“Still riding that mule?” Content asked, when Merian stopped by the tavern for his customary drink.
“She ain’t no worse off for it.”
“Seems like you’re doing well enough to get yourself a horse.”
“Next you’ll be trying to sell me on a carriage and livery.”
“It would be an improvement over that mule.”
“We can’t all be such country dandies as you, Content.”
“Can’t all get about on mules, either.”
“Do you know where I can find a man to hire? I need to make some improvements to the farm.”
“What is it you need?”
“Add a room.”
“Now that is fancy.”
“I can’t help it.”
When Merian told his friend the reason for the addition, Content nodded and refilled his glass, then called to Dorthea to share in the good news.
They drank a toast to Sanne, after which Merian followed his friend’s directions to a new tavern on the other side of the square, where the small road crew was said to take lunch.
When he walked in, he found the crew was nothing more than two brothers who had hired themselves out for the summer, being without land of their own.
“Would you like another job?” he asked them.
They answered that they were disinclined to work at all after their present job, work not being their preferred vocation.
“What is it you would rather be doing?” he asked.
“Just about anything,” the elder brother answered. “Work is not for us.”
“Then why did you take this job?”
“To eat,” the younger brother replied.
“You will still have to eat when you’re done.”
“But this one will feed us until the end of summer.”
He did not press beyond this, and when he left he did not berate them as hostile, for he could see they were short of wits. He but hoped his own children would not turn out so.
With Sanne growing heavier each day, he spent the rest of the summer as he had his first on the property, in grueling solitary work that lasted from first until final light. Mornings he woke and tended his fields; then, in the evening, began construction on the new building and cellar. As the warm days grew shorter, he began to despair he would not finish the task before the weather came down from the mountains.
By the first days of September it was nearly time to harvest his crops as well. The maize was as high as the archer’s bow over Old Cape, and the tobacco leaves were two full hand spans across. Sanne’s garden was also prospering, and they looked forward to reaping as much as in the last three years combined. He went to sleep nights that month thinking of his cellars bursting with the year’s increase, and his pockets overladen with money from the produce he would sell at market. How he would enjoy these rewards from his labors and reinvest the surplus well back in his fields.
The land, being free and fickle, though, conspired with the weather in mid-month against him, when a violent storm began to lash the house as they slept in the coolness of the old building. Merian awoke to the full force of the gale whipping the boards and joints of his house and the violent rains already under his door.
When Sanne woke she found her husband standing in the doorway cradling his head in his hands. “Are you going to stand and hide while it takes the whole season away from us?” she asked, as he stared out at the storm.
With an enormous effort he gathered himself and marched out into the rain to begin harvesting maize from the soggy plants, trailing a muddy sack behind his bent form as he went. In the house Sanne lit her oven, and when each sack was filled he would haul it to the house and unload it near the door. She then took and arranged the ears in stacks for drying in the heat of the kitchen, as he went back into the storm for the rest of their production.
They worked at it through the darkness, but in the morning the rains still slashed down in an onslaught that flooded the fields. Merian, exhausted, threw himself onto the earthen floor in defeat at about ten that morning, unable to work at all anymore.
“Are you quitting?” Sanne asked, as his weight oozed agreeably into the mud in front of the door.
“Let the devil have it,” he said, refusing to rise again.
“I did not know I had married a lazy man,” she told him, taking the sack up where he had left it, and going off into the rain to save what was left of their harvest. Seeing her go to fulfill the contract that he himself could not caused him an abiding sense of shame. He nursed this emotion but did not move from the floor.
It was only when he saw her pregnant form struggle to bring the first full sack to the door that he rose and went off to help.
“I am just a man, Sanne,” he said, taking the sack over his raw shoulders and setting out again. She looked at him then and was filled with pity. Her children, she swore, as he dragged the sack behind them in the feeble morning light and she looked at his mud-streaked face and the tatters of his shirt clinging to his frame, would be greater than this.
When they reached the door of the hut, she stopped short at the threshold, sensing disaster. “You don’t smell that?” she shrieked when she figured out what it was.
He did then, but he had not before. The maize that was outermost in the pile had taken on too much fire and was charred down half its length. Both looked at the burnt husk of their efforts, not speaking either to the other.
“We’ll have to throw it all out,” she lamented finally.
“It might still be good for feed,” he told her.
“Not even the pigs,” she answered.
“We will try and see.”
Nor was that the end of the disaster. The rains went on another five days, and when they were done, he was left with little else besides his despair. When he took what remained to market, he was paid a third for his labors that year of what he had the one before, and the merchant told him to be happy he was having that. “The markets are depressed for even prime crops,” he said, “and your own is nearly rotten.” Merian took what he was given and boiled with rage that he should have so little for his work and so little to say over his fate. But he had no other recourse.
He went on to the dry-goods shop, where he bought that year almost the same inventory as the one before, adding to it the nails he would need to finish work on his building, but there would be no new tub for liquor and no new shoes for himself.
He returned to his farm at the end of that day so woebegone he did not bother to unhitch Ruth Potter from the crude wagon she hauled. Sanne went out to the back of the house and performed this task for him, unloading the wagon as well, feeling the same pity for her husband she had the night he lost his crop but not afraid as she had been.
When he started the next day, however, Merian showed no sign of his defeat as he went to work finishing the outer part of the new building. As he sat on a beam, nailing roofing shingles to the top of the structure, he looked out over his property and possession and called to Sanne inside the house.
“Sanne, what is it I used to tell you I was building out here?’
“Utopia,” she said, heavily making her way to him to see exactly what it was he wanted.
“Well, I am still building it,” he said defiantly, “and no one is going to break me in that.”
“Stop your foolish talk,” she reprimanded him. “You’ll tempt God or else worse.”
He hammered away and said nothing more to his wife that day, but in his heart he was as intent as he had been that first day on the land. He nodded to her in the muggy summer light and drove another nail into the crossbeam.
The roof went up on the new building just before the first snows fell that year, but the structure itself sat empty as the root cellar beneath it. There were no extras that year and no need of the additional space. For the interior of the building he had run out of funds to continue construction. When Sanne’s waters broke, just after the turn of the new year, she left their shared bed nonetheless and went into the other house, where she had instructed Merian to build her a set of furniture of her own design. When she disappeared into the other dwelling, he was not permitted to go in, and neither could he go for help, there being no midwife and him being afraid to leave her alone for the time it would take to go to town for Dorthea.