Текст книги "Dominion"

Автор книги: Calvin Baker

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

Angus, drenched in sweat, saw him in the far distance and began to quicken his pace, though where he found the energy and stamina no one could tell, but as he looked at Sam’s back he hated all he saw and worked as if moving through the plants quickly would bring him closer to annihilating the object of his ire. As he worked his rage grew, until he found himself inventing new categories of it to indulge his intemperate passion. I hate the African, he began. I have always hated his tongue, his dress, his manner. Nay, he has no manners. I detest men who eat their corn in rows instead of columns, he added, until he could truthfully say the problem with the world was Africans who ate their corn lengthwise instead of going all the way round as was proper.

Sam in his row could sense Angus gaining, but from pride refused to turn around and look. Nor did he have the energy to spare. He willed his hands to keep moving, though they were already cut and bleeding from his efforts.

A gold coin for Sam Day, he said to himself to heal the pain, and the other I’ll spend just on Effie.

He could see the last tobacco leaf at the end of the row and willed himself to keep moving. He thought of the freedom he would gain with it – to be master and overlord of his self unbound. He thought of the land he would buy and the house he would put up there. He thought of the crops he would grow, one field just for the herbs he used in the practice of his religion and medicine. He thought of the first home he lost and what it would be never to stand in danger of losing so again.

When he reached the last plant he heard a great cry go up as he put his black hand out to clasp it. He broke the stem and lifted the wide leaf, feeling victorious and expansive. As he turned to stack it with the others, though, he saw Angus Carson there, smiling in the periphery of his vision. The cheers belonged all to Angus’s men and those of Sam’s who had turned their sentiments toward the winner of the race – as some men inevitably do after a contest has been decided – but it was false noise as the winner was he who harvested the most weight, not who was fastest.

As he sat down and rested, his woman, Effie, came over and kissed him on the cheek, proud that he had done so well. Sam, feeling only his defeat, brushed her kisses away.

The curers came round then to collect the last of the leaf, weighing it, and working quickly to string it all onto poles. On the giant scale the leaves crested and ebbed, before finally coming to rest as the balance groaned, then settled. The results were impossible to tell beforehand, for everyone except Angus and Sam themselves, as the contest was nearly dead even according to the scales. Both men had gathered near twelve stones in weight, but Angus had pulled a dozen and one.

Sam sat down on his haunches in the dirt and took a long drink of water from a dipper. As he looked up, he saw a shadow looming over him. It was Angus Carson, and he moved quickly, lest Carson kick him where he sat.

“You’re a hell of a man for one who never did this work before,” was all Angus said, extending his big maw of a hand.

Sam did not want to accept his defeat again, but he shook anyway, though he did not speak.

By then the evening sun had all but disappeared from the horizon, and there was little left of its light except the last red-golden rays. The men added to this the light of bonfires, which they had set up all around the camp to mark the end of their taskwork. Magnus watched it all from astride his favorite horse, who was called Annabel, as he had watched the harvest all day long. He dismounted then when the results were settled and called for silence as he reached in his pocket for the coins.

“Angus, you proved yourself once again to be the best worker of all my men and, I would wager, equal to any in the entire colony.”

He gave him his prize, which Angus measured in his palm with relief and satisfaction before slipping one into each of his pockets for safety.

“The contest this year was better than any other, though, and it would be a shame if that went unacknowledged,” Magnus went on, going into his purse again. “Sam, this is yours,” he concluded, “for making a show that in any other year, or on any other farm, would have won you two.” He then handed Sam a single glittering gold coin, which seemed to him as he received it to slip through the light like a fish through a stream of water.

He held it in his palm for a good long time, examining all the strange letters and markings embossed upon it, which were all indecipherable to him except the image of a crown. At last he closed his fingers around the warm metal. He thought how much he had done to get it, and how it had excited and divided all the men in the barracks.

“What do you suppose it be worth?” he asked Effie, finally putting it away and turning to his woman.

“Why, Sam, it be worth a whole lot,” she said. “A whole lot.”

The men all congratulated him on his great showing as the night wore on, but the excitement had faded from the air, and to rekindle it someone had started up a series of games. First there were to be foot races, then wrestling, and someone else suggested boxing, but Magnus vetoed that idea, knowing it would surely get too far out of hand.

When they began the wrestling, Caleum ached to join in the trial, as he had with his friends when he was younger, knowing he could defeat any other man there, but Magnus also put a halt to that notion, claiming the reason for his decision should be self-evident. Caleum accepted his uncle’s authority but only reluctantly, because he loved few things so much as a contest and knew no one could beat him.

“If you did win, you would rob the men of a prize, and if you didn’t win it would just never do,” Magnus said to him, as he watched the two final contestants circle each other inside the ring of men.

Magnus then left that circle and made his way through the bonfires and the music to seek out his slave Sam Day. When he found him, at the edge of the gathering, where he was drinking rum punch, he drew him away from the crowd, saying only that he would like a moment of his time. It pleased Sam to be spoken to this way, and, though he was much absorbed in the other games, he went willingly with Magnus to hear what his master had to say to him.

They walked together away from the others, and Magnus was not commanding and aloof as usual but waited so that Sam was at his side and stayed there as they made their way across the cow-shorn grass of the home meadow.

“Sam, I should never have taken you from the home you knew,” Magnus said, without looking at him, as they rested at the top of a rise. “I had a problem, and I let that get the better of what I knew to be right, so we have some business to settle between us.”

Sam listened without saying anything, but he was surprised to hear Magnus admit his fault, as that was not usual to hear from men who owned other men.

“I told you when I brought you here you could go at the end of the season,” Magnus reminded him, as they surveyed the land out to the edge of their sight and the darkness beyond that. “I didn’t know how to do it sooner, on account of not knowing what the town would think of me buying slaves just to turn them loose. You’ll have your wages, though, Sam, same as everyone else; then you can set up on your own. I suppose somewhere out here on my land.”

“You would give me a part of your land?” Sam asked incredulously.

“Not give, Sam,” Magnus corrected him. “Sell.”

“Master Merian,” Sam said, looking his owner in the eye, “I know what kind of problems plagued you before, and I don’t blame you too much for what you did. We both know, though, that if people think you buying slaves just to turn em free, they run both of us out from Berkeley.”

“I thought about it, Sam,” Magnus interrupted him, “and I think it’s what’s best. I can grapple with the consequences. The only other thing is for you to head out with the caravans at the end of the month, and that’s still a hard road.”

Sam looked at Magnus and understood what he meant. “I know ain’t nothing free to a certain way of thinking,” Sam said. “How much you think a plot of land cost me?”

“I’ll think of something fair,” Magnus answered him. The two of them then stood looking out over the country. “There’s a place out that way that might suit you just fine,” Magnus went on. “Good land too if you got a mind to do a little work, which I know you do.”

When he was Sam Day’s age Magnus had already been free for more than a decade, and he had been free now almost as long as he was captive. He did not know if Sam could learn everything he needed so late in life, and to manage his own place instead of just taking on itinerant work. The thought of him and Effie out there by themselves gave him pause, as he knew how difficult it would be, but he was willing to do it because he knew he had to restore the balance he had upset. “Tell you what, Sam, I’ll give it to you for your wages from this season,” Magnus said. “Then you’ll still have enough to start out with, and you can do some work around Stonehouses during the fall to earn a little extra.”

“Let me weigh it over, Master Merian,” Sam said, reckoning the prospect of turning into a farmer. “It’s not something I ever had a notion of before, so I need some time to wrap my mind about it and talk to Effie.”

“It’s good terms,” Magnus said, without telling him the only thing he himself had ever got such good terms for was Sam Day himself.

“I never thought getting sold away would work out like this,” Sam said to him.

“You know, I was once a slave, Sam,” Magnus said to him, trying to express what he felt just then.

“Couldn’t nobody never have told me that.”

“Well, I was.”

When Sam looked at Magnus at that moment, his master was a mystery to him: that a man who had been a slave could take one for himself. He did understand, though, why he was being set free.

“I’ma put a blessing on this place for you, to keep anything wrong from ever happening to it again,” he promised, having learned by then the original reason he was called there in the first place. It was his word, not as one grateful returning a favor, but as a doctor and expert in the workings of complex roots and hidden phenomena.

eight

It started raining the first of September that year, and rain was still descending violently two weeks later when the western caravans set out from Berkeley. Three-quarters of the way back in the train, Sam Day and Effie drove a used wagon he had bought cheap from the wheel-wright, because it tilted a little more to one side than the other and there was no way of fixing the condition. It was drawn by two piebald hinnies he had also gotten a deal on, who were the strangest animals he thought he had ever seen. They pulled his wagon without complaint, though, and he held the reins, guiding them westward with all the provisions he had bought for what he hoped would be his best chance in life. Nor did he have illusions it would be anything but difficult. He knew as well there was no real place for him anywhere else anymore, except that he might make one in a new country. Effie would go wherever her man did, but she was powerful afraid to be giving up Berkeley and Stonehouses, and she had heard many frightening tales about the western lands.

She knew in the end that her husband would never be satisfied to live as a near fugitive in Berkeley, and there could be no other life, and but few opportunities, for them there, with everyone knowing them from before, no matter his new status as a freedman.

Before they left, Sam gave Caleum a bag filled with a powerful concoction of plants and animal bones, with which to soothe the ground his house was set upon. “Every time you break the earth or otherwise interrupt the natural world, you have to heal it again,” Sam had said, walking around the house until he found the spot he was looking for. “You bury this right here, and things will be back to how they’re supposed to be.” In truth he had felt very strong energies coming from the land there from the moment he arrived and was not sure his craft was powerful enough to placate it. But he knew they had always had good fortune there at Stonehouses, and eventually whatever had been upset would be restored, as things always go back to being in the right balance. Still, he wished sincerely his charm would speed that process along for them, for he truly wanted nothing but blessing for the people of Stonehouses.

Whether it was only bad luck or a curse placed upon them, Caleum and Libbie’s problems did not end with Sam’s interdiction – but they weighed a bit less heavily upon them that entire autumn and winter, and the rift that had developed since the death of their child, keeping man from wife and vice versa, began at last to abate. The good spirits of the harvest, along with the shift in seasons themselves, made them feel closer again, and they began to spend the still temperate nights sitting out-of-doors together on a bench that looked out over the lake, talking until the cool hours of early night.

They went to bed on these nights very much enchanted with each other, as they had been when they were newlyweds. “We will have another child,” Caleum said to her that fall, after the caravans departed but before winter had set in. “You will see. We will have a whole house full of them.”

“We will have what it pleases God to allow us,” Libbie said solemnly.

In her heart she wanted the same thing he did and felt great affection for him when he spoke so boldly, wanting for their house to be filled. She dared not say so, though. She was no longer fearful of birth, as she had been on her wedding day, but she had new apprehensions about motherhood, including that it was possible she would never know its particular satisfactions, and so began to treat everything to do with children with superstition. So much so that when she first suspected she might be pregnant again she kept the news to herself for as long as possible, which was a great many weeks. At last, as they cleaned the kitchen one day, Claudia turned to her mistress without further remark and said, “You pregnant, Miss Libbie. You might better sit down.”

Libbie wondered then how long Claudia had known of her condition, or whether she had only just figured it out. Whichever the case, she knew her state would soon betray itself and thought it best to tell Caleum before it did, lest he accuse her of ill intent.

When she revealed her pregnancy in their bedchamber that night, Caleum was elated and showed none of her caution. “You see, it’s just as I said it would be,” he said. “And so close to Christmas!”

“Please, husband, don’t blaspheme,” was her hushed answer to his unchecked joy.

Adelia and Magnus were also reserved in their expression of emotion, having been cut down before by tragedy. “Perhaps Libbie should take to bed,” Adelia suggested to Claudia, when the winter holidays drew near. “She must be careful not to overexert herself.”

Claudia herself was of the opinion that hard work in the months before led to an easy labor, but in the end she acquiesced and Libbie was confined to her bed as the holiday preparations took place all around her. At first she protested against her idleness, but soon grew content being waited on by Claudia; as the smells of baking reached her, she began to feel as she had as a little girl in her parents’ house before Christmas.

This bred in turn its own nostalgia and melancholy, and in order to keep it at bay she began to embroider a scene of the first Christmas she could remember. She was a little girl and her brother Eli had just been born. Her young parents were filled with merriment; in her mind’s eye she saw them both smiling broadly. It was mild that year and she remembered everything being green on Christmas Day – not only the tree in their yard but also the landscape all around them. She received for gifts that Christmas a doll with a lovely dress and a small, bright round ball of a kind she had never seen before. When she held it before her face its smell tickled her nose, making her shriek. “Papa what is it?” she asked excitedly.

He told her it was called an orange, and that she was supposed to eat it.

She laughed gaily at this. It was so lovely she was drawn to taste it, but she could not imagine ruining such a wonderful gift. Instead, she carried it around with her doll, until eventually her mother remarked that her father had gone to great bother to get it for her, and if she didn’t eat it soon it would rot, leaving her neither toy nor fruit.

She sat down dutifully and, after her mother started the process, finished peeling the rind from the flesh. She was then careful to remove all the fuzzy white strings and divided the sections evenly. When she brought one of them to her mouth and bit into it, the thing was like a secret in her mouth. She could not believe she had carried it around with her for so long without knowing what it truly was. As if to make up for being such a slow learner she devoured the first six sections hungrily, as if she had never eaten before. With the last four slices, though – there were ten in all she remembered, for she had counted carefully – she became miserly again. She lined them all in a row on the kitchen table and allowed herself one every thirty minutes, so they lasted her almost until suppertime. The last hardened slice, though, she shared with her doll, thinking to be generous with her new treasure.

When she was done she went and thanked her father again for the orange. “It was the best thing I ever ate,” she told him. He smiled at her and reached into his pocket, from which he pulled out another.

“I was saving this, but since you like them so much why don’t you have it,” he offered. She could not believe her good fortune but took the orange from him and ran around the room, laughing in happiness.

This was the scene she tried to embroider as she lay in bed: a family at the holidays and a little girl eating an orange. It was very difficult, as the orange always seemed too big and the girl too small, but when Caleum saw it he proclaimed her work so well done he could smell the fruit itself on the fabric. He always loved her creations and found they put him in whatever mood she had hoped to invoke.

“You’re the best wife a man could have,” he said, sitting down beside the bed. “All will be safe.”

She smiled at him, as she thought how one day she must create a scene that was not only from her own head but from their life together there at Stonehouses. Alas, it would not be one from that winter.

With the exception of Christmas Day itself, she stayed in bed through the holidays until the first of the New Year – though she counted it bad luck to be idle on New Year’s Day. She ate the food Claudia prepared for her in the kitchen, and took her medicine as well. When Adelia visited she said she thought the girl looked in far better health than she had that time last year, and left thinking it only required patience before all was over and well.

Caleum, living with her every day, was more anxious by then but careful not to let his wife see his growing worry. There was, after all, nothing that had triggered his concern except her own, and his wanting everything to turn out as it should. As late as the third week of the year he could still hope this would be the case – things turning out as they should. However, he entered the house one day, after a morning spent out in the barns and curing sheds, to hear his wife’s diminishing sobs and Claudia saying, “There there, mistress.”

It seemed to him then he could hear a woman crying in each earthly direction outside the window, and her maid with her, replying with the same consolation. “There, there, mistress.”

He went to his wife’s room, where he found her no longer in bed but seated in a chair next to it. “What happened, my Libbie?” he asked. “What has gone wrong?”

Claudia looked between the two of them, then hurried from the room. Caleum looked after her retreating form and felt an unpleasantness in the bowels of his stomach.

“The baby,” Libbie said. Her tears had dwindled by now, so there was scarcely any emotion on her face. “I have lost another child.”

When she was finished speaking Caleum heard echoing in his ears again Claudia’s words from when he first entered the house. “There, there, mistress.” His first gesture was to give his wife a solacing embrace. His mind, however, immediately began to race with suspicions. “It is not your fault,” he consoled. “Only bad luck.”

When she heard him say this, she knew that was not the case either; it had nothing to do with luck at all. “It is simply a woman’s lot,” she retorted. “Just as it is sometimes her lot to have children, she sometimes must lose them.”

Caleum had never heard his wife speak so hard before, and his impulse was to try to shield her from her own words; to say she did not mean what she had said. However, looking at her withdrawn face, which was like some ancient stone mask, he thought it better to hold his tongue for the time being, deferring to her in the matter. “Is there anything you need?” he asked.

“No,” she answered, looking at him tenderly for the first time during that conversation. “Let me rest now. Everything will be as it is supposed to be.”

He took comfort in her words as he left the room, thinking she certainly knew best, and if it was what she thought then all would indeed be as it was supposed to be. As he sat alone in the darkened parlor, though, drinking a glass of rum, which for him was very rare since his days as a schoolboy, his comfort began to leave him and his mind to grow cold. In each direction he turned then, he heard again his wife’s cry.

When Claudia came to ask what he wished to eat for supper, he looked at her distantly and the machine of his fears began to whir and hum. He was not a hard-hearted man, but felt very passionately for what had befallen his wife, and that passion found then a place to alight – before he even knew that it was searching. “It’s a shame about your mistress,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Claudia answered him. “But it ain’t no more than she can bear.”

He looked at the woman narrowly and knew he could see her guilt. He thought then only of punishing her. “Claudia, I think I’ll have supper over at the main house,” he informed her. “I must attend to something I forgot about before. Please look after Libbie.”

He was so cold as he answered her that Claudia knew instantly she had somehow misspoken. “I’m sorry if I said something out of turn,” she offered, not knowing why she apologized. His reply, though, was all equanimity.

“You didn’t say anything but what was on your mind, Claudia. There couldn’t be anything evil in that.”

He was conciliatory when he spoke, but when he left the room she felt herself to be in gravest danger, though, of course, she did not imagine for one moment the cause.

Caleum walked the half mile through the frigid evening to the main house, thinking the entire time about revenge for the wrong he had suffered. When he entered the room where his uncle and aunt were sitting down to dinner, he tried to calm himself. Adelia invited him to join them at table and called Rebecca to make another setting. When he sat down in his customary place, he felt a great weight lift up from his shoulders and was soon enveloped in the comfort of familiarity and security.

His aunt had prepared roast beef, which was cooked pink as he liked it, and he took a slice from the serving platter and placed it on his plate. He cut into it and ate silently for a while, with his head bent down, looking neither at Adelia nor Magnus.

“Caleum, what has happened?” Adelia asked, after she thought he had enjoyed sufficient time to warm up from the cold.

“Why do you ask me what has happened?” he asked. “Can’t I only come by for a visit?”

“And to that you are always welcome, but something has happened to upset you,” Adelia answered, not seeing any reason to argue or to explain how she knew this to be true.

“Aunt Adelia, Libbie has lost our baby,” he answered, sitting up straight, only to slink back down in his seat. A caul seemed to descend on the room when he said this, and they were all silent where they sat.

“How is she now?” Adelia asked finally.

“Resting,” said Caleum. “She is out there with the witch who poisoned her. I would not have left, but I don’t see what further harm she can do to her now.”

“Caleum, what are you talking about?” Magnus asked.

“Claudia,” he said, looking at his uncle directly. “She is a witch who has poisoned my wife.”

“Did Libbie tell you that?” Adelia asked.

“No,” Caleum replied.

“Then what do you have against her to sustain your charge?”

“She walks at night in the fields, or else the woods. I have seen her.”

“Is that all of it?”

“She cannot look me straight on, and not because of modesty, but from her guilt.”

“What does Libbie say?”

“That it is her burden, and all will be fine. I think she is still under Claudia’s spell.”

“I thought her brother was a great friend of yours?”

“He was a friend of my youth, Uncle Magnus.”

“Aye.”

“My father warned me about taking her on.”

Caleum understood at last that Claudia was the reason they had seen so much misfortune.

“What do you plan to do?” Magnus asked the younger man. “You have no proof she has done anything.”

“I have the proof of what she has wrought,” he answered.

“Caleum, you know sometimes life by itself brings misfortune, and we can only live with it.”

“Why are you taking her side, Aunt Adelia?” he asked. “She poisoned my wife.”

“You should ask Libbie and see what she says.”

Caleum then felt there was some great conspiracy against him that even his family was party to. Was his wife as well? The thought was enough to make him mad, and he stood from the table in a barely controlled fit of anger. “I think I should go see how Libbie is,” he said. “As for Claudia, I don’t think there can be any more debate about her. Do I have your support or not?”

“Well, what do you want to do?” Magnus asked.

Adelia looked at him as he stood from the table, and there was a coolness in her gaze he had not appreciated before when she replied. “That depends,” she said. “How will you run your house?”

He looked at his uncle for support, but Magnus nodded in consent with Adelia.

“No one is against you,” his uncle continued. “Only there is not always a convenient place for us to lay down blame for our miseries.”

Adelia was pleased to see her husband with her, instead of joining Caleum in his witch hunt, but she was concerned Caleum would not see things that way, and still do something rash.

“Good night,” he said.

Magnus and Adelia looked back and forth between each other, and Adelia stepped forth to say something to Caleum, but Magnus checked her. “Good night, Caleum. Give Libbie our heartfelt regards.”

As he left the room Adelia took his hand and squeezed it.

How will you run your house?

When Caleum descended the front stairs back into the frigid evening, a gust of wind swept the tails of his banian, and he could feel a chill that reached through his clothing to embrace him with its icy fingers. He wished then he had ridden over, and thought briefly about going to the stable for a horse. Instead, he took the wind as part of that design counter to his well-being, and pulled the fabric close to his neck as he trudged along, hugging the shore of the lake on the path that had been worn between Stonehouses and his own house.

What have I done to be treated so? he asked, of no one in particular. He felt then the entire world arranged against him in a unified mocking he was powerless to affect, nor could he escape it. It was a torture for him, as he walked on under a crisp, low moon and heard again the sound of his wife crying. I had only this one wish, he thought to himself.

He became convinced as he went that his aunt and uncle had sided against him only because they had never had children of their own and were jealous. No sooner had he thought this, though, than he realized he did not know the reason for their childlessness.

Because his mind was well-formed and rational, he was forced to admit as he continued on that there were those whose wishes were daily denied them, and he was only unused to it – having been granted far more than was withheld. He knew then there was no pact against him, only bitter circumstance; not two-faced plot-making.

I shall still throw her out, he thought to himself, with some small satisfaction. If he could not prosecute her criminality he could at least expel her presence and give himself peace of mind. A stab of guilt shot through him no sooner had he formed the thought, though, and he admitted to himself it was only wicked fantasizing. Still, to accept what had happened to him meekly was not the way he was used to being. He had been raised to think he could achieve whatever he wished with the strength of his body and will and his mind’s cunning. He was now defeated, however, and the barb was all the more jagged because it was with something that came so easily to others. He felt crushed as one upon whom a monumental boulder has fallen. It was with this admission that he opened the door on his house.

Inside he smelled smoke and was at first worried that, on top of his other burdens, fire had broken out in his absence. Only slowly did he realize it was not the house on fire but the smell of lit tobacco. He followed the scent out to the kitchen, where he found Libbie and Claudia sitting on stools at the table, puffing away on little pipes. He had never known Libbie to smoke before and was stupefied to see her engaged in it now. He held his tongue, though, not knowing whether he should chastise her or let the grievance pass. He was certain Claudia had introduced her to this as well.

When the women saw him they were at pains to extinguish their little smokes, fanning the air as if he had not already seen their misdeed. “Libbie, how are you?” Caleum asked, feeling a deep weariness that seemed to the others a kind of patience.