Dominion (5 page)

“There is talk that the road might be graded and boards put down.”

“And who will do this?”

“They will hire a man.”

“Who will pay him?”

“The merchants.”

“Business is good on the square?”

“It hasn't been bad.”

Returning that night he wondered whether his own gains were as much as the merchants' on the square and whether the little farm would keep up. He had paid that year for his goods one quarter more in hard cash than the year before.

At home he climbed into bed next to Sanne but did not mention these things.

“How is the oven coming along?” he asked her.

“It should be finished before summer's end.”

“And everything else?”

“That's a fair amount. Hard to say when all of it might be done.”

“And with you yourself? How are you getting on here?”

It was the first time he had ever inquired about her general well-being since they were wed and he had brought her out there. The small tenderness moved her to forgive him certain other things, so that the coil which had been tensing day by day found release in the open atmosphere that night, where it was able to let loose of its stored energy without harm. On the contrary, it was energy that manifested itself in the same tenderness with which they sang to each other that first night, so that the early days of their marriage were not all full of strife and turbulence but also of the bliss that marks happier houses, when their inhabitants are so wise as to give it free reign. No, they were not Merian's acres alone at all anymore. Nor did he see them as such.

The house grew and the farm grew and Ruth Potter bore the yoke and burden of domesticity—both in the field and on the road—and Sanne and Merian began to thrive and feel at ease in the clearing that was the boundary line of creation. In the corner of the room nearest the door the belly of the stove grew; and in the fields maize, which would fill it with meal in the winter months, reached ever skyward.

At trading that year Merian acquired a cow that was not too badly used, a pig for the slaughter, and several chickens, which would give them eggs. He also bought sundry items for the house and farm, including a large tin tub, shoes for both husband and wife, a dress for Sanne and a peck of apples for Ruth Potter. When the accounts were said and figured, he owed no one, and still had monies left for the first time and did not want for anything.

From their private garden, Sanne pulled tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, okra, yam, pear, various berries, greens, onions, and other herbs. Merian saved from the harvest a separate lot of America corn for seeding in the spring, tobacco for his own personal consumption, and the hay he had planted in anticipation of acquiring livestock. Sanne prepared preserves of the berries and pears and helped her husband in digging a root cellar at the side of their house to store their other surplus.

As the harvest came to a close, Merian and Ruth Potter went to the mill with the maize they would need for the year to have it ground into flour. When they returned, Merian noticed the house had grown hotter than any day before, even during the height of the southern summer, and he could not determine what the reason was until he saw the
little stove his wife had built was fully fired and glowed, waiting only for something to give its heat and warmth to. She provided it with a pan of bread dough made from the new flour, and a pie made of berries she had set aside. The house filled with the smell of baking bread and sweets, and Merian thought he had never in his life had it as good, though his back ached as much as he could remember.

Still, he knew this was his own farm and labor given for his sustenance and his new wife's, a thing which none but the most rotten man could begrudge. They basked that night in comfort from their toil, and neither thought of any of the other rooms, in times recent or far distant, in the houses and halls of their memories, they had inhabited before.

By the time the caravans that headed west each year started out that season, the Merians were already well ensconced in their winter home, which was a full three weeks earlier than he had been able to ready it in the past. The snows arrived earlier that year as well, and when a knock came to their door one morning, during a sudden storm, Merian left bed reluctantly to open it for the stranded traveler who greeted him.

“I have lost a wheel,” the man said, as snow blew over the threshold and into the house.

While in the past he would barely have opened the door, let alone offered his assistance, his sense of peace made Merian eager to help, and he went off with the stranger in the snow to see if they could repair the carriage before the storm grew too foul.

It was as he walked home with the stranger and his team, after helping to right the overturned coach but not repair the wheel, which needed the attention of a smith, that he saw smoke from a fire not his own, which looked as if it rose from a built-up chimney instead of the bare ground of the forest. He thought then that he no longer lived at the edge of oblivion but had pushed its claim from his doorstep. He also envisioned how much easier the road would be to travel than when he walked it the first time, as parts of it were now graded. He thought then for the first time he might be able to keep his vow of the first year and return to Virginia someday soon for a visit.

He gave these things reign over his imagination as the dual aches of nostalgia and guilt seized him. One for the first family he had known
and now missed, and the other for the wife to whom he owed his presence and loyalty.

As they waited out the storm in his house, he asked the stranger where he was headed and where he was coming from. The man answered only in half riddles but told him the trip had gone well so far, as the roads had been without hostility. When the storm let up several hours later, Merian continued to question the traveler, as they went into the village and even still as the smith turned the wheel on his lathe to realign the warped rim. When he finally escorted the man back to his carriage, he still had only a dim notion of who he was but reasoned that was the way it would remain.

Riding home in the snow-shadowed forest he looked around himself to ensure that no one else was on the road who might see his tortured thought. Instead of going into the house directly when he arrived even with his door, he went on a bit farther into the night, as if testing the road's disposition toward him.

The stranger on their ride through the dark woods had inspired in him a feeling of great dread, as well as hope, that manifested itself now in the brooding trip he took back and forth along the road, thinking of his previous existence. “There is a great change coming to these precincts,” the man had preached, as they searched for the carriage in the darkness. “It will not make itself visible for years yet, but prepare thyself, for when it does it will be as if a hood has been lifted off the eyes of the world.”

“What hood is that?” asked Merian.

“It is the great darkness that prevents men from seeing the natural state of us all is in eclipse and shadow, and we had better not ask too much how such a life came to exist, but why any did. That is the hood that the preachers and politicians use to fool us ordinary folk. They tell you they have the postal address to Providence, but I tell you that you and I have a channel to the same divinity as the Bishop of Canterbury or the baby Christ, and you do not need permission for access. What they want is to assume your agency in this, the progress of your own salvation, and add it to the number of other souls they have hoodwinked, until they have amassed an authority to rival that of Lord John himself. No, brother, we must all be self-governed on this journey and keep any who wants it from getting control of this vessel, like some popish Argonaut,
which he would then steer only toward his own destination and neither yours nor mine nor God's.”

Merian went silent to hear this blasphemy and struggled to get the iron fastened around the stranger's wheel. “What kind of preacher are you?” Merian asked at last, standing up. “Every other one of you I ever heard said the only plan for any of us is already mapped out by God.”

“No preacher at all but a poor pilgrim.”

He asked nothing else to be explained that night.

When he turned to leave, the man pressed a small coin of solid gold into his hand, which had embossed upon it a seal he had never seen before. “Now, there—there is something with materiality,” the man said in a conspiratorial whisper, though there was no one else on the road. “Remember our conversation, brother, and mark it when it comes around to you again.”

In his heart, which was superstitious and had not thrown off all the old tales he had learned in his boyhood, Merian began to tremble and look around himself as he paced the greedy road.

If it is oblivion that is our state, what indeed keeps anything from disappearing just as easily? he asked himself. This in its turn caused a great sadness to visit him that night, as he thought on things he had not visited in a very long time, and that indeed he thought perhaps best now forgotten.

When he returned to the house, Sanne sat up in bed waiting and asked why it had taken him so long.

“The wheel was worse off than I suspected,” he said.

“I see. And the traveler?”

“He is back on his way, but he was a strange one.”

“How so?”

“He was all talk of signs and claimed he had found a new way of measuring time's progress.”

“You know what kind of talk all that is, don't you?”

Merian was not pious, as his wife was, but thought he knew what she made of it all. He was happy, though, to have the talk turn in a different direction than the pathways of his worries. “Now Sanne, he was just somebody who was stranded and needed help.”

“This road is tarnished by all sorts,” she said sternly. “Who knows what all we're likely to see out here before the end of it all?”

When he went out for wood that winter he found he had fallen into the habit of staring down the road whenever he happened to cross it, appraising its straightness and thinking how it went all the way back to Virginia in one form or other. He could not help but daydream of the other terminus. It was his current end, though, that always found and reclaimed him before he ever gathered the nerve to set back out toward the other.

As the spring came, and the ice thawed from the lake, he began to prepare his fields. On one of those mornings when thrush song was loud enough to cover the horrendous creak of melting ice, he looked out to the road and saw a new figure headed directly toward him. He kept at his work until the stranger stood in front of him. When he looked up from the shadow that covered the ground, he saw it was one he knew from long years before.

The two men clasped like kinsmen, and Merian invited the new arrival into the house, where his wife prepared for them a meal. When they had finished eating the two old friends began to reminisce and tell each other of former times and still other friends not forgotten.

As they grew comfortable, Merian had his friend, Chiron, wait while he went out of the house and into the root cellar. He returned with a jar of corn whiskey, which he had made in the tin tub he bought at the end of the previous season, and handed the jar to his guest.

“A drink,” was all the new arrival said as the hot liquid burned its way down his throat.

“It is the first batch,” Merian said, “but I could not imagine a better occasion for it. Tell me, what has brought you all this way?”

“Same as what brought you,” replied Chiron, who had a reputation as a seer back where they came from.

“How far you going?”

“I do not know.”

“You could stay on awhile.”

It was settled as simply as that, even after so long a separation, as each of them knew it was what he owed to the other man as a tithe to their shared past and common fate.

When Sanne asked about their relationship, Merian answered that they were cousins and did not elaborate on how.

They did not speak, however, about everyone they knew from the past, being content to enjoy each other's company, and silence, and the occasional jar of corn whiskey. When Merian did ask once after one of their mutual acquaintances who had gone unmentioned, Chiron invoked the unspoken rule that had governed all of their discussions about the past until then. “Things always getting separated from their roots,” he said. “When a man grows up in one place and leaves, he goes off part of the original and part of something new. The original don't always acknowledge the little offshoots, and all of them don't always acknowledge the master copy, because they need to get on with being separate and new and sometimes so different it don't make sense to talk about them at all anymore, other than gossip.”

In the mornings the two men went out into the fields and worked until midday, then returned home together, where they shared supper. The new man acknowledged this abundance of hospitality by working as hard in the sowing of Merian's fields as he would have if they were his own. One morning, though, late in his visit, when the crows were in full commotion, he paused to read his friend's fortune in their pattern, for he was learned and well-practiced in auspicating from the flight of birds. “You will profit twice more,” was all he said, as he stood from the place where he had sat to concentrate. Merian took the words as a mysterious gift to ponder and hope for, but he did not ask for further explanation, as he knew that was not how such things operated.

The arrangement continued well between them until late in the spring, when Chiron began to show signs of restlessness. As they worked outside one day, Merian asked him whether he wouldn't consider staying on longer.

“There is a nice spot over that way where you could put up a house of your own.”

“I appreciate it, but I think it best to keep to the road a little longer,” Chiron replied, without looking up from his work.