Текст книги "Dominion"

Автор книги: Calvin Baker

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

“You look very pretty today, Adelia,” he said boldly, just as he had in the kitchen many years earlier.

He had not meant to invoke that memory and worried she would take offense, but Adelia only accepted the compliment with a bashful smile and withdrew into the kitchen.

Magnus realized he did not know where Merian was and searched for him throughout the house until he finally found him sitting in the parlor, where he had been counting what was lost to him and what was left. When he saw Magnus, the old man looked his son over and asked him what his plans for things were.

“No plans but what we have been doing,” Magnus answered.

“That is not what I mean,” Merian told him. “I mean what will you do with yourself when you are alone here?”

“There’s always someone about,” Magnus said to him.

“Ware,” his father said, “that is not good enough. Out here by yourself, this is the loneliest place known to the world.”

“Let me help you to your room,” Magnus offered. Merian, however, continued looking out his window.

“We are exiled here. One day, when we are purified, we will be rejoined with what is beloved.”

Magnus could see then the light had gone out from Merian’s eyes. He thought he knew what had propelled him in his ambition there, but he could see it die that day, and with that it seemed revealed to him that this was never what the older man really wanted but was some elaborate substitution for something that could never be attained.

For Magnus, though, this was what he wanted, a place of safety and security. There was nothing more behind it. Merian loved what he could create and had created, but Magnus he loved that he was without any other’s claim on him.

He helped Merian to bed, where he would sleep alone for the first time in thirty years.

When father and son awoke the next morning both were aware of how much emptier the house felt, a fact that each of them dealt with in quite his own way. After dressing Merian went into the kitchen and took a handful of meal from a cupboard, which he placed in a pot and mixed with water. When Adelia heard him, she came and offered to cook. Instead of accepting or relinquishing to her a place at the stove, he drove her off and continued preparing his own breakfast.

“If you don’t like my cooking you could have told me long ago,” she said. “I’ll be going back to Content’s first thing this afternoon.”

“I cooked for myself for many years,” he answered her, “until I had a wife; then I ate from my wife’s table, and only once another woman’s. You can cook for him.”

Magnus had entered the kitchen and was surprised to see his old father over the cooking fire. He had always suspected that it was the one thing in the world Merian had no idea how to do. The sight worried him, and he thought to remove him and let Adelia make breakfast. In the end he thought better of it; if things got no worse than this they would all be lucky. Adelia looked at Merian and then to Magnus for instruction, and Magnus nodded to let her know she should simply leave him to his devices for the time being.

After Merian had finished cooking his porridge, he removed himself to the dining room to eat alone. When Magnus entered the room Merian gave him an aggrieved look that let him know he wished to be left in peace that morning. Magnus turned and went back to the kitchen, where Adelia was frying eggs for his breakfast. When she brought them to him at the table, he took the plate and then called to her as she was returning to her duties.

“Why don’t you sit with me?” he asked.

Sanne was everywhere and on all of their minds that morning, including Adelia’s. She thought then of what her patroness had said when she had found her looking out of the window one afternoon. “Are you watching him?” she had asked.

When the younger woman admitted she had been, Sanne had said, “He will come to you. You will see. He only needs a bit more time.”

Adelia had not believed her, as she had already given him what she thought was all the time anyone could need, until she began to consider herself unwanted and ruined. When he asked her to sit with him that morning, though, she accepted his invitation so easily he thought she had been waiting for it, and that perhaps Sanne had said something to her after all.

Adelia sat down across from him, and the two of them had breakfast together that morning, and every morning in the future, from that day forward.

ten

The inland roads of the southern colonies were as strange to Rennton as the ice sheets of Greenland, and – knowing the business of their ports – he picked his way across them with as much care. After inquiring about until he found someone who knew the way to Berkeley, he hired a coach to take them as far as Edenton, where they stayed the night. In the morning, after presenting his papers, he secured passage to Bath. Once they arrived he purchased a horse for not too much money, but the dealer was unscrupulous and the beast only survived as far as the Indian fort. From there, man and boy had no choice but walk the remainder of the way.

It was five days through the wilderness, with the trail sometimes becoming nothing more than a footpath in the woodlands. How coaches came that way, if any ever ventured out there, one would be hard pressed to say. When the boy grew too tired to continue, Rennton at first would pick him up and carry him upon his shoulders, but the third time that Caleum cried weariness and requested this treatment, his guardian bid him to toughen up. “I’m not your mule,” the man said to his charge. “Now see if your legs aren’t a little hardier.” The boy responded dutifully after that, and even when his feet began to blister over and shred he refrained from complaining for the rest of the trip.

Nights they made camp in the naked air, and in the morning both were stiff from the cold and did not want to move from their pallet. Rennton invariably ventured forth first and boiled water on the camp embers for the few loose tea leaves he would throw into a pot. The two then ate hard biscuits and charqui saved from the ship before setting out on their campaign again. At midday they had the roasted carcass of a hare Rennton had caught two days earlier, when they first started out. “It isn’t much,” Rennton told him, “but safer than we would have been otherwise.”

All the while the boy did not object, and when they finally entered Berkeley he did not mention his aching stomach that felt as if a timeless hunger had settled there, until Rennton noticed a tavern and said he figured it was all right for them to enter inside.

After ordering food, they asked the serving girl for directions to a place called Stonehouses and were happy to see it was well known. “Who are you?” Content asked him, coming over to their table after the girl had given them directions, for he still minded the bar himself some days.

“I am a stranger here and at your mercy,” is all Rennton would answer, being as suspicious of Content as the other man was of him.

“You say you and your boy walked from the fort?”

“Aye.”

“Well, no need of paying for the supper. I’ll see if someone can take you on the rest of the way.”

Content then sent for a young man who worked for him and told him to hitch a wagon and drive the strangers out to Merian’s place.

The boy had been quiet since the ship docked, asking few questions, not even where they were going. He had hoped they were meeting his parents, but now he could not contain himself and asked Rennton where he was taking him. “Your father’s house,” the man answered the child, making the boy wonder that his father had a house he did not know about. “No, your father’s father,” Rennton explained. “I imagine it will be much the same.”

It was not.

When they pulled up in the wagon, Jasper Merian sat in the cold air on the porch as if he had been waiting on a visitor, and Rennton could tell right away he was at Purchase’s people’s place because of his carriage. When he announced his business and told of their journey there, Merian was very aloof with him but invited them indoors nonetheless. He next gave Magnus the note Rennton had given him, and Magnus read it over. After he finished it he went in his pocket and retrieved a handful of coins. “This is for your trouble and expenses,” he said handing Rennton the monies.

Rennton looked at the coins and they were a large sum indeed, far more than enough for his troubles. Why, if he wanted he could take the rest of the season off from the ocean. The house itself was more than he had ever known of any Negro to possess, save for the African kings, who everyone in his business knew were fatter with wealth than anyone else in the world.

“You are welcome to stay for dinner, but if you need to get back I can have a horse saddled for you that should serve better than the one you lost on the journey out,” Merian told his guest.

“I would be happy to stay on for dinner, if it’s no bother,” Rennton answered, as he was tired deep within himself.

The boy was pleased to hear this response, for he did not understand yet that he was to stay there and was glad to have time in one place instead of moving on immediately.

“Hello, Caleum,” Magnus said, going to greet the latest Merian to make his way onto the land. “I’m Magnus, your uncle, and this is your grandpa.” The boy shook hands with his uncle very precisely, then did the same with his grandfather.

Adelia, who had come from the back by now, gave the boy a great hug when he came to greet her. He was comforted by this warmness but also confused by all the attention he was receiving. “You must be tired from your trip,” she said. “You’ll feel better after a rest.”

Indeed, both Rennton and Caleum looked frightful from the voyage, and both were appreciative for the chance to restore themselves a bit. Magnus showed Rennton a room where he could sleep, and told him he could have a bath if he liked. Rennton declined, however, not being in the habit or wanting to imperil his health, even as he was tempted by the idea of such luxury.

Adelia had water raised from the well and heated in the kitchen, then poured into the laundry basin in the basement. When she took Caleum’s shoes off, she was shocked to see the condition his feet were in and nearly went off in search of the man who had let him walk such a way. Instead, she put ointment on his wounds and commended Caleum for being so brave.

When Magnus returned from showing Rennton his room, Merian was still in the parlor. “I wonder how they made that trip out here on the trail they did without getting killed,” Magnus wondered. “It was madness of him.”

“No more madness than when you walked here,” Merian reminded him. “Or when I did.”

“Both of us grown men who knew our own ambition and limits,” Magnus replied. “Not a six-year-old barely out of swaddling.”

“Well, it pleased the Lord to bring both of you,” Merian said, “just as it pleased Him to call Sanne home.”

Magnus at first thought to argue with his father but checked himself, not wanting to excite Merian into one of his more unpredictable moods. He saw the good wisdom of this when he looked at Merian and realized clearly his advancing age, as if he had all of a sudden willed the years to hurry on their course with him.

“Sanne would have given anything to see that child,” Merian said. “It broke her so to lose Purchase.”

Magnus was again silent, now wondering how they would raise the boy that had shown up out of nowhere.

Adelia, who had not yet been blessed with children, had no such reservations but took to Caleum wholly and immediately, thinking not only that Providence had given them a child but that Caleum was there to replace the loss of Sanne in the house.

It was evident at dinner that evening, as she doted over the latest arrival to the point of inflaming Magnus’s jealousy. “My father and I might like to eat as well,” he said, when she lingered over Caleum’s plate with the food for too long.

“No one is stopping you,” Adelia replied.

Magnus did not say anything to her in reply but reached for the serving plate and helped himself, as Merian looked on with bemusement. “It must be harder when they show up already grown, instead of giving you a chance to see them grow and get used to them.”

“You would know that better than me,” Magnus said, his bad mood spreading across the table.

“I have things to teach you yet,” Merian replied to his older son, as they finished dinner.

If they were tense with each other that evening, on account of what the new presence in the house meant to each of them, they were also very kind to Caleum when alone with him in the days immediately after his arrival. Merian especially liked to spend time with the boy, telling him of his father, Purchase.

“Your father used to sit out there by that tree and while away an entire afternoon, leaving the wood to stack itself,” he recounted. But he would also call him to tell him things he dared not say to others.

“I came out here just as you did,” Merian confided to him, “Magnus the same way. It was only Purchase who was born without ever running, but that he did later. You must remember to be pious in whatever way you can. Whatever covenant you make with them you must keep; only then will they ever consider to redeem you.”

The child, when he heard these things, did not think they were overly strange. His abandonment and then the trip on the boat had already taught him beyond his years, and he understood somehow what his grandfather meant – that he was preparing to die.

It took Magnus and Adelia far longer to take up the evidence of this. Even after Merian informed them all he had written a new will – which they would find after his death in the drawer of a certain desk – they were still unwilling to accept it.

“You will live to be a hundred,” Magnus told him.

“By God, not if I can help it,” Merian replied. He took his food then and retired to the parlor, where he ate alone.

Magnus thought he was only being difficult or else eccentric, as he could sometimes be, but Adelia figured out his true intent. “Your father is starving himself to death,” she told her husband one night in bed, after she discovered Merian’s bowl in the room where he ate.

From then on they watched over him with extreme care at mealtimes, but he managed to begin wasting nonetheless. The cause was not, as they first suspected, grief at being deprived of his wife and son, but the exact opposite. He now no longer hungered for anything in the world and so was done with it.

“I have done everything I set out to,” he answered them, unbidden, after making a final tally to himself. “All the rest is just waiting.” High among the list of those things he was proud of was the fortune he had amassed. “I’m richer than I ever dreamed, and would have made even more money, but I never bought a man, nor sold one, nor tried to haggle anyone out of money for their labor. If I had been luckier at parenting it might have been the utopia I set out to create.” He aimed his words at Magnus and Adelia, but he also made certain Caleum was around when he said them.

* * *

When the rest of the house retired for the evening, Magnus did not go immediately to bed but sat up worrying late into the night about the future of those at Stonehouses. When he finally did join her in their bed, Adelia was up waiting for him, but he was in no mood to share his thoughts.

“You will be good with the boy,” she said, reassuring him, as though she knew his innermost thoughts. “Everything will keep moving forward, as it always has out here with your father.”

It was not the first time he was glad to be married instead of carrying all the weight of his worries alone, but it was one of the most comforting moments for him to have a wife, being otherwise filled with the dread of his father’s passing.

Merian, however, was not yet ready to leave them despite all his talk of death. He would live for some time to come yet – a fact that soon became apparent when he stopped losing weight, as if his body had reached some new equilibrium. Their worries then shifted back to Caleum and their frustration that he could tell them no more about what had happened to his parents than they already knew. This was still in those early days, when he was becoming accustomed to having lost one home and gained another. He thought Stonehouses the best place on earth but longed for his parents, and a remainder of the dread that had infested him during that trip from Providence made him quiet when left alone.

He spent his days exploring the property, especially the outbuildings and far meadows. It was the first time in his short life he was not confined under his parents’ constant watch, and he delighted in it, even in the chores he was given to perform.

Seeing how well he liked work made Merian pleased as anything could make him, and he gave the boy his allowance at the end of every week gladly, telling him to be sure and keep a tally of how he spent it. There being little occasion to spend money, Caleum always accounted for last week’s earnings by saying he had saved it all, which pleased Merian even more.

“Your father couldn’t wait to spend it whenever he got a little money,” Merian said. Then, not wanting to bias the boy against his father, “Not that there’s anything the matter with spending. Saving, though, is what I always thought you should do with a shilling. But he wasn’t one to care for money – only other things, I guess.”

Thinking then to show him something of his father’s, Merian led the boy into the living room, where the blade Purchase had crafted for him long ago still hung.

Caleum, when he saw it, was awed as any boy who ever beheld a sword. However, he was taken not only with the fantasy of war but also the pictures on the side of the blade. “I know them!” he said, pointing excitedly at the images. “And look, there I am!”

Merian, no longer able to see very much at all, indulged the boy a little while but reminded him that Purchase had made the sword well before he was born, and such talk did not figure.

Caleum did not argue with his grandfather but knew he had seen himself prominently displayed. In fact, in the image he saw, there he was holding the self-same blade as that of his reflection. Finally he asked whether he could hold the weapon.

Merian first told him no but then relented. When he tried to raise it up, however, it was far too heavy for him, and Merian took it back, promising one day he would be able to raise it.

“When?” Caleum wanted to know, but his grandfather told him he would know when. Merian put the sword back in its scabbard then, but not before noticing the blade had grown hot, as if just taken from the furnace.

Caleum looked at it so longingly on the nail over the mantel, Merian wondered whether it had been a good idea to put such a notion in the child’s head.

He did not stop, though, confiding to his grandson all those things he had held to himself his entire life. Either because he felt he finally had a companion who was enough like him to understand or for some other reason, the two of them would sit out no matter the weather, and Merian would tell the boy tales and lore, until the only thing he had not properly recounted for him was the story of how the land was first settled, there being so much on the lifelong list of things Merian had done to relate that particular event did not make it, so that, as he had it, he came down from Virginia one year and after a little privation he was much the man he was at that moment.

When Adelia came upon the two of them, she would always reprimand Merian and take Caleum off to bed as he protested.

“Don’t worry, I am not done for this world yet,” Merian would tell the boy, somewhat morbidly, as he left.

After rising the next day and making himself a breakfast of porridge, he saddled a mule from the barn and made a tour of his lands. At the lake he stopped and heard the ice creak and, beneath that, the singing and distinct sound of a great passion. To anyone else listening, all in that area would have been silence, but Merian and the fiend had a catching up that did not displease either of them

That was the way Magnus found him, sitting on top of a mule on the edge of the thawing lake, muttering to himself, with a half smile. “I vanquished it, son,” he said. “I conquered everything you see around you.”

“You were very brave,” Magnus replied, taking the reins and leading his father’s mule back to the stable.

“I mastered the beast, and it was lonely, dangerous work,” his father said.

“It was for the better.”

“Everything I knew was behind me, and I did not know what lay ahead.”

“Great men have bowed before lesser challenges.”

“I kept the pact I made, and my sons should do likewise.”

“We are intent on doing our best.”

“No modesty in this, but life and death.”

“You must rest now,” Magnus said, leading man and beast into the barn.

“Bury me where I told you, and never let anything unsettle your peace here,” Merian said, finally allowing himself to be lifted from the saddle.

Magnus was surprised both by how superstitious his father had become and by how little he weighed as he carried him to bed. There Adelia tended to him, as she would have her own father, and he was glad for her attention, but he never recovered his full senses, and eventually even his memory began to die within him. “I was bonded, now am free.” What he clutched near himself then was his watch and an ugly carved doll he had kept all these years in the original cellar of the house and thought to retrieve that day. It was the face of the spirit he made all his pacts with, and as close as he ever cared to get to any god. No one commented on it but left it with him for comfort, though they were all of them Christian and would have no mandates with their father’s god. None except the boy Caleum, who asked questions about it and, more than a decade on, when Merian eventually died, took it upon himself to protect the little idol as an heirloom, much as he would cherish the sword his own father had made: all of them in equal measures the patrimony of Stonehouses and not uncommon in that particular time on the continent, like the promise and prophecy of fire.