Anyway, Thrower got himself together, hitched up his trousers and buttoned them up proper, and they went back into the house. Brother Cavil put Thrower in their guest room, which wasn’t all that much used, so there was a cloud of dust when Cavil slapped the blanket. “Should have known the house slaves’d be slacking in this room,” said Brother Cavil.
“No matter,” said Thrower. “On a night this warm, I’ll need no blanket.”
On the way down the hall to his own bedroom, Cavil paused a moment to listen for his wife’s breathing. As sometimes happened, he could hear her whimpering softly in her bedroom. The pain must be bad indeed. Oh Lord, thought Cavil, how many more times must I do Thy bidding before You’ll have mercy and heal my Dolores? But he didn’t go in to her—there was nothing he could do to help her, besides prayer, and he’d need his sleep. This had been a late night, and tomorrow had work enough.
Sure enough, Dolores had had a bad night—she was still asleep at breakfast time. So Cavil ended up eating with Thrower. The preacher put away an astonishingly large portion of sausage and grits. When his plate was clean for the third time, he looked at Cavil and smiled. “The Lord’s service can give a man quite an appetite!” They both had a good laugh at that.
After breakfast, they walked outside. It happened they went near the woods where Salamandy had been buried. Thrower suggested looking at the grave, or else Cavil probably never would have known what the Blacks did in the night. There were footprints all over the grave itself, which was churned into mud. Now the drying mud was covered with ants.
“Ants!” said Thrower. “They can’t possibly smell the body under the ground.”
“No,” said Cavil. “What they’re finding is fresher and right on top. Look at that—cut-up entrails.”
“They didn’t—exhume her body and—”
“Not her guts, Reverend Thrower. Probably a squirrel or blackbird or something. They did a devil sacrifice last night.”
Thrower immediately began murmuring a prayer.
“They know I forbid such things,” said Cavil. “By evening, the proof of it would no doubt be gone. They’re disobeying me behind my back. I won’t have it.”
“Now I understand the magnitude of the work you slaveowners have. The devil has an iron grip upon their souls.”
“Well, never you mind. They’ll pay for it today. They want blood dropped on her grave? It’ll be their own. Mr. Lashman! Where are you! Mr. Lashman!”
The overseer had only just arrived for the day’s work.
“A little half-holiday for the Blacks this morning, Mr. Lashman,” said Cavil.
Lashman didn’t ask why. “Which ones you want whipped?”
“All of them. Ten lashes each. Except the pregnant women, of course. But even they—one lash for each of them, across the thighs. And all to watch.”
“They get a bit unruly, watching it, sir,” said Lashman.
“Reverend Thrower and I will watch also,” said Cavil.
While Lashman was off assembling the slaves, Thrower murmured something about not really wanting to watch.
“It’s the Lord’s work,” said Cavil. “I have stomach enough to watch any act of righteousness. I thought after last night that you did too.”
So they watched together as each slave in turn was whipped, the blood dripping down onto Salamandy’s grave. After a while Thrower didn’t even flinch. Cavil was glad to see it—the man wasn’t weak, after all, just a little soft from his upbringing in Scotland and his life in the North.
Afterward, as Reverend Thrower prepared to be on his way—he had promised to preach in a town a half-day’s ride south—he happened to ask Cavil a question.
“I noticed that all your slaves seem—not old, you understand, but not young, either.”
Cavil shrugged. “It’s the Fugitive Slave Treaty. Even though my farm’s prospering, I can’t buy or sell any slaves—we’re part of the United States now. Most folks keep up by breeding, but you know all my pickaninnies ended up south, till lately. And now I’ve lost me another breeder, so I’m down to five women now. Salamandy was the best. The others don’t have so many years of babies left in them.”
“It occurs to me,” said Thrower. He paused in thought.
“What occurs to you?”
“I’ve traveled a lot in the North, Brother Cavil, and in most every town in Hio and Suskwahenny and Irrakwa and Wobbish, there’s a family or two of Blacks. Now, you know and I know that they didn’t grow on northern trees.”
“All runaways.”
“Some, no doubt, have their freedom legally. But many—certainly there are many runaways. Now, I understand that it’s a custom for every slaveowner to keep a cachet of hair and nail clippings and—”
“Oh, yes, we take them from the minute they’re born or the minute we buy them. For the Finders.”
“Exactly.”
“But we can’t exactly send the Finders to walk every foot of ground in the whole North, hoping to run into one particular runaway buck. It’d cost more than the price of the slave.”
“It seems to me that the price of slaves has gone up lately.”
“If you mean that we can’t buy one at any price—”
“That’s what I mean, Brother Cavil. And what if the Finders don’t have to go blindly through the North, relying on chance? What if you arranged to hire people in the North to scour the papers and take note of the name and age of every Black they see there? Then the Finders could go armed with information.”
Well, that idea was so good that it stopped Cavil right short. “There’s got to be something wrong with that idea, or somebody’d already be doing it.”
“Oh, I’ll tell you why nobody’s done it so far. There’s a good deal of ill-feeling toward slaveowners in the North. Even though northerners hate their Black neighbors, their misguided consciences won’t let them cooperate in any kind of slave search. So any southerner who ever went north searching for a runaway soon learned that if he didn’t have his Finder right with him, or if the trail was cold, then there was no use searching.”
“That’s the truth of it. Like a bunch of thieves up North, conspiring to keep a man from recovering his run-off stock.”
“But what if you had northerners doing the searching for you? What if you had an agent in the North, a minister perhaps, who could enlist others in the cause, who could find people who could be trusted? Such an endeavor would be expensive, but given the impossibility of buying new slaves in Appalachee, don’t you imagine people would be willing to pay enough to finance the work of recovering their runaways?”
“Pay? They’d pay double what you ask. They’d pay up front on the chance of you doing it.”
“Suppose I charged twenty dollars to register their runaway—birthdate, name, description, time and circumstances of escape—and then charged a thousand dollars if I provide them with information leading to recovery?”
“Fifty dollars to register, or they won’t believe you’re serious. And another fifty whenever you send them information, even if it doesn’t turn out to be the right one. And three thousand for runaways recovered healthy.”
Thrower smiled slightly. “I don’t wish to make an unfair profit from the work of righteousness.”
“Profit! You got a lot of folks up there to pay if you’re going to do a good job. I tell you, Thrower, you write up a contract, and then get the printer in town to run you off a thousand copies. Then you just go around and tell what you plan to one slaveowner in each town you come to in Appalachee. I reckon you’ll have to get a new printing done within a week. We’re not talking profit here, we’re talking a valuable service. Why, I’ll bet you get contributions from folks what never had a runaway. If you can make it so the Hio River stops being the last barrier before they get away clean, it’ll not only return old runaways, it’ll make the other slaves lose hope and stay home!”
Not half an hour later, Thrower was back outside and on his horse—but now he had notes written up for the contract
and letters of introduction from Cavil to his lawyer and to the printer, along with letters of credit to the tune of five hundred dollars. When Thrower protested that it was too much, Cavil wouldn’t even hear him out. “To get you started,” said Cavil. “We both know whose work we’re doing. It takes money. I have it and you don’t, so take it and get busy.”
“That’s a Christian attitude,” said Thrower. “Like the saints in the early Church, who had all things in common.”
Cavil patted Thrower’s thigh, where he sat stiff in the saddle-northerners just didn’t know how to sit a horse. “We’ve had more in common than any other two men alive,” said Cavil. “We’ve had the same visions and done the same works, and if that don’t make us two peas in a pod, I don’t know what will.”
“When next I see the Visitor, if I should be so fortunate, I know that he’ll be pleased.”
“Amen,” said Cavil.
Then he slapped Thrower’s horse and watched him out of sight. My Hagar. He’s going to find my Hagar and her little boy. Nigh on seven years since she stole my firstborn child from me. Now she’ll come back, and this time she’ll stay in chains and give me more children until she can’t have no more. And as for the boy, he’ll be my Ishmael. That’s what I’ll call him, too. Ishmael. I’ll keep him right here, and raise him up to be strong and obedient and a true Christian. When he’s old enough I’ll hire him out to other plantations, and during the nights he’ll go and carry on my work, spreading the chosen seed throughout Appalachee. Then my children will surely be as numberless as the sands of the sea, just like Abraham.
And who knows? Maybe then the miracle will happen, and my own dear wife will be healed, and she’ll conceive and bear me a pure White child, my Isaac, to inherit all my land and all my work. Lord my Overseer, be merciful to me.
17
Spelling Bee
EARLY JANUARY, WITH deep snow, and a wind sharp enough to slice your nose off—so of course that was a day for Makepeace Smith to decide he had to work in the forge all day, while Alvin went into town to buy supplies and deliver finished work. In the summer, the choice of jobs tended to go the other way.
Never mind, thought Alvin. He is the master here. But if I’m ever master of my own forge, and if I have me a prentice, you can bet he’ll be treated fairer than I’ve been. A master and prentice ought to share the work alike, except for when the prentice plain don’t know how, and then the master ought to teach him. That’s the bargain, not to have a slave, not to always have the prentice take the wagon into town through the snow.
Truth to tell, though, Alvin knew he wouldn’t have to take the wagon. Horace Guester’s sleigh-and-two would do the job, and he knew Horace wouldn’t mind him taking it, as long as Alvin did whatever errands the roadhouse needed doing in town.
Alvin bundled himself tight and pushed out into the wind—it was right in his face, from the west, the whole way up to the roadhouse. He took the path up by Miss Lamer’s house, it being the closest way with the most trees to break the wind. Course she wasn’t in. It being school hours, she was with the children in the schoolhouse in town. But the old springhouse, it was Alvin’s schoolhouse, and just passing by the door got him to thinking about his studies.
She had him learning things he never thought to learn. He was expecting more of ciphering and reading and writing, and in a way that’s what she had him doing, right enough. But she didn’t have him reading out of those primers like the children—like Arthur Stuart, who plugged away at his studies by lamplight every night in the springhouse. No, she talked to Alvin about ideas he never would’ve thought of, and all his writing and calculating was about such things.
Yesterday:
“The smallest particle is an atom,” she said. “According to the theory of Demosthenes, everything is made out of smaller things, until you come to the atom, which is smallest of all and cannot be divided.”
“What’s it look like?” Alvin asked her.
“I don’t know. It’s too small to see. Do you know?”
“I reckon not. Never saw anything so small but what you could cut it in half.”
“But can’t you imagine anything smaller?”
“Yeah, but I can split that too.”
She sighed. “Well, now, Alvin, think again. If there were a thing so small it couldn’t be divided, what would it be like?”
“Real small, I reckon.”
But he was joking. It was a problem, and he set out to answer it the way he answered any practical problem. He sent his bug out into the floor. Being wood, the floor was a jumble of things, the broke-up once-alive hearts of living trees, so Alvin quickly sent his bug on into the iron of the stove, which was mostly all one thing inside. Being hot, the bits of it, the tiniest parts he ever saw clear, they were a blur of movement; while the fire inside, it made its own outward rush of light and heat, each bit of it so small and fine that he could barely hold the idea of it in his mind. He never really saw the bits of fire. He only knew that they had just passed by.
“Light,” he said. “And heat. They can’t be cut up.”
“True. Fire isn’t like earth—it can’t be cut. But it can be changed, can’t it? It can be extinguished. It can cease to be itself. And therefore the parts of it must become something else, and so they were not the unchangeable and indivisible atoms.”
“Well, there’s nothing smaller than those bits of fire, so I reckon there’s no such thing as an atom.”
“Alvin, you’ve got to stop being so empirical about things.”
“If I knowed what that was, I’d stop being it.”
“If I knew.”
“Whatever.”
“You can’t always answer every question by sitting back and doodlebugging your way through the rocks outside or whatever.”
Alvin sighed. “Sometimes I wish I never told you what I do.”
“Do you want me to teach you what it means to be a Maker or not?”
“That’s just what I want! And instead you talk about atoms and gravity and—I don’t care what that old humbug Newton said, nor anybody else! I want to know how to make the—place.” He remembered only just in time that there was Arthur Stuart in the corner, memorizing every word they said, complete with tone of voice. No sense filling Arthur’s head with the Crystal City.
“Don’t you understand, Alvin? It’s been so long—thousands of years—that no one knows what a Maker really is, or what he does. Only that there were such men, and a few of the tasks that they could do. Changing lead or iron into gold, for instance. Water into wine. That sort of thing.”
“I expect iron to gold’d be easier,” said Alvin. “Those metals are pretty much all one thing inside. But wine—that’s such a mess of different stuff inside that you’d have to be a—a—” He couldn’t think of a word for the most power a man could have.
“Maker.”
That was the word, right enough. “I reckon.”
“I’m telling you, Alvin, if you want to learn how to do the things that Makers once did, you have to understand the nature of things. You can’t change what you don’t understand.”
“And I can’t understand what I don’t see.”
“Wrong! Absolutely false, Alvin Smith! It is what you can see that remains impossible to understand. The world you actually see is nothing more than an example, a special case. But the underlying principles, the order that holds it all together, that is forever invisible. It can only be discovered in the imagination, which is precisely the aspect of your mind that is most neglected.”
Well, last night Alvin just got mad, which she said would only guarantee that he’d stay stupid, which he said was just fine with him as he’d stayed alive against long odds by being as pure stupid as he was without any help from her. Then he stormed on outside and walked around watching the first flakes of this storm start coming down.
He’d only been walking a little while when he realized that she was right, and he knowed it all along. Knew it. He always sent out his bug to se
e what was there, but then when he got set to make a change, he first had to think up what he wanted it to be. He had to think of something that wasn’t there, and hold a picture of it in his mind, and then, in that way he was born with and still didn’t understand, he’d say, See this? This is how you ought to be! And then, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, the bits of it would move around until they lined up right. That’s how he always did it: separating a piece off of living rock; joining together two bits of wood; making the iron line up strong and true; spreading the heat of the fire smooth and even along the bottom of the crucible. So I do see what isn’t there, in my mind, and that’s what makes it come to be there.
For a terrible dizzying moment he wondered if maybe the whole world was maybe no more than what he imagined it to be, and if that was true then if he stopped imagining, it’d just go away. Of course, once he got his sense together he knew that if he’d been thinking it up, there wouldn’t be so many strange things in the world that he never could’ve thought of himself.
So maybe the world was all dreamed up in the mind of God. But no, can’t be that neither, because if God dreamed up men like White Murderer Harrison then God wasn’t too good. No, the best Alvin could think of was that God worked pretty much the way Alvin did—told the rocks of the earth and the fire of the sun and stuff like that, told it all how it was supposed to be and then let it be that way. But when God told people how to be, why, they just thumbed their noses and laughed at him, mostly, or else they pretended to obey while they still went on and did what they pleased. The planets and the stars and the elements, they all might be thought up from the mind of God, but people were just too cantankerous to blame them on anybody but their own self.
Which was about the limit of Alvin’s thinking last night, in the snow—wondering about what he could never know. Things like I wonder what God dreams about if he ever sleeps, and if all his dreams come true, so that every night he makes up a whole new world full of people. Questions that couldn’t never get him a speck closer to being a Maker
Prentice Alvin: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume III Page 26
