So when Mama banged open the door, it wasn't altogether Alvin's fault that he didn't even have his pants on yet.
“You've missed breakfast! You're still half-naked! If you think I'm going to make the whole family parade into church late on account of you, you've got–”
“Another think coming,” said Alvin.
It wasn't his fault that she always said the same thing. But she got mad at him as if he should have pretended to be surprised to hear her say it for the ninetieth time since summer. Oh, she was all set to give him a licking, all right, or call for Pa to do it even worse, when there was Taleswapper, come to save him.
“Goody Faith,” said Taleswapper, “I'd be glad to see to it he comes to church, if you want to go on ahead with the others.”
The minute Taleswapper spoke, Mama whirled around and tried to hide how mad she'd been. Alvin right away started doing a calming on her– with his right hand, where she couldn't see it, since if she saw him doing a spell on her, she'd break his arm, and that was one threat Alvin Junior truly believed. A calming didn't work so well without touching, but since she was trying so hard to look calm in front of Taleswapper, it worked all right.
“I hate to put you to any trouble,” said Mama.
“No trouble, Goody Faith,” said Taleswapper. “I do little enough to repay your kindness to me.”
“Little enough!” The fretfulness was almost gone from Mama's voice now. “Why, my husband says you do the work of two grown men. And when you tell stories to the little ones I get more peace and quiet in this house than I've had since– since ever.” She turned back to Alvin, but now her anger was more an act than real. “Will you do what Taleswapper tells you, and come to church right quick?”
“Yes, Mama,” said Alvin Junior. “Quick as I can.”
“All right then. Thank you kindly, Taleswapper. If you can get that boy to obey, that's more than anybody else has managed since he learned to talk.”
“He's a real brat,” said Mary, from the hallway outside.
“Shut your mouth, Mary,” Mama said, “or I'll stuff your lower lip up your nose and tack it there to keep it shut.”
Alvin sighed in relief. When Mama made impossible threats it meant she wasn't all that angry anymore. Mary put her nose in the air and flounced down the hall, but Alvin didn't even bother with it. He just grinned at Taleswapper, and Taleswapper grinned at him.
“Having trouble getting dressed for church, lad?” asked Taleswapper.
“I'd rather dress myself in lard and walk through a herd of hungry bears,” said Alvin Junior.
“More people live through church than survive encounters with bears.”
“Not by much, though.”
Soon enough he got dressed. But he was able to talk Taleswapper into taking the shortcut, which meant walking through the woods up over the hill behind the house, instead of going around by way of the road. Since it was right cold outside, and hadn't rained in a while, and wasn't about to snow yet, there'd be no mud and Mama'd probably not even guess. And what Mama didn't know wouldn't hurt him.
“I noticed,” said Taleswapper as they climbed up the leaf-covered slope, “that your father didn't go with your mother and Cally and the girls.”
“He doesn't go to that church,” said Alvin. “He says Reverend Thrower is a jackass. Course, he don't say that where Mama can hear.”
“I suppose not,” said Taleswapper.
They stood at the top of the hill, looking down across open meadowland toward the church. The church's own hill hid the town of Vigor Church from view. The frost was just beginning to melt off the brown autumn grass, so that the church looked to be the whitest thing in a world of whiteness, and the sun flashed on it like it was another sun. Alvin could see wagons still pulling into place, and horses being tied to the posts on the meadow. If they hurried right now, they'd probably be in their places before Reverend Thrower started up the hymn.
But Taleswapper didn't start down the hill. He just set himself on a stump and started to recite a poem. Alvin listened tight, because Taleswapper's poems often had a real bite to them.
"I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen: A chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green.
"And the gates of this chapel were shut, And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door, So I turned to the Garden of Love, That so many sweet flowers bore,
"And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be. And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, And binding with briars my joys and desires.
Oh, Taleswapper had a knack, he did, for as he recited, the very world changed before Alvin's eyes. The meadows and trees looked like the loudest shout of spring, vivid yellow-green with ten thousand blossoms, and the white of the chapel in the midst of it was no longer gleaming, but instead the dusty, chalky white of old bones. “Binding with briars my joys and desires,” Alvin repeated. “You ain't got much use for religion.”
“I breathe religion with my every breath,” said the Taleswapper. “I long for visions, I search for the traces of God's hand. But in this world I see more traces of the other. A trail of glistening slime that burns me when I touch it. God is a bit standoffish these days, Al Junior, but Satan has no fear of getting down in the muck with mankind.”
“Thrower says his church is the house of God.”
Taleswapper, he just sat there and said nothing for the longest time.
Finally Alvin asked him right out: “Have you seen devil traces in that church?”
In the days that Taleswapper had been with them, Alvin had come to know that Taleswapper never exactly lied. But when he didn't want to get pinned down with the true answer, he'd say a poem. He said one now.
"O Rose, thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night, In the howling storm
“Has found out thy bed, Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love, Does thy life destroy.”
Alvin was impatient with such twisting answers. “If I want to hear something I don't understand, I can read Isaiah.”
“Music to my ears, my lad, to compare me to the greatest of prophets.”
“He ain't much of a prophet if nobody can understand a thing he wrote.”
“Or perhaps he meant us all to become prophets.”
“I don't hold with prophets,” said Alvin. “Near as I can tell, they end up just as dead as the next man.” It was something he had heard his father say.
“Everybody ends up dead,” said Taleswapper. “But some who are dead live on in their words.”
“Words never stay straight,” said Alvin. “Now, when I make a thing, then it's the thing I made. Like when I make a basket. It's a basket. When it gets tore, then it's a tored-up basket. But when I say words, they can get all twisted up. Thrower can take those same very words I said and bend them back and make them mean just contrary to what I said.”
“Think of it another way, Alvin. When you make one basket, it can never be more than one basket. But when you say words, they can be repeated over and over, and fill men's hearts a thousand miles from where you first spoke them. Words can magnify, but things are never more than what they are.”
Alvin tried to picture that, and with Taleswapper saying it, the picture came easy to his mind. Words as invisible as air, coming out of Taleswapper's mouth and spreading from person to person. Growing larger all the time, but still invisible.
Then, suddenly, the vision changed. He saw the words coming from the preacher's mouth, like a trembling in the air, spreading out, seeping into everything– and suddenly it became his nightmare, the terrible, dream that came on him, waking or sleeping, and spiked his heart to his spine till he like to died. The world filling up with an invisible trembling nothing that seeped into everything and shook it apart. Alvin could see it, rolling toward him like a huge ball, growing all the time. He knew from all the nightmares before that even if he clenched his fists it would thin itself out and seep between his fingers, and even when he clos
ed his mouth and his eyes it would press on his face and ooze into his nose and ears and–
Taleswapper shook him. Shook him hard. Alvin opened his eyes. The trembling air retreated back to the edges of his sight. That's where Alvin saw it most of the time, waiting just barely out of sight, wary as a weasel, ready to flit away if he turned his head.
“What's wrong with you, lad?” asked Taleswapper. His face looked afraid.
“Nothing,” said Alvin.
“Don't tell me nothing,” said Taleswapper. “All of a sudden I saw a fear come over you, as if you were seeing a terrible vision.”
“It wasn't a vision,” said Alvin. “I had a vision once, and I know.”
“Oh?” said Taleswapper. “What vision was that?”
“A Shining Man,” said Alvin. “I never told nobody about it, and I don't reckon to start now.”
Taleswapper didn't press him. “What you saw now, if it wasn't a vision– well, what was it?”
“It was nothing.” It was a true answer, but he also knew it was no answer at all. But he didn't want to answer. Whenever he told people, they just scoffed at him for being such a baby about nothing.
But Taleswapper wouldn't let him slough off his question. “I've been longing for a true vision all my life, Al Junior, and you saw one, here in broad daylight, with your eyes wide open, you saw something so terrible it made you stop breathing, now tell me what it was.”
“I told you! It was nothing!” Then, quieter: “It's nothing, but I can see it. Like the air gets wobbly wherever it goes.”
“It's nothing, but not invisible?”
“It gets into everything. It gets into all the smallest cracks and shakes everything apart. Just shivers and shivers until there's nothing left but dust, and then it shivers the dust, and I try to keep it out, but it gets bigger and bigger, it rolls over everything, till it like to fills the whole sky and the whole earth.” Alvin couldn't help himself. He was shaking with cold, even though he was bundled up thick as a bear.
“How many times have you seen this before?”
“Ever since I can remember. Just now and then it'll come on me. Most times I just think about other things and it stays back.”
“Where?”
“Back. Out of sight.” Alvin knelt down and then sat down, exhausted. Sat right in the damp grass with his Sunday pants, but he didn't hardly notice. “When you talked about words spreading and spreading, it made me see it again.”
“A dream that comes again and again is trying to tell you the truth,” said Taleswapper.
The old man was so plainly eager about the whole thing that Alvin wondered if he really understood how frightening it was. “This ain't one of your stories, Taleswapper.”
“It will be,” said Taleswapper, “as soon as I understand it.”
Taleswapper sat beside him and thought in silence for the longest time. Alvin just sat there, twisting grass in his fingers. After a while he got impatient. “Maybe you can't understand everything,” he said. “Maybe it's just a craziness in me. Maybe I get lunatic spells.”
“Here,” said Taleswapper, taking no notice that Alvin had even spoke. “I've thought of a meaning. Let me say it, and see if we believe it.”
Alvin didn't like being ignored. “Or maybe you get lunatic spells, you ever think of that, Taleswapper?”
Taleswapper brushed aside Alvin's doubt. “All the universe is just a dream in God's mind, and as long as he's asleep, he believes in it, and things stay real. What you see is God waking up, gradually waking up, and his wakefulness sweeps through the dream, undoes the universe, until finally he sits up, rubs his eyes, and says, 'My, what a dream, I wish I could remember what it was,' and in that moment we'll all be gone.” He looked eagerly at Alvin. “How was that?”
“If you believe that, Taleswapper, then you're a blamed fool, just like Armor-of-God says.”
“Oh, he says that, does he?” Taleswapper suddenly snaked out his hand and took Alvin by the wrist. Alvin was so surprised he dropped what he was holding. “No! Pick it up! Look what you were doing!”
“I was just fiddling, for pete's sake.”
Taleswapper reached down and picked up what Alvin had dropped. It was a tiny basket, not an inch across, made from autumn grasses. “You made this, just now.”
“I reckon so,” said Alvin.
“Why did you make it?”
“Just made it.”
“You weren't even thinking about it?”
“It ain't much of a basket, you know. I used to make them for Cally. He called them bug baskets when he was little. They just fall apart pretty soon.”
"You saw a vision of nothing, and then you had to make something. "
Alvin looked at the basket. “Reckon so.”
“Do you always do that?”
Alvin thought back to other times he'd seen the shivering air. “I'm always making things,” he said. “Don't mean much.”
“But you don't feel right again until you've made something. After you see the vision of nothing, you aren't at peace until you put something together.”
“Maybe I've just got to work it off.”
“Not just work, though, is it, lad? Chopping wood doesn't do the job for you. Gathering eggs, toting water, cutting hay, that doesn't ease you.”
Now Alvin began to see the pattern Taleswapper had found. It was true, near as he could remember. He'd wake up after such a dream at night, and couldn't stop fidgeting until he'd done some weaving or built a haystack or done up a doll out of corn shucks for one of the nieces. Same thing when the vision came on him in the day– he wasn't no good at whatever chore he was doing, until he built something that hadn't been there before, even if it was nothing more than a pile of rocks or part of a stone wall.
“It's true, isn't it? You do that every time, don't you?”
“Mostly.”
“Then let me tell you the name of the nothing. It's the Unmaker.”
“Never heard of it,” said Alvin.
“Neither did I, till now. That's because it likes to keep itself secret. It's the enemy of everything that exists. All it wants is to break everything into pieces, and break those pieces into pieces, until there's nothing left at all.”
“If you break something into pieces, and break the pieces into pieces, you don't get nothing,” said Alvin. “You just get lots of little pieces.”
“Shut up and listen to the story,” said Taleswapper.
Alvin was used to him saying that. Taleswapper said it to Alvin Junior more often than to anybody else, even the nephews.
“I'm not talking about good and evil,” said Taleswapper. “Even the devil himself can't afford to break everything down, can he, or he'd cease to be, just like everything else. The most evil creatures don't desire the destruction of everything– they only desire to exploit it for themselves.”
Alvin had never heard the word exploit before, but it sounded nasty.
“So in the great war between the Unmaker and everything else, God and the devil should be on the same side. But the devil, he doesn't know it, and so he serves the Unmaker as often as not.”
“You mean the devil's out to beat himself?”
“My story isn't about the devil,” said Taleswapper. He was steady as rain when a story was coming out of him. “In the great war against the Unmaker of your vision, all the men and women of the world should be allies. But the great enemy remains invisible, so that no one guesses that they unwittingly serve him. They don't realize that war is the Unmaker's ally, because it tears down everything it touches. They don't understand that fire, murder, crime, cupidity, and concupiscence break apart the fragile bonds that make human beings into nations, cities, families, friends, and souls.”
“You must be a prophet right enough,” said Alvin Junior, “cause I can't understand a thing you said.”
“A prophet,” murmured Taleswapper, “but it was your eyes that saw. Now I know the agony of Aaron: to speak the words of truth, yet never have the vision for hims
elf.”
“You're making a big lot out of my nightmares.”
Taleswapper was silent, sitting on the ground, his elbows on his knees, his chin propped all dismal on his palms. Alvin tried to figure out what the man was talking about. It was a sure thing that what he saw in his bad dreams wasn't a thing of any kind, so it must be poetical to talk about the Unmaker like a person. Maybe it was true, though, maybe the Unmaker wasn't just something he imagined up in his brain, maybe it was real, and Al Junior was the only person who could see it. Maybe the whole world was in terrible danger, and it was Alvin's job to fight it off, to beat it back, to keep the thing at bay. it was sure enough that when the dream was on him, Alvin couldn't bear it, wanted to drive it away. But he never could figure out how.
“Sposing I believe you,” said Alvin. “Sposing there's such a thing as the Unmaker. There ain't a blame thing I can do.”
A slow smile crept over Thleswapper's face. He tipped himself to one side, to free up his hand, which slowly reached down to the ground and picked up the little bug basket where it lay in the grass. “Does that look like a blamed thing?”
“That's just a bunch of grass.”
“It was a bunch of grass,” said Taleswapper. “And if you tore it up it'd be a bunch of grass again. But now, right now, it's something more than that.”
“A little bug basket is all.”
“Something that you made.”
“Well, it's a sure thing grass don't grow that way.”
“And when you made it, you beat back the Unmaker.”
“Not by much,” said Alvin.
“No,” said Taleswapper. “But by the making of one bug basket. By that much, you beat him back.”
It came together in Alvin's mind. The whole story that the Taleswapper was trying to tell. Alvin knew all kinds of opposites in the world: good and evil, light and dark, free and slave, love and hate. But deeper than all those opposites was making and unmaking. So deep that hardly anybody noticed that it was the most important opposite of all. But he noticed, and so that made the Unmaker his enemy. That's why the Unmaker came after him in his sleep. After all, Alvin had his knack. His knack for setting things in order, putting things in the shape they ought to be in.
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