Dominion (15 page)

He was pleased, though, at the way Ware had put it, thinking that is exactly what Ruth would have done, as if she planned it out long ago.

“When?” he asked.

“This November past.”

“I see. How did she go?”

“Her blood. It turned sweet.”

Merian knew this to mean she had sugar in the blood, which was common in older people, so that they could never satisfy the craving for sweets but were pitched into distemper immediately upon having them. He also knew it was said to be caused by a love that had been thwarted or never satisfied in youth. But he was happy to know she had died in old age, for she would have been nearly fifty years old, which he reckoned was as much time as was allotted most. His own days he had grown greedy and less sensible about, counting them as his getting-back time. When he first found freedom he had not been that way, but he was not always a stranger and foe to bitterness in his later years. He figured if he could get back another twenty or so, he would be just even.

“She go peaceful?”

“Peaceful enough.”

“You know, your mother, she was something else,” Merian said, for he had not marked her death and wished to remember her now that she was present before his memory's eye.

“I know what she was like,” Magnus said sharply, with the same flash of intensity about the mouth and eyes that had appeared there before.

“I remember when I first laid eyes on her,” Merian continued. “Both her and her mother came home with Hannah Sorel's father one day, and he installed the mother as cook. Ruth was just a little girl who didn't even speak English yet—no more than
hello,
and besides that nothing but pure Congo, or whatever it was in the port she was first from. You could tell she was quick, though, because she picked up better English than most people born to it by the end of her first year. That's just what it seemed. It was even more striking because her mother never learned it at all, beyond the few words she needed to do her job. Then the old man come to find out she spoke schoolmaster's Dutch on top of that.

“The original house there was called Colonus and was fairly small, so the two of them shared a room just across the hall from me, and I
would see both of them all the time. At first Ruth was so little that didn't nobody pay her any mind aside from, Well, she sure is one fast study with English speaking.

“I had never given her any more mind than anybody else anyway, but one day, after I came in from working, she was in the hall playing with a puppet she had found to amuse herself with, and she looked up at me as I was going into my room and asked, ‘Where Jasper mama?'

“That was the first thing she said to me, and the first time I even knew she knew my name. I just smiled at her—she couldn't have been no more than eight or nine—and went on to my room. But I was aware of her from then on and, like I said, she was something far out of the usual.”

The two men were silent then, thinking about Ruth. Magnus also thought of Merian as real flesh and bone for the first time since arriving, after nothing but having heard of him for so long. Merian's open affection for his mother made the younger man more trusting as well.

For Merian it was the first time he had talked about Ruth since the last time he saw her, and it did him good to speak about her. He would have taken Magnus into his home even if he wasn't his son but only as Ruth's boy, which, in truth, is how he saw him.

“You don't remember me, do you?”

“No more than you do something out of a dream,” Magnus admitted, then worried he might have sounded too hard, “In my mind, yes, but I know or think I know it's just something I been told. The same way you and Mama say they used to call me Ware.”

“Wasn't used to call, it was named,” Merian said. “Tell me how you came to get away?”

“No different than anybody else,” Magnus said.

Merian nodded. “Here,” he said, holding out to him the papers Content had written up, which testified that their bearer was his own proprietor. “If somebody aim to do something anyway, they won't be much good, I imagine,” Merian said. “Then again, if somebody aim to do something, you deal with that the way you must. Things haven't turned out as bad here as they are in Virginia and down the coast. It ain't what it is in some other places,” he allowed himself optimistically. “There's a few free African families around here, so it ain't so strange a sight for people, and they let you go about your business same as any other man. So what you can expect, if this is where you decide you want to be, is
that everybody will act toward you the way you act toward yourself. I can't tell you what way that should be. I don't know, but the way I would think about it for myself, if I was in your shoes, is: I started in one place and now I'm in another and aim to be all right there. Simple as that. No different from anybody else in these parts.”

“Is that simple?” Magnus asked

“Anyway, it says you're free, and if you ever need it there it is.”

Magnus took the papers without comment and looked at them. He was touched by the gesture, but it was holding the paper that made it all real to him, and he did not care if they were legitimate or only fakes worked up to fool constables and sheriffs. What they said was the truth and very real—he was a man free of any other's hold, and the sole foreman of his soul and being besides the Almighty. That was real as sunshine, and it would never be different. Even if he acted before Merian as if he had carried the papers himself the whole while and only dropped them in the road, he was very much affected.

Merian stood to leave and give Ware the day for himself to do whatever he thought fit. He moved by then like a man who was at ease with himself and who he was in the world. It would be a great many years before Magnus, as he was called, gained the same assurance, but once he did he moved with much the same bearing as his father.

Merian, as he left the room, knew Sanne would raise the devil about it, but for him there was no choice but that the young man, if he wanted, was welcome to stay on at Stonehouses.

His terror that second night, when he realized his condition, was abject and complete. He was not normally a sensitive man, but his teeth chattered against each other and his legs locked at the knees as he thought about what challenges lay before him. His manufactured freedom papers were clutched to his breast, making real all that had changed since he arrived there, still he was unmoored by this new status, not knowing whether he would prove master of the thousand strange contests it would pose for his every fiber.

After he had stayed there six days, Merian suggested that work might be the best thing to set his mind and body right again. Magnus agreed to try it, and as he worked out in the fields the next morning, alongside Merian, the older man asked again how he was faring.

“Everyone here treats me fine,” Magnus answered.

“That's not what I mean,” Merian said. “You will know it when it happens.” He walked away then, leaving Magnus to puzzle just what he did mean.

That night, when he tried to find sleep, Magnus instead found himself disoriented and dizzy to the point of losing his dinner in the chamber pot. As he told Merian the next day, all he felt was that he was in a different place, and he could not stop thinking about Sorel's Hundred and all he had known there.

“Do you know the story of that place?” Merian asked him then, sitting down to the midday meal.

“Just what I witnessed,” Magnus replied. “I didn't know there was any story about it to know.”

“You never knew about the old man?”

“He never affected me.”

“Well, he came over here from England—it must have been a full hundred years ago now—and when he bought that land there was nothing at all around there, or anywhere else in all of Virginia. Even so, he thought to name his new property, and the name he thought to call it by, as you well know, was Colonus.

“He would stand out on the porch, after the house grew to a certain size, and stare at all that virgin country around him, with no idea what lay beyond the other side of the river, and get the most forlorn look on his face. He would turn then and say, to anyone who happened to be in hearing distance, ‘See how Edenic it all is.' That was his word. ‘We are in exile, but only to be purified. If we let ourselves be cleansed without despoiling it, we will be allowed home again.'

“Then, not too long after the time Ruth and her mother came on the place, he started one day to call the old woman Antigone for no good reason. ‘What are we having for dinner this fine evening, Antigone?' Or, ‘How does the weather agree with you this afternoon, Antigone?' He claimed that if his wife had agreed to it that is what he would have named Hannah. ‘I can't think of any better name for a daughter than that,' he said.

“Nobody paid it much mind at first. Some men rename a slave at the drop of a hat, like a name is nothing more than a plaything. We just thought it a little peculiar, because he was not that way. When time came for Hannah to marry that Sorel fellow, he gave them some land out on his property to build a house and sent me off with them.

“It must have been the night before we were set to leave, and I was going into the house when he called me out there and told me to sit with him. Now that wasn't very strange either, as he always had somebody to sit out with him after his wife died. What was strange was when he started talking that night, and wanted to tell me it seemed like everything he knew, starting with where the name of his house came from.

“‘Once, long ago, there lived a great king, and those are precious few, who committed two gross and unforgivable crimes, and when they had made him poor as a beggar for it, his people's gods let it be known that Colonus was the place that would receive him in his old age.'

“When he finished telling me that I could see how very old he had grown, and I thought perhaps he was trying to remember the rest of his story, but he just looked at me and said, ‘It is terrible to be loved by God. Most cannot endure it, Jasper. But name all thy houses Colonus and all thy daughters Antigone, and thou shall never know sorrow.'

“That nearly brought tears to my eyes, to see how scared he was out there on his place; and that it would always be strange to him, even though it was his house. His advice, though, seemed sound as any I ever had. ‘Name all your houses Colonus and all your daughters Antigone, and you will never know sorrow.'”

That night when he went to bed, Magnus lay awake for the same long time as before, staring at the beams of the ceiling in his room and thinking of the last months. But instead of fearing what trial could possibly come next, he saw the good fortune he had had and the strength of the way he had acquitted himself. It felt then as if a great pressure was lifted up from him. He began to see that strength was as much a part of him as the fear he had been carrying since he ran from Virginia and had nearly been consumed by on the journey to Stonehouses, when he spent every day in hiding, waiting for nightfall so he could move on again. He began then to laugh, not altogether maniacally, but he had a good roar at all of it, and when he finished he was in tears. He fell asleep quite peaceful, and the next morning before Merian asked him he could say for himself, “It is good now.”

Merian was pleased when Magnus announced that he had finally put his fear aside. “It is a special day when that happens,” he told his sons, as Purchase left for his shop and he and Magnus went on to the fields. “It is like becoming a man all over again, when you come to know you're alive but will eventually die and so start to celebrate that. Everything changes. You start winning the struggle, because it is your own.”

Magnus did not feel anything so profound as all that had happened to him, but he told Merian he would take him at his word, as they went to work the fields with the hired men.

The previous days Magnus had worked lethargically, barely keeping up with the slowest man out there, but that afternoon when he worked he produced handsomely, thinking he owed Merian something for all he had given to him, and the only way he could repay him was with good labor. He was not invested in that land, but he worked as
though it meant something to him, and as the days passed he found he was beginning to grow attached to the people of Stonehouses.

Still, he did not sleep as well as he was accustomed to. At the end of his first week, when he was finally able to drift off for more than an hour or two, he had a strange dream that was very haunting and disturbing to him. In it he pursued a woman continuously but never caught up with her. He would run faster and faster, but she would always manage to elude him, until he grew frustrated and could not remember why he chased her in the first place. “Go on, you old witch,” he called out in the dream. “I don't want you no way.”

She laughed at him when he said this and began taunting him. “Even if you did catch me, you still couldn't get what you want.”

“I don't want nothing from you,” he yelled at her again, then added, as if she were an animal he could command, “Pass on.”

“Oh, yes, you do,” she countered, raising her skirts up so that he could see all her private parts.

“Man give the meat,

Man give the gravy,

But woman give the milk

And woman give the babies.”

She laughed and dropped her skirt.

“Get away from me, you evil thing,” he called out. She continued laughing at him and ran off again. Despite himself he started to chase after her, even though he understood by then he would never catch up.

He awoke frustrated and understood from the dream that he was meant never to have children. This in itself did not play at his emotions, because he had never been overly drawn to children in the first place and so could not see any shame in not having them. As for women, he had known several at Sorel's Hundred and the surrounding plantations, but never one whom he would have thought to call a wife. For to tell the truth he could not see the great pleasure in being so intimate with anyone and sharing all your thoughts and time. When he did take a woman, it was because nature could not be suppressed, or when he found one pleasant and thought to spend a season or so in her company—but not longer than that, for it began to weary him. He had no need for children and marriage but preferred his own solitude and thought, when
there was the luxury for it, which was but very seldom for family men. That was why the dream disturbed him even more, because he did not think it revealed anything true but was only a deep taunting, and he worried someone had put a root spell on him to make him want what he did not.