Текст книги "Dominion"

Автор книги: Calvin Baker

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

five

Libbie had always heard about the generosity of those at Stonehouses to friends and strangers alike, especially when Jasper Merian was still in his prime. The winter she first made a home there, however, was the coldest time she had so far known in her remembered life. She was not in the main house, of course, but the new place Caleum had put up with Magnus’s help on the southern side of the lake, and she could not imagine a place of greater desolation and distance from life’s comforts.

She knew her husband had built their home with her in mind, and it moved her to see all he had done to make it pleasant for her; still, she could not help but notice what was absent. For instance, when he showed her the glassed-in windows that framed the parlor, with a view out to the blue-green waters of the lake – gathering both the eastern and western light of the sun as it passed through the day – instead of thinking herself lucky to have such a fine picture window, she wondered only how she would endure not looking out on the vista she was used to from her parents’ house. She always reprimanded herself after such a thought, but the glass in the window seemed hard and forbidding to her, as opposed to the warm wooden shutters with which she had grown up. Furthermore, the distance from Magnus and Adelia in the main house, to say nothing of the next nearest neighbor, seemed to her so great that they might as well have been at the other edge of creation.

The building itself was the same size as her parents’ home, but, because it was occupied by only the two of them, it felt massive and empty. At night it was especially barren, and there was an echo that reverberated through the halls, which reminded her that she no longer heard her mother’s voice in the morning, or even her brothers fighting with each other at all hours of the day.

“I have built it for us to fill together,” said Caleum, who had spent the entire summer with his uncle and two hired men building for them a small replica of the main building, and he could not believe she did not find it agreeable, as he himself felt very rich when he finished putting it up. “The parlor will be warm when you have made curtains of your own design for the windows. The empty sounds will be padded by the paper you hang on the walls. The echoing rooms will fill with our children.”

She listened to him attentively, and was soothed by his words, until she heard his voice say children. Children? She knew certainly it was part of what was expected of her; however, she had not thought what it meant until she heard it from his mouth. When he said the word so assuredly she felt a crisis of fear, as its reality was brought home to her. She did not know if she was brave enough to face the danger she knew birth to be. She started then to weep.

Her mother had lectured her on what she might expect during her first days and weeks of marriage. Even if it had been for the most part a pleasant picture, and she had entered married life optimistically, Libbie could not divorce it from the stories she had heard since her girlhood of women who died during their labors. So when her husband came into their bedroom that first night, despite all her excitement about their new marriage, and even the physical spark that had passed between them early in their courtship, she was afraid to be with him as his wife.

Caleum was mystified by her tears but tried nonetheless to console her. “You are only being homesick,” he reasoned thoughtfully, unaware of her growing panic. “You will get used to it here.”

She tried to stop her tears. “Yes, you are right,” she said. “I know we will have a successful marriage and life together.”

When she finally recovered from crying, he drew nearer to her. He was at first patient, thinking her reluctance was like her tears, and that it would pass just as soon as she became accustomed to him and her new surroundings. When his patience was not rewarded, though, he grew angry and became increasingly hostile in his entreaties.

This did not have the intended effect, however, so that in the end he backed down and drew to one side of their new bed. She stayed on her side, as each stared out separately into the first night of their life together.

“I don’t mean to be rough with you,” he told her from his side.

“Nor do I mean to keep myself from you,” she answered.

“We are married now.”

“For what it means.”

“It is supposed to mean we are bound up with each other for the duration of things.”

“What is it we will have to endure?”

“That I do not know, but I don’t mean to be rough with you either.”

“Nor do I mean to keep myself from you.”

Having reached an understanding in principle, they both relaxed slightly in the darkened room. They did not have a long history together that they could call upon, or even a fight before this one to use as trail mark, but they tried to find their way back to one another nonetheless.

“How will you decorate the house?” he asked her eventually.

“I don’t know. I’ve never had anything so big or empty to try and fill.”

“I will help you in it.”

“You mean you will help me with the sewing and choosing fabric for curtains?” She laughed.

“No, not the curtains, but I might have something to say about the tableware,” he replied lightly, making her giggle even more. “I knew from the very first that you should be my wife and all that means,” he said then, catching her unaware with tenderness.

“As did I,” she answered him, finding herself grown less afraid.

He ventured then to approach nearer to her and reach out with his fingers for hers under the covers. She seized on them violently, and he could tell by this pressure what it was the matter.

“Are you afraid?”

“Mm-hm.”

He could not truthfully tell her not to be, because he was amateur as she and not so experienced as to give advice. However, he took care to show her every consideration after that, so when he moved closer beside her, she did not startle but simply closed her eyes. She knew it was part of her duty and was also anxious to have it be over, and as he inched closer to her she felt herself on the edge of some radiant mystery, which she understood to be general knowledge among her sex, but nonetheless seemed colossal as she lay at its gateway.

As she relaxed, Caleum’s thoughts and actions juggled between giving attention to her, his own nervousness, and the sheer excitement he felt at being upon his marriage bed. Under his touch her anxiousness began to pass and her senses awaken. They kissed passionately after that for a great long time, and began to explore each other as they had not before. Try as they might, though, neither of them could quite get used to the fact that their actions were not illicit. Because of this there was not any great freedom their first night together, but general awkwardness, and they were both happy to keep the covers pulled up as they explored and found their way beneath them. Their lovemaking then was clumsy and awkward as birds taking flight for the first time.

When it was over, their early embarrassment returned to them and they could only hope that, in time, it would do so less and less.

Nor was Libbie so afraid of her new husband anymore, or so fearful of the idea of babies, and in the days that followed they stayed near each other until they began to grow quite comfortable around each other’s nakedness.

The new surroundings were another matter. When Caleum left during the day to go work on the land, Libbie felt utterly deserted out there on the far side of the lake. She would busy herself with cleaning in the morning, but, the place lacking furniture, she was soon done. She would then plan the meals for midday and evening, but as there were only the two of them it was no great affair. Afternoons were spent in the chores of the farm and those did not vary, so she was soon bored by the ones in her own house as she had been in her parents’.

Her only respite from this tedium would come when she thought of some excuse to walk the half mile to the main house for a visit. Sensing how alone she felt on these occasions, Adelia would also come over and visit out there when she could. The main topic of their discussion then was how the rooms should best be finished. As the weather worsened, though, neither of them could make the trip as easily or as frequently. When winter fastened its grip, Adelia encouraged Libbie to throw herself into this work, as the only way she would ever feel at home in her new place. “You have to make it your own,” she admonished, with a mixture of sympathy and firmness. “It is your only home now.”

Libbie took this advice perhaps too much to heart that first winter. The wallpaper she decorated the living room with was an almost exact match from her mother’s house, the only difference being a graduation of color from straw yellow to gold. The furniture she ordered was the same as well, so much so that when the cabinetmaker was uncertain of something she had described he would go by the Darson house to reexamine the original. The only thing she made exception for was the fabric she used to decorate the windows, bedclothes, and cushions. “Each of these has its own character,” she claimed, examining the material.“It’s own thing it needs to be to bring the house lively.”

It was as she set about trying to create the house dressings and furniture that she began to find the character of her new rooms. A blue that was originally intended to upholster the sofa might instead become curtains for the windows. The eggshell-colored material meant to be used for the curtains then become the bed sham, and the burgundy she had intended to use as a simple design for pillows turned into a foot-stool for Caleum.

Her husband was happy she had found something to apply her attention to, and he was not in the least bothered by some of the bolder choices she had made, finding the house both more comfortable and more an expression of his wife’s personality instead of merely a miniature version of the place where she had grown up. As her work progressed the bare rooms became a welcome retreat for them when that cold winter stretched on longer than usual.

In the morning Caleum would leave before daybreak to attend to the winter work of the farm. During the morning hours, if she had no other substantial chores, Libbie would sit by the window, doing her sewing or embroidering, staring out at the white blanket of snow spread over the hill country. She was by herself all day and all those long hours, surrounded by the still whiteness of the landscape and her own work inside.

She began slowly to grow used to it and, though she had not forgotten her childhood home, was even able to imagine a future for herself there. When the holiday season arrived, though, she began to grow terribly sick after Caleum had gone. She wanted nothing more then than to return to her father’s house, where she knew she would be well cared for. Instead, she took to her bed.

When Caleum returned in late afternoon and she finally stood again, she was still light-headed as nausea gripped her entire body. Alarmed by this, Caleum did the only thing he could think of, which was to go to the main house for help.

When she heard Libbie was sick Adelia took immediate charge, telling Rebecca, her maid, to pack a basket with salts, medicinal roots, and certain herbs that she pointed out in one of the cupboards in the kitchen. When the parcel was prepared, they set out for the other house.

They found Libbie lying in bed, shaking and terrified, as she was so often that first year. Adelia began by asking her when it all started and the exact nature of her symptoms, as Caleum sat helpless and very still at her side.

As Adelia slowly began to hone in on the exact nature of her complaint, she asked Rebecca and Caleum to leave the room so she might have privacy with Libbie. The two of them then spent about twenty minutes talking alone together. Adelia, when she had finished her interview, left the bedroom and mixed a potion of ginger and wild yam root, which she said would make the nausea go away, and told Rebecca to take it to Libbie in her room. She then gave instructions for Caleum to go out and dig up a pound of choice clay.

“What is the clay for?” he asked.

“Just go, dear,” Adelia answered. “I will tell you everything when you return.”

Caleum went off, annoyed that he was being treated like a child again. Nevertheless he took a shovel from the barn and walked half a mile out to the hillside, where they always dug the best clay for firing bricks. After throwing off the snow that had accumulated on top of the ground he attacked the frozen earth with an edge of the shovel, until he had carved the outline of a square. He then stood on top of the shovel with all his weight trying to break this portion free of the ground around it.

The clay, which was beige in summer, was dark with frost and coldness, and it took him the better part of an hour to remove enough to satisfy Adelia’s demand. Once he had, he hastened back across the frozen fields to the house, so Libbie’s pain might be eased and to learn what was the matter with his wife that she needed dirt.

When he reentered the warm house, he found Libbie sitting up without discomfort for the first time that day, for which he was already thankful to his aunt. Adelia was not done with her cure, however, but took a small piece of the clay he had brought back and fed it to Libbie. “Take the same amount every morning,” Adelia instructed, after Libbie had swallowed the medicine. “You’ll see you feel better directly.”

“What is the matter with her?” Caleum asked, no longer able to remain patient and beginning to fear he had married a sickly woman.

“Why, she is pregnant,” Adelia replied.

Libbie looked at him and smiled weakly. He smiled back at her. She did not seem as afraid as she had been when he first brought her there to Stonehouses. The same, though, could not be said of Caleum himself.

“What do you suppose of that?” he asked, of no one in particular.

“I suppose it means you’re going to have a child,” Adelia answered, with a tone that struck him as slightly mocking.

“Thank you,” Caleum retorted. “Whatever would I do without such sound advice?”

Seeing that he was not happy as would be expected but nervous about Libbie’s new state, Adelia was softer with him. “You should be thankful,” she said. “It has been a long time since Stonehouses was blessed with the sound of a baby’s crying and laughter.”

“Of course, Aunt Adelia,” Caleum said, “I am very glad for it. It is just that I am anxious to do everything properly.”

“You will, husband,” Libbie said to him, knowing how important that was to him. “It isn’t, after all, like I am first ever to have a child.”

In the days that followed, though, both Caleum and Libbie were nervous about even the smallest things, so that instead of simply taking a pinch of clay with her fingers to eat each morning, Caleum and Libbie took a balance and weighed the exact amount so it should never fluctuate from what Adelia prescribed.

When Magnus saw how worried his nephew had become over his wife’s health, he decided to help relieve his burden by hiring a maid to help them. At first he thought to send Rebecca over to the other house, but Adelia told him medicine was specialized knowledge, and Rebecca would probably cause more harm than help. He then cast about among the other women on the place to see if any were knowledgeable about midwifery and general medicine. When he failed to find any on his own land, he put word out among his neighbors that he was in need of a nursemaid for his daughter-in-law.

Eventually a small brown woman with red-colored hair and the scars of pox on her skin turned up at the door, announcing herself as Claudia and saying she had come about the midwife job. She was the slave Julius’s older sister, and like her brother she was hired out at whatever tasks were available, to earn an income for her master as well as her own keep.

When Magnus interviewed her he was at first happy, thinking she would be perfect, as she was not too much older than Libbie and so could serve as a companion as well. When he thought about Caleum’s friendship with her brother, though, he was made wary she might take it as license to overstep her bounds. When he considered she was a slave on top of this, he was struck with further uncertainty, as there had never been anyone working at Stonehouses who was not free to command their own time and labor.

“It isn’t as if we would be holding her in bondage,” Adelia argued that night in bed, as they tried to decide whether they should hire Claudia or not. “We are giving her work and paying her a wage for it.”

“It’s not Claudia we are paying but her master,” Magnus countered. “She will have to give him whatever she earns.”

“Then we can pay her something just for her, perhaps,” Adelia said, wanting the matter settled quickly. “You’ll be doing well by both of them.”

Magnus’s mind was still undecided when he woke up the next morning, and sought out Caleum to see what the younger man thought about the idea, thinking to give him final say, as it was after all his roof and not Magnus’s she would be housed under.

Caleum, uncertain of the future and wanting whatever support he could have, was of the same opinion as his Aunt Adelia, telling Magnus that they would be doing Claudia a great favor. “Now she has to find work week to week with no guarantee of anything but that she will be hungry again,” he reasoned logically. “Here she will have steady employ and steady meals. She is after all the person most suited. Perhaps we might even try to acquire her outright from her master, and let her use her salary to repay us.”

Magnus was set against the last part of Caleum’s scheme, as it would violate all Jasper Merian stood for, even if it would benefit everyone concerned. He looked at the younger man a long time when he said it, thinking Caleum must eventually decide the affairs of his own house.

* * *

Magnus hired Claudia to the position that next afternoon, sending money to her owner in advance for the first six months of her services, so as not to have regular dealings with him.

It was a happy arrangement for all in the end, and Libbie’s pregnancy proceeded smoothly, until one day – when Claudia was at the original house with Adelia and Libbie, who was then in her seventh month of pregnancy – Jasper Merian asked who she was.

He was blind as an oracle by then and shriveled as a date in a jar at the bottom of the sea. According to the birthday he had given himself when he emerged from captivity, he was eighty years old, and Magnus had long since stopped consulting him in day-to-day decisions, he being no longer able to discern right from wrong, sense from nonsense – or so it seemed.

When Claudia answered, “I belong to Mr. Barrett and come from his place to help Libbie with her baby,” Merian grew so agitated he started to shake in his seat. Everyone watching was terrified for his health, thinking he was having a convulsive seizure. When it became clear, however, that it was anger that vibrated so through him, they grew even more afraid.

Alas, he could not voice what was in his heart to say. He ended up slurring the beginning of a single word, which was all he could manage, before losing completely the power of speech. Everyone present tried then to decipher what he had attempted to tell them.

He had little formal religion, aside from being once baptized, and he had done as much that was worldly as any man who ever lived, but what they all thought he said was shame, or else it was sin. It was hard for Magnus, who was sitting closest to him, to know which, but that it was one of them – perhaps even both – he had little doubt. He began to cast about then for some way to remedy the problem, for if he had heard correctly it was very serious business for them all.

“Do you want me to send her away?” Magnus Merian asked his old father in quiet tones, drawing nearer to hear what he would say. Merian shook, and sounded out no, and Magnus comprehended that the thing was done and sending her away would only compound it.

Jasper Merian sat up in his high-backed chair and pounded his fist weakly on the table, until his anger subsided. He had toiled there near half a century without resorting to either imprisoned or indentured hands to win a livelihood. He had given the same edict to each of his sons as he himself had lived by, hoping they would hold it as dear as he did. For the two, son and grandson, who walked on his dirt every morning and evening, it should have been obvious what free hands could do, and never miss anything for their lack of knowing chains. God had blessed them out there on that land, without ever showing too much the stronger force of His love. He saw doom now before himself.

Magnus tried to explain the logic that had brought the girl there. Seeing Merian still unsatisfied, he offered again to send her away. Merian only shook. And there could be no other word in the matter.

Jasper was exhausted from emotion and the effort required to communicate with his family. Where only a minute earlier he had seemed furious as an angel, he looked now again like a feeble old man and soon began to sleep where he sat, like a child too long awake. However, they could not dismiss his anger. On the contrary, everyone took it gravely and tried whatever they could to reverse its course and cause.

While they usually had a country preacher who came to the house every Sunday to give a sermon – as he did for all the estates with population enough – that week Adelia had everyone dress for church in town.

The four of them – Magnus, Adelia, Caleum, and Libbie – all shared a single cab and were silent on the way, none daring look at the others or mention what had happened out there. It was the middle of winter and the going was slow, but when they arrived they had been silent a long time and were happy to be in the fresh air again.

All their friends were glad to see them as well and congratulated Libbie and Caleum on their pending child. The family’s mood remained solemn. Magnus, in accordance with the plan Adelia had devised, paid the preacher to have the congregation pray for them at Stonehouses. In Adelia’s thinking it would wash away whatever ill any of their other decisions might have brought and bring forgiveness.

Too ashamed to tell the real need for absolution, what Magnus said, as Adelia had instructed him, was that his old father was very ill and he would like everyone to send prayers to heaven for him to recover and for his soul if he did not. The parishioners were all touched and only too eager to comply with this request, as Jasper Merian had lived so long and been there so long with them.

Nor was this ruse merely a deception: Jasper was mortally ill. He had lost as well, it seemed, the will to go on. While everyone around thought he might live to be a hundred, he had no desire in him to do so. Even before he lost the power of speech, he often claimed he had only stayed around as long as he had in order to gain back the years lost to servitude near the beginning of his life. So when Magnus and Adelia asked that everyone pray for their father, all understood they were seeking for him a final blessing.

Jasper Merian himself might have argued that the care of neither one’s soul nor other properties could be left to others. As he faced his death, though, locked in a state of inarticulation, he sent one day for Caleum. When Caleum came to him Merian labored with all his breath to say what it was he wished of the young man. The syllables as they left his mouth were all disconnected, but Caleum was able to puzzle them back together. His grandfather was instructing him about the care of his home and children, and even how he should name his own.

Caleum was always eager for his grandfather’s advice, but this particular instruction seemed strange, and at the time he did not fully understand it. He swore nonetheless he would abide by it. For Merian it was part of his final reckoning, as he counted out the successes and failures of his life and worried for the last time over the survival of all at Stonehouses.

Had he had voice, he might have enumerated his two natural sons, a like number of wives, and half that for grandchildren, so far as he knew; over fifty years of freedom, a quarter century, or thereabouts, in bondage at Sorel’s Hundred. His own parents he never knew, but how he came to Columbia had been for a while a famous story in the watery parts of the world. He counted both, the legend it engendered and the fate he had escaped, as among his worthy possessions and achievements.

His original father, it is said, was a seaman – though his origins before or beyond that are unknown to any record – who took a wife on the African coast. When he returned to her after an adventure that took him all the way to the South China Sea, he found she had taken another man in his place. To punish her and the son she had borne, he sold both to a merchant vessel. Such was the fate of the infant Merian and his mother.

On shipboard his mother suffered from a severe illness, succumbing to fever that swept the vessel two days out. When she died they brought her infant abovedecks, where it was taken to the captain’s quarters for instruction on whether it should join the mother at the bottom of the ocean, as was the custom. The captain, a man in his forties who had already made enough money to retire and was in fact plowing this route through the world for the final time, looked at the wrinkled creature they had brought to him, and for the first time on his journeys let show some small sympathy, some tiny, infinitesimal human heart. Instead of putting it where the mother was, he took the child and kept it with him for the rest of the journey, feeding it with milk from an onboard she-goat that had been intended for slaughter.

He took it ashore with him when he disembarked in Liverpool, and when he and his wife moved to the new colony some years later he took the boy with him there as well, having grown as attached to the creature as a familiar. When he cleared land for a farm the boy was with him still, and he called him little Columbian, as he seemed to take to this new place naturally. So Merian counted for himself four parents but no proper home, until he built Stonehouses with his own hands.

It was this he worried over at the end of his days when he gave his final instructions to Magnus. Their congress that afternoon was the last time Merian worried about earthly things.

When Jasper Merian finally died, the shadow on the sundial in his front garden stood exactly at noon, and all the hours of the day afterward were plunged in sadness for the residents of Stonehouses. Work on the land came to a halt. Neither the hired men nor the beasts they drove would work again before Merian’s body was lowered into the earth.

Magnus was at one end of the fields when he heard, and Caleum at another, and both made their way home to the center of the land, where the women were already dressing and preparing the body.

Merian, like his sons, had been a behemoth in life, and everyone remembered him as one of the tallest men they had ever seen. But when Magnus Merian saw his naked father that afternoon he could scarcely believe how small he was, like the tiniest of babies. When he called the carpenter to take measurements for a coffin and the man confirmed his actual measurement, he told him to build the box larger than they needed, because it also needed to encase his spirit, and that was giantsized still.

At the funeral the next day Merian would have hardly recognized a soul, as most of his peers had passed on before him. All the neighbors came out, though, and from town the daughters of Content with their husbands. Both the Methodist and Baptist preachers wanted to give the sermon, and argued among themselves about who should have the privilege. In the end both men spoke, each competing to outdo the other in oratory.

Rudolph Stanton sent over a full kitchen staff, so that no one at Stonehouses should have to work that day, as well as a group of musicians to entertain, such as was their custom, and they celebrated Merian’s life until the end of the week, each man according to his fashion. It is said the main of these festivities were divided between those that were African and those that were Christian, but others spoke of strange goingons that belonged to customs no one had ever heard of. They spoke of seeing lights, and spectral phenomena, and claimed to feel such magic as they never had before, as the ice on the lake groaned like the world coming apart.

When things finally returned to normal and work again resumed on the land, Caleum came in from the fields one evening and, without knowing what prompted him, took down the sword that hung over his mantel. There he saw the strangest thing of all. On the blade he would swear, as he stood there afright, was his grandfather, at the prow of a ship headed on a voyage of shades.

His eyes were sharp and he stood again a full head and a half taller than other men, and the boat went where he commanded. Whether in search of Ruth or Sanne or his father and mother, or even a trip more mysterious, the writings fail to say. But that Jasper Merian was a giant as great as Columbia had ever seen is well agreed upon. And that he is gone from here. Aye that is carved in steel.