Dominion (3 page)

“It is a fairly long way, especially in weather,” Merian reflected, letting his accusation hang there as Content looked at him. “I will see how it is next week.”

“Well, we would be much pleased,” Content said again. “And I am sure there is bound to be a woman there or two. I know at least Dorthea's cousin is coming from the coast.”

“I will see what the weather is,” Merian replied. “It is not so short a way for someone walking in foul elements.” At that he took his leave, bundling himself back into a knot of angry shivers and tension that warmed his muscles briefly against the springtime cold.

The next week brought nothing but more weather, and Sunday was the wettest day among them. Under his roof, Merian pattered about, preparing his porridge and trying to decide whether he would go into town or not. He listened to the spikes of rain hammering the boards and, in his own self, felt emotions hard and bitter that the growing season had still not arrived and his fields remained untilled. Beyond this, he felt a deep sense of gnawing discomfort that was not so sharp or hateful as hunger but reminded him of an abiding sickness. He knew it was loneliness that roiled within him, for he had been out on the land over a year and a half with scarce any human company. Still, he was surprised to find it so sharp within himself, for he seldom felt need for association of any kind. He remembered then the celebrations of springtime they had had back in Virginia, and how he felt among them like part of the company, even if he could not always share fully in their belief. If only
for the sake of this remembered fellowship, he resuscitated his expectations, allowing that he might join in the Easter Day services and the festivals that followed.

He dressed himself diligently before the low flames, taking from a stool beside the fire his pants, which he had washed by hand the night before and hung to dry. From a box beneath the bed he removed his other shirt and wrapped it around his body. At the flame again he took a piece of glass and a sharpened knife, which he lifted to his throat and began scraping until his neck and face were passable smooth. Outside, he saddled the mule with the harness it wore when he first liberated it from its former captivity and climbed on top of the animal. Man and beast then were prepared and headed down the road combined in a single quixotic form.

At the bottom of the hill he listened again to the ghost, singing with even greater strength than before. The creature's tortured sound caused him to stopper his ears in fear, with the base of his palms pressed against his minor lobes, as he knew everything that lives, or else half lives, does so on the constant edge of annihilation. There were those who saw this edge and got on with it—that is to say past it, smartly—and those others who looked on it and passed through the rest of life in paralysis of fear. The beast sang its dirge. Merian adjusted himself in the saddle astride the mule and coaxed it into a faster and faster trot. The animal would never reach anything even approximating a proper gallop, but it gained speed enough to hurry him beyond the sound of singing and on his chosen way.

The mule moved over the muddied pathways toward civilization, sure-footed even without the man's hand guiding its journey, until they neared the settlement's center. Half a mile from the burgeoning square, the animal came to a flat stop and refused to budge, regardless of goading or the eventual outright violence. The spot where it stood was the railing next to a stone-built house with a plot just inside the fence. Instead of keeping to the road, the animal shoved its head between the slats of wood and began rooting in the garden for whatever might reveal itself.

From the side of the house a man, who had watched and saw this, stepped forth and called to the two of them. “We just planted that ground.”

“I don't know what her interest is in it,” Merian replied, whipping at the animal's hide. “You know how mules are.”

“I know that mule,” the man said, walking closer toward them. “It belonged to Mr. Potter, who took his family west last spring.”

“Wrong mule,” Merian answered.

“Well, I would swear.”

“You would be lying.” Merian looked the man in the face, and the man looked away, past him at the animal, then back toward the house.

“I didn't mean nothing by it. It's just I had a neighbor with a mule that was the image of that one, liked to root in the same spot.”

“Must be something there that attracts them all,” Merian said.

“Must be,” the man returned, then took a half eaten and moldy apple from his pocket and offered it to the animal.

The mule lifted its head from the soil and nuzzled the man's hand, taking the fruit from his grasp.

“Mule's name was Potter too, just like the man. It liked apples nearly as much as yours here.”

“Well, we thank you for it, friend,” Merian answered, as he coaxed the animal back onto the road and they finally turned toward the square. The animal finished the apple in two great bites and began to trot again. In its mouth the taste of fruit was ancient and sweet.

The spring when he was released into the company of manumitted men, all were told by court and legislators they could not remain in the colony but had to leave under penalty of death. Those who did not hide and ransom their lives to chance in order to stay near loved ones and old ways joined the lines on the roads heading north and west at the beginning of the year. The month when he set out had been marked by pox, but it was very mild that year and put in check before too long, so that only twenty thousand souls died in the season. It was this fever and dying that he would associate with springtime for the rest of his days. On the square that morning it was brought to mind as bile welled in his throat and he tried to turn it back down, to force himself into better spirits before the Sunday service.

He dismounted outside the tavern and tied Ruth Potter to a railing, then straightened his shirt and went across the square to the little building that served as a church. He was met at the door by the sound of communion and found Content and Dorthea among the milling crowd, enthusiastic to see him as they attempted to banish any possible ill feelings from the previous Sunday. Merian nodded warmly, acknowledging that their fight was now behind them, and followed the couple into church, where they took a pew in back. Some who noticed him there a second week tried to be more generous in their gestures toward their outland neighbor. There were of course also those who did not. He took both sentiments in stride as he sat on the bench and listened to the Easter service.

That week was a different preacher than the one before, and his talk was all of schisms and something he kept calling Utopia, which they would build right there in the newbornland. The sermon was a towering success, and everyone brimmed afterward with talk of this grand enterprise the preacher kept calling by that name all the rest of them seemed to know. The idea, at least in its rough form, was not unknown to Merian, but the word itself was new, and when he asked about its exact meaning later he was told it was a vision for the perfection of place. He smiled with pleasure, savoring its optimism. It was years before he found it also meant nowhere.

“I am building a utopia in the woods,” he said, later that afternoon, when he was introduced to Dorthea's cousin, Sanne.

“Are you now,” she asked, with bemusement. “And how far have you gotten with it?”

“Oh, I'd say about as far as that preacher,” Merian answered, his face atwinkle.

Sanne cast her eyes downward, then looked across the room, where Dorthea was busy attending to her other guests. “I had better see if my cousin needs any help,” she said, and with that slipped out of the range of his admiration.

“I see you met Sanne,” Content remarked, when he found Merian in a corner off to himself, appraising the room.

“I did.”

“What did you think of her?”

“She is lovely,” Merian answered, holding in check anything that might appear overeager. “Is she married?”

“Widowed,” his friend answered. “Since a year ago.”

“How many children did he leave her?”

“They had none.”

“That must be very hard for her,” Merian said, looking out into the crowded room and trying to make sight of her. He said nothing else but felt a growing wave of empathy for the woman who had suffered what everyone he knew seemed forced to bear: to be widow or widower or else orphan—as he himself was—or in some other manner bereft of kin and mooring to fellow beings. It is simply how things go, he thought, and no use complaining over it.

When Sanne gathered the courage to look over at him again, a sadness sat on his face that made her want to reach toward him but also to draw away, for she could not read what was behind it and distrusted any emotion in people so close to the surface.

What if he is in his nature just a sad man? she wondered. She could imagine few worse things than to be perpetually phlegmatic. It would be worse than a curse, she surmised. Not that she herself was all light humors, but she believed in governing what was willful or overstrong in Nature.

When he caught sight of her staring at him, Merian flashed her a smile of such easy warmth she could not help but beam brightly in return. Why do the sad ones always have such lovely smiles? she thought to herself, starting to smile about the corners of her mouth almost involuntarily, though there was nothing insincere in her gesture.

Before he left that afternoon, Merian made his way purposefully toward her. “We did not talk as much as I would have liked,” he said, “but I hope I might happen to see you again.”

“I will be back for Whitsunday,” she volunteered.

“What is that?” he asked, knowing neither what it meant nor, more important, how far away it was.

“It is also called Pinkster. Seven Sundays from today.”

“We never had that where I grew up,” he told her.

“It will be a grand carnival.”

“I think I would enjoy that,” he answered, and took his leave, much better pleased than the Sunday before.

As he made his way home on the western road he watched the sun beginning to set over the countryside and its final plunge of red intensity over his own land. I am building a utopia in the wilderness, he said to himself, quite satisfied, as he egged Ruth Potter up the hill to his front door. And his spirits were so lifted that it did not seem so much like a joke to him as a thing he might actually achieve.

His first year he had approached the farm with all the enthusiasm of a new transaction, but he went to work on the fields that spring with a new confidence and even greater energies than the one before. As the
first shoots of his crops poked forth from the black soil, his diligence toward them was unflagging. He was not grumpy when he rose in the morning to go out, but eager, and he worked through the day sustained by this same feeling. He found himself hopeful in ways he had not dared express before, even in the final days of his servitude. He thought often of the woman he would meet again at the new holiday and imagined her within his rooms. It was greatly relaxing to his mind, and he would fall asleep with romantic notions he had not entertained since his separation from Ruth.

When Whitsunday came, he dressed in his clean shirt again and saddled the mule, then climbed astride, carefully guarding a bouquet of wildflowers in one hand. Outside of the settlement, the mule slowed down in front of the house where it had paused before, but he was able to keep control of it this time and persuade it to continue on. The animal obeyed and carried him on into town, where they stopped outside the inn and rested.

Merian dusted his shirt, rearranged the flowers in his hand, and went inside. The first person he saw when he opened the door was Dorthea, and he found his courage leave him, not knowing what was proper behavior under the circumstances.

“Merian, what pretty flowers,” she commented when she saw them.

“I am glad you like them. I thought they might look nice on the table,” he answered, thrusting them at her.

“Sanne, look at the lovely flowers Merian brought from his place,” Dorthea said, drawing out her cousin.

The other woman came over slowly, cautious both of him and of seeming too bold. “They look wonderful,” she offered stiffly. “What are they?”

“Why, they are utopia flowers,” Merian answered. “You must see the place I picked them someday.”

Dorthea looked at her cousin with a sidelong glance from a corner of her eye, but Sanne cast her look away in shyness at Merian's offer—although she did not fail to smile.

“If you keep asking, perhaps I will,” Sanne replied at last, before hurrying away across the room on an invented errand.

Throughout the afternoon the two of them went on to trade nervous and youthful looks when they thought no one else might notice them. During songs they gazed at each other more brazenly, staring directly across the room as they sang. It was a joy for him to hear songs
sung he had not heard since his childhood, as well as those altogether strange to him, which Sanne said she learned as a young girl.

At the end of the evening he bid her good-bye and asked again when they might next meet.

“I am staying here for a few weeks,” she answered. “You can stop by when it pleases you.”

Merian promised to visit, and even though he thought they had gotten on well, he was careful not to presume that the invitation meant anything more than that.

That evening, after their guests had departed, Dorthea and her husband questioned their houseguest good-naturedly but reminded her all the same how little they still knew about Merian and advised her to proceed with what care she thought due.

“How much do we ever truly know about anyone, other then the way they strike us ourselves?” she asked, but said no more.

Husband and wife looked at each other across the table. Both, however, allowed she was a grown woman and said there was nothing more to be argued. Still, they reminded her again it was her own self at stake.