Flies hovered around inside the house, and her wispy tail flailed halfheartedly at them, causing the creatures to scatter briefly before re-settling right where they had been, until they no longer even made the pretense of scattering but only an increase in buzzing before resuming their banquet on the festering meat. Merian soothed her mottled head and scattered the flies with his hat, while proclaiming to Sanne that the leg looked to be healing.
Sanne did not say anything when he went on like this, but nodded her head and brought him a fresh bucket of water, which man and mule alike used to quench their thirst in the sweltering heat. “Might be,” she said at last, trying to give him comfort.
By the second week it was apparent that the mule had no chance, and even his affection and loyalty could no longer hide this from him. Early one morning before Sanne and Purchase awoke, Merian lifted Ruth Potter up from the floor and led her out deep into the woods, beyond the trails that anyone knew but him, and into the same valley field that had served him as an emergency pasture in winter. There he untied the animal, and bade her luck with her own devices, turned, and went back to the house.
When he arrived, Sanne saw his weariness, and the mule missing, and did not ask what he had done that morning. He for his part was silent much of the rest of the day. As they bedded down for the night, though, Sanne told Merian that she heard a noise outside of the house. “It is only your imagining, or else the wind,” Merian told her, turning back to sleep. When she would not desist he went out, where he was greeted by the old speckled beast.
He led her limping inside and gave her feed and an apple, then a blanket, before returning to his wife in bed.
Sanne did not say anything as he wormed his way back under the covers, but let him try to sleep.
In the morning Merian repeated his routine of the day before, uncertain how she had made her way back on just three legs but determined she would not do so again. This time he led her even farther away, by back roads he was confident she had never trod. That night the mule was at the house again, same as any other day in the last four years. Sanne helped her husband feed the animal, and stroked the back of the poorman’s head when he lay down to sleep. The next day he tried once more but to no avail.
“I know,” was all she said, when he led the mule in the third night.
Despite the pretension of taking a name for the house, he knew it was senseless to keep and feed a used-up animal. That morning he faced the task as it was laid out for him, taking Ruth Potter by a long tether — as she was used to having when she had any — into the same field, where he leveled the musket against her temple. His anger, though, flashed and welled up as he saw how innocent she looked at him and munched dumbly on the summer’s sweet grass. “Goddammit, Ruth Potter, what good is it letting you loose if you don’t know what to do with yourself?” he growled at her. “If you don’t know that, what sense is there in living?” He fired the musket into the animal’s head. She fell where she stood, in a tumult of limbs, and he dug for her a grave, which he did cover back up with dirt and sweet grass.
As he made his way home late that morning his heart blazed with emotion, as the sun itself fires false things true.
eight
A train of princely coaches thundered over the road the first passable day of spring that year. A herald out front proclaimed its origin, and the king’s standard flew high overhead, guarding it against inhospitable actions. Its presence so far out was a confounding mystery to Merian and Sanne, and it was continuing on even farther — to an outpost that had cropped up more than two days’ journey from them, for it was a long time since they were the final dwelling on the road.
The mystery of the coach remained unsolved until Merian’s provisioning trip a few weeks later, when he stopped for his usual draught, and Content mentioned the self-important travelers who had stayed over at the inn about three weeks earlier.
“Who were they?” Merian asked. “What was their business?”
“I guess you didn’t hear”—Content nodded, offering him another pint—“but we’re going to be a colony of our own.”
“Don’t you think Dorthea and Sanne might be a little upset by that?”
“It’s no jest,” Content countered. “The colony is dividing in two.”
“On what grounds?” Merian asked, though he didn’t see how it could make a difference to them out there, whatever the case.
“Rulers and ruled upon. Anglicans and Presbyterians. Plantation and freeholder. Crown and colony,” a man sitting in shadow at the end of the bar interjected. “Past and future. However you want to square it. There’s not a whole lot of grounds where things aim to stay the same.”
“That’s all dukes’ and governors’ business,” Content said. “It won’t matter any to us out here.”
“You are an optimist, my friend,” the man at the bar argued, standing and coming over to join the other two, “as well you should be, all the way out here with no arrow in yer skull. But it will have everything to do with what goes on. Mark that, both of ye.” The stranger looked intently between them, and when he said, “Mark that,” Merian recognized his costume as one and the same with the fellow whose carriage he had fixed out on the empty road a few years past.
“You’re one of those wandering preachers, aren’t you?” Merian asked him. “One of your kind passed this way before.”
“I am no such thing,” the man answered. “If I were, though, I would tell you great fortune has smiled on both of ye in the sundering of these lands. The other side is no place even for a dog, or else a king’s created harlot.” With that he downed his drink and stood to depart. “They want inventory of things that should not be in their cupboards to count,” he said. “Give them those stores and you’ll not run a free house anymore than you will the Holy Roman Empire.”
When he had gone, Content went to collect the monies left on the bar and held up a silver coin of the same marking that Merian had seen once before. The two then drank silently for a spell, wondering whether there was anything in the preacher’s forecast to concern them.
They decided in the end there was nothing for them to do about it and switched the conversation over to local gossip and general speculation about the future. Merian arrived home that night in a good mood, although there was nothing to account for it other than a feeling of being near to great events, even if those unfolded happenings concerned more the great landowners and estates of religion and did not weigh on him directly.
“There are going to be two colonies from here on,” he told Sanne. “One for the religious planters and another for everybody else.”
“I don’t see what religion has to do with it,” she asserted, as always on guard against his blasphemies. “In any case, they’re both for the big planters.”
“Well, one of them wants everything for Crown and landed, and the other claims looser confederation.”
“Will you still be able to go between them or will you need special permission?”
“They’re both still the king’s lands,” her husband answered. “I imagine for somebody with the idea, it will be just like going from here to Virginia or from there to London.” As he finished his sentence Merian grew suddenly less jocular, and he stood up to go out-of-doors where he could walk a spell by himself.
Outside the sky teemed low with stars and he charted the figures as he had known them in his childhood, trying to remember their names as he learned them then. He found, however, that he could not name them all as he used to and eventually went back indoors still burning with thought.