“Too bad,” murmured a man. “I could use a cure for warts.”
They all laughed, but the danger was over. When the ridgebeam went up, it would be a Christian act to raise it, not a pagan one.
He blessed the ridgebeam, taking care to change the usual prayer to one that specifically did not confer any special properties upon the beam itself. Then the men tugged on the rope, and Thrower sang out “0 Lord Who on the Mighty Sea” at the top of his magnificent baritone voice, to give them the rhythm and inspiration for their labors.
All the time, however, he was acutely aware of the boy Alvin Junior. It was not just because of the boy's embarrassing challenge a moment ago. The child was as simpleminded as most children– Thrower doubted he had any dire purpose in mind. What drew him to the child was something else entirely. Not any property in the boy himself, but rather something about the people near him. They always seemed to keep him in attention. Not that they always looked at him– that would be a full-time occupation, he ran about so much. It was as if they were always aware of him, the way the college cook had always been aware of the dog in the kitchen, never speaking to it, but stepping over and around it without so much as pausing in his work.
It wasn't just the boy's family, either, that was so careful of him. Everyone acted the same way– the Germans, the Scandinavians, the English, newcomers and old-timers alike. As if the raising of this boy were a community project, like the raising of a church or the bridging of a river.
“Easy, easy, easy!” shouted Wastenot, who was perched near the east ridgepole to guide the heavy beam into place. It had to be just so, for the rafters to lean evenly against it and make a sturdy roof.
“Too far your way!” shouted Measure. He was standing on scaffolding above the crossbeam on which rested the short pole that would support the two ridgebeams where they butted ends in the middle. This was the most crucial point of the whole roof, and the trickiest to get right; they had to lay the ends of two heavy beams onto a pole top that was barely two palms wide. That was why Measure stood there, for he had grown into his name, keen-eyed and careful.
“Right!” shouted Measure. “More!”
“My way again!” shouted Wastenot.
“Steady!” shouted Measure.
“Set!” shouted Wastenot.
Then “Set!” from Measure, too, and the men on the ground relaxed the tension on the ropes. As the lines went slack, they let out a cheer, for the ridgebeam now went half the length of the church. It was no cathedral, but it was still a mighty thing to achieve in this benighted place, the largest structure anyone had dared to think of for a hundred miles around. The mere fact of building it was a declaration that the settlers were here to stay, and not French, not Spanish, not Cavaliers, not Yankees, not even the savage Reds with their fire arrows, no man would get these folks to leave this place.
So of course Reverend Thrower went inside, and so did all the others, to see the sky blocked for the first time by a ridgebeam no less than forty feet in length– and that only half of what it would finally be. My church, thought Thrower, and already finer than most I saw in Philadelphia itself.
Up on the flimsy scaffolding, Measure was driving a wooden pin through the notch in the end of the ridgebeam and down into the hole in the top of the ridgepole. Wastenot was doing the same at his end, of course. The pins would hold the beam in place until the rafters could be laid. When that was done, the ridgebeam would be so strong that they could almost remove the crossbeam, if it weren't needed for the chandelier that would light the church at night. At night, so that the stained glass would shine out against the darkness. That's how grandiose a place Reverend Thrower had in mind. Let their simple minds stand in awe when they see this place, and so reflect upon the majesty of God.
Those were his thoughts when, suddenly, Measure let out a shout of fear, and all saw in horror that the center ridgepole had split and shivered at the blow of Measure's mallet against the wooden pin, bouncing the great heavy ridgebeam some six feet into the air. It pulled the beam out of Wastenot's hands at the other end, and broke the scaffolding like tinderwood. The ridgebeam seemed to hover in the air a moment, level as you please, then rushed downward as if the Lord's own foot were stomping it.
And Reverend Thrower knew without looking that there would be someone directly under that beam, right under the midpoint of it when it landed. He knew because he was aware of the boy, of how he was running just exactly the wrong direction, of how his own shout of “Alvin!” brought the boy to a stop in just exactly the wrong place.
And when he looked, it was exactly as he knew it would be– little Al standing there, looking up at the shaven tree that would grind him into the floor of the church. Nothing else would be damaged– because the beam was level, its impact would be spread across the whole floor. The boy was too small even to slow the ridgebeam's fall. He would be broken, crushed, his blood spattering the white wood of the church floor. I'll never get that stain out, thought Thrower– insanely, but one could not control one's own thoughts in the moment of death.
Thrower saw the impact as if it were a blinding flash of light. He heard the crash of wood on wood. He heard the screams. Then his eyes cleared and he saw the ridgebeam lying there, the one end exactly where it should be, the other too, but in the middle, the beam split in two parts, and between the two parts little Alvin standing, his face white with terror.
Untouched. The boy was untouched.
Thrower didn't understand German or Swedish, but he knew what the muttering near him meant, well enough. Let them blaspheme– I must understand what has happened here, thought Thrower. He strode to the boy, placed his hands on the child's head, searching for injury. Not a hair out of place, but the boy's head felt warm, very warm, as if he had been standing near a fire. Then Thrower knelt and looked at the wood of the ridgebeam. It was cut as smooth as if the wood had grown that way, just exactly wide enough to miss the boy entirely.
Al's mother was there only a moment later, scooping up her boy, sobbing and babbling with relief. Little Alvin also cried. But Thrower had other things on his mind. He was a man of science, after all, and what he had seen was not possible. He made the men step off the length of the ridgebeam, measuring it again. It lay exactly its original length along the floor– the east end just as far from the west end as it should be. The boy-sized chunk in the middle had simply disappeared. Vanished in a momentary flash of fire that left Alvin's head and the butt ends of the wood as hot as coals, yet not marked or seared in any way.
Then Measure began yelling from the crossbeam, where he dangled by his arms, having caught himself after the collapse of the scaffolding. Wantnot and Calm climbed up and got him down safely. Reverend Thrower had no thought for that. All he could think about was a six-year-old boy who could stand under a falling ridgebeam, and the beam would break and make room for him. Like the Red Sea parting for Moses, on the right hand and the left.
“Seventh son,” murmured Wastenot. The boy sat astride the fallen ridgebeam, just west of the break.
“What?” asked Reverend Thrower.
“Nothing,” said the young man.
“You said 'Seventh son,”' said Thrower. “But it's little Calvin who's the seventh.”
Wastenot shook his head. “We had another brother. He died a couple minutes after Al was born.” Wastenot shook his head again. “Seventh son of a seventh son.”
“But that makes him devil's spawn,” said Thrower, aghast.
Wastenot looked at him with contempt. “Maybe in England you think so, but around here we look on such to be a healer, maybe, or a doodlebug, and a right good one of whatever he is.” Then Wastenot thought of something and grinned. “'Devil's spawn,”' he repeated, maliciously savoring the words. “Sounds like hysteria to me.”
Furious, Thrower stalked out of the church.
He found Mistress Faith sitting on a stool, holding Alvin Junior on her lap and rocking him as he continued to whimper. She was scolding him gently. “Told yo
u not to run without looking, always underfoot, can't never hold still, makes a body go plumb lunatic looking after you–” Then she saw Thrower standing before her, and fell silent.
“Don't worry,” she said. “I'll not bring him back here.”
“For his safety, I'm glad,” said Thrower. “If I thought my churchhouse had to be built at the cost of a child's life, I'd sooner preach in the open air all the days of my life.”
She looked close at him and knew that he meant it with his whole heart. “It's no fault of yourn,” she said. “He's always been a clumsy boy. Seems to live through scrapes that'd kill an ordinary child.”
“I'd like– I'd like to understand what happened in there.”
“Ridgepole shivered, of course,” she said. “It happens sometimes.”
“I mean– how it happened to miss him. The beam split before it touched his head. I want to feel his head, if I may–”
“Not a mark on him,” she said.
“I know. I want to feel it to see if–”
She rolled her eyes upward and muttered, “Dowsing for brains,” but she also moved her hands away so he could feel the child's head. Slowly now, and carefully, trying to understand the map of the boy's skull, to read the ridges and bumps, the troughs and depressions. He had no need to consult a book. The books were nonsense, anyway. He had found that out quite quickly– they all spouted idiotic generalities, such as, “The Red will always have a bump just over the ear, indicating savagery and cannibalism,” when of course Reds had just as much variety in their heads as Whites. No, Thrower had no faith in those books– but he had learned a few things about people with particular skills, and head bumps they had in common. He had developed a knack of understanding, a map of the shapes of the human skull; he knew as his hands passed over Al's head what it was he found there.
Nothing remarkable, that's what he found. No one trait that stood out above all others. Average. As average as can be. So utterly average that it could be a virtual textbook example of normality, if only there were any textbook worth reading.
He lifted his fingers away, and the boy– who had stopped crying under his hands– twisted on his mother's lap to look at him. “Reverend Thrower,” he said, “your hands are so cold I like to froze.” Then he squirmed off his mother's lap and ran off, shouting for one of the German boys, the one he had been wrestling so savagely before.
Faith laughed ruefully. “You see how quickly they forget?”
“And you, too,” he said.
She shook her head. “Not me,” she said. “I don't forget a thing.”
“You're already smiling.”
“I go on, Reverend Thrower. I just go on. That's not the same as forgetting.”
He nodded.
“So– tell me what you found,” she said.
“Found?”
“Feeling his bumps. Brain-dowsing. Does he got any?”
“Normal. Absolutely normal. Not a single thing unusual about his head.”
She grunted. “Nothing unusual?”
“That's right.”
“Well, if you ask me, that's pretty unusual right there, if a body was smart enough to notice it.” She picked up the stool and carried it off, calling to Al and Cally as she went.
After a moment, Reverend Thrower realized she was right. Nobody was so perfectly average. Everybody had some trait that was stronger than the others. It wasn't normal for Al to be so well balanced. To have every possible skill that could be marked by the skull, and to have it in exactly even proportions. Far from being average, the child was extraordinary, though Thrower had no notion what it would mean in the child's life. Jack of all trades and master of none? Or master of all?
Superstition or not, Thrower found himself wondering. A seventh son of a seventh son, a startling shape to the head, and the miracle– he could think of no other word– of the ridgebeam. An ordinary child would have died this day. Natural law demanded it. But someone or something was protecting this child, and natural law had been overruled.
Once the talk had subsided, the men resumed work on the roof. The original beam was useless, of course, and they carried the two sections of it outside. After what had happened, they had no intention of using the beams for anything at all. Instead they set to work and completed another beam by midafternoon, rebuilt the scaffolding, and by nightfall the whole roof ridge was set in place. No one spoke of the incident with the ridgebeam, at least not in Thrower's presence. And when he went to look for the shivered ridgepole, he couldn't find it anywhere.
Chapter Seven – Altar
Alvin Junior wasn't scared when he saw the beam falling, and he wasn't scared when it crashed to the floor on either side. But when all the grown-ups started carrying on like the Day of Rapture, a-hugging him and talking in whispers, then he got scared. Grown-ups had a way of doing things for no reason at all.
Like the way Papa was setting on the floor by the fire, just studying the split pieces of the shivered ridgepole, the piece of wood that sprung under the weight of the ridgebeam and sent it all crashing down. When Mama was being herself, not Papa or nobody could bring big old pieces of split and dirty wood into her house. But today Mama was as crazy as Papa, and when he showed up toting them big old splinters of wood, she just bent over, rolled up the rug, and got herself out of Papa's way.
Well, anybody who didn't know to get out of Papa's way when he had that look on his face was too dumb to live. David and Calm was lucky, they could go off to their own houses on their own cleared land, where their own wives had their own suppers cooking and they could decide whether to be crazy or not. The rest of them weren't so lucky. With Papa and Mama being crazy, the rest of them had to be crazy, too. Not one of the girls fought with any of the others, and they all helped fix supper and clean up after without a word of complaint. Wastenot and Wantnot went out and chopped wood and did the evening milking without so much as punching each other in the arm, let alone getting in a wrestling match, which was right disappointing to Alvin Junior, seeing as how he always got to wrestle the loser, which was the best wrestling he ever got to do, them being eighteen years old and a real challenge, not like the boys he usually hunkered down with. And Measure, he just sat there by the fire, whittling out a big old spoon for Mama's cooking pot, never so much as looking up– but he was waiting, just like the others, for Papa to come back to his right self and yell at somebody.
The only normal person in the house was Calvin, the three-year-old. The trouble was that normal for him meant tagging along after Alvin Junior like a kitten on a mouse's trail. He never came close enough to play with Alvin Junior, or to touch him or talk to him or anything useful. He was just there, always there at the edge of things, so Alvin would look up just as Calvin looked away, or catch a glimpse of his shirt as he ducked behind a door, or sometimes in the dark of night just hear a faint breathing that was closer than it ought to be, which told him Calvin wasn't lying on his cot, he was standing right there by Alvin's bed, watching. Nobody ever seemed to notice it. It had been more than a year since Alvin gave up trying to get him to stop. If Alvin Junior ever said, “Ma, Cally's pestering me,” Mama would just say, “Al Junior, he didn't say a thing, he didn't touch you, and if you don't like him just standing quiet as a body could ask, well, that's just too bad for you, because it suits me fine. I wish certain other of my children could learn to be as still.” Alvin figured that it wasn't that Calvin was normal today, it's that the rest of the family had just come up to his regular level of craziness.
Papa just stared and stared at the split wood. Now and then he'd fit it together the way it was. Once he spoke, real quiet. “Measure, you sure you got all them pieces?”
Measure said, “Ever single bit, Pa, I couldn't've got more with a broom. I couldn't've got more if I'd bent down and lapped it up like a dog.”
Ma was listening, of course. Papa once said that when Ma was paying attention, she could hear a squirrel fart in the woods a half mile away in the middle of a storm with the girls ra
ttling dishes and the boys all chopping wood. Alvin Junior wondered sometimes if that meant Ma knew more witchery than she let on, since one time he sat in the woods not three yards away from a squirrel for more than an hour, and he never heard it so much as belch.
Anyway, she was right there in the house tonight, so of course she heard what Papa asked, and she heard what Measure answered, and her being as crazy as Papa, she lashed out like as if Measure had just taken the name of the Lord. “You mind your tongue, young man, because the Lord said unto Moses on the mount, honor your father and mother that your days may be long on the land which the Lord your God has given you, and when you speak fresh to your father then you are taking days and weeks and even years off your own life, and your soul is not in such a condition that you should welcome an early visit to the judgment bar to meet your Savior and hear him say your eternal fate!”
Measure wasn't half so worried about his eternal fate as he was worried about Mama being riled at him. He didn't try to argue that he wasn't talking smart or being sassy– only a fool would do that when Mama was already hot. He just started in looking humble and begging her pardon, not to mention the forgiveness of Papa and the sweet mercy of the Lord. By the time she was done with ragging him, poor Measure had already apologized a half a dozen times, so that she finally just grumped and went back to her sewing.
Then Measure looked up at Alvin Junior and winked.
“I saw that,” said Mama, “and if you don't go to hell, Measure, I'll get up a petition to Saint Peter to send you there.”
“I'd sign that petition myself,” said Measure, looking meek as a puppy dog that just piddled on a big man's boot.
“That's right you would,” said Mama, “and you'd sign it in blood, too, because by the time I'm through with you there'll be enough open wounds to keep ten clerks in bright red ink for a year.”
Alvin Junior couldn't help himself. Her dire threat just struck him funny. And even though he knew he was taking his life in his hands, he opened up his mouth to laugh. He knew that if he laughed he'd have Mama's thimble hard on his head, or maybe her hand clapped hard on his ear, or even her hard little foot smashed right down on his bare foot, which she did once to David the time he told her she should have learnt the word no sometime before she had thirteen mouths to cook for.
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