Dominion Read Free Page A

in an unkind light and is not willing to have him among them? Or what if there should be no eligible women? He knows he is foolish to have taken Content’s advice. As the rain pounds down on his shivering body, still before daybreak, he thinks again of turning back. It is dishonest, Jasper, he argues with himself. You going to take another woman, and already Ruth back there in Virginia with the little one.
    He stops this talk as a terrible creaking sound reaches him from somewhere on the road above, whence he has just passed. It takes him near a minute before he recognizes the timbre of its complaint and realizes it is Lowe, cursing or else singing, from the bottom of the lake where he was fastened the year before. Something has disturbed him there. Merian starts and hurries on his way, lest he have to repeat again a history already settled and past. Who should like to repeat his own story? Merian asks himself. What man can be certain that victories once his would be so again? He hastens on from the sound of Lowe’s voice, picking his steps with less care and greater speed, over the muddy roadway in the first light of Sabbath day.
    He reaches the outpost without further incidence and finds his way to the meeting place, opposite the unkempt square. Outside, he stands for a long moment and looks to the eaves and joints of the building, admiring the workmanship, before removing his rain-soaked hat from the top of his head and entering. In the back of the church he finds a seat and takes his place, but does not make eye contact with anyone. Some smile on him, even those who in other rooms would shoot him for his boldness with no further question over the matter than that. He waits for his friends, then begins to grow angry at Content for not coming, feeling even greater betrayal when a hand seizes his shoulder, making him startle.
    â€œWelcome.” A voice greets him. It is the preacher, and Merian nods his head in an idiosyncratic bow of acknowledgment that moves three fourths the way down his neck before quickly accelerating the last quarter bit, and snapping back to forward attention. He does not remove his gaze from the room the entire time, nor, when the preacher goes off, does he feel any more at ease, but regards it nevertheless as an opportunity to take in the compass of the assembly.
    The gathered parishioners try to avoid seeming rudeness and avert their eyes when he looks at them, but try as well to seem open to all who would come and worship there. He sees the mason to whom he had occasion to sell some of his unused boards, and the merchant who sold him grain, as well as the smith and some few others he had come to recognize from his winter there in the village center.
    Other than those few the faces were entirely strange to him, and more numerous than he seemed to remember the population as being. Their collective impression on him was not unlike the meetinghouse he visited from time to time with Ruth back before leaving, except, if anything, those here were even more hardscrabble and wanting. He surveyed them again and counted his chances for success very small indeed, as it seemed unlikely that any among them might spare even a heel of bread, let alone a grown daughter. And if they should chance upon some generosity, he counted himself near the last who might receive it. His mission already a failure in his mind, he kept his eye open for his friend so he might abuse him openly for sending him so out of his way.
    When the sermon finally started he could only figure that the preaching had something to do with the intersection of wilderness and temptation, but then every sermon he had ever heard seemed to have in it something to do with wilderness and something to do with temptation, unless it was the one about kingdom and wickedness.
    â€œWe are congregating with wickedness right here among us,” a man from the congregation testified, when the preacher had finished the formal sermon, staring hard at