He is very young and his mother calls him to come with her to see Mr. Sorel, their master. The man who is his father visited recently and there was a great upheaval in their lives for a few days before settling back to normal, but this he feels is somehow part of that upheaval. She has scrubbed his shirt and combed his hair, and he knows that before this meeting there were others with their mistress that kept his mother agitated and on continuous edge.
Now as they prepare to go to the house, she is nervous and fidgets with the buttons on his blouse repeatedly until she is ready to go. At the main house they are taken into Mr. Sorel’s office, which he has never seen before and finds extremely frightening as they stand there. When Mr. Sorel greets them he is even more afraid, as the children on the place all try to avoid their master.
“My wife tells me you have something to request,” their master says to his mother, making what seems to him a point of not using her name.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Sorel,” his mother answered. “I was wanting to buy me and Magnus out.”
“Out of what?” Sorel asked.
“Out so we can be free,” she answered.
“Well, that is not generally my practice or view of business, Ruth,” he said, “but I tell you what I will do. I’m going to take this little boy of yours here and put him to a test. If he passes the test you can pay for both of you and go free. If he fails, though, you will stay on here until the end of your days, and so will he, and so will his children and so on, as the law says should be.”
“No, sir, Mr. Sorel,” his mother answered, “he’s just a boy and I don’t reckon he’s ready for tests.”
“Well, you have tested me already tonight, Ruth, so it’s my terms from here on.”
When they left the meeting his mother was crying sharply, and he drew near trying to console her. “I’ll pass whatever test he put me to,” he said.
Instead of being consoled, though, his mother began to cry even more, until he was afraid indeed.
That next morning a man came to their room to take him away. She gave him a kiss before relinquishing him. “They want everything,” she said. “If you ever make it back, just remember that. It is not human wanting that they have but something unmade and unnatural.”
He did not know what she meant for a long time, but he thought over what she had said as he sat in the back of the cart being carried away from her. When they arrived at the river, Mr. Sorel was there with some of his men and watched as those who had been sent to fetch him placed him in a large sack. The boy did not struggle but could only succumb to the power of his master’s men.
“Listen to me,” Sorel said, before they closed up the sack. “If you drown in this water your mother will get to have what she wants and go live with your sire, but if you live you will both stay on here exactly as you have been.”
He finished speaking and nodded for the men to close up the sack, crowding the child in dark fear. The boy breathed in quickly and deeply, hoping for air to be in him whenever the bag was tossed into the water. Finally, he felt himself up in the air; then a hard slap on the surface of the river and a frigid inrush of water as he hoarded his breath. The bag filled at first with a pocket of fresh air; then everything was water and he began to go very slowly to the bottom. He struggled against the sack, and struggled with it, until to his amazement it came open for him, and he began to swim up. As he swam he remembered his master’s words and thought whether to allow what it was his mother wanted so badly or what his body told him he ought.
As he thought of this, he felt a tap at his shoulder and Jannetje standing over him. He stood up to leave and made his way toward the door unsteadily, for he had been drinking the entire while. When he found his horse out in the pen, he brushed it briefly to give it some warmth, then stood in the stirrup.
As he began to head to Stonehouses, he looked back at Content’s place and saw Adelia in the kitchen through the snow. He stood there awhile, watching her in her movements against the yellow light from the warm room; then, when he thought he saw her turn to the window, spurred the horse for fear she might see him out there not knowing what to do.
eight
Purchase ranged the countryside in desolation after Mary Josepha left him, sometimes earning his living by honest means and sometimes in more expeditious fashion. A month after she went back to her husband he knew he would not forget her but made it through the winter alone as best he could. Nor was his heart heavy with anything else that winter, except failing in his union with her.
He was almost in Maryland before he found her again and, after much persuading, convinced her to come off with him. It seemed to him it was either easier than before or else he no longer felt the pain of what he went through. This time, so say the stories that eventually sprang up around the two of them and reached Berkeley, he swore he would employ all his powers of strength and intelligence to keep her. When she came to him then, in a rented room, he put a potion in her drink that made her sleep very sound. She awoke in an impenetrable cage of his besotted construction.
He had dreamed of that enclosure all the way from the border of Florida to where they were now. At night small details would come to him, and he would get up then and there to jot down a diagram of what had been revealed to him.
The bars of the jail were stronger even than the blade of the sword he had made for his father, and the lock was of ingenious design. No one would ever break it or learn its secret mechanism. The entire contraption was exceedingly light as well, so that it could be taken up and put in the back of a wagon, suspended in air, or even floated on water. Inside he tried to make it as comfortable as possible for her, and when they were not on the move it had a mechanism that allowed him to expand it and give her more room. In all those hours without her he had figured out how to make the cage perfect for what it was and escape-proof. If it was cruel he did not see it, only that it accomplished his goal and kept her near him.
The only time he opened the door was to give her food, or when he wanted to be with her. For a month she suffered this fate, until one day she suddenly warmed to him again, calling out for him to come to her of her own accord. They were happy like this for many weeks. It was after one of these episodes, though, that he awoke to find himself imprisoned in his own trap and Mary Josepha gone back to the Englishman.
It took him twice as long to escape the dungeon as build it. When he finally was able to let himself free he was bitter with a disgrace that forbade him from returning home, as he should have, so he continued roaming northward until he could forget or else find a way to redeem who he had become. He swore this time he would not go after her again either but reflect upon what he had learned those months, until the suffering itself had become a kind of balm and solace. “Suffering has always been the price of God’s love,” Mary Josepha used to say to him, when he had convinced her to come off with him, just before she left. He did not feel loved, though. He felt hated, and he was all the way down bitter with himself over what he had done. For he was no longer Purchase of Stonehouses but someone far removed.
He was working in Rhode Island in a shipyard when she finally came to him of her own free choice. She was with a small child and said Oswin had put her out, claiming to know it was not his and no way would it ever be passed off as such.