Dominion by Calvin Baker

preferred vocation.
    â€œWhat is it you would rather be doing?” he asked.
    â€œJust about anything,” the elder brother answered. “Work is not for us.”
    â€œThen why did you take this job?”
    â€œTo eat,” the younger brother replied.
    â€œYou will still have to eat when you’re done.”
    â€œBut 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 wasalso 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.
    â€œAre you quitting?” Sanne asked, as his weight oozed agreeably into the mud in front of the door.
    â€œLet the devil have it,” he said, refusing to rise again.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œI 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