Dominion (47 page)

When he did not show up, she left his breakfast warming for him in the stove until about eleven o'clock, after which she threw it out behind the house for the stray dog that sometimes wandered in the alley back there. She knew it bothered Caleum that she sometimes fed it, but even a stray dog deserved not to starve in the streets.

When he was not back for the midday meal, she began looking around to see if he had left any sign to tell her where he had gone. By evening she was worried enough that she swallowed her pride and went to her sister's house, not knowing where else to turn.

Her sister counseled her to be patient, though in her own mind she wondered whether a man who had appeared so suddenly out of nowhere wasn't bound to be off just as quickly.

To pass the time she stayed on and had dinner with her sister's family and, when she left, told herself Caleum would be there with a good explanation when she opened the door, and all would be well.

He was not, though, for the first time in the year they had been together. She went to bed early that night—but stayed awake until it was
almost dawn, listening for his footfall on the stairs. When she awoke and felt the cold space around her again she grew angry, which was very rare for her. It was the first night he had spent away from home since they became a couple, and she grew wrathful at how he had hurt her. Still, he did not come. When she got up from bed and checked his closet she saw his trunk was missing. Her anger then began to dissipate and was replaced again by worry, until she became miserable again. She ate alone that night and, when her sister knocked on the door, she pretended to be out, not wanting visitors.

Nor did she want to leave the house the next day but was forced to in order to buy groceries at the market. As she walked through the stalls, she did her best to avoid coming into contact with anyone she knew. At the produce stand, though, Mr. Miller called out to her and came to her side. “It is so good to see you, ma'am,” he said. “I have some winter squash today at a good price, I think you might be interested in.” She was in no mood to haggle, but took two medium-sized vegetables from him all the same.

“By the way”—he chatted on, as was his nature—“if you don't mind my asking, where was Mr. Merian going off to the other morning?”

“What do you mean?” she asked thinly.

“Early Friday he was down at the wharf and boarded a ship that left going south.”

“He is only off to visit relatives. Is that a crime?” she answered curtly, then began walking away as fast as she could, forgetting the gourds. Her heart pounded in her chest and she could feel its beat in her throat, as the taste of blood was brought to her mouth, and she hurried to get home.

Her breathing was going rapidly, and she tried her best to control it, but when she arrived back at her house she was drawing in air faster than she could exhale it. She locked the door soundlessly and stood in the hall a long time trying to regain control of her breath. Once she had managed this, she went out to the kitchen and made a cup of tea for herself. She drank it down quickly and was soothed by its warmth.

“So he has gone away,” she said to herself. And no matter what other reasoning she tried to give herself, she knew he would not be back.

When she finished the tea she washed the porcelain cup out in the sink and put it away. She then took a lamp from the cupboard and lit it
at the stove. She placed a handful of long wooden kitchen matches in her apron, and set out through the house.

In the living room she torched the curtains, taking a match and holding it steadily, until they began to burn. As they went up in flames she walked to the dining room, then each of the other rooms of the house, setting them all alight. When at last she reached the bedroom she had shared with Caleum, she lay down on the mattress and folded her arms, waiting for the fire to reach and consume her. Nor did she regret it at all, being determined in her plan. She had been cast aside and was without any way to return to her family or anything she had known before. He had left her an exile from his affections and all others as well.

The flames came under the door slowly at first, burning copper and specked with a red the color of old wine. After the door gave way it came for her mercifully swift, and she was waiting for it. Outside the house, though, and as far away as the next three blocks, her cries could be heard—whether from the pain of death or heartbreak or hotness of love no one ever knew. But all who heard her that morning felt an immense sympathy, and any who could have saved her from that fate would have done so, for it was unbearable to hear.

In the street in front of the house the neighbors all gathered, but it was impossible to enter the building. They could only hope to keep the ones around it from burning as well.

When her cries finally died away it was after twelve o'clock and all was silent in that street for a very long time, outside the sound of a dog's barking, as the building continued to burn well into the day.

Finally they tore themselves away and returned to their lives, taking care to avoid that place as best they could in the days afterward. Those who did walk that street in the days following, and indeed far into the future, claimed to hear the sound of a woman wailing, and it did strike them cold for a moment before they could continue their journeys. The one who caused it, however, never knew any of it, or her final agony, as she lived on in his memory the way he had known her, long into the future and even till his own final days.

Winter in the country around Berkeley was unusually dry that year, with no sign nor hint of snow or rain for weeks on end, until everything was desiccated and brittle as ancient parchment. The woodland creatures all burrowed deeper in their earthen hollows, to search out the soil's hidden moisture, or else moved higher up into the mountains—where the underground streams that usually fed the lakes of the valley still flowed a short distance before disappearing. There was also one summit, remote in the impenetrable wilderness, where water was always plentiful, and those migrating animals that knew of it passed the dry months. The people in their houses were careful to keep well water on hand to extinguish errant sparks from their cooking fires or tobacco pipes and so protect their farms and freeholdings, but all else it was at the mercy of Heaven.

When snow did begin to fall, the week after Christmas, all were happy for it and rejoiced, thinking it would relieve the parched valley and replenish the streams high up above. However, no one counted on what moved in with the snow clouds. Great, measureless branches of lightning cleaved the sky like a celestial Nile as the storm moved over the hill country, illuminating the entire valley each time one of them exploded—brilliant as a harvest moon or star shower. There was nothing passive, though, about its radiance, and when it finally subsided, little fires could be seen burning. Wherever it had touched the earth—either the stubbled ground itself or else massive oaks and pines high in their upper reaches—all was set ablaze.

At Stonehouses, Libbie gathered Rose and the smaller one, called Lucky, around her in the kitchen, and they watched through the small
back window as the world outside was made bright by the pale blue light, moving closer and closer toward them. Libbie worried briefly for Magnus and Adelia over in the main house, but there was no way to reach them, and then it was they had all weathered out storms before.

The next time the sky lit up, though, it was not by one of the massive jolts of lightning but three prodigious balls of it, which seemed to sit directly on top of Stonehouses. The entire farm took on a spectral pink and white glow, and when it died away the hill where Stonehouses itself sat looked to be aflame—as did two of the barns on the shore between the original structure and Caleum and Libbie's place.

Her first instinct was to go over to check on Magnus and Adelia, but she feared leaving her children alone, and it was impossible to tell in which direction the ground fire was moving. Nor did she want to chance being struck by lightning or getting otherwise caught in the path of the blaze. She sat there with her children as the crackling of the clouds continued, knowing that if anything happened while she was there with them she had at least a passing chance of keeping them from harm.

When the onslaught from the tempest died down and all seemed quiet again, she bundled the children off to bed, put her coat on, and went over to check that nothing had happened to Magnus and Adelia at the main house.

As she walked along the path hugging the lake, she could see fire burning in the distance, though from two different directions. The first was off on her left-hand side, about a hundred yards from where she stood. The wind was blowing it away from a barn that had burned down already, and the fire in grasses around it were moving out toward the barren fields, where they would wither away from lack of anything to feed upon. The other blaze came still from the direction of Stonehouses. It was not until she rounded the lake that she could see the house itself was alight with flame. She quickened her pace after that but tried not to panic as she ran on toward it.

When she arrived, she found Adelia and Magnus standing out there in the storm, looking at their home as it burned to the ground.

“Isn't there anything more we can do to save it besides just standing here?” Libbie demanded, looking first at them then again at Stonehouses as it cackled and crumbled in the still-falling snow.

Magnus shook his head stoically. “The lightning was right on top of us, and the whole place seemed like it went up at once. It will have to burn out now or not.”

They looked ghostly and faded standing there in the snow, wrapped in blankets and watching the house burn from the inside out. Libbie felt pity when she looked at the two old people, saying only that all of them should all better get in out of the storm before they caught chill on top of everything else. Reluctantly, then, they began to follow her back to the other place, filled with sorrows for all that departed that day.

As they made their way down the path, however, Libbie could see the winds were shifting, and the fire that had been burning toward the meadow was moving instead toward her house, where her children were. All at once she started to run, trying to outrace the flames that were feasting so swiftly, and cursing herself for leaving them there alone; promising to never do so again if they were still safe.

When she arrived at the other building, fire was already licking at the back wall, and she had to rush round to the front to get in, where she ran up the stairs through a thicket of black smoke that had filled the room. Mercifully the two girls were unharmed, though both had stayed there and were deathly afraid when she reached them. Rose, the older one, knew exactly what was happening, and what fire was and the danger they were in, but Lucky had hidden under the bed, and Rose had been unable to coax her out. Nor could she leave without her sister.

“Mother, the house is burning,” she said, pleading.

“Come with me,” Libbie told her sharply, bundling them up and hurrying outside.

Behind the house, Magnus and Adelia were carrying buckets of water from the well, which they struggled to throw onto the flames. Libbie joined in, running back and forth with water buckets, as Magnus battled against the fire with all the strength in his old body, knowing that, if they failed, all was lost, and what had taken so long to make would be snatched away in a single day.

They fought out there for hours, and even Lucky and Rose tried to help, carrying a single bucket between the two of them to give to Magnus, with barely a word passing between them all, until, as darkness fell at last, they began to gain the better of the fire. It was finally extinguished around seven that evening, but the exact time was impossible to reckon.
Much of the house was still standing and useful, and they went inside what remained of it to rest, all shivering from wetness and exposure to the freezing air.

Libbie put on a pot of water for tea, and brought the first ready cup to Magnus, who aside from the coldness had grown stiff in his joints from the diseases of age. He was still covered in gray ash from head to foot and coughed violently from time to time due to the smoke he had breathed in. The smell of burning still clung to him, as it hung in the air in general, but in greater concentration. Still, he wanted to go out and inspect the damage the fire had done to his lands. Libbie and Adelia, though, prevailed on him to rest awhile longer. He seemed then to all of them to have grown ancient, and he felt as much in his own mind, as it was true.

“It is nothing to worry about,” he said, trying to speak to their collective worries and console them, even as they looked after him. “We will rebuild everything just as soon as Caleum returns. It only took four of us a summer to put the majority of this place up, and I don't imagine it will take half that to fix.” The main house he was less certain of, whether there was need to rebuild, or whether they could on that scale again. During the time he drank his tea, he tried to recall what Stonehouses had looked like the first time he laid eyes on it. Certainly it was bigger now than it had been then, and rooms had been added not from a plan but according to where and when they were needed and the purpose they were to be put to, so that he was not even certain he could draw a plan of the place from memory, even though he had been in each of its rooms a thousand times and could walk through each of them in his sleep at night.

When Magnus mentioned Caleum's name, Libbie was silent, as was Adelia. Having all expected him home so long, there was no evidence now that he was anything other than dead. Magnus had counseled them steadily against assuming anything until there was ready proof of it—such as the army usually sent back to fallen soldiers' families. However, as the weeks and months passed with no word from him, Libbie had all but given up hope of ever laying eyes on her husband again.

“I had better see what the damage is to the house,” she said, not wanting to speak out loud what was uppermost in her heart.