“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 himself.”
“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 Taleswapper’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.
“I think my real vision was about the same thing,” said Alvin.
“You don’t have to tell me about the Shining Man,” said Taleswapper. “I never mean to pry.”
“You mean you just pry by accident?” said Alvin.
That was the kind of remark that got him a slap across the face at home, but Taleswapper only laughed.
“I did something evil and I didn’t even know it,” said Alvin. “The Shining Man came and stood by the foot of my bed, and first he showed me a vision of what I done, so I knowed it was bad. I tell you I cried, to know I was so wicked. But then he showed me what my knack was for, and now I see it’s the same thing you’re talking about. I saw a stone that I pulled out of a mountain, and it was round as a ball, and when I looked close I saw it was the whole world, with forests and animals and oceans and fish and all on it. That’s what my knack is for, to try to put things in order.”
Taleswapper’s eyes were gleaming. “The Shining Man showed you such a vision,” he said. “Such a vision as I’d give my life to see.”
“Only cause I’d used my knack to cause harm to others, just for my own pleasure,” said Alvin. “I made a promise then, my most solemn vow, that I’d never use my knack for my own good. Only for others.”
“A good promise,” said Taleswapper. “I wish all men and women in the world would take such an oath and keep it.”
“Anyway, that’s how I know that the—the Unmak
er, it isn’t a vision. The Shining Man wasn’t even a vision. What he showed me, that was a vision, but him standing there, he was real.”
“And the Unmaker?”
“Real, too. I don’t just see it in my head, it’s there.”
Taleswapper nodded, his eyes never leaving Alvin’s face.
“I’ve got to make things,” said Alvin. “Faster than he can tear them down.”
“Nobody can make things fast enough for that,” said Taleswapper. “If all the men in all the world made all the earth into a million million million million bricks, and built a wall all the days of their lives, the wall would crumble faster than they could build it. Sections of the wall would fall apart even before they built them.”
“Now that’s silly,” said Alvin. “A wall can’t fall down before you build it up.”
“If they keep at it long enough, the bricks will crumble into dust when they pick them up, their own hands will rot and slough like slime from their bones, until brick and flesh and bone alike all break down into the same indistinguishable dust. Then the Unmaker will sneeze, and the dust win be infinitely dispersed so that it can never come together again. The universe will be cold, still, silent, dark, and at last the Unmaker will be at rest.”
Alvin tried to make sense out of what Taleswapper was saying. It was the same thing he did whenever Thrower talked about religion in school, so Alvin thought of it as kind of a dangerous thing to do. But he couldn’t stop himself from doing it, and from asking his questions, even if they made people mad. “If things are breaking down faster than they’re getting made, then how come anything’s still around? Why hasn’t the Unmaker already won? What are we doing here?”
Taleswapper wasn’t Reverend Thrower. Alvin’s question didn’t make him angry. He just knit his brow and shook his head. “I don’t know. You’re right. We can’t be here. Our existence is impossible.”
“Well we are here, in case you didn’t notice,” said Alvin. “What kind of stupid tale is that, when we just have to look at each other to know it isn’t true?”
“It has problems, I admit.”
“I thought you only told stories you believe.”
“I believed it while I was telling it.”
Taleswapper looked so mournful that Alvin reached out and laid his hand on the man’s shoulder, though his coat was so thick and Alvin’s hand so small that he wasn’t altogether sure Taleswapper felt his touch. “I believed it, too. Parts of it. For a while.”
“Then there is truth in it. Maybe not much, but some.” Taleswapper looked relieved.
But Alvin couldn’t leave well enough alone. “Just because you believe it doesn’t make it so.”
Taleswapper’s eyes went wide. Now I’ve done it, thought Alvin. Now I’ve made him mad, just like I make Thrower mad. I do it to everbody. So he wasn’t surprised when Taleswapper reached out both arms toward him, took Alvin’s face between his hands, and spoke with such force as to drive the words deep into Alvin’s forehead. “Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.”
And the words did pierce him, and he understood them, though he could not have put in words what it was he understood. Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth. If it feels true to me, then there is something true in it, even if it isn’t all true. And if I study it out in my mind, then maybe I can find what parts of it are true, and what parts are false, and—
And Alvin realized something else. That all his arguments with Thrower came down to this: that if something just plain didn’t make sense to Alvin, he didn’t believe it, and no amount of quoting from the Bible would convince him. Now Taleswapper was telling him that he was right to refuse to believe things that made no sense. “Taleswapper, does that mean that what I don’t believe can’t be true?”
Taleswapper raised his eyebrows and came back with another proverb. “Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.”
Alvin was fed up with proverbs. “For once would you tell me straight!”
“The proverb is the straight truth, lad. I refuse to twist it up to fit a confused mind.”
“Well, if my mind’s confused, it’s all your fault. All your talk about bricks crumbling before the wall is built—”
“Didn’t you believe that?”
“Maybe I did. I reckon if I set out to weave all the grass of this meadow into bug baskets, before I got to the far end of the meadow the grass would all have died and rotted to nothing. I reckon if I set out to turn all the trees from here to Noisy River into barns, the trees’d all be dead and fell before I ever got to the last of them. Can’t build a house out of rotted logs.”
“I was going to say, ‘Men cannot build permanent things out of impermanent pieces.’ That is the law. But the way you said it was the proverb of the law: ‘You can’t build a house out of rotted logs.’ ”
“I said a proverb?”
“And when we get back to the house, I’ll write it in my book.”
“In the sealed part?” asked Alvin. Then he remembered that he had only seen that book by peeking through a crack in his floor late at night when Taleswapper was writing by candlelight in the room below him.
Taleswapper looked at him sharp. “I hope you never tried to conjure open that seal.”
Alvin was offended. He might peek through a crack, but he’d never sneak. “Just knowing you don’t want me to read that part is better than any old seal, and if you don’t know that, you ain’t my friend. I don’t pry into your secrets.”
“My secrets?” Taleswapper laughed. “I seal that back part because that’s where my own writings go, and I simply don’t want anyone else writing in that part of the book.”
“Do other people write in the front part?”
“They do.”
“Well, what do they write? Can I write there?”
“They write one sentence about the most important thing they ever did or ever saw with their own eyes. That one sentence is all I need from then on to remind me of their story. So when I visit in another city, in another house, I can open the book, read the sentence, and tell the story.”
Alvin thought of a remarkable possibility. Taleswapper had lived with Ben Franklin, hadn’t he? “Did Ben Franklin write in your book?”
“He wrote the very first sentence.”
“He wrote down the most important thing he ever did?”
“That he did.”
“Well, what was it?”
Taleswapper stood up. “Come back to the house with me, lad, and I’ll show you. And on the way I’ll tell you the story to explain what he wrote.”
Alvin sprang up spry, and took the old man by his heavy sleeve, and fairly dragged him toward the path back down to the house. “Come on, then!” Alvin didn’t know if Taleswapper had decided not to go on to church, or if he plumb forgot that’s where they were supposed to go—whatever the reason, Alvin was happy enough with the result. A Sunday with no church at all was a Sunday worth being alive. Add to that Taleswapper’s stories and Maker Ben’s own writing in a book, and it was well nigh to being a perfect day.
“There’s no hurry, lad. I won’t die before noon, nor will you, and stories take some time to tell.”
“Was it something he made?” asked Alvin. “The most important thing?”
“As a matter of fact, it was.”
“I knew it! The two-glass spectacles? The stove?”
“People used to say to him all the time, Ben, you’re a true Maker. But he always denied it. Just like he denied he was a wizard. I’ve got no knack for hidden powers, he said. I just take pieces of things and put them together in a better way. There were stoves before I made my stove. There were spectacles before I made my spectacles. I never really made anything in my life, in the way a true Maker would do it. I give you two-glass spectacles, but a Maker would give you new eyes.”
“He figured he never made anything?”
“I asked him that one day. The very day that I was starting out with my bo
ok. I said to him, Ben, what’s the most important thing you ever made? And he started in on what I just told you, about how he never really made anything, and I said to him, Ben, you don’t believe that, and I don’t believe that. And he said, Bill, you found me out. There’s one thing I made, and it’s the most important thing I ever did, and it’s the most important thing I ever saw.”
Taleswapper fell silent, just shambling down the slope through leaves that whispered loud underfoot.
“Well, what was it?”
“Don’t you want to wait till you get home and read it for yourself?”
Alvin got real mad then, madder than he meant to. “I hate it when people know something and they won’t say!”
“No need to get your dander up, lad. I’ll tell you. What he wrote was this: The only thing I ever truly made was Americans.”
“That don’t make sense. Americans are born.”
“Well, now, that’s not so, Alvin. Babies are born. In England the same as in America. So it isn’t being born that makes them American.”
Alvin thought about that for a second. “It’s being born in America.”
“Well, that’s true enough. But along about fifty years ago, a baby born in Philadelphia was never called an American baby. It was a Pennsylvanian baby. And babies born in New Amsterdam were Knickerbockers, and babies born in Boston were Yankees, and babies born in Charleston were Jacobians or Cavaliers or some such name.”
“They still are,” Alvin pointed out.
“They are indeed, lad, but they’re something else besides. All those names, Old Ben figured, those names divided us up into Virginians and Orangemen and Rhode Islanders, into Whites and Reds and Blacks, into Quakers and Papists and Puritans and Presbyterians, into Dutch, Swedish, French, and English. Old Ben saw how a Virginian could never quite trust a man from Netticut, and how a White man could never quite trust a Red, because they were different. And he said to himself, If we’ve got all these names to hold us apart, why not a name to bind us together? He toyed with a lot of names that already were used. Colonials, for instance. But he didn’t like calling us all Colonials because that made us always turn our eyes back to Europe, and besides, the Reds aren’t Colonials, are they! Nor are the Blacks, since they came as slaves. Do you see the problem?”
Seventh Son Page 14
