Al Junior leaned over the table, his eyes bright and unblinking. “Was he truly a maker?”
“All those stories, each in its own time,” said Taleswapper. “As long as your father and mother are willing to have me around, and as long as I believe I’m being useful, I’ll stay and tell stories night and day.”
“Starting with Ben Franklin,” insisted Alvin Junior. “Did he really pull lightning out of the sky?”
Visions
ALVIN JUNIOR WOKE UP sweating from the nightmare. It was so real, and he was panting just as if he had been trying to run away. But there was no running away, he knew that. He lay there with his eyes closed, afraid to open them for a while, knowing that when he did, it would still be there. A long time ago, when he was still little, he used to cry out when this nightmare came. But when he tried to explain it to Pa and Mama, they always said the same thing. “Why, that’s just nothing, son. You’re telling me you’re so a-scared of nothing?” So he learned himself to stifle and never cry when the dream came.
He opened his eyes, and it fled away to the corners of the room, where he didn’t have to look right at it. That was good enough. Stay there and let me be, he said silently.
Then he realized that it was full daylight, and Mama had laid out his black broadcloth pants and jacket and a clean shirt. His Sunday go-to-meeting clothes. He’d almost rather go back to the nightmare than wake up to this.
Alvin Junior hated Sunday mornings. He hated getting all dressed up, so he couldn’t set on the ground or kneel in the grass or even bend over without something getting messed up and Mama telling him to have some respect for the Lord’s day. He hated having to tiptoe around the house all morning because it was the Sabbath and there wasn’t to be no playing or making noise on the Sabbath. Worst of all he hated the thought of sitting on a hard bench down front, with Reverend Thrower looking him in the eye while he preached about the fires of hell that were waiting for the ungodly who despised the true religion and put their faith in the feeble understanding of man. Every Sunday, it seemed like.
And it wasn’t that Alvin really despised religion. He just despised Reverend Thrower. It was all those hours in school, now that harvest was over. Alvin Junior was a good reader, and he got right answers most of the time in his ciphering. But that wasn’t enough for old Thrower. He also had to teach religion right along with it. The other children—the Swedes and Knickerbockers from upriver, the Scotch and English from down—only got a licking when they sassed or got three wrong answers in a row. But Thrower took his cane to Alvin Junior every chance he got, it seemed like, and it wasn’t over book-learning, it was always about religion.
Of course it didn’t help much that the Bible kept striking Alvin funny at all the wrong times. That’s what Measure said, the time that Alvin ran away from school and hid in David’s house till Measure found him nigh onto suppertime. “If you just didn’t laugh when he reads from the Bible, you wouldn’t get whupped so much.”
But it was funny. When Jonathan shot all those arrows in the sky and they missed. When Jeroboam didn’t shoot enough arrows out his window. When Pharaoh kept finding tricky ways to keep the Israelites from leaving. When Samson was so dumb he told his secret to Delilah after she already betrayed him twice. “How can I keep from laughing?”
“Just think about getting blisters on your butt,” said Measure. “That ought to take the smile off your face.”
“But I never remember till after I already laughed.”
“Then you’ll probably never need a chair till you’re fifteen years old,” said Measure. “Cause Mama won’t ever let you out of that school, and Thrower won’t ever let up on you, and you can’t hide in David’s house forever.”
“Why not?”
“Because hiding from your enemy is the same as letting him win.”
So Measure wouldn’t keep him safe, and he had to go back—and take a licking from Pa, too, for scaring everybody by running away and hiding so long. Still, Measure had helped him. It was a comfort to know that somebody else was willing to say that Thrower was his enemy. All the others were so full of how wonderful and godly and educated Thrower was, and how kind he was to teach the children from his fount of wisdom, that it like to made Alvin puke.
Even though Alvin mostly kept his face under control during school, and so got less lickings, Sunday was the most terrible struggle of all, because he sat there on that hard bench listening to Thrower, half the time wanting to bust out laughing till he fell on the floor, and half the time wanting to stand up and shout, “That’s just about the stupidest thing I ever heard a growed man say!” He even had a feeling Pa wouldn’t lick him very hard for saying that to Thrower, since Pa never had much of an opinion of the man. But Mama—she’d never forgive him for doing blasphemy in the house of the Lord.
Sunday morning, he decided, is designed to let sinners have a sample of the first day of eternity in hell.
Probably Mama wouldn’t even let Taleswapper tell so much as the tiniest story today, lessen it came from the Bible. And since Taleswapper never seemed to tell stories from the Bible, Alvin Junior guessed that nothing good would come today.
Mama’s voice blasted up the stairs. “Alvin Junior, I’m so sick and tired of you taking three hours to get dressed on Sunday morning that I’m about to take you to church naked!”
“I ain’t naked!” Alvin shouted down. But since what he was wearing was his nightgown, it was probably worse than being naked. He shucked off the flannel nightgown, hung it on a peg, and started dressing as fast as he could.
It was funny. On any other day, he only had to reach out for his clothes without even thinking, and they’d be there, just the piece he wanted. Shirt, trousers, stockings, shoes. Always there in his hand when he reached. But on Sunday morning, it was like the clothes ran away from his hand. He’d go for his shirt and come back with his pants. He’d reach for a sock and come up with a shoe, time after time. It was like as if the clothes didn’t want to get put on his body any more than he wanted them there.
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 closed 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?”
“I
t 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?”
Seventh Son Page 13
