Текст книги "Dominion"

Автор книги: Calvin Baker

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

seven

When Purchase disappeared from Stonehouses everyone thought he had simply slipped off for a few days, as he was wont to do when one thing or other had caught his attention. After three days of not seeing him, though, Merian knew something must have happened and tried to keep Sanne calm while he discovered what it was.

He went first to Magnus to ask whether he knew what had happened to his brother. Magnus, looking at his father, knew he had to confess what little he knew. “He sure had it for that preacher woman,” he offered, leaving Merian to ponder aloud whether Purchase could be foolish and unsensible enough to run off after a married woman. Sanne, when she heard this, was filled with woe, worrying that his emotions had led him somewhere irredeemable.

Magnus, for his part, could not understand his brother at all in this instance and, try as he might, could not relate to him. Not long after Purchase disappeared he had the dream again about the woman who lifted her skirts and taunted him. When he awoke, instead of the malaise the dream usually left him with, he found himself thinking about the nights he had spent at the roadhouse with Purchase. He tried then to recall the women he had done his best to avoid looking at before, as he satisfied himself on these pictures drawn from memory. His nature had gotten up, though, and he knew he would eventually have to do something about it.

When he saw Adelia in the kitchen that next morning his eye lingered on her longer than usual, until the girl grew uncomfortable under his staring. It was the first time since the month he arrived that he had paid any more attention to her than he had the dining room table. This morning, though she was entirely present to him. “What a pretty girl you are,” he said, sounding full of sorrow, as he left the kitchen with his cup of coffee that was mostly milk.

As he walked past her she tried to shrink out of his way, not wanting an involvement that could jeopardize her position.

She thought momentarily about confessing her uneasiness to Sanne later that morning, after the older woman had come into the kitchen, but was not certain Sanne wouldn’t reprimand her as having done something to invite Magnus’s attention, or else of being the kind of servant who was just a certain way, no matter who the man was or how imprudent the idea would strike a reasonable person. In the end she kept her misgivings to herself, deciding out of hand it was all inappropriate to her station and employment.

As the weeks wore on into winter that year, Magnus did not leave her alone but grew more and more forward with his interest and intentions. In the face of such attention, Adelia found herself growing increasingly ambivalent in her refusals, until she was no longer certain about her position in the matter at all.

Sanne was the first to suspect there was something between them, seeing how Adelia became silent whenever Magnus entered a room, always hurrying herself away or else lingering over him, if she thought no one was paying attention.

When she mentioned Adelia to Merian as a possibility for Magnus, though, he was set against the idea and said he would speak to Magnus about his behavior.

“He can’t help if she is who he’s drawn to,” Sanne argued.

“Yes, he can,” Merian answered. “Everything can always be helped, and what can’t be helped belongs to the devil.”

“Who are you to be so high-and-mighty all of a sudden?” Sanne asked. “Their coming together, if that’s what they want to do, can’t hurt anything.”

“It just isn’t proper,” Merian argued. “And what isn’t proper, if it is allowed to happen in a house, begins to break down the very roof.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing has happened,” she answered. “Besides, there’s nothing improper about it.”

“He should think about himself in a different way,” Merian countered. “She’s not the kind of wife who will make him a good helpmate and partner.”

“And what do you know of that?” Sanne wanted to know. “She’s perfectly capable.”

“That’s just it,” Merian said. “He needs someone more than just perfectly capable, or else he’ll start heading backward.”

“Is that how you chose your wife?”

“It did not hurt,” he answered.

Sanne was angry at him then for assuming airs and growing so far out of his own station that he looked unkindly on another.

“A station isn’t a given thing,” he countered, “but something a man makes for himself if he can, and if he doesn’t like it he changes it or not – loses or gains what he should in the great marketplace – so that by a certain age he should end up in the correct one.

“I came out here without a station. I was not even a slave. A slave is something that belongs to the system of organization of courts and law. But if I had been taken up on charges, what would the law have called me? It would not have properly known. That is why I came to where there was no law and no station, so I might answer the question myself.”

“Well, you are certainly in one by yourself now,” she said, turning her back and giving him her coldness. “Just what do you think he has done?”

At this Merian was silent, but there was still something in the arrangement that did not sit right with him. Nonetheless, he said to Sanne, “Let them do as they please back there, then, but don’t come to me if it turns out poorly.”

Whenever Sanne saw Magnus around Adelia after that she would smile beatifically at both young people, in such a way that put Magnus at ease but made Adelia feel very lonely in the house, for now she knew Sanne would not be her champion against Magnus if it came to that.

She was only twenty-two years old at the time, but she sensed something odd about Magnus’s interest in her. She also knew she had to be very careful in the business of love and husbanding, not having anything else in this world. As he continued in his pursuit, though, she eventually could not bear it any longer and took control of the situation one evening, when they were alone, when she gave him a little kiss.

The kiss fired his imagination and he persuaded her to lie with him in an upstairs room after the house had all gone to sleep. By the time she came to him that night his head ached from needing her. It was very intense and passionate then, and even though she felt she had done something she should not have, she came to him again the following night. They burned through with need again that night as well, but when she visited him again the next day he did not want her as much and, in fact, sent her away at the end of the week.

He could hear her crying through the floor when she went back downstairs, but he was helpless to do anything for her. The day afterward she seemed very tired out as she went about her chores, and Magnus tried to avoid her. She continued on in her theater of sadness for the rest of the week, though, until Merian himself had to intervene.

“That is no way to treat a person,” he said, as the two of them worked at repairing a broken door on the barn. “If you didn’t want her you should have stayed off.”

“It’s not that I didn’t want her, but that I wanted her very badly and don’t anymore,” Magnus answered. “There are no guarantees in things.”

“You should be shamed to talk to your father that way,” Merian said. “Do you think I’m Purchase to just go support you in whatever you want, instead of what is rightful? They have places where you can treat a woman that way, but my wife’s kitchen is not one of them.”

After such a strong rebuke, Magnus did feel ashamed of the way he had behaved and apologized to Merian for it. “I couldn’t help it,” he said. “I just couldn’t.”

Merian started to tell him that everything we do can be helped but, seeing he was already cast low, decided to leave him to his thoughts. “Well, it is her you should apologize to. You led her to one set of expectations and dashed them. That is no way to live.”

“It is not what I meant,” Magnus said. “I will say something to her.”

Merian wondered why his sons acted as if their wants were so important they could not deny themselves anything for the sake of other people. He did not understand it and counted it as a way people were becoming when they were not before. He felt a fear for Magnus, just as he did for Purchase, that he could not abide by the sacrifices of life but only its bounty.

Marriage is like that too, he thought. Some days you want to be with each other and other days you do not, but you determine how to balance them so they are fair. You cannot just pursue her one day and send her away the next.

Magnus did not want a wife. He wanted to remain untethered to anything outside of himself, especially anything with so many different kinds of need as a woman. Nevertheless, he did go to Adelia some few days later to try to set things aright.

His heart was by now remarkable heavy with the notion that he had used her wrongly, when his only intention was to be rid of the disturbance that thundered in his own head. It was the same as it had always been for him. Where other men, like Purchase, were constantly thinking of women or their own pleasure, with him it simply all built up then burst forth and went away for a while.

When he saw Adelia she was stooped over the fire trying to coax a bit more heat from the embers. She looked up from her task and backed away a little upon seeing him.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, when she saw he was not moving on. “I thought you didn’t want me.”

“I was hoping for a little part of your time,” he answered her.

“You did not seem so interested in it a few days ago,” she managed, looking around the room with pulsating nervousness.

“That is what I wanted to talk to you about. I did not mean to treat you low. It’s just – well, I am different from other men.”

“I thought you were exactly the image of a certain kind of man.”

“I do like you, Adelia,” he pleaded. “I like you as much as anybody in the world.”

She turned away from him. He had had these scenes before when he had brought someone else into his situation. Some of the women would be very easy about it, as if nothing had happened, while others set to remonstrating and wailing until they had their fill of self-suffering. He only hoped she was not like the latter.

“When I saw you standing here Monday morning you seemed to me like the whole world that was worth having, and it took all the self-governance I had to keep from reaching out to you. Then, after I finally got you to me, I felt cast down because I knew I could not offer what you wanted.”

“You did not have a problem taking,” was her only reply.

“Adelia, I could not make you happy,” he finished. “I thought it would be better to cut it off before we got too far wrapped up.”

“You didn’t even ask what I wanted. You couldn’t even treat me with that decency but just turned me away from you.” She did start crying then, and Magnus was very moved by her tears.

“What is it you want, Adelia? Tell me that now and I will try to hear it.” He walked closer to her and looked down at the top of her head as she wiped her face with her hand. She looked back up and he saw again that she was very pretty, and was sorry he could not maintain the steadiness of devotion that a good husband must have. He was, however, taken again with wanting for her and touched her very lightly, in case she should be shocked or offended by his gesture.

Instead she put her head upon his chest and cried there, until he lifted her chin and kissed her. It was not what he had meant to do, but he told her to visit him again that night. It was not what she intended either, but she found herself in his chambers when all the rest of the world was asleep and it was only the two of them awake in creation.

She began to spoil him after that, making little cakes and cookies every day or cooking his favorite meals for dinner. He was kind with her for a while as well, until it seemed they would be together. Inevitably, though, it turned off in him again. The ability to reciprocate her feeling toward him. When it did, he told himself he was wicked, but he did try his best to rekindle his former feeling. When this failed he simply withdrew into himself remorsefully.

For a time he still suffered her company on occasion, but gradually refused even that and spent all his time with work or, in the evening, sitting late with his aging father discussing matters of great outward import, so that she dare not interrupt.

As he removed himself from her she offered more of her best attention to him, leaving the little sweets outside his door or knitting him warm things to have on his body in the cold weather. He took her gifts but could not enjoy them.

When he came into the kitchen one night, after two weeks of this treatment, she sat waiting up for him and asked why he abused her affections. He replied that he did not mean to. He was merely bound to his own ways and could not be always spending so much time in idling with her.

She began then the same weeping that had worked on him before, but his heart was steel and would not bend to her words or tears. He went off and left her crying in the kitchen. “What have I done to be abused?” she sobbed loudly in the night, so the whole house was awake with pity for her until dawn.

The next night he had his dream of the naked woman again, and it set in him the determination to have nothing to do with Adelia but get on instead in his work. During the time he had been there, Stonehouses had grown in size, as he and Merian worked more and more as a team, and his influence grew steadily to the point that when their neighbor to the east died he was able to convince Merian to buy the dead man’s land. Not that it was so difficult, as he was merely rekindling a dream Merian had in his own youth, so that when the properties were combined it was a sizable estate by any measure. There were also stores to be managed and disputes to settle and new tilling methods to try out, all of which suited him well, as he shared with his father a love for the land. He was in all other matters a quiet soul, and domestic life was too turbulent to him. He knew he must eventually either marry her or send her away, and he was not the one for marriage.

All that spring he stayed away from her, and eventually left her little gifts untouched by the door where she left them, until she stopped leaving things altogether. She determined in her heart then to leave that house and find work and a living elsewhere.

One day he came into the kitchen and found Sanne there with a girl he did not recognize. He did not think to say anything of it, but after a week of not seeing Adelia he did ask after her whereabouts. Sanne thought it was bold of him to mention her at all, but told him Merian had arranged for her to go work at Content’s place.

For a week he did not go, satisfied with merely knowing she had not gone too far off. Eventually, though, he had one of his bouts, as he had begun to refer to them, since they had become so frequent that they were no longer a separate part of his life and seemed to need to be called something. When it came it was like truth to him, and he went bravely, as he saw it, to seek her out.

When he entered Content’s the older man greeted him warmly, and they talked for a time about Merian, and then whether there had been word from Purchase – for his case was beginning to be known around the colonies and sometimes news or conjecture would reach them there in Berkeley. “What happened to him was a bewitching I would not wish on any man,” Content said, as he moved away to another customer, “but for you, Magnus, you know it is not so bad being close to someone else. Nothing at all for a man to fear. Then again, I am often surprised by what people do and don’t fear.”

“Will she see me?” he asked, when Content finished lecturing him.

“Ought she to?” he asked. “If you don’t know your own mind, you don’t need to go stirring her up again.”

“Well,” Magnus said, “to be all the way honest, Content, I don’t know if I know my mind or not. Some days I think about her and I am ready to be with her and all that means. Other days I think about it, and part of me doesn’t know if I can be with anything else that stirs.”

“Well, you are already with others that stir. What do you think Jasper thought when you showed up? It wasn’t, Can I be with another thing that stirs?”

“We are not the same.”

“It’s a matter of what is right to do.”

“Content, do you think it is more natural for a man to be with a woman all the time than for both of them to go about their business and come together when it suits them?”

“It might be or might not be,” Content answered, “but I don’t see what kind of coming together it can be, any more than beasts.”

“You think I should see her?”

“I think you should see her if you can get clear in your own heart what it is you want of her,” Content answered. “She is round back in the kitchen if you figure it out before closing.”

He did not go immediately round back, but took his glass to a far table, where he sat staring out the window, nursing both pint and thought. When he finished his drink he called Jannetje to bring him another, which surprised her, as he seldom had more than a single drink and that one more for social custom than want of beer.

As he looked through the window and waited for his pint, it began to snow, lightly at first but then becoming very dense and beautiful. The thick flakes fell all in a pattern that to him looked like a very cold night in winter set deep with stars. He drank and stared up until he felt himself beginning to move through them all into the deep infinite darkness. It was then, as he was rising up into the firmament, that he thought of the water for the first time in a great many years.

He is very young and his mother calls him to come with her to see Mr. Sorel, their master. The man who is his father visited recently and there was a great upheaval in their lives for a few days before settling back to normal, but this he feels is somehow part of that upheaval. She has scrubbed his shirt and combed his hair, and he knows that before this meeting there were others with their mistress that kept his mother agitated and on continuous edge.

Now as they prepare to go to the house, she is nervous and fidgets with the buttons on his blouse repeatedly until she is ready to go. At the main house they are taken into Mr. Sorel’s office, which he has never seen before and finds extremely frightening as they stand there. When Mr. Sorel greets them he is even more afraid, as the children on the place all try to avoid their master.

“My wife tells me you have something to request,” their master says to his mother, making what seems to him a point of not using her name.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Sorel,” his mother answered. “I was wanting to buy me and Magnus out.”

“Out of what?” Sorel asked.

“Out so we can be free,” she answered.

“Well, that is not generally my practice or view of business, Ruth,” he said, “but I tell you what I will do. I’m going to take this little boy of yours here and put him to a test. If he passes the test you can pay for both of you and go free. If he fails, though, you will stay on here until the end of your days, and so will he, and so will his children and so on, as the law says should be.”

“No, sir, Mr. Sorel,” his mother answered, “he’s just a boy and I don’t reckon he’s ready for tests.”

“Well, you have tested me already tonight, Ruth, so it’s my terms from here on.”

When they left the meeting his mother was crying sharply, and he drew near trying to console her. “I’ll pass whatever test he put me to,” he said.

Instead of being consoled, though, his mother began to cry even more, until he was afraid indeed.

That next morning a man came to their room to take him away. She gave him a kiss before relinquishing him. “They want everything,” she said. “If you ever make it back, just remember that. It is not human wanting that they have but something unmade and unnatural.”

He did not know what she meant for a long time, but he thought over what she had said as he sat in the back of the cart being carried away from her. When they arrived at the river, Mr. Sorel was there with some of his men and watched as those who had been sent to fetch him placed him in a large sack. The boy did not struggle but could only succumb to the power of his master’s men.

“Listen to me,” Sorel said, before they closed up the sack. “If you drown in this water your mother will get to have what she wants and go live with your sire, but if you live you will both stay on here exactly as you have been.”

He finished speaking and nodded for the men to close up the sack, crowding the child in dark fear. The boy breathed in quickly and deeply, hoping for air to be in him whenever the bag was tossed into the water. Finally, he felt himself up in the air; then a hard slap on the surface of the river and a frigid inrush of water as he hoarded his breath. The bag filled at first with a pocket of fresh air; then everything was water and he began to go very slowly to the bottom. He struggled against the sack, and struggled with it, until to his amazement it came open for him, and he began to swim up. As he swam he remembered his master’s words and thought whether to allow what it was his mother wanted so badly or what his body told him he ought.

As he thought of this, he felt a tap at his shoulder and Jannetje standing over him. He stood up to leave and made his way toward the door unsteadily, for he had been drinking the entire while. When he found his horse out in the pen, he brushed it briefly to give it some warmth, then stood in the stirrup.

As he began to head to Stonehouses, he looked back at Content’s place and saw Adelia in the kitchen through the snow. He stood there awhile, watching her in her movements against the yellow light from the warm room; then, when he thought he saw her turn to the window, spurred the horse for fear she might see him out there not knowing what to do.