Dominion (2 page)

Over the course of the summer Merian's house continued to rise from the floor of the virgin woodlands, and he planted crops in the ground, both foodstuff and tobacco to trade for cash. That summer in the clearing he was master of both masculine and feminine tasks, as there was not yet a mistress of the place to give him comfort in his toil. It was then, in those first days, a sad house even after the roof was completed.

In his private heart, however, he was not without companionship but thought often of the saltwater woman he had left behind in Virginia. He dreamed of her often as he worked outside in the hot months, and he dreamed of her when he lay down at night in the cold first hours of
winter. The force of these nostalgic passions took him unguarded, as he had never before known the occult powers of memory so fully but only seen them in others, seized and bound by its invisible teeth and shackles. He himself had never before been separated from kin and home, or had any one thing or place to miss.

He was far away as the other shore of the ocean but swore to himself he would someday return.

He had left behind—more than just the woman, Ruth was her name—a small child as well, whom he could not take with him, as he belonged properly to his mother and her master.

He knew it would be at least a year before he would see either of them again, if indeed he ever did. He planned, though, in his brain and bosom to recross the trail that had brought him out to this forest in time for next holiday season. It was a hard and solitary home in those early days as the roof went up in the clearing, and Jasper Merian was alone in the ancient forest with nary a beast for company.

Jealous neighbors swore that his success, when it came in time, grew from a compact he had made with the same devil who once frightened travelers on the southern and western roads. But he wrestled the wilderness as he did Ould Lowe and the rattling forces of fear, those first days, trying to gain permanence and soundness for his roof and the empty room beneath it. Over years and generations the path crossing westward grew broader, and smaller paths cut back across it in every which direction, so that no place was ever again uncharted or alone. However, Merian then lived pressed against the very boundary of the known, and the two roads were barely new-blazed trails that took the nearby settlement the last provisioning stop before the unknown.

Populations looking over that place in distant years would not know how fearful and wild the woods were, or the bright beauty of light when it reached into the provinces that darkness alone had known when beasts still fought and foraged the ground, before the man claimed it for himself. These, the wind, the shadows, and the light, were his companions as he pitted his wits against the forest to draw out partridge for dinner or else outmaneuver the straggling bear who ventured sometimes uncomfortably close to his door.

When the woodlands went barren and his own provisions also failed, it was the same old bear who supplied him with its sweet meat the last
weeks of that first winter, without which he would not have made the spring. The bear was felled with a single ball from the musket, it being old and unwilling to cling too fervently to life, or surely it would have claimed victory over the man in that contest, and lined its own hungry early-waking stomach with human flesh.

After the first of his meals of bear meat, venturing over the property he had purchased, Merian stopped to measure again what was his, arguing with himself the finer points of possession and trying to fathom certain secrets from the webbed, foggy circle of his experience. He asked himself whether that which was half divine on the place belonged to him in equal measure as things like the partridge and cypress. He also counted his own freedom and the depraved fiend Ould Lowe in that same lordly grouping of things and saw how much all of them struggled and bargained against one another, so that his life or another's, his freedom or his failure, were things that circled about—like-shaped and taloned as eagle's claws—looking for a place to grab and rip at their natural or made prey, as had always been and would always be on that place. His supremacy on his lands increased something great that morning, and he knew he would not die of starvation or ever allow himself to get so close to hunger out in the forest again. Other monstrosities he knew not the names of, but was certain that they would come as inevitable as hardship. However, having staked so much already to achieve the trove of freedom, he would do anything to preserve and keep it with him. He muttered the name of the fiend to himself and swore that, as he had vanished it, so would he everything else that stood in the way of his well-being and prosperity.

Spring, he set his sights to improvements upon the bare hut and fields he sowed by hand. In order to make the most of what was his, though, he knew two things were indispensable: the first being a good mule, the other a woman. Nor would he let a shortage of funds keep him from either.

To get the mule he saw no other way than to steal it, so woke early one morning and made his way out to those stretches of the trail in the mountains where no law ruled but only strong arms. When night came he made his way toward a camp and untied one of only two pack animals that belonged to the party traveling away.

In the darkness he led the mule over the ridge of earth back to his lands. Morning found the beast learning to bear the yoke instead of other burdens.

In this way he would clear twice as many acres that second spring as he had the first and increase vastly that year his purchase over the wilderness—where he had gone, when none other would go there, to make a home in the world where none existed before him and all said none could be made, to exist and hold him.

For the woman he turned in other directions. At the settlement's center was a tavern where one of three rooms could be rented by those with no other place to stay the night or, if so happened, the month. This is the same outpost where he had spent the spring before his own roof was yet ready to cover him. The proprietors of the inn were free-thinking people and had been the only ones who did not shy from him when they learned where he had bought and was building. They had even nodded on it as the scientific thing for one in his position who wished to improve it. As he did not see a way to steal a woman as you would a mule, he turned to these friends for advice as to where he might find one who was eligible.

“I am looking for a woman. Do you know where I might find one?” he asked Content, the husband.

The two looked at each other when he put this question out, and at first made no reply.

“Well, you might do as I did,” said Content, “which is to search in the church.”

“No,” Merian answered his friend.

“What do you mean no?”

“That I will not look there. I cannot go.”

“Of course you can. If they are not set up for it, they are certain to make arrangements.”

“That is not what I mean.”

“What is it you do mean, Merian?”

“That I have no faith in that course.”

“Still, you should go there if your aim is a wife.”

The man rises half clothed in darkness and dresses himself fully. At his fire he heats yesterday's porridge for his breakfast, then sets out on his journey. A cold spring rain belts the landscape, and he pulls himself tight trying to keep warm. He is solitary and on his way.

His cold form plows the gray empty roads of Sabbath morning, but he is happy to walk out here without encountering anyone. He holds his thoughts close to himself as the goose bumps on the underside of either arm, which are wrapped around his coldness. He does not consider himself to be making a sacrifice, or ask for special favor or forgiveness from Providence for this great effort in getting to the meetinghouse, but wants only to sit as a parishioner among parishioners and a believer among the devout. He will do this to gain their human company and does not think any more or less of himself for it; certainly he does not think it a thing to speak to God about in the silent talking back and forth that Protestants and Deists do with their Lord, or pagans and hypocrites with their idols.

He wishes for and, in his mind, talks to the mule—whom he could not resist naming after his former companion, his wife, even if there were some who would not agree to that term, as they had not been wed in church or made any other formal arrangement with authority.

He curses himself for not saddling the beast and wishes for its presence. If you were here, Ruth, he whispers against the morning wind, this road would not be half as hard on a body. He wonders now whether he should not turn back and spend his Sunday improving the hut or sorting his grain for the first planting. He frets over these constant
worries, as well as the minor ones that have occurred to him only this morning. What if the congregation judges him in an unkind light and is not willing to have him among them? Or what if there should be no eligible women? He knows he is foolish to have taken Content's advice. As the rain pounds down on his shivering body, still before daybreak, he thinks again of turning back. It is dishonest, Jasper, he argues with himself. You going to take another woman, and already Ruth back there in Virginia with the little one.

He stops this talk as a terrible creaking sound reaches him from somewhere on the road above, whence he has just passed. It takes him near a minute before he recognizes the timbre of its complaint and realizes it is Lowe, cursing or else singing, from the bottom of the lake where he was fastened the year before. Something has disturbed him there. Merian starts and hurries on his way, lest he have to repeat again a history already settled and past. Who should like to repeat his own story? Merian asks himself. What man can be certain that victories once his would be so again? He hastens on from the sound of Lowe's voice, picking his steps with less care and greater speed, over the muddy roadway in the first light of Sabbath day.

He reaches the outpost without further incidence and finds his way to the meeting place, opposite the unkempt square. Outside, he stands for a long moment and looks to the eaves and joints of the building, admiring the workmanship, before removing his rain-soaked hat from the top of his head and entering. In the back of the church he finds a seat and takes his place, but does not make eye contact with anyone. Some smile on him, even those who in other rooms would shoot him for his boldness with no further question over the matter than that. He waits for his friends, then begins to grow angry at Content for not coming, feeling even greater betrayal when a hand seizes his shoulder, making him startle.

“Welcome.” A voice greets him. It is the preacher, and Merian nods his head in an idiosyncratic bow of acknowledgment that moves three fourths the way down his neck before quickly accelerating the last quarter bit, and snapping back to forward attention. He does not remove his gaze from the room the entire time, nor, when the preacher goes off, does he feel any more at ease, but regards it nevertheless as an opportunity to take in the compass of the assembly.

The gathered parishioners try to avoid seeming rudeness and avert their eyes when he looks at them, but try as well to seem open to all who would come and worship there. He sees the mason to whom he had occasion to sell some of his unused boards, and the merchant who sold him grain, as well as the smith and some few others he had come to recognize from his winter there in the village center.

Other than those few the faces were entirely strange to him, and more numerous than he seemed to remember the population as being. Their collective impression on him was not unlike the meetinghouse he visited from time to time with Ruth back before leaving, except, if anything, those here were even more hardscrabble and wanting. He surveyed them again and counted his chances for success very small indeed, as it seemed unlikely that any among them might spare even a heel of bread, let alone a grown daughter. And if they should chance upon some generosity, he counted himself near the last who might receive it. His mission already a failure in his mind, he kept his eye open for his friend so he might abuse him openly for sending him so out of his way.

When the sermon finally started he could only figure that the preaching had something to do with the intersection of wilderness and temptation, but then every sermon he had ever heard seemed to have in it something to do with wilderness and something to do with temptation, unless it was the one about kingdom and wickedness.

“We are congregating with wickedness right here among us,” a man from the congregation testified, when the preacher had finished the formal sermon, staring hard at Jasper, as each parishioner spoke in the voice of his guiding genius. “It seems hypocritical to tolerate in the flesh what you would not in words or in the spirit.”

His words went unremarked upon, but all knew they were a reference to their outland neighbor. Merian himself sat rigid and did not need to look at the parishioners to know that their eyes were on him, in either judgment or sympathy. His own emotions, though, clenched up as he tried to contain them. When the service was over, he bundled himself again, made his way back into the unrelenting rain, and started out to his own lands, wondering where else now to find a woman.

On the unpaved road he spied Content and tucked his head into his coat, trying to go on unrecognized.

“I am sorry we were not there, but Dorthea has come down sick. I spent the morning at her bedside,” Content said, after catching up to him.

As Merian listened to these words he could barely look at the man without anger. For the sake of former friendship, he held back from saying that it was an outright lie he was hearing and had walked seven miles through the rain to suffer. He felt a great anger at his circumstances. If he were more prosperous, he explained to himself, there would be no need to resort to desperate works to achieve his ends and desires in the world.

“Let me make it up to you,” his friend offered. “Next week we are celebrating Easter and would be much pleased if you came.”