In the darkness he led the mule over the ridge of earth back to his lands. Morning found the beast learning to bear the yoke instead of other burdens.
In this way he would clear twice as many acres that second spring as he had the first and increase vastly that year his purchase over the wilderness — where he had gone, when none other would go there, to make a home in the world where none existed before him and all said none could be made, to exist and hold him.
For the woman he turned in other directions. At the settlement’s center was a tavern where one of three rooms could be rented by those with no other place to stay the night or, if so happened, the month. This is the same outpost where he had spent the spring before his own roof was yet ready to cover him. The proprietors of the inn were free-thinking people and had been the only ones who did not shy from him when they learned where he had bought and was building. They had even nodded on it as the scientific thing for one in his position who wished to improve it. As he did not see a way to steal a woman as you would a mule, he turned to these friends for advice as to where he might find one who was eligible.
“I am looking for a woman. Do you know where I might find one?” he asked Content, the husband.
The two looked at each other when he put this question out, and at first made no reply.
“Well, you might do as I did,” said Content, “which is to search in the church.”
“No,” Merian answered his friend.
“What do you mean no?”
“That I will not look there. I cannot go.”
“Of course you can. If they are not set up for it, they are certain to make arrangements.”
“That is not what I mean.”
“What is it you do mean, Merian?”
“That I have no faith in that course.”
“Still, you should go there if your aim is a wife.”
two
The man rises half clothed in darkness and dresses himself fully. At his fire he heats yesterday’s porridge for his breakfast, then sets out on his journey. A cold spring rain belts the landscape, and he pulls himself tight trying to keep warm. He is solitary and on his way.
His cold form plows the gray empty roads of Sabbath morning, but he is happy to walk out here without encountering anyone. He holds his thoughts close to himself as the goose bumps on the underside of either arm, which are wrapped around his coldness. He does not consider himself to be making a sacrifice, or ask for special favor or forgiveness from Providence for this great effort in getting to the meetinghouse, but wants only to sit as a parishioner among parishioners and a believer among the devout. He will do this to gain their human company and does not think any more or less of himself for it; certainly he does not think it a thing to speak to God about in the silent talking back and forth that Protestants and Deists do with their Lord, or pagans and hypocrites with their idols.
He wishes for and, in his mind, talks to the mule — whom he could not resist naming after his former companion, his wife, even if there were some who would not agree to that term, as they had not been wed in church or made any other formal arrangement with authority.
He curses himself for not saddling the beast and wishes for its presence. If you were here, Ruth, he whispers against the morning wind, this road would not be half as hard on a body. He wonders now whether he should not turn back and spend his Sunday improving the hut or sorting his grain for the first planting. He frets over these constant worries, as well as the minor ones that have occurred to him only this morning. What if the congregation judges him in an unkind light and is not willing to have him among them? Or what if there should be no eligible women? He knows he is foolish to have taken Content’s advice. As the rain pounds down on his shivering body, still before daybreak, he thinks again of turning back. It is dishonest, Jasper, he argues with himself. You going to take another woman, and already Ruth back there in Virginia with the little one.
He stops this talk as a terrible creaking sound reaches him from somewhere on the road above, whence he has just passed. It takes him near a minute before he recognizes the timbre of its complaint and realizes it is Lowe, cursing or else singing, from the bottom of the lake where he was fastened the year before. Something has disturbed him there. Merian starts and hurries on his way, lest he have to repeat again a history already settled and past. Who should like to repeat his own story? Merian asks himself. What man can be certain that victories once his would be so again? He hastens on from the sound of Lowe’s voice, picking his steps with less care and greater speed, over the muddy roadway in the first light of Sabbath day.
He reaches the outpost without further incidence and finds his way to the meeting place, opposite the unkempt square. Outside, he stands for a long moment and looks to the eaves and joints of the building, admiring the workmanship, before removing his rain-soaked hat from the top of his head and entering. In the back of the church he finds a seat and takes his place, but does not make eye contact with anyone. Some smile on him, even those who in other rooms would shoot him for his boldness with no further question over the matter than that. He waits for his friends, then begins to grow angry at Content for not coming, feeling even greater betrayal when a hand seizes his shoulder, making him startle.
“Welcome.” A voice greets him. It is the preacher, and Merian nods his head in an idiosyncratic bow of acknowledgment that moves three fourths the way down his neck before quickly accelerating the last quarter bit, and snapping back to forward attention. He does not remove his gaze from the room the entire time, nor, when the preacher goes off, does he feel any more at ease, but regards it nevertheless as an opportunity to take in the compass of the assembly.
The gathered parishioners try to avoid seeming rudeness and avert their eyes when he looks at them, but try as well to seem open to all who would come and worship there. He sees the mason to whom he had occasion to sell some of his unused boards, and the merchant who sold him grain, as well as the smith and some few others he had come to recognize from his winter there in the village center.
Other than those few the faces were entirely strange to him, and more numerous than he seemed to remember the population as being. Their collective impression on him was not unlike the meetinghouse he visited from time to time with Ruth back before leaving, except, if anything, those here were even more hardscrabble and wanting. He surveyed them again and counted his chances for success very small indeed, as it seemed unlikely that any among them might spare even a heel of bread, let alone a grown daughter. And if they should chance upon some generosity, he counted himself near the last who might receive it. His mission already a failure in his mind, he kept his eye open for his friend so he might abuse him openly for sending him so out of his way.
When the sermon finally started he could only figure that the preaching had something to do with the intersection of wilderness and temptation, but then every sermon he had ever heard seemed to have in it something to do with wilderness and something to do with temptation, unless it was the one about kingdom and wickedness.
“We are congregating with wickedness right here among us,” a man from the congregation testified, when the preacher had finished the formal sermon, staring hard at Jasper, as each parishioner spoke in the voice of his guiding genius. “It seems hypocritical to tolerate in the flesh what you would not in words or in the spirit.”
His words went unremarked upon, but all knew they were a reference to their outland neighbor. Merian himself sat rigid and did not need to look at the parishioners to know that their eyes were on him, in either judgment or sympathy. His own emotions, though, clenched up as he tried to contain them. When the service was over, he bundled himself again, made his way back into the unrelenting rain, and started out to his own lands, wondering where else now to find a woman.