The smith eyed him narrowly. “If this is just a way for you to get a few hours off work when that dowser comes on back, why”—he broke into a grin—“why, I reckon that you’ve earned it with last night’s labor.”
“Thank you sir,” said Alvin.
“You heading back to the house?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, I’ll take those tools and put them away—you carry this bucket to the missus. She’s expecting it. A lot less way to tote the water than the stream. I got to thank Hank Dowser special for choosing this very exact spot.” The smith was still chuckling to himself at his wit when Alvin reached the house.
Gertie Smith took the bucket, set Alvin down, and near filled him to the brim with hot fried bacon and good greasy biscuits. It was so much food that Al had to beg her to stop. “We’ve already finished one pig,” said Alvin. “No need to kill another just for my breakfast.”
“Pigs are just corn on the hoof,” said Gertie Smith, “and you worked two hogs’ worth last night, I’ll say that.”
Belly full and belching, Alvin climbed the ladder into the loft over the kitchen, stripped off his clothes, and burrowed into the blankets on his bed.
The Maker is the one who is part of what he makes.
Over and over he whispered the words to himself as he went to sleep. He had no dreams or troubles, and slept clear through till suppertime, and then again all night till dawn.
When he woke up in the morning, just before dawn, there was a faint grey scarce brighter than moonlight sifting into the house through the windows. Hardly none of it got up into the loft where Alvin lay, and instead of springing up bright like he did most mornings, he felt logey from sleep and a little sore from his labors. So he lay there quiet, a faint sort of birdsong chirping in the back of his mind. He didn’t think on the phrase Arthur Stuart told him from Redbird’s song. Instead he got to wondering how things happened yesterday. Why did hard winter turn to summertime again, just from him shouting?
“Summer,” he whispered. “Warm air, leaves green.” What was it about Alvin that when he said summer, summer came? Didn’t always work that way, for sure—never when he was a-working the iron or slipping through stone to mend or break it. Then he had to hold the shape of it firm in his mind, understand the way things lined up, find the natural cracks and creases, the threads of the metal or the grain of the rock. And when he was a-healing, that was so hard it took his whole mind to find how the body ought to be, and mend it. Things were so small, so hard to see—well, not see, but whatever it was he did. Sometimes he had to work so hard to understand the way things were inside.
Inside, down deep, so small and fine, and always the deepest secrets of the way things worked skittered away like roaches when you bring a lamp into the room, always getting smaller, forming themselves up in strange new ways. Was there some particle that was smallest of all? Some place at the heart of things where what he saw was real, instead of just being made up out of lots of smaller pieces, and them out of smaller pieces still?
Yet he hadn’t understood how the Unmaker made winter. So how did his desperate cries make the summer come back?
How can I be a Maker if I can’t even guess how I do what I do?
The light came stronger from outside, shining through the wavering glass of the windows, and for a moment Alvin thought he saw the light like little balls flying so fast, like they was hit with a stick or shot from a gun, only even faster than that, bouncing around, most of them getting stuck in the tiny cracks of the wooden walls or the floor or the ceiling, so only a precious few got up into the loft where they got captured by Alvin’s eyes.
Then that moment passed, and the light was just fire, pure fire, drifting into the room like the gentle waves washing against the shore of Lake Mizogan, and wherever they passed, the waves turned things warm—the wood of the walls, the massive kitchen table, the iron of the stove—so that they all quivered, they all danced with life. Only Alvin could see it, only Alvin knew how the whole room awoke with the day.
That fire from the sun, that’s what the Unmaker hates most. The life it makes. Put that fire out, that’s what the Unmaker says inside himself. Put all fires out, turn all water into ice, the whole world smooth with ice, the whole sky black and cold like night. And to oppose the Unmaker’s desire, one lone Maker who can’t do right even when he’s digging a well.
The Maker is the one who is part of—part of what? What do I make? How am I part of it? When I work the iron, am I part of the iron? When I shiver stone, am I part of the stone? It makes no sense, but I got to make sense of it or I’ll lose my war with the Unmaker. I could fight him all my days, every way I know how, and when I died the world would be farther along his downhill road than it was when I got born. There’s got to be some secret, some key to everything, so I can build it all at once. Got to find that key, that’s all, find the secret, and then I can speak a word and the Unmaker will shy back and cower and give up and die, maybe even die, so that life and light go on forever and don’t fade.
Alvin heard Gertie begin to stir in the bedroom, and one of the children uttered a soft cry, the last noise before waking. Alvin flexed and stretched and felt the sweet delicious pain of sore muscles waking up, getting set for a day at the forge, a day at the fire.
10
Goodwife
PEGGY DID NOT sleep as long or as well as Alvin. His battle was over; he could sleep a victor’s sleep. For her, though, it was the end of peace.
It was still midafternoon when Peggy tossed herself awake on the smooth linen sheets of her bed in Mistress Modesty’s house. She felt exhausted; her head hurt. She wore only her shift, though she didn’t remember undressing. She remembered hearing Redbird singing, watching Arthur Stuart interpret the song. She remembered looking into Alvin’s heartfire, seeing all his futures restored to him—but still did not find herself in any of them. Then her memory stopped. Mistress Modesty must have undressed her, put her to bed with the sun already nearing noon.
She rolled over; the sheet clung to her, and then her back went cold from sweat. Alvin’s victory was won; the lesson was learned; the Unmaker would not find another such opening again. She saw no danger in Alvin’s future, not soon. The Unmaker would doubtless lie in wait for another time, or return to working through his human servants. Perhaps the Visitor would return to Reverend Thrower, or some other soul with a secret hunger for evil would receive the Unmaker as a welcome teacher. But that wasn’t the danger, not the immediate danger, Peggy knew.
For as long as Alvin had no notion how to be a Maker or what to do with his power, then it made no difference how long they kept the Unmaker at bay. The Crystal City would never be built. And it must be built, or Alvin’s life—and Peggy’s life, devoted to helping him—both would be in vain.
It seemed so clear now to Peggy, coming out of a feverish exhausted sleep. Alvin’s labor was to prepare himself, to master his own human frailties. If there was some knowledge somewhere in the world about the art of Making, or the science of it, Alvin would have no chance to learn it. The smithy was his school, the forge his master, teaching him—what?—to change other men only by persuasion and long-suffering, gentleness and meekness, unfeigned love and kindness. Someone else, then, would have to acquire that pure knowledge which would raise Alvin up to greatness.
I am done with all my schooling in Dekane.
So many lessons, and I have learned them all, Mistress Modesty. All so I would be ready to bear the title you taught me was the finest any lady could aspire to.
Goodwife.
As her mother had been called Goody Guester all these years, and other women Goody this or Goody that, any woman could have the name. But few deserved it. Few there were who inspired others to call her by the name in full: Goodwife, not just Goody; the way that Mistress Modesty was never called Missus. It would demean her name to be touched by a diminished, a common title.
Peggy got up from the bed. Her head swam for a moment; she waited, then got up. Her feet padded on
the wooden floor. She walked softly, but she knew she would be heard; already Mistress Modesty would be coming up the stairs.
Peggy stopped at the mirror and looked at herself. Her hair was tousled by sleep, stringy with sweat. Her face was imprinted, red and white, with the creases in the pillowcase. Yet she saw there the face that Mistress Modesty had taught her how to see.
“Our handiwork,” said Mistress Modesty.
Peggy did not turn. She knew her mentor would be there.
“A woman should know that she is beautiful,” said Mistress Modesty. “Surely God gave Eve a single piece of glass, or flat polished silver, or at least a still pool to show her what it was that Adam saw.”
Peggy turned and kissed Mistress Modesty on the cheek. “I love what you’ve made of me,” she said.
Mistress Modesty kissed her in return, but when they drew apart, there were tears in the older woman’s eyes. “And now I shall lose your company.”
Peggy wasn’t used to others guessing what she felt, especially when she didn’t realize that she had already made the decision.
“Will you?” asked Peggy.
“I’ve taught you all I can,” said Mistress Modesty, “but I know after last night that you need things that I never dreamed of, because you have work to do that I never thought that anyone could do.”
“I meant only to be Goodwife to Alvin’s Goodman.”
“For me that was the beginning and the end,” said Mistress Modesty.
Peggy chose her words to be true, and therefore beautiful, and therefore good. “Perhaps all that some men need from a woman is for her to be loving and wise and careful, like a field of flowers where he can play the butterfly, drawing sweetness from her blossoms.”
Mistress Modesty smiled. “How kindly you describe me.”
“But Alvin has a sturdier work to do, and what he needs is not a beautiful woman to be fresh and loving for him when his work is done. What he needs is a woman who can heft the other end of his burden.”
“Where will you go?”
Peggy answered before she realized that she knew the answer. “Philadelphia, I think.”
Mistress Modesty looked at her in surprise, as if to say, You’ve already decided? Tears welled in her eyes.
Peggy rushed to explain. “The best universities are there—free ones, that teach all there is to know, not the crabbed religious schools of New England or the effete schools for lordlings in the South.”
“This isn’t sudden,” said Mistress Modesty. “You’ve been planning this for long enough to find out where to go.”
“It is sudden, but perhaps I was planning, without knowing it. I’ve listened to others talk, and now there it is already in my mind, all sorted out, the decision made. There’s a school for women there. but what matters is the libraries. I have no formal schooling, but somehow I’ll persuade them to let me in.”
“It won’t take much persuasion,” Mistress Modesty said, “if you arrive with a letter from the governor of Suskwahenny. And letters from other men who trust my judgment well enough.”
Peggy was not surprised that Mistress Modesty still intended to help her, even though Peggy had determined so suddenly, so ungracefully to leave. And Peggy had no foolish notion of pridefully trying to do without such help. “Thank you. Mistress Modesty!”
“I’ve never known a woman—or a man, for that matter—with such ability as yours. Not your knack, remarkable as it is; I don’t measure a person by such things. But I fear that you are wasting yourself on this boy in Hatrack River. How could any man deserve all that you’ve sacrificed for him?”
“Deserving it—that’s his labor. Mine is to have the knowledge when he’s ready to learn it.”
Mistress Modesty was crying in earnest now. She still smiled—for she had taught herself that love must always smile, even in grief—but the tears flowed down her cheeks. “Oh, Peggy, how could you have learned so well. and yet make such a mistake?”
A mistake? Didn’t Mistress Modesty trust her judgment, even now? “‘A woman’s wisdom is her gift to women,’” Peggy quoted. “‘Her beauty is her gift to men. Her love is her gift to God.’”
Mistress Modesty shook her head as she listened to her own maxim from Peggy’s lips. “So why do you intend to inflict your wisdom on this poor unfortunate man you say you love?”
“Because some men are great enough that they can love a whole woman, and not just a part of her.”
“Is he such a man?”
How could Peggy answer? “He will be, or he won’t have me.”
Mistress Modesty paused for a moment, as if trying to find a beautiful way to tell a painful truth. “I always taught you that if you become completely and perfectly yourself, then good men will be drawn to you and love you. Peggy, let us say this man has great needs—but if you must become something that is not you in order to supply him, then you will not be perfectly yourself, and he will not love you. Isn’t that why you left Hatrack River in the first place, so he would love you for yourself, and not for what you did for him?”
“Mistress Modesty, I want him to love me, yes. But I love the work he must accomplish even more than that. What I am today would be enough for the man. What I will go and do tomorrow is not for the man, it is for his work.”
“But—” began Mistress Modesty.
Peggy raised an eyebrow and smiled slightly. Mistress Modesty nodded and did not interrupt.
“If I love his work more than I love the man, then to be perfectly myself, I must do what his work requires of me. Won’t I, then, be even more beautiful?”
“To me, perhaps,” said Mistress Modesty. “Few men have vision clear enough for that subtle beauty.”
“He loves his work more than he loves his life. Won’t he, then, love the woman who shares in it more than a woman who is merely beautiful?”
“You may be right,” said Mistress Modesty, “for I have never loved work more than I have loved the person doing it, and I have never known a man who truly loved his work more than his own life. All that I have taught you is true in the world I know. If you pass from my world into another one, I can no longer teach you anything.”
“Maybe I can’t be a perfect woman and also live my life as it must be lived.”
“Or perhaps, Mistress Margaret, even the best of the world is not fit to recognize a perfect woman, and so will accept me as a fair counterfeit, while you pass by unknown.”
That was more than Peggy could bear. She cast aside decorum and threw her arms around Mistress Modesty and kissed her and cried, assuring her that there was nothing counterfeit about her. But when all the weeping was done, nothing had changed. Peggy was finished in Dekane, and by next morning her trunk was packed.
Everything she had in the world was a gift from Mistress Modesty, except for the box Oldpappy gave her long ago. Yet what was in that box was a heavier burden by far than any other thing that Peggy carried.
She sat in the northbound train, watching the mountains drift by outside her east-facing window. It wasn’t all that long ago that Whitley Physicker had brought her to Dekane in his carriage. Dekane had seemed the grandest place at first; at the time it seemed to her that she was discovering the world by coming here. Now she knew that the world was far too large for one person to discover it. She was leaving a very small place and going to another very small place, and perhaps from there to other small places. The same size heartfires blazed in every city, no brighter for having so much company.
I left Hatrack River to be tree of you, Prentice Alvin. Instead I found a larger, far more entangling net outside. Your work is larger than yourself, larger than me, and because I know of it I’m bound to help. If I didn’t, I’d be a vile person in my own eyes.
So if you end up loving me or not, that doesn’t matter all that much. Oh. yes, to me it matters, but the course of the world won’t change one way or the other. What matters is that we both prepare you to do your work. Then if love comes, then if you can play Goodman to my Goodwife
. we’ll take that as an unlooked-for blessing and be glad of it as long as we can.
11
Wand
IT WAS A week before Hank Dowser found his way back to Hatrack River. A miserable week with no profit in it, because try as he would he couldn’t find decent dry ground for them folks west of town to dig their cellar. “It’s all wet ground,” he said. “I can’t help it if it’s all watery.”
But they held him responsible just the same. Folks are like that. They act like they thought the dowser put the water where it sets, instead of just pointing to it. Same way with torches—blamed them half the time for causing what they saw, when all they did was see it. There was no gratitude or even simple understanding in most folks.
So it was a relief to be back with somebody half-decent like Makepeace Smith. Even if Hank wasn’t too proud of the way Makepeace was dealing with his prentice boy. How could Hank criticize him? He himself hadn’t done much better—oh, he was pure embarrassed now to think how he railed on that boy and got him a cuffing, and for nothing, really, just a little affront to Hank Dowser’s pride. Jesus stood and took whippings and a crown of thorns in silence, but I lash out when a prentice mumbles a few silly words. Oh, thoughts like that put Hank Dowser in a dark mood, and he was aching for a chance to apologize to the boy.
But the boy wasn’t there, which was too bad, though Hank didn’t have long to brood about it. Gertie Smith took Hank Dowser up to the house and near jammed the food down his throat with a ramrod, just to get in an extra half-loaf of bread, it felt like. “I can’t hardly walk,” said Hank, which was true; but it was also true that Gertie Smith cooked just as good as her husband forged and that prentice boy shod and Hank dowsed, which is to say, with a true knack. Everybody has his talent, everybody has his gift from God, and we go about sharing gifts with each other, that’s the way of the world, the best way.
So it was with pleasure and pride that Hank drank the swallows of water from the first clear bucket drawn from the well. Oh, it was fine water. sweet water, and he loved the way they thanked him from their hearts. It wasn’t till he was out getting mounted on his Picklewing again that he realized he hadn’t seen the well. Surely he should’ve seen the well—
Prentice Alvin: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume III Page 15
