Dominion (25 page)

Merian, however, was not yet ready to leave them despite all his talk of death. He would live for some time to come yet—a fact that soon became apparent when he stopped losing weight, as if his body had reached some new equilibrium. Their worries then shifted back to Caleum and their frustration that he could tell them no more about what had happened to his parents than they already knew. This was still in those early days, when he was becoming accustomed to having lost one home and gained another. He thought Stonehouses the best place on earth but longed for his parents, and a remainder of the dread that had infested him during that trip from Providence made him quiet when left alone.

He spent his days exploring the property, especially the outbuildings and far meadows. It was the first time in his short life he was not confined under his parents' constant watch, and he delighted in it, even in the chores he was given to perform.

Seeing how well he liked work made Merian pleased as anything could make him, and he gave the boy his allowance at the end of every week gladly, telling him to be sure and keep a tally of how he spent it. There being little occasion to spend money, Caleum always accounted for last week's earnings by saying he had saved it all, which pleased Merian even more.

“Your father couldn't wait to spend it whenever he got a little money,” Merian said. Then, not wanting to bias the boy against his father, “Not that there's anything the matter with spending. Saving, though, is what I always thought you should do with a shilling. But he wasn't one to care for money—only other things, I guess.”

Thinking then to show him something of his father's, Merian led the boy into the living room, where the blade Purchase had crafted for him long ago still hung.

Caleum, when he saw it, was awed as any boy who ever beheld a sword. However, he was taken not only with the fantasy of war but also the pictures on the side of the blade. “I know them!” he said, pointing excitedly at the images. “And look, there I am!”

Merian, no longer able to see very much at all, indulged the boy a little while but reminded him that Purchase had made the sword well before he was born, and such talk did not figure.

Caleum did not argue with his grandfather but knew he had seen himself prominently displayed. In fact, in the image he saw, there he was holding the self-same blade as that of his reflection. Finally he asked whether he could hold the weapon.

Merian first told him no but then relented. When he tried to raise it up, however, it was far too heavy for him, and Merian took it back, promising one day he would be able to raise it.

“When?” Caleum wanted to know, but his grandfather told him he would know when. Merian put the sword back in its scabbard then, but not before noticing the blade had grown hot, as if just taken from the furnace.

Caleum looked at it so longingly on the nail over the mantel, Merian wondered whether it had been a good idea to put such a notion in the child's head.

He did not stop, though, confiding to his grandson all those things he had held to himself his entire life. Either because he felt he finally had a companion who was enough like him to understand or for some other reason, the two of them would sit out no matter the weather, and Merian would tell the boy tales and lore, until the only thing he had not properly recounted for him was the story of how the land was first settled, there being so much on the lifelong list of things Merian had done to relate that particular event did not make it, so that, as he had it, he came down from Virginia one year and after a little privation he was much the man he was at that moment.

When Adelia came upon the two of them, she would always reprimand Merian and take Caleum off to bed as he protested.

“Don't worry, I am not done for this world yet,” Merian would tell the boy, somewhat morbidly, as he left.

After rising the next day and making himself a breakfast of porridge, he saddled a mule from the barn and made a tour of his lands. At the lake he stopped and heard the ice creak and, beneath that, the singing and distinct sound of a great passion. To anyone else listening, all in that area would have been silence, but Merian and the fiend had a catching up that did not displease either of them

That was the way Magnus found him, sitting on top of a mule on the edge of the thawing lake, muttering to himself, with a half smile. “I vanquished it, son,” he said. “I conquered everything you see around you.”

“You were very brave,” Magnus replied, taking the reins and leading his father's mule back to the stable.

“I mastered the beast, and it was lonely, dangerous work,” his father said.

“It was for the better.”

“Everything I knew was behind me, and I did not know what lay ahead.”

“Great men have bowed before lesser challenges.”

“I kept the pact I made, and my sons should do likewise.”

“We are intent on doing our best.”

“No modesty in this, but life and death.”

“You must rest now,” Magnus said, leading man and beast into the barn.

“Bury me where I told you, and never let anything unsettle your peace here,” Merian said, finally allowing himself to be lifted from the saddle.

Magnus was surprised both by how superstitious his father had become and by how little he weighed as he carried him to bed. There Adelia tended to him, as she would have her own father, and he was glad for her attention, but he never recovered his full senses, and eventually even his memory began to die within him. “I was bonded, now am free.” What he clutched near himself then was his watch and an ugly carved doll he had kept all these years in the original cellar of the house and thought to retrieve that day. It was the face of the spirit he made all his pacts with, and as close as he ever cared to get to any god. No one
commented on it but left it with him for comfort, though they were all of them Christian and would have no mandates with their father's god. None except the boy Caleum, who asked questions about it and, more than a decade on, when Merian eventually died, took it upon himself to protect the little idol as an heirloom, much as he would cherish the sword his own father had made: all of them in equal measures the patrimony of Stonehouses and not uncommon in that particular time on the continent, like the promise and prophecy of fire.

The boy took quickly to Stonehouses, as certain plants transferred from one soil to another find their new environs equally conducive to growth—for example
Solanum tuberosum,
the common potato, which he ate for his lunch, or
Taraxacum officinale,
the dandelions they consumed as greens at dinner and which, when he was older, he and his friends would harvest late in the summer to produce a crude, heady wine—until it was impossible to tell it was not his original home. Though perhaps one might have called it his
urhome
or
great home,
as certainly it suited him as well as the first, which he never forgot. Being young at the time of his orphanage—once he determined it was a permanent situation—he also took to Magnus and Adelia's care with amazingly little rebellion and, in fact, great joy that this newfound warmth and security belonged now fully to him.

Nor was he without the normal assertiveness of boys his age, far from it; he often resented the scrutiny to which Magnus and Adelia, being new to parenting, subjected him. It was simply that, having lost one home, he was hesitant to do anything that might make the residents of Stonehouses angry at him or in any way jeopardize his station. Eventually, this habit of obeying became second nature to him, so that at the time when other young men felt the need to revolt against authority and claim independence he was calm and found the strictures placed on him quite bearable, if not always fair. In short, he was a model boy.

Adelia for her part never tired of spoiling him with attention, and Magnus, who could be so stern in everyday life, was made happy by the boy's ethic of work and good personal habits. This was especially vital,
as there were some things they themselves could not help him with but had to rely on his own discipline to accomplish.

Although Magnus was able in mathematics, for example, after he enrolled Caleum in school there were many questions he could not answer for the boy but was still anxious for him to learn, so that certain skills and knowledge he deemed important might be restored to the household. Perhaps because of this expectation, Caleum soon became among the best pupils at Miss Boutencourt's, the woman who taught all the Negro children whose parents wanted them educated. It had originally been a white school, but as there were so few of either color interested in education she decided it prudent, and necessary to her income, not to discriminate between them. In the beginning, however, none of the Negro families sent their children to her, being uncertain of the arrangement, until Magnus inquired, through an intermediary, about teaching Caleum, and she affirmed a commitment to teach any child in the county who would learn. After that, Magnus told everyone he knew with school-age children what a brilliant teacher she was and that he was entrusting Caleum to her tutelage—this he did both to spread general knowledge and to ensure that his own ward would not be so isolated when classes resumed.

It always gave him pleasure, in the months and years that followed, to hear Miss Boutencourt report the boy's progress. He was as generous with praise then as Adelia was with sweets and gifts, telling his nephew how proud both he and his grandfather were, and that his mother and father would be as well if they knew of his achievements. For every subject mastered he would also add a pound to the boy's allowance, telling him to spend it freely. However, seized with worry about spoiling him, he then became careful not to let him slack at his other chores. In general, though, he thought he could not have asked for a better son if it had been given to him to choose.

This is not to say those early days were without incident. Whenever Caleum performed below satisfactory levels in schoolwork—else was lax with his chores or on rare occasions even unruly—Magnus was unrelenting in his punishment. Midsummer would find the boy out with the hired men under the unsparing sun, stomping water into clay and then molding rough bricks. When the brickmaker came and fired the kiln he was ordered to stay at the man's side as he supervised the fire, which could go on for days at a time without pause or rest.

When the firing was over, and the bricks were cooling in the kiln, Magnus would call Caleum—who had not slept properly for nearly a week by this time—and ask whether he had learned his lesson and now knew, for example, that it was offensive to fail at spelling or that drinking dandelion wine behind the church house was a disgrace. Magnus, even in these moods, would always attribute Caleum's bad behavior to the influence of his friends, but he knew the boy had to learn right from wrong whatever the case.

Caleum, however, being at least as prideful as honest, always pointed out that the activity in question had been his idea. He would do this even if it meant another week in the kilns. “I might be a bad speller,” he would say, “but I'm not so much a fool as to be one because William Gibbs is.” Or, “It was my idea to brew the wine. Who else of them do you think could have figured how it is made?”

It was true. Among the free boys of color he was the acknowledged leader, and if he had done poorly at his spelling exam there was as likely as not a rash of poor fourteen-year-old Negro spellers running around Berkeley that particular year.

The other parents, however, were all so happy to see their sons befriend the well-regarded young Merian that none ever suspected it was Caleum who hatched their more reckless adventures, believing rather that the slave Julius was behind it all.

During the three years he attended Miss Boutencourt's, Caleum's most steadfast and dependable companions as he began exploring the world around him were the two Darson boys, George and Eli, whose father ran a farm down the valley about half the size of Stonehouses; Bastian Johnson, whose father, also called Bastian Johnson, was the local gunmaker; and a boy named Cato, whose father was called Plato and had been born a slave but settled in Berkeley as a wheelwright after his mistress freed them, because he heard it was a place hospitable to people of his kind. Neither father nor son had a last name or, for that matter, saw the need of one. There was also the aforementioned Julius, whose master was too poor to care for the souls he owned and so hired out any with skill to support his meager holding. Although Julius did not attend school with the other boys, he was a most gifted apprentice to the cabinetmaker, who allowed him to come and go as he pleased, so that he often spent time with the free boys after their lessons.

Even if he was often scapegoated, Julius himself was hardly an innocent. Being aware, however, of his place, he would never have suggested the boldest of their schemes, such as trying out their new dandelion wine behind the church house; or, “the white church,” as it was generally known, as religion had not been integrated in the town since the days Merian had attended service. In the time since the free Coloreds had switched over mainly to the Baptist church, where there was a section devoted to their exclusive use, and the slaves received their religious instruction on the plantations.

When the six boys were found drinking behind what was nevertheless a house of God, Reverend Finch whipped Cato, the two Darson boys, and Bastian Johnson. He sent word to the cabinetmaker about Julius's behavior, not wanting to lay hands on another man's property. Nor did he lay his hand on Caleum, although whether it was out of respect for the Merians or for some other reason of his own no one ever knew.

When the preacher sent word around to Magnus about what had happened, though, Magnus himself did beat Caleum, being very clear that the lesson was not for drinking but for the position he had let himself into.