He was pleased, though, at the way Ware had put it, thinking that is exactly what Ruth would have done, as if she planned it out long ago.
“When?” he asked.
“This November past.”
“I see. How did she go?”
“Her blood. It turned sweet.”
Merian knew this to mean she had sugar in the blood, which was common in older people, so that they could never satisfy the craving for sweets but were pitched into distemper immediately upon having them. He also knew it was said to be caused by a love that had been thwarted or never satisfied in youth. But he was happy to know she had died in old age, for she would have been nearly fifty years old, which he reckoned was as much time as was allotted most. His own days he had grown greedy and less sensible about, counting them as his getting-back time. When he first found freedom he had not been that way, but he was not always a stranger and foe to bitterness in his later years. He figured if he could get back another twenty or so, he would be just even.
“She go peaceful?”
“Peaceful enough.”
“You know, your mother, she was something else,” Merian said, for he had not marked her death and wished to remember her now that she was present before his memory’s eye.
“I know what she was like,” Magnus said sharply, with the same flash of intensity about the mouth and eyes that had appeared there before.
“I remember when I first laid eyes on her,” Merian continued. “Both her and her mother came home with Hannah Sorel’s father one day, and he installed the mother as cook. Ruth was just a little girl who didn’t even speak English yet — no more than hello, and besides that nothing but pure Congo, or whatever it was in the port she was first from. You could tell she was quick, though, because she picked up better English than most people born to it by the end of her first year. That’s just what it seemed. It was even more striking because her mother never learned it at all, beyond the few words she needed to do her job. Then the old man come to find out she spoke schoolmaster’s Dutch on top of that.
“The original house there was called Colonus and was fairly small, so the two of them shared a room just across the hall from me, and I would see both of them all the time. At first Ruth was so little that didn’t nobody pay her any mind aside from, Well, she sure is one fast study with English speaking.
“I had never given her any more mind than anybody else anyway, but one day, after I came in from working, she was in the hall playing with a puppet she had found to amuse herself with, and she looked up at me as I was going into my room and asked, ‘Where Jasper mama?’
“That was the first thing she said to me, and the first time I even knew she knew my name. I just smiled at her — she couldn’t have been no more than eight or nine — and went on to my room. But I was aware of her from then on and, like I said, she was something far out of the usual.”
The two men were silent then, thinking about Ruth. Magnus also thought of Merian as real flesh and bone for the first time since arriving, after nothing but having heard of him for so long. Merian’s open affection for his mother made the younger man more trusting as well.
For Merian it was the first time he had talked about Ruth since the last time he saw her, and it did him good to speak about her. He would have taken Magnus into his home even if he wasn’t his son but only as Ruth’s boy, which, in truth, is how he saw him.
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
“No more than you do something out of a dream,” Magnus admitted, then worried he might have sounded too hard, “In my mind, yes, but I know or think I know it’s just something I been told. The same way you and Mama say they used to call me Ware.”
“Wasn’t used to call, it was named,” Merian said. “Tell me how you came to get away?”
“No different than anybody else,” Magnus said.
Merian nodded. “Here,” he said, holding out to him the papers Content had written up, which testified that their bearer was his own proprietor. “If somebody aim to do something anyway, they won’t be much good, I imagine,” Merian said. “Then again, if somebody aim to do something, you deal with that the way you must. Things haven’t turned out as bad here as they are in Virginia and down the coast. It ain’t what it is in some other places,” he allowed himself optimistically. “There’s a few free African families around here, so it ain’t so strange a sight for people, and they let you go about your business same as any other man. So what you can expect, if this is where you decide you want to be, is that everybody will act toward you the way you act toward yourself. I can’t tell you what way that should be. I don’t know, but the way I would think about it for myself, if I was in your shoes, is: I started in one place and now I’m in another and aim to be all right there. Simple as that. No different from anybody else in these parts.”
“Is that simple?” Magnus asked
“Anyway, it says you’re free, and if you ever need it there it is.”
Magnus took the papers without comment and looked at them. He was touched by the gesture, but it was holding the paper that made it all real to him, and he did not care if they were legitimate or only fakes worked up to fool constables and sheriffs. What they said was the truth and very real — he was a man free of any other’s hold, and the sole foreman of his soul and being besides the Almighty. That was real as sunshine, and it would never be different. Even if he acted before Merian as if he had carried the papers himself the whole while and only dropped them in the road, he was very much affected.
Merian stood to leave and give Ware the day for himself to do whatever he thought fit. He moved by then like a man who was at ease with himself and who he was in the world. It would be a great many years before Magnus, as he was called, gained the same assurance, but once he did he moved with much the same bearing as his father.
Merian, as he left the room, knew Sanne would raise the devil about it, but for him there was no choice but that the young man, if he wanted, was welcome to stay on at Stonehouses.
three
His terror that second night, when he realized his condition, was abject and complete. He was not normally a sensitive man, but his teeth chattered against each other and his legs locked at the knees as he thought about what challenges lay before him. His manufactured freedom papers were clutched to his breast, making real all that had changed since he arrived there, still he was unmoored by this new status, not knowing whether he would prove master of the thousand strange contests it would pose for his every fiber.
After he had stayed there six days, Merian suggested that work might be the best thing to set his mind and body right again. Magnus agreed to try it, and as he worked out in the fields the next morning, alongside Merian, the older man asked again how he was faring.
“Everyone here treats me fine,” Magnus answered.
“That’s not what I mean,” Merian said. “You will know it when it happens.” He walked away then, leaving Magnus to puzzle just what he did mean.
That night, when he tried to find sleep, Magnus instead found himself disoriented and dizzy to the point of losing his dinner in the chamber pot. As he told Merian the next day, all he felt was that he was in a different place, and he could not stop thinking about Sorel’s Hundred and all he had known there.
“Do you know the story of that place?” Merian asked him then, sitting down to the midday meal.