Calvin Baker
Dominion
For Ariane,
Gift of Paper
I. chronos
one
They ate the dead that first winter on the land, such was their possession by vile hunger, mean desperation, and who can say what else, other than it was unnatural. Any decent history will vouch for the truth of that. And, according to lore, the majority of the graveless sacrificed were uneasy souls, who walked certain nights on top of the earth — haunting not just the ground of their defilement but all the contiguous lands — until they possessed the entire continent as surely as if they had been more fortunate in life.
Ould Lowe, one from that legion of unblessed, had prowled the wilderness since anyone could remember. Each Sunday he could be seen standing atop the hill on the southern side of the lake, ululating as any wild beast, or grief-stricken man, from the first moments of creation.
It was why the land was sold to him at all, because to put up a proper house there he would have to begin construction on the very spot of the ghost’s weekly sojourn. Surveying east and west; north and south — to the edges of the horizon in each earthly direction — Jasper Merian sought a better place, or some compromise that would give him access to his lands without disturbing the unburied. He could see no other way, though, so started digging where he was forced, out there on the very boundary of civilization and silent oblivion. He was not generally a man to go against common sense or community, but this was all any would give him to purchase or settle when he finished his term of servitude.
Nights he went back to the outpost to sleep, until a half-proper roof had been put up out in the forest, over the little shack he had managed. The villagers all stayed away from him once they learned what he was doing out there, but he did not mind. Or rather he learned to show no sign, having concluded in earliest youth certain things about the inner levers and measures of assembled man. There was besides nothing else he might do about it but continue his building.
As for the ghost, he had not yet seen him. Nor was he bothered in the way other men might have presumed to be when he finally did catch sight of the fiend. For when his own forebears arrived on the land, not many years after the first settlement, God had already been brought in to tame the heathen new country — so that superstition and minor deities, along with pestilence and death, dwelled only in shadow and certain corners too mean to allow Him entrance. Over time, so say the writings, other gods would be imported as well, and all stand atop the aboriginal like a totem with none except true God at its sylvanite apex. This was He to whom Merian principally paid the respect of prayer when he paid it to any at all. Owing in large part to this, he saw no need for fear. For another thing he had borne the spirit no insult and looked on his presence not as divergent but an extended part of the numinous world.
When the roof was sound enough from the elements he slept out there his first night, still unafraid. It was Saturday and, if there was anything to lore and ancient saws, Ould Lowe was said certain to be visible in his full horror and abomination that next day. Merian stared out at the stars through his unfinished roof and despaired of other things, but banished them from his waking mind lest he thwart his own enterprise before it was properly begun. As for ghosts, he gave no more thought at all.
Morning was his first on the land, and he rose in the still darkness to make his way to the ceaseless work of clearing away timber for fields and digging rocks from the soil to increase its fertility. They were onerous tasks that on a proper farm would have been distributed among many. He toiled in solitude and did not swear oaths or otherwise complain.
In the small clearing he had already claimed, Merian raised ax to tree and listened to the sound echoing around the forest. He smiled, knowing it was his own woods and, as far as that sound could be heard, more than likely his own trees and property as well. Merian’s ground. After this ceremonial first blow, he rolled his sleeves and heaved the ax again, relishing the sound of his effort each time as it rang through the woods, like a shot from a musket, until the energy of his labor was so great that it deflated even this small pridefulness. He was mute as the wood creaked against itself, before crashing to the earthen floor of the forest, exhausted amid a thick storm of dead leaves and debris.
When the great oak finally gave way to his hand, Merian could not contain his vanity and surveyed the increasing space he was creating in the woods, beaming broadly as he imagined with preening care where each field would lie, and each barn, after the main building was finished. None could stop him from dreaming then, as he looked upon his lands and shone like a newborn constellation in the early evening sky. He was twenty-nine years on earth and three months a free man.
It was as he walked over to the downed giant, to clear away its limbs and prepare it to be made into rough boards, that he saw Ould Lowe the first time. Rather, it was then that he heard Ould, for the fury and passion of the creature’s wailing caused his heart to stop still in his chest and his blood to run backward through him. When he had recovered enough from his first shock, and gathered courage to raise his head and look upon the beast, it was just as the writings claimed. The specter stood not five paces from the future doorway of the settlement, and held in one hand a great polished walking stick that he leaned upon, having otherwise but one leg to support his immense frame. From his face a pair of deep-set and ill-matching eyes stared out from their withered sockets, each a color and disposition of its frightening own. Merian faced him full, holding the ax still in his hand, and the ghost in turn gazed on the man, holding the staff that supported him in his wandering to and fro between this world and the one not fully known. Neither the living nor the dead moved from the spot where he had staked himself, as Lowe stared the interloper over in appraisal before letting his great bellow curdle the woods again, so that all in town below who heard it knew exactly what strange new sound it was and swore that the fool who bought those cursed acres had met his fitting and proper end out in the Indian wilderness.
“What do you want?” Merian asked, carefully leading the ghost, as he had been instructed, toward a plate of offering he had set out the night before as providence against the creature’s coming. The fiend, when he heard Merian speak, began to laugh at his ignorance, as the last to dare address him so boldly was well versed in the left-handed arts, and what even he received for his courage was a fate worse than that of Ould Lowe himself.
When Merian repeated his question, even at once with the ghoul’s laughter, Lowe walked to within inches of him, then leaned in closer still and began to swear a string of obscenities that burned in the man’s ear. Merian did not move from his spot as the creature spoke but, when it had finished, motioned toward the offering he had set out before. The ghost eyed what was on the plate, made his way toward it — as rapidly as his condition would allow — then seized the platter and flung the thing away into the trees. As it spun through the air he pronounced again his curse over the land and the things that would befall whomsoever should settle there. Merian heard the curse and again approached the creature with calmness, but when Lowe again made one of his violent gestures it sent the man back on his heels in terror and cold blood. The ghost gave pursuit with a quick arm, which Merian neatly dodged and countered with his own fist. The two then locked in the most unsavory embrace and began a fearsome struggle that ended only at the shores of the lake, where their embattled forms seemed as one violent mass. Both were so disheveled, drenched, and unsteady from the effort of trying to master his foe that none looking, had there been witnesses to that epic, would have been able to tell flesh from spirit, body from soul, past from future, or Merian from Lowe, so tangled were they limb against limb in a single coil of mortal and immortal.