Текст книги "Dominion"

Автор книги: Calvin Baker

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

Sanne went to the baby and began to feed him. Merian watched for a while without comment as everything in his house satisfied its belly except him. Nor did he speak the remainder of that evening, but went to bed sometime after Sanne and the baby, giving both a wide berth.

They continued in this way for several days, neither admitting they had given offense to the other or doing anything to change his behavior. They shared the bed together with the child but did not touch, until Sanne began to think of moving back into the other house permanently.

It was another week before she offered the baby to her husband for holding again, and days even after that before Merian could bring himself to take him, who still had yet to receive a name of his own.

Merian had borne his exile as repentance for his behavior on the night of the birth, but when he looked at her curled up with the wrinkled form, although he knew it to be his own issue, he could not help but think a tiny new master had come upon his lands.

It was the baby who finally broke the tension in the house. Sanne woke in the middle of one night, disturbed by something in her sleep, to find Merian holding the child on his chest and speaking to him in the same abracadabra he sometimes used with Ruth Potter.

“He must of crawled on top of me in the middle of the night,” Merian said, when Sanne sat up and looked at the two of them. “When I opened my eyes, he was here on my chest.”

“He probably had a nightmare about utopia,” she said.

Merian ignored her barb and continued to play with the boy. “Did you dream of utopia, Mr. Purchase?” he asked.

“Who is Purchase?” Sanne wanted to know.

“It seemed like it fit him.”

Sanne did not answer but let the man hold his child and continue to speak to it in his gibberish meant to make the uncomprehending understand.

As Merian played with the tiny new baby, it was the first time he could remember ever holding anything so small. Nor could he remember being held by either mother or father when he himself was little. He knew this, of course, to be only a likely trick of the mind, one of the false floors or hidden rooms of memory deceiving him. There was, however, no way to verify either the one thing or the other.

seven

An orange liquid sun clung low over the white landscape most of that winter like a shield, cast and left as welcome gift for whichever strange new god slept and dreamed in the western lands.

Merian spent the darkened months beneath the burning sky learning to dote over his new son, Purchase, until the two of them started to became as inseparable as the boy was from Sanne, who considered him a miracle brought to her barren womb by unseen Providence. In the evenings, after finishing work on the buildings and grounds, Merian would go home, where instead of turning directly to food, corn whiskey, or wife, he would go to the boy and check on him, asking about his day. “Purchase Merian, what did you do while me and Ruth Potter were out cording firewood?”

Sanne regarded the child with protective affection as his father tickled him or else tossed him into the air. “That’s enough, Jasper,” she would say then, when she felt he was roughhousing the baby. “He’s still just a little one.”

Sometimes Merian argued the toughness of the child. More often he gave in to her demands and placed Purchase back on the mattress or else withdrew his hand and stopped trying to make the baby laugh. He found himself pleased that the building was still unfinished, as it gave him a project and excuse to be indoors and near them.

After Sanne finally vacated the other building, which had been taken over by their few livestock, Merian began tearing down the interior wall between the two rooms, to combine the whole into a single structure. Although he worked frequently in the empty room, he constantly invented reasons to be in the part of the house where they were.

It was during this season that proper warmth began to flow between husband and wife as well, when Sanne saw how her husband went through no end of invention to be near the newborn, and Merian saw how well she guarded his boy from harm.

That was also the winter Sanne began to take over management of the stores, beginning at first with her helping Merian count how many bales of hay were left until the time the cow would be able to graze outdoors again. It was then that she saw how precarious their own survival was as well, and dependent on an early spring. In fear she began to make suggestions about how the land was allocated to the different crops.

“We’ll have to feed the cow from our own food,” she said, “and unless you give another field to hay this year we might be in the same position next winter as well.”

“We might have to slaughter it,” Merian replied stoically, going to count the preserves in the half-empty room. “Now, how long will the cow last if you divide it by two people and the rest of the winter?”

Sanne thought it was a joke, even though she found herself involuntarily performing the math in her head. When she realized he was serious, though, she grew incensed. On her last place they would rather get down to the nub of their stores than kill an animal that wasn’t marked for slaughter, and a cow was almost a living relative. As the weeks progressed, though, the hay continued to thin, and Merian was forced into giving the animals smaller and smaller portions. To save the cow, Sanne would sneak some of her own meal to it when her husband was not looking. Still, the animals all grew thinner, until the cow’s warm morning milk had given out well before there was yet any sign of thaw in the fields. In desperation Merian went out and dug up turf from the ground beneath the snow, and took to feeding the animals that, but it was not enough to sustain them properly. They continued to weaken.

“Do you want to wait until your own milk has given out too?” he asked, arguing his course of action with her. “The little one can’t eat turf.”

Sanne did not answer him, and indeed began to withdraw some of the affection she had previously restored. He is just barely an animal himself, she thought. If he managed his stores right we would not be in this situation.

Their misfortune, he told her, was not his doing. “I am as beholden to the climate and the mercy of God as anything out there,” Merian said, as if reading her thoughts. “I do not make it rain or hail or snow or drought, or else descend on a poor fellow like the locusts, or bring fire, or make crops die from disease that can’t nobody see till the corn is withered all to ruin.”

He got up from the table, leaving half his dinner for the woman and child, or rather the animals, as he knew what she did with the scraps from her own plate, even with her husband’s head aching and light from hunger.

“If you kill the animals we’ll never have anything more for ourselves than season to season,” she said, as he stormed across the room and made a pallet for himself on the floor.

“If I don’t we won’t make this one, Sanne,” he said, with increasing frustration.

He woke up early the next morning and left the house before she knew he was gone. By the time she did find him missing she was already at the stove, making the thinnest ashcake ever measured out and set over a bed of coals. She looked around presently and counted the animals, as was her usual habit. The cow and the mule were both missing, and she went to the door in great agitation to see if she could find sign of either her man or their beasts.

Out in the wet melting snow she could still fathom the marks of hooves and the man’s feet next to them, leading off into the dark woods. “He has gone into the forest so I would not hear when he slaughtered her,” she said to the baby Purchase. “Next he will kill Ruth Potter for meat.” She looked back out across the fields, following the tracks in the snow until they faded at the entrance to the forest, and wondered which direction out there they had gone off into, so that she might listen for the animals’ scream.

She sat and listened all day, cursing both the man and herself for marrying him. I left my home for this she reminded herself again, daydreaming about her former house, which was always well stocked with both food and good company, as the rooms and halls of memory inevitably are.

Near dusk he reappeared, and just as she feared he had meat with him and was covered in blood.

“I’ll not cook the proceeds of your murdering,” she said, when he put the flesh on the table. “Take it out of here.”

“You have to eat too, Sanne,” he said. “It is good meat.”

When she heard him say this, the core inside her gave way and her eyes turned into hate-filled saucers. “Get it out of here,” she said again, taking up a knife from near the stove.

“What are you planning to do with that?” he demanded cautiously.

“Get it off my table,” was all she said.

“Calm yourself,” Merian told her. “It’s not your cow.”

“Where is she then?”

“I left her in the woods to feed. I took her out there this morning, down the valley, where the snow is melted enough that we found forage.”

“What is that then?” Sanne asked, motioning to the flank on the table. “Did you spare Ruth Potter too or assassinate her?”

“Yes, I spared Ruth Potter,” Merian said, but she still held the knife. “You’d rather die or kill your husband than eat those two beasts? You are a stranger one than I thought.”

“You cannot bring an animal to you with one promise and then abuse it another way. What is on my table?”she asked again, not yet putting down the knife.

“It is bear, Sanne. The rest of it is hung up out back if you want to see for yourself.”

She took him at his word, though, and cooked the meat as he prescribed, cutting it into thick steaks, which she grilled in a skillet with its own fat and onions from the otherwise empty cellar.

He sat down to the table and bade her eat as well. She sat and sliced a portion of the tender flesh and took it into her mouth, where its savoriness and nourishment nearly made her tear. She realized how thin she had become, and that the child was put in jeopardy because of it. She felt absurd in her relief, as disaster had been avoided, for the way she defended the cow and the mule and even the hog for a time, guarding what was dear almost to the expense of losing what was most precious. She sliced the steak again and let out a low sensuous moan of pleasure, as she began to enjoy the taste of the meat itself, which was denser and unlike anything else she could remember eating.

At his side of the table Merian took the hot meat with his bare hands and lifted it to his mouth, then tore off a great chunk from it and began to chew. He did not savor the flavor, but ingested the mass of flesh into his own dwindled stomach. The juices from the meat and fat rolled down one side of his face unchecked, as he finished the steak in three or four great bites. When he was done, he attacked the onions and only then remembered the first time he had eaten a wild bear and the awfulness of that winter.

We will make it through this one as well, he told himself, and looked over to Sanne to see how she enjoyed her dinner. He was glad of it, and to know they would not die of starvation, even if the cause of this salvation was desperate luck.

As his parents sated themselves on meat, from the corner of the room Purchase Merian began to cry. His mother went over to him to offer her breast, not feeling any of the angriness she had on some nights when his little screams would not cease. For all ate in the house that evening and no more mention was made of hunger or murder.

There was fresh meat the next meal as well, and then smoked and pickled meats in the days that followed, until they had feasted from the animal for the better part of six weeks.

When spring did finally come at the end of that interminable winter, it came vengefully, with a hot blast of heat that made going out of doors feel like punishment for some unspeakable crime.

Merian bore it gladly, though, as the animals could graze again, and he went about clearing a new field for their provisions, having learned a hard lesson from the previous months. However, when he began digging out the new plot he remembered just how rocky much of his property actually was. He worked from the first finger of light until sundown, plowing the land already under cultivation or removing stones from the soil. As he dug under the primitive sun he was never as thankful for its warmth, even as it burned and parched him to exhaustion.

From the heat it grew green quickly in the other fields and his crops began to soar again, as they had seasons before, when he dared dream he was getting ahead of that vast wilderness and all the things set against him. That year he dreamed only that he might reduce the debt he had amassed. Either because of this or to spite it, he tried again with rice, using a different seed but the same method Chiron had taught. As he irrigated the little plants, he thought of his old friend and wondered where he had disappeared to under the summit on the other side of the mountains. He remembered then what he had said about things always separating out from their source.

He looked again that summer down the long road back to where he had come from and tried to banish the other end from his mind, once and for all, to concentrate on the pleasures of home, uppermost of which was watching Purchase grow.

“If you keep growing like that you’ll end up a giant,” he said to the boy.

He meant it as well. The child was growing so remarkably that he worried there was something the matter with him. “Why don’t you and Purchase go see that new doctor in town, just to make sure everything is all right,” he offered to Sanne.

His wife laughed at him, the idea was so ridiculous. “With what money and what reason?” she asked. “Don’t you think a doctor has better things to tend to than just a child growing?”

Merian let it rest there for the time being, but he watched the boy’s growth with awe and fear together.

This was the same summer that his satisfaction and optimism also grew to such prodigious heights as to prompt him to give the place a name of its own.

When he finished his daily chores in the fields, both the ones that grew food for humans and the ones that supported their animals, he would bring old Ruth Potter around to the acres he had just cleared, load her cart with the stones he had dug up, then bid her haul it. Ruth Potter strained under those loads as she had under few others since coming into his possession, both because of the weight of rock in her wagon and because she was getting on in years. Merian tried to make the loads light as possible, often finding himself walking beside her, hauling nearly as much as the beast. When they finished their work for the day, he would share with her his water and give to her one of the apples from the cellar.

Still, the labors were a drain on her, and Sanne suggested it might be time to retire the mule. “Ruth Potter got as many years left as I do, don’t you, old girl?” he asked convivially. A sadness would creep into his voice, though, for his first helpmate on the place was reaching a stage that no one could deny or change. “This is the only work she has to do this year, besides the harvest,” he said, and went back to his own chores.

With the fieldstone that they hauled up from the slope stacked in loads out back, Merian began to face the two conjoined structures until it was one solid formation without crack for wind or cold to penetrate. It was when he finally finished that he began to call the place Stonehouses.

In the beginning Sanne could scarcely stand to hear the name come from his mouth.

“You’ll get your comeuppance yet, man,” she warned.

“I bet the little lord likes it, don’t you, Purchase?”

“The what?” she asked him, stupefied.

“Tiny lord.”

“So, man, I have married an honest heathen?”

“No, but you live on a true farm now,” he said, standing near the front door. It was a fitting assessment. He had made the rock-infested acres in the forest into a proper freehold that had at last begun to show signs of prosperity, even after the winter that brought them near full ruin.

The year, however, still held suffering in its maw, which it did offer up in due course of time. As he worked the fields with Sanne and Ruth Potter, reaping a harvest he hoped would be rich enough to unhitch him from debt, the mule tripped one day and lost her footing on a rock, then went tumbling loudly to the ground in a heap of sagging skin and snapping inner mass.

When Merian went to help her up, the mule brayed at him and kicked out with one leg to drive him off. Merian, hunched over her, finally succeeded in jamming the dislocated bone back into place, and coaxing the mule to stand and test it. It was no use. When she took to her legs Ruth Potter looked at him shakily and took one pained step before beginning a hopping walk on her three sound limbs.

Merian led her gently back to the house, where he sat up, cursing her clumsiness and feeding her apples late into the night. For a week he let her convalesce, until it became apparent the leg was not getting better. It was beginning to rot, in fact, right on the bone.

Flies hovered around inside the house, and her wispy tail flailed halfheartedly at them, causing the creatures to scatter briefly before re-settling right where they had been, until they no longer even made the pretense of scattering but only an increase in buzzing before resuming their banquet on the festering meat. Merian soothed her mottled head and scattered the flies with his hat, while proclaiming to Sanne that the leg looked to be healing.

Sanne did not say anything when he went on like this, but nodded her head and brought him a fresh bucket of water, which man and mule alike used to quench their thirst in the sweltering heat. “Might be,” she said at last, trying to give him comfort.

By the second week it was apparent that the mule had no chance, and even his affection and loyalty could no longer hide this from him. Early one morning before Sanne and Purchase awoke, Merian lifted Ruth Potter up from the floor and led her out deep into the woods, beyond the trails that anyone knew but him, and into the same valley field that had served him as an emergency pasture in winter. There he untied the animal, and bade her luck with her own devices, turned, and went back to the house.

When he arrived, Sanne saw his weariness, and the mule missing, and did not ask what he had done that morning. He for his part was silent much of the rest of the day. As they bedded down for the night, though, Sanne told Merian that she heard a noise outside of the house. “It is only your imagining, or else the wind,” Merian told her, turning back to sleep. When she would not desist he went out, where he was greeted by the old speckled beast.

He led her limping inside and gave her feed and an apple, then a blanket, before returning to his wife in bed.

Sanne did not say anything as he wormed his way back under the covers, but let him try to sleep.

In the morning Merian repeated his routine of the day before, uncertain how she had made her way back on just three legs but determined she would not do so again. This time he led her even farther away, by back roads he was confident she had never trod. That night the mule was at the house again, same as any other day in the last four years. Sanne helped her husband feed the animal, and stroked the back of the poorman’s head when he lay down to sleep. The next day he tried once more but to no avail.

“I know,” was all she said, when he led the mule in the third night.

Despite the pretension of taking a name for the house, he knew it was senseless to keep and feed a used-up animal. That morning he faced the task as it was laid out for him, taking Ruth Potter by a long tether – as she was used to having when she had any – into the same field, where he leveled the musket against her temple. His anger, though, flashed and welled up as he saw how innocent she looked at him and munched dumbly on the summer’s sweet grass. “Goddammit, Ruth Potter, what good is it letting you loose if you don’t know what to do with yourself?” he growled at her. “If you don’t know that, what sense is there in living?” He fired the musket into the animal’s head. She fell where she stood, in a tumult of limbs, and he dug for her a grave, which he did cover back up with dirt and sweet grass.

As he made his way home late that morning his heart blazed with emotion, as the sun itself fires false things true.