Текст книги "Dominion"

Автор книги: Calvin Baker

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

six

Winter in the country around Berkeley was unusually dry that year, with no sign nor hint of snow or rain for weeks on end, until everything was desiccated and brittle as ancient parchment. The woodland creatures all burrowed deeper in their earthen hollows, to search out the soil’s hidden moisture, or else moved higher up into the mountains – where the underground streams that usually fed the lakes of the valley still flowed a short distance before disappearing. There was also one summit, remote in the impenetrable wilderness, where water was always plentiful, and those migrating animals that knew of it passed the dry months. The people in their houses were careful to keep well water on hand to extinguish errant sparks from their cooking fires or tobacco pipes and so protect their farms and freeholdings, but all else it was at the mercy of Heaven.

When snow did begin to fall, the week after Christmas, all were happy for it and rejoiced, thinking it would relieve the parched valley and replenish the streams high up above. However, no one counted on what moved in with the snow clouds. Great, measureless branches of lightning cleaved the sky like a celestial Nile as the storm moved over the hill country, illuminating the entire valley each time one of them exploded – brilliant as a harvest moon or star shower. There was nothing passive, though, about its radiance, and when it finally subsided, little fires could be seen burning. Wherever it had touched the earth – either the stubbled ground itself or else massive oaks and pines high in their upper reaches – all was set ablaze.

At Stonehouses, Libbie gathered Rose and the smaller one, called Lucky, around her in the kitchen, and they watched through the small back window as the world outside was made bright by the pale blue light, moving closer and closer toward them. Libbie worried briefly for Magnus and Adelia over in the main house, but there was no way to reach them, and then it was they had all weathered out storms before.

The next time the sky lit up, though, it was not by one of the massive jolts of lightning but three prodigious balls of it, which seemed to sit directly on top of Stonehouses. The entire farm took on a spectral pink and white glow, and when it died away the hill where Stonehouses itself sat looked to be aflame – as did two of the barns on the shore between the original structure and Caleum and Libbie’s place.

Her first instinct was to go over to check on Magnus and Adelia, but she feared leaving her children alone, and it was impossible to tell in which direction the ground fire was moving. Nor did she want to chance being struck by lightning or getting otherwise caught in the path of the blaze. She sat there with her children as the crackling of the clouds continued, knowing that if anything happened while she was there with them she had at least a passing chance of keeping them from harm.

When the onslaught from the tempest died down and all seemed quiet again, she bundled the children off to bed, put her coat on, and went over to check that nothing had happened to Magnus and Adelia at the main house.

As she walked along the path hugging the lake, she could see fire burning in the distance, though from two different directions. The first was off on her left-hand side, about a hundred yards from where she stood. The wind was blowing it away from a barn that had burned down already, and the fire in grasses around it were moving out toward the barren fields, where they would wither away from lack of anything to feed upon. The other blaze came still from the direction of Stonehouses. It was not until she rounded the lake that she could see the house itself was alight with flame. She quickened her pace after that but tried not to panic as she ran on toward it.

When she arrived, she found Adelia and Magnus standing out there in the storm, looking at their home as it burned to the ground.

“Isn’t there anything more we can do to save it besides just standing here?” Libbie demanded, looking first at them then again at Stonehouses as it cackled and crumbled in the still-falling snow.

Magnus shook his head stoically. “The lightning was right on top of us, and the whole place seemed like it went up at once. It will have to burn out now or not.”

They looked ghostly and faded standing there in the snow, wrapped in blankets and watching the house burn from the inside out. Libbie felt pity when she looked at the two old people, saying only that all of them should all better get in out of the storm before they caught chill on top of everything else. Reluctantly, then, they began to follow her back to the other place, filled with sorrows for all that departed that day.

As they made their way down the path, however, Libbie could see the winds were shifting, and the fire that had been burning toward the meadow was moving instead toward her house, where her children were. All at once she started to run, trying to outrace the flames that were feasting so swiftly, and cursing herself for leaving them there alone; promising to never do so again if they were still safe.

When she arrived at the other building, fire was already licking at the back wall, and she had to rush round to the front to get in, where she ran up the stairs through a thicket of black smoke that had filled the room. Mercifully the two girls were unharmed, though both had stayed there and were deathly afraid when she reached them. Rose, the older one, knew exactly what was happening, and what fire was and the danger they were in, but Lucky had hidden under the bed, and Rose had been unable to coax her out. Nor could she leave without her sister.

“Mother, the house is burning,” she said, pleading.

“Come with me,” Libbie told her sharply, bundling them up and hurrying outside.

Behind the house, Magnus and Adelia were carrying buckets of water from the well, which they struggled to throw onto the flames. Libbie joined in, running back and forth with water buckets, as Magnus battled against the fire with all the strength in his old body, knowing that, if they failed, all was lost, and what had taken so long to make would be snatched away in a single day.

They fought out there for hours, and even Lucky and Rose tried to help, carrying a single bucket between the two of them to give to Magnus, with barely a word passing between them all, until, as darkness fell at last, they began to gain the better of the fire. It was finally extinguished around seven that evening, but the exact time was impossible to reckon. Much of the house was still standing and useful, and they went inside what remained of it to rest, all shivering from wetness and exposure to the freezing air.

Libbie put on a pot of water for tea, and brought the first ready cup to Magnus, who aside from the coldness had grown stiff in his joints from the diseases of age. He was still covered in gray ash from head to foot and coughed violently from time to time due to the smoke he had breathed in. The smell of burning still clung to him, as it hung in the air in general, but in greater concentration. Still, he wanted to go out and inspect the damage the fire had done to his lands. Libbie and Adelia, though, prevailed on him to rest awhile longer. He seemed then to all of them to have grown ancient, and he felt as much in his own mind, as it was true.

“It is nothing to worry about,” he said, trying to speak to their collective worries and console them, even as they looked after him. “We will rebuild everything just as soon as Caleum returns. It only took four of us a summer to put the majority of this place up, and I don’t imagine it will take half that to fix.” The main house he was less certain of, whether there was need to rebuild, or whether they could on that scale again. During the time he drank his tea, he tried to recall what Stonehouses had looked like the first time he laid eyes on it. Certainly it was bigger now than it had been then, and rooms had been added not from a plan but according to where and when they were needed and the purpose they were to be put to, so that he was not even certain he could draw a plan of the place from memory, even though he had been in each of its rooms a thousand times and could walk through each of them in his sleep at night.

When Magnus mentioned Caleum’s name, Libbie was silent, as was Adelia. Having all expected him home so long, there was no evidence now that he was anything other than dead. Magnus had counseled them steadily against assuming anything until there was ready proof of it – such as the army usually sent back to fallen soldiers’ families. However, as the weeks and months passed with no word from him, Libbie had all but given up hope of ever laying eyes on her husband again.

“I had better see what the damage is to the house,” she said, not wanting to speak out loud what was uppermost in her heart.

When Magnus offered to help her, though, she declined.

“You should rest, Uncle, and get back your strength,” she urged him. “Besides, I know better how everything out here was before.”

“Then I’ll walk around to the main house to see what is left of it.”

“Are you rested enough?” Adelia asked her husband.

“It’s just to have a look around,” he answered. “You stay here and tend to Libbie and the girls.”

Magnus left the women, then, and walked back to his house, surveying his lands as he went and the damage done to them. At the same time, Libbie went off to assess her house and how much of it was still sound.

What she saw was that the kitchen was in far worse shape than it had seemed before, and the upper portion of the house was burned very badly, so that those rooms were all open to the outside. She had also lost many of her household effects, but on the whole it was stable enough that they could live there until spring.

At Magnus and Adelia’s house, fire had taken a far higher toll. Besides the barn and an acre of trees around the lake, most of the main house was gone entirely along with everything it had held, except for the fieldstone outer shell. The fireplace and chimney was all that remained of the kitchen, and a few of the rooms that had been added over the years sat exposed to the elements, like something children had built and left in the woods. The original structure could be discerned for the first time in decades, so that Magnus could see, as he had not before, that for all its grandness Stonehouses was really two cabins, identical to the ones he had known at Sorel’s Hundred, built side by side. Being used to the completed house, this foundation seemed unimaginably small to him, as the house was already four times its original size when he came to live there, and it had grown four times that again. In his sadness, when he returned to Libbie and Caleum’s place, he told Adelia that the house was destroyed completely. “It claimed the whole thing, except some scraps you can have at if you want.”

He agreed with Libbie that it would be best for all of them to live in her and Caleum’s house until spring, when they could decide how best to go on – and either build that one out or else restore the original.

“Once Caleum gets back we can figure the best way to go at it. It doesn’t make sense to start before.” It cost him great effort to admit this, thinking how proud his father had been of that house, as well as the rooms he himself had added. However, he knew he could not build anymore by himself, and Caleum would have to decide what he preferred for the future.

When he said Caleum’s name again, though, Libbie turned silent and moved away from the rest of them.

“Libbie, what’s wrong with you?” Adelia asked, seeing that the younger woman was upset.

“Aunt Adelia, Caleum isn’t coming back,” Libbie said coldly, forgetting Lucky and Rose were still there. “Maybe we can get help from the neighbors or hire hands to help us build, but if we wait for Caleum we will be living out in the woods come next winter.”

Her words wounded Adelia to the core, and tears began to fall from the old woman’s eyes, seeming to trace each wrinkle of her face. “That is not so,” she said, but then spoke no more, being consumed with crying.

“Stop your tears,” Magnus told his wife crossly. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and you know better than listen to her.” For he had been at Stonehouses longest of all, and they had never given up on their people. “Libbie, we’ve always buried our people when they died, but not before that,” he told the younger woman, gently but with a finality that did not allow for argument.

Libbie felt very ashamed of herself then, and apologized for what she had said. “It has been a difficult day,” she tried to explain, turning her head low. “I did not mean it to sound hateful.”

“I know, dear,” Magnus answered, not wanting more strife to befall the house than already had.

“I will cook something for us to have for dinner,” Adelia interrupted, standing to go out to the exposed kitchen. When Libbie volunteered to help her, Adelia accepted gladly, and the two went off, leaving the girls and Magnus alone by themselves.

Magnus slumped down in his chair and closed his eyes, thinking to rest before he ate. However, Rose and Lucky, who were normally very shy with him, came and sat near his feet and looked up at him as he nodded.

Magnus felt their eyes upon him and sat up again in his chair. “We had a great setback today,” he said, looking down to them, “but we will get beyond it. Just as everything outside that window used to be wild until your great-grandfather, Jasper Merian, came here. He tamed the land, and built the house over across the lake from nothing but his own will. Maybe, though, it is not enough to only build once, but you must improve on what you have done, and sometimes build it over, if God wants you to prove yourself again. This is our place, though, and as long as we don’t do anything to foul that up it will always be so, and we will always be blessed.”

The girls let his words wash over them, not certain what he was telling them, or even that he was talking to them at all, but pleased to have his attention and warm mood. He in his turn spoke as he could only to the two of them, as they were after all his blood and his future.

“When will our papa come back?” Rose asked, worrying for the first time that he had not been there since her third birthday, when there was a break in the fighting.

“I don’t know, rightfully,” Magnus said, “but you must believe that he will.”

When Adelia and Libbie came in from the kitchen, bundled in their coats and carrying pots for the evening meal, Magnus and the two girls both went to offer to help with the table. The five of them then said grace and sat down to supper.

They finished late that evening, then began to search for bedding for all to stay warm through the night. After that they dispersed through the two undamaged rooms of the house, Magnus and Adelia downstairs in the parlor and Libbie upstairs with the girls on the other mattress left to them.

The air still smelled of smoke from the fire that had burned through their lives that day, and all were spent from the ordeal. When Rose and Lucky tried to ask their mother questions she quieted them and fell hard asleep, thinking of what all she had to do the next day, if they were to get on properly the rest of the week and, beyond that, the winter.

Downstairs Adelia could see the toll battling the fire had taken on her husband and fed him a glass of warm milk to help soothe his nerves. She listened then as he tried to get comfortable but was unable to because of the aches that racked his body. Whenever he found a position that seemed conducive to sleep, he would soon feel a pain he had not felt before and shift to avoid aggravating it. She rubbed his shoulders to ease his mind at least, but he was unable to find slumber and rest, so neither could she.

The two of them lay awake staring at the ceiling in the dark room, as they had occasionally done through the earliest days of their marriage but most memorably before they were wed. “We have been with each other a long time,” Magnus reminisced, without looking at her. “Through more than I ever thought we would survive.”

“Longer than I dared hope,” Adelia, who was always modest about such matters, answered. “But not longer than I wanted.”

“You have been a good wife to me,” Magnus said then. “Just as you will continue to be good to all of them when I am gone.”

She hated to hear her husband speak this way and usually tried to quiet him when he started down such a line. However, they were both very old and she could see he was feeling each of his years that night – those that weighed heavily on him as well as those that were light and sweet to his memory as spun sugar. She allowed him to say his piece, knowing there might not be very many more opportunities such as this one to count blessings and, though they had suffered a blow, give thanks.

“If I have been a good wife, it is because I had a good man, and it was easy,” she answered.

Magnus laughed softly at this, knowing she bent the truth for the sake of sentiment. They were like young lovers then for a moment, though in his limbs he still felt the accumulation of all his years. “It will be easier on you after he returns,” Magnus said. For he knew that, since he first became theirs to raise, Caleum had supplanted him in her affection. He had long ceased to be bothered by this, as he knew it to be a different emotion than that between man and wife. “Though I fear it might not be easy for him.”

“Do you think Libbie will be able to support him as he needs to be,” Adelia asked, “or might she be overwhelmed?”

“They will have to reckon with that,” Magnus replied. “Everybody figures out how to be with their troubles. But they are both grown now and will just have to figure it out. All I know is I myself was lucky with who I had for a wife.”

When she touched him he shifted himself again and took her in his arms tightly. “Not every man has a home.”

He was still holding her in the morning when she awoke, although he himself did not move. She turned, trying to get free of his grasp without waking him, so that she could go out to the kitchen and make his breakfast, as she had done every morning of their marriage. When his arms did not give way immediately she reached to pry his fingers one by one from the opposite forearm.

She knew as soon as she touched him that he felt no more pain. She took each finger in hers very gently then and coaxed it open. When they were removed from their final grasp, she squeezed his hand, and smoothed it tenderly, then withdrew from his embrace. She stood, and finished arranging his body, then went out to the kitchen, where she lit the stove.

She prepared that morning eggs, the last bacon from their larder, biscuits and wildberry preserves, then poured out a large glass of milk, which she set on the table beside his place at the table. Upstairs Libbie rose as soon as she smelled cooking coming from her kitchen and came downstairs to help.

When she entered the room, though, Adelia brushed her aside, telling her to sit down and stay out of the way of her work. Libbie, on the verge of protesting, saw something in Adelia’s face that bade her refrain. “What is wrong, Aunt Adelia?” she asked, concerned for the old woman.

“There is nothing wrong,” Adelia answered her. “It is only that I am cooking for my husband for the last time.”

He died without the chance to count and reckon his days or accomplishments, but were they ever to be laid down, the list would surely include his roughly eleven thousand days of bondage – though it was hard to know the true figure – and thirteen thousand his own man. Untold acres planted and a like number reaped, as he had been lucky in his day and increased his till. He grew rich as well – at least far beyond what he had dared to dream.

When he passed he left behind a wife whom time did teach him to love and a boy who, though not his, was his brother’s and he raised him like a son. He was mostly fortunate as well in whom he saw buried during his lifetime: both parents – one in old age and one very old. He had also a brother, whose body they could not put in the ground at Stonehouses but who was known to have had peace at the end.

He was a solitary man, but he had still a few whom he called friends and brethren, and all these were present in the lower southern meadow of Stonehouses when they added his body to the rank of those buried there, although it was bitter cold that day.

Many others came out as well, but it was a more intimate affair than some funerals they had had there. The ground was still frozen, and it had taken a long time to dig the grave, so no one wanted much to stand out in the cold any longer by the end of the sermonizing for him.

When it was over, entertaining the guests was made difficult by the fact that they no longer had the space they once did, but crowded all into the room at the front of the newer house. Those there did not stay long, though it had been very moving, and they were truly saddened by Magnus Merian’s passing away.

When they left at the end of the funeral feast, however, many were tempered in their grief by fear of the sounds that seemed to emanate from the woods around the house when they reached the road.

Inside, the women all went to bed as soon as the guests had gone and they were done with burying Ware, called Magnus. That night each of them heard strange sounds as well that they could not describe, and knew not what they were nor how to respond to them.