Alvin Journeyman: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume IV Page 12

  “I was afraid you’d be angry at her like this.”

  “I’m not angry at her. I’m angry at myself.”

  “Alvin, you think I don’t know a lie when I hear it?”

  “All right, I am angry. She knew, right? Well, why didn’t she just tell me? Amy Sump is going to tell lies about you and force you to leave, so get out now before her childish imaginings ruin everything.”

  “Because if she said that, you wouldn’t have left, would you, Alvin? You would have stayed, figuring you could make everything work out fine with Amy. Why, you would have taken her aside and told her not to love you, right? And then when she started talking about you, there’d be witnesses who remembered how she stayed after class one day and was alone with you, and then you would be in trouble because even more people would believe her story and—”

  “Taleswapper, I wish you sometime would learn the knack of shutting up!”

  “Sorry,” said Taleswapper. “I just don’t have any gift for that. I just blather on, annoying people. The fact is that Peggy told you as much as she could without making things worse.”

  “That’s right. In her judgment, she decided how much I was entitled to know, and that’s all she told me. And then you have the gall to tell me I should go marry her?”

  “I’m not following your logic here, Al,” said Taleswapper.

  “What kind of marriage is it, when my wife knows everything but she never tells me enough to make up my own mind! Instead she always makes up my mind for me. Or tells me exactly what she needs to tell me in order to get me to do what she thinks I ought to do.”

  “But you didn’t do what she said you ought to do. You stuck around.”

  “So that’s the life you want for me? Either to obey my wife in everything, or wish I had!”

  Taleswapper shrugged. “I’m still not getting your objection.”

  “It’s this simple: A grownup man doesn’t want to be married to his mother. He wants to make his own decisions.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” said Taleswapper. “And who’s this grownup man you’re talking about?”

  Alvin refused to be baited. “I hope someday it’s me. But it’ll never be me if I tie myself to a torch. I owe much to Miss Larner. And I owe even more to the girl she was before she became a teacher, the girl who watched over me and saved my life again and again. No wonder I loved her. But marrying her would have been the worst mistake of my life. It would have made me weak. Dependent. My knack might have remained in my hands, but it would be entirely at her service, and that’s no way for a man to live.”

  “A grownup man, you mean.”

  “Mock me all you want, Taleswapper. I notice you got no wife.”

  “I must be a grownup, then,” said Taleswapper. But now there was an edge to his voice, and after gazing at Alvin for just another moment, he turned and walked back the way they’d come together.

  “I never seen Taleswapper mad like that before,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “He doesn’t like it when folks throw his own advice back in his face,” said Alvin.

  Arthur Stuart said nothing. Just waited.

  “All right, let’s go.”

  At once Arthur turned and started walking.

  “Well, wait for me,” said Alvin.

  “Why?” said Arthur Stuart. “You don’t know where we’re going, either.”

  “Reckon not, but I’m bigger, so I get to choose which nowhere we head for.”

  Arthur laughed a little. “I bet there’s not a single direction you can choose where there isn’t somebody standing in your road, somewhere. Even if it’s halfway around the world.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Alvin. “But I know for sure that no matter which way we go, eventually we’ll run into the ocean. Can you swim?”

  “Not an ocean’s worth I can’t.”

  “So what good are you, then?” said Alvin. “I was counting on you to tow me across.”

  Hand in hand they plunged deeper into the woods. And even though Alvin didn’t know where he was going, he did know this: The greensong might be weak and jumbled these days, but it was still there, and he couldn’t help but fall into it and start moving in perfect harmony with the greenwood. The twigs leaned out of his way; the leaves were soft under his feet, and soon he was soundless, leaving no trail behind him and making no disturbance as he went.

  That night they camped on the shore of Lake Mizogan. If you could call it camping, since they made no fire and built no shelter. They broke out of the woods late in the afternoon and stood there on the shore. Alvin remembered being at this lake—not quite this spot, but not far off either—when Tenskwa-Tawa had called a whirlwind and cut his feet and walked out on the bloody water, taking Alvin with him, drawing him up into the whirlwind and showing him visions. It was then that Alvin first saw the Crystal City and knew that he would build it someday, or rather rebuild it, since it had existed once before, or maybe more than once. But the storm was gone, a distant memory; Tenskwa-Tawa and his people were gone, too, most of them dead and the rest of them in the west. Now it was just a lake.

  Once Alvin would have been afraid of the water, for it was water that the Unmaker had used to try to kill him, over and over, when he was a child. But that was before Alvin grew into his knack and became a true Maker that night in the forge, turning iron into gold. The Unmaker couldn’t touch him through water anymore. No, the Unmaker’s tool would be more subtle now. It would be people. People like Amy Sump, weak-willed or greedy or dreamy or lazy, but all of them easily used. It was people who held danger for him now. Water was safe enough, for them as could swim, and that was Alvin.

  “How about a dip in the water?” Alvin asked.

  Arthur shrugged. It was when they dipped together in the water of the Hio that the last traces of Arthur’s old self got washed away. But there’d be none of that now. They just stripped down and swam in the lake as the sun set, then lay down in the grass to dry off, the moonlight making the water shine, a breeze making the humid air cool enough for sleeping. In the whole journey they hadn’t said a word till they got to the shore of the lake, just moved in perfect harmony through the wood; even now as they swam, they still said nothing, and hardly splashed they were so much in harmony with everything, with each other. So it startled Alvin when Arthur spoke to him, lying there in the dark.

  “This is what Amy dreamed of, ain’t it?”

  Alvin thought of that for a moment. Then he got up and put on his clothes. “I reckon we’re dry now,” he said.

  “You think maybe she had a true dream? Only it wasn’t her, it was me?”

  “I didn’t do no hugging or unnatural things when we was naked in the water,” said Alvin.

  Arthur laughed. “Ain’t nothin’ unnatural about what she dreamed of.”

  “It wasn’t no true dream.”

  Arthur got up and put his clothes on, too. “I heard the greensong this time, Alvin. Three times I let go of your hand, and I still heard it for the longest time before it started fading and I had to catch your hand or get left behind.”

  Alvin nodded as if that was what he expected. But it wasn’t. In all his teaching of the folks of Vigor Church, he hadn’t even tried to teach Arthur Stuart much, sending him instead to the schoolhouse to learn reading and ciphering. But it was Arthur who might well be his best student after all.

  “You going to become a Maker?” asked Alvin.

  Arthur shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “Just going to be your friend.”

  Alvin didn’t say aloud the thought of his heart: To be my friend, you might just have to be a Maker. He didn’t have to say it. Arthur already understood.

  The wind rose a little in the night, and far away, out over the lake, lightning brightened the underside of distant clouds. Arthur breathed softly in his sleep; Alvin could hear him in the stillness, louder than the whisper of distant thunder. It should have made him feel lonely, but it didn’t. The breaths in the darkness beside him could have be
en Ta-Kumsaw on their long journey so many years ago, when Alvin had been called the Boy Renegado and the fate of the world seemed to hang in the balance. Or it might have been his brother Calvin when as boys they shared a room; Alvin remembered him as a baby in a cradle, then in a crib, the child’s eyes looking up to him as if he were God, as if he knew something no other human knew. Well, I did know it, but I lost Calvin anyway. And I saved Ta-Kumsaw’s life, but couldn’t do a thing to save his cause, and he is lost to me also, across the river in the fog of the Red west.

  And the breathing could have been a wife, instead of just a dream of a wife. Alvin tried to imagine Amy Sump there in the darkness, and even though Measure was right that it would have been a miserable marriage, the fact was that her face was pretty, and in this moment of solitary wakefulness Alvin could imagine that her young body was sweet and warm to the touch, her kiss eager and full of life and hope.

  Quickly he shrugged off that image. Amy was not for him, and even to imagine her like that felt akin to some kind of awful crime. He could never marry someone who worshipped him. Because his wife would not be married to the Maker named Alvin; his wife would be married to the man.

  It was Peggy Larner he thought of then. He imagined leaning up on one elbow and looking at her when the low distant lightning cast a brush of light across her face. Her hair loose and tousled in the grass. Her ladylike hands no longer controlled and graceful with studied gestures, but now casually flung out in sleep.

  To his surprise tears came to his eyes. In a moment he realized why: She was as impossible for him as Amy, not because she would worship him, but because she was more committed to his cause than he was. She loved, not the Maker, and certainly not the man, but rather the Making and the thing made. To marry her would be a kind of surrender to fate, for she was the one who saw futures that might arise out of all possible present choices, and if he married her he would be no man at all, not because she would mean to unman him, but because he himself would not be so stupid as not to follow her advice. Freely he would follow her, and thus freely lose his freedom.

  No, it was Arthur lying there beside him, this strange boy who loved Alvin beyond all reason and yet demanded nothing from him; this boy who had lost a part of himself in order to be free, and had replaced it with a part of Alvin.

  The parallel was suddenly obvious to Alvin, and for a moment he was ashamed. I did to Arthur just what I fear that Peggy Larner might do to me. I took away a part of him and replaced it with myself. Only he was so young and his danger so great that I didn’t ask him or explain, nor could he have understood me if I tried. He had no choice. I still have one.

  Would I be as content as Arthur, if once I gave myself to Peggy?

  Perhaps someday, Alvin thought. But not now. I’m not ready yet to give myself to someone, to surrender my will. The way Arthur has to me. The way parents do to their children, giving their lives over to the needs of helpless selfish little ones. The road is open before me, all roads, all possibilities. From this grassy bed beside Lake Mizogan I can go anywhere, find all that is findable, do all that is doable, make all that can be made. Why should I build a fence around myself? Leash myself to one tree? Not even a horse, not even a dog was loyal enough to do such a mad thing to itself.

  From infancy on his knack had captured him. Whether as a child in his family, as Ta-Kumsaw’s traveling companion, as a prentice smith, or as a teacher of would-be Makers, he had been hobbled by his knack. But not now.

  The lightning flashed again, farther off this time. There would be no rain here tonight. And tomorrow he would get up and go south, or north, or west, or east, as the idea struck him, seeking whatever goal seemed desirable. He had left home to get away, not to go toward anything. There was no greater freedom than that.

  9

  Cooper

  Peggy Larner kept watch on both of those bright heartfires: Alvin as he wandered through America, Calvin as he made his way to England and prepared for his audience with Napoleon. There was little change in the possible futures that she saw, for neither man’s plan was one whit altered.

  Alvin’s plan, of course, was no plan at all. He and Arthur Stuart, traveling afoot, made their way westward from Mizogan, past the growing town of Chicago and on until the dense fogs of the Mizzipy turned them back. Alvin had entertained a vague hope that he, at least, would be permitted to pass to the Mizzipy and beyond, but if such a thing would ever be possible, it certainly was not possible now. So he went north all the way to High Water Lake, where he boarded one of the new steamboats that was carrying iron ore to Irrakwa, where it would be loaded on trains and carried the rest of the way to the coal country of Suskwahenny and Pennsylvania, to feed into the new steel mills. “Is that Making?” asked Arthur Stuart, when Alvin explained the process to him. “Turning iron into steel?”

  “It’s a sort of Making,” said Alvin, “where earth is forced by fire. But the cost is high, and the iron aches when it’s been transformed like that. I’ve seen some of the steel they’ve made. It’s in the rails. It’s in the locomotives. The metal screams all the time, a soft sound, very high, but I can hear it.”

  “Does that mean it’s evil to use steel?” asked Arthur Stuart.

  “No,” said Alvin. “But we should only use it when it’s worth the cost of such suffering. Maybe someday we’ll find a better way to bring the iron up to strength. I am a smith. I won’t deny the forgefire or refuse the hammer and the anvil. Nor will I say that the foundries of Dekane are somehow worse than my small forge. I’ve been inside the flame. I know that the iron can live in it too, and come out unhurt.”

  “Maybe that’s what we’re wandering for,” said Arthur Stuart. “For you to go to the foundries and help them make steel more kindly.”

  “Maybe,” said Alvin, and they rode the train to Dekane and Alvin applied for work in a foundry and learned by watching and doing all the things there was to know about the making of steel, and in the end he said, “I found a way, but it takes a Maker to do it, or pretty close.” And there it was: If Alvin was to change the world, it required him to do what he had already half-failed at doing back in Vigor Church, which was to make more Makers. They left the steeltowns and went on east and as Peggy watched Alvin’s heartfire she saw no change, no change, no change. . ..

  And then one day, of a sudden, for no reason she could see in Alvin’s life, a thousand new roads opened up and down every one of them was a man that she had never seen before. A man who called himself Verily Cooper and spoke like a book-learned Englishman and walked beside Alvin every step of his life for years. Down that path the golden plow was fixed with a perfect handle and leapt to life under human hands. Down that path the Crystal City rose skyward and the fog at the Mizzipy shore cleared for a few miles and Red folk stood on the western shore and gladly greeted White folk come on coracles and rafts to trade with them and speak to them and learn from them.

  But where did this Verily Cooper come from, and why had he now so suddenly appeared in Alvin’s life?

  Only later in the day did it occur to Peggy that it was none of Alvin’s doing that brought this man to him, but rather someone else. She looked to Calvin’s heartfire—so far away she had to look deep through the ground to see him in England, around the curve of the Earth—and there she saw that it was he who had made the change, and by the simplest of choices. He took the time to charm a Member of Parliament who invited him to tea, and even though Calvin knew that this man had nothing for him, on a whim, the merest chance, he decided he would go. That decision transformed Calvin’s own futures only slightly. Nothing much was changed, except this: Down almost every road, Calvin spent an hour at the tea sitting beside a young barrister named Verily Cooper, who listened avidly to all that Calvin had to say.

  Was it possible, then, that Calvin was part of Alvin’s making after all? He went to England with the undoing of all of Alvin’s works in his heart; and yet, by whim, by chance—if there was such a thing as chance—he would have an encounter that wou
ld almost surely bring Verily Cooper to America. To Alvin Smith. To the golden plow, the Crystal City, the opening of the Mizzipy fog.

  Arise Cooper was an honest hardworking Christian. He lived his life as close to purity as he could, given the finite limits of the human mind. Every commandment he learned of, he obeyed; every imperfection he could imagine, he purged from his soul. He kept a detailed journal every day, tracking the doings of the Lord in his life.

  For instance, on the day his second son was born, he wrote: “Today Satan made me angry at a man who insisted on measuring the three kegs I made him, sure that I had given him short measure. But the Spirit of God kindled forgiveness within my heart, for I realized that a man might become suspicious because he had been so often cheated by devilish men. Thus I saw that the Lord had trusted me to teach this man that not all men will cheat him, and I bore his insult with patience. Sure enough, as Jesus taught, when I answered vileness with kindness the stranger did part from my coopery as my friend instead of my enemy, and with a wiser eye about the workings of the Lord among men. Oh how great thou art, my beloved God, to turn my sinful heart into a tool to serve thy purposes in this world! At nightfall entered into the world my second son, whom I name Verily, Verily, I Say Unto You, Except Ye Become As A Little Child Ye Shall In No Wise Enter Into The Kingdom Of Heaven.”

  If anyone thought the name a bit excessive, they said nothing to Arise Cooper, whose own name was also a bit of scripture: Arise And Come Forth. Nor did the child’s mother, whose own name was the shortest verse in scripture: He Wept. They all knew that the baby’s whole name would almost never be used. Instead he was known as Verily, and as he grew up the name would often be shortened to Very.

  It was not the name that was Verily Cooper’s heaviest burden. No, there was something much darker that cast its shadow upon the boy very early in his life.

  Arise’s wife, Wept, came to him one day when Verily was only two years old. She was agitated. “Arise, I saw the boy playing with scraps today, building a tower of them.”