Calvin Baker - Dominion

From then on they watched over him with extreme care at mealtimes, but he managed to begin wasting nonetheless. The cause was not, as they first suspected, grief at being deprived of his wife and son, but the exact opposite. He now no longer hungered for anything in the world and so was done with it.

“I have done everything I set out to,” he answered them, unbidden, after making a final tally to himself. “All the rest is just waiting.” High among the list of those things he was proud of was the fortune he had amassed. “I’m richer than I ever dreamed, and would have made even more money, but I never bought a man, nor sold one, nor tried to haggle anyone out of money for their labor. If I had been luckier at parenting it might have been the utopia I set out to create.” He aimed his words at Magnus and Adelia, but he also made certain Caleum was around when he said them.

* * *

When the rest of the house retired for the evening, Magnus did not go immediately to bed but sat up worrying late into the night about the future of those at Stonehouses. When he finally did join her in their bed, Adelia was up waiting for him, but he was in no mood to share his thoughts.

“You will be good with the boy,” she said, reassuring him, as though she knew his innermost thoughts. “Everything will keep moving forward, as it always has out here with your father.”

It was not the first time he was glad to be married instead of carrying all the weight of his worries alone, but it was one of the most comforting moments for him to have a wife, being otherwise filled with the dread of his father’s passing.

Merian, however, was not yet ready to leave them despite all his talk of death. He would live for some time to come yet — a fact that soon became apparent when he stopped losing weight, as if his body had reached some new equilibrium. Their worries then shifted back to Caleum and their frustration that he could tell them no more about what had happened to his parents than they already knew. This was still in those early days, when he was becoming accustomed to having lost one home and gained another. He thought Stonehouses the best place on earth but longed for his parents, and a remainder of the dread that had infested him during that trip from Providence made him quiet when left alone.

He spent his days exploring the property, especially the outbuildings and far meadows. It was the first time in his short life he was not confined under his parents’ constant watch, and he delighted in it, even in the chores he was given to perform.

Seeing how well he liked work made Merian pleased as anything could make him, and he gave the boy his allowance at the end of every week gladly, telling him to be sure and keep a tally of how he spent it. There being little occasion to spend money, Caleum always accounted for last week’s earnings by saying he had saved it all, which pleased Merian even more.

“Your father couldn’t wait to spend it whenever he got a little money,” Merian said. Then, not wanting to bias the boy against his father, “Not that there’s anything the matter with spending. Saving, though, is what I always thought you should do with a shilling. But he wasn’t one to care for money — only other things, I guess.”

Thinking then to show him something of his father’s, Merian led the boy into the living room, where the blade Purchase had crafted for him long ago still hung.

Caleum, when he saw it, was awed as any boy who ever beheld a sword. However, he was taken not only with the fantasy of war but also the pictures on the side of the blade. “I know them!” he said, pointing excitedly at the images. “And look, there I am!”

Merian, no longer able to see very much at all, indulged the boy a little while but reminded him that Purchase had made the sword well before he was born, and such talk did not figure.

Caleum did not argue with his grandfather but knew he had seen himself prominently displayed. In fact, in the image he saw, there he was holding the self-same blade as that of his reflection. Finally he asked whether he could hold the weapon.

Merian first told him no but then relented. When he tried to raise it up, however, it was far too heavy for him, and Merian took it back, promising one day he would be able to raise it.

“When?” Caleum wanted to know, but his grandfather told him he would know when. Merian put the sword back in its scabbard then, but not before noticing the blade had grown hot, as if just taken from the furnace.

Caleum looked at it so longingly on the nail over the mantel, Merian wondered whether it had been a good idea to put such a notion in the child’s head.

He did not stop, though, confiding to his grandson all those things he had held to himself his entire life. Either because he felt he finally had a companion who was enough like him to understand or for some other reason, the two of them would sit out no matter the weather, and Merian would tell the boy tales and lore, until the only thing he had not properly recounted for him was the story of how the land was first settled, there being so much on the lifelong list of things Merian had done to relate that particular event did not make it, so that, as he had it, he came down from Virginia one year and after a little privation he was much the man he was at that moment.

When Adelia came upon the two of them, she would always reprimand Merian and take Caleum off to bed as he protested.

“Don’t worry, I am not done for this world yet,” Merian would tell the boy, somewhat morbidly, as he left.

After rising the next day and making himself a breakfast of porridge, he saddled a mule from the barn and made a tour of his lands. At the lake he stopped and heard the ice creak and, beneath that, the singing and distinct sound of a great passion. To anyone else listening, all in that area would have been silence, but Merian and the fiend had a catching up that did not displease either of them

That was the way Magnus found him, sitting on top of a mule on the edge of the thawing lake, muttering to himself, with a half smile. “I vanquished it, son,” he said. “I conquered everything you see around you.”

“You were very brave,” Magnus replied, taking the reins and leading his father’s mule back to the stable.

“I mastered the beast, and it was lonely, dangerous work,” his father said.

“It was for the better.”

“Everything I knew was behind me, and I did not know what lay ahead.”

“Great men have bowed before lesser challenges.”

“I kept the pact I made, and my sons should do likewise.”

“We are intent on doing our best.”

“No modesty in this, but life and death.”

“You must rest now,” Magnus said, leading man and beast into the barn.

“Bury me where I told you, and never let anything unsettle your peace here,” Merian said, finally allowing himself to be lifted from the saddle.

Magnus was surprised both by how superstitious his father had become and by how little he weighed as he carried him to bed. There Adelia tended to him, as she would have her own father, and he was glad for her attention, but he never recovered his full senses, and eventually even his memory began to die within him. “I was bonded, now am free.” What he clutched near himself then was his watch and an ugly carved doll he had kept all these years in the original cellar of the house and thought to retrieve that day. It was the face of the spirit he made all his pacts with, and as close as he ever cared to get to any god. No one commented on it but left it with him for comfort, though they were all of them Christian and would have no mandates with their father’s god. None except the boy Caleum, who asked questions about it and, more than a decade on, when Merian eventually died, took it upon himself to protect the little idol as an heirloom, much as he would cherish the sword his own father had made: all of them in equal measures the patrimony of Stonehouses and not uncommon in that particular time on the continent, like the promise and prophecy of fire.