The house grew and the farm grew and Ruth Potter bore the yoke and burden of domesticity — both in the field and on the road — and Sanne and Merian began to thrive and feel at ease in the clearing that was the boundary line of creation. In the corner of the room nearest the door the belly of the stove grew; and in the fields maize, which would fill it with meal in the winter months, reached ever skyward.
At trading that year Merian acquired a cow that was not too badly used, a pig for the slaughter, and several chickens, which would give them eggs. He also bought sundry items for the house and farm, including a large tin tub, shoes for both husband and wife, a dress for Sanne and a peck of apples for Ruth Potter. When the accounts were said and figured, he owed no one, and still had monies left for the first time and did not want for anything.
From their private garden, Sanne pulled tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, okra, yam, pear, various berries, greens, onions, and other herbs. Merian saved from the harvest a separate lot of America corn for seeding in the spring, tobacco for his own personal consumption, and the hay he had planted in anticipation of acquiring livestock. Sanne prepared preserves of the berries and pears and helped her husband in digging a root cellar at the side of their house to store their other surplus.
As the harvest came to a close, Merian and Ruth Potter went to the mill with the maize they would need for the year to have it ground into flour. When they returned, Merian noticed the house had grown hotter than any day before, even during the height of the southern summer, and he could not determine what the reason was until he saw the little stove his wife had built was fully fired and glowed, waiting only for something to give its heat and warmth to. She provided it with a pan of bread dough made from the new flour, and a pie made of berries she had set aside. The house filled with the smell of baking bread and sweets, and Merian thought he had never in his life had it as good, though his back ached as much as he could remember.
Still, he knew this was his own farm and labor given for his sustenance and his new wife’s, a thing which none but the most rotten man could begrudge. They basked that night in comfort from their toil, and neither thought of any of the other rooms, in times recent or far distant, in the houses and halls of their memories, they had inhabited before.
By the time the caravans that headed west each year started out that season, the Merians were already well ensconced in their winter home, which was a full three weeks earlier than he had been able to ready it in the past. The snows arrived earlier that year as well, and when a knock came to their door one morning, during a sudden storm, Merian left bed reluctantly to open it for the stranded traveler who greeted him.
“I have lost a wheel,” the man said, as snow blew over the threshold and into the house.
While in the past he would barely have opened the door, let alone offered his assistance, his sense of peace made Merian eager to help, and he went off with the stranger in the snow to see if they could repair the carriage before the storm grew too foul.
It was as he walked home with the stranger and his team, after helping to right the overturned coach but not repair the wheel, which needed the attention of a smith, that he saw smoke from a fire not his own, which looked as if it rose from a built-up chimney instead of the bare ground of the forest. He thought then that he no longer lived at the edge of oblivion but had pushed its claim from his doorstep. He also envisioned how much easier the road would be to travel than when he walked it the first time, as parts of it were now graded. He thought then for the first time he might be able to keep his vow of the first year and return to Virginia someday soon for a visit.
He gave these things reign over his imagination as the dual aches of nostalgia and guilt seized him. One for the first family he had known and now missed, and the other for the wife to whom he owed his presence and loyalty.
As they waited out the storm in his house, he asked the stranger where he was headed and where he was coming from. The man answered only in half riddles but told him the trip had gone well so far, as the roads had been without hostility. When the storm let up several hours later, Merian continued to question the traveler, as they went into the village and even still as the smith turned the wheel on his lathe to realign the warped rim. When he finally escorted the man back to his carriage, he still had only a dim notion of who he was but reasoned that was the way it would remain.
Riding home in the snow-shadowed forest he looked around himself to ensure that no one else was on the road who might see his tortured thought. Instead of going into the house directly when he arrived even with his door, he went on a bit farther into the night, as if testing the road’s disposition toward him.
The stranger on their ride through the dark woods had inspired in him a feeling of great dread, as well as hope, that manifested itself now in the brooding trip he took back and forth along the road, thinking of his previous existence. “There is a great change coming to these precincts,” the man had preached, as they searched for the carriage in the darkness. “It will not make itself visible for years yet, but prepare thyself, for when it does it will be as if a hood has been lifted off the eyes of the world.”
“What hood is that?” asked Merian.
“It is the great darkness that prevents men from seeing the natural state of us all is in eclipse and shadow, and we had better not ask too much how such a life came to exist, but why any did. That is the hood that the preachers and politicians use to fool us ordinary folk. They tell you they have the postal address to Providence, but I tell you that you and I have a channel to the same divinity as the Bishop of Canterbury or the baby Christ, and you do not need permission for access. What they want is to assume your agency in this, the progress of your own salvation, and add it to the number of other souls they have hoodwinked, until they have amassed an authority to rival that of Lord John himself. No, brother, we must all be self-governed on this journey and keep any who wants it from getting control of this vessel, like some popish Argonaut, which he would then steer only toward his own destination and neither yours nor mine nor God’s.”
Merian went silent to hear this blasphemy and struggled to get the iron fastened around the stranger’s wheel. “What kind of preacher are you?” Merian asked at last, standing up. “Every other one of you I ever heard said the only plan for any of us is already mapped out by God.”
“No preacher at all but a poor pilgrim.”
He asked nothing else to be explained that night.
When he turned to leave, the man pressed a small coin of solid gold into his hand, which had embossed upon it a seal he had never seen before. “Now, there — there is something with materiality,” the man said in a conspiratorial whisper, though there was no one else on the road. “Remember our conversation, brother, and mark it when it comes around to you again.”
In his heart, which was superstitious and had not thrown off all the old tales he had learned in his boyhood, Merian began to tremble and look around himself as he paced the greedy road.
If it is oblivion that is our state, what indeed keeps anything from disappearing just as easily? he asked himself. This in its turn caused a great sadness to visit him that night, as he thought on things he had not visited in a very long time, and that indeed he thought perhaps best now forgotten.
When he returned to the house, Sanne sat up in bed waiting and asked why it had taken him so long.
“The wheel was worse off than I suspected,” he said.
“I see. And the traveler?”
“He is back on his way, but he was a strange one.”
“How so?”
“He was all talk of signs and claimed he had found a new way of measuring time’s progress.”