Dominion (36 page)

He gave him his prize, which Angus measured in his palm with relief and satisfaction before slipping one into each of his pockets for safety.

“The contest this year was better than any other, though, and it would be a shame if that went unacknowledged,” Magnus went on, going into his purse again. “Sam, this is yours,” he concluded, “for making a show that in any other year, or on any other farm, would have won you two.” He then handed Sam a single glittering gold coin, which seemed to him as he received it to slip through the light like a fish through a stream of water.

He held it in his palm for a good long time, examining all the strange letters and markings embossed upon it, which were all indecipherable to him except the image of a crown. At last he closed his fingers around the warm metal. He thought how much he had done to get it, and how it had excited and divided all the men in the barracks.

“What do you suppose it be worth?” he asked Effie, finally putting it away and turning to his woman.

“Why, Sam, it be worth a whole lot,” she said. “A whole lot.”

The men all congratulated him on his great showing as the night wore on, but the excitement had faded from the air, and to rekindle it someone
had started up a series of games. First there were to be foot races, then wrestling, and someone else suggested boxing, but Magnus vetoed that idea, knowing it would surely get too far out of hand.

When they began the wrestling, Caleum ached to join in the trial, as he had with his friends when he was younger, knowing he could defeat any other man there, but Magnus also put a halt to that notion, claiming the reason for his decision should be self-evident. Caleum accepted his uncle's authority but only reluctantly, because he loved few things so much as a contest and knew no one could beat him.

“If you did win, you would rob the men of a prize, and if you didn't win it would just never do,” Magnus said to him, as he watched the two final contestants circle each other inside the ring of men.

Magnus then left that circle and made his way through the bonfires and the music to seek out his slave Sam Day. When he found him, at the edge of the gathering, where he was drinking rum punch, he drew him away from the crowd, saying only that he would like a moment of his time. It pleased Sam to be spoken to this way, and, though he was much absorbed in the other games, he went willingly with Magnus to hear what his master had to say to him.

They walked together away from the others, and Magnus was not commanding and aloof as usual but waited so that Sam was at his side and stayed there as they made their way across the cow-shorn grass of the home meadow.

“Sam, I should never have taken you from the home you knew,” Magnus said, without looking at him, as they rested at the top of a rise. “I had a problem, and I let that get the better of what I knew to be right, so we have some business to settle between us.”

Sam listened without saying anything, but he was surprised to hear Magnus admit his fault, as that was not usual to hear from men who owned other men.

“I told you when I brought you here you could go at the end of the season,” Magnus reminded him, as they surveyed the land out to the edge of their sight and the darkness beyond that. “I didn't know how to do it sooner, on account of not knowing what the town would think of me buying slaves just to turn them loose. You'll have your wages, though, Sam, same as everyone else; then you can set up on your own. I suppose somewhere out here on my land.”

“You would give me a part of your land?” Sam asked incredulously.

“Not give, Sam,” Magnus corrected him. “Sell.”

“Master Merian,” Sam said, looking his owner in the eye, “I know what kind of problems plagued you before, and I don't blame you too much for what you did. We both know, though, that if people think you buying slaves just to turn em free, they run both of us out from Berkeley.”

“I thought about it, Sam,” Magnus interrupted him, “and I think it's what's best. I can grapple with the consequences. The only other thing is for you to head out with the caravans at the end of the month, and that's still a hard road.”

Sam looked at Magnus and understood what he meant. “I know ain't nothing free to a certain way of thinking,” Sam said. “How much you think a plot of land cost me?”

“I'll think of something fair,” Magnus answered him. The two of them then stood looking out over the country. “There's a place out that way that might suit you just fine,” Magnus went on. “Good land too if you got a mind to do a little work, which I know you do.”

When he was Sam Day's age Magnus had already been free for more than a decade, and he had been free now almost as long as he was captive. He did not know if Sam could learn everything he needed so late in life, and to manage his own place instead of just taking on itinerant work. The thought of him and Effie out there by themselves gave him pause, as he knew how difficult it would be, but he was willing to do it because he knew he had to restore the balance he had upset. “Tell you what, Sam, I'll give it to you for your wages from this season,” Magnus said. “Then you'll still have enough to start out with, and you can do some work around Stonehouses during the fall to earn a little extra.”

“Let me weigh it over, Master Merian,” Sam said, reckoning the prospect of turning into a farmer. “It's not something I ever had a notion of before, so I need some time to wrap my mind about it and talk to Effie.”

“It's good terms,” Magnus said, without telling him the only thing he himself had ever got such good terms for was Sam Day himself.

“I never thought getting sold away would work out like this,” Sam said to him.

“You know, I was once a slave, Sam,” Magnus said to him, trying to express what he felt just then.

“Couldn't nobody never have told me that.”

“Well, I was.”

When Sam looked at Magnus at that moment, his master was a mystery to him: that a man who had been a slave could take one for himself. He did understand, though, why he was being set free.

“I'ma put a blessing on this place for you, to keep anything wrong from ever happening to it again,” he promised, having learned by then the original reason he was called there in the first place. It was his word, not as one grateful returning a favor, but as a doctor and expert in the workings of complex roots and hidden phenomena.

It started raining the first of September that year, and rain was still descending violently two weeks later when the western caravans set out from Berkeley. Three-quarters of the way back in the train, Sam Day and Effie drove a used wagon he had bought cheap from the wheel-wright, because it tilted a little more to one side than the other and there was no way of fixing the condition. It was drawn by two piebald hinnies he had also gotten a deal on, who were the strangest animals he thought he had ever seen. They pulled his wagon without complaint, though, and he held the reins, guiding them westward with all the provisions he had bought for what he hoped would be his best chance in life. Nor did he have illusions it would be anything but difficult. He knew as well there was no real place for him anywhere else anymore, except that he might make one in a new country. Effie would go wherever her man did, but she was powerful afraid to be giving up Berkeley and Stonehouses, and she had heard many frightening tales about the western lands.

She knew in the end that her husband would never be satisfied to live as a near fugitive in Berkeley, and there could be no other life, and but few opportunities, for them there, with everyone knowing them from before, no matter his new status as a freedman.

Before they left, Sam gave Caleum a bag filled with a powerful concoction of plants and animal bones, with which to soothe the ground his house was set upon. “Every time you break the earth or otherwise interrupt the natural world, you have to heal it again,” Sam had said, walking around the house until he found the spot he was looking for.
“You bury this right here, and things will be back to how they're supposed to be.” In truth he had felt very strong energies coming from the land there from the moment he arrived and was not sure his craft was powerful enough to placate it. But he knew they had always had good fortune there at Stonehouses, and eventually whatever had been upset would be restored, as things always go back to being in the right balance. Still, he wished sincerely his charm would speed that process along for them, for he truly wanted nothing but blessing for the people of Stonehouses.

Whether it was only bad luck or a curse placed upon them, Caleum and Libbie's problems did not end with Sam's interdiction—but they weighed a bit less heavily upon them that entire autumn and winter, and the rift that had developed since the death of their child, keeping man from wife and vice versa, began at last to abate. The good spirits of the harvest, along with the shift in seasons themselves, made them feel closer again, and they began to spend the still temperate nights sitting out-of-doors together on a bench that looked out over the lake, talking until the cool hours of early night.

They went to bed on these nights very much enchanted with each other, as they had been when they were newlyweds. “We will have another child,” Caleum said to her that fall, after the caravans departed but before winter had set in. “You will see. We will have a whole house full of them.”

“We will have what it pleases God to allow us,” Libbie said solemnly.

In her heart she wanted the same thing he did and felt great affection for him when he spoke so boldly, wanting for their house to be filled. She dared not say so, though. She was no longer fearful of birth, as she had been on her wedding day, but she had new apprehensions about motherhood, including that it was possible she would never know its particular satisfactions, and so began to treat everything to do with children with superstition. So much so that when she first suspected she might be pregnant again she kept the news to herself for as long as possible, which was a great many weeks. At last, as they cleaned the kitchen one day, Claudia turned to her mistress without further remark and said, “You pregnant, Miss Libbie. You might better sit down.”

Libbie wondered then how long Claudia had known of her condition, or whether she had only just figured it out. Whichever the case,
she knew her state would soon betray itself and thought it best to tell Caleum before it did, lest he accuse her of ill intent.

When she revealed her pregnancy in their bedchamber that night, Caleum was elated and showed none of her caution. “You see, it's just as I said it would be,” he said. “And so close to Christmas!”

“Please, husband, don't blaspheme,” was her hushed answer to his unchecked joy.

Adelia and Magnus were also reserved in their expression of emotion, having been cut down before by tragedy. “Perhaps Libbie should take to bed,” Adelia suggested to Claudia, when the winter holidays drew near. “She must be careful not to overexert herself.”

Claudia herself was of the opinion that hard work in the months before led to an easy labor, but in the end she acquiesced and Libbie was confined to her bed as the holiday preparations took place all around her. At first she protested against her idleness, but soon grew content being waited on by Claudia; as the smells of baking reached her, she began to feel as she had as a little girl in her parents' house before Christmas.

This bred in turn its own nostalgia and melancholy, and in order to keep it at bay she began to embroider a scene of the first Christmas she could remember. She was a little girl and her brother Eli had just been born. Her young parents were filled with merriment; in her mind's eye she saw them both smiling broadly. It was mild that year and she remembered everything being green on Christmas Day—not only the tree in their yard but also the landscape all around them. She received for gifts that Christmas a doll with a lovely dress and a small, bright round ball of a kind she had never seen before. When she held it before her face its smell tickled her nose, making her shriek. “Papa what is it?” she asked excitedly.

He told her it was called an orange, and that she was supposed to eat it.

She laughed gaily at this. It was so lovely she was drawn to taste it, but she could not imagine ruining such a wonderful gift. Instead, she carried it around with her doll, until eventually her mother remarked that her father had gone to great bother to get it for her, and if she didn't eat it soon it would rot, leaving her neither toy nor fruit.

She sat down dutifully and, after her mother started the process, finished peeling the rind from the flesh. She was then careful to remove all the fuzzy white strings and divided the sections evenly. When she brought
one of them to her mouth and bit into it, the thing was like a secret in her mouth. She could not believe she had carried it around with her for so long without knowing what it truly was. As if to make up for being such a slow learner she devoured the first six sections hungrily, as if she had never eaten before. With the last four slices, though—there were ten in all she remembered, for she had counted carefully—she became miserly again. She lined them all in a row on the kitchen table and allowed herself one every thirty minutes, so they lasted her almost until suppertime. The last hardened slice, though, she shared with her doll, thinking to be generous with her new treasure.

When she was done she went and thanked her father again for the orange. “It was the best thing I ever ate,” she told him. He smiled at her and reached into his pocket, from which he pulled out another.

“I was saving this, but since you like them so much why don't you have it,” he offered. She could not believe her good fortune but took the orange from him and ran around the room, laughing in happiness.

This was the scene she tried to embroider as she lay in bed: a family at the holidays and a little girl eating an orange. It was very difficult, as the orange always seemed too big and the girl too small, but when Caleum saw it he proclaimed her work so well done he could smell the fruit itself on the fabric. He always loved her creations and found they put him in whatever mood she had hoped to invoke.