As the spring came, and the ice thawed from the lake, he began to prepare his fields. On one of those mornings when thrush song was loud enough to cover the horrendous creak of melting ice, he looked out to the road and saw a new figure headed directly toward him. He kept at his work until the stranger stood in front of him. When he looked up from the shadow that covered the ground, he saw it was one he knew from long years before.

The two men clasped like kinsmen, and Merian invited the new arrival into the house, where his wife prepared for them a meal. When they had finished eating the two old friends began to reminisce and tell each other of former times and still other friends not forgotten.

As they grew comfortable, Merian had his friend, Chiron, wait while he went out of the house and into the root cellar. He returned with a jar of corn whiskey, which he had made in the tin tub he bought at the end of the previous season, and handed the jar to his guest.

“A drink,” was all the new arrival said as the hot liquid burned its way down his throat.

“It is the first batch,” Merian said, “but I could not imagine a better occasion for it. Tell me, what has brought you all this way?”

“Same as what brought you,” replied Chiron, who had a reputation as a seer back where they came from.

“How far you going?”

“I do not know.”

“You could stay on awhile.”

It was settled as simply as that, even after so long a separation, as each of them knew it was what he owed to the other man as a tithe to their shared past and common fate.

When Sanne asked about their relationship, Merian answered that they were cousins and did not elaborate on how.

They did not speak, however, about everyone they knew from the past, being content to enjoy each other’s company, and silence, and the occasional jar of corn whiskey. When Merian did ask once after one of their mutual acquaintances who had gone unmentioned, Chiron invoked the unspoken rule that had governed all of their discussions about the past until then. “Things always getting separated from their roots,” he said. “When a man grows up in one place and leaves, he goes off part of the original and part of something new. The original don’t always acknowledge the little offshoots, and all of them don’t always acknowledge the master copy, because they need to get on with being separate and new and sometimes so different it don’t make sense to talk about them at all anymore, other than gossip.”

In the mornings the two men went out into the fields and worked until midday, then returned home together, where they shared supper. The new man acknowledged this abundance of hospitality by working as hard in the sowing of Merian’s fields as he would have if they were his own. One morning, though, late in his visit, when the crows were in full commotion, he paused to read his friend’s fortune in their pattern, for he was learned and well-practiced in auspicating from the flight of birds. “You will profit twice more,” was all he said, as he stood from the place where he had sat to concentrate. Merian took the words as a mysterious gift to ponder and hope for, but he did not ask for further explanation, as he knew that was not how such things operated.

The arrangement continued well between them until late in the spring, when Chiron began to show signs of restlessness. As they worked outside one day, Merian asked him whether he wouldn’t consider staying on longer.

“There is a nice spot over that way where you could put up a house of your own.”

“I appreciate it, but I think it best to keep to the road a little longer,” Chiron replied, without looking up from his work.

“Well, it is there if you decide you want it,” Merian said, returning to his own work, as he was not one to argue with a grown man what his own best interest was.

With Chiron that year he had already planted twice as many acres as the season before and hoped to improve on that by yet a few lots more. Without his friend, Merian knew when harvest came there would only be him and Sanne to work the land, so he stopped his ambitions there where his hand might reach by its own power alone.

His mind, though, did not stop dreaming of increasing his till, and he began to experiment with a small batch of rice seed he bought from the dry-goods merchant, who claimed it had made men rich throughout the Caribbean. Chiron nodded when he saw them, and helped Merian to set up the patch, as he had some memory of the way the stuff was cultivated.

By early July, however, the plants were dry and yellow with no hope of growing further, even with Chiron’s nursing. Merian knew then the seeds were bad, and cursed the merchant for selling him them, swearing that would be the last time he did business with the so-called chandler.

“He has robbed me of my time and labor from two seasons,” he cursed, when he realized the plants were hopeless. “The first I spent saving to buy his rubbish and the second I spent trying to get them to grow.”

Sanne tried to console him. “It is no guarantee that a thing will grow only because it was planted.”

“There’s no chance of it at all if the thing is infernal,” Merian countered gloomily. He spent then long hours that night thinking of ways to recoup from the unreliable merchant, if not to cheat him of something as precious.

By morning his anger had departed and he could admit to himself that if nothing else was lost it would still be a better year than the one before. He devoted more time toward convincing Chiron to stay on, though, telling him that there was little to nothing in the country beyond them.

“Good,” he was answered, “because that’s what I aim to find. I’ve spent about enough days working and getting nowhere to know that nothing is a fine place for a man with a certain kind of head to be.”

“What kind is that?”

Chiron did not answer the question, saying only, “I’m going to go over there and think about all me and you and the Virginia folk been through and see if it doesn’t mean something more than that, like bird patterns against the sky.”

“What good can it mean to be bonded or else a hermit, with nothing but rags keeping him from the harm of cold and heat?” Merian asked.

“All of that is just passing,” Chiron said, in the old country way, and it was not his own way of reasoning but Merian could not argue against it.

When the crop was weeded, Chiron came and told him he was leaving, and did not care to be reminded that the caravans westward did not depart for several weeks still.

“Where I am headed I can’t imagine much caravanning.”

Merian paid him his wages with silver and added to it the coin that had been pressed on him many months earlier by the stranger he met that winter. He found all again beside the hearthstone next morning and nothing else gone from the storeroom but a little food and the bearskin.

So he had two visits that year and both of them religious in their own way. Nor would they be the last visits either, from seers, strangers, or holy men on the property. Nor were such the only ones to come to the house in those early years.

six

In the round heat of the summer months Sanne found herself beginning to grow heavy, and Merian realized there would be another mouth, and in time other hands, on the land. In optimism he began to expand the house, which he had first built in the old African style with a square foundation of twelve on either side. To this initial square he added a second, first placing in the foundation certain herbs said to be propitious and other provisions.

After laying the groundwork himself, he saddled Ruth Potter for the trip into town, intent on hiring someone to help with raising the walls. On the trip that year he noticed the village center seemed to be growing steadily outward. Where stands of wild trees stood before were now farms and storehouses, some of which, though newer and still modest, were already larger than his own. In all, things had changed so much over the previous year that Ruth Potter barely recognized her way, either to the general store or to Content’s inn, and offered up resistance as being in a strange land when they entered the town center.