Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume V

by Orson Scott Card

She soon learned that the library was the better teacher, for the authors of the books were helpless to shut her out because of her sex. Having put their best knowledge into print, they had to endure the ignominy of having a woman read it and understand it. The living professors, on the contrary, took notice of when Purity was listening, and most of them used that occasion to speak very quietly, to close the door, or to speak in Latin or Greek, which the students presumably spoke and Purity was presumed not to understand at all. On the contrary, she read Latin and Greek with great fluency and pronounced it better than all but a few of the male students—how else would she have come to the notice of a traditionalist like Reverend Study?—but she began to learn that the professors were rarely as coherent, deep, or penetrating in their thought as the authors of the books.

  There were exceptions. Young Waldo Emerson, who had only just graduated from Harvard himself, would have brought her right into his classroom if she had not refused. As it was, she heard every word of his teaching quite clearly, and while he was prone to epigrams as a substitute for analysis, his enthusiasm for the life of the mind was contagious and exhilarating. She knew that Emerson cared much more about being thought to be erudite than actually thinking deeply—his “philosophy” seemed to consist of anything that would be particularly annoying to the powers that be without being so shocking that they would fire him. He got the reputation among the students as an original and a rebel without having to pay the penalty for actually being either.

  It was not from Emerson, therefore, but from the library that Purity made the next leap toward understanding the meaning of her name and what it told her about her parents’ lives. For it was in a treatise, “On the Care of Offspring of Witches and Heretics,” by Cotton Mather that she first came to understand why she was an orphan bearing a Netticut name in a Massachusetts house.

  “All children being born equally tainted with original sin from Adam,” he wrote, “and the children of fallen parents being therefore not more tainted than the children of the elect, it is unjust to exact from them penalties other than those that naturally accrue to childhood, viz. subjection to authority, ignorance, inclination to disobedience, frequent punishment for inattention, etc.” Purity read this passage with delight, for after all the constant implication that the children of the orphanage clearly were not as likely to be elect as children growing up with parents who were members of the churches, it was a relief to hear no less an authority than the great Cotton Mather declare that it was unjust to treat one child differently from any other.

  So she was quite excited when she read the next sentence, and almost failed to notice its significance. “To give the children the best chance to avoid the posthumous influence of their parents and the suspicion of their neighbors, however, their removal from the parish, even the colony, of their birth would be the wisest course.”

  And the clincher, several sentences later: “Their family name should be taken from them, for it is a disgrace, but let not their baptismal name be changed, for that name cometh unto them from and in the name of Christ, however unworthy might have been the parents who proffered them up for christening.”

  I am named Purity, she thought. A Netticut name, but I am in Massachusetts. My parents are dead.

  Hanged as witches or burned as heretics. And more likely, witches, for the most common heresy is Quakerism and then I would not be named Purity, while a witch would try to conceal what he was and would therefore name his children as his neighbors named theirs.

  This knowledge brought her both alarm and relief. Alarm because she had to be on constant guard lest she also be accused of witchery. Alarm because now she had to wonder if her ability to sense easily what other people were feeling was what the witchy folk called a “knack.”

  Relief because the mystery of her parents had at last been solved. Her mother had not been a fornicator or adulteress who delivered up the baby to an orphanage with the name pinned to a blanket. Her father had not been carried off as a punishment of God through a plague or accident. Her parents had instead been hanged for witchery, and given what she knew of witch trials, in all likelihood they were innocent.

  As Waldo Emerson said in class one day, “When does a God-given talent cross an imperceptible boundary and become a devilish knack? And how does the devil go about bestowing gifts and hidden powers that, when they were granted unto prophets and apostles in the holy scriptures, were clearly gifts of the Spirit of God? Is it not possible that in condemning the talent instead of the misuse of that talent, we are rejecting the gifts of God and slaying some of his best beloved? Should we not then judge the moral character of the act rather than its extraordinariness?”

  Purity sat in the hallway when he said this, grateful that she was not inside the classroom where the young men would see her trembling, would see the tears streaming down her cheeks, and would think her a weak womanly creature. My parents were innocent, she said to herself, and my talent is from God, to be used in his holy service. Only if I were to turn it to the service of Satan would I be a witch. I might be one of the elect after all.

  She fled the college before the lecture was over, lest she be forced to converse with someone, and wandered in the woods along the river Euphrates. Boats plied the river from Boston as far inland as their draft would allow, but the boatmen took no heed of her, since she was a land creature and beneath their notice.

  If my talent is from God, she thought, then if I stay here and hide it, am I not rejecting that talent? Am I not burying it in the garden, like the foolish servant in the parable? Should I not find the greater purpose for which the talent was given?

  She imagined herself a missionary in some heathen land like Africa or France, able to understand the natives long before she learned their language. She imagined herself a diplomat for the Protectorate, using her talent to discern when foreign ambassadors or heads of state were lying and when they were sincere.

  And then, in place of imagination, she saw a boy of twelve or so, dark of skin with tight-curled hair, shoot up out of the river not three rods off, water falling off him, shining in the sunlight, his mouth open and laughing, and in midair he sees her, and she can see his face change and in that instance she knows what he feels: embarrassment to be seen buck naked by a woman, the fading remnants of his boisterous fun, and, just dawning under the surface where his own mind couldn’t know it yet, love.

  Well I never had that effect before, thought Purity. It was flattering. Not that the love of a twelve-year-old boy was ever going to affect her life, but it was sweet to know that at the cusp of manhood this lad could catch a glimpse of her and see, not the orphan bluestocking that so disgusted or terrified the young men of Cambridge, but a woman. Indeed, what he must have seen and loved was not a woman, but Woman, for Purity had read enough Plato to know that while wicked men lusted after particular women, a man of lofty aspirations loved the glimpse of Woman that he saw in good women, and by loving the ideal in her helped bring her to closer consonance, like lifting the flat shadow off the road and rejoining it to the whole being who cast it.

  What in the world am I thinking about. This child is no doubt every bit as peculiar as I am, him being Black in a land of Whites, as I am an orphan in a land of families and am thought to be the child of witches to boot.

  All these thoughts passed through her mind like a long crackle of lightning, and the boy splashed back down into the water, and then near him another person rose, a grown man, heavily muscled in the shoulders and back and arms, and considerably taller than the boy, so that although he didn’t jump, when he stood his bare white buttocks showed almost completely above the water, and when he saw where the Black boy was looking, his mouth agape with love, he turned and...

  Purity looked away in time. There was no reason to allow the possibility of impure thoughts into her mind. She might or might not be one of the elect, but there was no need to drag herself closer to the pit, thus requiring a greater atonement by Christ to draw her out.

  �
�So much for a spot where nobody comes!” the man cried out, laughing. She heard a great splashing, which had to be the two of them coming out of the water. “Just a minute and we’ll be dressed so you can go on with your walk, ma’am.”

  “Never mind,” she said. “I can go another way.”

  But at the moment she took her first step to return along the riverbank, a coarse-looking man with heavy muscles and a menacing cast to his face stepped in front of her. She couldn’t help gasping and stepping back—

  Only to find that she was stepping on a man’s boot.

  “Ouch,” he said mildly.

  She whirled around. There were two men, actually, one of them a dapper but smallish man who looked at her with a candor that she found disturbing. But the man she had stepped on was a tall, dignified-looking man who dressed like a professional man. Not in the jet-black costume of a minister, but not in the earthy “sad” colors of the common folk of New England. No, he dressed like nothing so much as ...

  “An Englishman,” she said. “A barrister.”

  “I confess it, but marvel that you guessed it.”

  “English visitors come to Cambridge often, sir,” she said. “Some are barristers. They seem to have a way of dressing to show that their clothing cost considerable money without ever quite violating the sumptuary laws.” She turned around to face the menacing man, unsure whether this Englishman was a match for him.

  But then she realized that she had been momentarily deceived by appearances. There was no menace in the rough fellow, no more than in the Englishman. And the other one, the dapper little fellow who was still inspecting her with his eyes, posed no danger, either. It was as if he knew only one way to think of women, and therefore shelved his attitude toward Purity under the heading “objects of lust,” but it was a volume that would gather dust before he cared enough to take it down and try to read it.

  “We must have frightened you,” said the Englishman. “Our friends were determined to bathe, and we were determined to lie on the riverbank and nap, and so you didn’t see any of us until you were right among us, and I apologize that you saw two of our company in such a state of deshabille.”

  “And what, pray, is a state of Jezebel?”

  The dapper little fellow laughed aloud, then stopped abruptly and turned away. Why? He was afraid. Of what?

  “Pardon my French,” said the Englishman. “In London we are not so pure as the gentlefolk of New England. When Napoleon took over France and proceeded to annex the bulk of Europe, there were few places for the displaced aristocracy and royalty to go. London is crawling with French visitors, and suddenly French words are chic. Oops, there I go again.”

  “You still have not told me what the French word meant. ‘Cheek,’ however, I understand—it is a characteristic that your whole company here seems to have.”

  The barrister chuckled. “I would say that it’s yourself that takes a cheeky tone with strangers, if it were not such an improper thing to say to a young lady to whom I have not been introduced. I pray you, tell me the name of your father and where he lives so I can inquire after your health.”

  “My father is dead,” she said, and then added, despite her own sense of panic as she did so, “He was hanged as a witch in Netticut.”

  They fell silent, all of them, and it made her uneasy, for they had nothing like the reaction she expected. Not revulsion at her confession of such indecent family connections; rather they all simply closed off and looked another way.

  “Well, I’m sorry to remind you of such a tragic event,” said the Englishman.

  “Please don’t be. I never knew him. I only just realized what his fate must have been. You don’t imagine that anyone at the orphanage would tell me such a thing outright!”

  “But you are a lady, aren’t you?” asked the Englishman. “There’s nothing of the schoolgirl about you.”

  “Being an orphan does not stop when you come of age,” said Purity. “But I will serve myself as father and mother, and give you my consent to introduce yourself to me.”

  The Englishman bowed deeply. “My name is Verily Cooper,” he said. “And my company at the moment consists of Mike Fink, who has been in the waterborne transportation business but is on a leave-of-absence, and my dear friend John-James Audubon, who is mute.”

  “No he’s not,” said Purity. For she saw in both Cooper and Audubon himself that the statement was a lie. “You really mustn’t lie to strangers. It starts things off in such an unfortunate way.”

  “I assure you, madam,” said Cooper, “that in New England, he is and shall remain completely mute.”

  And with that slight change, she could see in both of them that the statement was now true. “So you choose to be mute here in New England. Let me puzzle this out. You dare not open your mouth; therefore your very speech must put you in a bad light. No, in outright danger, for I think none of you cares much about public opinion. And what could endanger a man, just by speaking? The accent of a forbidden nation. A papist nation, I daresay. And the name being Audubon, and your manners toward a woman being tinged with unspeakable presumptions, I would guess that you are French.”

  Audubon turned red under his suntan and faced away from her. “I do not know how you know this, but you also must be seeing that I did not act improper to you.”

  “What she’s telling us,” said Verily Cooper, “is that she’s got her a knack.”

  “Please keep such crudity for times when you are alone with the ill-mannered,” said Purity. “I observe people keenly, that is all. And from his accent I am confident that my reasoning was correct.”

  The rough fellow, Mike Fink, spoke up. “When you hear a bunch of squealing and snorting, you can bet you’re somewhere near a pig.”

  Purity turned toward him. “I have no idea what you meant by that.”

  “I’m just saying a knack’s a knack.”

  “Enough,” said Cooper. “Less than a week in New England and we’ve already forgotten all caution? Knacks are illegal here. Therefore decent people don’t have them.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Mike Fink. “Except she does.”

  “But then, perhaps she is not decent,” said Audubon.

  It was Purity’s turn to blush. “You forget yourself, sir,” she said.

  “Never mind him,” said Cooper. “He’s just miffed because you made that remark about unspeakable presumptions.”

  “You’re travelers,” she said.

  “John-James paints North American birds with an eye toward publishing a book of his pictures for the use of scientists in Europe.”

  “And for this he needs a troop along? What do you do, hold his brushes?”

  “We’re not all on the same errand,” said Cooper.

  At that moment the two she had seen in the river came out of the bushes, still damp-haired but fully clothed.

  “Ma’am, I’m so sorry you had to see so much horseflesh without no horses,” said the White one.

  The Black one said not a thing, but never took his eyes from her.

  “This is Alvin Smith,” said Cooper. “He’s a man of inestimable abilities, but only because nobody has cared enough to estimate them. The short one is Arthur Stuart, no kin to the King, who travels with Alvin as his adopted nephew-in-law, or some such relationship.”

  “And you,” said Purity, “have been long enough out of England to pick up some American brag.”

  “But surrounded by Americans as I am,” said Cooper, “my brag is like a farthing in a sack of guineas.”

  She couldn’t help but laugh at the way he spoke. “So you travel in New England with a Frenchman, who is only able to avoid being expelled or, worse, arrested as a spy, by pretending to be a mute. You are a barrister, this fellow is a boatman, as I assume, and the two bathers are ...” Her voice trailed off.

  “Are what?” asked Alvin Smith.

  “Clean,” she said. Then she smiled.

  “What were you going to say?” asked Smith.

  “Don’t pres
s her,” said Cooper. “If someone decides to leave something unsaid, my experience is that everyone is happier if they don’t insist on his saying it.”

  “That’s OK,” said Arthur Stuart. “I don’t think she knows herself what was on her lips to say.”

  She laughed in embarrassment. “It’s true,” she said. “I think I was hoping that a jest would come to mind, and it didn’t.”

  Alvin smiled at her. “Or else the jest that did come to mind was of a sort that you couldn’t imagine yourself making, and so it went away.”

  She didn’t like the way he looked at her as if he thought he knew all about her. Never mind that she must be looking at him the same way—she did know about him. He was so full of confidence it made her want to throw mud on him just to show him he wasn’t carried along by angels. It was as if he feared nothing and imagined himself capable of achieving anything. And it wasn’t an illusion he was trying to create, either. He really was conceited; his attitude reeked of it. His only fear was that, when push came to shove, he might turn out to be even better than he thought himself to be.

  “I don’t know what I done to rub you the wrong way, ma’am,” said Smith, “other than bathing nekkid, but that’s how my mama taught me it ought to be done, so my clothes don’t shrink.”

  The others laughed. Purity didn’t.

  “Want something to eat?” Arthur Stuart asked her.

  “I don’t know, what do you have?” she said.

  His eyes were still focused on her, slightly widened, his jaw just a bit slack. Oh, it was love all right, the swooning moon-in-juning kind.

  “Berries,” said the boy. He held out his hat, which had several dozen blackberries down in it. She reached in, took one, tasted it.

  “Oh no,” said Cooper mildly. “You’ve eaten a berry, so you must spend one month of every year in Hades.”

  “But these berries are from New England, not hell,” she said.

  “That’s a relief,” said Smith. “I wasn’t sure where the border was.”

  Purity didn’t know how to take this Smith fellow. She didn’t like looking at him. His boldness bothered her. He didn’t even seem ashamed that she had seen him naked.