Текст книги "Dominion"

Автор книги: Calvin Baker

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

nine

As he traveled the road home Merian found himself muttering various half-remembered recitations, though he did not know who or what he was invoking when he spoke them. They came to his lips all the same with the persistent force of ingrained habit: Amama amachaghi amacha. He would say the words from memory, then look down at his hands, desirous of glimpsing some part of his destiny or journey that had not been revealed before, or else praying that the fate of Ruth and Ware, called Magnus, would be gentle. He prayed because he knew their future was no longer in his power to affect. He recited his prayer again, then opened his hands again unconsciously, to release them, hoping that God, such as He was, would catch both.

How many people would have ever gone back there at all? he asked himself, trying to absolve any stain of felt guilt that might rest upon him. Amama amachaghi amacha. He chanted the strange words like a talisman of battle, yet he still could not remember what they meant or how he knew them in the first place. He rode the horse harder and followed a slope of his knowing southward through the forest toward his home.

Nor did he sleep the first night of his journey, but only got down from the horse and built a lean-to in the woods, while the animal watered and recuperated for the night. For him there was no rest; he cursed himself again for his failure and eventually for going back there at all.

He rose at the first shading of light and took to the southward trail again. For the first time since the week before, he began to wonder what had happened at Stonehouses during the days he was away. It was not concern, he told himself, but only curiosity. He did not even ask himself how Sanne and Purchase might have gotten on in his unannounced absence. He was headed back to them, so saw no harm done for anyone to complain about.

When he stopped the second night it was in Huguenot country, and he decided to try an inn he had not seen on his earlier trip. He tied the horse up and knocked at the door, then went inside, where he was greeted by two small round people – one a man, the other a woman. Whether they were husband and wife or brother and sister he could not say, but that they were related was unarguably clear, as both had the same set to their face and a general shared air about them. When he tried to order pork they responded to him in a language he thought might be Frankish but could not understand. They brought him out what he had asked for without further complaint, though, and he was satisfied until the little one, the woman, spoke to him sharply and pointed at a picture of the Accepted Son of God that had been pinned to the wall. He nodded his head at it, turned back to his plate, and began eating. At that point the larger one of the two came and took the spoon from his hand.

“As I haven’t paid, I guess it is your spoon. So you are lucky today,” Merian said, standing and towering over the man. The hotelier then pointed at the picture drawing and folded his hands together with bowed head. Merian understood that they expected him to pray before he had his meal, or else they thought he was not Christian and were trying to convert him. It was not his understanding, though, of how such things were done. He took his coat and continued out the door.

Outside he sat his horse again and pulled a piece of hardtack from the saddlebag, which he ate, half wishing he had not left in such haste. He appreciated, however, that he would now get home that much sooner, so long as the gelding’s legs should hold.

He rode half possessed into the evening, when the sun became a thin yellow line at the horizon, silhouetting the heavy tarnished-gray sky that descended from the heavens as a breeze from the east began to tremble and scatter the clouds. When he finally stopped that night it was to sleep under the stars, as he had not done since he was still a young man. Half his natural life, he thought, bending slowly to avoid aggravating an ache in his knees, was passed now and over. He lay down on his pallet and tried then, as he watched the night, to draw out all the lines that had led to him, and all that led away – parsing events and faces, trying to remember the different iterations of his character and seeming fate. One had gone to Ruth and Ware, and another to Sanne and Purchase. One to Virginia and Sorel’s Hundred, another to Stonehouses, or else one led to Virginia and then away, breaking again across the schism of that place into two. Only one line, though, continuing through each station, both itself and its own tangent, bending before the objects in its path and reuniting on the other side of them to continue its passing march. And one of those boys to grow up fathered and the other abandoned; one left with a knowable inheritance; the other a patrimony of questions. There is no sense to be made of it all but a pretend one, he told himself, pulling his saddle blanket up under his chin and staring up mutely before falling asleep, as he used to in times past, under the blanketing stars, the cold and naked canopy, systemic and random, of heaven.

When he finally reached Stonehouses first frost had already set in, and the crystalline glow from the fields danced in the red sunrise as he approached, making the whole place look as if it were on fire. Around the lake district all was quiet, and he reached the house without disturbance or indication that anything was the matter on his farm.

He stabled the horse at a small outbuilding he had put up, which served as a barn, then walked the worn path to his door. Inside nothing stirred when he entered, and he touched the oven to see how long it might have been since Sanne went out. It was stone cold, and a fine dust covered its surface, but he cast about briefly for her anyway, before admitting she was nowhere on the place. He did not know what he would do about it, but knew whatever it was would have to wait until later in the day. He fired the stove then and made himself some porridge and a handful of okra, as he was used to from his days alone there.

He had never considered his and Sanne’s rows a thing to be worried about, but as an elemental part of the working conflict of creation. He was concerned, though, as he went out to the barn and fed the wan-looking animals, that he might have disturbed the very base of relations between the two of them. He returned and finished boiling water for a wash, savoring the hot cloth across his dirty, tired face, then bedded down for a spell – collapsing from the demands of the journey just passed. He had returned a full day quicker than it took him to go there, but when he added the time he was away, almost two weeks, he realized he had been far and gone indeed.

* * *

When he woke from his rest, he checked on the horse and decided to let the creature continue sleeping as he went on his errands. “You’re no Potter,” he said, slapping the gelding’s shank. “Potter would’ve – well, never mind what Potter would have done.”

He gave the beasts new hay, bundled himself in warm clothing, and set out on foot for the town center. When he reached Content’s place, exhausted from the trek, he hollered around back before going inside, where he found his friend at the bar.

“Sanne here?”

“Mad at you a bit.”

“But here?”

“Since three days. Scary out there by herself.”

Content did not say anything else to accuse him, and Merian did not feel the need to explain himself. All the same, he told his friend, “I came from somewhere too, Content. Just like you and Dorthea and Sanne and that little boy. I came from somewhere that didn’t just dry up and disappear when I left.”

“Still, scary out there at night by herself,” Content said, pulling a pint and placing it before Merian.

“I appreciate your looking after them.”

“Nothing of it.”

“Will she see me?”

“We can try and find out.”

Content went out back and upstairs to the main living quarters, returning after fifteen minutes and nodding to Merian from the doorway. Merian rose and removed his hat, going the way his friend had just come from, as Content went back to the bar.

When he entered the room Dorthea said hello cordially before withdrawing to help Content in the tavern.

“I had business to attend,” he said preemptively. “I had put it off already, and put it off, but it was getting older and older until it couldn’t wait anymore.”

“Did you bring her back with you?” Sanne asked, staring directly at him. “Is she out there at my home right now?”

“No, Sanne,” he answered her. “There is no one else there, nor will there ever be.”

Still, she would not return with him that evening, and it took almost a week of negotiations before she would go back to Stonehouses at all. When she finally did, she reminded him at every opportunity what it was like to sit waiting for him those first two days after he disappeared, after she had put two and one together to figure what he had done.

He bore the recrimination silently, knowing it would eventually die down and be replaced by some other passion. In due course this proved correct, when she turned her attention back to Purchase, gathering him up in her arms. “Why, I bet he hardly recognizes you anymore,” she said, without looking at her husband.

Merian’s face deflated, and she witnessed then the same look she had noticed when he was courting her, and wondered again whether he was not a man cursed with sadness. But Merian simply began playing with Purchase, speaking to him softly, until they were all at ease. His only remark to Sanne then was to ask whether the boy had grown in the brief time he was away. “Didn’t anybody comment on his size when you were staying in the town?” he asked.

“Just that it proves country air beats all else for raising little ones,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with him, Merian, he just aims to be tall, as you should know.”

All the same, Merian took to measuring Purchase with a ruler to mark how much was adding on from month to month that winter, and then from season to season and year to year after that, until it was generally acknowledged that he was the tallest person, man or boy, in the colony.

The strife that had befallen husband and wife that winter, though, was not the last discord in their house, or even the last over that particular subject, but it was the end of serious conflicts. They settled in again as a unit that winter that would survive whatever was given them, understanding that they might disagree at times but would not divorce their union.

Deprived of one, his dedication to the other child continued to strengthen and served increasingly as the bond between them – so that when he added a second-floor attic to the house, he did not say to Sanne, I think this will be good for us, but rather, “Purchase might someday appreciate it if the house had a second story.”

For his part Purchase continued the business of growing up, now infant, now crawling, now toddler pulling the bread down from the table, until one of his parents would take him up. As he matured and began to express interests of his own, less tolerant of whatever Merian and Sanne put before him for amusement.

Wooden blocks he found satisfying, but only when he banged them together with all the force of his fat arms. Shapes made against the wall were dull, no matter what form or what noise was made to accompany them. Birds, however, he thought intriguing and would lie in waiting when they flew into the yard around the house, before pouncing, making them scatter briefly just beyond his reach.

Near his eighth birthday, when he was old enough to go about independently, Merian began to take him on the rounds of the farm, but the boy showed no interest in any creature save the chickens and the geese, who swam out on the lake in summer. After his father released him from his chores, he would go lie in the meadow where Ruth Potter was buried to stare at the falcons as they circled the sky in search of an evening meal.

When he returned home at night, Merian would invariably chide him for his laziness, warning what tribulations that particular path held.

To break him of bad habits and daydreaming, Merian tried to instill respect for laboring in the fields, taking him at his side and pointing out how each crop was grown and what they received for each thing there. At harvesttime, he took the boy to market with him, to learn from his bartering; he would produce then a crude tally sheet of the hours Purchase had helped him, and count out two coins, which he gave to him before they entered Content’s free house. “A man should always be paid for his work,” Merian said, giving the boy his monies. “There is no exception ever to be made to that.”

Purchase’s eyes lit when he received his pay, and he pocketed it, promising to save and add to it until he could use it for something worthy. Merian rubbed the boy’s shoulder and pulled up to the bar, where Content greeted them both.

“You’ll be bigger than your own father soon, if you don’t stop it,” he said, giving the kid a watery punch.

“Uncle Content, look,” Purchase said, showing off his wages.

“Yes, well, this one’s on the house,” Content told him, adding a penny to his bounty.

“Don’t go giving him charity,” Merian complained. “He’s already half spoiled.”

Purchase eyed the penny still on the bar, unwilling to let it go but certain Merian would make Content take it back if he didn’t do something clever. “I’ll sweep for it,” he volunteered, thinking what useful task he could perform.

“You can’t go hiring yourself out,” Merian said. “We need you at Stonehouses.” When he went and got the broom and began sweeping from the front of the store, though, Merian was proud to see the boy busy with honest work.

As the adults talked at the bar, complaining of the harvest and the way the outpost had grown beyond all recognition, Purchase worked diligently moving the dust around the ankles of the drinkers and other guests of the inn, until he had amassed a respectable pile of dirt at the back of the store. As he swept this into the alley, finishing with his work, he heard a man calling to him.

“Ever seen a baby falcon?” he asked, opening his coat to reveal a blind hatchling.

The creature was still covered in down, but as he stared at it in amazement, Purchase thought he saw the rippled under muscles of flight and capture.

“Where did it come from?”

“He fell from the nest,” the stranger said. “But for a shilling he’ll make you a right hunter.”

“I don’t have a shilling,” Purchase complained, going into his pocket to retrieve his wages. “All I have is this much.”

“Well, I suppose I can make you a deal this once,” the man said, lifting the coins before Purchase had even finished the sentence and bestowing the bird on the boy with a courtly motion before disappearing down the narrow alley.

Purchase held the bird in his hands, trembling from palm to sole as he ran back into the bar to show his father what he had acquired.

“You did what?” was all Merian said, hanging his head in dismay. “Look, Content, my boy here has bartered a whole season’s labor for a sickly vulture.”

“It’s a falcon,” Purchase argued. “That’s what the man who sold it to me said.”

“What man was that, son?” Content asked, looking at the poor miserable bird.

Purchase looked around and admitted the seller had already left. “He was sitting right there.” He pointed to the stool where the bird vendor had been sitting as he swept.

Content looked at him. “No one ever sits at the stool,” he said. “It’s just there to block access.”

Still, the boy swore the man had sat just where he said, and also that the bird he held was a falcon.

“I would never tell you other than the truth,” his father told him, before deriding the bird as “carrion vulture,” and “rotten buzzard.” Purchase knew, though, it was a raptor of prey, and he need only wait for it to fly.

First he held it in his hands and gave it small tosses that he hoped might make it lift off, but which his mother claimed only frightened the animal. “It is a wonder he eats,” she told him. “Anything that young away from its mother should be rightfully dead.” When she saw the anger in his eyes, though, she desisted and told him how the great brick oven in the kitchen came to be built over many years.

He did not want to take many years, though, and installed the hatchling falcon among the chickens, hoping he might learn from their efforts of remembered flight, or else that the instinct of the hunt would seize it and he would turn on the weaker animals to devour them.

To his surprise, one day while they were in the chicken coop, his falcon did find wing, jumping a few wide feet when a chick ventured too near. From these flichtering beginnings he soon took the entire room with a few easy beats of his wings.

At dinner, Purchase was excited by the new development. “Well, what are you going to do when you take him from the coop?” Merian asked. When Purchase inquired what he meant, he was told that the bird could no longer stay in the pen, or it would eat the chickens, and that it would not ever return once it had gone free.

“It will,” Purchase argued, looking to his mother for support. At night, though, he was seized by the fear that he would lose his bird and decided to keep it in the chicken pen forever.

He was stubborn about it, but his father more so, and he left the house one morning to find the bird tied to a post in the yard. “Now untie it,” Merian commanded.

Purchase did as he was told and walked over to his bird, noticing that it did not look like the falcons that he had seen over the pasture, but neither was it a vulture. He undid the hitch in the twine and smoothed the bird’s feathers.

The animal released a low thrill of approval, then climbed onto Purchase’s shoulder and down his arm. The boy looked at his pet in this pose and his heart beat with pleasure, because it was so like a true raptor responding to its master. His joy, however, was short-lived when the bird lifted off his arm, with a motion that generated a deep pressure on his flesh, as it leaped into a tree.

The boy called, and the animal would not come, but it also did not go off on its own. It stayed perched there, receiving table scraps until the first of spring. He thought it might stay on indefinitely, but when he went to feed it one day it had disappeared.

Merian tried to explain to him how everything separated out from its source eventually but also had to stay near to it. That’s what the bird was doing, he said. But to his son the words sounded victorious, and he searched the sky for his bird, until far off he saw a speck high up over the rolling hills. It was his, and he knew it would return. His father looked at the boy and said nothing. His mother came to him in the yard to offer her sympathy, but he was getting too old in years to accept her comfort so easily.

He looked between his father and mother again, and again to the sky as the speck wheeled and turned on high, before making a blunted attempt at its first dive. The father took the son’s shoulder under his hand and began to talk to him of that year’s planting. The son listened dispassionately. He would forge his own way.

ten

As Purchase grew older, and his own health began to grow less dependable, Merian looked more and more to his son for help with Stonehouses. Without his eventual aid, Merian knew, he would be forced to turn to the market for hired labor or else scale back what he had worked so hard to increase over the years.

He tried to interest the boy in caring for the herd of cattle he had bred each from the other over the long winter months. But Purchase, true to his nature, became lost in the pasture himself, given over to reverie and daydreams or simple inattentiveness. When Merian employed him in the fields, he found the boy less productive with each new day, as if playing slow. There were also many tasks he simply could not master. The only interest he ever showed in farmwork seemed to be when Merian went to the barn to fix something that had broken. Then the boy would watch the tools in motion, as he had once watched the birds over Potter’s Field, until the repair was complete. Merian was always careful to explain what he did and allow Purchase a hand in the repair. Try as he might, though, he could not convert this interest into general enthusiasm for the land.

Come harvest that year, Merian hired three hands and relegated his boy to the house with his mother, trying hard not to complain or display the bitterness he felt.

Finally he could not take it and took the lash to the boy, but even the welts on his hide could not make Purchase pretend to love labor and exertion. When the harvest was done, Merian had Purchase accompany him to town. This year instead of going to Content’s immediately after the market closed he stopped the cart in front of the smith’s. After some time inside he called for Purchase, who came sheepishly to the door. The man looked at the boy and nodded. “He’ll do just fine.”

In all of this Purchase did not speak but did as his father bade him, taking a sack that was already packed for his stay.

When Merian returned home Sanne wanted to know where Purchase was.

“He is apprenticed to the smith,” Merian answered.

Sanne was stunned when she heard this. “You cannot apprentice the boy,” she said. “He is hardly ten years old.”

“He looks fourteen to the smith.”

She yelled at him to hitch the cart and go retrieve her son. Reluctantly Merian did as she bade, and when she joined him for the ride into town he fully expected to be upbraided the entire way.

“What were you thinking, man?” Sanne asked. “How could you do such a thing?”

“I was thinking he is old enough to learn to work.”

When they arrived at the smith’s shop she pushed her husband from the cart to go reclaim her son from the harm in which Merian had left him. Inside, where she had expected to find him crying and miserable, waiting for his rescue, she instead found him studying all the action without complaint and performing his chores with such diligence he did not notice their arrival. All around them the heat from the smith’s oven baked the room, and the hiss of hot metal placed by another assistant to cool in water nearly drove her to distraction, as she told Purchase to get his things so that he could come home.

The smith complained to Merian that they had a deal and that any boy in the county would be happy to apprentice there. “What can I do?” Merian replied to the man. “His mother says he isn’t old enough yet.”

“Fourteen is old enough to work at the devil’s own hearth,” the smith argued.

“Yes, but the problem is he’s only barely ten. He’s just a bit large for his age.”

“I’ll be,” the smith swore, slapping Purchase on the back. “You can come back in a few years, or any other time you like, son. I promise to make you a place.”

Purchase was happy for this, for he had found in the furnace of the shop and the working of the element of fire an excitement he knew would never be present on the farm. “If my papa says so.”

Merian was pleased to be deferred to by the boy and thought his brief stint at work was already beginning to pay dividends. He assured him it would be all right to rejoin the smith as a proper apprentice when he was older. “As long as you do your chores at Stonehouses in the meanwhile,” he said exactly.

Sanne looked from her husband to the smith, trying to decide if they had arranged some pact between themselves that she was not privy to.

“Jasper, you’ll tell me what this is about yet.”

“Say what you want about his age, it’s never too young to teach him good habits and honest work.”

In subsequent years Purchase would recall his day at the smith’s as among the most memorable of his early years. Although he did not speak much about the experience later, the primacy of heat and water and force was nearer to him than the slow plantings his father dragged him around to witness and help with every spring, or the wheat that was harvested when the seedlings had matured. “Eating seems to interest you plenty, though,” Merian, in lighter moods, would always joke when Purchase was older.

Still, Merian worried deeply for all he had sacrificed to create at Stonehouses. Feeding a family is enough satisfaction for your labor, he always tried to console himself, but with a second story added and very nearly the entire land under cultivation or pasture, he thought it would be a shame and a waste if the boy never developed an interest in it. “I wish my father had given me an interest in something,” he reproved whenever the youngster rebelled against his work or teachings. “Or that I had been anything other than an orphan. You don’t know yet how difficult it all is.”

To Purchase’s young ears, his father’s words sounded like little more than scolding. He wished to be a falconer and hunt his birds, or else a governor with the king’s business on his hands, or a knight defeating great dangers. He did not want to be a farmer ruled by weather and caprice. Despite this, he respected his father and tried to obey him. Still, he never did know whether he would be able to please him.

Sanne watched the two of them and hoped they might fulfill the hopes and expectations each had for the other, which she knew to be different from her own for either of them, which were only that each should find contentment.

Merian watched the land, taking satisfaction in what he had done but aware that someday all would be dismantled, and that he should plant on a scale small enough to sustain alone in his old age. He no longer remembered what he made that first year at market, but it was still the season he was proudest of, when he had no company and battled nature without a reserve of food or safety. Having survived that he could not fret for the future. His natural optimism, though, no longer had a place to expand to and express itself.

“He is young still,” Sanne counseled. “You’ll be proud of him yet.”

Merian hoped she was prescient in the way mothers often are – and fathers too seldom – but he spent the fall months after the harvest going on long walks, inspecting both his lands and the new buildings that had gone up in the intervening years. A new road, north and south, now crossed the original westward line ten miles farther on. It moved goods and peoples all in a tumultuous rush, to settle the areas of the even farther-outlying counties, making him wonder how long before everything had been seized and a man either had gotten in with the original parceling or would be left without, until some new land and new parceling of it, fair and first-come, came about. And what about the last one there at the great partitioning? He could not answer but thought he should like to see Chiron again one day and ask him what would happen to him who had no direction, physical or otherwise, to move in away from his original source. Would he be satisfied, never knowing the tear of separation or else pained by the constriction of his movement?

He thought only that the boy better make up his mind on one thing or the other before too long, and that the other lines he had crossed, and been custodian of, must take custody of themselves soon.

He thought again then for the first time in years of Ruth and Ware, called Magnus. In his mind they were locked on the Sorel place, as he knew they always would be, either because she had lost courage to ask what was even in the rights of a bondswoman or because he had been too impatient to wait. He forced this last thing away from himself. He had done what was his responsibility and knew you could no more make someone free than you could keep that same thing away from one determined to have it.

On his walk home from the edge of his lands, he stared out over the rolling hills and valley, which were now under cultivation as far as he could see, and decided then he would continue in any case with the land and no more wait for the boy, Purchase, to show an interest.

He took this new optimism and set out on a project of improvement, so that when he finished it would be the equal of any farm in the colony and his fortune beyond any he might have imagined for himself when first beginning. Jasper Merian set his mind to growing rich.

Sanne, who was well into her middle years now as well, watched her husband in his new ambition for fortune. It reminded her of their early years together and also instilled in her a new hope for the future. She took it that he was decided on being less demanding and more forgiving of the boy, but also that he would rest less of his own ambition upon him. She was more tender in turn with her husband, cooking and teasing as she did all those years ago when he was clearing the second field and she was building her stove.

Purchase that winter often sought his father’s approval for his various pursuits, telling him, “I’m going to build an army camp in the barn” or “I am off in search of pirate’s treasure in the woods just there,” so his father would take it that he was engaged in constructive activity.

Merian then, looking at the boy, thought he might not be such a disappointment, and, when he took him into his latest scheme for the improvement of the place, was much pleased with the boy’s contributions, finding him quite natural with measuring tools and also able to imagine things before they were cast in hard reality, and – while perhaps still lazy – not at all slow.

The project, which was to be the last of the improvements for the year, was something Merian had long dreamed of but thought too presumptuous for the modest scale of Stonehouses, especially given the fact that he had already thought to give it a name. Now that he had decided on improving the place once more, he also decided his new creation was the first thing he needed for the new phase in his life, as it marked a man who took his affairs seriously and would let him better manage them.

He went into town for various small pieces and to check his designs against other examples of its kind, but found he could mostly make it himself, and with Purchase’s offers of help with the measuring and cutting he was certain of its accuracy.