“He must of crawled on top of me in the middle of the night,” Merian said, when Sanne sat up and looked at the two of them. “When I opened my eyes, he was here on my chest.”
“He probably had a nightmare about utopia,” she said.
Merian ignored her barb and continued to play with the boy. “Did you dream of utopia, Mr. Purchase?” he asked.
“Who is Purchase?” Sanne wanted to know.
“It seemed like it fit him.”
Sanne did not answer but let the man hold his child and continue to speak to it in his gibberish meant to make the uncomprehending understand.
As Merian played with the tiny new baby, it was the first time he could remember ever holding anything so small. Nor could he remember being held by either mother or father when he himself was little. He knew this, of course, to be only a likely trick of the mind, one of the false floors or hidden rooms of memory deceiving him. There was, however, no way to verify either the one thing or the other.
seven
An orange liquid sun clung low over the white landscape most of that winter like a shield, cast and left as welcome gift for whichever strange new god slept and dreamed in the western lands.
Merian spent the darkened months beneath the burning sky learning to dote over his new son, Purchase, until the two of them started to became as inseparable as the boy was from Sanne, who considered him a miracle brought to her barren womb by unseen Providence. In the evenings, after finishing work on the buildings and grounds, Merian would go home, where instead of turning directly to food, corn whiskey, or wife, he would go to the boy and check on him, asking about his day. “Purchase Merian, what did you do while me and Ruth Potter were out cording firewood?”
Sanne regarded the child with protective affection as his father tickled him or else tossed him into the air. “That’s enough, Jasper,” she would say then, when she felt he was roughhousing the baby. “He’s still just a little one.”
Sometimes Merian argued the toughness of the child. More often he gave in to her demands and placed Purchase back on the mattress or else withdrew his hand and stopped trying to make the baby laugh. He found himself pleased that the building was still unfinished, as it gave him a project and excuse to be indoors and near them.
After Sanne finally vacated the other building, which had been taken over by their few livestock, Merian began tearing down the interior wall between the two rooms, to combine the whole into a single structure. Although he worked frequently in the empty room, he constantly invented reasons to be in the part of the house where they were.
It was during this season that proper warmth began to flow between husband and wife as well, when Sanne saw how her husband went through no end of invention to be near the newborn, and Merian saw how well she guarded his boy from harm.
That was also the winter Sanne began to take over management of the stores, beginning at first with her helping Merian count how many bales of hay were left until the time the cow would be able to graze outdoors again. It was then that she saw how precarious their own survival was as well, and dependent on an early spring. In fear she began to make suggestions about how the land was allocated to the different crops.
“We’ll have to feed the cow from our own food,” she said, “and unless you give another field to hay this year we might be in the same position next winter as well.”
“We might have to slaughter it,” Merian replied stoically, going to count the preserves in the half-empty room. “Now, how long will the cow last if you divide it by two people and the rest of the winter?”
Sanne thought it was a joke, even though she found herself involuntarily performing the math in her head. When she realized he was serious, though, she grew incensed. On her last place they would rather get down to the nub of their stores than kill an animal that wasn’t marked for slaughter, and a cow was almost a living relative. As the weeks progressed, though, the hay continued to thin, and Merian was forced into giving the animals smaller and smaller portions. To save the cow, Sanne would sneak some of her own meal to it when her husband was not looking. Still, the animals all grew thinner, until the cow’s warm morning milk had given out well before there was yet any sign of thaw in the fields. In desperation Merian went out and dug up turf from the ground beneath the snow, and took to feeding the animals that, but it was not enough to sustain them properly. They continued to weaken.
“Do you want to wait until your own milk has given out too?” he asked, arguing his course of action with her. “The little one can’t eat turf.”
Sanne did not answer him, and indeed began to withdraw some of the affection she had previously restored. He is just barely an animal himself, she thought. If he managed his stores right we would not be in this situation.
Their misfortune, he told her, was not his doing. “I am as beholden to the climate and the mercy of God as anything out there,” Merian said, as if reading her thoughts. “I do not make it rain or hail or snow or drought, or else descend on a poor fellow like the locusts, or bring fire, or make crops die from disease that can’t nobody see till the corn is withered all to ruin.”
He got up from the table, leaving half his dinner for the woman and child, or rather the animals, as he knew what she did with the scraps from her own plate, even with her husband’s head aching and light from hunger.
“If you kill the animals we’ll never have anything more for ourselves than season to season,” she said, as he stormed across the room and made a pallet for himself on the floor.
“If I don’t we won’t make this one, Sanne,” he said, with increasing frustration.
He woke up early the next morning and left the house before she knew he was gone. By the time she did find him missing she was already at the stove, making the thinnest ashcake ever measured out and set over a bed of coals. She looked around presently and counted the animals, as was her usual habit. The cow and the mule were both missing, and she went to the door in great agitation to see if she could find sign of either her man or their beasts.
Out in the wet melting snow she could still fathom the marks of hooves and the man’s feet next to them, leading off into the dark woods. “He has gone into the forest so I would not hear when he slaughtered her,” she said to the baby Purchase. “Next he will kill Ruth Potter for meat.” She looked back out across the fields, following the tracks in the snow until they faded at the entrance to the forest, and wondered which direction out there they had gone off into, so that she might listen for the animals’ scream.
She sat and listened all day, cursing both the man and herself for marrying him. I left my home for this she reminded herself again, daydreaming about her former house, which was always well stocked with both food and good company, as the rooms and halls of memory inevitably are.
Near dusk he reappeared, and just as she feared he had meat with him and was covered in blood.
“I’ll not cook the proceeds of your murdering,” she said, when he put the flesh on the table. “Take it out of here.”
“You have to eat too, Sanne,” he said. “It is good meat.”
When she heard him say this, the core inside her gave way and her eyes turned into hate-filled saucers. “Get it out of here,” she said again, taking up a knife from near the stove.
“What are you planning to do with that?” he demanded cautiously.
“Get it off my table,” was all she said.
“Calm yourself,” Merian told her. “It’s not your cow.”
“Where is she then?”
“I left her in the woods to feed. I took her out there this morning, down the valley, where the snow is melted enough that we found forage.”