Merian paced in the old house, opening the door from time to time to go roam around out-of-doors. From the other room he could hear an occasional groan that caused him to stand still wherever he was at the time. A great shock of fear would pass through him during those moments, heavy with the wailing agony that emanated from the other room. As the night wore on, the frequency and severity of her groans increased, until he found himself pressed with his back against the wall between the two rooms in paralysis. After another of these noises he knew he would not be able to bear it any longer and called in to her. “I’m going to go fetch Dorthea.”
From the other room Sanne screamed back at him. “Don’t you dare leave me out here in the middle of creation”—she added, “just because you’re scared of a birthing.”
Merian walked out of the house and all the way to the road with worry, before turning back to the house, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do, either leave her for help or stay there helplessly while she cried out in pain. Finally he made his way back to the other house and pushed at the door. It was fastened from the inside, and he was forced to shove his shoulder into it with his entire might until it budged but only the smallest bit. Through the crack he could barely make out her form but saw that she stood in the middle of the room, holding on to the halfborn violently.
He thought then, that this was how she escaped her prior marriage childless, by killing them off as they came into the world. He yelled at her to stop as he rammed his frame into the door again.
The rough-hewn door was swollen with dampness and cleaved to its position. Merian threw himself into it again with greater and greater force, until the wood began to creak and splinter. Still Sanne said nothing to him nor made any motion to let him into the room; rather, she continued on in her task and the sounds of pain she had emitted before.
Finally he rammed the door with his foot and succeeded in making it give way. He entered the dark room and rushed toward his wife, as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light. When he was upon her he saw that she held the newborn creature with all the gore of birth still attached. She looked up at him with an implacable face.
“He came first by the feet,” she said, telling him to get her a towel. “What is all the commotion you are keeping up?”
He said nothing, ashamed of his former suspicions.
She took the child then and moved sorely to her side, where she reached a basin of water and began to clean it. When she had finished, and he could distinguish the baby’s human shape, she held it out to him. He, for his own reasons, looked on the creature but did not move to receive it.
* * *
For days after the birth she stayed in the other room with the newly repaired door still barred and forbade him entrance. She sat then with her child and talked to him and sang to him the songs that had been sung to her when she was small, but for the father she gave little thought except when he came around to bring or retrieve something at the door.
In all the two of them, mother and son, were sequestered nearly a fortnight in the other house, and Merian began growing used to their absence. When they finally did emerge, he was at work mending the chicken coop and did not see them until he returned to the house later in the day, when he entered the room to find it hot as the oven could make instead of cool as he liked to keep it. Sanne sat in her chair by the little window cradling the boy and, when she saw her husband, held his son out to him. Merian looked at the child a second time but did not take him in his hands.
“Don’t you want to hold your boy, Jasper?” she asked. “What is the matter?”
He said nothing but went over to the fire to get his lunch, his hands trembling as he poured the soup he had prepared days earlier into a bowl.
“Well, have you thought about what you want to call him?” Sanne asked, as Merian took a bit of the watery broth and looked over at the child’s hovering eyes.
“I thought you might of named him already,” he answered her.
Sanne did not respond, as he sopped at the bowl with a piece of hard bread and stared straight ahead of himself. When he finished he stood up and went back to his work outside, leaving the two of them alone as they were used to being.
When he returned at dusk Sanne had baked new bread and prepared their dinner. Merian, still sulking, did not take his accustomed seat but avoided the common table.
Seeing that he was committed to his act, Sanne sat down and ate alone. Merian left her to the table and entertained himself with a pack of playing cards he had acquired. When the boy started to cry Merian cut his eyes between mother and infant, seemingly annoyed with both of them for disturbing his peace.
Sanne went to the baby and began to feed him. Merian watched for a while without comment as everything in his house satisfied its belly except him. Nor did he speak the remainder of that evening, but went to bed sometime after Sanne and the baby, giving both a wide berth.
They continued in this way for several days, neither admitting they had given offense to the other or doing anything to change his behavior. They shared the bed together with the child but did not touch, until Sanne began to think of moving back into the other house permanently.
It was another week before she offered the baby to her husband for holding again, and days even after that before Merian could bring himself to take him, who still had yet to receive a name of his own.
Merian had borne his exile as repentance for his behavior on the night of the birth, but when he looked at her curled up with the wrinkled form, although he knew it to be his own issue, he could not help but think a tiny new master had come upon his lands.
It was the baby who finally broke the tension in the house. Sanne woke in the middle of one night, disturbed by something in her sleep, to find Merian holding the child on his chest and speaking to him in the same abracadabra he sometimes used with Ruth Potter.
“He must of crawled on top of me in the middle of the night,” Merian said, when Sanne sat up and looked at the two of them. “When I opened my eyes, he was here on my chest.”
“He probably had a nightmare about utopia,” she said.
Merian ignored her barb and continued to play with the boy. “Did you dream of utopia, Mr. Purchase?” he asked.
“Who is Purchase?” Sanne wanted to know.
“It seemed like it fit him.”
Sanne did not answer but let the man hold his child and continue to speak to it in his gibberish meant to make the uncomprehending understand.
As Merian played with the tiny new baby, it was the first time he could remember ever holding anything so small. Nor could he remember being held by either mother or father when he himself was little. He knew this, of course, to be only a likely trick of the mind, one of the false floors or hidden rooms of memory deceiving him. There was, however, no way to verify either the one thing or the other.
seven
An orange liquid sun clung low over the white landscape most of that winter like a shield, cast and left as welcome gift for whichever strange new god slept and dreamed in the western lands.
Merian spent the darkened months beneath the burning sky learning to dote over his new son, Purchase, until the two of them started to became as inseparable as the boy was from Sanne, who considered him a miracle brought to her barren womb by unseen Providence. In the evenings, after finishing work on the buildings and grounds, Merian would go home, where instead of turning directly to food, corn whiskey, or wife, he would go to the boy and check on him, asking about his day. “Purchase Merian, what did you do while me and Ruth Potter were out cording firewood?”