“Are you doing that, Alvin? Can you try?”
“No,” said Alvin.
“You have to fight against the pain, so you can use your own knack to make things right.”
“I never will,” said Alvin.
“Why not!” cried Faith.
“The Shining Man,” said Alvin. “I promised him.”
Taleswapper remembered Alvin’s oath to the Shining Man, and his heart sank.
“What’s the Shining Man?” asked Miller.
“A—visitation he had, when he was little,” said Taleswapper.
“How come we never heard of this afore now?” Miller asked.
“It was the night the ridgebeam split,” said Taleswapper. “Alvin promised the Shining Man that he’d never use his power for his own benefit.”
“But Alvin,” said Faith. “This isn’t to make you rich or nothing, this is to save your life.”
The boy only winced against the pain and shook his head.
“Will you leave me with him?” said Taleswapper. “Just for a few minutes, so I can talk to him?”
Miller was rushing Faith out the door of the room before Taleswapper even finished his sentence.
“Alvin,” said Taleswapper. “You must listen to me, listen carefully. You know I won’t lie to you. An oath is a terrible thing, and I’d never counsel a man to break his word, even to save his own life. So I won’t tell you to use your power for your own good. Do you hear me?”
Alvin nodded.
“Just think, though. Think of the Unmaker going through the world. Nobody sees him as he does his work, as he tears down and destroys things. Nobody but one solitary boy. Who is that boy, Alvin?”
Alvin’s lips formed the word, though no sound came out. Me.
“And that boy has been given a power that he can’t even begin to understand. The power to build against the enemy’s unbuilding. And more than that, Alvin, the desire to build as well. A boy who answers every glimpse of the Unmaker with a bit of making. Now, tell me, Alvin, those who help the Unmaker, are they the friend or the enemy of mankind?”
Enemy, said Alvin’s lips.
“So if you help the Unmaker destroy his most dangerous foe, you’re an enemy of mankind, aren’t you?”
Anguish wrung sound from the boy. “You’re twisting it,” he said.
“I’m straightening it,” said Taleswapper. “Your oath was never to use your power for your own benefit. But if you die, only the Unmaker benefits, and if you live, if that leg is healed, then that’s for the good of all mankind. No, Alvin, it’s for the good of the world and all that’s in it.”
Alvin whimpered, more against the pain in his mind than the pain in his body.
“But your oath was clear, wasn’t it? Never to your own benefit. So why not satisfy one oath with another, Alvin? Take an oath now, that you will devote your whole life to building up against the Unmaker. If you keep that oath—and you will, Alvin, you’re a boy who keeps his word—if you keep that oath, then saving your own life is truly for the benefit of others, and not for your private good at all.”
Taleswapper waited, waited, until at last Alvin nodded slightly.
“Do you take an oath, Alvin Junior, that you will live your life to defeat the Unmaker, to make things whole and good and right?”
“Yes,” whispered the boy.
“Then I tell you, by the terms of your own promise, you must heal yourself.”
Alvin gripped Taleswapper’s arm. “How,” he whispered.
“That I don’t know, boy,” said Taleswapper. “How to use your power, you have to find that out inside yourself. I can only tell you that you must try, or the enemy has his victory, and I’ll have to end your tale with your body being lowered into a grave.”
To Taleswapper’s surprise, Alvin smiled. Then Taleswapper understood the joke. His tale would end with the grave no matter what he did today. “Right enough, boy,” said Taleswapper. “But I’d rather have a few more pages about you before I put finis to the Book of Alvin.”
“I’ll try,” whispered Alvin.
If he tried, then surely he would succeed. Alvin’s protector had not brought him this far only to let him die. Taleswapper had no doubt that Alvin had the power to heal himself, if he could only figure out the way. His own body was far more complicated than the stone. But if he was to live, he had to learn the pathways of his own flesh, bind the fissures in the bones.
They made a bed for Taleswapper out in the great room. He offered to sleep on the floor beside Alvin’s bed, but Miller shook his head and answered, “That’s my place.”
Taleswapper found it hard to sleep, though. It was the middle of the night when he finally gave up, lit a lantern with a match from the fire, bundled on his coat, and went outside.
The wind was brisk. There was a storm coming, and from the smell in the air, it would be snow. The animals were restless in the big barn. It occurred to Taleswapper that he might not be alone outside tonight. There might be Reds in the shadows, or even wandering among the buildings of the farm, watching him. He shuddered once, then shrugged off the fear. It was too cold a night. Even the most bloodthirsty, White-hating Choc-Taws or Cree-Eks spying from the south were too smart to be outside with such a storm coming.
Soon the snow would fall, the first of the season, but it would be no slight trace. It would snow all day tomorrow, Taleswapper could feel it, for the air behind the storm would be even colder than this, cold enough for the snow to be fluffy and dry, the kind of snow that piled deeper and deeper, hour after hour. If Alvin had not hurried them home with the millstone in a single day, they would have been trying to sledge the stone home in the midst of the snowfall. It would have become slippery. Something even worse might have happened.
Taleswapper found himself in the millhouse, looking at the stone. It was so solid-looking, it was hard to imagine anyone ever moving it. He touched the face of it again, being careful not to cut himself. His fingers brushed over the shallow dress cuts, where flour would collect when the great water wheel turned the shaft and made the grindstone roll around and around atop the millstone, as steadily as the Earth rolled around and around the sun, year after year, turning time into dust as surely as the mill turned grain into flour.
He glanced down, to the place where the earth had given way slightly under the millstone, tipping it and nearly killing the boy. The bottom of the depression glistened in the lantern light. Taleswapper knelt and dipped his finger into a half-inch of water. It must have collected there, weakening the ground, carrying away the soil. Not so that it would ever be visibly moist. Just enough that when great weight was placed on it, it would give way.
Ah, Unmaker, thought Taleswapper, show yourself to me, and I’ll build such a building that you’ll be trussed up and held captive forever. But try as he might, he could not make his eyes see the trembling air that had shown itself to Alvin Miller’s seventh son. Finally Taleswapper took up the lantern and left the millhouse. The first flakes were falling. The wind had almost died. The snow came faster and faster, dancing in the light of his lantern. By the time he reached the house, the ground was grey with snow, the forest invisible in the distance. He went inside the house, lay down on the floor without removing even his boots, and fell asleep.
Book
THEY KEPT A THREE-LOG FIRE, night and day, so the stones of the wall seemed to glow with heat, and the air in his room was dry. Alvin lay unmoving on his bed, his right leg heavy with splints and bandages, pressing into the bed like an anchor, the rest of his body afloat, adrift, pitching and rolling and yawing. He was dizzy, and a little sick.
But he hardly noticed the weight of his leg, or the dizziness. The pain was his enemy, throbs and stabs of it taking his mind away from the task that Taleswapper had set him: to heal himself.
Yet the pain was his friend, too. It built a wall around him so he scarce knew he was in a house, in a roof, on a bed. The outside world could burn up and turn to ash and he’d never notice it. It was the world
inside that he was exploring now.
Taleswapper didn’t know half what he was talking about. It wasn’t a matter of making pictures in his mind. His leg wouldn’t get better from just pretending it was all healed up. But Taleswapper still had the right idea. If Alvin could feel his way through the rock, could find the weak and strong places and teach them where to break and where to hold firm, why couldn’t he do it with skin and bone?
Trouble was, skin and bone was all mixed up. The rock was pretty much the same thing through and through, but the skin changed with every layer, and it wasn’t no easy trick figuring where everything went. He lay there with his eyes closed, looking into his own flesh for the first time. At first he tried following the pain, but that didn’t get nowhere, just led him to where everything was mashed and cut and messed up so he couldn’t tell up from down. After a long while he tried a different tack. He listened to his heart beating. At first the pain kept tearing him away, but after a while he closed in on that sound. If there was noise in the world outside he didn’t know about it, because the pain shut all that out. And the rhythm of the heartbeat, that shut out the pain, or mostly, anyway.
He followed the tracks of his blood, the big strong stream, the little streams. Sometimes he got lost. Sometimes a stab from his leg just broke in and demanded to be heard. But by and by he found his way to healthy skin and bone in the other leg. The blood wasn’t half so strong there, but it led him where he wanted to go. He found all the layers, like the skin of an onion. He learned their order, saw how the muscle was tied together, how the tiny veins linked up, how the skin stretched taut and bonded tight.
Only then did he find his way to the bad leg. The patch of skin Mama sewed on was pretty much dead, just turning to rot. Alvin Junior knew what it needed, though, if any part of it was to live. He found the mashed-off ends of the arteries around the wound, and began to urge them to grow, just the way he made cracks travel through stone. The stone was easy, compared to this—to make a crack, it just had to let go, that’s all. The living flesh was slower to do what he wanted, and pretty soon he gave up on all but the strongest artery.
He began to see how it was using bits and pieces of this and that to build with. A lot was happening that was far too small and fast and complicated for Alvin to get hold of with his mind. But he could get his body to free up what the artery needed in order to grow. He could send it where it was needed, and after a while the artery linked up with the rotted tissue. It took some doing, but he finally found the end of a shriveled artery and linked them up, and sent the blood flowing into the sewn-on patch.
Too soon, too fast. He felt the heat on his leg from blood pouring out of the dead flesh at a dozen points; it couldn’t hold in all the blood he sent. Slow, slow, slow. He followed the blood, now seeping instead of pumping, and again linked up blood vessels, arteries to veins, trying to match it, as best he could, to the other leg.
Finally it was done, or well enough. The normal flow of blood could be contained. Many parts of the patch of skin came back to life as the blood returned. Other parts stayed dead. Alvin kept going around and around with the blood, stripping away the dead parts, breaking them up into bits and pieces too small for him to recognize. But the living parts recognized them well enough, took them up, put them to work. Wherever Alvin explored, he made the flesh grow.
Until he was so weary in his mind from thinking so small and working so hard that he fell asleep in spite of himself.
“I don’t want to wake him.”
“No way to change the bandage without touching it, Faith.”
“All right, then—oh, be careful, Alvin! No, let me!”
“I’ve done this before—”
“On cows, Alvin, not on little boys!”
Alvin Junior felt pressure on his leg. Something pulling at the skin there. The pain wasn’t as bad as yesterday. But he was still too tired even to open his eyes. Even to make a sound to let them know he was awake, he could hear them.
“Good laws, Faith, he must have bled something awful in the night.”
“Mama, Mary says I have to—”
“Hush up and get on out of here, Cally! Can’t you see your ma’s worried about—”
“No need to yell at the boy, Alvin. He’s only seven.”
“Seven’s old enough to keep his mouth shut and leave grown-ups alone when we’ve got things to—look at that.”
“I can hardly believe it.”
“I thought to see pus coming out like cream from a cow’s tit.”
“Clean as can be.”
“And skin growing back, will you look at that? Your sewing must’ve took.”
“I hardly dared to hope that skin would live.”
“Can’t even see no bone under there.”
“The Lord is blessing us. I prayed all night, Alvin, and look what God has done.”
“Well, you should’ve prayed harder, then, and got it healed up tight. I need this boy for chores.”
“Don’t you get blasphemous with me, Alvin Miller.”
“It just gripes me hollow, the way God always sneaks in to take the credit. Maybe Alvin’s just a good healer, you ever think of that?”
“Look, your nastiness is waking the boy.”
“See if he wants a drink of water.”
“He’s getting one whether he wants it or not.”
Alvin wanted it badly. His body was dry, not just his mouth; it needed to make back what it lost in blood. So he swallowed as much as he could, from a tin cup held to his mouth. A lot of it spilled around his face and neck but he didn’t hardly notice that. It was the water that trickled into his belly that mattered. He lay back and tried to find out from the inside how his wound was doing. But it was too hard to get back there, too hard to concentrate. He dropped off before he was halfway there.
He woke again, and thought it must be night again, or maybe the curtains were drawn. He couldn’t find out cause it was too hard to open his eyes, and the pain was back, fierce again, and something maybe even worse: the wound was a-tickling till he could hardly keep himself from reaching down to scratch. After a while, though, he was able to find the wound and once again help the layers to grow. By the time he slept, there was a thin, complete layer of skin over the whole wound. Underneath, the body was still working to renew the ravaged muscles and knit the broken bones. But there’d be no more loss of blood, no more open wound to get infected.
“Look at this, Taleswapper. You ever seen the like of this?”
“Skin like a newborn baby.”
“Maybe I’m crazy, but except for the splint I can’t see no reason to leave this leg bound up no more.”
“Not a sign of a wound. No, you’re right, there’s no need for a bandage now.”
“Maybe my wife is right, Taleswapper. Maybe God just rared back and passed a miracle on my boy.”
“Can’t prove anything. When the boy wakes up, maybe he’ll know something about it.”
“Not a chance of that. He hasn’t even opened his eyes this whole time.”
“One thing’s certain, Mr. Miller. The boy isn’t about to die. That’s more than I could have guessed yesterday.”
“I was set to build him a box to hold him underground, that I was. I didn’t see no chance him living. Will you look at how healthy he is? I want to know what’s protecting him, or who.”
“Whatever is protecting him, Mr. Miller, the boy is stronger. That’s something to think about. His protector split that stone, but Al Junior put it back together and not a thing his protector could do about it.”
“Reckon he even knew what he was doing?”
“He must have some notion of his powers. He knew what he could do with the stone.”
“I never heard of a knack like this, to tell you straight. I told Faith what he did with that stone, dressing it on the backside without ever laying on a tool, and she starts reading from the Book of Daniel and crying about fulfillment of the prophecy. Wanted to rush in here and warn the boy about clay feet. Don
’t that beat all? Religion makes them crazy. Not a woman I ever met wasn’t crazy with religion.”
The door opened.
“Get out of here! Are you so dumb I have to tell you twenty times, Cally? Where’s his mother, can’t she keep one seven-year-old boy away from—”
“Be easy on the lad, Miller. He’s gone now, anyway.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with him. As soon as Al Junior is down, I see Cally’s face wherever I look. Like an undertaker hoping for a fee.”
“Maybe it’s strange to him. To have Alvin hurt.”
“As many times as Alvin’s been an inch from death—”
“But never injured.”
A long silence.
“Taleswapper.”
“Yes, Mr. Miller?”
“You’ve been a good friend to us here, sometimes in spite of ourselfs. But I reckon you’re still a walking man.”
“That I am, Mr. Miller.”
“What I’m saying is, not to rush you off, but if you go anytime soon, and you happen to be heading generally eastward, do you think you could carry a letter for me?”
“I’d be glad to. And no fee, to sender or receiver.”
“That’s right kind of you. I been thinking on what you said. About a boy needing to be sent far off from certain dangers. And I thought, in all the world where’s there some folks I can trust to took after the boy? We got no kin worth speaking of back in New England—I don’t want the boy raised Puritan on the brink of hell anyway.”
“I’m relieved to hear that, Mr. Miller, because I have no great longing to see New England again myself.”
“If you just follow back on the road we made coming west, sooner or later you come along to a place on the Hatrack River, some thirty miles north of the Hio, not all that far downriver from Fort Dekane. There’s a road house there, or leastwise there was, with a graveyard out back where a stone says ‘Vigor he died to save his kin.’ ”
“You want me to take the boy?”
“No, no, I’ll not send him now that the snow’s come. Water—”
Seventh Son Page 19
