Dominion (22 page)

He was working in Rhode Island in a shipyard when she finally came to him of her own free choice. She was with a small child and said Oswin had put her out, claiming to know it was not his and no way would it ever be passed off as such.

He took her in, and they lived for a while in great harmony, each forgiving the other for the things they had done to cause one another misery. They lived above the smithy where he worked, and the rooms were always warm from the furnace, and she set about making a home for the three of them there. He had long ago melted the cage down, and from its remains crafted a great wrought-iron bed, which they slept on as husband and wife, for she claimed that a man and woman could marry themselves to each other with no more officiating than that. That it was the way it had always been done until the church
thought to step in and charge a fee, but the institution was still built of just two people.

Whatever this state was called, it was blissful to him, and he went to work regular most mornings, except those he stayed home to be with her. On those holidays he always worked late into the evening the following day so that they always had dependable meals and warm clothes against the seaside winters. From this routine, life in the house took on the contours of regularity that did much to ease both their minds.

She had come over from Africa not ten years earlier and Oswin had originally been her master, until he had a vision one night and immediately upon waking repented of how he lived, saying now that it was not proper for one human to own another. When he set his slaves free he had thirty other souls he had been responsible for during the previous portion of his life. He told them they were all permitted to go, but he said to Mary Josepha that he would be much pleased if she stayed with him of her own volition. It surprised her, for he had never seemed to so much as look at her before. She agreed to stay with him, and they were happy awhile.

In time she found he was a very jealous husband and snuck off with Purchase, at first to punish him. The second time, however, it had been because she had found she preferred to be with Purchase and had no want of punishing anyone, if such were possible.

They wrestled with this for the years they were on the road together, him telling her she was his wife and her saying it was difficult to find a difference between that and being his slave. Shamed, he would be silent a bit, but when she abandoned him for Purchase he beat her to within an inch of her life. The next day, heavy of heart, he gave two very popular sermons: the first was about the rights of slaves to freedom, and the second was about the duty of the wife and the pain of marriage. “Both are among the truest penance to God,” he claimed. That day they saved two dozen souls, more if one included the slaves one of the parishioners set free after the sermon.

Purchase was irresistible to her after that and she had come to him in Maryland intending to stay, until she found herself in the cage. When she returned to Oswin he at first took her in, and even kept her after he saw her condition, thinking perhaps it was his issue she bore. As soon
as the child was born, though, he put them both out in the snow. He himself died very soon afterward, of an affliction either of the nervous system or of the blood. He had two different doctors and on this final diagnosis neither could agree.

That winter and spring husband, wife, and child were all content as could be in the warm little room above the shop, and when summer came they talked of visiting Stonehouses. It was put off because of Purchase's work, which picked up during the warm months, and on account of the child still being so small, but Mary Josepha gave every impression of being the most diligent of mothers. She seemed to be rid of the wandering that was in her blood before.

When Purchase came upstairs from the workshop she would have a meal waiting for him, and on Sundays they went to the Baptist church together for worship and praying on the things they could find no other answers for, or refuge from, in daily life.

It was here she first felt the need to minister again. Even though Rhode Island was the most liberal of the colonies, there was not yet a significant congregation of people who professed as they did, for Purchase had come to be an adherent of her unorthodox beliefs as well. She expressed her dissatisfaction at first by attending different churches to hear what their ministers had to preach. Usually she went for no more than a week, but sometimes she would maintain interest in a congregation for as long as eighteen months before moving on, until she had been to nearly every church in Providence. In the end she knew it was simply no use. They were none of them as liberal as they preached, all were beholden to an ordering she recognized as false, and none could explain these falsehoods away.

She began to give sermons in the square on her own, but what had been popular among the country people caused a great sensation in the town. There were two principal charges brought against her. The first was that she was uneducated and so could not interpret the Gospels; no one claimed her to be heretical, because heresy requires knowing and they denied her ability in this endeavor. The second was that she was a woman and, on those grounds alone, should stop and desist.

When they brought the complaint, they first spoke to Purchase, but
he supported her steadfastly. “If she has it to preach, I don't see the harm. There's a thousand churches in Providence.” The response did not endear him to anyone and soon his business began to decline, among both the whites and free Negroes.

Purchase told her it was nothing to cause them worry, and they would withstand the privations of opinion. For Mary Josepha, however, it was more than people talking against her, it was that she could not practice her chosen craft and belief. “It is my calling, and the price of God's love has always been and ever will be suffering,” she repeated, and he knew this is what she truly believed and that he was in danger of her leaving. “Better a liar with true words than a false prophet and none of it worth telling.”

He did not want to know anything more about that kind of love and told her they would leave the state and return the coming autumn to his people at Stonehouses, where there was always a place for them.

What she wanted foremost was to preach, and to know again the feeling of bringing souls to God on what she thought of as reasonable terms, even if there was theater out in front of that. “I will have the same problem there as here,” she said. “The only way to keep going for me is to move and not rest still.” He told her they should at least try his people first before settling into that kind of life, as he did not think it would be any great bargain for any of them.

He returned from work one day soon after that to find her gone again, as he had all those days in the past. This time, however, he was not frantic in his action but very deliberate. It was northern autumn and already beginning to freeze over during the nights.

He dressed the boy in heavy shoes and a thick warm sweater underneath a heavy coat. His head was covered in a woolen hat. Purchase affixed a bag containing some coins of silver in the pockets of his coat and another of gold inside his sweater. He also wrote two notes, one for the messenger and another for the receiver.

He then took the boy in his arms and carried him out into the night and to the other side of Providence, down near the quays. It was the home of one of his friends and customers, a half-caste sailor named Rennton who belonged to the Antinomian church with his wife and often did business in the farmost reaches of the Crown's possessions, including the southern colonies.

In his father's arms the boy felt safe when they left the house, but soon a sense of dizziness overtook him as they bounded over the small hills, which looked enormous from his perspective, and moved toward the fish smell of the docks. He knew something strange was afoot, but when his father set him down on the unfamiliar porch and told him to stay quiet, the child obeyed. He was still quiet an hour later when Rennton came home and found him there, and in fact would not speak for two full days afterward.

Purchase he could not help but go off again after Mary Josepha, as he had those days in the past when she still had another man and he chased after her. Both of them like the original Fools, or else original Lament and Heartache.

Rennton took the child inside his little house and asked his wife to feed him from their pot. While the child ate he unpinned the note from his coat and went out to his neighbor's place to have it read. He did not need anyone to tell him that something was amiss with the boy and that in likelihood he had been abandoned. It seemed too important a thing to guess at, though, and not be entirely certain. What if they only wanted to leave the child for a little while and then come back? But leaving him out there in the cold, Rennton knew, was the same as giving him away.

He apologized to his neighbor for coming at such an hour, but when he showed him the note the man marveled at the audacity of it. “Imagine them not just leaving the boy free and clear but leaving him with a lien they want you to pay off.” Rennton thanked him for reading the note and went back to his own house, puzzling more how Purchase could do something like that than the inconvenience it would cause him.

When he returned he told his wife what Purchase and Mary Josepha had done, and she argued with him that it was Purchase who had done more wrong, because Mary Josepha only left the child with its father, as you would if going to the market or away for a visit to relatives.

Rennton did not argue with her—he never argued with her—but said he would take up the task Purchase had left to him—as it was good friendship, and someone had to take up responsibility for the little creature—and try, beginning the day after next, to deliver the boy safely
to the place in the note. The boy, Caleum he was called, felt very safe in that house for the two days he was there and seldom cried for missing his parents. He was a manual of composure, and no one watching him would have known any of this, especially as he held his tongue and did not speak.

When they set out for Stonehouses, though, the boy was at first upset by the voyage and the life of the sea. He was almost as disturbed by the journey from Providence to Edenton as he had been when he finally realized for himself that his parents were gone away without him and what his condition was. Rennton, when he addressed him, always started out calling him Caleum, but in the end found himself saying
poor boy
or
pitiful orphan.

It was on this voyage that Caleum began to speak again and ask his fate, as the sounds of the ship and its other passengers had unsettled him so he did not know what would become of him. Looking over the side of the vessel as they rounded Cape Lookout, the ink-dark water seemed lit from underneath by a strange, ominous light that would show itself if only the waves could part far enough. He looked at this mystery, hoping the water would leap higher and show the bottom of the ocean, but soon the waves began to toss the ship and make it creak with a horrible sound that seemed to him like an old person screaming. He ran back from the rail and sought out Rennton in the excitement of the sailors trying to fasten down the ship for the storm they had entered. When he found his caretaker, he could only think to ask him if they were going to hell. He asked this very calmly, as if he were prepared should that be their ultimate destination.

Rennton told the boy they were going to no such place but were only caught in a squall such is normal at sea in that season. Caleum went back to the rail of the ship and looked out again. This time he spied another boat on the horizon that was sailing under calm winds, and a young couple stood at the rail holding hands. The woman, seeing the boy, kissed her hand with great intensity then blew the kiss to him. Although she looked very different, and he had never seen her before, he felt when he received it that he had been kissed by his own mother. He waved back to the other ship, until they were nearly gone from sight, and the wind in the sails of his boat forced him to seek shelter below.

Rennton, when the boy came back, tried his best to console him, but he could not help worrying aloud what they were thinking to leave him in such a state of safety. He did not judge them though, and while not one man in a hundred thousand would have done what he did, he was good as the trust Purchase placed in him. When the boat docked in Carolina they disembarked, and the two continued overland together toward Stonehouses.

In the end it was Sanne who made a way for Adelia in Magnus's affections, years after the start of the affair and even then under the most terrible of circumstances.

The night after she saw him riding away in the snow, Adelia knew Magnus was lost to her. While he sat in the tavern, she allowed her desire for him to seize and run rampant in her imagination. When he stood and, instead of coming to beg her forgiveness, went away, her heart clinched inside her chest and she lost her breath briefly. While he sat out on the horse in the snow, she was aware of him watching her and still thought it only a matter of time before he came back and they were together. When he rode off into the darkness, though, Content had to close the tavern, so distraught was she to see him ride away.

Nor would she come down from her room upstairs in the days that followed, and whenever Dorthea brought her food she sat at the edge of the bed and shoved it away, asking, “What have I done to be treated like this?”

All the sympathy and outrage shown to her, though, did nothing to move Magnus. Sanne, seeing how he behaved, knew it was not how he wished to be. Still, when she prayed at night, she began to wonder whether he was not hardening heaven against himself.

That was in the days immediately before illness took her, and life at Stonehouses changed forever.

When she first noticed it, one day in early spring, the crab on her chest was already livid, and extended out over her breast like a lover's jealous hand. When she gazed upon it she thought of her former husband, and how, when they were still a young couple, he would sometimes clutch her with maddening force as he swore his love. She
guarded the crab as a secret for months then, as she had once guarded his affection for her.