Sanne, after seeing him seized by one of his unpredictable moods, tried to ignore it, and when he reentered the house he found her already closing everything down for the night. He helped silently, then got into bed alongside her, where he attempted to mask his earlier moodiness with talk of how good the harvest was going to be again this year, if the weather should hold.
It was a mask but a true one; his yield from the ground had improved steadily as he invested it with fertilizers and good care each year, so that he expected nearly twice again what he achieved the year before. All the result of steady work and getting to keep his benefits for himself. This season, he reckoned, when his accounts were settled, he would leave with more ready cash than he had ever seen in his life, and no debt to any man.
When the harvest came he took his produce to market and received payment, more than a little amazed at the amount — for it was a sum that would have been unthinkable to him only recently.
He splurged then at the merchants’ shops and even spent a few pence at his sworn enemy the chandler’s, after seeing a handkerchief in the window he thought Sanne might fancy.
When he went home that evening he was loaded down with the winter goods in a new cart, which was pulled by the gelding he had bought to replace Ruth Potter, though he considered that particular creature irreplaceable and without peer in all the annals of animal husbandry.
He arrived back at Stonehouses at nightfall, and Sanne came out to help him unpack the cart and put things away in their cellar. He was proud then that, while before he had barely been able to fill a single basement with his labors from the season, this year two storerooms were scarcely enough to hold all his goods. He celebrated with a little of the bought whiskey he had picked up in his splurging, then presented his wife with her gift.
“Oh, it’s just foolish,” she protested, as she looked at the spun lace cloth. “What do I need with such a thing around here?” She could not, however, disguise her merriment at being presented with something so precious, or, for that matter, at receiving anything besides another pair of sturdy boots.
Nor was it his only gift to her. As he unpacked the crates there were all kinds of sweets and delicacies, such as had barely been available for sale in the place before but which were now well within their means. He drank in celebration of his growing wealth as well as the commerce that made it possible. He had amassed a sum of capital that was tremendous to his mind, and he knew exactly what it was worth and what purpose to put it to.
“I have another family I left back in Virginia,” he said to Sanne that night, as they lay in bed.
“What do you mean another family?” she asked, even as she had always suspected he kept secrets from her. “You have another wife?”
“Not legal like you and me, at least, but yes, you can say another wife.”
When she heard this she began to cry and berate him. “I always knew you hid things from me,” she said, sobbing. “What else is there? Do you have other children? Why, I bet you have them all the way up to Massachusetts!”
“Just one, Sanne,” he answered. “I had to leave both of them when they changed the law about where freed men could settle. I never made it a secret that’s how I ended up here. Or did you think I had lived all that time before you just by myself?”
“You never told me about another family,” she said, still tearing.
“That’s because I couldn’t do anything about it,” he answered. “I can now and intend to.”
“Intend to what?” she asked, sitting up. “What are you going to do?”
“Buy them out,” he answered her. “It don’t affect you and me, but it is what I promised them and still intend.” It had been his heart’s truth for longer than he could bear, although when he made the promise it had seemed like an earthly impossibility.
“You can’t bring another woman here; I won’t stand for that!” Sanne screamed at him. “I don’t care what you promised. If you try to bring your slave woman here you’ll both pay in hell.”
Merian chewed the inside of his mouth and said nothing else. He tried eventually to embosom and comfort his wife, whom he did love, until she could sleep. But in his pocket that money from the harvest lit him with singular purpose.
He rises the next day, before the sun has gained the rim of the horizon, while his wife still sleeps soundly, and saddles the gelding. Sanne wakes and listens to him outside, leaving, but does not stir from their shared mattress. By the time she realizes to herself where he has gone the sun will be at noonday and he will be unredeemable to her except by his own will.
He stopped for lunch at his customary time and ate in the saddle, to save an hour before taking back to the road again. The last time he was on this path he had been pressed to it by the legal inability to earn a wage and the misery that ensued. Still, he did not consider this ride back triumphant, for he did not know what to expect. He only knew he was in better condition than before — when he was beyond whipped and defeated and damn near dead. He tried not to think about it any longer or ever again, but if he did speculate in isolated moments he surely did not dwell on it, and certainly not on the last night before his manumission was a legal fact. Ebsen, the overseer, had visited him then at the party they were having in one of the cabins and, unprovoked, smashed him full in the mouth with a leather-wrapped fist.
Everyone in the room stared between the two, waiting for a response as the blood welled in Merian’s lip and Ruth clutched their boy toward her bosom.
Merian looked at the other man quizzically, determined not to be hedged. “I thought you and me were friends, Ebsen,” he said. “We never had discord before.”
“Well, we got it now,” Ebsen answered, smacking him again with his sheathed fist. “You think you’re better than everybody else here.”
The other men in the room made a cordon of bodies around the two combatants, though they knew it would take much more provocation for Merian to box.
“I’m not better than anybody,” Merian said, as the other man drew up to strike him again. “But I’m no less than anybody either.”
Ebsen beat his mute hand against Merian again, as if he wanted to teach him a lesson, though he himself did not know what lesson that was. He knew only that the other man’s lot had changed and his own had not; not for six years had it changed at all. He beat him in accordance with no known law but only because men do not like to know defeat, and he felt, with Merian’s advancement, something was lost to him, so tortured whatever he might to rectify that feeling.
He struck him again and Merian withstood the blows with his hands raised in defense and an equanimity that bordered on indulgence.
I bet he won’t try to hit me again, Merian thought now, as he drew himself up in the saddle and spurred the horse. I bet won’t nobody ever lay another living finger on me. The memory, though, of what had passed before filled him with a shame he could not speak. I hope Ebsen is the first person I see when I get to Sorel’s Hundred.
He rode for three days, barely stopping to sleep, as he stoked in his imagination the narrative of how the journey would play out and all the flattering variations of his original imagining. They were almost as fanciful as those of his last night on the old place, when he dreamed himself larger than his natural size, which was very mighty, striding a great mountain and holding a balled gavel in his hand. To the east the skies parted and he saw an antelope’s head rear and stare after him, as if to give chase. He responded by running, still clutching the gavel, until the eyes of the animal bore into him with such intensity he felt himself beginning to melt. To escape he flung the hammer directly at the stars and the sky, and only then saw that it was fashioned of horn, as it split in two along an enormous chasm that began to fill immediately with a great inrush of water, the eastern half receding, as if falling into the abyss of a well, and the western sky pushing up toward him slowly as if he were sinking to the bottom of a river. He woke before he touched bottom and reached out to Ruth. He knew there were those who could interpret it rightly, but he had never revealed this vision for fear, even while waking, of what it might mean.