“Be easy on the lad, Miller. He’s gone now, anyway.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with him. As soon as Al Junior is down, I see Cally’s face wherever I look. Like an undertaker hoping for a fee.”
“Maybe it’s strange to him. To have Alvin hurt.”
“As many times as Alvin’s been an inch from death—”
“But never injured.”
A long silence.
“Taleswapper.”
“Yes, Mr. Miller?”
“You’ve been a good friend to us here, sometimes in spite of ourselfs. But I reckon you’re still a walking man.”
“That I am, Mr. Miller.”
“What I’m saying is, not to rush you off, but if you go anytime soon, and you happen to be heading generally eastward, do you think you could carry a letter for me?”
“I’d be glad to. And no fee, to sender or receiver.”
“That’s right kind of you. I been thinking on what you said. About a boy needing to be sent far off from certain dangers. And I thought, in all the world where’s there some folks I can trust to look after the boy? We got no kin worth speaking of back in New England—I don’t want the boy raised Puritan on the brink of hell anyway.”
“I’m relieved to hear that, Mr. Miller, because I have no great longing to see New England again myself.”
“If you just follow back on the road we made coming west, sooner or later you come along to a place on the Hatrack River, some thirty miles north of the Hio, not all that far downriver from Fort Dekane. There’s a road house there, or leastwise there was, with a graveyard out back where a stone says ‘Vigor he died to save his kin.’”
“You want me to take the boy?”
“No, no, I’ll not send him now that the snow’s come. Water—”
“I understand.”
“There’s a blacksmith there, and I thought he might want a prentice. Alvin’s young, but he’s big for his age, and I reckon he’ll be a bargain for the smith.”
“Prentice?”
“Well, I sure won’t make him a bond slave, now, will I? And I got no money to send him off to school.”
“I’ll take the letter. But I hope I can stay till the boy is awake, so I can say good-bye.”
“I wasn’t going to send you out tonight, was I? Nor tomorrow, with new snow deep enough to smother bunnies.”
“I didn’t know if you had noticed the weather.”
“I always notice when there’s water underfoot.” He laughed wryly, and they left the room.
Alvin Junior lay there, trying to figure why Pa wanted to send him away. Hadn’t he done right all his life, as best he could? Hadn’t he tried to help all he knew how? Didn’t he go to Reverend Thrower’s school, even though the preacher was out to make him mad or stupid? Most of all, didn’t he finally get a perfect stone down from the mountain, holding it together all the time, teaching it the way to go, and at the very end risking his leg just so the stone wouldn’t split? And now they were going to send him away.
Prentice! To a blacksmith! In his whole life he never even saw a blacksmith up to now. They had to ride three days to the nearest smithy, and Pa never let him go along. In his whole life he never even been ten mile from home one way or any other.
In fact, the more he thought about it the madder he got. Hadn’t he been begging Mama and Papa just to let him go out walking in the woods alone, and they wouldn’t let him. Had to have somebody with him all the time, like he was a captive or a slave about to run off. If he was five minutes late getting somewhere, they came to look for him. He never got to go on long trips—the longest one ever was to the quarry a few times. And now, after they kept him penned up like a Christmas goose all his life, they were set to send him off to the end of the whole earth.
It was so blame unfair that tears come to his eyes and squeezed out and tickled down his cheeks right into his ears, which felt so silly it made him laugh.
“What you laughing at?” asked Cally.
Alvin hadn’t heard him come in.
“Are you all better now? It ain’t bleeding nowhere, Al.”
Cally touched his cheek.
“You crying cause it hurts so bad?”
Alvin probably could have spoke to him, but it seemed like too much work to open up his mouth and push words out, so he kind of shook his head, slow and gentle.
“You going to die, Alvin?” asked Cally.
He shook his head again.
“Oh,” said Cally.
He sounded so disappointed that it made Alvin a little mad. Mad enough to get his mouth working after all. “Sorry,” he croaked.
“Well it ain’t fair, anyhow,” said Cally. “I didn’t want you dead, but they all said you was going to die. And I got to thinking what it’d be like if I was the one they all took care of. All the time, everybody watching out for you, and when I say one little thing they just say, Get out of here, Cally, Just shut up, Cally. Nobody asked you, Cally, Ain’t you spose to be in bed, Cally? They don’t care what I do. Except when I start hitting you, then they all say, Don’t get in fights, Cally.”
“You wrestle real good for a field mouse.” At least that was what Alvin meant to say, but he didn’t know for sure if his lips even moved.
“You know what I did one time when I was six? I went out and got myself lost in the woods. I just walked and walked. Sometimes I closed my eyes and spun around a few times so I’d sure not know where I was. I must have been lost half the day. Did one soul come looking for me? I finally had to turn around and find my own way home. Nobody said, Where you been all day, Cally? Mama just said, Your hands are dirty as the back end of a sick horse, go wash yourself.”
Alvin laughed again, near silently, his chest heaving.
“It’s funny for you. Everybody looks after you.”
Alvin worked hard to make a sound this time. “You want me gone?”
Cally waited a long time to answer. “No. Who’d play with me then? Just the dumb old cousins. There ain’t a good wrassler in the bunch of them.”
“I’m going,” whispered Alvin.
“No you ain’t. You’re the seventh son and they’ll never let you go.”
“Going.”
“Course the way I count up it’s me that’s number seven. David, Calm, Measure, Wastenot, Wantnot, Alvin Junior that’s you, and then me, that’s seven.”
“Vigor.”
“He’s dead. He’s been dead a long time. Somebody ought to tell that to Ma and Pa.”
Alvin lay there, near wore out from the few things he said. Cally didn’t say anything much after that. Just sat there, still as could be. Holding Alvin’s hand real tight. Pretty soon Alvin started drifting, so he wasn’t sure altogether whether Cally really spoke or it was in a dream. But he heard Cally say, “I don’t never wish you dead, Alvin.” And then he might have said, “I wish I was you.” But anyway Alvin drifted off to sleep, and when he woke up again there was nobody with him and the house was still except for nightsounds, the wind rattling the shutters, the timbers popping as they shrunk from the cold, the log snapping in the hearth.
One more time Alvin went inside himself and worked his way down to the wound. Only this time he didn’t have much to do with the skin and muscle. It was the bones he worked on now. It surprised him how lacy it was, pocked with little hollows all over, not solid straight through like the millstone was. But he learned the way of it soon enough, and it was easy after a while to knit the bones up tight.
Still, there was something wrong with that bone. Something in his bad leg just wouldn’t get exactly like the good leg. But it was so small he couldn’t see it clear. Just knew that whatever it was, it made the bone sick inside, just a little patch of sickness, but he couldn’t figure how to make it better. Like trying to pick up snowflakes off the ground, whenever he thought he had ahold of something, it turned out to be nothing, or maybe just too small to see.
Maybe, though, it would just go away. Maybe if everything else got better, that
sick place on his bone would get better by itself.
Eleanor was late getting back from her mother’s house. Armor believed that a wife should have strong ties with her family, but coming home at dusk was too dangerous.
“There’s talk of wild Reds up from the south,” said Armor-of-God. “And you traipsing about after dark.”
“I hurried home,” she said. “I know the way in the dark.”
“It’s not a question of knowing the way,” he said sternly. “The French are giving guns as bounty on White scalps now. It won’t tempt the Prophet’s people, but there’s many a Choc-Taw who’d be glad to come up to Fort Detroit, gathering scalps along the way.”
“Alvin isn’t going to die,” said Eleanor.
Armor hated it when she turned the subject like that. But it was such news that he couldn’t very well not ask after it. “They decide to take off the leg, then?”
“I saw the leg. It’s getting better. And Alvin Junior was awake late this afternoon. I talked to him awhile.”
“I’m glad he was awake, Elly, I truly am, but I hope you don’t expect the leg to get better. A big wound like that may look to be healing for a while, but the rot’ll set in pretty soon.”
“I don’t think so this time,” she said. “You want supper?”
“I must have gnawed down two loaves just pacing back and forth wondering whether you were even coming home.”
“It isn’t good for a man to get a belly.”
“Well, I got one, and it calls out for food just like any other man’s.”
“Mama gave me a cheese to bring home.” She set it out on the table.
Armor had his doubts. He figured half the reason Faith Miller’s cheeses turned out so good was because she did things to the milk. At the same time, there wasn’t no better cheese on the banks of the Wobbish, nor up Tippy-Canoe Creek neither.
It put him out of sorts when he caught himself compromising with witchery. And being out of sorts, he wasn’t about to let anything lie, even though he knew Elly plain didn’t want to talk about it. “Why don’t you think the leg will rot?”
“It’s just getting better so fast,” she said.
“How much better?”
“Oh, pert near fixed.”
“How near?”
She turned around, rolled her eyes, and turned back away from him. She started cutting up an apple to eat with the cheese.
“I said how near, Elly? How near fixed?”
“Fixed.”
“Two days after a millstone rips off the front half of his leg, and it’s fixed?”
“Only two days?” she said. “Seems like a week to me.”
“Calendar says it’s two days,” said Armor. “Which means there’s been witchery up there.”
“As I read the gospels, the one that healed people wasn’t no witch.”
“Who did it? Don’t tell me your pa or ma suddenly figured out something as strong as that. Did they conjure up a devil?”
She turned around, the knife in her hands still poised for cutting. There was a flash in her eyes. “Pa may be no kind of church man, but the devil never set foot in our house.”
That wasn’t what Reverend Thrower said, but Armor knew better than to bring him into the conversation. “It’s that beggar, then.”
“He works for his room and board. Hard as anyone.”
“They say he knew that old wizard Ben Franklin. And that atheist from Appalachee, Tom Jefferson.”
“He tells good stories. And he didn’t heal the boy neither.”
“Well, somebody did.”
“Maybe he just healed up himself. Anyway, the leg’s still broke. So it ain’t a miracle or nothing. He’s just a fast healer.”
“Well maybe he’s a fast healer cause the devil takes care of his own.”
From the look in her eye when she turned around, Armor kind of wished he hadn’t said it. But dad-gum it, Reverend Thrower as much as said the boy was as bad as the Beast of the Apocalypse.
But beast or boy, he was Elly’s brother, and whereas she might be as quiet as you please most of the time, when she got her dander up she could be a terror.
“Take that back,” she said.
“Now, that’s about as silly a thing as I ever heard. How can I take back what I said?”
“By saying you know it ain’t so.”
“I don’t know it is and I don’t know it ain’t. I said maybe, and if a man can’t say his maybes to his wife then he might as well be dead.”
“I reckon that’s about true,” she said. “And if you don’t take that back you’ll wish you was dead!” And she started coming after him with two chunks of apple, one in each hand.
Now, most times she came for him like that, even if she was really mad, if he let her chase him around the house awhile she usually ended up laughing. But not this time. She mushed one apple in his hair and threw the other one at him, and then just sat down in the upstairs bedroom, crying her eyes out.
She wasn’t one to cry, so Armor figured this had got right out of hand.
“I take it back, Elly,” he said. “He’s a good boy, I know that.”
“Oh, I don’t care what you think,” she said. “You don’t know a thing about it anyway.”
There weren’t many husbands who’d let their wife say such a thing without slapping her upside the head. Armor wished sometimes that Elly’d appreciate how him being a Christian worked to her advantage.
“I know a thing or two,” he said.
“They’re going to send him off,” she said. “Once spring comes, they’re going to prentice him out. He’s none too happy about it, I can tell, but he don’t argue none, he just lies there in his bed, talking real quiet, but looking at me and everybody else like he was saying good-bye all the time.”
“What are they wanting to send him off for?”
“I told you, to prentice him.”
“The way they baby that boy, I can’t hardly believe they’d let him out of their sight.”
“They ain’t talking about nothing close by, neither. Clear back at the east end of Hio Territory, near Fort Dekane. Why, that’s halfway to the ocean.”
“You know, it just makes sense, when you think about it.”
“It does?”
“With Red trouble starting up, they want him plumb gone. The others can all stick around to get an arrow in their face, but not Alvin Junior.”
She looked at him with withering contempt. “Sometimes you’re so suspicious you make me want to puke, Armor-of-God.”
“It ain’t suspicion to say what’s really happening.”
“You can’t tell real from a rutabaga.”
“You going to wash this apple out of my hair, or do I have to make you lick it out?”
“I expect I’ll have to do something, or you’ll rub it all over the bed linen.”
Taleswapper felt almost like a thief, to take so much with him as he left. Two pair of thick stockings. A new blanket. An elkhide cloak. Jerky and cheese. A good whetstone.
And things they couldn’t even know they gave him. A rested body, free of aches and bruises. A jaunty step. Kind faces fresh in his mind. And stories. Stories jotted in the sealed-up part of the book, the ones he wrote down himself. And true stories painfully inscribed by their own hands.
Still, he gave them fair return, or tried to. Roofs patched for winter, other jobs here and there. More important, they’d seen a book with Ben Franklin’s own handwriting in it, with sentences from Tom Jefferson, Ben Arnold, Pat Henry, John Adams, Alex Hamilton—even Aaron Burr, from before the duel, and Daniel Boone, from after. Before Taleswapper came they were part of their family, and part of the Wobbish country, and that’s all. Now they belonged to much larger stories. The War of Appalachee Independence. The American Compact. They saw their own trek through the wilderness as one thread among many, and felt the strength of the whole tapestry woven from those threads. Not a tapestry, really. A rug. A good, thick, solid rug that generations of Americans after th
em could tread on. There was a poem in that; he’d work that into a poem sometime.
He left them a few other things, too. A beloved son he pulled from under a falling millstone. A father who now had the strength to send away his son before he killed him. A name for a young man’s nightmare, so he could understand that his enemy was real. A whispered encouragement for a broken child to heal himself.
And a single drawing, burnt into a fine slab of oakwood with the tip of a hot knife. He’d rather have worked with wax and acid on metal, but there was neither to be had in this place. So he burnt lines into the wood, making of it what he could. A picture of a young man caught in a strong river, bound up in the roots of a floating tree, gasping for breath, his eyes facing death fearlessly. It would have earned nothing but scorn at the Lord Protector’s Academy of Art, being so plain. But Goody Faith cried out when she saw it, and hugged it to her, dropping her tears over it like the last drips from the eaves after a rainstorm. And Father Alvin, when he saw it, nodded and said, “That’s your vision, Taleswapper. You got his face perfect, and you never even saw him. That’s Vigor. That’s my boy.” Then he cried, too.
They set it right up on the mantel. It might not be great art, thought Taleswapper, but it was true, and it meant more to these folks than any portrait could mean to some fat old lord or parliamentarian in London or Camelot or Paris or Vienna.
“It’s fair morning now,” said Goody Faith. “You’ve got long to go before dark.”
“You can’t blame me for being reluctant to leave. Though I’m glad you trusted me with this errand, and I won’t fail you.” He patted his pocket, wherein lay the letter to the blacksmith of Hatrack River.
“You can’t go without you say good-bye to the boy,” said Miller.
He’d put it off as long as it could be delayed. He nodded once, then eased himself from the comfortable chair by the fire and went on into the room where he’d slept the best nights of his life. It was good to see Alvin Junior’s eyes wide open, his face lively, no longer slack the way it was for a while, or winced up with pain. But the pain was still there, Taleswapper knew.
“You going?” asked the boy.
“I’m gone, except for saying good-bye to you.”
Seventh Son: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume I Page 20
