As they were about to leave, Mike brought his horse—stamping and fuming, since Mike was a sturdy load and not much of a horseman—beside the carriage and said to Alvin, “Well this plan worked too well! I was looking forward to scaring some poor thug half to death before the night was through!”
Peggy leaned over from the other side of the front seat and said, “You’ll get your wish about a mile up the road. There’s two fellows there who saw Dr. Physicker’s carriage come here this afternoon and wondered what he was doing with four horses tied behind. They’re just keeping watch on the road, but even if they don’t stop us, they’ll give the alarm and then we’ll be chased instead of getting away clean.”
“Don’t kill them, Mike,” said Alvin.
“I won’t unless they make me,” said Mike. “Don’t worry, I ain’t loose with other folks’ lives no more.” He rode to Armor, gave him the reins, and said, “Here, bring this girl along with you. I do better on my feet for this kind of work.” Then he dismounted and took off running.
Near as I can gather from Mike Fink’s tale of the event—and you got to understand that a fellow who wants his story to be truthful has to allow for a lot of brag before deciding what’s true in a tale of Mike Fink’s heroic exploits—those two smarter-than-normal thugs was dozing while sitting with their backs to opposite sides of the same stump when all of a sudden they both felt their arms pretty near wrenched right out of their sockets and then they were dragged around, grabbed by the collars, and smacked together so hard their noses bled and they saw stars.
“You’re lucky I took me a vow of nonviolence,” said Mike Fink, “or you’d be suffering some pain right now.”
Since they were already suffering something pretty excruciating, they didn’t want to find out what this night-wandering fellow thought of as pain. Instead, they obeyed him and held very still as he tied their hands to a couple of lengths of rope, so that the one man’s right hand was tied on one end of a rope that held the other man’s left, with about two feet of rope between them; and the same with their other two hands. Then Fink made them kneel, picked up a huge log, and laid it down across the two lengths of rope that joined them. What he could lift alone they couldn’t lift together. They just knelt there as if they were praying to the log, their hands too far apart even to dream of untying their bonds.
“Next time you want gold,” said Fink, “you ought to get yourself a pick and shovel and dig for it, stead of lying in wait in the night for some innocent fellow to come by and get himself robbed and killed.”
“We wasn’t going to rob nobody,” burbled one of the men.
“It’s a sure thing you wasn’t,” said Fink, “cause any man ever wants to get at Alvin Smith has to go through me, and I make a better wall than window, I’ll tell you that right now.”
Then he jogged back to the road, waved to the others, and waited for them to come alongside so he could mount his horse. In a couple of minutes it was done, and they rode briskly south along a lacework of roads that would completely bypass Wheelwright—including the fancy carriage waiting all day empty by the river, until Horace Guester crossed over, got in the carriage, and used it to shop for groceries in the big-city market that was Wheelwright’s pride and joy. That’s when the ruffians knew they had been fooled. Oh, some of them lit out in search of Alvin’s group, but they had a whole day’s head start, or nearly so, and not a one of them found anything except a couple of men kneeling before a log with their butts in the air.
All the way to the coast, Calvin expected to be accosted by Napoleon’s troops, the carriage blown to bits with grapeshot or set afire or some other grisly end. Why he expected Napoleon to be ungrateful he didn’t know. Perhaps it was simply a feeling of general unease. Here he was, not yet twenty years old, and already he had moved through the salons of London and Paris, had spent hours alone discussing a thousand different things with the most powerful man in the world, had learned as many of the secrets of that powerful man as he was likely ever to tell, spoke French if not fluently then competently, and through it all had remained aloof, untouched, his life’s dream unchanged. He was a Maker, far more so than Alvin, who remained at the rough frontier of a crude upstart country that couldn’t properly call itself a nation; who had Alvin known, except other homespun types like himself? Yet Calvin felt vaguely afraid at the thought of going back to America. Something was trying to stop him. Something didn’t want him to go.
“It is nerves,” said Honor’. “You will face your brother. You know now that he is a provincial clown, but still he remains your nemesis, the stick against which you must measure yourself. Also you are traveling with me, and you are constantly aware of the need to make a good impression.”
“And why would I need to impress you, Honor’?”
“Because I am going to write you into a story someday, my friend. Remember that the ultimate power is mine. You may decide what you will do in this life, up to the point. But I will decide what others think of you, and not just now but long after you’re dead.”
“If anyone still reads your novels,” said Calvin.
“You don’t understand, my dear bumpkin. Whether they read my novels or not, my judgment of your life will stand. These things take on a life of their own. No one remembers the original source, or cares either.”
“So people will only remember what you say about me—and you they won’t remember at all.”
Honord chuckled. “Oh, I don’t know about that, Calvin. I intend to be memorable. But then, do I care whether I’m remembered? I think not. I have lived without the affection of my own mother; why should I crave the affection of strangers not yet born?”
“It’s not whether you’re remembered,” said Calvin. “It’s whether you changed the world.”
“And the first change I will make is: They must remember me!” Honor”s voice was so loud that the coachman slid open the panel and inquired whether they wanted something from him. “More speed,” cried Honor’, “and softer bumps. Oh, and when the horses relieve themselves: Less odor.”
The coachman growled and closed the panel shut.
“Don’t you intend to change the world?” asked Calvin.
“Change it? A paltry project, smacking of weak ambition and much self-contempt. Your brother wants to build a city. You want to tear it down before his eyes. I am the one with vision, Calvin. I intend to create a world. A world more fascinating, engrossing, spellbinding, intricate, beautiful, and real than this world.”
“You’re going to outdo God?”
“He spent far too much time on geology and botany. For him, Adam was an afterthought—oh, by the way, is man found upon the Earth? I shall not make that mistake. I will concentrate on people, and slip the science into the cracks.”
“The difference is that your people will all be confined to tiny black marks on paper,” said Calvin.
“My people will be more real than these shallow creatures God has made! I, too, will make them in my own image—only taller—and mine will have more palpable reality, more inner life, more connection to the living world around them than these mud-covered peasants or the calculating courtiers of the palace or the swaggering soldiers and bragging businessmen who keep Paris under their thumbs.”
“Instead of worrying about the emperor stopping us, perhaps I should worry about lightning striking us,” said Calvin.
It was meant as a joke, but Honor’ did not smile. “Calvin, if God was going to strike you dead for anything, you’d already be dead by now. I don’t pretend to know whether God exists, but I’ll tell you this—the old man is doddering now! The old fellow talks rough but it’s all a memory. He hasn’t the stuff anymore! He can’t stop us! Oh, maybe he can write us out of his will, but we’ll make our own fortune and let the old boy stand back lest he be splashed when we hurtle by!”
“Do you ever have even a moment of self-doubt?”
“None,” said Honor’. “I live in the constant certainty of failure, and the constant certaint
y of genius. It is a species of madness, but greatness is not possible without it. Your problem, Calvin, is that you never really question yourself about anything. However you feel, that’s the right way to feel, and so you feel that way and everything else better get out of your way. Whereas I endeavor to change my feelings because my feelings are always wrong. For instance, when approaching a woman you lust after, the foolish man acts out his feelings and clutches at an inviting breast or makes some fell invitation that gets him slapped and keeps him from the best parties for the rest of the year. But the wise man looks the woman in the eye and serenades her about her astonishing beauty and her great wisdom and his own inadequacy to explain to her how much she deserves her place in the exact center of the universe. No woman can resist this, Calvin, or if she can, she’s not worth having.”
The carriage came to a stop.
Honor’ flung open the door. “Smell the air!”
“Rotting fish,” said Calvin.
“The coast! I wonder if I shall throw up, and if I do, whether the sea air will have affected the color and consistency of my vomitus.”
Calvin ignored his deliberately crude banter as he reached up for their bags. He well know that Honor’ was only crude when he didn’t much respect his company; when with aristocrats, Honor’ never uttered anything but bon mots and epigrams. For the young novelist to speak that way to Calvin was a sign, not so much of intimacy, but of disrespect.
When they found an appropriate ship bound for Canada, Calvin showed the captain the letter Napoleon had given him. Contrary to his worst fears, after seeing a production of a newly revised and prettied-up script of Hamlet in London, the letter did not instruct the captain to kill Calvin and Honor’ at once—though there was no guarantee that the fellow didn’t have orders to strangle them and pitch them into the sea when they were out of sight of land.
Why am I so afraid?
“So the Emperor’s treasurer will reimburse me for all expenses out of the treasury when I come back?”
“That’s the plan,” said Honor’. “But here, my friend, I know how ungenerous these imperial officials can be. Take this.”
He handed the captain a sheaf of franc notes. Calvin was astonished. “All these weeks you’ve pretended to be poor and up to your ears in debt.”
“I am poor! I am in debt. If I didn’t owe money, why would ever steel myself to write? No, I simply borrowed the price of my passage from my mother and my father—they never talk, so they’ll never find out—and from two of my publishers, promising each of them a completely exclusive book about my travels in America.”
“You borrowed to pay our passage, knowing all along that the Emperor would pay it?”
“A man has to have spending money, or he’s not a man,” said Honor’. “I have a wad of it, with which I have every intention of being generous with you, so I hope you won’t condemn my methods.”
“You’re not terribly honest, are you?” said Calvin, half appalled, half admiring.
“You shock me, you hurt me, you offend me, I challenge you to a duel and then take sick with pneumonia so that I can’t meet you, but I urge you to go ahead without me. Keep in mind that because I had that money, the captain will now invite us into his cabin for dinner every night of the voyage. And in answer to your question, I am perfectly honest when I am creating something, but otherwise words are mere tools designed to extract what I need from the pockets or bank accounts of those who currently but temporarily possess it. Calvin, you’ve been too long among the Puritans. And I have been too long among the Hypocrites.”
It was Peggy who found the turnoff to Chapman Valley, found it easily though there was no sign and she was coming this time from the other direction. She and Alvin left the others with the carriage under the now-leafless oak out in front of the weavers’ house. For Peggy, coming to this place now was both thrilling and embarrassing. What would they think of the way things had turned out since they set her on this present road?
Then, just as she raised her hand to knock on the door, she remembered something.
“Alvin,” she said. “It slipped my mind, but something Becca said when I was here a few months ago.”
“If it slipped your mind, then it was supposed to slip your mind.”
“You and Calvin. You need to reclaim Calvin, find him and reclaim him before he turns completely against the work you’re doing.”
Alvin shook his head. “Becca doesn’t know everything.”
“And what does that mean?”
“What makes you think Calvin wasn’t already the enemy of our work before he was born?”
“That’s not possible,” said Peggy. “Babies are born innocent and pure.”
“Or steeped in original sin? Those are the choices? I can’t believe that you of all people believe either idea, you who put your hands on the womb and see the futures in the baby’s heartfire. The child is already himself then, the good and bad, ready to step into the world and make of himself whatever he wants most to be.”
She squinted at ffim. “Why is it that when we’re alone, talking of something serious, you don’t sound so much the country bumpkin?”
“Because maybe I learned everything you taught me, only I also learned that I don’t want to lose touch with the common people,” said Alvin. “They’re the ones who are going to build the city with me. Their language is my native language—why should I forget it, just because I learned another? How many educated folks do you think are going to come away from their fine homes and educated friends and roll up their sleeves to make something with their own hands?”
“I don’t want to knock on this door,” said Peggy. “My life changes when I come into this place.”
“You don’t have to knock,” said Alvin. He reached out and turned the knob. The door opened.
When he made as if to step inside, Peggy took his arm. “Alvin, you can’t just walk in here!”
“If the door wasn’t locked, then I can walk in,” said Alvin. “Don’t you understand what this place is? This is the place where things are as they must be. Not like the world out there, the world you see in the heartfires, the world of things that can be. And not like the world inside my head, the world as it might be. And not like the world as it was first conceived in the mind of God, which is the world as it should be.”
She watched him step over the threshold. There was no alarm in the house, nor even a sound of life. She followed him. Young as he was, this man she had watched over from his infancy, this man whose heart she knew more intimately than her own, he could still surprise her by what he did of a sudden without thought, because he simply knew it was right and had to be this way.
The endless cloth still lay folded in piles, linked each to each, winding over furniture, through halls, up and down stairs. They stepped over the spans and reaches of it. “No dust,” said Peggy. “I didn’t notice that the first time. There’s no dust on the cloth.”
“Good housekeepers here?” asked Alvin.
“They dust all this cloth?”
“Or maybe there’s simply no passage of time within the cloth. Always and forever it exists in that one present moment in which the shuttlecock flew from side to side.”
As he said these words, they began to hear the shuttlecock. Someone must have opened a door.
“Becca?” called Peggy.
They followed the sound through the house to the ancient cabin at the house’s heart, where an open door led into the room with the loom. But to Peggy’s surprise, it wasn’t Becca seated there. It was the boy. Her nephew, the one who had dreamed of this. With practiced skill he drove the shuttlecock back and forth.
“Is Becca...” Peggy couldn’t bring herself to ask about the weaver’s death.
“Naw,” said the boy. “We changed the rules a little here. No more pointless sacrifice. You done that, you know. Came here as a judge—well, your judgment was heeded. I take my shift for a while, and she can go out a little.”
“So is it you we talk t
o now?” asked Alvin.
“Depends on what you want. I don’t know nothing about nothing, so if you want answers, I don’t think I’m it.”
“I want to use the door that leads to Ta-Kumsaw.”
“Who?” the boy asked.
“Your uncle Isaac,”.said Peggy.
“Oh, sure.” He nodded with his head. “It’s that one.”
Alvin strode toward it.
“You ever used one of these doors before?” asked the boy.
“No,” said Alvin.
“Well then ain’t you the stupid one, heading right for it like it was some ordinary door.”
“What’s different? I know it leads to the Red lands. I know it leads to the house where Ta-Kumsaw’s daughter weaves the lives of the Reds of the west.”
“Here’s the tricky part. When you pass through the door, you can’t have no part of yourself touching anything here but air. You can’t brush up against the doodamb. You can’t let a foot linger on the floor. It’s not a step through the door, it’s a leap.”
“And what happens if some part of me does touch?”’
“Then that part of this place drags you down just a little, slows you, lowers you, and so instead of you passing through the door in one smooth motion, you go through in a couple of pieces. Ain’t nobody can put you together after that, Mr. Maker.”
Peggy was appalled. “I never realized it was so dangerous.”
“Breathing’s dangerous too,” said the boy, “if’n you breathe in something to make you sick.” He grinned. “I saw you two get all twined up together here. Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” said Alvin.
ALVIN JOURNEYMAN Page 39
