Calvin Baker: Dominion

When the fight finally reached the banks of the lake, Merian jumped into the water, fleeing from the beast, and Ould came after him in quick dangerous pursuit. This, though, was the man’s wish, having heard that any spirit who finds himself in water will soon become disoriented and lose his way there. He hoped it was true, as the Gospels claimed, for themselves, as he dove under the surface of the lake.

Out upon the water Ould Lowe did lose track of his prey and fast found himself unable to distinguish north from south or east from west. Neither could he tell confidently between the natural world of his haunting and the unnatural world that was his proper abode. In this confusion of watery enchantment Merian resurfaced to cast a stone attached to an old chain he had brought with him, around the spirit’s neck, and Ould Lowe sank to the bottom of the lake bed. There his profane songs could long be heard, trapped between Earth and the Palaces of Death, especially each spring when the thaw came, as he tried to find his way to either one world or the other.

In this way did Merian rid his land of the spirit that had haunted it since the ill-starred first settlement, in ages untold. When he arrived back at the shore, he took the ghoul’s stick and his own knife and began to carve a leg for the drowned ghost.

When he finished he was shivering and graycold, as he buried it under an outcropping rock on the shore of the lake, hoping this was the reason of Ould Lowe’s wandering and that its cenotaphic restoration might bring him peace.

Years later, when his sons wanted to take a certain stone and put it to use as a boundary marker, Jasper Merian would tell them it was no mere rock but a gravestone for the spirit he had battled in order to win their place of home. They would look at each other then, silently, and though both knew better than to say so out loud, in his heart each refused to believe his father but that he was telling stories.

When he had finished his tasks on the side of the lake, Merian went back into the forest and began readying the fallen timber, as if nothing strange or unearthly had happened on his farm that morning. The forest brightened with birdsong, and he worked serenely to hasten the day when he would no longer be forced to sleep half out-of-doors, under the naked canopy of heaven, as he had done so many twilights since leaving Virginia.

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.