Becca smiled, and led him to the loom. She sat on her weaving stool and gathered the newest cloth up into her lap. She started about three yards from the lip of the loom.
“Here,” she said. “The gathering of your folk to Prophetstown.”
Alvin saw how she passed her hand over a whole bunch of threads that seemed to climb out of their proper warp and migrate across the cloth to gather up near the edge.
“Reds from every tribe,” she said. “The strongest of your people.”
Even though the fibers tended to be greenish, they were indeed heavier than most threads, strong and taut. Becca fed the cloth farther down her lap. The gathering grew stronger and clearer, and the threads turned brighter green. How could threads change color that way? And how with the machinery of the loom could the warp shift like that?
“And now the Whites that gathered against them,” she said.
And sure enough, another group of threads, tighter to start with, but gathering, knotting up a little. To Alvin's eyes it looked like the cloth was a ruin, the threads all tangled and bunched– who'd wear a shirt made of such stuff as that? –and the colors made no sense, all jumbled together without no effort to make a pattern or any kind of regular order.
Ta-Kumsaw reached out his hand and pulled the cloth toward himself. Pulled until he exposed a place were all those pure green threads just went slack and then stopped, most of them. The warp of the cloth was spare and thin, then, maybe one thread for every ten there used to be, like a worn-down raggedy patch in the elbow of an old shirt, so when you bent your elbow maybe a dozen threads made lines across your skin one direction, and no threads at all the other way.
If the green threads stood for Prophetstown, there couldn't be no mistake what was going on here. “Tippy-Canoe,” Alvin murmured. Now he knew the order of this cloth.
Becca bent over the cloth and tears dropped from her eyes straight down on it.
Tearless, Ta-Kumsaw pulled the cloth again, steadily. Alvin saw the rest of the green threads, the few that remained from the massacre at Tippy-Canoe, migrate to the edge of the cloth and stop. The cloth was narrower by that many threads. Only now there was another gathering, and the threads were not green. They were mostly black.
“Black with hate,” said Becca. “You are gathering your people with hate.”
“Can you imagine conducting a war with love?” asked Ta-Kumsaw.
“That's a reason to refuse to make war at all,” she said gently.
“Don't talk like a White woman,” said Ta-Kumsaw.
“But she is one,” said Alvin, who thought she made perfect sense.
They both looked at Alvin, Ta-Kumsaw impassively, Becca with– amusement? Pity? Then they returned to the cloth.
Very quickly they came to where the cloth hung over the beam, then fed out of the loom. Along the way, the black threads of Ta-Kumsaw's army worked closer together, knotted, intertwined. And other threads, some blue, some yellow, some black, all gathered in another place, the fabric bunching up something awful. It was thicker, but it didn't seem to Alvin that it was a speck stronger. Weaker, if anything. Less useful. Less trustworthy.
“This cloth ain't going to be worth much, if this goes on,” said Alvin.
Becca smiled grimly. “Truer words were never spoken, lad.”
“If this is about a year's worth of story,” said Alvin, “you must have two hundred years all gathered up here.”
Becca cocked her head. “More than that,” she said.
“How do you find out all that's going on, to make it all go into the cloth?”
“Oh, Alvin, there's some things folks just do, without knowing how,” she said.
“And if you change the threads around, can't you make things go different?” Alvin had in mind a careful rearrangement, spreading the threads out more even-like, and getting those black threads farther apart from each other.
“It doesn't work like that,” she said. “I don't make things happen, with what I do here. Things that happen, they change me. Don't fret about it, Alvin.”
“But there wasn't even White folks in this part of America more than two hundred years ago. How can this cloth go farther back?”
She sighed. “Isaac, why did you bring him to plague me with questions?”
Ta-Kumsaw smiled at her.
“Lad, will you tell no one?” she asked. “Will you keep it secret who I am and what I do?”
“I promise.”
“I weave, Alvin. That's all. My whole family, from before we even remember, we've been weavers.”
“That your name, then? Becca Weaver? My brother-in-law, Armor-of-God, his pa's a Weaver, and–”
“Nobody calls us weavers,” said Becca. “If they had any name for as at all, they'd call us– no.”
She wouldn't tell him.
“No, Alvin, I can't put such a burden on you. Because you'd want to come. You'd want to come and see.”
“See what?” asked Alvin.
“Like Isaac here. I should never have told him, either.”
“He kept the secret, though. Never breathed a word.”
“He didn't keep it secret from himself, though. He came to see.”
“See what?” Alvin asked again.
“See how long are the threads a-flowing up into my loom.”
Only then did Alvin notice the back end of the loom, where the warp threads were gathered into. place by a rack of fine steel wires. The threads weren't colored at all. They were raw white. Cotton? Surely not wool. Linen, maybe. With all the colors in the finished cloth, he hadn't really noticed what it was made of.
“Where do the colors come from?” asked Alvin.
No one answered.
“Some of the threads go slack.”
“Some of them end,” said Ta-Kumsaw.
“Many of them end,” said Becca. “And many begin. It's the pattern of life.”
“What do you see, Alvin?” asked Ta-Kumsaw.
“If these black threads are your folk,” said Alvin, “then I'd say there's a battle coming, and a lot are going to die. Not like Tippy-Canoe, though. Not as bad.”
“That's what I see, too,” said Ta-Kumsaw.
“And these other colors all bunched up, what are they? An army of White folk?”
“Word is that a man named Andrew Jackson of the western Tennizy country is gathering up an army. They call him Old Hickory.”
“I know the man,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “He doesn't stay in the saddle too well.”
“He's been doing with White folks what you've been doing with Red, Isaac. He's been going up and down the western country, rousting people out and haranguing them about the Red Menace. About you, Isaac. For every Red soldier you've gathered, he's recruited two Whites. And he figures you'll go north, to join with a French army. He knows all your plans.”
“He knows nothing,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “Alvin, tell me, how many threads of this White army end?”
“A lot. More, maybe. I don't know. It's about even.”
“Then it tells me nothing.”
“It tells you that you'll have your battle,” said Becca. “It tells you that there'll be more blood and suffering in the world, thanks to you.”
“But it says nothing of victory,” said Ta-Kumsaw.
“It never does.”
Alvin wondered if you could just tie another thread onto the end of one of the broken ones, and save somebody's life. He looked for the spools of thread from which the warp was formed, but he couldn't find them. The threads hung down from the back beam of the loom, taut like there was a heavy weight hanging on them, but Alvin couldn't see where the threads came from. They didn't touch the floor. They didn't exactly stop, either. He looked this far, and there they were, hanging tight and long; and he looked this much farther, and there weren't no threads, nothing there at all. The threads were just coming out of nowhere, and there was no way the human eye could see or make sense of how they started.
But Alvin, he could see with other eyes, inward
eyes, the way he studied into the tiny workings of the human body, into the cold inward currents of stone. And with that hidden vision he looked into a single thread and traced its shape, following how the fibers wound around and through, twisting and gripping each other to make the strength of the yarn. This time he could just keep following the thread. Just keep on following until finally, far beyond the place where the threads all disappeared to natural eyes, the thread ended. Whosever soul that thread bespoke, he had a good long life ahead of him, before he died.
All these threads must end, when the person dies. And somehow a new thread must start up when a baby got born. Another thread coming out of nowhere.
“It never ends,” said Becca. “I'll grow old and die, Alvin, but the cloth will go on.”
“Do you know which thread is you?”
“No,” she said. “I don't want to know.”
“I reckon I'd like to see. I want to know how many years I got.”
“Many,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “Or few. All that matters is what you do with however many years you have.”
“It does too matter how long I live,” said Alvin. “Don't go saying it don't, cause you don't believe that yourself.”
Becca laughed.
“Miss Becca,” said Alvin, “what do you do this for, if you don't make things happen?”
She shrugged. “It's a work. Everybody has a work to do, and this is mine.”
“You could go out and weave things for folks to wear.”
“To wear and then wear out,” she said. “And no, Alvin, I can't go out.”
“You mean you stay indoors all the time?”
“I stay here, always,” she said. “In this room, with my loom.”
“I begged you once to go with me,” said Isaac.
“And I begged you once to stay.” She smiled up at him.
“I can't live forever where the land is dead.”
“And I can't live a moment away from my cloth. The way the land lives in your mind, Isaac, that is how the lives of all the souls of America live in mine. But I love you. Even now.”
Alvin felt like he shouldn't be there. It was like they forgot he was there, even though he'd just been talking to them. It finally dawned on him that they'd probably rather be alone. So he moved away, walked over to the cloth again, and again began tracing its path, the opposite direction this time, scanning quickly but carefully, up the walls, through the bolts and piles, searching for the earliest end of the cloth.
Couldn't find it. In fact, he must have been looking the wrong direction or got himself twisted up, because pretty soon he found himself on the same familiar path he had followed, the path that first led him to the loom. He reversed direction, and after a short time he found himself again on the path to the loom. He could no more search backward to find the oldest end of the cloth than he could search forward to find where the newest threads were coming from.
He turned again to Ta-Kumsaw and Becca. Whatever whispered conversation they had carried on was over. Ta-Kumsaw sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her, his head bowed. She was stroking his hair with gentle hands.
“This cloth is older than the oldest part of this house,” said Alvin.
Becca didn't answer.
“This cloth's been going on forever.”
“As long as men and women have known how to weave, this cloth has passed through the loom.”
“But not this loom. This loom's new,” said Alvin.
“We change looms from time to time. We build the new one around the old. It's what the men of our kind do.”
“This cloth is older than the oldest White settlements in America,” said Alvin.
“It was once a part of a larger cloth. But one day, back in our old country, we saw a large portion of the threads moving off the edge of the cloth. My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather built a new loom. We had the threads we needed. They pulled away from the old cloth; we continued it from there. It's still connected up– that's what you're seeing.”
“But now it's here.”
“It's here and there. Don't try to understand it, Alvin. I gave up long ago. But isn't it good to know that all of the threads of life are being woven into one great cloth?”
“Who's weaving the cloth for the Red folk that went west with Tenskwa-Tawa?” asked Alvin. “Those threads went off the cloth.”
“That's not your business,” said Becca. “We'll just say that another loom was built, and carried west.”
“But Ta-Kumsaw said no White folk would ever cross the river to the west. The Prophet said it, too.”
Ta-Kurnsaw turned slowly on the floor, without getting up. “Alvin,” he said, “you're only a boy–”
“And I was only a girl,” Becca reminded him, “when I first loved you.” She turned to Alvin. “It's my daughter who carried the loom into the west. She could go because she's only half White.” She again stroked Ta-Kumsaw's hair. “Isaac is my husband. My daughter Wieza is his daughter.”
“Mana-Tawa,” said Ta-Kumsaw.
“I thought for a time that Isaac would choose to stay here, to live with us. But then I watched as his thread moved away from us, even though his body still was with us. I knew he would go to be with his people. I knew why he had come to us, alone from the forest. There is a hunger deeper than the Red man's hunger for the song of the living forest, deeper than a blacksmith's yearning for the hot wet iron, deeper even than a doodlebug's longing for the hollow heart of the earth. That hunger brought Ta-Kumsaw to our house. My mother was still the weaver at the loom then. I taught Ta-Kumsaw to read and write; he rushed through my father's library, and read every other book in the valley, and we sent for more books from Philadelphia and he read those. He chose his own name, then, for the man who wrote the Principia. When we came of age, he married me. I had a baby. He left. When Wieza was three, he came back, built a loom, and took her west over the mountain to live with his people.”
“And you let your own daughter go?”
“Just like one of my ancestors sat at her old loom and let her daughter go, across the ocean to this land, her with a new loom and her watchful father beside her, yes, I let her go.” Becca smiled sadly at Alvin. “We all have our work, but there's no good work that doesn't have its cost. By the time Isaac took her, I was already in this room. Everything that happened has been good.”
“You didn't even ask how your daughter was doing when he got here! You still haven't asked.”
“I didn't have to ask,” said Becca. “No harm comes to the keepers of the loom.”
“Well, if your daughter's gone, who's going to take your place?”
“Perhaps another husband will come here, by and by. One who'll stay in this house, and make another loom for me, and yet another for a daughter not yet born.”
“And what happens to you then?”
“So many questions, Alvin,” said Ta-Kumsaw. But his voice was soft and tired and English-sounding; Alvin wasn't in awe of the Ta-Kumsaw who read White men's books, and so he paid no heed to the mild rebuke.
“What happens to you when your daughter takes your place?”
“I don't know,” said Becca. “But the story is that we go to the place where the threads come from.”
“What do you do there?”
“We spin.”
Alvin tried to imagine Becca's mother, and her grandmother, and the women before that, all in a line, he tried to imagine how many there'd be, all of them working their spinning wheels, winding out threads from the spindle, yarn all raw and white, which would just go somewhere, go on and disappear somewhere until it broke. Or maybe when it broke they held the whole thing, a whole human life, in their hands, and then tossed it upward until it was caught by a passing wind, and then dropped down and got snagged up in somebody's loom. A life afloat on the wind, then caught and woven into the cloth of humanity; born at some arbitrary time, then struggling to find its way into the fabric, weaving into the strength of it.
And as he imagined th
is, he also imagined that he understood something about that fabric. About the way it grew stronger the more tightly woven in each thread became. The ones that skipped about over the top of the cloth, dipping into the weft only now and then, they added little to the strength, though much to the color, of the cloth. While some whose color hardly showed at all, they were deeply wound among the threads, holding all together. There was a goodness in those hidden binding threads. Forever from then on, Alvin would see some quiet man or woman, little noticed and hardly thought of by others, who nevertheless went a-weaving through the life of village, town, or city, binding up, holding on, and Alvin would silently salute such folk, and do them homage in his heart, because he knew how their lives kept the cloth strong, the weave tight.
He also remembered the many threads that ended at the point where Ta-Kumsaw's battle was to take place. It was as if Ta-Kumsaw had taken shears to the cloth.
“Ain't there'a way to heal things up?” asked Alvin. “Ain't there a hope of keeping this battle from ever happening, so those threads don't all get broke?”
Becca shook her head. “Even if Isaac refused to go, the battle would take place without him. No, the threads aren't broken by anything Isaac did. They broke the moment some Red man chose a course of action that would surely end in his death in battle; you and Isaac weren't going around spreading death, if that's what worries you. No more than Old Hickory's been killing people. You were just going spreading choices. They didn't have to believe in you. They didn't have to choose to die.”
“But they didn't know that's what they was choosing.”
“They knew,” said Becca. “We always know. We don't admit it to ourselves, not until the very moment of death, but in that moment, Alvin, we see all the life before us and we understand how we chose, every day of our lives, the manner of our death.”
“What if something just happens to fall on somebody's head and mashes him?”
“He chose to be in a place where such things happen. And he wasn't looking up.”
“I don't believe it,” said Alvin. “I think folks can always change what's coming, and I think some things happen that ain't nobody ever chose to happen,”
Becca smiled at him, reached out her arm. “Come here, Alvin. Let me hold you close to me. I love your simple faith, child. I want to hold on to that faith, even if I can't believe it.”
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