of Antioch.

“None can undo what a Pope has done without undoing the ancient communion of the church itself, so I remain now a high bishop but have had an argument with the other churches on your behalf.

“I can see some of you are saying, He is still the Pope’s man, and what do you mean with this lowercase and uppercase pope business? Isn’t there only one? The truth is there are five popes, all equally entitled to the claim, and the Roman pope is little more than a bishop who has gotten pretensions to be master of the world. The more haughty he has got, the more he has separated all of us from the works of Jesus and His apostles.

“Why he does this is because there are things in the Gospels that the Church in Rome would rather bar all of us from knowing. But all of it belongs ever to the flock of the faithful.

“‘Now what is this Knowledge he keeps talking about?’ I can see you asking. ‘Isn’t Jesus the perfection of Love and all of Love?’ Yes, He is, but also other things besides.

“You see, the seventh seal has long been breeched, and it is silent in Heaven as They watch.”

The residents of the town were baffled by much that the preacher was saying, but he put up such a show with that great purple robe billowing out on the wind under the perfect cerulean autumn sky, along with the red coronation stole, that they decided to let him finish his sermon before making up their minds.

“Today I wish to read to you from one of the Hidden Books of Christ, which the popes and high bishops have all conspired among themselves to keep out of your knowing, certain Knowledge they would like to keep hidden in order to elevate their own earthly kingdom. I am here to tell you that you can know the True Heart of Christ, as intimately as those apostles who sat down with Him in Communion, and not go supplicating to any interdicting authority other than your own hearts.”

He opened a gigantic old tome, turned to a well-marked page, and began reading.

“Mary Magdalene said to Him, ‘Lord, then how will we know that?’

“The perfect Savior said, ‘Come you from invisible things to the end of those that are visible, and the very emanation of Thought will reveal to you how faith in those things that are not visible was found in those that are visible, that belong to the unbegotten Father. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear!’”

“What Jesus means by this,” the preacher went on, “is that God’s bounty is available to us all without interference. He will create each of you a prince of your own Destiny, but you must first sabbitise your belief, and the joy that comes from knowing, and the sharing of Bread with the College of the Faithful. You must be born and weep in the jubilation that is Christ and, through Him, receive the Hidden Knowledge that will sanctify all your works. For only then will He reveal to you the Truth.

“As proof of this I offer my assistant minister, Mary Josepha, who has been ordained by God with the power of healing, even though she was nothing but a common maid before He sought her out as His servant.”

The woman whom Purchase had met earlier that summer then took the podium, and she was as beautiful as he remembered her, even a in her vestments of office, which were a purple robe like the other preacher’s and, in place of the stole, a garter of different-colored glass beads, which caught the light as she moved to the lectern.

“When I first met her she prayed to strange gods and spoke of an oracle called the Aro Chukwu and places with untamed names, where the weaker of her people took shelter from the stronger because they did not have God’s knowledge to protect them. But since she found Christ she hides from no one and needs no other strength. As proof I invite any of you with an ailment, any seeking relief, to come up here and let Sister Mary Josepha put her hands on you so that you might be healed. You must hurry, though, because there is, as John teaches, but half an hour left.”

There was a great clamoring among the audience and many people stood to receive her blessing, even some who were devout in the normal church. The Merians sitting there all felt something stir in them as well, as the Englishman began a chanting behind the woman.

When the preacher spoke, Merian thought he could remember things he did not remember and closed his eyes, seeking to pin down those elusive flickerings. He was also reminded of the stranger he had met that dark winter day years ago, who prophesied the end of unions when it was still barren woodlands around him.

Magnus remembered then how he was once called something else, and that there was a truth about him he could no longer possess but had died with his African mother.

Sanne, when she saw the woman standing there in the office of preacher and healer, felt a great pride that all but the church fathers were going to get blessed by her, and that she had in her the power to make them defer, and that she very obviously did not wear the yoke of the household. It was an affirmation for her that was not religious but was powerful all the same.

Purchase, when he saw her standing before the crowd with the girdle, which accentuated her shape and the length of her limbs to an effect of great beauty, was moved mysteriously into standing from his seat and walking forth to get a better look at her. He soon found that he kept moving closer, as though hypnotized by the glass beads.

“You see,” the preacher said, as people streamed forth in a great throng under the tent to receive blessings, “there is but one original of each thing: one slave and one master; one church and one believer; one convert and one righteous heathen; one husband and one wife; one king, one subject; one father, one son; one Wisdom and one great Lie.

“All marched forth from the Original Element in the Beginning in pairs, to either stay with their original other or else get lost from it; either remembering their purpose or forgetting it. The farther they get from the Beginning the less they know, unless those binds are renewed, and if they are not, eventually they will lose all their original way and purpose. Such was the fate of Sophia, and of preacher and believer. We are here today to remember and to redeem that mission.

“I want the Seeker to come forth now to rejoin with the Sought After; and the Pursued and Persecuted to come forth and know again Original Freedom.”

“They will have you all burning in hell,” a man from the crowd called as the preacher went on. “He is a charlatan and preaches original heresy. If you ask him how he found himself among you he will tell you a fantastic story about being waylaid by pirates off the coast. It is not true, and his deaconess is no religious woman but his common married wife, though what kind of marriage it is only the devil can tell. Probe about Antioch and you will find it is a pub in central London, and he was ordained there, all right. My Jesus, how he was ordained!”

The Englishman defended himself. “He is an agent of the pope.”

“It does not take an agent of the pope to know God would never hide His wisdom from us,” the other countered. “And if not for theology then for the sake of philosophy, but he is illiterate and ignorant as dirt. If he were not, he would not so disregard the doctrine of Telos, as described by Aristotle in his thesis of metaphysics. Sophia is no more lost than a bird in winter, but fulfilling her function according to divine plan, which is mysterious. Anyone who claims to know it is a bigger blasphemer than Satan himself.”

In all this the crowd began taking sides, arguing either from religious, superstitious, or philosophical views about who was right and who was wrong, as others ignored both men and kept moving toward the woman, some shouting as she touched them, others falling down in the aisle and weeping. The most profound feeling among all of them that morning belonged to Purchase Merian.

After the last congregant had finished wailing he walked up to the healing chair and sat down. Somewhere inside himself he knew what he did amounted to bad faith where God Himself might have been concerned, but the religiousness of his feelings was undeniable. He had made his way to that chair with a palpitating heart that quickened when Mary Josepha put her hands on him. As he sat there under her hand, every desire within him was to join with her. If she were truly a vessel for the spirit, he would accept conversion and serve her God. If she were vessel for some other concern that stood unseen behind her, he would serve that instead, so long as he could keep her hands on him. He held his eyes closed and allowed what she offered to course through him. He knew there were unknown forces in the world that he had felt, unbidden or else in deep moments of contemplation. When she touched him he did not know what it was that she offered, and it reminded him not of the energy of creation, as he had known it before, but something just as white hot in his breast. When he opened his eyes he thought he knew what it was and shivered. To his surprise he also felt her hand trembling as she held it there on his forehead. He knew not only what it was then, but that it was also experiencing out of the ordinary for either her church or any other. In that instant he almost pulled her down into his lap, but he stayed still and rigid in the chair, receiving her touch.

The other preacher looked at them with a fiery stare that spoke not of spiritual disapproval but erotic jealousy. Whether she herself struggled with religious notions or the more earthly ones that sometimes pulled on them, he did not know, but Purchase was certain he would win her over for his own.

As he sat, there was a shot fired in the audience, and people began climbing over each other to leave the tent, which was quickly brought to lean on one side. Magnus reached for Sanne and Merian, and they began making their way toward the exit. Someone pushed against their back, and Sanne was knocked down to her knees, and her purse disappeared. While the two men made a cordon around her with their bodies to give her room to stand, they were manhandled by the crowd and nearly toppled over, as the other side of the tent came down and full pandemonium erupted. Finally they were able to get Sanne to her feet and, with brute strength, force their way out of the commotion.

When the tent finally cleared, it was collapsed everywhere but under its main pole. There Purchase still sat in the healing seat, with Mary Josepha’s hands still on him.

six

Their congress when it was finished had lasted a full ten minutes, through all the bedlam, and if Mary Josepha had possessed healing power Purchase would have been cleansed and fixed of all that ever disturbed him. Instead, he was possessed by a great wanting, and when she removed her hands from him he was afraid such as he had never been before – of being without her touch.

She looked slightly wild about the eyes, and her girdle was misaligned. After she took her hands down she did not know what to think of the man who had sat so calmly through all the commotion without flinching, as if he were afraid of nothing in the world. When he finally stood and took her arm to find them a pathway out of the fallen tent, she felt hot beneath his hand and realized she had been wanting for him to return her touch the entire time he was seated there.

Outside, Purchase placed her on his horse, mounted the animal behind her, and rode off. Mary Josepha had a prearranged meeting on the edge of town with her husband, Oswin Palmer. When Purchase rode in the other direction, however, she did not protest.

Purchase took her to the same room in back of his workshop where he had asked her to wait for him the last time they met. This time, instead of going off, he went inside with her and bolted the door. There they spent the entire rest of the day in the thrall of each other’s embrace.

They were still there the next day, when Magnus came round from Stonehouses looking for him. Sanne had been very distraught that he had not come home after the chaos at the prayer meeting and worried he was hurt in the mayhem. Magnus, though, who had observed him as he sat in the chair, suspected he had finally conspired a way to be alone with the preacher woman.

When Magnus knocked at the door there was no response from inside at first. He knocked louder, finally calling out, until Purchase responded. “What do you want?”

“Open the door,” Magnus said.

It was silent inside, but after a while the worn wooden door creaked open and Purchase stood there, looking as though he had not slept for many days.

“Sanne wants to know what happened to you.”

“Tell her I’ll be around for dinner.”

“Will you?”

When Magnus came back without Purchase, but told them he had found him in his workshop, Sanne was quieted. Merian, however, grew suspicious.

“What was he doing there?”

“Repairing a wheel,” Magnus answered.

“Likely,” Merian returned. “Any sign of those two preachers around town?”

“None that I have seen,” Magnus said.

“You’re a remarkable poor liar,” Merian said. “That’s a marvel for a slave, but it’s a sign of your mother’s character, not your own. You would lie if you could; you just can’t. You are trying your mighty best, though.”

“He says he will be here at dinner.”

That afternoon, as Sanne and Adelia put food out for the family, Purchase came through the door, and Magnus was relieved to see his brother had not gone mad enough to bring the woman with him.

During the meal he answered all their questions glancingly, hiding his secret thoughts, and departed as soon as the table was cleared. Merian watched him go with a heavy heart, for he could see the beginning of unhappiness in his son, who until then had seldom known the evil of tears. At least that is what Merian imagined. Purchase to all the world looked elated that afternoon, and, when he took his horse and galloped off in a frenzy, anyone watching would have thought it was a youthful hunger for speed and experience rather than eagerness to find heartbreak.

When he returned to the shop that evening, Mary Josepha was gone again, as were all of her things, and the room was carefully straightened. Next to the place where they had made their bed, he found a coin with a strange marking on it he had not seen before. When he realized she had abandoned the place, he felt as if he had just walked through a sheet of glass and was only waiting for the noise to reach him. He knew then he could not hear the noise because he was inside it and its sound was pain itself.

He sat there awhile, still hoping her departure was only momentary and that she might come back through the door with all her things proclaiming the desire to stay with him, until he could no longer bear the atmosphere of the room and soon went out and mounted his horse, intending to ride a spell so that he might gather himself. His feelings were still tender in his breast three hours later when he stopped the horse in front of the roadhouse.

He entered and there was very little activity, as it was still the middle of the day and midweek at that. Soon the proprietress came out to oblige his needs, sending him into one of the rooms.

When he was done if he had to describe her he would have failed in all detail except her sex, which was female, and so all that mattered to his end of the trade.

As he rode home, he agreed with what Magnus had said, that taking one woman to forget another was indeed a peculiar sort of arithmetic. But, like some clever trick of calculus, it worked a shortcut to forgetting for him, and he was balanced enough so long as he was able to stay in the anonymous arms of the other woman. Seated on his horse, taking the trail back to Stonehouses, he felt a compounding of the shame that had seized him from the time he was there before and sensed how he was neglecting himself to behave in such a way. He knew nothing but the devil could work such low misery on a man.

“I must get this out of myself,” he said aloud, as he turned onto his father’s property. As he thought how he might be falling into Satan’s grasp, he resolved to himself never to go to that place in the woods again or do what he had done out there with anyone else.

When he came on his father’s land, he composed himself before riding to the house, but both his parents were still able to tell he was brought fairly far down by something. Sanne, not yet sensing its seriousness, did not try to comfort him. Merian, though, asked slyly whether he did not think it was time for him to begin thinking of taking a wife. “Of your own,” he added, as if in afterthought.

Purchase, when he heard this, looked severely at Magnus, thinking he had betrayed him.

“What puts that into your mind?” he asked Merian coolly.

“Only that it’s getting to be time. But you seem to have your own notions. What about you, Magnus?”

“What, sir?” Magnus replied.

“Have you given thought to a wife? Worse things can happen to a man at your age in life.”

“I’m still getting used to all that has changed in the last two years,” he said. “I don’t think a wife would help any but to confuse things.”

“Is there a drink to be had anywhere?” Purchase asked, when they had finished dinner.

Sanne, hearing this, grew worried. “There’s no need of drinking with every meal,” she said.

“No need for it, just asking,” Purchase said.

“Nay, have a drink,” Merian told him. “You too, Magnus. Let’s all sit down, since it is so rare we seem to be all together of late.”

Sanne went out into the kitchen, muttering that it was not temperate to drink in the middle of the week for no reason other than want of drink. “Salvation is in resisting urges, not giving in to whatever we want just for desire of it,” she said. Out in the kitchen she sent Adelia away and sat herself down at the low table, where she began praying for all of them in the house.

When she was younger all her prayers had seemed very abstract to her, and merely the habit of ritual and good behavior. As she prayed now, in the later part of her life, she was stricken with a great terror, and even the things she worried might happen in the afterlife seemed very real, nor did they seem far off. She prayed with an anxiety that she might pass at any moment and did not want any of her thoughts for her family to go unheard. She did not know what influence anyone on earth could have, either up there or in the other place, if people down there had sympathy for those still up here, but she knew that, without her, Merian would go to church very seldom, and Purchase and Magnus, whom she had taken in as an orphan even though he was well grown when he came into their lives, would not go at all unless it was for needs that had little to do with salvation. She did not think they were unscrupulous, any of them, simply that they did not pay enough heed to the care of their religion, in the same way some people would sit down to table without paying mind to the cleanliness of their hands.

In his own way, Merian was much concerned with the same thing, as he uncorked a cordial in the parlor and poured the spirits into glasses for each of them. “Temperance is the best way to go with this stuff,” he said, giving out the glasses. “But I tend to think that of most things.”

Magnus sipped at the spirits carefully, being still distrustful of their effect in any amount. Purchase, when he received his glass, emptied it in two great swallows and set it on the table beside himself without self-consciousness.

“Are you sure you haven’t had a drink already today?” Merian asked him. “That’s no way to act in your mother’s house.”

“I’m sorry,” Purchase said. “I forgot myself.”

“Well, why don’t you tell me what has been going on with you lately that has you forgetting yourself. How is your trade?”

“The same as always,” he answered laconically, without offering any elaboration.

“It is never the same. Magnus, why is Purchase acting so possessed?”

When Purchase heard that word it set off in him the worry that he actually was under an unnatural influence. He glowered at Magnus to see if he would betray him.

Magnus was not one to trust authority with any information they did not already have in their keep, but his concern for Purchase was strong enough that he thought about giving him away right then and there.

“I don’t know,” he answered at last, deciding that lying to Merian might give him more influence to help Purchase right his own course instead of the old man trying to fix it.

“Whatever it is, you had better get it under control,” Merian said, taking away the bottle. “Otherwise I fear you might lose your way. You always have been one to wander, but as you get older the danger from that is worse and worse,” he concluded. “You’ll tell me if you need help getting it back under control?” he asked, to let him know it was all right to do so. “The thing for both of you,” he went on, “is to start thinking of marrying someone to help hold you upright in all of this, because sometimes I fear it is too difficult for any one of us to do alone.”

Purchase and Magnus both nodded, and it pleased Merian a great deal that they listened to him so thoughtfully. As if to prove the effect of his advice, very soon after this speech in the parlor Magnus did become involved with a woman – even if it did not lead straightaway to respectable marriage. Purchase, though, he was bent on the dangerous course he had fallen onto and was soon lost to it entirely.

He slept very poorly that night, tossing under his blanket as he tried to put the woman out of his mind. He knew well that no welcome end would follow from his desires if he did not master them. In the middle of the night, still unable to sleep, he got up and went to the front porch for air. It was late October and already the frost came in at night, making everything before him sharp in the moonlight from the shards of crystal that clung to the grass and foliage. His own breath rose on the blue darkness in front of his face, and he placed his hand in front of it to feel the fleeting warmth, then rubbed both hands together. He was happy for this moment alone. He found, however, he could not concentrate on any one thought, but everything went scattering before his focus and examination until there was nothing but the diffuse desire for what he knew he should not want or, if wanting were no crime in itself, what he should not do.

He stayed sitting in a corner of the porch until he was everywhere numb from the air and his brain had stopped its overactivity. When he stood and went back to his bed, he lay down and found there was no thought of anything else except the woman. This time, though, when he tried to sleep the thought of her was warming to him and he drifted off with a mirthful smile on his face.

He woke the next morning unhappy again and soon after breakfast went to his workshop, where he was in the foulest of moods all day. The other smiths and assistants avoided him as he worked with his tools irritably. After supper he was unable to bear his anguish anymore and saddled his horse to go off in search of her.

Five days later he found her back with her husband, leading a meeting in Columbus County. It was much like the one that had taken place near Stonehouses, with the tent pitched in a field and congregants come from all around to hear what they had to say. When the healing chair was put out, Purchase could not control himself and went and stood in front of it, but he did not sit down this time. He only looked at Mary Josepha as she went through the pantomime of releasing people from their aches and demons.

Oswin, the Englishman, smoldered at him from the pulpit, but when Purchase moved away it was of his own accord, as nothing in the world would have been able to move him otherwise. All his strength had gone over to the thing that afflicted him. He was sick with love.

After the meeting she was gone very quickly with the Englishman, but Purchase pursued them and showed up at every one of their revivals until he could have given Palmer’s sermon himself. Once the Englishman even fired a shot at him, telling him he knew how to handle his sort. This was in Bladen County, when he saw him on the road behind their carriage, but Purchase escaped unharmed. Nor did he see it as his business to argue further with the husband, as the only talking he wished for was with the wife.

It was in Georgia that he finally persuaded her to come off with him again. She and her husband had done their preaching that day to a crowd that was mostly slaves but receptive to the message they were sharing. When she looked out and saw Purchase standing at the back of the tent she nodded to him, as if it had been her intention all along to wait five weeks then come to him again.

He did not know what her nod meant, for she had refused to speak to him the entire time of his pursuit, and, as the crowd dispersed after the sermon he was still half surprised when he turned and saw her standing there behind him.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

He nodded and led her to where his horse was and put her upon it. Once he had her he galloped off, with a quick pacing heart, and all want pressed against him from the inside out.

They stopped in a pine stand and slept that night out-of-doors. It was late November and the days still held a little of their autumn warmth, but at night there was nothing deceptive about which time of year it was, and the two of them bundled tight as a single coil of hair all the night long.

When he woke in the morning it was because he no longer felt her under his outstretched arm. He opened his eyes in the half gray of a clouded dawn and found no sign of her, but for another of the little keep-sake coins she had left before.

They had been so rapt in each other’s arms he had not even asked her why she changed her mind and came to him, but he thought it must have been his steadfast presence that persuaded her. There on the cold damp ground, with pine needles prickling the side of his face, Purchase felt like a born idiot. She must have had a falling out with her Englishman and only taken him for revenge on the other.

For his own part he could not answer why he behaved as he did, but that it had gotten beyond his ability to govern his own actions. When he realized this he felt a deep penetrating shame that, more than her drumming his emotions and hoaxing him, brought him close to tears. This in its turn increased his shame and he grew angry with himself, as something hard and dark turned over inside of him – showing a burning underbelly that shone in his eyes as he rose that morning and went off again in search of her.

That he should get back to his people he had no doubt, but he was lost to them as he was to himself, thinking only how he would keep the woman from leaving once he had her back.

The night with her had been tender, and the one before that endearing, but after this there would only be the power of his will and her will when they were with each other, locked in contest.