Magnus was again silent, now wondering how they would raise the boy that had shown up out of nowhere.

Adelia, who had not yet been blessed with children, had no such reservations but took to Caleum wholly and immediately, thinking not only that Providence had given them a child but that Caleum was there to replace the loss of Sanne in the house.

It was evident at dinner that evening, as she doted over the latest arrival to the point of inflaming Magnus’s jealousy. “My father and I might like to eat as well,” he said, when she lingered over Caleum’s plate with the food for too long.

“No one is stopping you,” Adelia replied.

Magnus did not say anything to her in reply but reached for the serving plate and helped himself, as Merian looked on with bemusement. “It must be harder when they show up already grown, instead of giving you a chance to see them grow and get used to them.”

“You would know that better than me,” Magnus said, his bad mood spreading across the table.

“I have things to teach you yet,” Merian replied to his older son, as they finished dinner.

If they were tense with each other that evening, on account of what the new presence in the house meant to each of them, they were also very kind to Caleum when alone with him in the days immediately after his arrival. Merian especially liked to spend time with the boy, telling him of his father, Purchase.

“Your father used to sit out there by that tree and while away an entire afternoon, leaving the wood to stack itself,” he recounted. But he would also call him to tell him things he dared not say to others.

“I came out here just as you did,” Merian confided to him, “Magnus the same way. It was only Purchase who was born without ever running, but that he did later. You must remember to be pious in whatever way you can. Whatever covenant you make with them you must keep; only then will they ever consider to redeem you.”

The child, when he heard these things, did not think they were overly strange. His abandonment and then the trip on the boat had already taught him beyond his years, and he understood somehow what his grandfather meant — that he was preparing to die.

It took Magnus and Adelia far longer to take up the evidence of this. Even after Merian informed them all he had written a new will — which they would find after his death in the drawer of a certain desk — they were still unwilling to accept it.

“You will live to be a hundred,” Magnus told him.

“By God, not if I can help it,” Merian replied. He took his food then and retired to the parlor, where he ate alone.

Magnus thought he was only being difficult or else eccentric, as he could sometimes be, but Adelia figured out his true intent. “Your father is starving himself to death,” she told her husband one night in bed, after she discovered Merian’s bowl in the room where he ate.

From then on they watched over him with extreme care at mealtimes, but he managed to begin wasting nonetheless. The cause was not, as they first suspected, grief at being deprived of his wife and son, but the exact opposite. He now no longer hungered for anything in the world and so was done with it.

“I have done everything I set out to,” he answered them, unbidden, after making a final tally to himself. “All the rest is just waiting.” High among the list of those things he was proud of was the fortune he had amassed. “I’m richer than I ever dreamed, and would have made even more money, but I never bought a man, nor sold one, nor tried to haggle anyone out of money for their labor. If I had been luckier at parenting it might have been the utopia I set out to create.” He aimed his words at Magnus and Adelia, but he also made certain Caleum was around when he said them.

* * *

When the rest of the house retired for the evening, Magnus did not go immediately to bed but sat up worrying late into the night about the future of those at Stonehouses. When he finally did join her in their bed, Adelia was up waiting for him, but he was in no mood to share his thoughts.

“You will be good with the boy,” she said, reassuring him, as though she knew his innermost thoughts. “Everything will keep moving forward, as it always has out here with your father.”

It was not the first time he was glad to be married instead of carrying all the weight of his worries alone, but it was one of the most comforting moments for him to have a wife, being otherwise filled with the dread of his father’s passing.

Merian, however, was not yet ready to leave them despite all his talk of death. He would live for some time to come yet — a fact that soon became apparent when he stopped losing weight, as if his body had reached some new equilibrium. Their worries then shifted back to Caleum and their frustration that he could tell them no more about what had happened to his parents than they already knew. This was still in those early days, when he was becoming accustomed to having lost one home and gained another. He thought Stonehouses the best place on earth but longed for his parents, and a remainder of the dread that had infested him during that trip from Providence made him quiet when left alone.

He spent his days exploring the property, especially the outbuildings and far meadows. It was the first time in his short life he was not confined under his parents’ constant watch, and he delighted in it, even in the chores he was given to perform.

Seeing how well he liked work made Merian pleased as anything could make him, and he gave the boy his allowance at the end of every week gladly, telling him to be sure and keep a tally of how he spent it. There being little occasion to spend money, Caleum always accounted for last week’s earnings by saying he had saved it all, which pleased Merian even more.

“Your father couldn’t wait to spend it whenever he got a little money,” Merian said. Then, not wanting to bias the boy against his father, “Not that there’s anything the matter with spending. Saving, though, is what I always thought you should do with a shilling. But he wasn’t one to care for money — only other things, I guess.”

Thinking then to show him something of his father’s, Merian led the boy into the living room, where the blade Purchase had crafted for him long ago still hung.

Caleum, when he saw it, was awed as any boy who ever beheld a sword. However, he was taken not only with the fantasy of war but also the pictures on the side of the blade. “I know them!” he said, pointing excitedly at the images. “And look, there I am!”

Merian, no longer able to see very much at all, indulged the boy a little while but reminded him that Purchase had made the sword well before he was born, and such talk did not figure.

Caleum did not argue with his grandfather but knew he had seen himself prominently displayed. In fact, in the image he saw, there he was holding the self-same blade as that of his reflection. Finally he asked whether he could hold the weapon.

Merian first told him no but then relented. When he tried to raise it up, however, it was far too heavy for him, and Merian took it back, promising one day he would be able to raise it.

“When?” Caleum wanted to know, but his grandfather told him he would know when. Merian put the sword back in its scabbard then, but not before noticing the blade had grown hot, as if just taken from the furnace.

Caleum looked at it so longingly on the nail over the mantel, Merian wondered whether it had been a good idea to put such a notion in the child’s head.

He did not stop, though, confiding to his grandson all those things he had held to himself his entire life. Either because he felt he finally had a companion who was enough like him to understand or for some other reason, the two of them would sit out no matter the weather, and Merian would tell the boy tales and lore, until the only thing he had not properly recounted for him was the story of how the land was first settled, there being so much on the lifelong list of things Merian had done to relate that particular event did not make it, so that, as he had it, he came down from Virginia one year and after a little privation he was much the man he was at that moment.