“We go on home now, Mrs. Guester,” said Anga. She handed the baby to Mama. “If one of my children wake up with a boogly dream I best be there or you hear them screams clear up here on the high road.”
“Ain’t you going have no preacher say words at her grave?” said Mock.
Papa hadn’t thought of it. “We do have a minister upstairs,” he said.
But Peggy didn’t let him hold that thought for even a moment. “No,” she said, sharp as she could.
Papa looked at her, and knew that she was talking as a torch. Wasn’t no arguing that point. He just nodded. “Not this time, Mock,” he said. “Wouldn’t be safe.”
Mama fretted Anga Berry clear to the door. “Is there anything I ought to know?” said Mama. “Is there anything different about Black babies?”
“Oh, powerful different,” said Anga. “But that baby, he half White I reckon, so you just take care of that White half, and I reckon the Black half take care of hisself.”
“Cow’s milk from a pig bladder?” Mama insisted.
“You know all them things,” said Anga. “I learnt everything I know from you, Mrs. Guester. All the women round here do. How come you asking me now? Don’t you know I need my sleep?”
Once the Berrys were gone, Papa picked up the girl’s body and carried her outside. Not even a coffin, though they would overlay the corpse with stones to keep the dogs off. “Light as a feather,” he said when first he hoisted her. “Like the charred carcass of a burnt log.”
Which was apt enough, Peggy had to admit. That’s what she was now. Just ashes. She’d burnt herself right up.
Mama held the pickaninny boy while Peggy went up into the attic and fetched down the cradle. Nobody woke up this time, except that minister. He was wide awake behind his door, but he wasn’t coming out for any reason. Mama and Peggy made up that little bed in Mama’s and Papa’s room, and laid the baby in it. “Tell me if this poor orphan baby’s got him a name,” said Mama.
“She never gave him one,” said Peggy. “In her tribe, a woman never got her a name till she married, and a man had no name till he killed him his first animal.”
“That’s just awful,” said Mama. “That ain’t even Christian. Why, she died unbaptized.”
“No,” said Peggy. “She was baptized right enough. Her owner’s wife saw to that—all the Blacks on their plantation were baptized.”
Mama’s face went sour. “I reckon she thought that made her a Christian. Well, I’ll have a name for you, little boy.” She grinned wickedly. “What do you think your papa would do if I named this baby Horace Guester Junior?”
“Die,” said Peggy.
“I reckon so,” said Mama. “I ain’t ready to be a widow yet. So for now we’ll name him—oh, I can’t think, Peggy. What’s a Black man’s name? Or should I just name him like any White child?”
“Only Black man’s name I know is Othello,” said Peggy.
“That’s a queer name if I ever heard one.” said Mama. “You must’ve got that out of one of Whitley Physicker’s books.”
Peggy said nothing.
“I know,” said Mama. “I know his name. Cromwell. The Lord Protector’s name.”
“You might better name him Arthur, after the King,” said Peggy.
Mama just cackled and laughed at that. “That’s your name, little boy. Arthur Stuart! And if the King don’t like such a namesake, let him send an army and I still won’t change it. His Majesty will have to change his own name first.”
Even though she got to bed so late, Peggy woke early next morning. It was hoofbeats woke her—she didn’t have to go to the window to recognize his heartfire as the minister rode away. Ride on, Thrower, she said silently. You won’t be the last to run away this morning, fleeing from that eleven-year-old boy.
It was the north-facing window she looked out of. She could see between the trees to the graveyard up the hill. She tried to see where the grave was dug last night, but there wasn’t no sign her natural eyes could see, and in a graveyard there wasn’t no heartfires neither, nothing to help her. Alvin will see it though, she knew that sure. He’d head for that graveyard first thing he did, cause his oldest brother’s body lay there, the boy Vigor, who got swept away in the Hatrack River saving Alvin’s mother’s life in the last hour before she gave birth to her seventh son. But Vigor hung on to life just long enough, in spite of the river’s strongest pulling at him, hung on just long enough that when Alvin was born he was the seventh of seven living sons. Peggy herself had watched his heartfire flicker and die right after the babe was born. He would’ve heard that story a thousand times. So he’d come to that graveyard, and he could feel his way through the earth and find what lay hidden there. He’d find that unmarked grave, that wasted body so fresh buried there.
Peggy took the box with the caul in it, put it deep in a cloth bag along with her second dress, a petticoat, and the most recent books Whitley Physicker had brought. Just because she didn’t want to meet him face to face didn’t mean she could forget that boy. She’d touch the caul again tonight, or maybe not till morning, and then she’d stand with him in memory and use his senses to find that nameless Black girl’s grave.
Her bag packed, she went downstairs.
Mama had drug the cradle into the kitchen and she was singing to the baby while she kneaded bread, rocking the cradle with one foot, even though Arthur Stuart was fast asleep. Peggy set her bag outside the kitchen door, walked in and touched her Mama’s shoulder. She hoped a little that she’d see her Mama grieving something awful when she found out Peggy’d gone off. But it wasn’t so. Oh, she’d carry on and rage at first, but in the times to come she’d miss Peggy less than she might’ve guessed. It was the baby’d take her mind off worrying about her daughter. Besides, Mama knew Peggy could take care of herself. Mama knew Peggy wasn’t a one to need to hold a body’s hand. While Arthur Stuart needed her.
If this was the first time Peggy noticed how her Mama felt about her, she’d have been hurt deep. But it was the hundredth time, and she was used to it, and looked behind it to the reason, and loved her Mama for being a better soul than most, and forgave her for not loving Peggy more.
“I love you, Mama,” said Peggy.
“I love you too, baby,” said Mama. She didn’t even look up nor guess what Peggy had in mind.
Papa was still asleep. After all, he dug a grave last night and filled it too.
Peggy wrote a note. Sometimes she took care to put in a lot of extra letters in the fancy way they did in books, but this time she wanted to make sure Papa could read it for hisself. That meant putting in no more letters than it took to make the sounds for reading out loud.
I lov you Papa and Mama but I got to leav I no its rong to lev Hatrak with out no torch but I bin torch sixtn yr. I seen my fewchr and ile be saf donte you fret on my acown.
She walked out the front door, carried her bag to the road, and waited only ten minutes before Doctor Whitley Physicker came along in his carriage, bound on the first leg of a trip to Philadelphia.
“You didn’t wait on the road like this just to hand me back that Milton I lent you,” said Whitley Physicker.
She smiled and shook her head. “No sir, I’d like you take me with you to Dekane. I plan to visit with a friend of my father’s, but if you don’t mind the company I’d rather not spend the money for a coach.”
Peggy watched him consider for a minute, but she knew he’d let her come, and without asking her folks, neither. He was the kind of man thought a girl had as much worth as any boy, and more than that, he plain liked Peggy, thought of her as something like a niece. And he knew that Peggy never lied, so he had no need to check with her folks.
And she hadn’t lied to him, no more than she ever lied when she left off without telling all she knew. Papa’s old lover, the woman he dreamed of and suffered for, she lived there in Dekane—widowed for the last few years, but her mourning time over so she wouldn’t have to turn away company. Peggy knew that lady well, from watchin
g far off for all these years. If I knock on her door, thought Peggy, I don’t even have to tell her I’m Horace Guester’s girl, she’d take me in as a stranger, she would, and care for me, and help me on my way. But maybe I will tell her whose daughter I am, and how I knew to come to her, and how Papa still lives with the aching memory of his love for her.
The carriage rattled over the covered bridge that Alvin’s father and older brothers had built eleven years before, after the river drowned the oldest son. Birds nested in the rafters. It was a mad, musical, happy sound they made, at least to her ears, chirping so loud inside the bridge that it sounded like she imagined grand opera ought to be. They had opera in Camelot, down south. Maybe someday she’d go and hear it, and see the King himself in his box.
Or maybe not. Because someday she might just find the path that led to that brief but lovely dream, and then she’d have more important things to do than look at kings or hear the music of the Austrian court played by lacy Virginia musicians in the fancy opera hall in Camelot. Alvin was more important than any of these, if he could only find his way to all his power and what he ought to do with it. And she was born to be part of it. That’s how easily she slipped into her dreams of him. Yet why not? Her dreams of him, however brief and hard to find, were true visions of the future, and the greatest joy and the greatest grief she could find for herself both touched this boy who wasn’t even a man yet, who had never seen her face to face.
But sitting there in the carriage beside Doctor Whitley Physicker, she forced those thoughts, those visions from her mind. What comes will come, she thought. If I find that path I find it, and if not, then not. For now, at least, I’m free. Free of my watch aloft for the town of Hatrack, and free of building all my plans around that little boy. And what if I end up free of him forever? What if I find another future that doesn’t even have him in it? That’s the likeliest end of things. Give me time enough, I’ll even forget that scrap of a dream I had, and find my own good road to a peaceful end, instead of bending myself to fit his troubled path.
The dancing horses pulled the carriage along so brisk that the wind caught and tossed her hair. She closed her eyes and pretended she was flying, a runaway just learning to be free.
Let him find his path to greatness now without me. Let me have a happy life far from him. Let some other woman stand beside him in his glory. Let another woman kneel a-weeping at his grave.
3
Lies
ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD Alvin lost half his name when he came to Hatrack River. Back home in the town of Vigor Church, not far from where the Tippy-Canoe poured its waters into the Wobbish, everybody knowed his father was Alvin, miller for the town and the country round about. Alvin Miller. Which made his namesake, his seventh son, Alvin Junior. Now, though, he was going to live in a place where there wasn’t six folks who so much as ever met his pa. No need for names like Miller and Junior. He was just Alvin, plain Alvin, but hearing that lone name made him feel like only half hisself.
He came to Hatrack River on foot, hundreds of miles across Wobbish and Hio territories. When he set out from home it was with a pair of sturdy broke-in boots on and a pack of supplies on his back. He did five miles that way, before he stopped up at a poor cabin and gave his food to the folk there. After another mile or so he met a poor traveling family, heading on west to the new lands in the Noisy River country. He gave them the tent and blanket in his pack, and because they had a thirteen-year-old boy about Alvin’s size, he pulled off them new boots and gave them straight out, just like that, socks too. He kept only his clothes and the empty pack on his back.
Why, them folks were wide-eyed and silly-faced over it, worrying that Alvin’s pa might be mad, him giving stuff away like that, but he allowed as how it was his to give.
“You sure I won’t be meeting up with your pa with a musket and a possy-come-and-take-us?” asked the poor man.
“I’m sure you won’t, sir,” said young Alvin, “on account of I’m from the town of Vigor Church, and the folks there won’t see you at all unless you force them.”
It took them near ten seconds to realize where they’d heard the name of Vigor Church before. “Them’s the folk of the Tippy-Canoe massacre,” they said. “Them’s the folk what got blood on their hands.”
Alvin just nodded. “So you see they’ll leave you be.”
“Is it true they make every traveler listen to them tell that terrible gory tale of how they killed all them Reds in cold blood?”
“Their blood wasn’t cold,” said Alvin, “and they only tell travelers who come right on into town. So just stay on the road, leave them be, ride on through. Once you cross the Wobbish, you’ll be in open land again, where you’ll be glad to meet up with settled folk. Not ten mile on.”
Well, they didn’t argue no more, nor even ask him how he came not to have to tell the tale hisself. The name of the Massacre of Tippy-Canoe was enough to put a silence on folks like setting in a church, a kind of holy, shameful, reverent attitude. Cause even though most Whites shunned the bloody-handed folk who shed Red men’s blood at Tippy-Canoe, they still knew that if they’d stood in the same place, they’d’ve done the same thing, and it’d be their hands dripping red till they told a stranger about the wretched deed they done. That guilty knowledge didn’t make many travelers too keen on stopping in Vigor Church, or any homes in the upper Wobbish country. Them poor folks just took Alvin’s boots and gear and moved on down the road, glad of a stretch of canvas over their heads and a slice of leather on their big boy’s feet.
Alvin betook him off the road soon after, and plunged into woodland, into the deepest places. If he’d been wearing boots, he would’ve stumbled and crunched and made more noise than a rutting buffalo in the woods—which is about what most White folks did in the natural forest. But because he was barefoot, his skin touching the forest floor, he was like a different person. He had run behind Ta-Kumsaw through the forests of this whole land, north and south, and in that running young Alvin learned him how the Red man ran, hearing the greensong of the living woodland, moving in perfect harmony to that sweet silent music. When he ran that way, not thinking about where to step, the ground became soft under young Alvin’s feet, and he was guided along, no sticks breaking when he stepped, no bushes swishing or twigs snapping off with his onward push. Behind him he left nary a footprint or a broken branch.
Just like a Red man, that was how he moved. And pretty soon his White man’s clothing chafed on him, and he stopped and took it off, stuffed it into the pack on his back, and then ran naked as a jaybird, feeling the leaves of the bushes against his body. Soon he was caught up in the rhythm of his own running, forgetting anything about his own body, just part of the living forest, moving onward, faster and stronger, not eating, not drinking. Like a Red man, who could run forever through the deep forest, never needing rest, covering hundreds of miles in a single day.
This was the natural way to travel, Alvin knew it. Not in creaking wooden wagons, rattling over dry ground, sucking along on muddy roads. And not on horseback, a beast sweating and heaving under you, slave to your hurry, not on any errand of its own. Just a man in the woods, bare feet on the ground, bare face in the wind, dreaming as he ran.
All that day and all that night he ran, and well into the morning. How did he find his way? He could feel the slash of the well-traveled road off on his left, like a prickle or an itch, and even though that road led through many a village and many a town, he knew that after a while it’d fetch him up at the town of Hatrack. After all, that was the road his own folks followed, bridging every stream and creek and river on the way, carrying him as a newborn babe in the wagon. Even though he never traveled it before, and wasn’t looking at it now, he knew where it led.
So on the second morning he fetched up at the edge of the wood, on the verge of a field of new green maize billowing over rolling ground. There was so many farms in this settled country that the forest was too weak to hold him in his dream much longer anyhow.
It took a while, just standing there, to remember who he was and where he was bound. The music of the greenwood was strong behind him, weak afore. All he could know for sure was a town ahead, and a river maybe five mile on, that’s all he could feel for sure. But he knew it was the Hatrack River yonder, and so the town could be no other than the one he was bound for.
He had figured to run the forest right up to the edge of town. Now, though, he had no choice but to walk those last miles on White man’s feet or not go at all. That was a thought he had never thought of—that there might be places in the world so settled that one farm butted right against the next, with only a row of trees or a rail fence to mark the boundary, farm after farm. Was this what the Prophet saw in his visions of the land? All the forest killed back and these fields put in their place, so a Red man couldn’t run no more, nor a deer find cover, nor a bear find him where to sleep come wintertime? If that was so, no wonder he took all the Reds who’d follow him out west, across the Mizzipy. There was no living for a Red man here.
That made Alvin a little sad and a little scared, to leave behind the living lands he’d come to know as well as a man knows his own body. But he wasn’t no philosopher. He was a boy of eleven, and he also hankered to see an eastern town, all settled up and civilized. Besides, he had business here, business he’d waited a year to take up, ever since he first learned there was such a body as the torch girl, and how she looked for him to be a Maker.
He pulled his clothes out of his pack and put them on. He walked the edge of the farmland till he came to a road. First time the road crossed a stream, there was proof it was the right road: a covered bridge stood over that little one-jump brooklet. His own pa and older brothers built that bridge, and others like it all the way along that road from Hatrack to Vigor Church. Eleven years ago they built it, when Alvin was a baby sucking on his mama while the wagon rattled west.
Prentice Alvin: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume III Page 6
