Legends

by Robert Silverberg

  Not that Alvin minded a little sport. He let the grinning man work himself up into quite a temper of pulling and tugging and twisting and wrenching. It would have looked like quite a contest, except that Alvin could’ve been fixing to nap, he looked so relaxed.

  Finally Alvin got interested. He squished down hard and the grinning man yelped and dropped to his knees and began to beg Alvin to give him back his hand. “Not that I’ll ever have the use of it again,” said the grinning man, “but I’d at least like to have it so I got a place to store my second glove.”

  “I got no plan to keep your hand,” said Alvin.

  “I know, but it crossed my mind you might be planning to leave it here in the meadow and send me somewheres else,” said the grinning man.

  “Don’t you ever stop grinning?” asked Alvin.

  “Don’t dare try,” said the grinning man. “Bad stuff happens to me when I don’t smile.”

  “You’d be doing a whole lot better if you’d’ve frowned at me but kept your musket pointed at the ground and your hands in your pockets,” said Alvin.

  “You got my fingers squished down to one, and my thumb’s about to pop off,” said the grinning man. “I’m willing to say uncle.”

  “Willing is one thing. Doing’s another.”

  “Uncle,” said the grinning man.

  “Nope, that won’t do,” said Alvin. “I need two things from you.”

  “I got no money and if you take my traps I’m a dead man.”

  “What I want is your name, and permission to build a canoe here,” said Alvin.

  “My name, if it don’t become ‘One-handed Davy,’ is Crockett, in memory of my daddy,” said the grinning man. “And I reckon I was wrong about this tree. It’s your tree. Me and that bear, we’re both far from home and got a ways to travel before nightfall.”

  “You’re welcome to stay,” said Alvin. “Room for all here.”

  “Not for me,” said Davy Crockett. “My hand, should I get it back, is going to be mighty swoll up, and I don’t think there’s room enough for it in this clearing.”

  “I’ll be sorry to see you go,” said Alvin. “A new friend is a precious commodity in these parts.” He let go. Tears came to Davy’s eyes as he gingerly felt the sore palm and fingers, testing to see if any of them was about to drop off.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Journeyman Smith,” said Davy. “You too, boy.” He nodded cheerfully, grinning like an innkeeper. “I reckon you couldn’t possibly be no burglar. Nor could you possibly be the famous Prentice Smith what stole a golden plow from his master and run off with the plow in a poke.”

  “I never stole nothing in my life,” said Alvin. “But now you ain’t got a gun, what’s in my poke ain’t none of your business.”

  “I’m pleased to grant you full title to this land,” said Davy, “and all the rights to minerals under the ground, and all the rights to rain and sunlight on top of it, plus the lumber and all hides and skins.”

  “You a lawyer?” asked Arthur Stuart suspiciously.

  Instead of answering, Davy turned tail and slunk out of the clearing just like that bear done, and in the same direction. He kept on slinking, too, though he probably wanted to run; but running would have made his hand bounce and that would hurt too much.

  “I think we’ll never see him again,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “I think we will,” said Alvin.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Cause I changed him deep inside, to be a little more like the bear. And I changed that bear to be a little bit more like Davy.”

  “You shouldn’t go messing with people’s insides like that,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “The Devil makes me do it,” said Alvin.

  “You don’t believe in the Devil.”

  “Do so,” said Alvin. “I just don’t think he looks the way folks say he does.”

  “Oh? What does he look like then?” demanded the boy.

  “Me,” said Alvin. “Only smarter.”

  Alvin and Arthur set to work making them a dugout canoe. They cut down a tree just the right size—two inches wider than Alvin’s hips—and set to burning one surface of it, then chipping out the ash and burning it deeper. It was slow, hot work, and the more they did of it, the more puzzled Arthur Stuart got.

  “I reckon you know your business,” he says to Alvin, “but we don’t need no canoe.”

  “Any canoe,” says Alvin. “Miss Larner’d be right peeved to hear you talking like that.”

  “First place,” says Arthur Stuart, “you learned from Tenskwa-Tawa how to run like a Red man through the forest, faster than any canoe can float, and with a lot less work than this.”

  “Don’t feel like running,” said Alvin.

  “Second place,” Arthur Stuart continued, “water works against you every chance it gets. The way Miss Larner tells it, water near killed you sixteen times before you was ten.”

  “It wasn’t the water, it was the Unmaker, and these days he’s about give up on using water against me. He mostly tries to kill me now by making me listen to fools with questions.”

  “Third,” says Arthur Stuart, “in case you’re keeping count, we’re supposed to be meeting up with Mike Fink and Verily Cooper, and making this canoe ain’t going to help us get there on time.”

  “Those are two boys as need to learn patience,” says Alvin calmly.

  “Fourth,” says Arthur Stuart, who was getting more and more peevish with every answer Alvin gave, “fourth and final reason, you’re a Maker, dagnabbit, you could just think this tree hollow and float it over to the water light as a feather, so even if you had a reason to make this canoe, which you don’t, and a safe place to float it, which you don’t, you sure don’t have to put me through this work to make it by hand!”

  “You working too hard?” asked Alvin.

  “Harder than is needed is always too hard,” said Arthur.

  “Needed by whom and for what?” asked Alvin. “You’re right that I’m not making this canoe because we need to float down the river, and I’m not making it because it’ll hurry up our travel.”

  “Then why? Or have you give up altogether on doing things for reasons?”

  “I’m not making a canoe at all,” says Alvin.

  There knelt Arthur Stuart, up to his elbows in a hollowed-out log, scraping ash. “This sure ain’t a house!”

  “Oh, you’re making a canoe,” said Alvin. “And we’ll float in that canoe down that river over there. But I’m not making a canoe.”

  Arthur Stuart kept working while he thought this over. After a few minutes he said, “I know what you’re making.”

  “Do you?”

  “You’re making me do what you want.”

  “Close.”

  “You’re making me make this tree into something, but you’re also using this tree to make me into something.”

  “And what would I be trying to make you into?”

  “Well, I think you think you’re making me into a maker,” said Arthur Stuart. “But all you’re making me into is a canoe-maker, which ain’t the same thing as being an all-around all-purpose Maker like yourself.”

  “Got to start somewhere.”

  “You didn’t,” says Arthur. “You was born knowing how to make stuff.”

  “I was born with a knack,” says Alvin. “But I wasn’t born knowing how to use it, or when, or why. I learned to love making for its own sake. I learned to love the feel of the wood and the stone under my hands, and from that I learned to see inside it, to feel how it felt, to know how it worked, what held it together, and how to help it come apart in just the right way.”

  “But I’m not learning any of that,” says Arthur.

  “Yet.”

  “No sir,” says Arthur Stuart. “I’m not seeing inside nothing, I’m not feeling inside nothing except how my back aches and my whole body’s pouring off sweat and I’m getting more and more annoyed at being made to labor on a job you could do with a wink of your eye.”

/>   “Well, that’s something,” says Alvin. “At least you’re learning to see inside yourself.”

  Arthur Stuart fumed a little more, chipping away burnt wood as he did. “Someday I’m going to get fed up with your smugness,” he says to Alvin, “and I won’t follow you anymore.”

  Alvin shook his head. “Arthur Stuart, I tried to get you not to follow me this time, if you’ll recall.”

  “Is that what this is about? You’re punishing me for following you when you told me not to?”

  “You said you wanted to learn everything about being a Maker,” says Alvin. “And when I try to teach you, all I get is pissing and moaning.”

  “You also get work from me,” says Arthur. “I never stopped working the whole time we talked.”

  “That’s true,” says Alvin.

  “And here’s something you didn’t consider,” says Arthur Stuart. “All the time we’re making a canoe, we’re also unmaking a tree.”

  Alvin nodded. “That’s how it’s done. You never make something out of nothing. You always make it out of something else. When it becomes the new thing, it ceases to be what it was before.”

  “So every time you do a making, you do an unmaking, too,” says Arthur Stuart.

  “Which is why the Unmaker always knows where I am and what I’m doing,” says Alvin. “Because along with doing my work, I’m also doing a little bit of his.”

  That didn’t sound right or true to Arthur Stuart, but he couldn’t figure out an argument to answer it, and while he was trying to think one up, they kept on a-burning and a-chipping and lo and behold, they had them a canoe. They dragged it to the stream and put it in and got inside it and it tipped them right over. Spilled them into the water three times, till Alvin finally gave up and used his knack to feel the balance of the thing and then reshape it just enough that it had a good balance to it.

  Arthur Stuart had to laugh at him then. “What lesson am I supposed to learn from this? How to make a bad canoe?”

  “Shut up and row,” said Alvin.

  “We’re going downstream,” said Arthur Stuart, “and I don’t have to row. Besides which all I’ve got is this stick, which is no kind of paddle.”

  “Then use it to keep us from running into the bank,” said Alvin, “which we’re about to do thanks to your babbling.”

  Arthur Stuart fended the canoe away from the bank of the stream, and they kept on floating down until they joined a larger stream, and a larger, and then a river. All the time, Arthur kept coming back to the things Alvin said to him, and what he was trying to teach, and as usual Arthur Stuart despaired of learning it. And yet he couldn’t help but think he had learned something, even if he had no idea at present what the thing he learned might be.

  Because folks build towns on rivers, when you float down a river you’re likely as not to come upon a town, which they did one morning with mist still on the river and sleep still in their eyes. It wasn’t much of a town, but then it wasn’t much of a river, and they weren’t in much of a boat. They put in to shore and dragged the canoe onto the bank, and Alvin shouldered his poke with the plow inside and they trudged on into town just as folks was getting up and about their day.

  First thing they looked for was a roadhouse, but the town was too small and too new. Only a dozen houses, and the road so little traveled that grass was growing from one front door to the next. But that didn’t mean there was no hope of breakfast. If there’s light in the sky, somebody’s up, getting a start on the day’s work. Passing one house with a barn out back, they heard the ping-ping-ping of a cow getting milked into a tin pail. At another house, a woman was coming in with the night’s eggs from a chicken coop. That looked promising.

  “Got anything for a traveler?” asked Alvin.

  The woman looked them up and down. Without a word she walked on into her house.

  “If you wasn’t so ugly,” said Arthur Stuart, “she would have asked us in.”

  “Whereas looking at you is like seeing an angel,” said Alvin.

  They heard the front door of the house opening.

  “Maybe she was just hurrying in to cook them eggs for us,” said Arthur Stuart.

  But it wasn’t the woman who came out. It was a man, looking like he hadn’t had much time to fasten his clothing. In fact, his trousers were kind of droopy, and they might have started laying bets on how quick they’d drop to the porch if he hadn’t been aiming a pretty capable-looking blunderbuss at them.

  “Move along,” the man said.

  “We’re moving,” said Alvin. He hoisted his poke to his back and started walking across in front of the house. The barrel of the shotgun followed them. Sure enough, just as they were about even with the front door, the trousers dropped. The man looked embarrassed and angry. The barrel of the blunderbuss dipped. The loose birdshot rolled out of the barrel, dozens of tiny lead balls hitting the porch like rain. The man looked confused now.

  “Got to be careful loading up a big-barrel gun like that,” Alvin said. “I always wrap the shot in paper so it don’t do that.”

  The man glared at him. “I did.”

  “Why, I know you did,” said Alvin.

  But there sat the shot on the porch, a silent refutation. Nevertheless, Alvin was telling the simple truth. The paper was still in the barrel, as a matter of fact, but Alvin had persuaded it to break open at the front, freeing the shot.

  “Your pants is down,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “Move along,” said the man. His face was turning red. His wife was watching from the doorway behind him.

  “Well, you know, we was already planning to,” said Alvin, “but as long as you can’t quite kill us, for the moment at least, can I ask you a couple of questions?”

  “No,” said the man. He set down the gun and pulled up his trousers.

  “First off, I’d like to know the name of this town. I reckon it must be called ‘Friendly’ or ‘Welcome.’”

  “It ain’t.”

  “Well, that’s two down,” said Alvin. “We got to keep guessing, or you think you can just tell us like one fellow to another?”

  “How about ‘Pantsdown Landing’?” murmured Arthur Stuart.

  “This here is Westville, Kenituck,” said the man. “Now move along.”

  “My second question is, seeing as how you folks don’t have enough to share with a stranger, is there somebody who’s prospering a bit more and might have something to spare for travelers as have a bit of silver to pay for it?”

  “Nobody here got a meal for the likes of you,” said the man.

  “I can see why this road got grass growing on it,” said Alvin. “But your graveyard must be full of strangers as died of hunger hoping for breakfast here.”

  On his knees picking up loose shot, the man didn’t answer, but his wife stuck her head out the door and proved she had a voice after all. “We’re as hospitable as anybody else, except to known burglars and thieving prentices.”

  Arthur Stuart let out a low whistle. “What you want to bet Davy Crockett came this way?” he said softly.

  “I never stole a thing in my life,” said Alvin.

  “What you got in that poke, then?” demanded the woman.

  “I wish I could say it was the head of the last man who pointed a gun at me, but unfortunately I left it attached to his neck, so he could come here and tell lies about me.”

  “So you’re ashamed to show the golden plow you stole?”

  “I’m a blacksmith, ma’am,” said Alvin, “and I got my tools here. You’re welcome to look, if you want.”

  He turned to address the other folks who were gathering, out on their porches or into the street, a couple of them armed.

  “I don’t know what you folks heard tell,” said Alvin, setting down his poke, “but you’re welcome to look at my tools.” He drew open the mouth of the poke and let the sides drop so his hammer, tongs, bellows, and nails lay exposed in the street. Not a sign of a plow.

  Everyone looked closely, as if taking
inventory.

  “Well, maybe you ain’t the one we heared tell of,” said the woman.

  “No, ma’am, I’m the exact one, if it was a certain trapper in a coonskin cap named Davy Crockett who was telling the tale.”

  “So you confess to being that Prentice Smith who stole the plow? And a burglar?”

  “No, ma’am, I just confess to being a fellow as got himself on the wrong side of a trapper who talks a man harm behind his back.” He gathered up his bag over the tools and drew the mouth closed. “Now, if you-all want to turn me away, go ahead, but don’t go thinking you turned away a thief, because it ain’t so. You pointed a gun at me and turned me away without a bite to eat for me or this hungry boy, without so much as a trial or a scrap of evidence, just on the word of a traveler who was as much a stranger here as me.”

  The accusation made them all sheepish. One old woman, though, wasn’t having any of it. “We know Davy, I reckon,” she said. “It’s you we never set eyes on.”

  “And never will again, I promise you,” said Alvin. “You can bet I’ll tell this tale wherever I travel—Westville, Kenituck, where a stranger can’t get a bite to eat, and a man is guilty before he even hears the accusation.”

  “If there’s no truth to it,” said the old woman, “how did you know it was Davy Crockett a-telling the tale?”

  The others nodded and murmured as if this were a telling point.

  “Cause Davy Crockett accused me of it to my face,” said Alvin, “and he’s the only one who ever looked at me and my boy and thought of burglaring. I’ll tell you what I told him. If we’re burglars, why ain’t we in a big city with plenty of fine houses to rob? A burglar could starve to death, trying to find something to steal in a town as poor as this one.”

  “We ain’t poor,” said the man on the porch.

  “You got no food to spare,” said Alvin. “And there ain’t a house here with a door that even locks.”

  “See?” cried the old woman. “He’s already checked our doors to see how easy they’ll be to break into!”

  Alvin shook his head. “Some folks see sin in sparrows and wickedness in willow trees.” He took Arthur Stuart by the shoulder and turned to head back out of town the way they came.