Dominion (33 page)

Magnus tried to explain the logic that had brought the girl there. Seeing Merian still unsatisfied, he offered again to send her away. Merian only shook. And there could be no other word in the matter.

Jasper was exhausted from emotion and the effort required to communicate with his family. Where only a minute earlier he had seemed furious as an angel, he looked now again like a feeble old man and soon began to sleep where he sat, like a child too long awake. However, they could not dismiss his anger. On the contrary, everyone took it gravely and tried whatever they could to reverse its course and cause.

While they usually had a country preacher who came to the house every Sunday to give a sermon—as he did for all the estates with population enough—that week Adelia had everyone dress for church in town.

The four of them—Magnus, Adelia, Caleum, and Libbie—all shared a single cab and were silent on the way, none daring look at the others or mention what had happened out there. It was the middle of winter and the going was slow, but when they arrived they had been silent a long time and were happy to be in the fresh air again.

All their friends were glad to see them as well and congratulated Libbie and Caleum on their pending child. The family's mood remained solemn. Magnus, in accordance with the plan Adelia had devised, paid the preacher to have the congregation pray for them at Stonehouses. In Adelia's thinking it would wash away whatever ill any of their other decisions might have brought and bring forgiveness.

Too ashamed to tell the real need for absolution, what Magnus said, as Adelia had instructed him, was that his old father was very ill and he would like everyone to send prayers to heaven for him to recover and for his soul if he did not. The parishioners were all touched and only
too eager to comply with this request, as Jasper Merian had lived so long and been there so long with them.

Nor was this ruse merely a deception: Jasper was mortally ill. He had lost as well, it seemed, the will to go on. While everyone around thought he might live to be a hundred, he had no desire in him to do so. Even before he lost the power of speech, he often claimed he had only stayed around as long as he had in order to gain back the years lost to servitude near the beginning of his life. So when Magnus and Adelia asked that everyone pray for their father, all understood they were seeking for him a final blessing.

Jasper Merian himself might have argued that the care of neither one's soul nor other properties could be left to others. As he faced his death, though, locked in a state of inarticulation, he sent one day for Caleum. When Caleum came to him Merian labored with all his breath to say what it was he wished of the young man. The syllables as they left his mouth were all disconnected, but Caleum was able to puzzle them back together. His grandfather was instructing him about the care of his home and children, and even how he should name his own.

Caleum was always eager for his grandfather's advice, but this particular instruction seemed strange, and at the time he did not fully understand it. He swore nonetheless he would abide by it. For Merian it was part of his final reckoning, as he counted out the successes and failures of his life and worried for the last time over the survival of all at Stonehouses.

Had he had voice, he might have enumerated his two natural sons, a like number of wives, and half that for grandchildren, so far as he knew; over fifty years of freedom, a quarter century, or thereabouts, in bondage at Sorel's Hundred. His own parents he never knew, but how he came to Columbia had been for a while a famous story in the watery parts of the world. He counted both, the legend it engendered and the fate he had escaped, as among his worthy possessions and achievements.

His original father, it is said, was a seaman—though his origins before or beyond that are unknown to any record—who took a wife on the African coast. When he returned to her after an adventure that took him
all the way to the South China Sea, he found she had taken another man in his place. To punish her and the son she had borne, he sold both to a merchant vessel. Such was the fate of the infant Merian and his mother.

On shipboard his mother suffered from a severe illness, succumbing to fever that swept the vessel two days out. When she died they brought her infant abovedecks, where it was taken to the captain's quarters for instruction on whether it should join the mother at the bottom of the ocean, as was the custom. The captain, a man in his forties who had already made enough money to retire and was in fact plowing this route through the world for the final time, looked at the wrinkled creature they had brought to him, and for the first time on his journeys let show some small sympathy, some tiny, infinitesimal human heart. Instead of putting it where the mother was, he took the child and kept it with him for the rest of the journey, feeding it with milk from an onboard she-goat that had been intended for slaughter.

He took it ashore with him when he disembarked in Liverpool, and when he and his wife moved to the new colony some years later he took the boy with him there as well, having grown as attached to the creature as a familiar. When he cleared land for a farm the boy was with him still, and he called him little Columbian, as he seemed to take to this new place naturally. So Merian counted for himself four parents but no proper home, until he built Stonehouses with his own hands.

It was this he worried over at the end of his days when he gave his final instructions to Magnus. Their congress that afternoon was the last time Merian worried about earthly things.

When Jasper Merian finally died, the shadow on the sundial in his front garden stood exactly at noon, and all the hours of the day afterward were plunged in sadness for the residents of Stonehouses. Work on the land came to a halt. Neither the hired men nor the beasts they drove would work again before Merian's body was lowered into the earth.

Magnus was at one end of the fields when he heard, and Caleum at another, and both made their way home to the center of the land, where the women were already dressing and preparing the body.

Merian, like his sons, had been a behemoth in life, and everyone remembered him as one of the tallest men they had ever seen. But when Magnus Merian saw his naked father that afternoon he could scarcely
believe how small he was, like the tiniest of babies. When he called the carpenter to take measurements for a coffin and the man confirmed his actual measurement, he told him to build the box larger than they needed, because it also needed to encase his spirit, and that was giantsized still.

At the funeral the next day Merian would have hardly recognized a soul, as most of his peers had passed on before him. All the neighbors came out, though, and from town the daughters of Content with their husbands. Both the Methodist and Baptist preachers wanted to give the sermon, and argued among themselves about who should have the privilege. In the end both men spoke, each competing to outdo the other in oratory.

Rudolph Stanton sent over a full kitchen staff, so that no one at Stonehouses should have to work that day, as well as a group of musicians to entertain, such as was their custom, and they celebrated Merian's life until the end of the week, each man according to his fashion. It is said the main of these festivities were divided between those that were African and those that were Christian, but others spoke of strange goingons that belonged to customs no one had ever heard of. They spoke of seeing lights, and spectral phenomena, and claimed to feel such magic as they never had before, as the ice on the lake groaned like the world coming apart.

When things finally returned to normal and work again resumed on the land, Caleum came in from the fields one evening and, without knowing what prompted him, took down the sword that hung over his mantel. There he saw the strangest thing of all. On the blade he would swear, as he stood there afright, was his grandfather, at the prow of a ship headed on a voyage of shades.

His eyes were sharp and he stood again a full head and a half taller than other men, and the boat went where he commanded. Whether in search of Ruth or Sanne or his father and mother, or even a trip more mysterious, the writings fail to say. But that Jasper Merian was a giant as great as Columbia had ever seen is well agreed upon. And that he is gone from here. Aye that is carved in steel.

Libbie Merian felt the pain of labor for the first time in mid-July that year—as if one soul had first to cross over before the other could begin its outward journey. She was sitting in the front parlor, knitting a blanket for the expected child, when her waters burst without warning. She felt her former fear descend upon her but was calm as she called Claudia, to come help her.

Claudia, who had delivered countless young, was perfectly poised as she came to her mistress's side. “It will most likely be awhile yet,” she said, leading Libbie to the room they had prepared for her to give birth in when the time came. None of them could have known, though, how that time would reach and stretch—until it had taken up near two days and consumed all their hopes and fears—before putting them down to rest again.

Libbie sweated through the night, cursing all she could think of, and all who crossed her path, so unbearable was her torment and tribulation. Caleum had decamped to Stonehouses for the duration of the labor, and Adelia had in turn gone over to the new building to aid with the birth and comforting of the mother.

At Stonehouses Magnus sat up with Caleum until late in the evening, speaking of how long it had been since there were children on the land. Magnus next told stories of what Caleum was like as a boy and laid wager as to what the new arrival's character would be like. They also noted things, such as who was tallest in the family and who was strongest, and bet about the child's height and strength. When the two men went to sleep
that night, each abundantly happy at the prospect of the new birth, both were certain the ordeal would be over before they awoke.

In the morning one of the women who worked on the place told them the women were still at the new building and the baby had not yet come into the world. Magnus and Caleum took the news in stride, as they went to work inspecting the fields, thinking they would be summoned before midday.

They came home that noon unbidden, as they had yet to receive word about the delivery and were grown anxious from this lack of news. In their concern they decided to go over to the other house to see what the matter was, even if it was not their place to do so.

When they arrived they were told nothing was wrong; it was only proving an extraordinarily long labor, and they should perhaps better return to the other place. Libbie, flush-faced and exhausted, was in the throes of the greatest pain, and when Caleum peeked into the room where she was, he could see this, and became filled with apprehension. “You are very brave,” he said to her.

When she saw his doting face, Libbie cursed him for being there and added further obscenities, ending with, “It was an evil hour I met thee.”

At nine o'clock that evening her torment finally ceased. The child who was so long in coming into the world decided at last to join it, and Caleum was called back to the birthing house. When Claudia came to summon him, though, instead of joy he felt a passing second of dread, like a fast-moving cloud that plunged him temporarily into shadow. He found himself hoping nothing was the matter with his wife, but, as he walked through the crowd of women in his house and approached the room where his wife was, he heard a loud, wailing cry that filled him with sadness and hope.

Caleum's fears all left him then and he was overjoyed, as he could not have imagined just hours earlier. When he held the child he had no sight for anything else. It was a feeling unlike any he had known, as he looked on the boy's shriveled new face, like a bud on a vine that had yet to fully open. The child was so small Caleum could fit him in one of his outstretched hands, though he was careful not to do so for danger of dropping him.

At last he turned to Libbie and stroked her face as she recovered from the long labor. “How are you feeling?” he asked, looking at her where she rested.

He could tell how much her ordeal had taken from her, but her dread at least had lifted and she was no longer afraid. Too tired to speak, she merely smiled at her husband.

As they gazed at the child together, what sprang first to Caleum's mind was that, coming so close after Merian's death, the boy must somehow be blessed by the departed. To honor the connection, he suggested they name him accordingly.

Libbie nodded in assent when he told her. “I think Jasper is fitting. But I also had in mind John.”

“That is also a good name.” Caleum negotiated, wanting to give her what she wanted. “We can give him both.”

So they named their first child together John Jasper, and Magnus and Adelia were nearly as pleased as the parents to be made grandparents, or granduncle and grandaunt, such as it was. To give thanks, Magnus declared the next day a holiday for all of Stonehouses, so they might celebrate Libbie's motherhood.

How long he stayed with them though, or, rather, how short a while, was soon the cause of great desolation. The child for whom it had been so difficult to gain life only held on to it until the end of his first week, when they found him dead atop his mother's breast.

“He seemed perfectly healthy,” Adelia said with despair, coming over from the other house after she learned the boy had passed away, “but God strikes and snatches what He will.”

“It is true,” Claudia agreed, as she tried to coax the child from its mother's arms. “And for all His own reasons He did not give the boy this day as He did the ones before it.” She had seen so many little ones whisked back away in her work, she knew whereof she spoke.

Libbie, though, shunned Claudia's hands, refusing to let go or relinquish the boy's lifeless body. She went on holding her baby in her arms the rest of that day.

Caleum had the opposite response. Pretending a coarseness that had known greater suffering than was in his history, he refused to look on the corpse at all, saying there was no reason to glance back.