Calvin Baker - Dominion

He looked between his father and mother again, and again to the sky as the speck wheeled and turned on high, before making a blunted attempt at its first dive. The father took the son’s shoulder under his hand and began to talk to him of that year’s planting. The son listened dispassionately. He would forge his own way.

As Purchase grew older, and his own health began to grow less dependable, Merian looked more and more to his son for help with Stonehouses. Without his eventual aid, Merian knew, he would be forced to turn to the market for hired labor or else scale back what he had worked so hard to increase over the years.

He tried to interest the boy in caring for the herd of cattle he had bred each from the other over the long winter months. But Purchase, true to his nature, became lost in the pasture himself, given over to reverie and daydreams or simple inattentiveness. When Merian employed him in the fields, he found the boy less productive with each new day, as if playing slow. There were also many tasks he simply could not master. The only interest he ever showed in farmwork seemed to be when Merian went to the barn to fix something that had broken. Then the boy would watch the tools in motion, as he had once watched the birds over Potter’s Field, until the repair was complete. Merian was always careful to explain what he did and allow Purchase a hand in the repair. Try as he might, though, he could not convert this interest into general enthusiasm for the land.

Come harvest that year, Merian hired three hands and relegated his boy to the house with his mother, trying hard not to complain or display the bitterness he felt.

Finally he could not take it and took the lash to the boy, but even the welts on his hide could not make Purchase pretend to love labor and exertion. When the harvest was done, Merian had Purchase accompany him to town. This year instead of going to Content’s immediately after the market closed he stopped the cart in front of the smith’s. After some time inside he called for Purchase, who came sheepishly to the door. The man looked at the boy and nodded. “He’ll do just fine.”

In all of this Purchase did not speak but did as his father bade him, taking a sack that was already packed for his stay.

When Merian returned home Sanne wanted to know where Purchase was.

“He is apprenticed to the smith,” Merian answered.

Sanne was stunned when she heard this. “You cannot apprentice the boy,” she said. “He is hardly ten years old.”

“He looks fourteen to the smith.”

She yelled at him to hitch the cart and go retrieve her son. Reluctantly Merian did as she bade, and when she joined him for the ride into town he fully expected to be upbraided the entire way.

“What were you thinking, man?” Sanne asked. “How could you do such a thing?”

“I was thinking he is old enough to learn to work.”

When they arrived at the smith’s shop she pushed her husband from the cart to go reclaim her son from the harm in which Merian had left him. Inside, where she had expected to find him crying and miserable, waiting for his rescue, she instead found him studying all the action without complaint and performing his chores with such diligence he did not notice their arrival. All around them the heat from the smith’s oven baked the room, and the hiss of hot metal placed by another assistant to cool in water nearly drove her to distraction, as she told Purchase to get his things so that he could come home.

The smith complained to Merian that they had a deal and that any boy in the county would be happy to apprentice there. “What can I do?” Merian replied to the man. “His mother says he isn’t old enough yet.”

“Fourteen is old enough to work at the devil’s own hearth,” the smith argued.

“Yes, but the problem is he’s only barely ten. He’s just a bit large for his age.”

“I’ll be,” the smith swore, slapping Purchase on the back. “You can come back in a few years, or any other time you like, son. I promise to make you a place.”

Purchase was happy for this, for he had found in the furnace of the shop and the working of the element of fire an excitement he knew would never be present on the farm. “If my papa says so.”

Merian was pleased to be deferred to by the boy and thought his brief stint at work was already beginning to pay dividends. He assured him it would be all right to rejoin the smith as a proper apprentice when he was older. “As long as you do your chores at Stonehouses in the meanwhile,” he said exactly.

Sanne looked from her husband to the smith, trying to decide if they had arranged some pact between themselves that she was not privy to.

“Jasper, you’ll tell me what this is about yet.”

“Say what you want about his age, it’s never too young to teach him good habits and honest work.”

In subsequent years Purchase would recall his day at the smith’s as among the most memorable of his early years. Although he did not speak much about the experience later, the primacy of heat and water and force was nearer to him than the slow plantings his father dragged him around to witness and help with every spring, or the wheat that was harvested when the seedlings had matured. “Eating seems to interest you plenty, though,” Merian, in lighter moods, would always joke when Purchase was older.

Still, Merian worried deeply for all he had sacrificed to create at Stonehouses. Feeding a family is enough satisfaction for your labor, he always tried to console himself, but with a second story added and very nearly the entire land under cultivation or pasture, he thought it would be a shame and a waste if the boy never developed an interest in it. “I wish my father had given me an interest in something,” he reproved whenever the youngster rebelled against his work or teachings. “Or that I had been anything other than an orphan. You don’t know yet how difficult it all is.”

To Purchase’s young ears, his father’s words sounded like little more than scolding. He wished to be a falconer and hunt his birds, or else a governor with the king’s business on his hands, or a knight defeating great dangers. He did not want to be a farmer ruled by weather and caprice. Despite this, he respected his father and tried to obey him. Still, he never did know whether he would be able to please him.

Sanne watched the two of them and hoped they might fulfill the hopes and expectations each had for the other, which she knew to be different from her own for either of them, which were only that each should find contentment.

Merian watched the land, taking satisfaction in what he had done but aware that someday all would be dismantled, and that he should plant on a scale small enough to sustain alone in his old age. He no longer remembered what he made that first year at market, but it was still the season he was proudest of, when he had no company and battled nature without a reserve of food or safety. Having survived that he could not fret for the future. His natural optimism, though, no longer had a place to expand to and express itself.

“He is young still,” Sanne counseled. “You’ll be proud of him yet.”

Merian hoped she was prescient in the way mothers often are — and fathers too seldom — but he spent the fall months after the harvest going on long walks, inspecting both his lands and the new buildings that had gone up in the intervening years. A new road, north and south, now crossed the original westward line ten miles farther on. It moved goods and peoples all in a tumultuous rush, to settle the areas of the even farther-outlying counties, making him wonder how long before everything had been seized and a man either had gotten in with the original parceling or would be left without, until some new land and new parceling of it, fair and first-come, came about. And what about the last one there at the great partitioning? He could not answer but thought he should like to see Chiron again one day and ask him what would happen to him who had no direction, physical or otherwise, to move in away from his original source. Would he be satisfied, never knowing the tear of separation or else pained by the constriction of his movement?